In a world with increasing complexity, uncertainty and conflict, it’s not surprising that many people feel unable or unwilling to take action. So, playing the role of a simplifier, how are the CIOs finding ways of cutting through argumentative speech with precise solutions for their employees and engaging them in productive work instead of being disengaged by hostility?

Contributor

• • Piyush Chowhan, Group Chief Information Officer, Lulu Group International

Download Podcast

Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, iHeartRadio, SoundCloud, TuneIn, and Stitcher. Find other syndication channels here or search CIO Talk Network podcast on any other app.

Explore More

• • CIOs are Connecting the Dots Between Technology and Business Strategy
  • From the Basement to the Boardroom: From CIO to CEO
  • Three Lessons Learned After a CIO Transition
  • The CIO as a Futurist
  • CIO as an Innovation Leader
  • The CIO as a Venture Capitalist
  • How Can CIOs Stay Relevant and Resilient in Today’s IT Economy?
  • Building the All-In-One CIO
  • The CIO as Ball Coach!
  • Can a CIO Act as a Chief Strategist?

Transcript

Sanjog: Hello, and welcome to CTN, to learn more about the show, please visit www.ciotalknetwork.com, and today’s topic is CIO As A Simplifier. So, what do we mean by that? So we know we already have a lot going on in the world that we’re living in from a business standpoint and the life that has changed for us in the last few years, you got more complexity than you ever wanted and then you also have uncertainty and you have conflict and it’s not just in our lives, it has also penetrated into the business environment and it is very possible that many people are unable and unwilling to take action. They are having arguments, they are losing it and they are trying to figure out how to go about living their life and working in an environment, but then there is business to be conducted, there is work that needs to get done, so, what is a CIO doing? Playing the role as a simplifier to essentially make sure that we do not engage in such argumentative speech unless otherwise it’s healthy and actually create some good precise solutions for the employees so that they are more focused and engaged in productive work and not be succumbing to the pressures and, or have any hostility get introduced in the environment. So how do you go about doing that? Our guest for today is Piyush Chowhan, he is the Group Chief Information Officer with Lulu Group International. Hey Piyush, how are you?

Piyush: I am very good, thank you for having me Sanjog.

Sanjog: Absolutely, the pleasure is ours, so since I’ve set the stage Piyush, let’s kind of jump in, frankly on one side, everyone is playing nicely, nobody says anything wrong to each other, that might look on the surface a good thing, but that also means people are compromising, they’re not speaking their mind and that’s what we have seen over the years. Well, but then there could also be situations where people are talking and there is a heated argument. So, we could come from a train of thought that, oh, this is healthy conversation, or it could very well be hostility, which is coming out in open and it’s been verbalized. How do you know, is it the productive, healthy argument for the best outcome or is it somebody lashing out?

Piyush: So, you’ve touched upon a few points that we kind of build on and then kind of come to the straight answer here, we live in a Google word, yeah, we’ll guys a concept has been there, but I think  in the last, few years, or at least in the last decade, this has kind of taken center stage. Nothing is predictable, everything is volatile, so are decisions, so are outcomes, when your decisions and outcomes are so volatile and, conflicting in nature, it is so very important that executives need to play a very constructive role and one of the key elements towards this is the word collaboration, right, in the past collaboration meant, I support you; you support me and then we work towards a common goal, but not  in a digital world and what we have seen and what I’m seeing when I speak to different board members, when I speak to various CXOs, what I’m seeing is there are conflicting priorities which are coming up, for example, the marketing function wants to control the customer, the IT or the technology function is the owner of the data platform, the CFO wants to minimize costs. Now in the past, they would kind of work on making this simpler, using collaborative and say that look, everybody works towards maximizing the shareholder value and then so on and so forth. But in today’s context, the digital outcomes are not very simple as they were in the past. Maybe, in the past century, it was all very clear saying that let us work towards increasing the revenue, increasing the bottom line, reducing costs, and our job is done, but the business models have been disrupted with the digital coming into play and that is when the CIO community as such will play a very pivotal role and then kind of give you a little perspective. Marketing always believed that they are the custodians of customer data and customer interactions, customer engagement, and logistics always thought, the backend, the fulfillment, supply chain logistics function, always thought that my job is to fulfill what the customer needs and I don’t need to speak to the customer, not any longer. So, everybody has to work towards interactions with the customer, everybody has to learn the finance function, needs to make sure that the modeling of the business is such that it is much more customer oriented. The logistics and the supply chain function need to orient their fulfillment so that they are aligned to the customer vision and the experience, the front end, which is sometimes owned by let’s say the operations, and the marketing function, they need to work towards making customer experience much better and so if you see this context, which I painted for a B2C company, it is very important that there is one glue, which is binding all these people together and that is the CIO and CIO has to basically glue that kind of customer centric view of saying that, how can I bring the entire experience of the customer? Build the platform on it, and then try to bring all the functions around it so that you are able to deliver and kind of deliver an experience, which is amazing, and which is a differentiating factor and so until there is somebody which is a glue, earlier it was CEO, which was driving this agenda, but with digital taking the center stage where sometimes a lot of CEOs are not very conversant with what and all of digital and that is why I think the CIO as the insider is in the right position to balance this dialogue, create value and then disrupt the module with some of the other organizations may not be doing it, so, I don’t know if it made sense, but I’m just trying to lay the foundation to our topic of discussion as to how CIO’s can predominantly be the glue of eliminating some of these talks and discussions, which are happening, which may not be aligned, but which may be kind of working towards various priorities which are there.

Sanjog: No, this is a good response, the only thing I would like to ask further on this, because you touched more a business leader to a business leader, say an IT and a line of business and executive management, you played, or your response was more hinting that if there is a disconnect at that level, then all of that, will percolate down and that will create even more chaos and complexity in the lower ranks, right, so that is a great thing you mentioned that you could be a glue and yes, there is an importance for CIO, which is many times undermined and people then face issues. Now imagine that was being done and I’m sure CIO as your role your everyday thinking, how can I be a better glue than yesterday while that you do that and you got alignment essentially, now comes the point of execution, whether it is within an IT for an IT project or them working with a business counterpart or a business user or a business manager counterpart, but then they are butting heads and there could be butting heads because of a nuance thing, because even though you have an alignment at the top, when it comes down to execution, people start thinking about things differently at a granular level. What do you do about that, or in fact, before you do anything, how do you determine if this is essentially healthy debate or is it somebody trying to eat the other person alive

Piyush: Yeah, and I think that model is changing and as the visitor transformation, is happening across enterprises, one of the things which is happening is, is this, you, me, they, kind of a feeling, saying that, who runs the digital charter, and that to me is the crux of the problem that you are highlighting. I’ll give you a very simple example, I’ll kind of quote some examples from retail industry as a context, everybody’s moving towards this digital commerce or the e-commerce as we call it and everybody wants to increase the penetration from a physical world to a digital world. They want to drive, that part of the business much stronger because, the customer is moving towards that direction and experiences moving towards that direction. Now, obviously people will start questioning in a sense who owns that channel, the guy who is managing the retail operations, which is in the physical format, he is threatened about the new channel and if you have silos build across channels, you will always see friction as to how to allocate resources, how to manage and balance the kind of priorities between these two channels and sometimes marketing may spend more in terms of marketing budget on the e-commerce because that is growing and then start shrinking their budget, so there will be kind of conflicts that that will arise and the way to assess those is how is the board, the executive and the teams behaving towards the priority where business models are changing. The business is either trying to protect its stuff or are they trying to adopt new ways of working, are they’re trying to adopt new agile models, which will kind of keep them reinventing and disrupting their own ways of working so that you are able to drive change. Yes, and to me, that is the biggest bottleneck and road block at this point of time for organizations to adopt this digital transformation. When they’re not able to change the ways of working, sometimes the blame starts with various parts in that, the e-commerce gentleman said that marketing is not doing enough to acquire customers, the e-com channel will say that the logistics and supply chain is not supplying enough to fulfill their orders, sometime the e-commerce can say the IT is not prioritizing on the projects, which are done by the e-commerce and so there will be blame game all across, and it is for people to understand that in new ways of working agile is the mantra that everybody needs to be follow. You need to be agile towards working small projects, working more collaboratively with the cross-functional team, so that you are able to deliver to that common objective of disruption that everybody’s battling with. So, I think to me, the ways of working need to be changed, to kind of understand and remove those blame games and those noises which are coming on, which are kind of raised and rising because of the difference in priorities which are out there.

Sanjog: You know, that this is easier said than done, right? I mean, we need to remove it, but the conflict still stays. So, what do you see as some of the strategies you adopted, which actually helped you on the ground?

Piyush: One of the things which has always worked is bringing everybody on the same table and one of the things what has transitioned over a period of time and I’ve seen, digital organizations change and with digital at the core, it was always believed and still a lot of organizations still believe that digital is equal to IT, and to me digital is not equal to IT, digital is much more than IT, it is IT plus, plus, and what you do is, in that context is try to have teams and so I’ll give you a very simple example, any digital native, organizations, which are born in this age, which are kind of scaled up in this age, they don’t seem to have this kind of conflicts, which the non-digital organizations have and, I think we are more talking about, so, one of the ways how we execute, it has to change drastically and there are two or three things which needs to change in terms of how we execute. It is in an execution earlier, it was siloed function, or siloed view set up, which was there in an enterprise in which there was a marketing function, supply chain function. there was an operations function and so on and so forth, which its own leader, which is own KPIs and they were all measured on slightly different parameters. Unfortunately, in a digital world when everything is so connected, when there’s the initial data fungibility all across the enterprise, this siloed way of structuring execution will not work and so you need to have what is known as agile teams and that is what I have solved the problems saying look, if this is a problem, if this is a project, which needs to be delivered, let’s say we want to improve the fulfillment function for our customer in e-commerce, let’s say that is a priority, which has been set up by the board and the CEO and everybody is working towards that, earlier what would have happened is the chief supply chain officer alongside let’s say the supporting functions, like IT will kind of make and take that project as the owner of the project and then try to deliver, in today’s context that will not work. Why, because you need to have touch points with the customer, you need to have touch points with the finance function, so all you need to do is you need to create and constitute a team, which is multifunctional, tried to kind of form a team, which is multifunctional, wherever the touch points are and once you have formed that as a team, and everybody’s brought on the same table, you are bringing ownership of that function and then everybody’s working towards that objective of improving the fulfillment experience for the customer, which means it is not only supply chain, it is also marketing, it is also finance, it is also technology, it is also customer service and so on and so forth and this new way of working so-called agile teams using digital at the core of and methodologies, which are kind of much more flexible in nature are the only way to solve this problem.

Sanjog: So, it’s a fantastic solution you proposed, when you try to implement it, there may be people within the group who will say, I did not sign up for the shift. What do you do? Change them on actual or remove them?

Piyush: That is the biggest roadblock as we see is, we are in a stage and I’ll give you some data points, I think McKinsey did a fantastic research, making the list for work research and they found that, by, I think it was during pandemic or pre pandemic and so this statistics may have accelerated quite strongly from there is that, by 2030, 70% of the jobs will not be of the same form as it is today. Maybe, that, it’s not the job that will not be there, but they will not be the same form that it is today or they were, maybe, 5-6 months back. So, what is happening is while everybody’s talking about VUCA in terms of business model, in terms of ability to change the operating ways and so on and so forth, the change in people is much lower than what everybody’s expecting and that is the biggest bottleneck as you speak. People, changing their ways of working, people reskilling themselves, people adopting new ways of doing things is the biggest bottleneck around it. Now, how do you solve this as a problem? And one of the ways that I have looked at solving that as a problem is what I call us by model people architecture, which means that you need to have a team, which is much aligned to the new skills which are out there. So, for example, the new ways of working, as I kind of talked to you about the new ways of working on keeping digital at the core, making agile as your mantra, making collaboration as your thing in a multi multifunctional, right, that is the whole crux of it. Now, if somebody has been in the marketing function for, let’s say two decades and done only marketing, for him to go and get any involvement in the supply chain would what would feel like you’re challenging that person’s authority or knowledge in terms of what he or she should be doing in the future, but that is a reality. So, there are those luggage  which will always be there in every enterprise. There needs to be a set of people, who are kind of early adopters you as a leader, what you do is you put in a small set of people who are flexible, who are agile, who are adopting the same much faster into a smaller team and start asking them to deliver much faster, because what is happening is the world is moving very fast. Unlike in the past where programs we learned for multi years and, things like that, we are talking about months and sometimes days for delivery and so there needs to be a set of people who are much more faster, who are much more kind of agile, and then you form that as a team. Once you do that, and people start seeing value to it, there’ll be more people who will be polling towards it and you keep on making that pie bigger, the bigger pie, when you start, will be on the people who are skeptical, people who are not willing to change, but then over a period of time, when people see this new way of working, they will start pollinating towards that and then you start incentivizing showcasing, beating the drum around with the employees and then you’ll be able to see that change if after doing such things and giving an opportunity for a lot of people, I ‘m sure 10 to 15% of the people will still not be able to make that cut and those are the people that, you know, have to be kind of either shown the door or being repurposed for something else and this bi-modal architecture is something which a lot of enterprises are doing and that they’re seeing much more benefit. I’ve done it myself and that is the only way that I believe that you need to solve rather than having a very odd wide, so called change management exercise to say that, let us do a change management programs and that drive that change slowly over a period of time, to me that does not work into today’s context.

Sanjog: Let’s take quick break listeners, we will right back after these messages and let’s build upon what Piyush just mentioned about the bi-modal, now yes, you can put two people, like two sets of people into different tracks, if you will, some people are innovating and other people are doing the consistent work. One is to say, okay, these two people are doing differently, but it’s still the same business and when you try to introduce any innovation, which means you are going to disrupt the status quo eventually at the execution level and when you do that, that could create even temporarily some hostility, some conflicts, but the user, the end customer who we are all striving to serve simply cannot be party to it and, or be exposed to it and their experience should not suffer and all along in both of these tracks, you still want them to maximize their own individual potential. So, one is to say, okay, let’s take this bi-modal, but what is its impact on the human resource and how do you minimize the conflicts and hostility that comes up and secondly, all along, how do you make people from both tracks feel that we are allowing them to maximize their potential and allowing them to blossom. Please stay tuned listeners we’ll be right back.

Sanjog: Welcome back, so Piyush, you want to do bi-modal, it’s a proven model, a lot of people have, but then when it comes to execution, we still are creating disruption because we want to embrace innovation and if we cannot say we do not want innovation, otherwise we will perish. So, people at the human resource level, in the sense as humans, they still would want to feel that they are getting their potential maximized, they are growing and all of that going on while you try to get the business agenda met, your bi-modal approach by itself, does it cut it or there is something more you have to do as part of its implementation to get this ultimate Nirvana level outcome?

Piyush: Well, see, the reason why this is coming is because of the speed of change, unlike in the past where change have come, people have adopted those change and people did it at their own pace, but no longer and at what is happening in this digital world and is that the change is so fast that there is a sizeable chunk of the population within the enterprise, which is not able to keep up with the pace and that’s a reality, and that is what is happening, large more than a hundred year organizations are being challenged by that by organizations which are just four or five, seven years old, and that is the reality and the fact. Now either you can continue to live in that pride, that I am a large organization, I have always taken care of people, I’ve given time for people to be comfortable in their journeys and we have given them enough handheld, for this change to happen, unfortunately, that luxury we don’t have in this age and that’s the brutal fact whether you like it or not and so what is needed, and I can tell you, I’ve worked with the largest retailer in the world, it is a country in itself. Which means that you need to make change at a much larger scale than it is needed, which means that you need to do things at a much faster pace than it is needed today, but it does not mean that everything has to be changed at that fast pace. So, what you do is one you created that bi-modal architecture, which is one part of it, then second, you define those high speed, high velocity, high-impact priorities for an enterprise and assign that faster team to that faster project. I don’t think, for example, if we were to let’s say, run a contact center, I don’t think there is any remarkably new or a disruptive way of running contact center, only change is that the mode of interaction with the customer is moving from with a voice to more social interaction, more digital interactions and so on and so forth. So, there is very less interaction on a large part of your BAU activities and that is not going to differentiate or create a very big competitive advantage for you. You identify areas where your actual competitive advantage lies, how can you disrupt your own self, how can you disrupt your own business model losing digital at core, identify those fast-changing projects, create those small teams, because until, unless there is a change which is done in a fast way, you will always be laggard you cannot say that I run a 6 year, 7 year digital transformation program, nobody does that. Maybe, 25 years back, people used to have five-year strategy, now people would just laugh, if somebody says I have a five-year strategy of what will happen in 2027, it is highly impossible for somebody to gauge what will happen in 2027 and so this fine motor teams, architects aligned to a certain set of business priorities, which are looking at ‘A’- looking at very fast-paced disruptive, innovative projects, and ‘B’ – a team, a larger team, maybe the spend out there is bigger, the skills needed are not that cutting edge, but doing more or less BAU, but with a twist of agile, with a twist of digital intimacy, digital collaboration and so on and so forth, so that glue of using digital at the core, by improving the productivity and the benefits to the enterprise. So, I think to me, these are the tools in terms of prioritizing the business outcomes, using the bi-modal architecture, we’ll be able to solve this problem.

Sanjog: Now, when you are referring to, the areas that the solutions that you mentioned on how to deal with the people side of it, are there anything else or any other areas that you feel are required for an organization to get ready, for the so-called simplification because CIO as a simplifier can only do so much, if the organization is not ready, what would you do if you were say a CIO coming in or as a consulting CIO coming into an organization, will you clean the house? Will you do something else to set the right tone, the foundation for this transformation to truly happen? 

Piyush: Well, my three tenets of digital transformation are on three pillars. The first is obviously the technology pillar, you need to revamp the entire technology landscape. We need to look at your business processes, with the new paradigm, optimize revitalize and revamp the processes and third is the workforce, which I talked about the digitalization of the workforce, digital transformation, digital skills, and so forth. Once you do these three things in a way such that you are able to achieve the goal of that digital transformation, something which I do, one of the things which is very foundational in all these three, is the use of data and to me, the organizations which are so-called digital, native digital savvy are the organizations where data asset is democratic in nature. Democratizing of data is something which I always feel is the only glue, which we’ll try this 10 to a while CIO can be the glue for some amount of digital strategy. Data can be the glue for bringing all the various silos in the organizations together, so, for example, like, I talked about that, example of how can you let’s say, improve the fulfillment experience for the consumer now for that you need good amount of data to understand what is the customer looking for? Where are the touch points? And believe me again, there is research which I’ve done and people have kind of identified that organizations at this point of time use less than 10% of the organization data, which means that 90% of the data is there, but either it is not accessible or people don’t have the skills to understand it and make sense out of it. It is both the problem either it is not available or it is not available in the form for people to use it, or even if it is there, the skills are not there in the organizers for understanding to make meaning out of it. So, if you have a good digital strategy in place, I will make sure that it’s a very clear data enabled decision-making as a core principle needs to be enabled for each and every part of the organization and CIOs can actually play a very important role.Now, let me put this very clearly and some organizations may jump and say that let me build a Chief Data Officer and that is a mistake that a lot of organizations have done and fail miserably, don’t ever do that, because data is something which is so important for each and every individual will the supply chain officer look at customer data? Absolutely, will the marketing manager look at the fulfillment data? Absolutely, until and unless you  democratize data rather than having a central data officer who then becomes another complexity in the whole maze, you are trying to bring everybody together with the glue of that data so that it is accessible, democratization of data and then you are giving data on the power of the user so that they can make those decisions much faster and easily.

Sanjog: Would you say that the other departments where you want to see the changes be brought about, right? Whether people process technology, technology maybe you have some control over it, but about people and processes, you can at most be influencing those other department, so, do you think there is something, creative the CIOs can do, so that their simplification agenda can actually be realized, even though you are merely an influencer at the business department level?

Piyush: Yeah, and that is, to me, the biggest bottleneck as of now, at least in the old non-digital native enterprises, the awareness of digital and what digital means is quite low and hence, your ability to let’s say, I talked about, workforce transformation as a big pillar of digital transformation, that is not understood by most of the functional leaders, be it marketing, be it supply chain and finance to a large extent and that is why, what is needed is, when we try to do this digital transformation as an exercise and I was reading some report to say that, at least, it started in the US that at a board level, I’m not only talking about a CEO level, at a board level, at least there should be 30% of representation of people who understand digital quite well and sometimes this is more misunderstood that people believe that marketing is for digital and some people believe IT is for digital, it is not about that, it’s all about the new way of doing business and so if it starts right from them saying that at the board, if you have 30% presentation of who understand digital quite well. It will then populate down to people let’s say at the CEO and the CXO level and that is when you will try to align more towards the digital legend of the organization and if you ask me what the CIO can do, now it is a golden opportunity, I think it is the best time for a CIO to rise up beyond the influencer role in this case and say that, look, guys, I can run this workforce transformation agenda, the digital workforce transformation agenda at an enterprise, which was always the COVID responsibility of let’s say  CHRO, or Chief Digital Officer or things like that. So, there are multiple ways, to, kind of skin the cat here and there’s no one way that can work in every enterprise. My view is that bringing in people, leaders who understand digital, if that is not possible, there are opportunities for the technology leaders to scale up and drive that agenda across rather than just being an influencer and then watching things to happen in their own pace.

Sanjog: Now, my one last question would be based on the premise that we are no longer in the same world, like what you spoke about in terms of how you get things implemented, they are very well taken points. The thing which has changed around us is how pandemic shifted the way we work, the business models, the customer expectations, the employee expectations, the empathetic approach, and the employer needs to take for the people to be attracted, the talent to be attracted and also retain they have to change that approach, which means, what work pre pandemic in terms of the classic case of getting digital to be enabled and or embraced within an organization, some things ought to change, which means our approach, the way of thinking and even our leadership. So if I were to ask you Piyush, if you and or your fellow CIO leaders had to build some new muscles, to get the best outcome for all parties involved, not just for the business, but for the customers, for your partners and for your people who all in some form of fashion personally, or professionally have been impacted by the pandemic and other business forces, energy, economic, and political forces, what would those new ways of thinking and new leadership ideas, traits, and muscles that needs to be developed for us to be effective going forward?

Piyush: I think, the ways of working have changed drastically, for sure, it’s more a cliché now, but I think people are still grappling with how do you collaborate in the new environment. One of the things that has been brought to the forefront is there was lot of waste, the waste in terms of, effort, which was there in enterprises and that is why you certainly see that people who have adopted this new way of working are automatically seeing, increasing productivity, increasing in some kind of revenues and a reduction in cost, which means that this new style will continue and because there’s this significant benefit, but there are, these haves and not haves, which are brought to the front and there are a lot of enterprises which are still kind of in the middle talk in which they are trying to figure out whether to go this way or whether to go this way and that’s why you see, there are the enterprises which have gone out and said that, look, this is the new way of working and that will continue for a long time and, there are a few people who have said that, no, we will still watch, we will kind of understand what is going on, how this will adapt to it and those are the kinds of follow ups which will continue. To me the biggest way to look at it is work from anywhere is a reality, I will not be surprised if in five, seven years, we can see enterprises in which they predominantly have, even, executives working from anywhere, without any physical collaboration in place, which is already happening with digital native companies but, for large companies also, this will start to happen. So, in that context, how do you work on strategies, how do you work on collaboration, how do you work on new ideas, how to work on innovation moderates? how do we look at disruption as a challenge, are something which are quite intriguing? I don’t think I have an answer to it, I’m also watching the space, as many other who are watching, but I believe that people will strive in the future, people who understand how to collaborate very well without being physically present in the place that they are and to me, this might sound very easy, but, it is not as easy as we would imagine them in research because we are still building. The aftereffects of pandemic are that we are still building on what was being done pre pandemic, all that has happened is it has accelerate those adoptions but we are still doing the same thing that we were doing earlier and so I will still watch this space, how collaboration increases and how collaboration changes. I watch this space as to how delivery and execution models, keep on changing and evolving and I will watch how the roles and responsibilities of people will keep on evolving and kind of changing in the due course.

Sanjog: Once again, thank you so much Piyush for sharing your insights about how CIOs can indeed work towards the business management managing upwards, managing sideways and managing downwards, or in fact, instead of saying managing lead upwards, downwards, and sideways to truly become a simplifier. Thanks so much.

Piyush: Thank you for having me, it was a pleasure speaking to you Sanjog.

Sanjog:  Thanks again, and listeners, please like us on social media and subscribe to our podcast. Once again, thank you for listening to CTN, this is your host Sanjog Aul, till next week, take care and God bless.

 Advertisement: Thank you for tuning in to CTN CIO talk network with Sanjog Aul, to learn more about our program or for show archives, comments or questions, please visit www.ciotalknetwork.com. Thank you again for listening.