Anu VarmaA well thought out digital strategy with poor or hasty execution doesn’t deliver expected results. Nor does an amateur grade digital blueprint realized by implementation experts. With digital still evolving, how can organizations ace the whole process starting from the clean design of digital initiatives to immaculate execution for maximum impact?
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Transcript
Sanjog Aul [00:00:23]:
Hello, and welcome to this segment on CTN. To learn more, please visit ciotalknetwork.com, and the topic for today is Clean Digital Design Executed Right, and our guest for today’s show is Anu Varma, who’s the CIO with TE Connectivity. Hey, Anu. How are you?
Anu Varma [00:00:40]:
I’m great, Sanjog Aul. Thanks so much for inviting me on.
Sanjog Aul [00:00:44]:
Oh, definitely. Pleasure is all mine, and, this is an interesting topic. I’m sure you and many other leaders are actually living this interesting and crazy world of digital, and as they are and you are, I’m sure, working on these related initiatives, two things come to play. One is, are we designing our digital road map and blueprint effectively while staying relevant to the organization but at the same time looking a little bit in the horizon, and then second is whatever we are designing can be executed properly. There have been reported challenges in both and there are some successes. Some people are still trying and some other people have almost given up because it seems that it’s totally getting out of control and things are not working the way it is, but let’s not say it’s a doomsday for anyone. We are all working towards making it better. That said, let’s dig into the first question here. So when someone says I want to or rather an organization says we want to get into digital and realize our digital dreams. Are they really be doing it thinking and investing in doing it methodically and really investing in quote unquote investing versus saying, it’s cool. Let us experiment. What is the mindset?
Anu Varma [00:02:09]:
So, you know so Sanjog, I think that’s a great question and I agree with you completely. There have been quite a few failures. People step into this without clear thinking and planning. So I appreciate you bringing this topic up because it is about how do you approach this, how do you plan for this, how do you treat this more as a strategic initiative. And a lot of people are doing digital to do digital. It is the buzzword of the day. We were doing digital. We’d need a digital transformation. Let’s get on that journey, and not really stepping back to say it should just be another strategic business initiative, which always start with what is the business outcome you’re going after, and I think that brings it more from the world of dreams into a more pragmatic strategic look and also gets you back to how you define strategy for your business, which is often what will this do for my customer. What will this do for my business? What will this do for my customer? And I think the companies that look at it that way with the business outcome in mind tend to be more successful because they have a clear kind of North Star of this is what we’re trying to accomplish with it and not just a maybe a chasing of a shiny object. And around the digital world, I’m sure this is your experience and your listeners’ experience, there are a lot of shiny objects that are very exciting for a person like me who’s been a technologist forever, went to college in the 80s when AI and machine learning and things like this were just theories for us and exciting theories, but theories because we didn’t have the compute power to do all of the wonderful things we’re able to do now. So there’s lots of shiny objects, but really the path to success is around how do you treat this as a strategic initiative, how do you get it focused on your business outcomes, and how do you get a roadmap put together that really delivers on those. One of my mantras that I say this to my team all the time is, let’s spend money to make money. Let’s make sure that everything that we’re doing is somehow adding value to the company and is going to result in productivity savings and revenue growth, employee engagement, customer loyalty, those types of things that really add significant value. So for example, at TE, we’re doing digital transformation end-to-end. So we’re a global company, almost 80,000 employees, 140 countries, a very complex environment with 11 BUs, serving 11 different industries, and one of the things we said was a front end that really represented TE globally, but that front end wasn’t like, let’s go open up an ecommerce store because that seems to be the thing to do. It was really around what do we want to accomplish, and those strategic initiatives in the case of our ecommerce strategies around growing customers, growing revenue, and creating differentiation, and that differentiation is really important because everybody says that. How do you differentiate yourself? It’s really about evaluating your market, evaluating your customers and the needs of your customers and your competition more importantly. What are they doing that either you’re not doing and you have to play catch up or what are they not doing that you can get ahead of and be the first to the door or first to that entry point and really steal market share, and so our ecommerce strategy really around growth in revenue and growth in customers and differentiation is what drove our digital transformation on the front end or is still driving that. The other side of it is service to our customers. We’re doing a lot of exciting things in our contact center. We have agents across the globe, and we are updating the technology and toolset that they use, but, again, the way that we’re measuring the success of that, the way that we’re designing the road map for that is based on the outcomes, which is, again, revenue growth because these are also, they provide service, but they also do inside sales these agents, and so we want to grow revenue. We want to grow loyalty with our customers. We want to prevent churn in our customer group. Those are the objectives that we are going after, and the digital transformation in our contact center is supporting those outcomes. Similarly, in factory, we’re doing some exciting work in our factories around IAOT, a lot of focus around connectivity of our machines. We’re also doing some exciting things with AI and machine learning and predictive, predictive maintenance, predictive quality. So these are exciting things, but again, they have a clear objective. That objective is productivity savings. That objective is lead time improvement STR, which are both differentiating for us in the market and differentiate us against our competitors. We want to do those investments in that factory to improve our cost of course, but then also to serve our customers better and differentiate ourselves in the market, and the final example I would share with you is our engineering space. This is one of some of the most exciting work in the power of what the power of compute has been able to do for us in our innovation, and our data and devices business as an example, their customers are Facebook, Google, Amazon. We’re supporting the connectivity of their data centers, and these customers, as you can imagine, the growth is enormous. The stability requirements are enormous, and the technology innovation that we have to keep up with and we have to lead with to serve these customers is huge. That’s exciting but also proves to be a challenge, and so one of the things that we’re looking at in our engineering space is how do we do more simulation in the cloud? How do we arm our engineers with the digital technology so they can test out products in the digital space, test for effectivity before it goes on to a factory floor and becomes a physical test that we’re doing or a prototype to our customers? And, also, as we’re doing this connectivity on the floor, in Industry 4.0, all this data that’s helping us improve productivity is also able to be fed back into our engineering solution development to say, okay, this is what we’ve learned from what we’ve developed before. This is how well these products worked as we manufactured them. Here’s an opportunity to improve the design based on those learnings and effectively use the production data back into our engineering environment, to help us drive the better designs and of course increase our speed to market which as you can imagine in this space where we’re delivering 5G and thinking about 6G in the future, it’s critical that speed to market is absolutely critical for us.
Sanjog Aul [00:09:27]:
Now this is a very, very comprehensive answer that you gave and I like the depth to which you went because you gave some real examples. Now one thing which does come up where the pendulum swings sometimes to extremes. Either we say we are too crazy about the new toys that we are finding and that’s why we try to chase them. Other times, we just say, oh, yes. It is yet another business initiative, which will, of course, require us to connect it to revenue growth or, the productivity improvement, but there’s something to be said about digital, which is that it brings some disruption or it has the potential to bring some disruption and resetting and rethinking the way we have been doing things and in the interest of relevance. Relevance, of course, today but also in the future because our business models are changing, customers’ needs and demands are changing. The overall approach to how things can be done is changing. So if we just stay focused on what I can do to make more money now or shave more cost now. We are actually leaving some potential on the table to redefine and enhance our overall our in fact, improve our overall DNA to stay relevant, but that portion gets missed. Where is the issue people are oblivious about it or they don’t believe they should invest in it? Because that is true investment where you don’t have an immediate ROI, but that investment is not happening as one would expect. Why?
Anu Varma [00:11:02]:
Right. Yeah. So one thing I would say, Sanjog Aul, and I’m a big believer in enterprise architecture. I consider myself woke, if I can say it that way, because I do think that you get to a moment with enterprise architecture where the light goes on and you go, oh, wow. This is the answer to so many of these types of questions where this could be answered. So for example, in our factory space as an example, we’re working on our digital transformation, the 3 to 5 year road map, but that is being driven by a capability assessment, and I don’t mean just our current capabilities in the factory, but what are the capabilities that we need for the future? And then working backwards from there and saying, okay. What are our gaps alone? Let’s put that 3 to 5 year road map together on how do we get to a smart factory, that is ready for the future. So for example, if you look at the supply chain, it’s a perfect example. The evolution of what’s happening in the supply chain is so rapid, from companies like UPS and FedEx and these companies that are Amazon, of course, that are driving this totally digital supply chain network. We need to be thinking about what is this gonna mean to our customers in the future. Are they gonna have their digital supplier network? How are they gonna be looking at that supply chain and the digitization in that supply chain? What are their needs gonna be in that future? And then how are we going to meet those needs? So we’re doing a capability assessment, just like you would do any other EA type of exercise, but it’s focused on the factory capabilities of today, which answers the gaps of where are our gaps now that we need to plug, but it also thinks about the future of what will be needed, and then you come backwards to say, okay. How am I gonna close those gaps with digital technology? And put that investment plan together to say, over the 3 to 5 years, this is where I need to invest, and these are the capability gaps I need to close, and that gets you thinking in that future space. So it’s not a blank page, throw a dart on the board and say, oh, I need to get digital in the future. I need to think about this, but again, a very strategic way of looking at what capabilities am I gonna need in the future. Let me brainstorm all of that. I think this is where it’s going. I think these are the ideas that are coming up. I’ve heard a lot of these types of discussions happening. This is what Amazon’s doing. Now let’s work backwards. Where are we and how do we close that gap?
Sanjog Aul [00:13:49]:
So I totally see the value of enterprise architecture. Now one aspect of this is how about if enterprise architecture is supposed to be used, we are almost front-ending with how will we execute it, and if you were to preempt ideation with minutiae of the execution, then ideation process could potentially suffer, and the natural tendency of us looking at what’s gonna be good for us, first, we should see what’s even possible and not taint that ideation based juices with what will work for us or not work with us. So, in fact, abstracting or divorcing the ideation and execution could actually help both parties
Anu Varma [00:14:45]:
Yeah.
Sanjog Aul [00:14:46]:
At the very stage of, envisioning this whole thing, but we see, like, your response was, we will always look from business lens and always look what would I need, but do you know what you need at all times? We don’t.
Anu Varma [00:14:59]:
No, and I think this is where the ideation comes in. So the other example I would use for you is, in our contact center space, we have a new leader who came in to the company, and as she developed her strategy, she did her assessment and came in with, here’s my gaps in people process and technology, and that to me was, as you can imagine from an IT perspective, an awesome way to look at things. You’re not coming into me saying, hey, Anu. I’ve got all of these technology gaps. You’re coming to me and saying, I’ve got a people process and technology road map, which was a recipe for success in my mind. So I was very excited with that, but the way that we approached developing a road map was very business centric in that, and the ideation was segregated from technology. So what we did was talk about what are the capabilities that she needs for her goals around people process technology. So she has strategic goals on customers she wants to grow, revenue growth, and capacity growth in her resource capacity. These are her strategic initiatives. We work down from there to say, okay, what are the capabilities that support that? What are the drivers that can help us close the gaps in those capabilities, and one of the final things we said was what is technology, and that’s a very business led exercise in getting to, here’s the gaps in my world for the future, for the current. This is what I think I need, and then the technologists from my IT organization come in and say, okay. These are the drivers and these are the gaps that you want to close. Here’s some ideas on innovation and technology that can come into play now and let’s start putting that 3 to 5 year technology investment plan together. So it is allowing that business activity and that ideation to happen separate from a technology discussion and the technology discussion comes in afterwards.
Sanjog Aul [00:17:05]:
So you definitely shared stories about what you did some ideation, some execution, so many things are underway. So if you were to look back, are there any lessons learned? Are there any mistakes which you could safely share were made in the ideation process or I’m sure there is resistance to anything new? So what would be the pitfalls, the gotchas, the mistakes, the resistance, the rejections that you went through as you even worked on the design? Let’s not even talk execution for a second. Just as you started painting on this blue sky, what was the experience?
Anu Varma [00:17:48]:
So I will tell you a pitfall that I see many places, and actually coming into TE, I’ve only been here for one year. I was happy to see that that pitfall hasn’t happened to us, that our strategy around digital, which was already underway when I got here, had already taken into consideration, and one of the biggest pitfalls in digital is you think about customer, you think about the customer experience, you’re thinking about your business outcomes, you don’t necessarily think about an end-to-end transformation, and so your front end experience for your customer is wonderful. Easy, beautiful, personalized. That’s one of the most important things is how do we create a more personalized experience for our customers, but then on the back end of your business, those front end capabilities are being supported by hamsters on a wheel. Because it’s still all manual, takes a lot of effort, and one of the places that we saw this happening a little bit is in our ecommerce. We wanted to open up an ecommerce store but we knew that we would also have to invest in product information and making sure the right product information, accurate product information was available to that ecommerce store, and so we had to do the work and the investment on the back end to make sure that it wasn’t the hamsters on the wheel. It didn’t require a lot of human power to feed the front end experience. It was an end-to-end view of it, and we were doing the full transformation, not just focusing on the front end, and that’s a pitfall I’ve seen myself in my past career, but I’ve also seen it, and heard of it from other customers that are like, oh, they’re so focused on that front end because that’s the shiny object and not understanding, to really realize value it needs to be end-to-end, and that means you have to think about your SAP integration or your engineering systems integration. The less sexy things. The less visible to the world things but those are also critical to the success of the Faranam.
Sanjog Aul [00:20:02]:
Okay. So another thing we should talk about is digital by design is fluid, it’s not something, you cannot design based on a current state, if you will, because even that is transient or there is always something shifting and we are evolving. When you think about design, do you really go blue sky painting or do you take some parameters, create a very big box and then do design? Well, what would a good design approach entail? What kind of loosely hinged box that you would create which will give you the flexibility and keep the room so that if there are shifts happening, you’re able to accommodate them.
Anu Varma [00:20:46]:
Yeah. I think that’s a great question, because one of the shifts that’s happened for me mentally, and I was just talking about this to some colleagues is we need to stop thinking about technology in terms of the way we’ve always looked at technology, In IT, ERP as an example, we look at things from that 10 to 15 year lens. Okay. We’re investing in an ERP system. It’s a 10 to 15 year investment. We’re not gonna easily be changing that. The digital space is evolving so fast. There is so much transformation happening in the technology landscape and the ecosystem of new suppliers coming in, new vendors coming in, lots of innovation happening. You have to start thinking in terms of the 3 to 5 year roadmap, and you have to think about, how do I invest now in a technology and I can see the ROI on that, We’re doing this in our factory right now where we’re creating a digital SDC for quality so that you can, near real time, monitor the production and see that it’s deviating from the constraints that you have and that you may need to make some machine adjustments automatically. So we’re doing that, and the technology platform we’ve chosen, there is some debate. Is this the right platform? Is this the wrong platform? Will this be the right platform in the future? And all of these types of questions, and we had to step back and say, what is the ROI on this? And if the return you can see a return or a payback in 10 months, 11 months because you’re solving a big problem, which is quality and scrap reduction. If you can see a payback in 10 months, invest in the technology. Don’t worry about where it’s gonna be in 5 years. Because the logic that you’re building in is lift and shift to another platform, to another technology. So one of the guiding principles that we’re saying is don’t get caught up in these IT decisions like you did in the past, and that gives us flexibility because that keeps us open to the evolution that’s happening in the industry on the new vendors coming into the space, the new innovation that they’re bringing. It keeps us open to those ideas, and it’s the logic of how do we solve a problem that becomes our proprietary IP, and that becomes a and that can be lifted and shifted onto different platforms, and so that’s one of the ways that we’re looking at flexibility, but the other thing that is a pet peeve for me is, one of the things that drives me nuts is we have this idea of an all you can eat buffet. Because there’s so much going on, because your email box is bombarded by technology vendors promising Nirvana with their tool. There’s this idea of there’s all these different things we can do. Let’s go after that, and what I’ve been really pushing for with our business leaders is let’s get away from this idea of the all you can eat buffet to the 3-course meal. Let’s bring back focus on what’s most important, and in fact, as our CEO talks about this all the time, mind what matters, and mind what matters means really focus on that 3-course meal. These are the things that I’m going after. Let me focus narrowly on that, then let me go to the next big things instead of diverting your focus and trying to do 20 things at once, which could also lead to failure, and it doesn’t give you the flexibility. You’re tying yourself into all of these different areas and you’re not really focused on driving what is gonna deliver the biggest outcomes for you.
Sanjog Aul [00:25:08]:
Now the same way like this is I mean, I love the way you respond because you’re so thorough. So in terms of the execution, like the way you found some gotchas, some issues or pitfalls when you did the design, to whatever level have you in whatever way you have tried to execute on your plans, and I’m sure comparing with your industry peers who are working on this, are there any patterns? Are there any things which we should be watching out for or we should improve upon or get ready with before we jump on the execution journey? Because a lot of people are spending money whether it is on cloud foundation or security or talent or analytics. all of these things are core pillars, but all of them are seeing a lot of leakage where an investment is done. The outcome is not as desired, and so the company suffers. So did we jump the gun? Did we not prepare? Where are those issues which we have to look at nip in the bud and do the best job we can by design?
Anu Varma [00:26:17]:
Yeah. I think one of the biggest frustrations I’ve seen is when digital becomes part of a siloed organization, and that siloed organization in your company is responsible for that digital transformation. When you break that apart from the thread of the rest of your organization, and try to treat it as an initiative on its own, I’ve seen it create a tremendous amount of frustration in the organization and usually resulting in start, stop, and failure, and so my lessons learned here have really been alignment around digital. Digital is not an entity that can live on its own. Digital is a transformation of your business, so it’s an integral part of every part of your business, and so it’s important that you get your business leaders, your key stakeholders identified, engaged, helping you define what those business outcomes are, and that makes sure that you are, of course, bringing in thought leadership there and saying, hey. This is where this can take the business, but also aligning on what are the desired business outcomes that they have and are they committed to helping you get there. So the example of the products that we needed for our ecommerce and all of the data that needed to see that, all of that work was our engineers or our product management teams across the company and getting that alignment at the top level and all the way down at the product management level to say, this is what we’re doing and I need your assistance and your team’s effort in getting us there. Are we all on the same boat? Are we all rowing in the same direction? And what happens if you treat digital as its own entity, got a chief digital officer, he’s driving everything, he’ll tell us what we need to do, then usually, you’ve got a lot of different boats going a lot of different directions, and you can see where that failure is coming. And that usually results in, yeah, this is what we thought would happen. It hasn’t happened. Let’s start over. Let’s rethink this. Do we really need digital? It hasn’t delivered the results that we expected, and then when you start talking about, everybody hasn’t jumped on the same boat, it sounds like a lot of excuses, but it’s really about did you get the right alignment in what you were trying to do, and so my short answer would be when you talk about digital transformation, it’s a business change, and that we know when business changes, you need change management, you need alignment, you need to communicate, communicate, communicate, and then find a different way to communicate to make sure everybody is throwing in the same direction.
Sanjog Aul [00:29:30]:
Let’s take a quick break, listeners. We’ll be right back, and, when we come back, let’s continue this discussion and maybe delve a little into the talent area because digital is so dependent on people, our own people, people who we get from outside and the people who could build their skills and talent in this totally new unprecedented skill mix that we need to acquire and the mindset we need to acquire because that’s what it’s gonna make digital truly happen, but is it happening? What challenges are we facing? How are we tackling those challenges? Let’s explore when we come back. Please stay tuned.
Speaker 0 [00:30:10]:
Today, enterprise technology is both strategic and global. Each week on CTN CIO Talk Network, IT thought leaders from around the world share their experience with listeners as they discuss with Sanjog Aul how they are trimming costs and partnering with business to innovate and help IT become more competitive, better care for customers, and improve the corporate bottom line. If you want to keep up with IT thought leadership, you are listening to CTN CIO Talk Network with Sanjog Aul. To learn more about our program, please visit ciotalknetwork.com. Now back to the show. Welcome
Sanjog Aul [00:31:09]:
let’s talk about the very people who make this all happen. We spoke about business alignment. We spoke about people in the Ivory Tower, and doing the design and the enterprise architecture, but the mere mortals who are business users, who are the people who are connecting with the actual customer and trying to deliver value. Plus, of course, people in technology who would spin out these good things or integrate these things to give that seamless fabric if you will on which digital will set. All those people are humans and this is a lot to chew, lot to swallow and lot to embrace. What does that journey look like and has looked like for you as you’re going about this shift?
Anu Varma [00:32:02]:
Yeah. So I would tell you that this is some of the stuff that does keep me up at night. As is every other leader, we’re looking for the right talent, and it’s not always easy to find, and you have to be creative and then how do you solve the problems? The first thing I would say when it comes to talent is you have to approach it the same way you do everything else. You have to approach a strategic view on it. What are the capabilities I need for today? What are the capabilities I need for tomorrow? And really where are my gaps? And how are my people assessing your people against those capabilities? So as I came in new to this organization, that’s exactly what I said to these are the competencies and the capabilities that I think my people need in these roles, when we did an assessment, and then we allowed the people to work on a development plan to say, okay. Here’s how you close some of these gaps, and then see if they can. I mean, that’s part of the challenge is can people bring themselves into the new digital age? And that means things like, can they work in an agile project management methodology? Can they work with this new technology? How fast do they learn? How are they at keeping up with all of the changes as we talked about? The space is evolving so fast. How do they keep up with it? Do they have a passion for it? Half the battle is getting people that really have a passion for this and wanna do this work. So that’s one of the first things, I think, is to really assess your current talent, but that means you need to know exactly what you need. Then you start looking at the gaps that you have and how are you gonna fill those gaps. Certainly, hiring talent is one way of doing that, and you want to go find that talent. That isn’t always easy as you think about, for example, in the analytics space and some of the advanced analytics like AI and machine learning. Those data sciences are hard to find and very expensive. So how do you bring in some of that talent from the outside and you utilize them as your catalyst to educate the rest of your team and as a catalyst to kind of raise the bar, bring a fresh thinking and, certainly, experience and expertise in that space, and then the last peg to the stool is really around how do you leverage your partners, and the ecosystem around you to fill in the gaps. As you’re doing your capability assessment on your talent, what are the capabilities that are more commodity skills, more development skills? They don’t require that tremendous amount of business acumen or technology acumen. They’re more execution based. What are my partners that are gonna bring me that type of skill in a reliable quality way at the most cost effective way? And then you look at what are my more strategic skills that I need and knowledge and experience, and who are my partners that are going to do that for me? And they may not be the same. I think some of our partners come to us and say, hey. I have skills from one end to the other. I can help you with everything, and that may be true. There are good partners in our ecosystem that can do that, but this is where you start looking at some of the more boutique firms and partners and say, who’s really got a niche on this? Who’s gonna bring me the thought leadership, not just execution skills and execution resources and added capacity, but really the thought leadership that makes me think differently about what I think I wanna do and challenges us to say, okay. This is what you’re thinking you want to do, but here’s some things that we’ve seen that we think this is a better approach. You want to bring some of that into your partner network because there’s no way you can really develop a huge talent pool internally or even hire a talent pool internally that can keep up with that, and so it’s important to find that ecosystem, those few partners that really push you to the edge and challenge you to go above and beyond what you were thinking.
Sanjog Aul [00:36:16]:
So your response indicates or I would not say indicate but more it’s a view where you’re looking corporate in the sense an organization try it’s like a capability or a capacity issue. How do you fix that capacity? But then, really, the value creators who are these individuals who are supposed to deliver, they may already exist in your company and yes, you might retool them, but for them to really deliver the experience that you’re thinking, it goes beyond just having skills or having a performance appraisal. They should be excited about it. For them to not only execute on the orders you give them because you don’t know it all sitting in the ivory tower. That means there will be some ongoing learning. That means these people should be willing to give you feedback that what you gave me, this was the nuance that we should take care of because otherwise this is upsetting to the customer or overwhelming or customers getting detached because of a b c, but they would not do it if they were not on board. The people, the human side of a talent is what I’m referring to also.
Anu Varma [00:37:36]:
No. I think that’s really good. The one recent learning I’ve had and our HR partner has been really pushing us to think about how we look at talent, and when I talked earlier about kind of our old IT baggage of thinking about things like ERP, you need to think in the 10 to 15 years. We have this bias around years of experience in our talent pool. I really need a data scientist who’s done this for 10 years and I need somebody that’s really been tested. What we found recently, we did a project actually with the University of Pennsylvania, The Wharton School, and we tested this with a project, a 5-week project on predictive forecasting with two MBA students, three undergrads, and a professor advisor, who was an expert in data science as well as economics. Can we create a predictive forecast? I was shocked, and I went in thinking, okay. I think we’re gonna get a lot of value from this, but I was so pleasantly surprised with what these young people were able to do in the short period of time for us, and my takeaway coming out of that is they came to the problem without any bias. This is a generation that has grown up in this digital world, in this data world, and they came to the problem without any bias, and they solved it without that bias. They didn’t know a lot about our business or our strategies or anything else. They just looked at the problem in that way, and I walked away with an affirmation of what I had been thinking is that we need to bring in more young people and partner them with the people that we have here that do have the experience, that do have the knowledge of the business and the strategy, and one of the things that we’ve talked about is can you do more apprentice type of work? Can we create apprentices where you bring these young people in that have just a great fresh way of looking at things, that completely unbiased approach to it, partner them up with somebody that’s got more experience. I think both individuals come out of their learning a lot more, and you grow this talent and then a different type of talent within your organization. I think the same is true in our business side of it where, as these young people are coming in, one of the things I heard a long time ago was, Google spoiled it for all of us in IT. Their user interface for Google is one box, blank box. That’s it. You type anything to it, you get answers. Then people come into work and we give them screens and screens of stuff, and so this generation that’s grown up with this Google user interface is coming at problem solving at using digital in a different way. How do you partner that up with the folks that really understand our industry, our customers that have that insight and design for that experience in the future. How do you design for the people that are using the systems now and the whole generations of people that are coming after. Does that answer your question? Was that what you were looking for, Sanjog Aul?
Sanjog Aul [00:41:15]:
Yes. So definitely what you’re talking about, the people who we are getting, the ones who are invited to help execute, this is not like a discrete stage type of an effort where you will design once, you have a blueprint ready, and then you go about executing. There will be design, there will be experimentation, there will be feedback collection or even if you created something substantial, but even that will be continually tweaked, and for that to be done, you need to keep getting feedback. So there are people, humans who are designing it, humans who are executing it. Those two constituents have to be able to work together closely enough and have to be able to respect each other and have to be able to openly say that I messed up or you messed up. Or we all messed up. Let’s go back to the drawing board. Or maybe what we are thinking, the value proposition or so called the business case we developed, there isn’t one there. Instead of only the onus lying on the folks sitting in the ivory tower or the corner office, which requires a different type of a DNA shift or a culture.
Anu Varma [00:42:40]:
Yeah. That’s the word I was gonna use. We’re having a lot of conversations around culture right now. We talk about it often. We need a culture that accepts failure. We talk about, fail fast, learn fast. There’s a lot of these ideas. Implementing those ideas and actually working that way is a whole different thing. So it’s easier to say we support failure. We don’t want to be a risk averse culture. One of the things that I learned in some of my leadership training, a while ago, I was working with a leadership developer. Her name is Tony Genoy. She’s got some great books out there. One of the things she asked is, what do you think of your company, and if your company was a person, how would you describe it? And we would say maybe, okay, it’s conservative, it’s risk averse, it’s solid financially. We would give it all these kind of characteristics if it was a person, and then the question was, what do you want your company to be? Well, I want it to be progressive. I want it to take risks. I still wanna be solid and financial, and I want all these other things, and for us all as we were listening to this is if that’s the culture we want our company to be, that’s how we have to behave every single day. We have to come in here, and when we say we’re okay with failure, then we have to be okay with failure, and we do have to celebrate it, and celebration doesn’t mean, okay, you give everybody an award for failing, but you recognize that somebody took a risk. Somebody took a calculated risk on something. We went out and did it, and you know why it didn’t work the way that it should have, but now the question is, what can we salvage from that? Not just what can we learn from that so we don’t repeat that mistake, but what can we salvage from that and how can we build something new from what we had started? That type of thinking of getting creative about failure and leveraging failure to open up another door that you may have not even thought of, I think is where we need to be, and to change the DNA, each one of us as leaders has to behave like that every single day in every one of our engagements with our teams, and then the next level of leadership so that it isn’t something that you drive a risk culture from the top down. It’s really part of the DNA because you’re living it throughout the organization.
Sanjog Aul [00:45:29]:
Talk about leadership. So, of course, you did what you had to do to meet business objectives. You went and talked about the partners who need to also step up. Where do you need to go as leader for you to be able to do it well? Because it all starts with us. You’re an IT leader. You might have a business counterpart. Is there a shift required in the way we perceive, in the way we live our leadership roles for us to actually make progress not by fluke, but by design?
Anu Varma [00:46:10]:
Yeah. Here’s what I would say. Just like with everything else in leadership, you have to know when to apply what skill. When do I need to be much more conservative and risk averse and maybe even more directive, hands on, engaged? And when do I need to step back and empower my team? You need to figure out that balance always in leadership. I think digital is the same. There are proven technologies out here. Not everything is on the bleeding edge that we’re doing. There are proven technologies and there’s a lot that we can learn from people that have implemented a lot of this stuff. We can learn from their failures, and do it right for ourselves. Then there are areas of what we’re doing that is really on that bleeding edge. Some of those things that we’re doing with machine learning and AI for our factory. Some of these areas require a different type of leadership and you have to say okay, what is the right balance of investment in that type of skunk works? How much am I willing to invest in that? How much time am I willing to give it? How will I measure Am I seeing success in that space? When you’re truly out there doing skunk work stuff, you have to look at it in a different way. You don’t measure it with the same KPIs that you do in implementation of a call center tool or analyzing our engagement data, for example, which is a proven technology. So from a leadership perspective, you can’t apply the same levers that you did before. You really have to be open to this. We used to always do R and D, but not at this level of scale where you’re kind of on the bleeding edge and every time you turn around somebody’s invented something new or some other way of looking at it, then there’s an opportunity to learn, and to be honest with you, I don’t know all the answers to that. This is something that is evolving for us as well as we’re doing this. How much leeway do you give to that Skunk Works? How do you measure success? When do you know it’s ready? When do you say, okay, that’s enough investment in that that really isn’t going to get us there. Let’s switch gears and go somewhere else. So just like everything else with digital, I would say that flexibility and leadership is critical and being able to know your risk tolerance and where do you want to suspend some of that and say, okay, my risk tolerance in this space is kind of low. There should be known technology. Let me go implement that. My confidence level is high there. Here, I don’t know. What’s my risk tolerance? How do I want to measure it? How do I want to go after that? You have to have that flexibility as you look at the entire end to end digital.
Sanjog Aul [00:49:17]:
On behalf of the show and our listeners, I’d really like to thank you Anu for sharing your views on how organizations can design digital well enough and then execute it immaculately or at least come close to it for the best outcomes. Thanks so much.
Anu Varma [00:49:34]:
Thank you, Sanjog Aul. Again, thanks for having me on.
Sanjog Aul [00:49:38]:
And listeners, hope you enjoyed. I got a bunch of nuggets out of this. So please like us on Facebook, search for CTN and be sure to follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn, and of course, go ahead and subscribe to the podcast. We are on over 20 syndication channels and listen to in over 110 countries. So you can join us too. Thank you again for listening to this segment on CTN. This is Sanjog Aul, your talk show host. Until next week take care and God bless.
