With legacy going out, cloud and third party managed services being embraced, we are essentially handing over our IT lifeline to external entities while still taking responsibility for the outcome. How do we rethink, renovate and/or replace our IT core leveraging partners such that it is more reliable, resilient and effective?

Contributor

• • Helen Norris, Chief Information Officer, Chapman University

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Transcript

Sanjog Aul [00:00:27]:

Hello, and welcome to CIO Talk Radio. To learn more about the show, please visit www.ciotalkradio.com, and as always, we invite you to join the discussion on Twitter, CTR live, and look for this show as management. Today’s topic is Developing Partner Driven It Core, and our guest for today’s show is Helen Norris, Chief Information Officer with Chapman University. Hi, Helen. How are you?

Helen Norris [00:00:54]:

Good. Thank you, Sanjog Aul. How about yourself?

Sanjog Aul [00:00:57]:

Oh, life could not be better. So, work is going well?

Helen Norris [00:01:00]:

It is busy. I’m the CIO at a university. It’s summer, so a lot of times people think our lives are a bit easier because we have fewer students around, but actually, we tend to choose this time of the year to do a lot of projects and implement things that would be harder to do when our students are on campus. So

Sanjog Aul [00:01:20]:

Sure. So never a dull moment.

Helen Norris [00:01:22]:

Never a dull moment.

Sanjog Aul [00:01:23]:

Alright. So, as we are letting go of this legacy, over the years and embracing cloud and other hosted services or managed services for delivering our IT and IT enabled functionality. The goal perhaps is to become nimble and maybe remove a few things from our plate. However, are we actually inviting risk, that comes with relying on external partners? Should we be really ripping apart the very core of what our IT was built on and rethink and reimagine it to make it the way we want, but at the same time, do not lose sight of what risks it’s introducing, what security challenges it’ll create. That’s what we wanted to discuss today. So, Helen, the first question I have for you is, command and control has been the guru mantra for IT management all along, and, yes, we went the route of outsourcing or co sourcing and using other service providers, etcetera, but then that was more at a peripheral level. Now we are fundamentally talking about, okay, why not just have the people who are best at it, let them take over so we focus more on the business needs versus wiring the computers. What is happening here? Why is this change of heart? Where is this coming from?

Helen Norris [00:02:50]:

Well, first of all, I think it’s a slow change of heart. I don’t think that everybody’s completely bought into that. The time is now for us to look at moving the IT core or partnering with vendors or partners, excuse me, to manage our core services. So I don’t think that it’s been completely embraced by IT professionals or by organizations, but where we started to look at it, the triggers for us are really about the level of service that’s now expected for any of us. So even when you think about basic service, think of this as a person, can you imagine going anywhere where you didn’t have wireless access? And that’s the kind of expectation that IT leaders have in organizations. It’s to provide that same level of service. We always hear when we look at our enterprise systems, why can’t it be more like Amazon? I use Amazon all the time. So the expectation for us has grown dramatically, because of the consumerization of IT. It used to be in the old days, we could say, well, this is how it is, and now we can’t because people have brought a different expectation. Our consumers, our executives, everybody in our organization has that expectation. At the same time, it’s not like we’ve seen a massive infusion in resources into IT to meet this new expectation, so I think we simply have to find different ways to do things. One of my favorite examples is around storage. We have more and more needs. I’ve been around a long time, and I recall 25, 30 years ago, you actually could say to users, well, you only have this much space and so delete your old documents or archive your old documents. You sort of can’t say that anymore. People have an expectation of unlimited storage. So how can we do that? And the answer, one of the answers to those kinds of expectations is, as you said, working with people who do this all the time and finding a way to do it a little bit cheaper. So I think it’s the expectation and the desire to meet that expectation without seeing a huge increase in cost.

Sanjog Aul [00:05:24]:

So you mentioned the renewed expectations of what IT should be potentially delivering and the lack of ability to be able to scale to that level, that’s taking us in the direction where we use third party providers. Now do you think we kinda draw a line or we should be drawing a line still to say, okay. You can only go to third party and do these peripheral things which do not touch my core or because there are peep organizations who are even saying, why even just draw a line wherever because you could be fundamentally rethinking. So is it more a human reluctance or inertia which is preventing us from going all the way, or is there a reason why it is not a good idea to go and fundamentally rethink the core?

Helen Norris [00:06:14]:

Well, I think there are three reasons. First of all, I think that line does exist. It exists in different places for different organizations, and I would actually say for different industries. However, I do see that that line is just going to continue to move as time goes by. So where the line was last year is different to where the line is this year is different to where it’s going to be in the future. I think there are three reasons why people draw the line. The first one is exactly as you said. It’s a people thing. This is threatening. This is challenging. For those of us who work in IT, it’s threatening our livelihood in some ways, or at least it’s going to, it already has, so fundamentally changed our lives and what we do. That’s pretty threatening. I even recall the first time I outsourced email, a very peripheral function, absolutely makes common sense to outsource it, but the very people who had to outsource the email were my email administrators. These are people who were fundamentally changing their job, a job that they enjoy. They like being email administrators, and all of a sudden now they have a project to wind down that part of their job. So I do think there’s a people piece. I think that that’s very real. I think sometimes we go into it with an element of, well, they were going to do this. They should do this, and I think that’s not the right approach. You have to figure out how to work with people, to make this feel, it’s going to be threatening, you can’t make it feel less threatening, but make it feel like it’s not the end of the world. I think the second issue is around cost. I don’t believe that the cost models are quite there yet. I think we have a little bit of work to do on making the costs work for us, and especially I think when we consider, and I’m going to pick on a piece of infrastructure as I mentioned, storage. In the past we did storage, we bought storage, it was capital expense and we bought it and then we upgraded it and then we replaced it and this was all kind of capital. When we look at moving our services, our core especially our core, but really any services into the cloud, the costs are different. They’re operating expenses, and so we have to figure out how to make that shift from CapEx to OpEx. We also have to really figure out how to truly compare the costs because when we do it internally, the costs are not just the cost of buying storage, but it’s the cost of the people and the cost of the environment, and the third thing I think we have to consider is something that you mentioned before. It’s risk and security, and this is why I think that line varies by industry to industry. I’m not in health care, I haven’t worked in health care, but I do know that some of the rules around protecting personal health information put a very high burden on the people who manage the infrastructure, and so I think that in that industry, or I would guess that in that industry, there’s a great deal of discussion as IT leaders and executives in that industry look at moving those services out of their data centers. The risks are real. I think sometimes we lean on, well, for security reasons, we’re not going to do this when the real reason is the first reason, it’s the people reason, but we do have to look at what happens when we move our most prized assets, our most prized, and that’s our data, out of our immediate control, and again, as I said, I think that matters more and has a higher degree of concern in health care organizations and I would guess in financial organizations also.

Sanjog Aul [00:10:43]:

See, when you discussed cost, and of course, there are situations where it may look on the surface that the cost of going to a third party provider compared to doing it internally, an apples-to-apples comparison here because with that, you also get the renewed capability of scaling or extending your operations in a heartbeat, which you may not have today, and there are some other justifications to go that route. So do you think that cost, while we discuss it and we keep bringing it up, is truly what is holding us back?

Helen Norris [00:11:29]:

That’s a great point. I think sometimes we look at cost and we fail to consider things like what’s the opportunity or what can we do in the future that it’s really setting us up for future growth and we really fail to consider internal costs. So I think it becomes a different way of managing our budgets. This is where I think it gets even a little bit scary. Sometimes costs are lower because you need fewer people, fewer technical people to run it, and that’s a different kind of discussion then. It’s not just about the cost, but it’s about the personnel implications, and that can be very challenging. I think, though, the key is, or certainly in my experience, the key is moving from the capital to the operating, because it simply is changing how you manage your budgets. I’ve had experiences in the past where it feels easy, I guess it’s never easy, to seek funding for a one-time purchase, but to your point, that doesn’t put you in the position for growth. However, seeking funding for operating expenses, that are seen in some way as permanent operating expenses can be a little bit harder. So I think it’s about educating up the chain, if you will. A person in my role might see the value of moving to an operating expense because it gives us greater capability for growth, but we have to speak to our upper management about why we’re now bringing on this additional operating expense.

Sanjog Aul [00:13:18]:

So we are talking about a transformation from us selectively at our own discretion using various services where the cost and many other criteria match to a point where our very fundamental IT core is taken care of by partners who are best of breed, for example, doing the things that they’re supposed to do, and, of course, I’m sure it’ll not result in you having your two weeks in Hawaii every month. It will still require you to be there. However, what you’ve done is you’ve fundamentally taken your IT from a monolithic organization into a set of programs that are running and CIO turning into a program manager. Do you think that’s too much to ask for, or is that too Star Trek type?

Helen Norris [00:14:08]:

I think that’s the direction, and I would actually argue one of the things I’ve seen, and again, I’ve worked in universities for a long time, is that while I think we’ve thought of ourselves as kind of the big IT organization in control, in fact for many years we haven’t been. We’ve had pockets of IT throughout the organization running very critical services. So in fact, for many years we’ve had to do this kind of work internally, where our role as the CIO or in the IT organization is not to deliver all the services, but sometimes find ways to broker and integrate those services, even internally. I see this, bringing in services that are managed outside the organization in a similar way. I agree, I think our jobs are going to change. It becomes about integrating all of those services into a good experience for our customers and for our end users, so we may have pieces of the infrastructure or the peripheral services that are outsourced, and our job is now to bring those pieces together, in addition to managing the service providers. So many of us have become very skilled at managing our internal service providers, we know how to manage our own people, but now we’re really talking about managing external service providers. So I think it’s a different skill set. I think we’ve been dabbling in it for years because I actually think it’s a bit of a fantasy to say we were monolithic and we had everything in our control because we didn’t. We were ignoring the other pieces of the work. So I think it’s a different skill set and I do think we’re moving more in that direction.

Sanjog Aul [00:16:08]:

Let’s take a quick break, listeners. We’ll be right back, and let’s talk about the way these new partner driven IT core models could potentially emerge. Would you just continue to utilize the same SLAs and contracts and the upfront due diligence as a way to develop it or there is more involved when you are literally handing over your lifeline to them. Please stay tuned listeners. We’ll be right back.

Speaker 0 [00:16:42]:

HP is proud to sponsor this program. Find out how the HP as a service solution for SAP HANA can help you gain instant impactful business results without capital investment by logging on to hp.com. Transform information into intelligence and a competitive advantage with a full spectrum of SAP HANA products and services from HP, a global SAP hosting partner.

Speaker 0 [00:17:12]:

Bosch Software Innovations is proud to sponsor this program. Visit www.bosch-si.com/connectedmanufacturing to find out how Bosch can help you improve your operational performance and become a manufacturing industry leader in a connected world. Change the way you predict, manage, and produce outcomes. Bosch connected manufacturing.

Speaker 0 [00:17:44]:

HP is proud to sponsor this program. Tap into our expertise, innovation, and services to bring your most important workloads to the cloud. You are listening to CIO Talk Radio with Sanjog Aul. To learn more about the show, please visit www.ciotalkradio.com. If you have a question or comment, call toll free at +1 (866) 472-5790. That number again is +1 (866) 472-5790. Now back to the show. Here’s Sanjog Aul.

Sanjog Aul [00:18:29]:

Welcome back. So imagine the possibilities of us being able to develop a partner driven IT core, what possibilities it’ll bring, what value it’ll bring. So, of course, there is a justification on, yes, it is it is. If possible, if you could go that route, that would be really bringing a lot of value to the organization. Now the goal here is to see if that’s an intent, how do we get to it? So coming to the question I just asked before we went for the break, the SLAs or contractual agreements and or upfront due diligence like we used to acquire any other partner, would that be the best way for us to think how you’re gonna develop a partner driven core? Because now you’re bringing them in, but they are no longer to be treated as vendors who you used to deal with when you had contracts only and due diligence only upfront. There has to be a different way of working with them.

Helen Norris [00:19:29]:

That’s great point. I think, you know, we certainly have to have contracts and SLAs in place. I think that makes sense, but I think what you’re talking about is something that goes a little bit beyond there where the relationship goes from vendor to customer to more partner to partner relationship. I don’t know that we know the answer as to how to contractually prepare for that, you know, if there’s a different way we write contracts or a different way we negotiate with the vendors, but I do think that how, and I think we’ll have to depend and rely a lot on our relationships with our legal departments and our procurement departments to help us in that regard, but I do think the role of the IT organization within the organization will be to manage those partnerships with our outsourcing vendors or partners. So we have to figure out how to work with them in a collaborative way so that we’re treating them more like a partner than a vendor. At the same time, part of the reason that we’re doing this is because we’re trying to outsource some of the risk and we’re trying to outsource some of the work, so we don’t want to fall into the relationship with them where we’re treating them like one of our employees. We have a duty and a responsibility to the organization to look at them as a supplier of services while at the same time looking at them as a partner. So I think it’s a pretty tricky role. I think the outsourcing vendors are getting prepared for this by instead of having the traditional roles, you know, of a salesperson and an engineer, having the role of a kind of a customer success advocate, which is a term I heard yesterday from one of my vendors, a person whose role isn’t to sell to me or whose role isn’t to deliver the service, but someone that the organization works with, in a more strategic way. So instead of treating them just like vendors, they become part of our strategy team, they become part of our discussion as we think about how we’re going to work in the future, and some of that is through new roles on the vendor side or the partner side, and new roles on our side, but I think this is pretty uncharted territory for us. I think most of us have worked with vendors, and we’ve built in things into the SLA that say if we’re down for 4 hours, we’re gonna get a rebate or whatever, and in this model, those things don’t matter because we really just don’t want to be down for 4 hours. So the rebate piece becomes much less important, and so it’s really more about the relationship.

Sanjog Aul [00:22:37]:

And we do talk about relationships. So of course, if you have the right intent and you want to bring them as a family member, you also would have some explicit or implied expectations on how should they behave. Do you think the provider community is stepping up to the plate for them to automatically start getting that type of a behavior from you as the host?

Helen Norris [00:22:58]:

Well, I think it’s going to be a journey. As we get more and more into this field, they will start developing new relationship management roles. If you look at where we’ve outsourced to date, in universities, our first steps at outsourcing was with email. We outsourced to Google. We outsourced to Microsoft. Many of us use Amazon Web Services, and these are really the big monolithic kind of companies, kind of a little bit like central IT used to be. Google, when you outsource your email, they just tell you what their terms are and you accept them, and so that’s the model we’ve been working under, so these vendors are also on a path to changing that. I think the key is that many of the vendors will be smaller vendors, that it won’t always be the Amazons and the Googles, that in some cases we’ll be using smaller, more nimble vendors who can respond to our changes, and in some cases, and this may be even a little bit more futuristic, I think the vendors will actually be brokers too, that we’ll be working with vendors who are consolidating services from bigger vendors because the bigger vendors aren’t that nimble either. Does that make sense?

Sanjog Aul [00:24:32]:

Definitely, it does. Now Socrates mentioned or is rather quoted, wisdom begins in wonder, and what if we started that journey to wonder, what would that partner driven IT core look like? Because perhaps that is where we would start, you know, first reimagining what we want and then thinking how we will get to it. So if I were to ask you that question, have you ever wondered what that partner driven IT core would look like, say, for your organization or any other organization?

Helen Norris [00:25:05]:

So, as you said, wisdom begins in wonder, thinking about what it might look like in the future, where we’ve outsourced, for universities, I think the next step is really looking at outsourcing or cloud solutions for our data and our core business. So that’s what I see coming for us down the road. How do we get that, how do we run that in this mythical future? What about infrastructure as a service? I think a couple of things that will bring fundamental change for us. First, I think I’d envision that we’ve become a little bit more standard in what we offer as an IT service because part of doing this is being willing to work with the vendor and do things a little bit differently, but the value that we get for making those changes in our approach is really the agility. In my business, we have real peaks and valleys. So at the beginning of my semester, for instance, when our students come back, the stress on our infrastructure is very high. Everybody’s trying to get online to get classes or to find out where they’re assigned in their dorms and so on, and so our traffic is much higher at that time period. In the summer, not so much. So what I would envision in the future is if we were able to live in this ecosystem of partners, being able to scale it up and pay for what I need at that time when the needs are very high and then when they are not so high being able to scale it back. So I see the flexibility as something that would be a real benefit for us as we move in this direction. I think the ability to quickly integrate new solutions and new services to offer to our clients would be part of this, and finally, one of the other things that we’re looking at throughout all industries is the ability to handle much more volume than we used to in the past, whether it’s bigger datasets or bigger pieces of network traffic, the ability to quickly manage those pieces without the large step up to get to them.

Sanjog Aul [00:27:46]:

So there is a lot involved and we would not boil the ocean. So we’ll have to take slices and conquer them, and that seems to be the approach to getting to that partner driven IT core. So if you had to rationalize and prioritize on what you will start with, how will you move that forward, what would that set of steps look like or what would you do first versus the other?

Helen Norris [00:28:10]:

Sure. Well, I think as you look at that goal, if we just have agreed we’re going to outsource or partner to move as much of our IT into a cloud kind of solution as we can. Let’s assume we’ve said that. So what’s the road map for going forward? How do we get to that road map? I think we get to it in a couple of different ways: look at areas where we’re already struggling to meet demand and see if there’s an opportunity to move those into a partner environment first, and secondly, look at the ecosystem of what’s being offered now and see where the path of least resistance is. I think it’s a combination of those two. When I look at that ecosystem and when I see where the demands are, I would say that the first step, maybe one of the easier steps is really the storage. There’s higher and higher demands on our storage. I think the partner industry is ready to manage storage for most organizations. As we talked a little bit before about issues with risk and security because once we put our data out there, it’s sort of quote out there, but I think the partner industries are prepared for that. So I think that’s the way I would look at it: where’s our pain points and can we address the pain points for the organization by looking at alternative methods of delivery and what are the partners in the ecosystem ready to deliver now, and to me, the clear example is storage.

Sanjog Aul [00:29:55]:

Now coming to the typical challenges that we do discuss and the way we approach, would you say first you will build a plan or you’ll plan your work and work your plan or you will keep that in mind as a forethought while coming up with the next steps? Which one would actually get you to that end state?

Helen Norris [00:30:17]:

That’s a great question. As IT people, the way we’ve always managed projects is we spent a lot of time planning and we have a big plan and then we move toward that end goal, and the plan might be 3 years or 5 years or something like that. Planning is really important, don’t get me wrong, but I think the days of saying we’re going to figure out what the end state looks like and then we’re going to put all the steps in place to get us there are gone. I think we’re looking at a more agile approach where we may in principle accept that we’re going to be in a different place in 3 years or 5 years, but we don’t have a blueprint for that. I think our blueprints are more in 6-month or 12-month places. So I think you kind of develop a strategy more than a plan, and one approach an organization might take, and I think this is futuristic, okay, we have a strategy to where we want to outsource all of our core IT over the next 5 years. We don’t have a blueprint of what it’s going to look like at the end of the 5 years. We know what the goal is and then we develop milestones along the way, picking the pieces that we want to get to, milestones in much smaller bites. I think we’re in the agile age. The technology is changing too fast for us to have these big long term plans because as soon as we write it, it will be different.

Sanjog Aul [00:31:56]:

Let’s take a quick break, listeners. We’ll be right back, and we will first talk about what are we talking when it is when we are referring to IT core. So is that a common denominator across the organizations on what that core looks like? Are there some common pieces? And if we can identify those and then evaluate what can be sent to someone or whether it has to be handled internally, then we will have a clearer answer to that question. So please stay tuned listeners. We’ll be right back.

Speaker 0 [00:32:32]:

HP is proud to sponsor this program. Tap into our expertise, innovation, and services to bring your most important workloads to the cloud.

Speaker 0 [00:32:44]:

Bosch Software Innovations is proud to sponsor this program. Visit www.bosch-si.com/connectedmanufacturing to find out how Bosch can help you improve your operational performance and become a manufacturing industry leader in a connected world. Change the way you predict, manage, and produce outcomes. Bosch connected manufacturing.

Speaker 0 [00:33:15]:

HP is proud to sponsor this program. Find out how the HP as a service solution for SAP HANA can help you gain instant impactful business results without capital investment by logging on to hp.com. Transform information into intelligence and a competitive advantage with a full spectrum of SAP HANA products and services from HP, a global SAP hosting partner. You are listening to CIO Talk Radio with Sanjog Aul. To learn more about the show, please visit www.ciotalkradio.com. If you have a question or comment, call toll free at +1 (866) 472-5790. That number again is +1 (866) 472-5790. Now back to the show. Here’s Sanjog Aul.

Sanjog Aul [00:34:18]:

Welcome back. So we spend the last 30 minutes trying to see what would it take to rethink, reimagine IT core, but what is it today? What is it that we think is the core for what we do? So Helen, what what’s your definition?

Helen Norris [00:34:35]:

Sure. Well, when I think of the IT core, I think of four or five different components thereof. You mentioned earlier on in our discussion that we’ve moved, we’ve already, many of us have already moved some of our peripheral services, so I think that there are basic services that comprise the IT core, things like email and calendar and maybe our mobile device management and so on and so forth. Then I think there’s the basic infrastructure that those services sit on, whether that’s data center and our servers and our UNIX boxes or whatever and also the storage upon which they reside. A specific type of service, I would define maybe the core business or the mission systems as a specific kind of service, our enterprise systems, what it takes us to run our business on a day to day basis, whether it’s the finance systems, the HR systems, if you’re in the health care industry or patient management systems or for us here in universities, our student management systems. There are ERPs, they’re part of the core, I think a huge part of the core is the data, organizations are becoming more and more heavily dependent on data and on reporting and we could talk about that for hours, and then finally I think the networking and the wireless infrastructure is a big part of the core. So it’s kind of, just to summarize in my opinion the peripheral services, the data center infrastructure including the storage, the mission critical systems or the enterprise systems, the huge swaths of data that go along with all of this and finally the network infrastructure. So that’s what I think of as the core.

Sanjog Aul [00:36:42]:

No, definitely, and that’s a clear enough definition. So let’s table that for a second. We’ll come back to it, but let’s go to the most important piece of the puzzle, which you also mentioned is one of the biggest challenge is a people related challenge. So when you talk about IT core, which is being run by your internal staff, they may have a certain amount of skills and competencies required, the specific roles that you’ll define, the workload and the work variety that they will have to deal with. Now all of that will have to fundamentally be rethought when it is going to be handed over to some people who are outside. So would you do it fully? Would you still keep somebody in house? What would be the approach to it? We’re not looking for the final answer what it is going to be, but what would be your approach to thinking through all that?

Helen Norris [00:37:32]:

Yeah, that’s a great question and this is, I think, the hardest part of this discussion. First of all, I think for the foreseeable future, I believe it will be a bit of a hybrid approach where we will continue to have internal expertise as well as handing off some of the work to our partners. I actually think that hybrid approach makes it even harder. If we could cut a cord and go from all internal one day to all external the next day, that would almost be easy by comparison, but I think in order to make the transition, you have to have some internal expertise. So you’re asking the people, if we pick on any piece, the storage, for example, if we made a decision that our end goal is to have our storage be managed by another group, we’re actually asking our storage administrators, our staff, to go through that transition when it fundamentally changes what they do. It may even put them out of a job. So you can see the challenges associated with this. I think some of the approaches you can take are thinking about, working — and this is painful or lengthy — working with your staff to see where they really want to end up. Do they want to continue to, we always use the phrase, they’ll free them up to do something more interesting. Well, that’s true, but what if you really like being a storage administrator and we outsource all of the storage pieces? I think you have to have that hard conversation with the individuals because I do think it’s possible to arrange safe landings for people, if for good people as you go through this process, but I really think it’s about having those conversations, being very clear and very honest with your staff instead of having something where you haven’t been clear about what your direction is and rumors take over and people imagine other things. So those are some of the techniques I would employ in going through this journey. First of all, it is a journey, it’s not a destination, it takes a long time, the journey’s hard, it’s important to be honest and forthright with your staff, and it’s also really important to understand where they want to end up. In my experience also, sometimes it doesn’t end in a good place for people, and that’s just really a hard place to be.

Sanjog Aul [00:40:28]:

Now what you just described was how we would manage the psyche, the motivation level, etcetera, of the people who currently are there in order for us to move to the newer state and not have attrition due to people being scared, etcetera. Right? So we spoke about that part. Now let’s take a step back. We are talking about what do you think would be the basis of you saying, this is what my core staff look like if I have moved my IT core to the partners? What would be the way you will think through? Because you could very well be on either extreme. You’ll say I’m gonna retain everything, but still give something out and I’ll retool my people.

Sanjog Aul [00:41:14]:

On the other hand, you can say I can let go of everyone because I’m seriously thinking that why would I need anyone here because partner has already taken over people. Or you will create a BOT model, which is build, operate, transfer to say, okay. Let’s build this IT core, let the vendor manage, but then my people become the employees of somebody else. So these are different strategies people have utilized. In your view, if people are going to be impacted, and, yes, we’ll have to manage their psyche and the culture and their motivation level, but what is the core people strategy that would work well in if we were to go and make it a partner driven IT core? What would work?

Helen Norris [00:41:56]:

I think the core developing the strategy for how to manage the people and how to manage the transition is going to vary from organization to organization. I think you have to look both at, as you mentioned, the culture in the organization, and you also have to look at, frankly, what your employment agreements govern your organization. As a result, I think you might have a different answer for this strategy, say, in a public organization or in the public sector where perhaps the staff are unionized versus an answer that you might have in more of a start up type organization or a Silicon Valley type organization where there’s a different approach to staffing. So I think the first thing you have to do is to look at what might work in your particular organization because I don’t think there’s a one size fits all solution here. So that would be one factor that you would consider when you’re trying to envision what the end picture looked like for this outsourcing organization or outsourcing infrastructure and envisioning what the end picture looks like for the outsourced organization. So I think you consider that first. Secondly, I think you apply what you’ve more or less agreed to do in terms of how much is outsourced and how much is managed internally and that will help you figure out, do I need to keep a lot of technical staff, do I need to have people retooled to be managers of the relationship? Because that’s sort of what it becomes. You need more people who can manage the relationships with the partners. So consider how much of that you’re going to need in your long term organization, and finally, look critically at the skill sets of the people that you have and if you’ve made a decision that we’re going to outsource more of the technical work and we need to have relationship managers in place, look critically at the people that you have and see if we could transform them from whatever job they’ve got into this different role. Now this isn’t really an answer to the question you just asked, but I want to point out that I think, and this is looking very far down the future, I think that more and more of us are going to move to where we have fewer and fewer technical staff, and this is a long term view. I think we have to because as we look into the future, the U.S. is facing, in my opinion, a critical shortage of technical workers. Those of us that choose to keep our infrastructure inside our organizations are really, in my opinion, going to struggle to find resources to manage it, and I’m really talking about 10 years out. I’ve read statistics that say in 10 years, we will be short 10,000,000 technical workers. So I think you have to consider that long term reality in your planning. If you set up your organization to where you have to have a lot of technical people in the year 2025, I think you’re setting up your organization for a difficult challenge. They’ll be competing with these outsourced vendors for that talent and we won’t be able to compete. Many of us already find ourselves in that position, it’s difficult to find technical people, it’s difficult to pay them, and so we have to look at different ways to do things, and I think that’s one of the drivers that will get us to the outsourcing of the IT core, because we simply won’t be able to staff to maintain the IT core internally.

Sanjog Aul [00:46:23]:

Let’s take a quick break, listeners. We’ll be right back, and let’s talk about the accountability and the responsibility. Yes, as a top honcho, the CIO will have that. However, you’ll need a set of lieutenants who take this initiative, break it into logical pieces, take the responsibility and accountability and move that forward. What would that cabinet look like? Those leaders and or lieutenants look like in terms of their roles and how the work will be divvied up. Please stay tuned. Listen. We’ll we’ll come back and explore.

Speaker 0 [00:46:59]:

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Speaker 0 [00:47:31]:

HP is proud to sponsor this program. Tap into our expertise, innovation, and services to bring your most important workloads to the cloud. HP is proud to sponsor this program. Find out how the HP as a service solution for SAP HANA can help you gain instant impactful business results without capital investment by logging on to hp.com. Transform information into intelligence and a competitive advantage with a full spectrum of SAP HANA products and services from HP, a global SAP hosting partner. You are listening to CIO Talk Radio with Sanjog Aul. To learn more about the show, please visit www.ciotalkradio.com. If you have a question or comment, call toll free at +1 (866) 472-5790. That number again is +1 (866) 472-5790. Now back to the show. Here’s Sanjog Aul.

Sanjog Aul [00:48:46]:

Welcome back. So talk about lieutenants, where they are the ones who will be accountable and responsible. What would be your directive to them and what would that cabinet look like?

Helen Norris [00:48:58]:

That’s a great question. I think in the past as we’ve hired people at the deputy CIO or the director level, we focused a lot on delivery. I wanted an infrastructure services director or an enterprise systems director who really knows enterprise systems and really knows how to run the network and the data center. What we’re really talking about in this environment is a set of skills that are more about collaboration and about working, figuring out how to work with partners to come up with creative solutions. So I think the lieutenants throughout the organization, we have to infuse that skill set of collaboration, figuring out how to work with people who don’t report to you in the traditional way and how to ensure that you’re clear with them and being able to hold them accountable as we want to get things done. So it’s a different kind of person. You’re looking less for a certified engineer or a person with a particular skill set who really knows how to architect and network. Instead, they need to know how to collaborate with these partners and ensure that the partners do a good job of architecting our infrastructure. I think one of the challenges there is in order to do that you do have to be fairly technically savvy in order to work with those partners and kind of hold them accountable and keep them honest around what they’re doing. So collaboration, good high level technical savviness about strategic issues and also being able to hold people accountable regardless of your reporting relationship to them. That’s what I would see as critical skill sets in those new roles.

Sanjog Aul [00:51:18]:

Now while you develop the cabinet and of course make other changes, how will you keep the spirit of innovation and experimentation alive? Because if we make it partner driven, one of the potential risks is partner would even though they are partners and they’re trying to do the way you would have done a job, but they will just do a job versus saying, okay. Let’s innovate. Let’s think out of the box. Let’s do these things not to just make more money, but more to improve or raise the bar for themselves. How would you bring that motivation within a partner?

Helen Norris [00:51:53]:

That’s an interesting question, and one thing it kind of implies to me is that we’ve done a good job of doing that in our internal IT organizations, which I don’t think we have, frankly. I think IT could certainly do better, and the reason we haven’t always done great jobs about being innovative within our IT organizations is because we’re so focused on keeping the lights on and on keeping things running that we simply haven’t had time to innovate. So I would take that lesson and apply it to the partner. If we are using them, the main reason that we’re using them is so that they keep the lights on and keep things running. That really matters, but we have to build something into our relationship with them that gives them the time and the opportunity and rewards them for innovation and coming up with new ways for us to do things. So we have to figure out a way to manage that, and as I mentioned, I don’t think we’ve always done a great job of that internally and I believe it’s come down to that our employees have been rewarded for keeping the lights on and keeping things running and not for taking risks and trying new innovative ideas. So learning from that, rewarding our partners for taking risks and for coming up with innovative ways that we can do things, allowing them for example to take some, if they create something on our dime so to speak, allowing them to use that with other customers if it makes sense. In some cases, it doesn’t, but it can in some cases. So finding a way to reward them for innovation is important.

Sanjog Aul [00:53:50]:

Now what do you think would be the top three traits of third party provider for them to be invited to your core group or the people who will handle your core?

Helen Norris [00:54:04]:

Sure. Well, I think there are two that come to mind right off the bat. First of all, it’s the price of admission to be technically competent. If they’re going to want to run our storage for instance, they have to actually know how to do that. The second piece that comes to mind is they have to be highly collaborative. They have to invest in the relationship with us, they have to be good listeners. So being able to do the job and being able to work well with us are really critical, and then the third thing, it gets a little bit to the innovation thing, but having some vision, demonstrating the ability to see beyond the next 3 months or 6 months, demonstrating a spirit of vision, understanding strategy and having some long term view of where technology is going, I think, is critically important.

Sanjog Aul [00:55:21]:

One final question, 30 seconds. What do you think would be the top three leadership traits that would be required for a CIO or another IT leader who’s at the top in order to pull this off that is to rethink, reimagine, and develop a partner driven IT core?

Helen Norris [00:55:40]:

Well, collaboration. You’ve got to be able to get the buy in of the people in your group and in the organization as well as working with the partners. So collaboration is a critical piece. I think vision and strategy, the ability to see what we want to do in the future and not designing or working with the vendor to meet our needs today, but to meet our needs in 5 years, and then finally being a risk taker because this is risky, and so being comfortable with taking risks and being comfortable with making a change that’s a little bit scary and not being afraid to fail. Because we will make mistakes, we will have some failures and being able to recover from them, I think, is a critical piece.

Sanjog Aul [00:56:28]:

On behalf of the show and our listeners, thank you so much, Helen, for sharing your thoughts on how organizations can actually envision and execute on developing a partner driven IT core.

Helen Norris [00:56:40]:

Great. Well, thank you, Sanjog Aul. I’ve enjoyed the conversation. It’s been fun.

Sanjog Aul [00:56:46]:

Beautiful. Thank you so much, and listeners, hope you enjoyed, learned a few nuggets, got a few nuggets out of this. Please like us on Facebook, search for CIO Talk Radio, and be sure to follow us on Twitter. Thank you again for listening to CIO Talk Radio. This is Sanjog Aul, your talk show host. Next week, take care, and God bless.