Today’s rapidly changing business landscape is driving many organizations to re-calibrate their customer acquisition and retention strategy and establish a real and robust business continuity plan. They need strong leadership, an infrastructure that is scalable with redundant connectivity to access data, flexible systems, and reliable tools to keep their people productive and focused on serving customers. How are they making this shift to keep up with the pace of change?

Contributor

• • Talvis Love, Senior Vice President & Chief Information Officer – Pharmaceutical Segment, Cardinal Health

Transcript

Sanjog Aul [00:00:00]:
Welcome, listeners. This is Sanjog Aul, your host and the topic for conversation today is Keeping Up With The Pace Of Business And Unpredictable Changes. So today’s rapidly changing business landscape is driving many organizations to recalibrate their customer acquisition and retention strategy and establish a real and robust business continuity plan. They need strong leadership, an infrastructure that is scalable, with redundant connectivity to access data, flexible systems, and reliable tools to keep their people productive and focused on serving customers. How are they making this shift to keep up with the pace of change? To discuss this, I have with me Talvis Love. Talvis is the Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at the Pharmaceutical segment with Cardinal Health. Hey, Talvis, thank you for joining us.

Talvis Love [00:00:57]:
Hi. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Sanjog Aul [00:01:00]:
Thank you and so, Talvis, here’s my first question. So today’s socioeconomic environment poses challenges for organizations like never before. The customers are anxious and so are our employees who are responsible for serving them. So what challenges do the business and IT leaders like you face as you all are trying to keep everyone focused on delivering on the customers as promised?

Talvis Love [00:01:32]:
That’s a really great question and I’ll tell you, the most unprecedented time that we’ve encountered, at least in my business experience, has been this COVID 19 epidemic and it has posed a lot of challenges across a number of different areas but really to keep people focused in what we have done, and I think we’ve done a pretty good job at it is really focused first taking care of the safety of our employees. Our organization was pretty out in front making decisions about people working from home, looking at their safety first, ensuring that their families were safe and being able to do that. Our employees didn’t have to worry about themselves so much other than adjusting to that new normal. They could continue their focus on their customer and continue their focus on providing the services that we do, which are in the healthcare industry also. We all needed healthcare to be strong.

Talvis Love [00:02:28]:
So the work that our organization, Cardinal Health, was doing every day was absolutely required and continues to be absolutely required in order to help the country as well as across the globe through this pandemic. So that’s the first thing is really ensuring that the employees are safe. I would say the second thing is to ensure that they are able to collaborate and get the work done. So now that they don’t have to be focused so much on their safety or their family safety, but they are working an entirely different environment with a different context than ever before. How do we make that as smooth as possible and we’ve done a number of things really starting a couple years ago when we made a decision to move the majority of our processing to cloud environments and we opted for speed in doing that and by that I mean we for the most part lifted and shifted our existing environments and then took to optimizing them for cloud efficiencies. Now we had no idea this was of course like none of us did

Talvis Love [00:03:31]:
but as a result of that, we were able to have all of our systems available in the cloud environment for access in a way that we couldn’t have before and the second part of that is leveraging the collaboration technologies and having that ready and available for employees to use and we were able to do that pretty much at a turn of a dime. We made a decision, I think it was a Tuesday or Wednesday, that we would be working from home, sending everyone working from home that following Monday and by that time we were ready to go and we didn’t have any issues with people being able to connect, people being able to collaborate and talk to each other. If you talk across our management team, the majority will say that they have seen an increase in productivity through the use of these technology versus a decrease. The final point that I’ll make, and this is going toward the safety because generally we think about office environments and I work in an office environment and most of my teams as well, but I have team members that work in our distribution centers that are the closest with the customers.

Talvis Love [00:04:36]:
So ensuring that those distribution center workers are safe within their environments, making sure that they have cleaning protocols that happen within those facilities, also ensuring the technology which is all cloud enabled as well, works for them on a day to day basis and they don’t have to get exposed to people that they don’t need to get exposed to in order to do those jobs. So across all those different components are things that I think we’ve done fairly successfully with the pandemic in these very uncertain and changing times. As we learn more and more about COVID 19.

Sanjog Aul [00:05:14]:
So Talvis, with the unpredictable nature of the business landscape we have today, our IT infrastructure, the systems and the tools really got tested to the max. So what’s truly working well in your view and where are things falling apart?

Talvis Love [00:05:32]:
I think the things that we did strategically, we put in place, strategically move it to the cloud. Selecting collaboration tools that allowed us to connect across the globe. Those things really worked out well for us. We were able to put them in place and have them work efficiently. I think that the challenges that we’ll have, as in most organization, as we shift back to going back to work. Our environments aren’t set up for this. So how do we move to open environments, open workspaces and with this move back to work without a solution in place or a vaccine or a successful therapy in place for COVID 19 we’ll have to maintain social distancing and those type of things.

Talvis Love [00:06:17]:
So how do we make sure that we employ that to go back to work environment is our next thing that we’re looking at but overall, the shift to work from home, the support of the infrastructure has worked well and probably one area, another area for us as a industry to look at is connectivity in the home. This was something that we never really thought about. In Cardinal we never thought about it as an organization and I think most organization has haven’t considered it until now. That is a critical and crucial connect point for employees working from home. I would say probably 99% of the time we’ve been successful with that but there have been instances where we have employees that are in locations where they just can’t get the connectivity.

Talvis Love [00:07:08]:
So we’ve had to provide other means for them to connect versus a local kind of cable Internet connection or that type. So that probably is the another area to look at closely is given. Kind of take this as a scenario and say you have a certain percentage of your employee base that may not be in an area that has good Internet connection. How do you plan for that prior to and be able to deploy those assets at the ready?

Sanjog Aul [00:07:39]:
So to be future ready, how would you suggest we rethink our infrastructure capacity, the network redundancy, the systems and the tool set and what are some of the easy fixes which could help reduce the risk for the business and stress for IT and when facing business revenue challenges, how do we get creative and make smart investments?

Talvis Love [00:08:09]:
This is a tough one, very business dependent. In our business, where we live and die on the strength of our supply chain. That’s both from a volume perspective as well as our ability to be up and running almost 24 by 7 to serve consumers, which are hospitals, pharmacies, another caregiving institution across the spectrum of healthcare. So I think you really have to identify those bottlenecks in your processes, whether they’re system bottlenecks or whether they’re business process bottlenecks and figure out how do you create redundancy across those. I guess first, how do you free those up? Either remove them from being bottlenecks and generally by doing that you create kind of multiple streams that are doing their work. So it doesn’t all bottleneck into one place and then for those areas that are crucial one, you can’t create multiple streams.

Talvis Love [00:09:07]:
It doesn’t make sense from your business process or technology perspective, how do you create redundancy across those? We’ve been really successful with our cloud implementation. I think that’s the technology that everyone should continue to explore and determine how you can deploy that into your environment to drive that level of redundancy fairly quickly and efficiently gives you the opportunity to do that. I think investing in those areas where you need to create redundancy below that, either multiple applications or in the case of, let’s say, a supply chain where you have a facility that’s serving a set of customers, looking at those set of customers and see how you can create redundancy between other locations to be able to serve them on a backup basis if you need to, and really be able to do that on the fly and test that on a regular basis to make sure that’s effectively working to be able to service your customers.

Sanjog Aul [00:10:10]:
Are there any creative angles, like I asked you, any smart investments or avenues where we could get creative? Given we have, of course, expenses to be happening in terms of getting our systems and processes right, so that’s an investment but at the same time, we have business revenue challenges. How do we get creative?

Talvis Love [00:10:31]:
I think you have to look at are you able to accomplish a multitude of things through single investments, really looking at those investments through multiple lenses and I’ll give you an example looking at we have within our environment, we have a number of pharmacy processes that we leverage and we are in the process of designing a new process to support our business going forward. It has nothing to do with COVID or anything like that, but we’re looking across other parts of the businesses where parts of that capability intersect. So taking that one investment in pharmacy improvement and determining how you can leverage that across a number of different business initiatives, so you get the biggest bang for your buck for that investment in that platform that you are implementing, really looking at things through those lenses to make sure that you’re getting the most out of the investment that you can also having a robust prioritization process to make sure that you are invested in the most important things.

Sanjog Aul [00:11:39]:
Let’s take a quick break, listeners. We’ll be right back after these messages and Talvis when we come back, let’s talk about a task force we might have to put together to deal with this interesting, rather crazy situation today. So how should one assemble such a task force? Who else should be invited to join? What level of support and collaboration should be happening among all the entities, including our partners, which could mean suppliers, technology solution vendors, and even service provider partners. So let’s talk more when we come back. Please stay tuned, listeners. We’ll be back and discuss.

Talvis Love [00:12:27]:
This is CTN Viewpoint on CIO Talk Network.

Sanjog Aul [00:12:31]:
Welcome back. So Talvis, we will need a dedicated task force, it looks like, given the interesting and challenging situation we are facing today, the question is how does an organization go about assembling such a task force? Who all should be invited? What should be the expectation set for all involved in terms of support and collaboration and when I say all involved, it could include the internal constituents, but also our partners, which means suppliers, technology solution vendors and service providing partners.

Talvis Love [00:13:08]:
Great, I guess I’ll first I’ll start with debating your presumption that requires a dedicated task force or maybe I would say it differently. I think of this as a business risk. This is a business risk that we haven’t encountered before at the scale certainly, and it is different than we’ve seen before because of that but it is in and of itself a business risk system across the gamut. So the way that I think about it is how do you articulate what that risk is and then roll it up to all of the other risk management processes that you have across your business for dealing with business risk? I will agree that because of the newness and the scale and scope and impact this has to the business that is requires a dedicated focus within that framework. Just as we have other dedicated focuses within that framework of managing risk across the business, this one is newer and has different participants.

Talvis Love [00:14:09]:
So I think starting there with that as a starting point within our risk management framework but it’s a business risk that we just encountered and that impacts across all different aspects of the business. So in order to deal with that, you need to understand what those potential impacts will be. So we have some short history on it right within the year, what we’ve experienced but you also have to project out what you think it will be ongoing and really forecasting what a recovery may look like and how to respond to that within your business model. So given all those things, I would say you need to have a risk management person or a group that’s involved with it, someone that really understands how to manage risk across the business. You’ll need to have your business participants, those folks that are actually running the lines of business or representatives of those folks that are running the lines of business. I would think you want, especially as you’re scoping this out, you need to have the heads of those business and there are people that are directly running it on a day to day basis to weigh in on impacts and mitigations.

Talvis Love [00:15:18]:
You need to have, of course, your technologists, because you need to. All the businesses that we have today are leveraged through technology in some kind of way and your mitigation strategies will likely be heavily dependent on it. Your HR representatives, because your people are impacted, your sales organization because they understand what your customer needs and I’m not saying everyone in it, but you need to have representatives that understand your customer impact and how to articulate that and make sure you have mitigation plans to assemble that team to focus on. First lay out what the overall risk landscape looked like in this scenario. Then you need to carve it out into pieces. You need to say, so what is the impact to this line of business and P and L for doing these sets of activities and Carvanal is a separate group to really focus on that and do that across the gambit. Even include an area around what are those new technologies that we should be looking at to help mitigate and or data and analytics to support those other work streams that we’ve carved out.

Talvis Love [00:16:26]:
It would also embed an IT representative in ETO that carved out work streams that come out of this because again, you need to have a technologist, someone that understands how the business process and the systems come together and be able to help build the mitigation strategies hand in hand with the business management. So the recap, I would have a risk framework. Within that framework, identify those areas that are most impacted by this risk, carve out work streams for each of those areas, embed technologists across them, and also the business people that are responsible for those particular areas that are carved out work each of those work streams separately and then bring them all together to create an overall risk mitigation plan and you would have to continue to, just like you do with any risk plan, you don’t just author it and then walk away. You have to continue to refresh it based upon data that you give, based upon what you’ve seen in the marketplace to ensure that you have the proper adjustments that you need to make and mitigations in place given the risk you’ve identified.

Sanjog Aul [00:17:31]:
So that said, we also need some support and collaboration from all the different partners. You might have technology solution providers, service providers, other suppliers. They also have to step up because it’s a business risk and they should see that your risk has to be mitigated by them stepping up.

Talvis Love [00:17:51]:
I agree and I would say I would engage them through those areas where it’s most impactful. This is where it depends on what relationships you have with those partners and to the extent where the amount of accountability and responsibility they have within your operation. So they may be part of that broader team that helps to scope it out. They may not. It depends on how you are engaging with those partners but wherever they make sense to have them a part of this structure, you should ensure that they’re inserted in the right place given your relationships and giving you a level of partnership.

Sanjog Aul [00:18:30]:
So one is to bring them on and say we will set expectations for you but then frankly, what’s going to motivate these partners to step up and how do you while you try to motivate them and internally you get that risk framework created and bring people on board but then how do you get these stakeholders and their lieutenants to stop any of the turf wars or stop any bureaucracy and remove and drop the inertia and actually have all parties work as a cohesive force.

Talvis Love [00:19:03]:
For the first piece around. How do you motivate your partners? If they’re true partners, you shouldn’t have to motivate them too much but the really the bottom line of that is they’re only going to be as successful within your organization is as successful you are in managing through your business challenges and this is a significant one. So hopefully you don’t have to paint that picture for them but if you do, then that’s what you should do. Our partnership is only as lasting and as strong as successful I am as a business and this is a significant business threat to me and I need your help and assistance to work through

Talvis Love [00:19:36]:
it, is really a dialogue you may have to have with your partners but again, I would say if you gotta have too much coercement with them, they’re probably not the right partners for you and you need to figure out a different strategy around that. With regard to the turf wars internal to the company, you really have put everyone’s, identify the goals for everyone and then unify them. You have to ensure that everyone understands that their contributions across their business unit, how it contributes to the whole and how if we don’t figure it out together that we will be much weaker as an organization or have even graver impact if we don’t and get people rallied around that. So just like any change effort that you have any what’s in it for them and make sure that people understand that and they can tie the work that they’re doing to that goal into the overall goal of the company.

Sanjog Aul [00:20:35]:
Let’s talk about the new skills and the mindset both the IT teams and the business staff will need to acquire to deal with the pace of business and the unpredictable changes that are going to continue to occur and in that case, how do you go about related learning and training effort, especially with employees who are working from home are also concerned about their job security or the environment in general?

Talvis Love [00:21:07]:
In terms of new skills and mindset, I think one and this really shouldn’t be new because the environment has been changing rapidly for most businesses. Not as rapid as this I do gare but I bet we’ve been having significant change in business, varied business models for quite some time now but having the mindset that change is always going to happen and you have to be ready for it and being ready for it is kind of tied to the next part of your question around those and equipping the organization with the right learning and they’re really a continuous learning environment for them. So I think the for both IT and the business team is really making sure that everyone understands that this is a rapidly changing environment and we have to in some cases adapt to those changes if they happen.

Talvis Love [00:21:55]:
In some cases we’ll be able to forecast and predict those changes and then if we more plan but in any case that the environment is going to continue to change and that needs to be part of our DNA is understanding what those changes are, what the impact they have to our organization and our whether it’s our IT teams or our business teams and their capabilities and being able to adjust those things as those changes happen. So part of that is making sure that you’ve communicated a goal and a strategy for the organization that you need to move forward and within strategy that you create. You’re going to have to have room for IT to be able to adjust based upon these macro level changes that may happen in the market but there still needs to be a true north so people understand where they’re driving to and what they need to accomplish. So within that framework you have your strategy which shows people where they need to go and you built this understanding across the organization of there’s always going to be change and we need to think about our solutions that way, whether they’re IT solutions or strictly business solutions that they need to be able to change over time. Then you have to figure out how do you keep people, like I said, in this continuous learning environment. You mentioned working from home, but I think this applies to whether you’re working from home or you’re working in the office, and that is that you have your training material available digitally so that people can access it wherever they are.

Talvis Love [00:23:32]:
Right now, we happen to be at home. You may, a year from now be on the plane going somewhere, and you want to have that available at that time too, so that folks can be able to train and learn things when it fits within their schedule and be able to dispatch new learnings through your tool set as you find new things that are impacting your business, that you want people to get up to speed with you, but you need to be able to dispatch that readily through a tool set where people can access it and be able to learn from it. It needs to be not just formal learning, which is important as well, but also things like this podcast you’re doing. We do podcasts at Cardinal Health as well, where we talk about the situation that’s going on in the business, an impending technology change, business strategies, et cetera, and we have all those available as well in our learning environment but you have to tackle these things across a number of different avenues so that people can be able to train and learn based upon their ability and availability.

Sanjog Aul [00:24:40]:
One last question is how would you change your leadership style or how do you recommend other CIOs could change their leadership style so that whatever they do that results in the business becoming real and predictable.

Talvis Love [00:24:55]:
I would say just in terms of style in general is really understanding the business and that’s spending time with both those people that are running the business and customers. So you need to have a understanding not just from the inside out, but also outside in. Spend some time with your customer base, whether that’s directly or in conferences or forums that they attend, so you understand what their needs are, you understand and how your business is addressing those needs or not addressing those needs. It gives you a really firm basis by which to make decisions on. I think the other thing is having a very accessible style where you are yourself taken going through the organization. We are a lean Six Sigma shop across the company, so we do gembas and those type of things and that fits your culture, leveraging that so you can get down and really understand how the work is being done and again, both from an IT perspective as well as a business perspective

Talvis Love [00:26:02]:
and you get a good understanding of the people that are doing the work as well and that makes you much more accessible to them and being able to understand where there are challenges where you otherwise wouldn’t have gotten that information. So I think that combination of things will allow you to be really much more attuned to what’s happening in the business and be able to receive sensors across your customer set and your business set to be able to react to that or even forecast that before it becomes an issue for the business and start to solution and strategize around it.

Sanjog Aul [00:26:41]:
Thank you Talvis for sharing your thoughts and insights about how business and IT leaders can keep up with the pace of business and unpredictable changes.

Talvis Love [00:26:51]:
You’re welcome. I really appreciate it. It was good talking with you.

Sanjog Aul [00:26:54]:
And listeners, I invite you to find related conversations on our website@ciotalknetwork.com.

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