Cindy McKenzie
To achieve agility, a business should be able to make real time decisions based on comprehensive and actionable insights. It should also be able to extend and scale applications and infrastructure at the speed of innovation. Finally, the human resource should be motivated to wear different, more and multiple hats as the organization builds momentum and changes direction. With no standards or benchmarks, how are organization and leaders developing and mastering their own recipe to Business Agility?
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Transcript
Sanjog Aul [00:00:22]:
Hello, and welcome to CTN. To learn more, please visit www.ciotalknetwork.com. As always, I’d invite you to join the discussion on Twitter. Look for this show as hashtag agility. Today’s topic is Mastering Recipe To Business Agility , and I’ve got James Swanson, who’s the Chief Information Officer with Monsanto. Hi, Jim. How are you?
James Swanson [00:00:45]:
Hi. Good morning to you.
Sanjog Aul [00:00:46]:
Good morning to you as well. We have Cindy McKenzie, who’s the CIO with Deluxe Entertainment Group. Hey, Cindy. How’s life?
Cindy McKenzie [00:00:53]:
Life’s great.
Sanjog Aul [00:00:55]:
Alright. Good. So the reason we even picked up this topic? Frankly, you go into any conference, you talk to any leader today, they are saying, “I got to make my business agile.” And when you start deconstructing this agility, that means you got to have a lot of data, the right type of data, actionable data, and insights which you can use. Then you need application and infrastructure which could scale to the speed of business, if you will. And then finally, the people and the culture, who have to come together and be ready to change or switch hats on a dime. So all of this is too much happening at the same time, and you really don’t have a so-called governance structure or a practice which has really proven to be successful. So how would any organization, number 1, kind of get their arms around it, get a structure perhaps, or they can try to work toward developing their own recipe or a mix of things that they will do so that they master this art of business agility. So that said, Jim, first question for you. We know we already are doing a whole lot. And frankly, with IT departments, we always know we are asked to do more with less or more with nothing sometimes. And you already have more than a full plate. Do you think this is really helping, or is it going to become worse, where the law of diminishing returns will kick in and you will get less than what you’ve been trying to get in terms of business agility?
James Swanson [00:02:27]:
So I think every industry is being transformed through technology and agriculture is certainly top of that list. It’s an industry that’s been around for thousands of years. And I’d say over the last half decade or so, it is really being transformed through digital, through science, through the need to feed a growing planet. There’s 7,500,000,000 people on the planet today going to 9,000,000,000 by 2050 and doing that sustainably. So it’s driving a sense of agility certainly in my industry that we need to be able to think through how technology can enable that. The way that we’ve approached that is really to try to disrupt processes and thinking and bring data, bring analytics and bring technology to drive a really important industry for the future. That enables us to, although we have to continue to drive through a cost effective mechanism, really think about IT being a transformative change agent for our company and our industry, not just the back office responding to items. We try to disrupt processes, we disrupt the way of thinking, and that allows us to really put technology in the center with our science and our people and our processes to drive things in very different ways. By taking that mindset, we’ve been able to, what we call, unlock the value of IT or “unlock digital yield.” We’re a yield-based company and we’re really trying to drive technology to drive different ways of thinking. So balance the cost optimization, but really the growth, the revenue, the impact technology can have. That balance has allowed us to be very innovative and drive some different approaches that have enabled our business.
Sanjog Aul [00:04:00]:
That’s a great response, Jim. So now, Cindy, based on what Jim said, he definitely provided input on how IT contributes. Now let’s look at the business component of business agility. Did the business want it? If that’s the case, should the business be driving it, or should IT come and tell them this is what I can do, and so let’s do experimentation and see what more we can deliver? Who’s triggering this?
Cindy McKenzie [00:04:27]:
Well, I think, honestly, for it to be the most effective, it has to be a senior management initiative. For us, we’re a media company, so we’ve been affected by digitization pretty significantly as well. Specifically, because we were a film lab, so think Kodak for movie mastering, our entire business model was completely, utterly disrupted. We had to completely transform ourselves 5 years ago in order to stay profitable and relevant. If you think about the media industry, it is changing completely on an ongoing basis. So it’s going to be a continuum for us that we need to do in order to stay relevant for our customers. I would say for us, we really didn’t get momentum on being truly agile from a business perspective until we got our new CEO in place, John Wallace, about a year ago. When he put that significant focus on business strategy and business agility, it set the tone at the top. He put a leadership team in and believed in that vision and that he believed could execute it. The culture and people part is as important as the technology part, which is hard for a CIO to say. A lot of it was around breaking down business unit silos, supporting strategies that leverage our global footprint. We had to do a lot of business process simplification, buy-in across the business, taking advantage of our capabilities across our board because we started with a number of acquisitions that were siloed. That whole concept of simplification in order to drive agility, I think, is really key. Having that senior management momentum is what allows you to really take that momentum to move faster. You can do it without it, but it’s a lot harder. IT really plays a much larger role in this type of an environment and needs to start being thought of as a profit center as opposed to a cost center and can add a lot of value-added services to the product lines that you have. But I think it still has to be driven to be really effective, and really get to be the market at a senior level.
Sanjog Aul [00:07:05]:
So, Jim, when this whole business agility initiative was started, and Cindy mentioned that it has to be started ideally by the business leaders, do you think there was something missing or something felt as missing which triggered this process at Monsanto?
James Swanson [00:07:25]:
So it was really a combination of all the leadership, whether it be myself and IT, whether it be our Chief Supply Officer or Customer Officer or CEO, our Chief Research Officer, really understanding this transformation that was occurring in the industry, really understanding our customers. We do things such as customer journey maps to understand how our services show up for them and what are the things they need in either a tough market or a tough cycle and how we approach them in ways that we create value. That’s really come together. I very much agree on the comments that it needs to be top down driven. But we’ve approached it collectively. We each bring our expertise to the table with the customer in mind and then how do we transform an industry that is so critical to the future of the world population that it’s imperative. We have a set of guidelines or principles that we follow, and we are trying to advance and disrupt not just incrementally improve. That’s created the right kind of innovative and risk-taking spirit. We’ve put in place agile methodologies to do things at scale and at speed, do a lot of experiments and then scale those things that work really well. That’s really taken root in all parts of the organization and has allowed for agility and transformation to occur at the pace we’re doing it. Very much agree with the comments and it really is a forward-looking view with the customer at the center and is shaping a really important industry as we go forward with all employees part of that journey and vision.
Sanjog Aul [00:08:59]:
So based on what you just said, Jim, your approach is very innovation-centric and customer-centric. Now, for all of that to happen, it has to be a transformation inside-out, where being business agile means making your organization nimble internally so that as customers’ whims change, as the macroeconomic or sociopolitical environment changes, or demands change, you should be able to turn your organization on a dime. That’s what I would call ideal business agility versus getting locked in innovation where we come out with some cool stuff but remain a monolithic, slow-to-move organization. So what is your approach? Are you going inside, cleaning that up and then as a result producing customer-centered results?
James Swanson [00:09:53]:
So we’re actually doing both in parallel, which certainly is not for the faint of heart. We have digital ag products and platforms that we work with our customers directly as well as our core products, such as our seeds and traits and our chemistries, which give us direct real-time insight of how our customers interact with us and how we make that easy for them to actually create value with us. We’re also digitizing and transforming internally. You can’t do one without the other. A lot of companies will start in one place that’s inside and go outside or vice versa. We’re trying to do both at the same time and that’s really causing us to think differently around how we approach these problems. I’ve reengineered the IT organization to be an agile-based organization, global in scale, but doing things like a minimum viable product, which allows us to iterate with our business partners and our customers in real time, and then within 2 week cycles, being able to deliver the next release of capability or data or technology or process. It’s allowing them the freedom to think differently, more armed with data and insights that they never had before. Now the amazing thing that’s happening is they don’t just think of what they know and try to organize around that. They’re getting new insights, and we’re getting new insights that allow us to think very differently because we have more experience now of doing things at velocity that’s given us the ability to reshape the way we operate and the way we approach our business. We start with our people with the right skill sets. We have processes in place to take the risk. We work directly with our customers to get immediate feedback and then we quickly iterate and evolve on all aspects of our business to enhance the way we operate and think about this transformation both from a customer perspective and what we’re doing internally. That’s been a real important sea change in how we approach transforming the industry.
Sanjog Aul [00:11:41]:
So that said, Cindy, if you were to look at what Jim is trying to do with his organization, it is definitely not for the faint of heart. Fewer things are done better when you go with the scale and size of Monsanto; they may have the resources to do it. But an average organization, even though they’re 1 billion-plus, may not always have the wherewithal to try both. So where would you start in this whole process?
Cindy McKenzie [00:12:09]:
Well, I completely agree that you have to do both. On top of what Jim said, I think for us it’s not just the customer component; part of what we try to look at is technology advancements that we might be able to take advantage of. We have a long history of acquisitions, and we’re always looking at whether there is something we can buy or a company we can partner with which will move us faster than we could move on our own. We’re constantly doing market awareness—what’s happening out in the market from our customer standpoint, from our vendor partners, from our competitors, from other companies that we might be able to leverage. For example, we’ve been on a big digitization process for our back office functions, because we’re a delivery company in a lot of ways. We deliver content to our customers. How can we do that process in a more automated, streamlined way that gives value-added services to them such as portals that they can use directly and see where the status of their product is in our pipeline, those types of things which are very customer centric. At the same time, we recently found an opportunity to acquire a company that had both a platform that was bleeding edge and, on top of that, had a disruptive model of sourcing some of the talent we need with a crowdsourcing model, thereby giving us faster access to talent and a much more cost-effective workforce. Back to what Jim said about success being a cross-functional team, in the review of that acquisition, we pulled together the leaders from every area and said, will this work? Will it really give us the market differentiation that we need? Will it jump-start what we’re doing? Does it make sense to license it or buy it? What is that business model? In order to make that business model work, what would we need to do? Before we acquired, we went through the whole process of how we were going to do value realization, which I think is a real key point that we haven’t talked about. It’s how you are measuring what you’re doing to make sure you’re really getting the value from what you’re trying to do. I think we’re all aware of companies who acquired a lot of companies and at the end of the day they didn’t get the value out of it. For us, we’re all about that measurement and value realization across what we’re doing. We decided that that was really going to give us a huge jump start and be leverage to deliver more faster and really disrupt the model that work is done in. Specifically, I’m talking about localization. If you think about the situation with content and over-the-top services, there is now a proliferation of content globally that may be made in the US that we have to either dub or subtitle so that it’s relevant in the country that it’s being released. More and more companies are putting that out in different geographies, and we’ve got to be able to keep up with that demand faster. We saw that the explosive growth was going to be a problem for the industry, and buying this company ended up being a significant disruptor for us to be able to support the business needs of our clients. So I see it as this combination of customer, customer, customer, but also what’s happening from a technology standpoint that you can leverage. Cloud, I think, for all of us has been a huge enabler for things that we might not have been able to do in house, and how do we take advantage of those technology disruptions to move us faster as well as responding directly to customer requests.
Sanjog Aul [00:16:29]:
Let’s take a quick break. Listeners will be right back. And, Jim, when we come back, let’s talk about the challenges. You mentioned the journey is not for the faint of heart, so I’m sure you have had your share of dealing with things which were unpredictable or challenging. So let’s talk about them and see exactly what is happening when you are trying to go through this process of business agility that you want to bring into your organization. Please stay tuned, listeners. We’ll be right back.
Sanjog Aul [00:17:57]:
Welcome back. So, Jim, you mentioned that it was a tough journey. It has been an interesting journey. So let’s talk about the top challenges that you have come across as you started from the very beginning. And what are you facing today?
James Swanson [00:18:11]:
Yes. As we said, we’re trying to do both of these in parallel. We have a great external part of our company called Climate that provides these digital ag services for our growers, while at the same token, we’re digitizing internally our processes and capabilities around data. Some of the challenges you run into are unlocking data, democratizing that, moving it from data stovepipes and silos to make that data ubiquitous across the environment. There are certainly technology challenges such as making sure you have a modern infrastructure, you can do things at scale, as well as leading-edge technologies and different ways of working. There’s change management, so thinking differently around concepts like agile as a good example and really energizing the whole company around applying agile methodologies to the way that you work and also breaking down norms. When you’re trying to disrupt the way you work, people do get held into “I used to do it this way,” “I’ve always done it this way, but very successful. You’re asking me to do something very different” and it’s a space that may be unknown for them. So how do you bring light and get advocacy in your company for ideas that you can bring to market or bring value? Back to Cindy’s point about value realization, we’re tightly coupled into value creation as well as adoption. We measure not just installation of a capability or a process; we look at adoption and value creation. That could be in our pipeline and what we do in R&D and increasing the NPV of a pipeline. It could be in supply chain and connecting our supply chain to look at cost of goods reductions or optimized processes. It could be in our customer value and things like Net Promoter Score. When we do those things at scale and we show examples of how each one of those are impacted by new waves of thinking, data and technology and we’re reengineering our workforce towards that view, we’ve been able to accelerate some of the thinking. But you still have to prove its value and help the company iterate over time, saying you’re not going to get it right the first time, but if you do tens of hundreds of iterations, you’re evolving your thinking, you’re generating new ideas, you’re building the knowledge base in the workforce and you’re retooling and reskilling the workforce, modern processes, modern technology. Everybody has a data role in the company, everybody has a role around innovation and bringing new insight. You’re creating an energy that feeds on itself and it propels the company going forward. But you’ve got to get through those first set of hurdles. You have to have top-down support. You have to have an innovative, risk-taking spirit and you have to learn by doing. There’s a great study that says people learn 70% by actually getting involved and doing, 20% are self-taught, 10% are traditional training. So we use that 70% energy to learn by doing and iterate and evolve and that’s created a really good groundswell, both externally with our customer-facing platforms as well as internally of how we’re transforming our business.
Sanjog Aul [00:21:08]:
So, Cindy, typically there is not as much play money available. You can say top of our lungs we want to become or embrace business agility. But when it comes to the tactics, there has to be some experimentation, and you don’t have proof upfront that this is going to fly and create incremental value. Even if it does, the total ROI may not be positive. So how do you go about creating a business case to approach business agility, when you cannot truly get to that complete agile form of the business until you touch quite a few areas, like Jim mentioned, he’s touching every part of the organization? So where do we start?
Cindy McKenzie [00:21:51]:
Well, I completely agree that you have to do both. I think you have to look at your business specifically and look at your company’s challenges and opportunities, and then make a decision. All of the pieces we’ve talked about—from processes to simplified technology to leadership culture—are part of what needs to happen. But every company has things that are going to be a bigger impediment than others. For us, because we had grown through acquisition and had a very siloed set of business processes, management, systems, etc., I’m a firm believer that simplification is a real key to agility. If you have a very siloed set of processes and systems and management, that is a big hurdle to overcome. For us, our first focus has been on how we simplify our processes, how we look across our company, look for where there’s synergies, where there’s overlaps, and try to come up with simplified and common processes as we can. There’s been a lot of effort with that as well as the systems component. We have an initiative to come up with one workflow for all of our delivery businesses that’s a simplified framework that allows us to plug and play different software pieces or business processes into the framework for specific business needs, but the framework is the same and can be leveraged. Once we get that into place—which we’re in the midst of—that is really going to speed up the journey here. I truly believe each company needs to look at themselves and say, where are our challenges? That’s where you put your focus first. Then, obviously, you have to address all of them. Taking something Jim said, I really do think that leadership change is important: you move from that more hierarchical model to make it much more about setting strategy, setting guiding principles, and then enabling and empowering your teams to make decisions quickly. When you add bureaucracy and a hierarchical model to it, you automatically slow everything down. Permeating that mindset through the culture is a key component as well.
Sanjog Aul [00:24:38]:
So, Jim, the road to business agility, would you think that it is a combination of quite a few innovations and integration among different things? Even if it gets complex, if the outcome is business agility, is it all forgiven? Or would you start with saying, let me simplify the organization and its interfaces and the way the different elements work? If I’m able to achieve simplicity, then it’s going to be easy for me to maneuver things, which can be called business agility. Would you start with simplicity to achieve business agility, or no matter what ugliness is there inside, as long as the outcome is that you get things out faster, it’s okay?
James Swanson [00:25:23]:
Well, I think Cindy said an important point around really focusing on what’s important for your business and how you drive value in your business. You start there. Then you realize it’s not just one group that owns or drives it. How do you connect the groups or connect the data or connect the information or the processes in a way that achieves that outcome? Everybody thinks that they’re going to be agile in their particular space and they probably are in their functional areas doing some agile things. But when we actually looked at it horizontally, what we saw was we had to create agility in the organization to think and connect horizontally. Supply chain doesn’t fit on its own. It has a direct impact to what we do in the pipeline in R&D and a direct impact to what we do in commercial and how we sell to our growers. Our digital ag platform does not sit on its own; it will impact and change the way we do research or how we do supply chain. Our commercial go-to-market strategy is not in isolation of the products that we’re developing and the ability of what we can produce for our growers. Getting the agility to be anchored in outcomes and this horizontal view starts to change people’s perspective of how they need to think and operate around data and around process and technology. We created agile work teams that are cross-representative of supply chain, commercial, IT, finance, and R&D. What ends up happening is you have a very different lens you’re now applying. That drives a mirror on my function: how agile is my function? You start to realize you’re not as agile as you think or you start to realize there’s other priorities you now need to connect with to create this integrated value versus a functional stovepipe value. That’s created a step change in thinking. Even as we think about our offerings, we’ve moved from selling seeds and traits or chemistry or bio-ags or products or digital products; we sell integrated solutions. From a grower or customer perspective, they want to see how those products come together to create value for them on the farm. That’s been a change in mindset for our company and allowed us to drive more agility horizontally, focus on the key outcomes that drive value, and it takes an iterative, agile approach to show every week or every 2 weeks we’re incrementing our value. The combination of those things has allowed us to change our mindset and be more agile for the company and learn as we go and create high value for our customers.
Sanjog Aul [00:27:52]:
Let’s take a quick break, listeners. We’ll be right back. Cindy, we’ve all heard that execution needs strategy for breakfast. There is something to be said about having the right mindset at the corporate level, then the horizontal integration that Jim mentioned should be in place. Now when we talk about the brass tacks—when the projects have to be identified, rationalized, you have to get budgets, get people on board—that’s where the challenges occur. Let’s dig deeper into those challenges because once we tackle those, we can say a company or a business is becoming agile. Please stay tuned, listeners. We’ll be right back.
Sanjog Aul [00:29:27]:
Welcome back. So, Cindy, let’s go to the brass tacks. Let’s talk about the initiatives that you may have started at the top, which may be an ivory tower when you include the people who were to do it. But now you’re going to rationalize, prioritize, and have people who are going to be invited to do those projects which is against their grain. Let’s talk challenges. Let’s talk issues which would be holding you back from being able to realize this dream.
Cindy McKenzie [00:29:53]:
Well, for us, the biggest challenge is that we have a very large appetite for business agility, and we have to balance that with the work we have to do to deliver our day-to-day business. We have a number of different lines of business within our company, from creative services like visual effects and 3D mastering to delivery to different platforms and services like over-the-top and IP-based delivery of services. We have a lot of different companies within our umbrella, and all of them are moving full speed ahead to meet their own profitability targets and to deliver services on an ongoing basis. We’re very much driven by our customer and our customer schedules. For example, in the holiday season for anybody dealing with content, this is our busy season because everybody’s putting out movies right now. We have to do that work, and with the same people we have to take advantage of the opportunities as they come. Balancing that work is very interesting, and we use Tiger teams for projects that can be short—1 to 3 month max timelines. We pull those people out of their business-as-usual work to focus on the opportunity, and then when that’s done, cycle them back out and cycle another team in so that we’re not burning people out. That’s a key issue. Another big issue is the amount of change our business wants to do because there are so many different businesses within our umbrella and they all have opportunities they want to take advantage of. How do we, as a management team, decide where the biggest opportunities are and where we should focus? For us, that’s been about making those decisions as a management team. We meet quarterly for multi-day off sites and agree on strategy and a plan for the next couple of years on priorities. Those change, but we continue to take that back up to this cross-line-of-business management team to make those decisions so everybody’s buying into where we’re putting our focus. That way we get cross-business buy-in. They all participate because they’ve bought into the decision, and we’re able to not get pulled off to 10 competing new opportunities that may cause us to do them all partially instead of one completely the way we want. As I said before, the measurement component is key. We’re doing a good job of defining what it is to be successful with the opportunity before we start it and then making sure we actually measure it through the process and at the end. We use the minimum viable product approach. It’s all about 80% solutions. What is the minimum product that meets the biggest business need? Let’s not over-engineer. Use the methodology I’m used to, where I want everything in my first release—you’re never going to give me anything again and you try to make it 100% perfect. We go in saying we’re going to make it 80%. We’ll get the biggest bang for our buck and then move on because that’s where we’re going to get the biggest value and the most agility. Those are our struggles, and we’re trying to do that through stronger governance and oversight of these initiatives while allowing the teams to make their own decisions and move quickly.
Sanjog Aul [00:34:17]:
So the outcome of business agility is, of course, allowing you nimbleness so you can move and serve your customers better. Jim, when you look at this whole mantra of agility, isn’t it also dependent on your value-chain players, your partners, acquired or merged entities—whoever you’re dealing with? You’re the ultimate sum total of agile operations and the approach you take to change across all of these is what the customer will experience. The interesting challenge is you may be all gung-ho about it, but your partner may not be. Then what?
James Swanson [00:34:53]:
Yes. Understanding your partner ecosystem is really critical. In this transformation going on in many industries, the partners you have today are still strong partners, but you may have new partners you haven’t had before, trying to create value for them as well as they may be the intermediary between you and your customer. How do you create a value play for them and create a value play for your customer and get them enrolled and engaged? For example, in our connected supply chain we want visibility from our manufacturing and packaging of our seeds into the distributor into the growers because we want to understand that experience. If we don’t create value for our distributors, then they may not be able to deliver the value for the customers and we don’t want them to be seen as creating a burden for them. If we’re connecting the supply chain and looking at what’s in our inventory pipeline—both at distributor level, at our manufacturing level and at the grower level—we have capabilities we can work with them that they can create value for their customers. If we’re out of stock in their plant, maybe there’s another plant that has available stock we can ship to them, and having that visibility creates value on both ends. So it has to be a win-win. You have to understand your partner ecosystem and create value using the customer as the final recipient of that value. We work with a lot of startups and new companies that we’re trying to digitize; that creates new capabilities we can bring together on our integrated solutions platform. We’re constantly looking at that ecosystem, but we’ve seen the highest uptake when there’s a win-win partnership with our partners, and that creates higher value for our customers. That’s a high focus for us as we think about our overall strategy for the company.
Sanjog Aul [00:36:40]:
So like your new I would add to that that I think it’s also making sure that you’re working with them early in your cycles and making sure that your partners and potential partners are really aware of your business strategy. A lot of these companies are in the same positions we are—they’re trying to iterate and make sure they’re serving their customers, which is us in this case. If you start to tell them where you’re trying to go, you’d be surprised how much they’ll help you get where you want to go if it makes sense to them. For me, part of it is early on making sure you’re constantly talking to the people who you think might be going in the direction you are and making sure they’re clear on what would help you with your business vision. We’re working with a couple of very, very large providers right now that I wouldn’t have expected to cater to us as much as they are, and they are. A lot of times, it is a win-win, but getting there early and articulating what you need really helps get your partners there at the same time you need them to be there.
Sanjog Aul [00:37:52]:
Now, Jim, coming back to that partner ecosystem: starting out, you may have created the best partnerships you could imagine because you felt there was alignment. But given the environment changed, variables change, ecosystem change, and a specific partner or a couple of partners may have their own reasons to not be able to keep up with the pace or the agility you want, and that brings down everyone. How do you keep managing those weaker links? They were not weaker earlier but now became weaker. Do you just get rid of them, replace them with someone who can catch up? How do you play this juggling act?
James Swanson [00:38:30]:
Yeah. I think you have to go back to the partner ecosystem: who are the real strategic partners you have in an ecosystem? What’s the relationship look like today? What does it need to be to drive the value you want to create in your industry or segment back to your focus on your customers? You may create some different strategic partnerships or relationships than you have today once you understand the value stream you’re trying to extend. We’ve done that across a number of partners that we work with and we’ve been very targeted on a more strategic relationship with some partners we think are true accelerators for that vision and shared vision. For those that we may be disrupting, that actually happens as you’re trying to transform your company or your industry. But even there, there’s a win-win scenario you can work through that allows them to create value and you to create value. With success with other partners, they tend to be more on your platform. We have a platform-based mindset and model and that platform requires a partner ecosystem to be successful. If you know that going in, it’s a very different dialogue from “you just provide me a service” to “we’re creating a platform; we want you to be part of it so we can create value for our companies and for our customers.” It’s a very different discussion. You can enter into very strategic relationships that maybe were transactional in the past but create shared opportunity. That’s been a step change in our thinking and evolution, and it has been very successful for where we’ve really gone after that strategic relationship. We have a lot more to do; there’s a long road ahead, but that’s the pivot we’ve been taking as we think about that ecosystem.
Sanjog Aul [00:40:09]:
Humans have limits. While we started out trying to manage sustained growth and profitability and at least existence, and that’s why we said, let’s become agile, let’s become nimble, if this unknowingly converts into a race and workers in the organization start getting burned out, then the very resources—one of the most important resources—if they are not effective, then who knows what’s going to happen to your initiatives. How do you strike a balance with respect to the people who are making it happen and at the same time achieving your business goals? Let’s talk more about it. Let’s take a quick break, listeners. When we come back, Cindy, I’d like you to touch on the human element and how you keep them motivated and not go out of bounds with your initiatives or the speed where it becomes counterproductive. Please stay tuned, listeners. We’ll be right back.
Sanjog Aul [00:42:04]:
Welcome back. So, Cindy, there is no breather for the workforce. You talk IT, you talk business, the workforce. When we are trying to work on this business agility, there is definitely more work coming to them or maybe a variety of work or something they have never tackled before. In all counts, there is discomfort. How do you make them feel motivated from inside out when there’s discomfort or a new territory to jump on board and give their best?
Cindy McKenzie [00:42:38]:
Well, I think we talked about leadership and a flatter networked environment. Part of that is really making sure that the strategy the company is trying to execute is clear and that people buy into their part of it. For most people, that is an amazing motivator, especially if they were feeling disconnected from what the company was doing and very siloed in their function. Being part of these initiatives is a huge motivator for most of our teams. They appreciate being able to be in something that they can see real value in a short amount of time, either for our customers or for our own viability. What we try to do is cycle Tiger teams for specific initiatives so that we get more people working on these types of initiatives and then pull them back into their regular functions. That way we permeate this new agile culture to more people in the organization. Sometimes there’s a little fear; it’s a little scary to jump into a different environment. But because it’s quick and they’re part of the team, they get over that pretty quickly for the most part. For the few people who don’t, if they’re good and they like what they’re doing and it’s more of a support function, we need those people as well. So for most people, it’s a change management piece but it’s actually been considered a huge win for the teams. They understand that they’re working with new technology. They understand the value to the company. They get closer to the business as well. It becomes less of a service request process and more of how do we solve this problem together, which has increased our IT organization’s understanding of all facets of the business so that what they’re delivering is even better. The other thing we’ve done is make sure our teams stay abreast of technology and what’s happening in the industry. They go to conferences; they get trained. We also bring the business in to talk to them about where they’re going so they’re hearing it directly. We bring our partners in to do briefings to the team. We’ve increased the learning opportunities for the team so that they’re ready because these opportunities happen and you have to jump. If, for example, you have a team who isn’t used to dealing with cloud or open source, you need to get them ready so that when the opportunity comes, they’re ready to move. You can’t react when the opportunity comes. We’ve invested more in making sure their skill sets are up to date, and that’s been a huge motivator for the teams. Burnout is something you always have to deal with in organizations. We’re in an environment where we’re expected to do more than sometimes seems humanly possible. But it’s a lot more enjoyable to do that when you feel like you’re keeping your skill sets up, you feel like you’re doing something new, and you can truly see the value of what you’re doing quickly.
Sanjog Aul [00:46:51]:
So, what is the DNA, Jim, that you would expect of a worker who would be the best, most compatible with an organization embarking on this business agility pursuit?
James Swanson [00:47:05]:
Yeah. I think there’s a lot in passion and intent. As an IT professional or a business professional, you have many choices where you can work. Why do you work in the company you’re in or the industry you’re in? If there’s a commitment to that company or the industry, that’s a long way for people’s enthusiasm and passion. You want to capture that passion with impact: how do I in my role have impact? I try to link no matter where you are in the IT function, you have a role to our vision and strategy. If you’re in network and operations, you have a direct impact by having a highly reliable, highly scalable network and infrastructure so we can move the petabytes of data and make that data accessible real time wherever we need around the world to drive our vision of unlocking digital yield for the company. When we draw that line of sight, it’s amazing what people will do—the innovation they bring, the excitement and the thinking. If you can unlock it and you don’t have a hierarchy, it’s a team of folks doing dramatic things whether it’s in infrastructure, application space, data space, or the business space. With that passion, it’s amazing what they can achieve. You arm them with skills, you arm them in teams where they can learn. We have mentor-mentee relationships. We do paired programming. We do a lot in open source, as Cindy said, so people can get educated. We work directly with our business partners in these DevOps teams, so they’re learning the business in addition to helping the business understand the value and impact and disruption of technology and data. That environment creates such energy and focus. Even though people are working long hours, it’s a mission of love that they actually have and what they bring together is truly amazing. We try to instill and foster that and give them the empowerment to make sure they have work-life balance and make sure they’re taking care of their family. We give them support for that and that creates the ecosystem we want to create that not only keeps really good people but actually attracts new people to our company.
Sanjog Aul [00:49:33]:
Now, Cindy, this is one last question, one minute for you. Since nobody is fully cooked for this business agility pursuit, including yourself as a leader—because you may have done many other things and you have a lot of experience, but there are many new things coming at you—if you were to give a message to leadership out there, what would you say they need to acquire, maintain, or improve in terms of their leadership so that they are ready to take this on?
Cindy McKenzie [00:50:02]:
Well, it’s a lot of what was just said. The same thing we expect of our people is what we should have ourselves. It’s that passion. It’s truly understanding the business and the industry you’re in and making sure you’re staying abreast of the opportunities and threats that are hitting that industry, that you’re aware of who your market is and who your competitors are. It’s about relationship skills in this kind of a teaming environment. A lot of it is around how well you communicate, how well you work with others, how you set up that ecosystem in which you can help both your team and your company move forward quickly. Also, dealing with ambiguity—opening up those same skill sets in yourself, spending as much time as you can with the business and the industry and the technology and keeping breadth so that you can provide that leadership and guidance when it’s needed. One of the messages we got across here is it’s a management team that makes these decisions, and that happens all the way down. These are network teams, and you have to understand all sides of it to really participate at the level that you need to.
Sanjog Aul [00:51:24]:
On behalf of the show and our listeners, I’d really like to thank you both Jim and Cindy for sharing your thoughts on how organizations and their leaders can master the recipe for business agility. Thank you so much again.
James Swanson [00:51:37]:
Yeah. Thank you. Alright.
Cindy McKenzie [00:51:38]:
Thank you.
Sanjog Aul [00:51:39]:
And listeners, hope you enjoyed it. Like us on Facebook. Search for CTN, that is CIO Talk Network, and be sure to follow us on Twitter and join our LinkedIn community. Thank you again for listening to CTN. This is Sanjog Aul, your talk show host. Till next week, take care, and God bless.
