Dominic RedmondBusiness context is shifting faster than plans. Boards want visible value, not just stable systems. That means the people of IT must step up as partners who bring judgment, speed, and clarity to how work gets done. Leaders set direction, protect learning, and reward collaboration and problem solving. Are your teams ready to lead where the business needs to go next? What will “good” look like in the year ahead, and how will you know you’re creating real value?
Contributor
- Dominic Redmond, Chief Information Officer, PageGroup.
Transcript
Sanjog Aul [00:00:00]:
Hello and welcome to CTN. To learn more about the show, please visit ciotalknetwork.com and our topic is today Reimagining The IT Team: People, Culture And Leadership. Well, so IT has been around for decades and we have seen different flavors of it. We have seen it getting the backseat, it seemed like getting seat at the table. Then comes today, the business transformation, the AI and now AI has been asked to help drive and even this conversation is not new but the flavors are changing.
Sanjog Aul [00:00:35]:
but at all times what we have been seeing is the leaders who are at the IT, the helm of IT, they are the ones who are driving it, but they also need to take their team along and it should not be reactive. It should be something where they prepare it, prepare all of those team members to work individually and collectively to make sure that they deliver on that promise, plus their management style, their communication style, all has to be such that the business can respect IT for what it brings. IT starts listening to IT and basically help them drive the change that they are all looking for. Well, easier said than done. It has been tried. There have been philosophies, strategies that have been utilized
Sanjog Aul [00:01:17]:
but then in the current state of affairs, where a lot of things are in flux, we don’t have a command and control in IT and even IT is learning how to deal with the newer technology and business disruptions. So what does an IT leader do? What does an IT team do and how do they both work together? How do they reassess their capabilities? How do they recalibrate the way they plan things and do things so that the outcome that they get is for the business and it’s not tech for the sake of tech. Well, what is going on on the ground? What is working? I have with me Dominic Redmond, who’s the Chief Information Officer for Page Group Business Technology. Hey Dom, how are you?
Dominic Redmond [00:02:01]:
Very well, thanks. Happy to be here.
Sanjog Aul [00:02:03]:
Absolutely, the pleasure is mine. So now let us start with this first question and this question might have been asked in the past as well, but I think since the things are changing, you may be answering hopefully in a different way, which is that the cost center, the IT was seen as a cost center, then they started looking at as a source of innovation and they wanted IT to be looked at differently. It had to be done differently and we’ve seen flavors of that. If you take today and the times ahead, at least if not more six months, how do you think you would want to lead your tool or actually trying to lead your team so that the right value is delivered.
Dominic Redmond [00:02:46]:
It is a journey, as you say. It’s something that we’ve talked about for a while. I think the days of IT as a cost center are in the past. I think even before the recent advancement in technology, we were looking through things like digital transformation for how technology could have a real impact on organizations, as you say, there’s a lot of conversations about seats at the table and influencing the right discussions. I think for me, what’s changed more than anything more recently in technology and it affects how you have to lead teams and the type of people you need, is that it is more of a pull approach from the top than a push approach upwards. So a lot of the time we used to talk about how you sell in the benefits of technology to a board or an organization, how you need to curate the right value case or investment case to deliver new technology transformation or otherwise. Whereas now boards are very interested in the opportunity that technology creates and they can see it in their day to day lives.
Dominic Redmond [00:03:52]:
and people are becoming more familiar with technology, becoming more democratized. So as a leader in technology, as in fact any member of a technology team, you have to reference the fact that’s happening and think about the skills that are needed. So it’s less about trying to create that energy and it’s more about how you deal with that energy that exists, particularly with things like AI and what’s important is to be the, I think, barometer of common sense. So lots of hype, lots of excitement and a lot of real opportunity in business. The real value of people in technology is saying what are the right things to do and taking into account all of the things that are relevant to that, right from solid business cases and value cases, but supporting an environment where you can innovate, thinking about scalability, thinking about how you put things into production, thinking about the cost profile of that, but also thinking how you’re going to track the value and AI particularly has brought about a conversation around productivity. Productivity is very difficult to measure in a lot of businesses.
Dominic Redmond [00:05:05]:
Cost is quite easy to. So there is also a mindset shift in the minds of technology people as to how they approach that question. It’s a lot more complex to create a value case for technology. It’s a lot easier to say we’re going to do this and we’re going to take this amount of cost out and your payback will be 18 months. It’s much more difficult to say we think there is an opportunity here through technology and we believe we can make an impact on the organization and so what that means as well is being more adaptable and flexible in how you look at those opportunities. It’s actually all about how you co create with partners within the business whose functions or parts of the organization are going to deliver the value that comes with that technology as well. So we’ve always talked about business partnering, about the right language, about demystifying tech,
Dominic Redmond [00:05:57]:
all of that remains the case but I think those nuances are where it’s different now. If you look at more about the execution, then it’s clearly about saying what are the skills you need in the people who do the brunt of the work, who do the day to day. I think it’s important to rely on our partners because partners will always have the cutting edge of knowledge and expertise in a lot of cases but it’s also about understanding who you have in your team and organization that can really take that new technology but have the business knowledge to go with it and so if you put the two things together, you start to get the benefits as well. So there’s lots of layering I see in terms of how you need to lead the teams and how you need to change right from the top in terms of influencing about doing the right things through to those people who are doing the work and how they need to evolve as well.
Sanjog Aul [00:06:44]:
So we’ve spoken of course to a lot of leaders in technology and business and there are some people telling publicly, others privately, that while every organization talks about innovation, but when IT goes to look for funding, then they cling at that idea and they very closely scrutinize and try to fund the ones which will save them money versus anything which will show potential opportunity because they don’t have any living proof. So they think this could be a pie in the sky but then if you keep going that route, and that’s how the world has been doing so far, then when as a percentage of IT budget, we’ll start moving more towards innovation where you can show value because just getting cost cutting efforts underway is depressing and you can only cut costs so much. So is this actually changing or we will continue to see IT leaders more of tired warriors versus enabled folks who can go about making a difference.
Dominic Redmond [00:07:51]:
There’s two aspects to it. One is that cost savings, as you say, are much more binary. It’s much easier to make a compelling business case, as I said before, it also depends on where you allocate those cost savings. So there is a model in IT that’s existed for a while, whereas you save money and reallocate it to growth, investment or innovation, you can start to solve some of that problem but a lot of companies will look at that savings and want to put them in the bank, as you say. So therefore, how do you ever change that mentality. It is hard because somebody told me a long time ago that there were three reasons why people invest, fact, fear or faith.
Dominic Redmond [00:08:31]:
So fact is the example we’ve just given. You can prove that it’s going to have an impact, you can measure that impact, you can embed it in budgets and have the same consequence that you want. It’s fine, it’s fact. Fear is that everybody else is doing something or maybe a risk based investment. So that’s a kind of a not a discretionary. It’s a mandatory investment. You have to do it because you’re worried about something
Dominic Redmond [00:08:54]:
and then faith is the one where you take a punt, you just decide to invest in something and I think there is a little bit of faith required at the moment in some of these investments, but not so much faith that you don’t do the groundwork. So if you tier business cases, as you say, you might have one that’s mandatory. So for example, regulation comes in, you have to make a change to meet that regulation. It’s not really a debate. It is a cost. The benefit is you are compliant and your brand reputation and your compliance is okay. You then have the other type of business case where you can take cost out to justify the investment
Dominic Redmond [00:09:31]:
but in the middle is a business case where you look at opportunities and you look at compelling use cases that could drive a value and that’s, I think the world we’re going to operate in, in a lot of cases when it comes to technology and AI, it isn’t saying that it will generate this money and you can measure it. It’s saying that there is a compelling case for doing this. This is what it will mean to your business process or your business model. This is what if it’s executed and managed from a change perspective? Well, you could deliver on the other side of it, as a business, when you’re a people business, productivity is very difficult to measure as a result of a change. It’s easy to measure as a business but if, for example, you were to put in a new system and the economy went downwards, then you would see probably a productivity hit.
Dominic Redmond [00:10:22]:
You put in a new system and the economy’s going upwards, you would see the productivity getting better. So there are too many variables to make it as precise and specific as you do on a cost outplay but I think you have to look at those compelling cases that say if we were to refine the information we give our sales teams, or if we were to refine the content we use in our marketing strategies, or if we were to save a significant amount of time of people who are dealing with customers, this is what you could do with that time and you create that compelling use case that allows parts of your business to really grab hold of it and try and make the most out of that opportunity and you can then measure it from the other side but trying to do all of that rigor up front becomes very difficult for investments. I think the final thing I would say on that is that it often depends on your board, it depends on your company and the appetite of that organization has to invest and make a difference. You’ll get a very different answer from a P backed organization that’s on a growth trajectory to a certain target than you might in a more challenge traditional corporate organization
Dominic Redmond [00:11:29]:
and there’s no right or wrong but that appetite for investment and technology does play into how much faith you’re willing to take and how much faith you actually need in that decision.
Sanjog Aul [00:11:41]:
Should IT leader be responsible for making a compelling business case and because of which the CFO would agree or is there an overall organizational change management, a larger issue at play which needs to be tackled because otherwise there could be either finger pointing or tired demotivated technology leaders who say, I’m here, help me help you.
Dominic Redmond [00:12:06]:
I think co-creation is important. Co-creation seems to be more and more talked about these days because for two reasons. Firstly, I think because then you have joint ownership and it’s in everybody’s interest to make that work and the programs and projects and initiatives that I’ve seen in my career that have been the most successful are where you get that cross functional alignment. I saw a stat the other day that said 70% of digital transformations that don’t have cross functional ownership or alignment will fail. Now, whether that number’s right or wrong, it says that there’s quite a compelling case for being cross functionally aligned and it starts at the top, right through the different levels.
Dominic Redmond [00:12:46]:
I think from a technology point of view though, you also want that to understand the real business impact of what you’re doing. Too often you can have a scenario where you’re delivering technology, it makes sense, it’s delivered to the brief, it’s delivered largely on time, on budget, on quality, and it goes out into the business and the business don’t use it or don’t get the benefits from it and the technology team say, well we did what we were asked to do and the business teams go, but it doesn’t work. Say well you asked us to do this, it doesn’t work and you get into this back and forth that isn’t helpful to anybody and that is at the crux of this cross functional collaboration that is critical for organizations now because it enables you to make sure you’re having those conversations earlier in the process and therefore you’ve got a better chance of success. So I don’t think it’s just about co-owned business cases, it’s about the whole execution planning being done together as well.
Dominic Redmond [00:13:51]:
I always remember one example where we were delivering a project and all the information I was getting was this is going really well and it was a transition of an external piece of software to something we could build within our own environment and it was going well and I just happened to talk to one of the two business sponsors who were working with us and said it’s going well, is it? They said, well, it’s not really going that well, but it’s such a nice team. I don’t really want to upset them by telling them it’s not going to quite deliver the brief and I thought, wow, if I’d not made that phone call, that project would have continued on and delivered something that wasn’t fit. So we were able to intervene and make some changes and make it work in the right way and that taught me an important lesson, I think a lesson that stays with me, that it’s better to know whether something’s going to work or not early and wait to the end and say, well, we did what we asked us to, we were asked to. So co-creation, co-delivery, co-definition, all of that stuff I think is the way to solve the problem you’re thinking about because otherwise you will have a technology function or indeed I’m sure this works with different functions trying to plow a path that not everybody is bought into and that won’t work, but particularly it will mean your change management is exceptionally hard, lengthy and costly.
Dominic Redmond [00:15:10]:
Whereas if you have the buy in upfront, you tend to have the benefit downstream.
Sanjog Aul [00:15:15]:
I would love this idea about co-creation to be evangelized and adopted. Now let’s look at the reality on the CFO side and the CIO side both have their respective performance appraisals. IT is asked to do more with less, more with nothing and yes, they want to see those beautiful looking things happen in terms of innovation but don’t ask me for the money, that’s the intention. Now CFO on the other hand, is supposed to run a tight ship and selectively invest in things where the results are almost guaranteed. There is no rolling the dice when it comes to the finance department and you are looking at that intersection of two people both being told to do more with less or you better show me results. God bless us all
Sanjog Aul [00:16:06]:
how would co-creation happen, especially to achieve the new, more or different type of innovation or even investment towards it, even energy and time and effort and people spend towards it.
Dominic Redmond [00:16:19]:
That’s a traditional view of a CFO I will accept that but I don’t think that’s the way the CFO role is working in a lot of companies these days. I think it’s commercial by its nature. I agree there is probably more of an appetite traditionally to look at predictable savings. So going back to what we were talking about earlier, those predictable savings are cost out or direct revenue attribution to what you invest in. We are in the world where that’s a bit more ambiguous and gray and we have to create as much information as we can to prove the case but it won’t be perfect.
Dominic Redmond [00:16:56]:
I think if you have other parts of the business, whether it’s sales or ops or supply chain or whatever it is in an organization and you go together as a technology person and somebody who’s leading that part of the organization, say this is something we want to go in together. There is a commitment potentially for the business owner to put some of the benefits into their budgets. I know this can be sometimes a bit aspirational and the thing affects happy and in fact, so as a CEO and everybody, because you’re getting a commitment behind what difference that is going to make. I think the challenge rightly that anybody reviewing a budget, whether it’s me or finance teams or whoever, is where you look at it and you haven’t committed to something changing as a result of that investment and you might get it wrong. You might be slightly lower or slightly higher in your predictions, but you have to commit to something changing and if you commit to it in co-creation, then you start to deal with some of the challenges
Dominic Redmond [00:17:54]:
I suppose from a finance or cost perspective. I think the other thing is there is a bit of storytelling in this as well. This is very new what we’re dealing with at the moment. It feels like it’s been around for ages. There’s a lot of hype. If you read a lot about it, it should do everything but it’s still quite embryonic in the full extent of how you can change business models, I think and there are absolutely brilliant use cases with perfect alignment to cost out or revenue generating strategy out there but as a whole it still feels like it’s evolving
Dominic Redmond [00:18:31]:
and because of that, maybe there is a case to say we need to put some investment in this so we don’t get caught behind. That’s maybe the fear element of investment as well as a bit of faith that this is going to create a foundation that we can exploit in the future. A lot of companies in the last 18 months have been almost reigniting the data debate around. We need to invest to get our data in the right place at the right quality and it’s interesting because I remember that debate when it first happened and it was very difficult again to say you need to invest in data, it’s going to be the currency of the future. You need to think about the infrastructure, the quality, the services around it and that was a very difficult sell because it wasn’t creating direct value all the time. What it was is creating a foundation for something else.
Dominic Redmond [00:19:18]:
So I suppose you’ve got a bit of a historical case study there of the companies that looked at data and said, we want to get this in one place, we want to tidy it up, we know that it’s going to be used in the future, we know we’ve got some good reporting in MI we can do on the back of it, but actually the next phase is going to be even more exciting. We’re just not quite sure what it is and those companies that did that are now much better prepared to exploit AI than the companies that didn’t and there’s a lot of conversations I have with my peer group people going, we’re now using AI as the lever to try and get investment in our data. So that is a good example maybe to come back to if you’re struggling to sell stuff around the foundation, investment that is required for innovation or indeed some POCs that you’ll learn from to say that you can’t always be 100% sure what you’re going to get, but be selectively good at investing in things for the future and try as much as possible and build some benefits into your plans that make everybody feel a bit more comfortable about that investment in the first place.
Sanjog Aul [00:20:20]:
So, that was at the management level, now when it comes down to the people and you want them to reskill themselves and the way, the AI especially is moving, you got new things are coming up and some technology skills that the people had, either the systems are getting wiped out or those skills are being replaced by something new and that is a typical nature of technology. With that in place and then now we are talking about copilots, agents and everything else, what does that do to the people, so we have had discussions about people getting scared, but now everyone knows this is the way people are going to move forward. So what is the kind of conversation and leading that you do with your team and supporting them, getting them to become the best form of who they are so that you as a team can deliver on what is being asked?
Dominic Redmond [00:21:17]:
There’s two aspects to it. One is most companies will not do all their internal technical work without partners. So I think that as I mentioned it before, I think you need to rely on your partners to bring a lot of the expertise and it entirely depends, I think, on your business model. So if you outsource a lot of your development, a lot of your more, I suppose, delivery centric tech, whether it’s development, testing or release management, whatever those things are, then actually there’s a question to work with your partners on, which is what’s this going to look like in terms of our processes? So I think that’s the first thing internally, it’s about understanding what’s going to be successful for the future. So first thing is business knowledge. I don’t think you can learn that as easily as you can learn maybe how to evolve your technical skills, but both are important. So you have people with business knowledge.
Dominic Redmond [00:22:15]:
You have very analytical mindsets and critical thinking within technology teams and they’re very important skills for the future as well. You have an appetite to be involved and to learn. It is so rare that I see technology people that say, I’m happy using this system and I’m going to use it for the next 20 years. People want to be involved in this new technology, so they’re prepared to put in the time to upskill themselves and at the same time we’ve also had this conversation around automation. So what’s automation going to mean? Well, it means people start developing automation rather than developing in more classical development languages. I think it’s also important to think that there are different statistics on this but how many people spend 100% of their time actually coding if they’re in a development role? Well, not many.
Dominic Redmond [00:23:05]:
A lot of that time is about talking to other people about how the interdependencies work within systems. It’s about understanding integrations. It’s an understanding the analysis the business need. You might take 30% of that time out of a developer if you had full AI supported dev, but actually the rest of the work remains the same. So I think it is about evolving people. It’s about not panicking, it’s about understanding that AI at the heart of it is technology and technology people are probably best placed to manage that in the future but clearly there’s this upskilling that’s needed.
Dominic Redmond [00:23:42]:
What I tend to find with this technology is people start doing that themselves so they play around and that’s perhaps the difference with AI and I’m not talking just about generative AI, but the accessibility of some of this means that people can just go and try it for themselves. So I speak to enterprise architects who have, not coded for ages and they’re playing with it because they really are interested in how it works and I think because it’s easier to get used to it and less scary for technical people, it isn’t like learning Java, it’s much easier. So people are naturally upskilling. They’re therefore, because they have the business knowledge and the analytical mindset, starting to think about opportunities as well and I’m fairly optimistic about how it evolves and I think a lot of it is organic and then where necessary you support it with the right organizational structures and training that you need when you get into a broader organization and the fact that people can self serve a lot more, I think that’s also good for technology people because it means that you can focus on real value add stuff and really interesting things as well.
Dominic Redmond [00:24:46]:
Going back to your point before, if you don’t need to build technology solutions in an enterprise fashion for all of these use cases that people have found through AI, you don’t need to spend as much money so you can use that for more innovation. So I think the whole cycle of it is positive but as I say, it’s early days and part of the job of any management team or leadership is to keep an eye on that and make sure that things do progress in the right way and if not, of course, correct and intervene as needed.
Sanjog Aul [00:25:17]:
Now, when you are looking at doing all of this and things are changing, do you think it makes sense for organizations and you said that, okay, we should definitely leverage partners, right, for us to kind of, keep at it and, or consistently grow and stay at the edge. Do you think a model where all the geek stuff or the mercenary stuff or the specialist stuff that needs to get done it is handed over to the partners to say you go deal with it and you within your IT team get people who are able to jump from one thing to another and they are able to think how technology can be utilized versus tinkering with code and especially now when even the code could be written by AI. So they become more evaluators and more orchestrators versus creators.
Dominic Redmond [00:26:13]:
I don’t believe that just doing all code through AI, which I don’t think will happen, it is actually the thing that is difficult in any delivery and I think that just assuming it will move over and then we’ll have AI doing coding completely and then we can, I think if I answer the question, sort of elevate what third parties do. I don’t think it’s quite as simple as that, but I understand the question is absolutely out there. I go back to what I said before coding, let’s say it’s 30% of a dev role, for example whether it’s 50, 40, 30, I don’t know but if it’s 30% of a dev role, you’ve still got 70% of that role. That’s about analysis, thinking, problem solving.
Dominic Redmond [00:27:00]:
So you’re not going to see quite the shift that I think people are talking about. To answer your question more broadly, my own philosophy has always been use partners for what they’re really good at and when I say partners, I mean you can get some real good co-creation if you get that right, that model right but keep control of your IT estate and your architecture yourself and create the right blend between the two. I’m not a believer in full outsource, and I’m not a believer normally in full insource. I think you’ve got to get the balance right but where you want to have control and almost critical thinking in your own organization, I think it’s important to back those people and they can then challenge our partners where necessary. They can think about all the different things that interact because you won’t have just one vendor doing everything, you’ll have several.
Dominic Redmond [00:27:55]:
So what are all those partners and vendors going to do? They’re all going to present their own case and they’re going to present a piece of the puzzle, but they’re not going to look at the whole puzzle. So you absolutely have to have that. You have to have people to manage them. So yeah, you might be able to elevate some of what they do but I think actually if you look at AI and the complexity of the technology estate that we’ve now got, the number of integrations, the fact that data has to flow across so many different systems, it’s getting more complex, not less complex. So it’s getting maybe easier to do some things, but the foundations and the infrastructure around that are complicated and it’s challenging. Classic models, if you’ve got a system of record and a database and then you’ve got an application layer. So how does that work with AI and agentic options, we don’t really know, but it’s more complex.
Dominic Redmond [00:28:46]:
So with that complexity comes a need to really be careful that you’re keeping the right architectural and technical control over things and that I think is important to keep in house and getting the most out of your partners in terms of their expertise and delivery as well and I think that balance, at least for the foreseeable future for me, stays and who knows what it’ll look like in five years but I think there’s a lot of merit in the model that currently we have and I think we’ll continue with it.
Sanjog Aul [00:29:12]:
So one is the technical stuff, the second is keeping up with what is happening. So if you remember, people used to start talking about future fit and future ready systems and approaches. Well, that meant that you have a steady current and perhaps a well defined steady future, and then you create a system for that steady future but now it seems like we are moving to continuous fit and continuous readiness, which means I do not know what’s going to shift fundamentally disruptively in six months, three months, even a month in the context that you might be doing your innovation, et cetera, your architecture, the way people are thinking about things, what they are building for, even those things are changing. So if you were to plan your next month or next quarter, how far out would you, number one plan. The second part of the question is, would there be a fluid enough architecture which says, okay, bring it on, anything comes, at least I’ll be able to accommodate 90% of it. Rest we will tinker it in.
Dominic Redmond [00:30:30]:
It’s a really good question because it is hard. It’s very hard. I think there’s an obligation on most people in technology to try and understand what’s happening externally. The learning curve is huge and it’s very rare to find an expert in this space. I can met people who talk about it in such a credible way. It’s been fascinating to learn from them and their journeys but you’re right, it changes and every time I go to something, an external, like a conference, I’ll sit there and think something slightly different from last time I had somebody talk about this.
Dominic Redmond [00:31:04]:
and so how far do I look in front, you can look as far as you want. It’s more about, for me, how you can course correct and what bets you’re making that are very difficult to unravel. So it’s about flexible architecture and it’s about having a plan and a destination, but understanding you might need to flux. So if you’re able to think about that as part of your architecture principles and your design principles, that’s really important. If you’re going all in, say for example, with a SaaS provider, and you go, we’re just going to use this company, and we’re all in, then I think there’s a danger that maybe you don’t get access or opportunity to use other things. You may not need to. So there has to be a flexibility in it, but I don’t think it precludes you from looking a year, two years down the line.
Dominic Redmond [00:31:53]:
The other thing, and I know this is maybe a slightly traditional technology view, but Gartner always have these hype cycles and they are normally right. They might not be right in terms of the same timing or anything, but they’re normally right and what you see at the moment is a lot of hype and there is a lot of possibility in AI and there is a lot of opportunity for companies to quite quickly set up PoCs or demos that look amazing and then you come to look at it in a production context and realize it’s very hard to do it because you’ve got integrations, you’ve got to make sure it’s compliant with legislation, you’ve got security, you’ve got to understand how it scales, you’ve got consumption charges. You know, it’s a bit like cloud all over again. How many people are going to use it, what’s it going to cost? So there are a lot of similarities to other tech trends that I think it’s worth keeping an eye on as well and that is always important to take into account when you’re looking at roadmaps, whether it’s architectural or otherwise.
Dominic Redmond [00:32:56]:
So set your destination, understand some flexibility and take a sort of pragmatic view of what we’re hearing, because the industry and certainly all the people creating AI solutions, it is in their interest to create this sort of panic or expectation or excitement or hype, because they want everybody to invest in it and there is clearly a lot of amazing stuff out there but equally understand the solution for what it is, understand whether it’s solving a business problem, understand what architecture might get you there, and go through that same methodical process that you often see in technology and be more flexible on your architecture than perhaps you have been in the past and I think that’s maybe the one shift you need to make.
Sanjog Aul [00:33:41]:
So if you’re sitting in an IT war room, I’m sure your lingo is different vocabulary, the way you think, what you think about is different but at the same time, your IT department is only as good as the way you touch business and how you interact with them and you’re not the only lone warrior who’s supposed to do it right, because there’s a touch happening at all different levels between the user, business user and the technology individual. So that business fluency that needs to be created and which you’ve been gifted with, and that’s why you are in this role, is because you can talk in that lingo but invariably that has been a chronic issue for people and now that things are changing very quickly and while the business user is fascinated with AI but for an individual from within technology department to have a conversation which is more business centric and explain things to that business user in those terms so that co-creation that you’re talking about doesn’t only happen in the ivory tower, it happens at all levels but that requires a different, not a DNA, but maybe a different way of grooming the technology talent, which was traditionally not, I would say, required. It was required then, but now it’s imperative.
Dominic Redmond [00:34:54]:
It is and this is a theme that comes up a lot, actually, specifically the skills that you need for the future of IT. So if you, if people have school children and they’re looking at what they could do, a lot of them put kids into coding. I still think that’s a good thing to do because they thought that was going to be the future. Now things have slightly changed. The one thing that always comes up is people who can translate between business and technology exactly like you say but I think we’re not starting from scratch. I think there are a lot of roles within technology where people are doing that. You have business relationship managers, business partners, business analysts.
Dominic Redmond [00:35:35]:
You have people who sit on regional committees. You have people who are involved in data and risk, who and compliance who have to understand both sides. I think we’ve got quite a lot of people who are skilled in it and I think actually there’s a challenge the other way as well is that it isn’t like everybody in a business role or a non IT role, I should say, is coming along going, I don’t know anything about AI. A lot of them are coming along going, I do understand AI, so let’s do this. So the education is not actually, this is how it works. In some cases it’s more, let me explain what you need to consider to make it safe, to make it sustainable, to make it valuable. So there is absolutely a changing of the guard where as you say, those people need to be more savvy with what is important in the business and be able to translate and use the right language.
Dominic Redmond [00:36:30]:
I think we’re not starting from scratch. I think what’s important is to talk to your technology teams and work with your technology teams about what’s going on in the business right at the top level around sharing financial results and understanding what levers make a difference. I think if you can get people from non technical or non technology backgrounds to come and work in technology, whether that’s from finance disciplines, marketing or even your operations and sales, I think that helps because it’s a voice that educates other people and you have that kind of peer to peer benefit. I think that’s beneficial and just talking more and more about outcome and value rather than just delivery I think is important. So not starting from scratch. I think there’s a lot of groundwork already being done, but more work to do definitely.
Sanjog Aul [00:37:21]:
Now, given what you and I want from the team and how the conversation should go, number one, you’re trying to change the DNA, the education, the way they get to a point where they are able to skillfully talk about technology and not as much facing the business because that was their so called upbringing in technology and secondly, how the stigma has been passed along from generations in the minds of business users that I do not know if IT guys get it and you still hear it. So on the ground when you’ve tried to fight this, like I mean you’ve given the concept of what should happen, but what really happened when you tried to attempt and were there any bruises if you will, you guys got as a result of going through that change and well, that’s fine, but at least if he could recognize these are the possible challenges we will encounter and get ready to what worked and what didn’t, that would be some good insights from you.
Dominic Redmond [00:38:24]:
I think you make a really good point. There’s a difference between somebody who’s in a role to have a conversation with a wider business community and is skilled at doing that but we all learn. I remember one board meeting I was sitting in and I was talking about technology and thinking I’m very good at explaining this in clear terms and somebody looked at me and went, sorry, I just didn’t understand any of that and so I sort of took a step back and thought, well, obviously we think we’re speaking in business terms, but we’re still technologists, so we all have an opportunity to learn. I think you read body language, you get people to play back, you think about what is important and what is not. I remember trying to explain network pipes to people and literally saying, if you’ve got a big pipe, you cost you more money. It means you’re less likely to slow down if you’ve got a small pipe.
Dominic Redmond [00:39:23]:
It wasn’t that people couldn’t engage with the content around how you configure networks, or it was more that they didn’t need to and that’s the crux of it. We in technology often want to explain our working, we want to explain how we’ve reached the answer and it’s very important and lots of context and here’s 10 slides to explain it. That’s an instinct because we’re thorough, analytical and we want to make very clear and based decisions. We don’t need to share our workings with people across businesses that a lot of the time they just want to know why something’s happened and what the answer is and it does take time to understand that, particularly depending on your audience and I think one thing I’ve always learned in my career is if you’re speaking to one type of audience, it’s different from another.
Dominic Redmond [00:40:14]:
So you might be speaking to somebody who’s really interested in how things work and they want to get into the detail around maybe your risk position or your cyber position or or what application functionality you’re building and you might have other people who say, have you got it under control? Just tell me what the issue was and how you’re fixing it. You get completely different reads on it and so I’ve had a few lessons along the way of either being in too much detail or less detail and I think there isn’t one answer to this. I think it’s about listening to what people are saying to you, understanding what’s important to them and sometimes you can do something as simple as say, I’m here to update you on this, or I’m here to position this or sell this into you, or get your button, whatever it is. What do you need to know? What do you need to know? How often do people go into meetings and this isn’t just an IT with pre prepared slide decks, without asking the person what they would like to see or what would be interesting to them.
Dominic Redmond [00:41:15]:
So you go through 10 slides and they’re halfway through the second and they say, yeah, how much does it cost and when can I have it because I get it and so being able to listen and try and learn what people need and position it in the right way is a lesson I think we can all take and certainly at times I’ve refined the way I do that based on feedback I’ve received, either direct or indirect.
Sanjog Aul [00:41:41]:
So one last question. What are you working on when you’re trying to fix yourself so that you are ready for the crazy world ahead?
Dominic Redmond [00:41:50]:
I think there is a shift in technology around control. So if it’s an individual thing, and I think I would apply this to a lot of people in technology. For many moons we were approached with problems, things weren’t working or we needed to do something new and it was a handoff to the technology team and therefore the technology team would do something and go back and you would have those challenges. There wasn’t quite as enough connection with our business broadly in terms of what we wanted to deliver, but it was definitely owned by technology and then you went through digital transformation, which was a bit different, but actually a lot of the scale up applications were still owned by technology in some ways. So that’s the context. Now technology is democratized. Everybody’s got an opinion on it, everybody’s got a view.
Dominic Redmond [00:42:41]:
Can’t really stop the usage and evolution of it in the way you used to. Somebody used the word shadow IT to me the other day and I just don’t think that’s a thing anymore. I think you have to embrace it but that means a shift in that kind of control to co-collaboration, co-creation and that is a shift that I think is difficult for technology people a lot of the time to make because they used to work in a certain way and they are very driven by ownership and accountability. As a generalization, they are, in my experience, driven by ownership, accountability. So when you’re doing things that are more fluid, it’s quite hard to pin that down
Dominic Redmond [00:43:18]:
and what you have to help people with is saying your measures of success are not just you got this to do, you did it well, we’ll tick it off. Your measures of success are what was the outcome of it, what did you learn and how has that made us a better function and a better team for the future? So that shift, I think is going to take a little bit of time for anyone in it, including me.
Sanjog Aul [00:43:42]:
Well, thank you so much, Dom, for sharing your insights on this very interesting and timely topic because whether it’s your team or yourself, you both have to look within, heal ourselves from inside out, take care of what is going on outside and create value for business and I think that’s a journey but very good points that you made on this discussion. So thank you.
Dominic Redmond [00:44:05]:
Thank you. Nice to be here.
Sanjog Aul [00:44:07]:
And our audience please find us on YouTube, podcast and our website, of course, stay in touch. This is Sanjog Aul, your host, signing off. Till next time, take care and god bless.
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