Sue B. Workman
For your organization to stay fit to take on challenges as future unfolds, your strategy, cost and spend management, and talent development need to be in top shape. How are business and technology leaders teaming up to tackle this organizational fitness challenge?
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Transcript
Sanjog Aul [00:00:22]:
Hello, and welcome to this segment on CTN. To learn more, please visit ciotalknetwork.com, and our topic for today is tackling organizational fitness challenge. When I say the organizational fitness, what I’m referring to here is as we are looking at an organization which is going to be going through some rough times or some disruptions, some fundamental changes or some rapid, volatile, and uncertain times overall, it’ll have to be able to stay resilient, it should remain fit, like, for lack of a better word since we’re talking about fitness here, so that you are able to keep delivering value to who we serve. So that said, what are the business and technology leaders doing, and how are they teaming up to tackle this fitness challenge? And for that, we have Sue B. Workman, who’s the CIO of Case Western Reserve University. She’s joined us, and we’ll have a conversation about it. So, hey, Sue. How are you?
Sue B. Workman [00:01:33]:
I’m doing well. How are you?
Sanjog Aul [00:01:35]:
Good. Good. Can’t be better. I mean, I always enjoy having conversation on such subjects, and you’ve been always a fantastic guest for us. So without further ado, let’s get started. So I always believed at least it happened with me as an individual that, okay, life goes on, you don’t work out and sometimes you have a health challenge, so it’s a wake up call, and then you say, Oh my God, we got to be fit, and this is no different than in many organizations where they feel nothing can go wrong with us or whatever we are doing today; if it’s working out okay, we’ll just continue going ahead in the same fashion. Only when they get a wake up call is when we start thinking about preparing to stay fit. It’s almost like a workout for an organization. So if you were to take this mindset, what is preventing us from getting over that mindset in the first place?
Sue B. Workman [00:02:35]:
Well, I think there’s many things, and I really like your analogy of fitness to both humans and the organization. I think that makes a whole lot of sense, and I think, like, some humans who are physically fit and really take it seriously, some organizations are the same way and make organizational fitness a priority, and these are really the healthy ones, and so I think, also, like humans and fitness, those organizations who don’t take care of themselves are the ones that may in fact need that wake up call, and in some instances, it could be too late. I think, as you said, I’m in higher education, and higher education right now is going through quite a bit of turmoil, and we’re seeing colleges, especially smaller schools, close and just close up their doors and, or merge or do things we haven’t seen before in higher education, but I so I think if it takes a wake up call, just like humans, you’re already a step behind if the wake up call is needed. I mean, we know after a heart attack, humans can come back and stay or get fit and heal and live a longer life if they are working out and eating right and lower their stress, but if you’re starting an organization from a negative place, you may never get back to the health that you had, just like humans. I think organizations are the same, and to really solve this, we have to have true leaders that know and understand the markets and where we are moving and preparing organizations ahead of time, for the near future as well as looking further out for upcoming needs, and make adjustments even if they’re hard ones. So just like working out, sometimes the harder workout is needed and you just have to suck it up and do it. I think in organizations it’s really all about leadership and the preparations there.
Sanjog Aul [00:05:07]:
So if you look at organizations which today, like in volatile environment and the uncertain environment that we are living in, do you think there are organizations still who would muster the courage of staying put and not shifting? Because most of the times when somebody wants to be fit, that whole human fitness analogy, is when they know that’s the only way they will be able to survive. If somebody says I’m going to go climb Mount Everest, they would not just one fine morning after breakfast say, okay, let’s take a flight there. So they prepare. For a marathon, they prepare, but when an organization is working, maybe it has some agenda for business growth and other things, is it ignorance or is it a deliberate, you just kind of look away from the turbulence which might come to you? And ignorance is bliss is the mantra which makes people feel, okay, let’s keep doing the things which we are doing and not do certain things which will keep us fit for us to maintain that continuity. You see what I mean? You get so enamored by what’s in front of you and you spend all your energies and time on it, but you don’t do anything which will keep you doing the same or making the same investment for future. Like, a marathon runner has to drink water before they feel thirsty.
Sanjog Aul [00:06:38]:
But that, an organization is not doing, and when it’s not doing, do you go how do we rattle somebody’s cage to say wake up?
Sue B. Workman [00:06:47]:
Up? Yeah. Well, I think that’s an interesting question, and I think it’s up to the leadership. I think true leaders can do that, and I think you do that by strategic planning and just making sure that you have a roadmap, if you will, that others can follow or a playbook, maybe I would call instead of the roadmap that others can follow, and I think if organizations don’t change and wake up and see how the value— I mean, you can name organization after organization that didn’t change. I mean, like, Kodak. They were the number one filmmaker forever, and you know what? We don’t use film anymore. Blockbuster was where everybody went on Friday night to get movies for the weekend, and now we have them on our phone. We don’t have to go to a store, and so, there are just examples after examples of industries and companies that didn’t make that change, and then there’s those that really see the future. So sometimes I think part of the fitness may be an incremental change that they need to make or it may be a very large change that they have to really leapfrog in order to get to the next version of itself, and I think organizations today just have to have leaders that are willing to make hard decisions, and it’s not easy. Just like exercising, it’s not easy to make those hard decisions and sometimes you take a risk. You don’t know if it’s going to pay off or not, but I think that we as CIOs and as leaders, we have to really help the organizations make those changes and not be comfortable necessarily in how we’re doing things or what we’re doing, but really look at what’s best for the organization and to keep it viable for the future.
Sanjog Aul [00:09:19]:
So I have a friend who turned 50 last year, and he mentioned that I have just started changing my lifestyle and it’s not that suddenly dawned upon me that I am going to die another 50, but it’s more to say I am going to live every day starting today the best I can and to be able to do that and ensure that for tomorrow. Not 10 years from now, but for tomorrow I’m going to exercise today. This is less of a morbid thought where you are not doing it out of fear of death. You are doing it because you want to make the most for what you are doing today. I am going to do better than today and it will be full of vitality. Now that said, is the organizational mindset the word wake up call almost insinuates that we are doing it out of fear, but is there a sentiment that could prevail similar to what my friend has, say, I want to be able to do things better tomorrow, and for that I have to do what it takes to remain fit for tomorrow, but not because of there’s an uncertainty. It’s a difference. I mean, I’m just trying to bring up the nuance of fitness and less fear based.
Sue B. Workman [00:10:44]:
Yeah. I agree with you. I think that’s a much better place to be is to be in the positive and really looking forward to what can I do today to be better than yesterday and to make the best of this day? And so I think it really begins with at the top, and I do believe that it has to be a team effort. It’s not just a president or 1 or 2 leaders. I think the whole leadership team really needs to be aligned and willing to, and ready themselves both fit and ready to make these changes in order to really influence the organization and move it forward, and then just find a couple. I mean, all you have to do sometimes is find a couple of champions in your stakeholders and align with them and then get other people on the team and influence it and then show successes, and if you can show some success and you can encourage that and reward that, it’s a much more positive way to do it than to do it in fear. Fear is not a good spot. I don’t think you can be very productive when you’re in fear, and you can’t be very influential even when you’re afraid. I think leading from a spot of positive strength is certainly a much better place to be.
Sanjog Aul [00:12:55]:
So if you were to look at the scope of what all we could potentially cover under the umbrella of an organizational fitness. If an organization has a sound strategy, which has taken into account of what’s possible tomorrow, then if you have a good enough control on how and where the money is being spent, And then also talk about where we are to control the costs so that it is not they basically run a tight ship, and then how do we best make use of the resources? Because other resources, other than humans, you try to suck the juice out of it, the last drop if you can, and that’s what business is about, but in humans, it works differently. While we call them human resource, but you need a different type of an approach to help that person deliver the most value and increasingly more value by treating them somewhere differently, developing them. Now all of these things are business as usual for any organization. Of course, everyone says we do this, but what would you say would be a comparison or a contrast to an organization which does focus on fitness versus, okay, we exist. We’re gonna do something. We’ll deal with it when we have a dip or we will enjoy when we have our organization source versus a company which is intentional for the fitness.
Sue B. Workman [00:14:44]:
I think there’s several things that you really do need to be intentional for fitness, and much of that, I believe, centers around people and just preparing your staff. So I think, you know, we have to, first of all, let our staff understand that there’s an expectation, and there’s an investment that we will make in them to make them better and to help them keep their skills up to snuff here, and so I think we have to really make investments, intentional investments every year, especially in technology, not only in technology, I think really everywhere, to make sure we have professional development happening. So it’s not just technical skills, though. I mean, although that’s important and the technology is always changing, and we need to be able to deliver and service that technology. We also need to invest in professional development for succession planning and to grow our managers and leaders and help them be good managers, both as humans and other resources, financial and other resources, and I think we have to really put plans in place to be able to negotiate contracts so that we are getting as many of those pennies back as we can and keeping the organization fit, but I really concentrate first on people, and then technology, because I think if we have organizations that have really smart the best people we can hire, and let them go and give them resources, they will create, and they will find things that need to be changed and then get excited about changing it, and so sometimes it’s the environment we also set, so that we allow people to take some risks and really experiment and find out what are they good at? What do they like to do? And then what is the best thing for them to do to move the organization along. I also think, though, we have to really think about in IT, especially, we have to really think about how we do spend our money and how we look at how we spend that money and how we manage it, and so I really think that looking at every opportunity to reinvest is a good way to do that. So in my own organization, I have my own direct reports team. Any expenditure over a certain dollar amount, they all have to weigh in on. So whether it’s IT security or whether it’s applications or whether it’s networks or whether it’s support, they all get the opportunity to weigh in on that expenditure. They have 24 hours to do it. They have 24 hours to advise me, and I make that final decision. Same thing with every vacancy. There’s no vacancy that goes without or there’s no vacancy that’s just automatically available to refill. We look at every single one and say, is this the best use of our funding right now? It might have been three years ago, five years ago, 7 years ago, whatever, but we look at and say, is this the best use of our resources and our human specific things right now? And everybody gets to weigh in, and what we do find is by doing this, there’s a couple of things that really happen here. We do find that sometimes we don’t need that same position or we need it to look differently or we can combine it with something else, and sometimes the idea came from somebody else, that says, oh, you know what? This person could do that. Let’s use this position to do x, something new. Or also on the expenditure part, what it really does is it helps our entire team to know what’s happening, and they’ll catch other things along the way. So it may be something that they agree upon purchasing, but then they’ll put something in and say, oh, well, we need to make sure that we have this team aligned or that team aligned, and have we told school x that this is going to happen? And just to make sure that we have good communication. It’s really improved that communication among my senior leadership team, and so, I really think those kinds of things can really help an organization.
Sanjog Aul [00:20:13]:
Let’s take an example of us going to a gym. Again, bringing it back to the connection to human fitness. I’m very familiar with it, and then the reason I bring it back because it’s easier to explain sometimes. So if I go to gym and I say I want to tone my body. So I’m going to do I’m going to Google something. I’m going to talk to a few friends and I’ll start doing. I may or may not get results, and take that in comparison to me signing up for a program with a sports trainer. Someone who I say, this is my goal, and the person develops a regimen and makes me work out in a certain manner, and predictably, I see the results. Now let’s take this back to your organization or anyone else trying to say that, okay. We are going to become fit or work towards becoming fit. Yes. We come we all could say, this is what I’m gonna try to do to become fit, but we do not have a playbook. Or we are not sure if this works. We do not have many times the luxury of looking at while sitting inside, looking outside in with an expert eye to say whether whatever we are trying to do, is that going to take us somewhere? And we do not have a benchmark in many cases to say, what do we change in strategy and what manner for it to deliver the right results? Where should I spend, manage my spend and where else should I curtail my cost so it’s gonna give us the best effort? And the way traditionally we have been doing the talent development. Maybe we have to change it in a b c manner for it to be able to bring the fitness to the degree we expect. We don’t do that. We do the best we know, and then it’s like predicting weather. Oops, sorry. It did not get there, so we keep going, but that’s not the recipe to become fit.
Sanjog Aul [00:22:28]:
So what needs to change? Suppose you had to make changes to your organization or somebody else who is listening has to make changes to their organization. Who is that sports trainer? Because one person or one company cannot from outside come and fix your whole organization, but that analogy were to be drawn and adopted in context of an organization. What should one do? You may not have tried it, but what would you have done if you were going as a consultant to another organization to help them gain that fitness level?
Sue B. Workman [00:23:03]:
Well, I have done it. Sometimes it’s easier to see others’ fitness than your own. I mean, it’s just easier to go in and see how others have perhaps not staged it and advise them on it. In fact, most of the time that I have done other consulting jobs, I also, on the plane home or something like that, go, ma’am, I have to do that too. I mean, I just told somebody to do it. I have to do it too. So I think those are sometimes hard. I think how that happens probably differs a little bit from organization to organization, and much of this, I think, is how fit the organization already is and how much in trouble it already is, and really the leadership. So I think leaders can be successful getting organizations fit in many ways. One of those may be to have a consultant or have a different view expressed than what is coming from your internal organization or leaning on companies that do this for the industry that you’re in. Others, I think, is just the leadership has to really take this upon themselves and really get your stakeholders in line, and I think when you get all of your stakeholders in line and in technology, I’m not just talking about the technology implementers, but it may be a group of technologists and others. I mean, it may be IT architects and IT security and IT support along with those implementers, but it also has to be functional owners, and I really believe and have stolen a mantra of a CIO that used to be at Stanford that says, I believe the answer’s in the room. If you have smart people and can really listen well and bring out ideas and functions, I think that’s a leadership trait that actually can make your organization move forward because often you can’t just do it yourself, but it’s to get the right minds together and really try to think through that. That may include some sort of consultant or somebody that has expertise in a particular area that you’re looking at, but it also just may be getting the right minds together and it will happen and then you have to take that and implement it.
Sanjog Aul [00:26:34]:
Let’s take a quick break, listeners. We’ll be right back and continue this discussion where we are going to try to make changes to be fit tomorrow, and even if we have a proven playbook, but the way the things are shifting and even the approach which is being proposed here for us to learn are not those big bang projects but instead by design, we want to do things which are fail fast, fail small and a lot of different experimentation, and then figure out what we’re going to keep versus what we will not keep. This approach itself is creating cost overruns. It’s creating chaos among the workforce because they don’t know where are we going even. We do not know if you have a direction because we change. We have a strategy of the month. While the leadership might think they are trying to navigate through the haze, a person who’s coming as an employee, as a front line staff or someone from IT, a programmer for example, they may not see it that way. So how do I, if I was running this company, handle my costs, handle the way I spend and still be able to predictably and confidently state that I am working towards organizational fitness. How do I do that? What’s the recipe? What’s the way forward for any organization which attempts to do it? Let’s explore that when I come back. Please stay tuned.
Speaker 0 [00:28:24]:
Today, enterprise technology is both strategic and global. Each week on CTN CIO Talk Network, IT thought leaders from around the world share their experience with listeners as they discuss with Sanjog Aul how they are trimming costs and partnering with business to innovate and help IT become more competitive, better care for customers, and improve the corporate bottom line. If you want to keep up with IT thought leadership, listen to CTN, CIO Talk Network with Sanjog Aul at ciotalknetwork.com. You are listening to CTN CIO Talk Network with Sanjog Aul. To learn more about our program, please visit ciotalknetwork.com. Now back to the show.
Sanjog Aul [00:29:19]:
Welcome back. So, Sue, when we look at the different kind of investments are being made today in this whole crazy digital world, by design we are saying we’re not gonna make big bets because things are shifting. Business models are shifting, customer expectations are shifting, the way the partners come together, the way projects get done, everything has been fundamentally rethought and been disrupted. When you do that, and that’s what people are trying to do, they are spending a lot of money, and it is put under the bucket of sandboxing, experimentation and figuring out how to navigate through the haze, which itself creates an issue about not being able to run a tight ship, and it also prevents you from being able to create a strategy and get enough time to work on it, which is based on some core fundamentals. Because if the fundamentals are changing, then you cannot say, I have a sound strategy, and with all this madness, the very talent you’re trying to develop, whether in terms of skills or temperament or whatever leadership qualities, you are telling them that every month or 2 I am going to give you a different job to work with, or we might shift our gears. So no person as an individual is able to make up their mind. What am I going to do to add value? Because that’s what’s going to give them the confidence. If I presented to you this problem, which actually is there in most organizations, How would you become that sports trainer and help this organization with these different, moving parts and bring it in shape, bring it to fitness?
Sue B. Workman [00:31:01]:
Well, I think there’s a it’s a really good question, and I think that, you know, it may differ from organization to organization a little bit, but, basically, you have to train your staff to be very flexible and open, and ready for those changes. So much like if you went to a trainer and they’re working on, say, your upper body strength, well, you don’t know that in a couple of weeks, it might be your legs that you need to have, strengthened, and so, just picking one spot to strengthen in your organization may not be sustainable over time, and you could really hurt your organization by not keeping the whole thing strong, but I also think you mentioned that the cost spend, you know, failing fast earlier and those kinds of things, and, you know, the spend management is really a tight ship. I gave an example a little bit earlier on on how we are in IT at Case Western Reserve University, how we are managing our resources, and we have to be very, very careful because we don’t have I mean, we have enough, but we don’t have the kind that, you know, we can just go, and throw pennies to to do things or throw dollars to do things. So, we have to be very fit, in our minds as well and making sure that we have assessed all of our options, but also, is this really an option that will work for us and in our environment and in our culture and, and in our, you know, frankly, in our budget? And so I think pretty much everyone is in that spot that you have a budget and you have to put your bets on what you think will get you the biggest return, and so, yeah, there’s some things that really, you know, do fail and as soon as you recognize those failures as a leader, it behooves you to stop, change direction if you can, but I think you know what your infrastructure is. You know what you have to have for the foundation, and, what you have to do and what your priorities of your organization are, and so you have to really put resources where that belongs and reallocate from places that maybe are not such high value to you or your organization, and it just really comes down then to making good decisions. They’re the best you can make, and, you know, I do think you were right that we especially in this environment now, you know, things are are still pretty good. I think, you know, we’ve been expecting some sort of downturn or recession coming up. So far it hasn’t, thankfully, but, you know, I think that we need to have plans that says what if. You know, we have to worry about, in higher education, we have to worry about DACA. We have to worry about international students’ ability to get here with visas. We have to worry about downturns in the economy, and so I think it behooves us. I mean, even one that’s upcoming is a true cliff in 2025 where the number of 18 year olds is going to drastically shrink. So the number of available new college students or new students that are the traditional kind of college student, that number is gonna shrink, and so, there will be great competition for those students, and we have to we’re already looking at plans for that, because if you look around the industry in higher ed now, as I mentioned earlier, there’s schools closing. There’s enrollments already that are already down, and so if we don’t have the available resource, then we can’t just go get them, and so I think higher education needs to all be making plans right now for what’s gonna happen in five years with just the number of pure number of 18 year olds. That doesn’t mean there’s not other students. I mean, yes, there are, but that means you need to perhaps reset some of your expectations and some of the plans that you have to not necessarily market to those 16, 17 year olds. It means you need to go market to those perhaps that are 25 or 30 that haven’t finished a degree or market to students that want to change jobs or increase their skills in an area. So I think the winners here will have already figured out those plans when 2025 hits, and we’ll have already made those shifts. If a school waits until they see, oh, 2025, well, probably 2026, actually, enrollments are down and then again in 2027 and then again in 2028, and they aren’t making those shifts to be fit and serve those industry serve the students, then it’s too late.
Sanjog Aul [00:37:30]:
So all the changes that we discussed or someone is gonna be able to lead the charge at least you’re expecting that someone will lead the charge. Now at the same time, we know there is also flux in the leadership itself, and any tweaks, if you will. So if I were to say draw a parallel of saying a sports trainer being the leader in the company in this case, but isn’t that the risk? Because the moment that sports trainer goes away, so does fitness, and what we are instead saying is, okay, let that sports trainer come, go for help you train and learn what that person was helping you do so that you can continue on that path, which in a way means enablement of the organization, which would maintain its fitness level with or without the intervention of the leader once they reach a certain level of fitness and understanding and knowledge of how to maintain it. Organizations have the potential to be able to do so, but very few are able to get there where their capacity, their fitness level transcends the leadership. What would be the recipe to that? Where organization could be self sustaining, whether or not a leader stays or goes, whether or not that person triggered this whole fitness, regimen.
Sue B. Workman [00:39:01]:
I do think that part of the role of that leader has to be to have a succession plan and to have their senior leadership and others fully capable of running without them, and I know that’s not sustainable real long term, but at least, in a short term to be able to, you know, until they find the next right leader. So and it may already be somebody that previous leader taught. So, you know, I just think that the strength of the organization, you know, as the fitness trainer, as the leader of that fitness regimen, really has to work not as the one telling or prescribing exactly what to do, but as a leader of a team that that team then can go and perform. I mean, you know, it’s just like a sports team. If you want to take a sports team and, I mean, I played college basketball and softball and, let’s just take basketball. So you have usually, sometimes, you have a star that, you know my job usually was to get the ball to that star to shoot and not shoot myself, but, although I did sometimes, but, it was to get the ball to them, and, you know, what happens if you build all of your plans and all of your plays around this star, and then they get hurt or they’re sick or whatever, and you have to be able to have plays that somebody else can step in and, or that are different, that fit the personnel that are out there, and you can’t just put that play out there when that star gets hurt. You better already have those in the players’ heads before they go out on the floor and practice those and make sure that you have a team that’s really ready to go, and in any case, not just in the best case, and so I think that that analogy is very apropos to our industry today is, you know, you can’t just build a strategy around a single leader, a single vision, or a single person. You really have to build that strategy around multiple views and be able to quickly switch if needed and, you know, switch leaders or switch players or switch plays or whatever the case may be.
Sanjog Aul [00:42:16]:
Now let’s take the example of a relay race, and the reason I bring this up is because it is a parallel to us building our talent, but frankly, in today’s day and age, it’s almost impossible to have all talent in house for you to be able to deliver to your customers. That means you rely on partners. Your talent development or talent availability is also going to be affected by the intent and the investments your partners would make towards building that pool that you are planning to tap into. When we have that type of an environment where there are external dependencies, It’s complex as is to handle talent in house. Do you think we could just play customer to those partners and treat them as vendors and mandate our ask and things will fall in place and we will become and stay fit? If not, what’s the best way to approach partners so that our suppose we are a black box as an organization which is delivering and yes, we are using partners, to support us, but to the customer, it’s a black box. How can that black box be kept fit?
Sue B. Workman [00:43:47]:
Well, I think that’s a good strategy, first of all. We use that strategy, quite a bit for either, talent that we don’t have and we want to sometimes test out, an individual. So we bring them on as a contractor or we have, you know, partners that supply those things where we don’t want to have to hire for, say, a high watermark service level. We want to hire for the average and then be able to augment, should that service level increase quickly, and so really to do that and what my strategy has been around this is to include those partners as employees and treat them as employees, even though they’re paid from someplace else. So, you know, we make sure that when we have staff meetings or when we have various educational opportunities, we include them and treat them just as if they were one of ours, and so I really think that that’s a good way to do this, and so, we recently opened a new, health education campus here at Case Western Reserve that is interdisciplinary education between our medical school, our school of nursing, and our school of dental medicine all altogether before they were all in separate places, and we really wanted these students to get to work together and understand how to work together before they, let’s say, go to a hospital or before they enter their professional career. We don’t want to train them prior, and so, you know, this is a new building that’s 500,000 square feet that has the atrium the size of a football field. It’s a joint project with Cleveland Clinic, and so, you know, we’re opening this whole new area with the number of devices in classrooms increased by 1,400, and it was new technology from both vendors and new technologies that we had not experienced before. So we really didn’t know how to support it. We didn’t know what it was gonna take. So, yeah, we invested a little in our hiring for this new area, but we also have contracted some of it out to just say, we don’t know. You know, we don’t know if there’s going to be need at 11 PM or if there’s need at 2 AM or if not. So, it actually worked out great, and we have learned, since this place opened in July of this year, what it’s gonna take and doing that with some support staff from other areas, I mean, by vendors, has worked out perfectly for us to really, really understand, and, again, you know, I don’t want to staff for high watermark. So I don’t want to carry them until, you know, half the semester that we don’t need them, and so it’s really worked out well for us to have these kind of partners and inform partnerships so that the company owners understand and can train and also staff themselves, and be ready for us.
Sanjog Aul [00:48:16]:
So if you look at the different aspects that we spoke about, technology, of course, is becoming the very fabric for most organizations, and related quality of what that foundation is, that will matter. At the same time, we still have people raising eyebrows when you go with a plan to invest in technology. With a good plan, hopefully. With the skepticism that IT is always there to buy the next shiny toy.
Sue B. Workman [00:48:52]:
Yeah.
Sanjog Aul [00:48:52]:
If we are talking about organizational fitness, what needs to change in terms of the equation and the relationship between business and technology so they’re not spending time in the tug of war and actually invest timely to make sure that you’re proactive enough to go through that fitness. It’s almost like a sports trainer says, okay, you have to start doing it. You have to meet this goal, but where’s the equipment? And people don’t have it. That’s not gonna fly. That’s not gonna get you to that goal. So we still have these issues in companies, and the businesses are becoming more and more the business leaders are becoming more and more skeptical because they say, last 6 months, you have changed or brought new technology. What happened with it? Why do I keep signing on checkbooks? And I don’t see something material come out of it, and you say you’re sandboxing and you’re experimenting. So what would you do to make sure that the best thing happens to the organization? Whatever that you would have done. So what would be your approach in today’s day and age with what’s what we’re dealing with with respect to technology investments?
Sue B. Workman [00:50:20]:
Yeah. Well, I have heard those same words, at times, and I think that it really is in a lot of the prep. I think there is a lot of shiny new objects around that do catch your eye, and that could be of benefit, and I think we really have to think about what is the return on that investment and how soon can you get that and is that the best place of your money. So, let’s just take cryptocurrency. Right now, you know, you see some organizations and even some universities that are accepting cryptocurrency for tuition or payment of some sort, and, you know, we know that this technology has true potential, and it’s the new thing, and it’s kind of the cool thing, and, could we do it? Should we do it? And is it time? And when you think about that was the key question. So I think asking the key questions is absolutely a necessity. So the key question is should we? Because we could, and, basically, I talked myself out of the fact that just because we could, we should. There’s still too much risk in it for accepting things, you know, critical things like tuition money and, or, you know, even some platforms are starting to put their transcripts in blockchain. I think that’s when you have to be a follower. So there you know, you can be the innovator and the leader. You can be kind of in the middle, or you can be the follower in technology, and so when you see that should we question, that may be when you want to move back from being the innovator to, you know, a follower if the answer is no. There’s other things if the answer is yes. So at that
Sanjog Aul [00:53:17]:
30 seconds
Sue B. Workman [00:53:20]:
we also are looking at the chatbot, developing a chatbot, which we did internally.
Sanjog Aul [00:53:29]:
Okay. So do you have 30 seconds to do? Too close.
Sue B. Workman [00:53:31]:
Okay.That was the easy thing to do. We did it. It cost very little, and it was a big success.
Sanjog Aul [00:53:38]:
On behalf of the show and our listeners, thank you so much, Sue, as always, for sharing your thoughts and insights about how the business and IT leaders could collaborate and work as a fitness trainer. That’s the parallel I draw to effectively tackle the organizational fitness challenge. Thanks so much.
Sue B. Workman [00:53:58]:
Thank you. I enjoyed it.
Sanjog Aul [00:54:00]:
And thanks so much, and hope listeners you enjoyed, got some nuggets out of this. Please like us on Facebook, search for CTN, CIO Talk Network, and be sure to follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn and please go ahead and subscribe to our podcast in over 20 syndication channels and give us your reviews so that more people discover us and benefit from these conversations. Thank you again for listening to this segment on CTN. This is Sanjog Aul, your talk show host. Till next week, take care, and God bless.
