With most organizations well on their way to embedding digital in the DNA of their organizations, what’s on the CIO Agenda for 2019? How do they plan to support volatile and growing business capability demands reliably without breaking the bank?
Contributors

• • Lawanda Parnell, Chief Information Officer, Pedernales Electric Cooperative (PEC)
  • Helen Constantinides, Chief Information Officer, AVBOB

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Transcript

Sanjog Aul [00:00:22]:

Hello, and welcome to this segment on CTN, and to learn more, please visit ciotalknetwork.com, and the topic for today is the 2019 CIO Agenda, and our guests for today are Helen Constantinides, who’s the chief information officer with AVBOB, and Lawanda Parnell, chief information officer for Pedernales Electric Cooperative. Hey, Helen. How are you?

Helen Constantinides [00:00:48]:

Good. Thank you. Happy New Year to you, Nelos.

Sanjog Aul [00:00:52]:

Oh, thank you so much, Helen. Hope the new year is starting with a bang and you are ready to make waves.

Helen Constantinides [00:01:00]:

Definitely.

Sanjog Aul [00:01:01]:

Yeah. Very nice. Very nice, and we also should have Lawanda join us shortly, but we’ll at least get started with you. Also, Lawanda, you’re back, right? So how are you doing? Happy New Year.

Lawanda Parnell[00:01:13]:

Thank you. Happy New Year to you as well.

Sanjog Aul [00:01:16]:

Oh, thank you so much. So, essentially, our other goal here today, and it’s a brand shiny new year that we are dealing with, and there are a lot of organizations who have already started working with what started in a way year or two back, which was the digital fever. Right? Everyone was trying to understand digital. In fact, it started around 2014/15, but then last whole year was about, okay, how do I embed digital in the DNA of the organization? And that continued. A lot of organizations made some good strides in that area. That said, things haven’t changed, in terms of what is being done, but then there are new challenges or new initiatives and new priorities are coming up and that’s what we wanted to talk about, and we also wanted to touch the subject that this will be an ongoing change. No longer are we gonna sit on something, a trend which is gonna sit for ten years. It’s gonna be a continuous change or a continuous next approach to how we live our life and do business, and if that’s the direction we are going, how would we continue to work on handling the business demands which are gonna continue to change and grow, and we do it reliably and without breaking the bank? So that said, Lawanda, my first question will be for you. If you are going already with digital, are you saying it’s gonna be the same 2018 agenda carried forward to 2019?

Lawanda Parnell[00:02:46]:

Well, I think some of the things will, of course, be the same, they focus on, but it’s as you already talked about, it’s going to be ever changing from a digital perspective. What things are going digital that weren’t in 2018, and some of the things that we got started, especially in the utility industry, which is where I am, a lot more digital innovation and conversion is happening as our customers look for more ways to look at their own data and be able to control their own fate.

Sanjog Aul [00:03:21]:

And and if if if that’s what it is so, Helen, when you are looking at your organization, what all did you do in 2018 or prior year, perhaps, which was left incomplete and or which needs tweaking, which will require you to rethink or reimagine those areas? Or are you thinking this year is gonna be whatever platforms that you build, whatever foundation you try to put in place, do you want to capitalize on it this year?

Helen Constantinides [00:03:54]:

Well, enabling technology to be a transformational force for our business is a continuous and persistent journey, which does require continuous involvement and engagement and needs to be built on a business culture of continuous improvement to be able to thrive. In 2019, we’re going to continue to drive the customer experience that everybody has been talking about and as part of the digital transformation agenda, improving productivity and delivering competitive value to our business. We will, as always, be working very close to business and side by side with business in recognizing obviously, the customer service, customer services and customer experiences, which are part of my responsibilities as CIO and these sort of services and agendas make up the top priorities of new technology strategy and they remain to, as continuations to sustain and enable our business and make relevant and inclusive our customers. It’s important we continue to make our business leaders be behind each of the projects and confirming the sponsorship and involvement is one of the most fundamental and important factors affecting our continuous digital journey. There’s a lot that we’re doing. We’re driving a technology agenda that is underlined by a theme that we have termed as “be simple and agile.” And we’re tracking some fundamental changes to our enterprise architecture and our software development, and being a 100-year-old company, there’s a lot to do around both of these areas.

Sanjog Aul [00:06:01]:

Okay. So now this, Lawanda, comes to you the question. You know, while we went ahead and worked on the digital side of things, at the same time, people not used it as an excuse, but in a way a reality that there’s so much which we don’t understand or maybe we are getting over optimistic or we’re getting overzealous. So let’s let’s not go crazy with digital. So let’s move a little slowly or let’s move a little with healthy skepticism, and that was utilized because business did not want to lose their shirt in the interest of saying, oh, we are doing the latest cool thing. What do you think is gonna happen in 2019? Are you done being skeptic? Are you done being moving slowly? Because if you move slowly, there’s also a cost attached to it, an opportunity cost because there is a lot that other competitors may be doing. What do you think is the sentiment? What are you starting the year with?

Lawanda Parnell[00:07:01]:

I think there’s still going to be a bit of skepticism depending on which organization within your business you’re interfacing with. For instance, the financial organization within any company might still be approaching the digital innovation era with some skepticism, or I wouldn’t say skepticism, maybe more caution than say your customer service organization would approach digital. So again, I think there’s some caution, but I think when you’re dealing with organizations like your customer service organization, I think you’ll see them move at a more rapid pace, and I think that’s because of the demand specifically coming from the customers wanting, again, back to the utility industry, their customers want to understand how to influence their bill. They want to understand what are their generation sources and how to choose their generation sources. So the demands are growing from a customer perspective. So I think that’s why you see that particular organization approaching the digital area more aggressively than you would, say, our financial organizations. So I think part of the role from an IT perspective is helping the various organizations within any company understand how this digital era will impact them specifically. How is it going to change how they approach work? How is it going to change their day to day work processes? And how can they use these digital innovations to solve today’s problems? And I think that’s part of what my responsibility is, is to help those organizations understand how they can solve today’s and tomorrow’s problems with some of this digital innovation.

Sanjog Aul [00:09:02]:

But see, Lawanda, your response suggests that we are still thinking, but don’t you think that digital is not new and there was a lot of thinking and experimentation that was done in the last few years to ensure that we are not jumping the gun. We are not fighting and then aiming. How long do you think we should continue to think? We are to act now.

Lawanda Parnell[00:09:24]:

I think there will still be some thinking occurring. Again, I have to look at who are my customers and helping them understand how they can use this because I can’t force some of my colleagues to take the digital innovation. What my approach has been is helping them understand how they solve their business problems and using digital to do that, and because I’m looking for more of a collaboration, a joint decision making with them, them because they own their business processes, I’m trying to help them innovate, make those business processes more productive, more efficient, and digital is here to stay. So there’s no question about that, but helping them understand how they can use it to make their organizations better and more productive and more efficient.

Sanjog Aul [00:10:18]:

So, Helen, when you’re looking at your organization, of course, you know, the first response that you gave was, very articulate in terms of how you are even thinking about digital. How are you thinking going forward and meeting the business agenda? Perfectly understood, but then there was some effort put in already in building a foundation. That’s the assumption here in my question in terms of what digital can bring, and, yes, we understand that it’s gonna continue to change. Have you at least put some pillars in place, and now aren’t you working to at least get some value out of these initial investments and thinking and research and development efforts that you would have put in in 2019?

Helen Constantinides [00:11:03]:

Correct. So our agenda in 2019 drives a number of purposes. Firstly, we want a unified view of our customer and our customers’ data. Secondly, we want a single omnichannel experience for our customers, which I define as a single touch point for any customer communication. Having a visibility when a customer walks into one of our financial branches or makes a call to our call center or has a conversation with a sales representative or an insurance broker or even does an inquiry in one of our social sites, LinkedIn or Twitter or any one of our social sites, or accesses any one of our mobile or web customer applications. So we want to know what they’re inquisitive about, what other services they want, better understand our customers’ need and their touch points. Thirdly, we’re working on creating a single view for our business because it’s very important that our business is able to service the customer effectively and efficiently. So consolidating and centralizing our definition of our business rules and our business processing to make life simpler for the customer is very important to us. We are also driving our communication channel because communication is very, very important, needs to be reliable, needs to be available and needs to be fast, and therefore we’ve also included a better and faster digital communication backbone, and alleviating and making our branch network a lot faster across our head offices, our provincial offices, and our 365 nationwide branch network infrastructure, and we’ve continued in terms of making the paper-to-digital automation transformation of our remaining paper based business processes, and there’s a lot we’re doing around AI, robotic process automation in terms of embracing new technologies that work hand in hand in delivering the technology strategy.

Sanjog Aul [00:13:31]:

So Helen, what you just mentioned was a number of those initiatives look like that they are trying to build a robust infrastructure so you can move faster, you could do more effective business operations. Where are you utilizing the innovation? Like, see, on one hand, you may have thought of digital. You may have worked on trying to create innovation, and, yes, we need that up corresponding infrastructure to be put in place. So is 2019 about a set of milestones you achieve in terms of strengthening your infrastructure, or basically get the value out of harness the value out of the innovations that digital brings?

Helen Constantinides [00:14:14]:

Well innovation for us is obviously creating customer applications, new services, new products, and new ways of communicating with us. All of this is about innovation and while we do that and how we do that is very important. So we’ve looked at our enterprise architecture and how and what we do to develop our software, and it’s very important for us to change some of the ways that we’re developing the software to make things a lot more agile in delivering new products to our business and delivering new services to the business. So to meet some of these business agendas, we have to change some of the underlying technology, and being a company that’s a 100-year-old company, there’s a lot to do in that space in terms of changing what was developed years ago to what has to be developed now and what’s required in the new age of delivering modern and agile services. So we are touching our architecture and we are modernizing applications which are business services to our customers.

Sanjog Aul [00:15:41]:

So, Lawanda, when you look at the technologies that we either heard about or even started using, advanced analytics, AI, digital mesh, robotic process automation, IoT, I mean, I could keep going. How much of that truly was a few 1 to 2% of the overall industry which was tackling, and what was the level of adoption that already happened in 2018 in your view, and how much of that is going to be actually put in place in 2019? And where all you go beyond these obvious innovations which were put in in the limelight in the previous years. It’s a loaded question, but I wanted to just understand where do you see you going and where do you see industry going with respect to the innovations which have already happened and the ones which are coming beyond what we’ve already seen?

Lawanda Parnell[00:16:41]:

Well, I think IoT is already here. I mean, that was here in 2018. I think you saw it even before 2018, and it will continue to be across all industries when you look at where we’re going from an innovation perspective. So IoT is real, and it will continue to be real. I think when in 2018, you started to hear about AI and you started to see how it impacted some of the industries more than others, but I think AI will grow in how it impacts solutions and how customers see it and how they view the impact of AI in their everyday lives. I think one of the other innovations and technologies that will become more and more prevalent in 2019 is blockchain, and how that will impact, and I think it has the ability to be cross industry impactful as well, and I think things like which isn’t really an innovation, but one area that will be very, very impactful, and it has been over the last year or two, is cybersecurity. I mean, that is something that we all hear about every day in the media, but it’s there, and we all have to focus on it every day, because it’s ever changing. The threat actors are changing every day. Their skills are improving. Therefore, our defenses against that will have to improve as well, but I had to bring that one in here, even though that’s not necessarily an innovation, but it’s one of those overarching areas that every CIO is going to have to worry about and defend for.

Sanjog Aul [00:18:37]:

So, Helen, where you are and and what you are tackling with in your organization, Do you think these latest and greatest technologies or innovations that we’re talking about, AI, RPA, IoT, etcetera, have they forced you to fundamentally rethink your business, or are you using them as a bolt on to get some value out of? What has been your approach to looking at these innovations, maximizing the potential from these?

Helen Constantinides [00:19:10]:

So it’s about transforming and transforming is not just about taking technology and plugging it into the organization. Transforming is about embracing new technology and looking at your business processes and your business models and seeing how you can change some of those models to make you more competitive, to make you more agile, and to make you more relevant. So AI for us, artificial intelligence, especially being in the financial insurance sector is very important to us. We want to automate a lot of our processes, and the way we did claims, in the way we process applications in your business. Robotic process automation is also very important to us, and can be used in different facets of our organization, and we are busy developing in some of those areas. Predictive analytics is also hugely important to us in understanding our customers better, taking our customers data and creating more insights to that data, but more importantly is how we marry that data to external data and seeing what more insight we can gain about the market, about customers to be able to obviously provide and develop new services that will obviously generate more revenues. There’s a lot that we’re doing around blockchain as well. Blockchain is just not a technology you just embed, but it’s about how that whole supply chain works with your business partners and building new business models to support both your business partners and yourself. So technology and disruptive technology or doing something innovative involves the business and it involves embracing and seeing how you could use that technology to create more revenues for the business.

Sanjog Aul [00:21:18]:

So, question for you, Lawanda here is about the talent pool. We actually I personally was on a travel circuit, if you will. A lot of different discussions across a lot of different cities around the globe, and one main issue with all the disruption that we are trying to tackle and get more value out for the business, it eventually came down to this choking point of not being able to develop and shape the talent which will essentially enable or bring this to reality. Is there something specific? Not becoming a soapbox. Is there something specific we are looking to do to make sure that the talent pool evolves, talent pool doesn’t have the fatigue, and talent pool is able to and is enabled by the business to be able to realize these new digital dreams that we have been having?

Lawanda Parnell[00:22:26]:

I don’t think that these are new ideas, but I think it’s something that as an IT leader, we have to look at, and one of the things that I’ve discovered, from let’s say the cybersecurity area, I mean, we’ve all seen the data that says that the demand for cybersecurity skilled resources is very high, and the supply is low, and one of the things I think from an IT organization we have to look at is investing in our current employee base, and by that I mean grow those skills within your own organization, and that doesn’t say you won’t try to recruit skilled cybersecurity resources, but we’re competing against each other across industries for that same skill, and I think that’s applicable not only to cybersecurity, but in other things like network architecture, network administration. When you’re in an area where the competition is fierce—when I say area, if you’re in a metropolitan or urban area where the competition for those skill sets is very high—I think you have to look at investing in your current IT employee base and train them for those emerging and new skill sets that you need. The other one area that I think we have to look at is not just going to the established universities in the area, but look at the community colleges, because there you have a different base of people coming to community colleges than you would at your typical universities, and those individuals are primed, and the community colleges are more agile than universities, typically, and they have the ability to change their curriculum quickly and focus their graduates in areas that the businesses need more quickly than a university would, and from an IT leadership and executive perspective, forming those relationships with some of those community colleges and working with their faculty for them to understand what are our needs, and helping them design programs that would produce resources that meet our needs. I think those are two key ways for us to sort of develop and shape what comes out as far as graduates and how we invest in our current employee base to help us meet those ever changing demands and needs.

Sanjog Aul [00:25:06]:

Let’s take a quick break, listeners. We’ll be right back, and, Helen, I’d love to come back and talk about the talent pool a little more because this is an area which is fuzzy for many organizations. Especially, it was fuzzy in the past that everything else in technology and processes, we were very specific about what we want to achieve, but when it came to human resource, it always was, we are trying. We are trying to get there, but the answers were fuzzy. The strategies were fuzzy. So what is being done in 2019, especially when the talent, the human resource is gonna become the most critical element of what you’re gonna be able to achieve as an organization? So please stay tuned, listeners. We’ll be right back.

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Sanjog Aul [00:27:49]:

Welcome back. So, Helen, let’s talk about this talent, situation that we are dealing with. Lot of organizations, every organization for that matter, is dependent on talent to eventually realizing the strategy. Sitting in ivory tower, building good good strategies is one thing. Getting these people to embrace new skills, new attitudes, new behaviors, and essentially sometimes go beyond what they signed up for is all going to impact what you are able to deliver to the business and the business to its customers. How are we balancing? How are we thinking about this area? And what is gonna be different for 2019 as you may have thought of for your organization?

Helen Constantinides [00:28:41]:

Great. So retaining talent is one of my top priorities and challenges at the same time. Together with my management team for 2019, we are creating a strong performance culture, investing in our talent and prioritizing business initiatives in terms of what needs to be done first. So to be ready in 2019, we know and we need to bring a team behind us and with us. We need to prioritize and we need to focus. A team, as a team, we must create meaningful change in order to achieve our most important goals, and top quality IT people want to know what they must do and how they will be measured. So driving a high performance culture and having metrics to monitor performance and good performance scorecards that are built on SMART objectives that are comprehensive, measurable, achievable, time based are all important for our people. With modern scales of change and all of these things that we are doing, it is putting a lot of pressure on our developers. If I look at the way that they developed previously, they are required to be more involved and more collaborative with business. They need to be more creative. They need to work more in a teamwork environment. They need to be innovative in flexing their thoughts. They need to have positive minds and positive moods because all of these influence and drive prosperity within the team. Teamwork requires us to appreciate the value of working together to resolve a lot of these challenges, and for me, having a diverse team with different backgrounds, different experiences, ways of working can help us to produce superior results in order to provide better services for our customers. It takes a lot for everyone to create an environment where everyone thrives, where one can outperform the other, where differences are accepted, yet where inclusion and cohesion need to be part of the values that strengthen the foundation. So in summary for me, talent is gonna be a challenge. I see it within my IT team. I have a team of 60 people and we are stretching them. We’re stretching them in terms of what they can do, continually being innovative, continually bettering what they developed previously, and making them think differently, but it’s important for us to invest in the talent to understand what needs to be done and work together in one cohesive team.

Sanjog Aul [00:31:49]:

So, Lawanda, based on what Helen just mentioned, of course, all the right measures that Helen mentioned we take and which is good, and these are some of many of them are proven techniques when we are moving in a rather stable environment. Right? We talk about smart goals. We talk about, hiring in in a fashion where we know very clearly what the job description is. Now think about the scenario, especially in IT, who are supposed to be working on one thing, but suddenly within six months or every six months, their role or the scope of what they have to deliver changes. Your performance appraisal cannot stay the same. Your goals will not stay the same. Everything will be in flux, and then you would truly not have one yardstick to measure across the board, all technology people. So what what’s the evolution that we need to do so that these people stay the most, excited about what business is trying to achieve and come along with you like a pied piper? How will you become a pied piper? How will business become a pied piper so everyone follows and willingly and helps you achieve your business dream?

Lawanda Parnell[00:33:18]:

I think one way to do that is making the goals very, very visible. What are your objectives from an IT organization perspective? What are the goals? How are you gonna measure them? And make that very visible. One of the things we’ve done is we’ve built a dashboard that says what are our goals, how are we being measured, so that it’s visible to every employee, not just the IT organization, but share it with our peers. What are our goals? And in looking at their performance from an IT organization perspective, yes, things are changing. We set our performance goals at a certain period in the year, but we have to be flexible to say what may have been relevant and what may have been our goal six months ago could change and probably will change, and one of the things we’ve stretched ourselves to do is say, let’s talk every quarter with our employee base and say, are these goals still the ones that you should be measured on? And even at the time that you’re doing the performance evaluation, your performance system needs to be flexible enough to say even something that was in there three months ago, this wasn’t relevant. We actually didn’t do this, and that’s okay. That shouldn’t be a negative impact on the employee, but a reflection of the system that’s flexible enough that says that goal you didn’t achieve, but it wasn’t because you were a poor performer. It was because the business needs and the business drivers changed, and here’s what you were working on and should be measured on, and here’s how you performed at that goal. I think you have to have a system like that in order to keep the employees motivated and help them understand that you care about what they’re working on and you understand. A lot of IT employees need to know that their executives and their management understand what they’re doing, and you’ll get that will pay a lot of dividends if they think you are connected to what they’re doing and that it’s important to meeting the corporate goals that have been set forth outside of IT that IT can influence, and being able to map that IT goal to the corporate goals is also important for an IT organization because sometimes it’s not always clear how the IT goals are influencing the corporate goals, and making that connection for the IT organization I think will help you retain key IT resources and help them understand how they individually are influencing those corporate goals.

Sanjog Aul [00:36:18]:

So is this gonna be like a work in progress in 2019 as well that you attempt to try, attempt to tweak your workforce management strategies to see what works or what doesn’t, and somehow expect that the traditional techniques and some of the ideas that you gave are innovative, that in a way it’ll be like a mix of different strategies, and we’ll see what sticks. Is that how you think CIOs are gonna approach workforce management in 2019?

Lawanda Parnell[00:36:56]:

Absolutely. I think we’ll continue to tweak it, because again, every organization, every IT organization may not be exactly the same as far as what work they’re producing. We’ve seen tremendous success in my application team from making the work visible. We’ve fully embraced the whole Kanban development process. We’ve embraced agile development and we’ve seen tremendous success from a combined perspective. All the work is visible on a dashboard and everyone in that application team sees it. They understand who picked something off of that dashboard as the next thing that they’re working on, and being able to use agile development and kicking out development things every two weeks has been tremendously effective for us, both from an IT organization and from the view of the business organizations about the effectiveness of the IT organization, but again, we continue to tweak that and look at how we’re doing that work and putting SLAs in place so that organizations outside of IT understand what they can expect from us.

Sanjog Aul [00:38:18]:

So, Helen, earlier in the show, you had mentioned about the architecture. So let’s talk about the very IT strategy and then subsequently the architecture, the data, the processes, and the tools, which we need to either change or tweak or figure out a way to make a set of them, which will become the foundation so you can accommodate this continuous innovation and disruption. What do you think are the challenges in that journey? So have you already put that in place? Is it work in progress? What is it that you are facing as a challenge? And what are you have been able to ace so that you have the right platform to to move on and deal with this digital continuous next type of agenda?

Helen Constantinides [00:39:09]:

Modernization strategy is an integral part of our business strategy. We’re busy curing the technical debt in our current application landscape with modernization and rationalization, making things simpler and more agile for our business and our business owners and our business users. We’ve invested a lot in our applications to a level sufficient to keep them running and servicing our customers. However, we need to continue this investment to make our applications even more sufficient to support and enable our strategic growth and our future needs as a business. So our modernization journey within our software application landscape includes replatforming, rearchitecting, reengineering, addressing integration, interoperability and design thinking in the way we release services and in the way that we release application program interfaces for our business and for our customers. It’s not a short journey, it’s a continuous journey. We started on it and it’s going to take some time. We have over 50,000 applications and there’s a lot of work that we need to do.

Sanjog Aul [00:40:40]:

So you you’ve done and you focused on the modernization part of it and which is, of course, one of the things that someone will do. Is there a blueprint, if you will, that you have envisioned to make sure that that’s gonna be the right platform? And as you try to build a blueprint and now to work towards executing or building based on that blueprint, are there any specific challenges that you’re tackling?

Helen Constantinides [00:41:08]:

There’s a lot of challenges that we’re tackling. So it’s very important to us as part of that architecture blueprint that we learned lessons of the past. So we don’t have applications where business rules and the same business rules exist in 20 different applications. When we want to make a change and that change needs to be agile, it’s very important that we change a business rule once or we change a business process once, and we’re able then to change service, as opposed to spending hours and days making 20 different changes, which increases the risk, and makes development a lot longer in terms of the services you need to deliver. There’s also a lot of the DevOps that we’re embracing in terms of the tools and automating a lot of our environment in the way we release and automate releases and take it from development, quality assurance through to production in a very automated, less risk environment. So all of this at the end of the day is just making things simpler and making things more agile, but to do that, there are so many complexities that have to be removed from the architecture layers, the legacy layers, to be able to sustain and deliver an architecture for the future. So we’re building for tomorrow, but we’re also building for today.

Sanjog Aul [00:42:56]:

So coming to security, Lawanda, you actually gave a couple of times references to the way people have to deal with security, and that’s not a new problem. Do you have a new idea that you’re gonna implement to better handle security in 2019?

Lawanda Parnell[00:43:13]:

I don’t think I would say that it’s new, but one of the most effective things that I’ve seen here where I work is making our employees aware and making them more conscious about cybersecurity. Because we all understand that the weakest link in any cybersecurity plan is the employees or the human factor, and what I’ve instituted is required cybersecurity training for every employee, irregardless of what their role is at the utility, and actually testing them on that cybersecurity awareness. So we do simulated phishing four times a year, and we report those results back to the executives, and so that they have an investment in cyber security within their organization. So anyone that fails that simulation is required to take some additional training, also gets a call from our cyber security team, and asked questions about what about that test made them click, or what about that test made them provide that critical information. So understanding their mindset and walking them through what happened, and we report back to the entire employee base after that test, here’s what you saw, here’s what you should have done if you fail that. So those are the type of things that we put in place, but I wouldn’t call any of that new, and it’s always a challenge to look at what are the new cybersecurity providers because I’m constantly being bombarded with emails from cyber vendors saying, hey, I’ve figured it out. Please come to us to help you defend against the cyber attacks, but again, it’s a continual, constant focus on that, and again, investing in your cybersecurity team because it’s ever changing what the tactics are that are being used, and no company is immune to the attacks, and one of the other things I think you have to do is educate your board, because they need to understand how important this is. Because I think they’re used to more tangible things that they need to focus on, but the board has to be educated on what their role is, because what I’ve seen here is our board directors have become targets, and because their emails are public knowledge, they’ve become targets, so I’ve spent a considerable amount of time educating the board on cybersecurity and what to watch out for as well.

Sanjog Aul [00:46:12]:

So, Helen, one last question for you about the leadership. What do you think you’re gonna fix or improve in yourself as a leader so that you are ready to lead the troops into 2019, which will make you effective and also bring the business results?

Helen Constantinides [00:46:35]:

I believe that to be an effective leader today, you need to have high levels of emotional intelligence, be highly adaptable, highly intelligent, and self aware. Understanding myself and my own limitations, what I’m good at, what I’m not good at, is critical to ensuring that I do surround myself with the right people that are able to leverage my weaknesses or even enhance my strengths. In summary, having high levels of IQ, EQ, AQ and self awareness are very important. Need to be able to know how to gauge the environment and the players, manage communication, so that listeners get what their emotions are telling them they need, and wanting to continually grow and learn, making decisions tirelessly are also very important skills. I think a modern and effective CIO today first and foremost is a business leader and a technology leader second. A modern CIO does need to understand and be passionate about the technology, but more importantly needs to understand what and how the technology can be used to enable and serve the business. So CIOs today need to be defining the business model and enabling more technology to deliver the business results. We need to be team players rolling out our digital strategies that touch different parts of the business. So having strong relationships with other business leaders is very important. Technology is part of the business strategy and an effective CIO needs to ensure that

Sanjog Aul [00:48:31]:

the business embraces the appropriate attitude to the technology.

Helen Constantinides [00:48:31]:

And CIOs who are not capable of operating at a strategic level will not be successful in today’s world.

Sanjog Aul [00:48:46]:

On behalf of the show and our listeners, thanks so much, Helen and Lawanda, for sharing your thoughts on how the CIOs are going to position themselves in 2019 for the best business outcome, best for their workforce, and best for themselves. Thank you so much, and listeners, please like us on Facebook, search for CTN. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and join our LinkedIn community. 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 and a happy new year again.