Jim Smith
Delivering technology to drive business innovation and results is a team sport where more focus on building a conducive culture is not enough. How can we first win within the IT locker room by syncing thinking, behavior, habits, and expectations of each person in the IT department and aligning with what’s needed for progress?
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Sanjog Aul [00:00:22]:
Hello, listeners, and welcome to this live broadcast on CIO Talk Network. To learn more, please visit www.ciotalknetwork.com. Follow the discussion on Twitter today using the #teamIT and #win. And the topic for today is Winning First In The It Locker Room. And the guest for today’s show is Jim Smith, who’s the CIO with the Office of Information Technology, State of Maine. Hello, Jim. How are you?
Jim Smith [00:00:50]:
I’m doing very well. Thank you.
Sanjog Aul [00:00:52]:
Very good. Thank you so much for being on our show. So the topic we picked up today was coming from the notion whereas as leaders, we always think, yes, we have to do our job of leading the troops. And as part of it, we feel that first and most important thing is to build a culture. Nothing wrong with that, but is that where things stop? Some of them think that, okay, if you have a great culture. I’ve had many shows in the past where whenever we talk leadership, they say the focus is to build a culture, but then that doesn’t really get everyone in the team to their maximum performance. And if they don’t become the best they can be within that locker room, if you will, with the same mindset, how would we deliver the maximum we could to the business? With that said, we wanted to explore the different areas which are also to be considered besides building a culture. So that’s my first question for you, Jim, is that traditional leadership wisdom says we focus on culture, and then the rest will fall in place. What do you think are the issues with that notion and what leakages does it cause if we just stick to just building a culture alone?
Jim Smith [00:02:01]:
Well, I think the initial premise is correct. I think you gotta get the culture right. You gotta get people on the bus moving in the same direction, but as much as we talk about this and there’s studies being done and things like that, it’s probably the hottest thing we do. Back in the day when I was in the financial world, I’m in state government now, but I was in the financial world and back in the days you do mergers and acquisitions, you’d always say, well, we gotta get the culture right, but that was the tricky part. I don’t think we ever quite got that. If you had a big, sort of legacy organization, a big company buying a smaller one that might have been entrepreneurial. How do you fit that together? How do you get people to say, people in a small company might do every job and they might be they’re touching everything, production, test, everything they do. They do it all. Then all of a sudden you go into big organization which is, over the years become more risk averse and so there are checkpoints and gateways and stuff and say, well, no. You gotta go through these 10 bureaucratic steps to get there. Well, in my experience with different companies, not everybody makes it, right? Not everybody is happy staying there after that merger. You get a lot of turnover after a year after a merger just because you are trying to crash combined cultures and it doesn’t always work. I think as we think about culture and the challenges today, I think we sort of start with this thought. We have 5 different generations in the workforce now. Millennials through Baby Boomers. Do they all react to the same division, strategy and message? No of course not. One difference we see constantly, employees look for change, new approaches. Some employees really say, I want to be on the cutting edge, I want to make change, I want to do things differently, I can see how to do things differently. Then you have other groups that may say, well no, the status quo has worked for years and we want to continue that. So you have that sort of tug and pull going back and forth. And I think the challenge is how do you get the consistent message to different listeners, to people that are hearing your message differently? I think there’ll be leakage, of course, but I think the theme in our discussion today will really be about communication interaction, giving people a chance to discuss, to challenge, and to embrace where you’re trying to go.
Sanjog Aul [00:04:14]:
So does it remain like a hazy science or a partial, would say more of an art form where you say, oh, okay. I’m gonna sit inside the locker room and remove the so called leader hat and wear a coach’s hat where you’re actively involved and you are responsible for the individual’s performance as well and not just the end result?
Jim Smith [00:04:37]:
Well, I think that’s aspirational. I think that’s the right direction. In practicality, when you have 5 or 600 people in your organization, it’s harder to do that. You have to rely on your team and the team below your team and things like that. I think it’s definitely the right direction to go. We do a lot with mentorships and working relationships, those type of things, and sort of getting everyone to sort of pulling in the same direction, but it’s a challenge. There’s a tipping point at some point where you’re the leader and you’re sort of saying, well, this is the direction we’re going versus that coach that says, let’s work together to get there. We have to do both things, but it’s a challenge, I think.
Sanjog Aul [00:05:21]:
So the assumption that in your response was that you have to do it alone, but you have the opportunity to build a hierarchy. And then be the coach to that second in command, the second-in-command guys, deal with the third in command and eventually the people who are supposed to be in the field. And all of them are essentially delivering technology to the business. So that said, you don’t have to assume you did not have to be the lone warrior or the Hercules who has to do it all as an individual coach, but you had a sub coach and sub sub coach. Would that type of an approach work?
Jim Smith [00:05:58]:
Oh, definitely. And then that’s a requirement. You have to get that. You have to get your team on board and move through the organization. I think that one of the keys here really, if you assume change is constant, we understand that in the IT organization. Business requirements change, technology changes, we’re always changing. The world we entered, 30 years ago is not what the world is today. Things are done differently. It’s different tools, different people, etc. You have to understand change is constant. So you say, okay, how can I set out a vision? And can that vision be realistic and not a 1 page vision? Can you get down to these are the things we need as a team to embrace? And then you say now how do I find apostles within the organization that are really gonna be out there embracing and selling that vision. I mean one example is we’ve over the last couple years we’ve gone to an agile methodology. We were a waterfall shop for years. Now we’re going to an agile methodology. Well how do you do that? That’s a big cultural change both for the technologist and for your business partners. That’s a different way to do things. You get stand up meetings and sprints and things like that. Whole different world. And so the way you have to do that is you start out small, help people learn, embrace and sell the vision. You start out small, you start building some successes and I think those build upon themselves, but I think in that case in particular you can’t be sort of on the mountain top dictating thou shall go to Agile. You have to build it within the organization. You have to convince people why you’re gonna go that way, and then get out those apostles out there and identify those apostles and give them the power and ability to influence the organization.
Sanjog Aul [00:07:41]:
So imagine you as a leader, as you rightly said that you cannot be just at the top and doing it. You have to build an organization who’ll do it, but then even they, if they feel, I have to just focus on the culture versus working towards making sure that each person in the team eventually who’s actually delivering is an independent thinker, but also is ready to work with the team. And their different beliefs, mindset, systems, etcetera, whatever they bring to the table are at least aligning or converging. How do you ensure that also works? So are you rolling all of that that up into culture because that’s not purely just culture issue?
Jim Smith [00:08:20]:
Yeah. I think that maybe goes back to our comment about the different generations in the workforce and everything. And you’re exactly right. What might motivate a Baby Boomer might be different from a Millennial but you need them in many ways to be pulling in the same direction, but I would contend that in some ways the problem solves itself because as an organization and I think most IT organizations around are like this, especially bigger ones. You’re living in two worlds right? We’re living in a legacy world. We have some applications and processes 35 years old and then you have obviously a new world of big data and mobile applications and remote workers and things like that. And you say okay now I have to live in both worlds, I’m gonna need skill sets in both worlds. So I’m gonna need sort of a traditional skill set, and then I’m gonna need a skill set that embraces whether it’s Cloud or whether it’s software as a service or those type of things. Embraces a different way to get work done. So in all cases you see you need the people that want to make the progress, make things more efficient, move forward at all times, but there might be different ways to get there. So as you talk about culture, I think you have to embrace that. You have to understand that okay, there’s different factors to that culture question because we have different resources in the workforce.
Sanjog Aul [00:09:44]:
Okay. So then if you are looking at the different ways organizations are trying to handle it and the way you handle it, how do you measure what really brought you an incremental improvement in what got delivered? Because that’s what we are talking about here. So we can do the soft talk, but it’s like predicting weather. So I tried to predict weather. It did not work out. I did not lose my job, but leader cannot afford to do it because you’re being measured on the results. And if you have that room, the fuzziness in the result that you promised, and then somehow you’re able to work through it, then that’s okay, but that’s really not doing justice to what IT could have otherwise delivered. So this discussion is not about how somebody can be a leader and still be there and workers still be there. We talk about maximizing the output.
Jim Smith [00:10:38]:
Well, I think you’re right on that. It goes back to that question you sort of started with. Is it an organizational question? Is it hierarchy? Is it top down? Or is it more than that? And I think most organizations today would say it’s much more than that. It’s not that sort of dictation from the mountain as we talked about before. It’s how do I ingrain that? How do I move people forward? And I think that, I think sometimes you can do an outside, you can do a spot check. Sometimes we’ll bring in outside agencies to help us or outside businesses. We recently had a we have a very big project going on in one of our agencies, it’s gonna be multi-year, involve changing the culture among probably 1,000 resources. And so what we’ve done is we’ve brought in some outside experts and say okay every once in a while you need to tune up. How do we think about change? How do we think about culture? And things like that. And they bring the sort of typical things like blogs and newsletters and training videos and things like that. And discussion sessions and things like that, but sometimes you just need that refresher to say, what are the best practices out there? How do I move an organization from a to b? And can you help me with that journey? I think that, you know, so you do it sometimes it’s a big bang approach like it would be with this, and sometimes it’s a softer approach like we do in Agile or we do a lot of business process management here. We say, okay, I’m gonna start with a pilot. I’m gonna find my real stakeholders, my real apostles, and I’m gonna build it from the bottom up. And obviously, when you can build it from the bottom up, you get a lot of strength, you get a lot of buy in from the organization. Not always possible, but it’s great when you can take the time and do it that way.
Sanjog Aul [00:12:24]:
Let’s take a quick break, listeners. We’ll be right back, and let’s talk about commitment. So if culture is not able to ensure 100% commitment, what does? And if sometimes when we talk about commitment, it can be interpreted or it can be heard as having to make sacrifice, and that really doesn’t really always resonate well. So how do you end up developing commitment in everyone in the team for it to maximize value? Again, somehow, somewhere, we will be able to deliver results, which may be not at 110% that we aspire for, but if we had 100% commitment, perhaps we can get there. So big question, how to get the commitment going? How do you not let it be interpreted or misinterpreted as sacrifice? Please stay tuned, listeners. We’ll be right back.
Speaker 0 [00:13:26]:
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 [00:14:21]:
Welcome back, listeners. So, Jim, when we look at commitment as the word, which you are, of course, expecting that everyone in the team is committed, but then we don’t know how much. And if we don’t know how much, then we are kinda living with that fuzzy factor of some leakage happening, but we have to live with it, but then what can we do to introduce or at least strive towards that 100% commitment and not be that be seen as a sacrifice?
Jim Smith [00:14:50]:
Yeah. Thank you. And I think part of that goes back to some of our earlier discussion about do you build change from the bottom up or do you sort of pronounce it from the mountain top? I think on the commitment side, I think the first thing you really have to understand in your organization, do you have the right people on the bus? Are people willing to pull in the same direction? Do they want the same things you want? Do they sort of understand where the organization goes? I mean, you can set the vision, but people still have to be committed to that thing. And I think how do you go from how do you prevent commitment from just being a sacrifice? I think part of that starts or a lot of that starts with just the workforce. Who are the leaders? Who are the visionaries? Who will lead the different, who will lead the journey, all different levels of the organization. We talked a little bit before about living in multiple worlds and that’s what we’re seeing now. And that multiple worlds requires multiple resources and multiple thought processes. What we do in the legacy world today is different from what we’re doing in a more modern sort of mobile open data type of world. Those are different skill sets. Directionally we’re still saying well we want to build efficiency, we want to get better at what we’re doing, we want to digitize and we are in state government so we have customers, our citizens who expect their experience with the state government to be the same it would be with an eBay or one of those. And that’s a big challenge for us. We have a lot of work to do to get there. It takes time and money and quite frankly it takes people, it takes resources that are experienced with that and experience with probably a different way of thinking from our old world where paper moved around through the organization for months. You could have a vendor bill that might come in and it might take 60 days to process. Well people don’t want to live in that world anymore. They want to submit their bill and then they want to go online and say where is my bill? And so if you sort of think of this thing through how do you go from how do you prevent commitment from being just a sacrifice? I think if we go back to what I talked earlier about, embrace the agile methodology, we believe it’s the right way, but at the same time, when we talk about this foot in both worlds, we don’t believe it’s right for every project currently because you have to find the right team, you have to find people comfortable with a whole different way of thinking how to get work done, think about sprints and stand up meetings and stuff. Not everyone’s comfortable with that. Or you might have a project run by a vendor and all of a sudden if they’ve never done Agile, you don’t wanna go down that route. You say, well, I’ll do the traditional waterfall. So we have a vision, we have a direction we’re going, but we understand that it’s not all encompassing immediately. You gotta work to get the culture and get the resources there.
Sanjog Aul [00:17:30]:
So we use the word culture which is fine. Now let’s talk about the belief system. That’s not something that people are really developing now. They are adults, professionals who are coming into your organization to do a certain job, but the way they look at individual personalities, the way they are gonna like or not like someone, all of those things actually do matter when you’re trying to deliver as individuals and as a team. So what can you do so that you can really work towards an alignment and convergence of the team which is put together? Do you hire keeping that in mind, or is there a magic pill that you have which will allow people to align and converge their belief systems which have been developed over the years?
Jim Smith [00:18:19]:
Well, I think that’s a great question. And I think it goes back to the multiple generations in the workforce. The Millennials probably have a different belief system than us Baby Boomers. It’s a different world. The hierarchy is different. So I came from a world of certainly command and control and as we first started going down the agile approach and all of a sudden you had self governing teams. For someone like me, I had to sort of swallow hard and say, well, what if a team member’s not performing? What are you doing? The people come back and say, no. We govern that. We’ll take care of that within the team. For someone that’s an older person like I am that’s used to that sort of straight hierarchy right down from the CIO all the way down to team leads and all that stuff, you sort of say, well, I’m not sure on that. And so what you have to do at some point, you have to take a leap of faith. You have to say, well let’s go do it and see what happens. It’s working for companies, so why shouldn’t it work for us? So let’s go do that. I think that’s an example of one sort of environmental belief system that I’ve had my 30 or 40 years in this industry and that’s being challenged whether you have to be open to that kind of challenge. Whether you’re a Millennial or a Baby Boomer you’re gonna have to have an open mind, you’ve got to approach these things the right way. We as leaders have to understand there will be different belief systems out there. And I think as we try to ingrain it, a couple of things we do: we do a lot with mentorships, we do a lot with interns. Made that very formal where there’s a great mentorship between the interns and the older resource that’s already here. What we found though is that benefits both sides. People love to be mentors. You get the right people and they love to share knowledge. They love to bring younger people up to speed and stuff. So we’re finding that’s a win win. And we do things like how do you get people on the bus? Well we do, as I said we have a big intern program but we also do more than that. We recently had what we call an intern challenge. We gave a business problem to a group of interns, gave them a mentor, and our business problem was about how do you recruit in the modern world? How do you get away from paper applications? You get to social media, all those kinds of things. How do you attract the younger workforce? So obviously we put younger people on that. That issue said go research what other people are doing, go find some best practices, come back. When they came back with a proposal, we vetted it through our organization, but then we had them present to the governor. Now if you think about that a student in college all of a sudden get a chance to present to the governor of a state, that’s very exciting, but it’s not just exciting for the team. Other people sort of grab onto that and say oh something exciting is happening here. How do we think about this? So there are different ways to build excitement throughout the organization and combine those belief systems.
Sanjog Aul [00:21:15]:
Now that the thing which you just mentioned, which also requires a good amount of communication is mentioned, which also requires a good amount of communication that is happening among different constituents. It could be within the team, with the bosses, and with you. So when we look at communication, it has always been seen as, okay, how is the leader communicating top down or the communication from bottom up? But there is a lateral communication also important on a regular basis, and we really don’t know how that communication is being carried out when the two people at a water cooler or four colleagues are hanging out with each other. We’re not trying to pry into their private conversations, but at least if the quality of communication is not good, that’s also impacting somewhere on what eventually will get delivered. How do you handle that? How do you improve it?
Jim Smith [00:22:02]:
Well, I think the first acknowledgment is that communication is hard. Communication is work. You have to think about it. It has to be part of your daily culture. I’d be the first one to stand up and say we could improve it. I think probably most organizations would say the same. You always think you do enough, but it’s like they say, say it 7 times. You probably don’t do enough because you put out your vision, you put out your strategy, and then people are uncertain about that. They need the ability to discuss it. They need some venue to say, well, I don’t understand what this means. Help me with this. We brought in outside experts to talk about change management and communication, blogs and videos and newsletters and stuff. I think that’s one side of it. The other side is how do you build it within the culture so that all parts of the organization are talking about that from the new entry level resources all the way through senior level management. How do you get that conversation going? That takes a lot of work and we do work at it. I probably don’t do it enough but we do work at it. I saw an example recently. The CIO of Illinois, a new CIO there, is doing some real culture changes. He’s really moving the organization forward. Fascinating because he puts out a daily blog. He puts out a public daily blog. This is what we’re thinking about. This is why we’re doing this. Not a long thing, maybe a page or so. That is really a great way to communicate. He’s sharing with his whole organization and even people beyond that. Why are we doing this and what are we thinking about and what are the challenges we’re gonna see. So I think you’re exactly right. This is about communicating and giving people the chance to interact and sort of digest all this information and internalize it, but it’s a lot of work and it’s a constant job.
Sanjog Aul [00:23:57]:
And you are looking at the ability for people to communicate effectively. That’s one, but then when we come to feel connected with each other and connection means they really feel that this person has the right job, and I can work with this person. The person has the right intention. And I really like that person. All of these 2 or 3 things form that connection between the two. Do you think you can realistically impact that?
Jim Smith [00:24:27]:
Well, I think if you have the right foundation, if you give people the right opportunities that will come. One of the things I think is very important is to get teams to have cross discipline meetings. Teams need the chance to understand, get to know and work with each other. It’s difficult in a world where you may have remote workers and people may not be in the same location, but it’s important to give people the opportunity to meet and get to know each other. I remember I was an insurance company years ago and we were doing our year 2000 project as everyone did and we’re starting to bring teams together and somebody said to me, I never met with that team before. I’ve been here 20 years and never met with that team. And you just go back and you think about that and you say, well, how do you build an organization if you don’t have that level of communication? So what we try to do, I don’t know if we’re 100% successful, but we do try to make some effort to have cross discipline meetings. People that wouldn’t necessarily get a chance to meet with each other. Let’s get them together. And let’s have a lot of skip level meetings. Let’s have different levels of the organization talking to different levels, and bring all the interns in and let them have a conversation with all our senior managers, that type of thing. People that don’t necessarily get a chance to work together, let’s find ways to help them work together. Innovation is gonna come from a lot of different areas in the organization, you just gotta give people the voice and the opportunity there. So I think you’re right. To get people connected, it’s really giving them the opportunity and the venue to work together.
Sanjog Aul [00:26:05]:
So if you are looking at whatever you have done so far and the kind of efforts that you put in with respect to whether building culture or trying to get them to feel committed or try to feel connected, what have you seen happening which you feel either was a result of your effort? And then what do you see is something you have not been able to control?
Jim Smith [00:26:28]:
Well, on the positive side, sometimes you can feel the energy in an organization and people get excited about something. One of the things we did, we’re gonna do a 4th one next week as we do a high school technology night where we bring in high school students and teach them a little bit about what we do, what our careers are, what opportunities there are in technology. A lot of high school students and their parents have no idea really what’s going on from a technology perspective. They have no idea the opportunities out there, the different disciplines you can do, all the way from a developer to a network person to a QA person, all these different types of disciplines we need in the industry. This is a reaction to the Baby Boomers retiring and we’re trying to work with other organizations in the state, get more and more people into considering Computer Science as a possible pathway. We did that TechNet, we’ve done this, this 4th one coming up. The excitement that builds in the employees when they have a chance to go for 3 hours and work with high school students and we do a cyber exercise and we do a quick development exercise, those type of things. They get to share that information. It takes months of planning to get all these schools in here, get all the things put together, get all the technical demonstrations done and everything, but people get so excited about that. You can feel the excitement among the employees and it gives them something to step out of their comfort zone but to share their expertise. People love doing that. If you can give people that opportunity to say, you know what? We really value what you’re doing. We want you to share that information. What you do is important whether it might be a cyber security professional or a project manager who might not normally get any public notice of what they do, but you give them the opportunity and all of a sudden there’s a lot of excitement. You can actually feel the excitement build within the organization. So on the success side, it’s those types of things. Are there projects, are there ways we can take people’s expertise and give them a chance to share that. And I think we’ve seen great success with that. We have a lot of people volunteer to work on that, we get a lot of excitement around that. We’re really looking forward to that. On the other side where we haven’t been successful, I think some of that is assessment. I talked about Agile in the beginning and where it’s been successful and where it hasn’t. We found where we’ve run into problems is if we didn’t do a good assessment on the people involved. In other words, if the people aren’t on the bus with you, it can be a challenge. We’ve had some challenges with some of the smaller projects. We said this part of the organization really wasn’t ready for that change. Maybe it needed more training or needed more time. We sorta jumped in with both feet even though being a small pilot project, and we found some growing pain. So I think that probably goes back to training and communication.
Sanjog Aul [00:29:24]:
When we talk about branding let’s take a quick break first of all, listeners. So when we come back, let’s talk about the way IT delivers results. And to some extent, it also depends on the type of branding of how IT is seen by the other constituents, which in turn is dependent on how consistently we deliver results at an acceptable or a quality that exceeds expectations. So the keyword here is consistency. When we talk about getting inside the locker room and working on different aspects, one of the things which we wanna do is it’s not a sign curve that when we do one and then we are seen as people who totally drop the ball. How do we ensure consistency in all things we do and at the same time, incrementally improve quality project after project? Please stay tuned, listeners. We’ll be right back and explore.
Speaker 0 [00:30:23]:
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. Now back to the show.
Sanjog Aul [00:31:14]:
Welcome back. So we talked about consistency. We do not want any time when we, on one hand, are given pat on the back of a great job done, and other hand, brought inside a room and been scolded about why did we totally mess up. And that is a nightmare for any leader to go through this roller coaster. So how do you prevent that, Jim?
Jim Smith [00:31:37]:
Well, great question. I don’t know if you can prevent it, because what we do is very complex. There’s a lot of moving parts. There’s a lot of complexity to it all the way from requirements through testing through development all this kind of stuff to integrating multiple packages. And this world today where we’re doing cloud based endeavors and we’re doing software as a service. The whole world is changing under our feet there. So it’s hard not to have some challenges. You’re going to have successes and you’re going to have some challenges. That idea of consistency is exactly right. How do you get there? As you think about an IT organization you think well I think about it as three things: you keep the lights on. People have to come in every day and be able to access their network, get on the Internet, all those kinds of things, be able to do their work. And then for us today we have an evolving world. We always had on the risk management side disaster recovery and things like that, but the whole cybersecurity thing has just changed the game enormously. So we have keep the lights on, risk management. And the third leg of my stool would be development. How do you move an organization forward? How do you go from a to b? How do you bring efficiency in? How do you take things that used to take 40 hours and get them down to 4 hours, those type of things. I think you’re gonna have some issues there. You try to get consistency on project management. That’s why we do agile so we can have predictable results so we know we’re gonna deliver in small incremental steps so you don’t have the project that goes for 2 years and all of a sudden you pull the plug and say, whoops, that’s never gonna work. So we try to get away from that, but I think you’re definitely gonna have the pilots and the ups and downs where you may have some challenges. The point on that is make sure you get the right business partner with you and do it with the right people and make sure that you understand when it’s a pilot and when there are lessons to be learned. In general you gotta, you know, the majority of things have to move forward, but it’s probably not realistic to think everything is going to be 100% success. You just have to have the right people and the right understanding to say we’re going to learn from this. Take going to the cloud, right. Going to the cloud is new for organizations. We have a cloud first approach, a philosophy that says if we’re doing something new, let’s decide why it would not be in the Cloud. We don’t want to promote more on premise things. We believe that the industry is going in the right direction and that there’ll be expertise in Cloud providers that we may not have, but it brings up a whole slew of things we may never have thought about before: disaster recovery, cyber security, performance, how do we bring legacy systems to the cloud, all those types of things. So if you look at any of those things, cloud and software as a service, they’re all new things for us. And we’re not going to get it right every time out of the box. So I think that’s part of an understanding that this is complex stuff. We’re going to do the best, minimize risk, but at some point, we will have some challenges.
Sanjog Aul [00:35:00]:
So if you are looking at everything else that is going on in a given moment, what are you doing to make sure that they are getting the required support and blessing from the business and also the business unit leaders who they are trying to serve so that they are not feeling that they are being thrown into the swimming pool without floaters?
Jim Smith [00:35:29]:
Yeah. That is a challenge. It comes back to what is an IT organization doing? I talked about the three things before but the other part of that is an IT organization has to be a strategic business partner, right? The business has X things they have to get done. We have to come in with different solutions, different ways to do it, how is the industry evolving, other things we can lead with as strategists, as visionaries, but you’re right, how do you prevent that from becoming negative? You don’t want that to become a negative. In a state organization we’re not going to be on the cutting edge ever because we’re going to say something has to be proven before we’re going to go out and do it, but we have to be cognizant of what’s going on in the industry whether it’s agile, whether it’s BPM, whether it’s software driven network, those kinds of changes. We have to bring those along. How do you prevent people from being thrown under the bus? I think it’s education and communication. You gotta meet with your business partner to say, here’s our vision. You gotta share the vision with them. I’ve got our vision brief enough that it can fit on a name place card, and I got 5 things: business process management, agile delivery, legacy modernization, risk management, and workforce development. Those are sort of the 5 legs of our stool all under the superstructure of enterprise strategy. So we build things once and use them many. A State government has many different agencies that get different sources of funding, so you might end up with multiple licensing systems or imaging systems or things like that. We say, no. That’s not the right way to go. We gotta think about spending citizen tax dollars once and getting multiple uses out of that. As you start to build your vision and your strategy, and you sit down with your business partners and find out who’s on the bus with you and say, yeah. This is the right direction. Let’s go that way. And then you have to understand, as you said before, there’s gonna be some bumps along the road, and we gotta make sure that the resources don’t get thrown under the bus, that we work with them and help them understand why we’re doing something, and the fact that there may be some glitches, but how do you work through the glitches? You’re gonna have glitches. You’re gonna have challenges. The question is how do you work through those and can you be agile enough to get to the end goal?
Sanjog Aul [00:37:54]:
So all of us in our professional lives, we have a set of people we work with and then we have our personal life where we hang out with our buddies and we cannot really force someone to become buddies with people at work but at the same time without that camaraderie the ability of two people or a group of people to really ignore each other’s shortcomings and move ahead as a team is significantly undermined if that camaraderie is missing. How do you foster that?
Jim Smith [00:38:28]:
Great question and even more of a question as you get to remote workforces and different geographical locations. I think that’s always a challenge. I mentioned a couple of things we did, the intern challenge, the tech night, those types of things. We try to find venues where people can work together and might be on something outside the mainstream as those two are or it might be we’ve got a huge project for maybe the Department of Health and Human Services might be a 3 year project involving 400 people. How do you keep all those people sort of rowing in the same direction? That’s a challenge. It goes back to communication because you gotta, with a million other things to do, think I gotta communicate too. How do I find time to do that? I think you have to put together some venues where people can have that kind of sharing, whether it’s the senior management meeting with the mentors and just an open session. Say, okay, let’s just talk about business. Let’s just talk about what you’re seeing. Let’s talk about some of the barriers you’re seeing. Let’s talk about our careers, how do we get here and what do you want to do and how do you get there and building that sort of social aspect. Social media plays a part on that. We have different ways to communicate with people that we didn’t have years ago and whether it’s within the organization or people you knew before there’s a lot of sharing of information and opinions that I think really help, but it is a challenge. How do you get everyone buying into that same team approach? They come from different backgrounds and different value systems and belief systems. How do we get everyone pulling in the same direction is a challenge because you can’t force people to wanna be best friends or anything like that, but if you give people the opportunity to work together and meet together, you see a lot come out of that. And if you can ever throw pizza in, that always works.
Sanjog Aul [00:40:35]:
So you essentially, of course, are recognizing that it’s a challenge. What has been tried in your view to get over this buddy building challenge. So you mentioned pizza always works. Of course. I’d agree with that, but then besides that, how much opportunity do we offer in terms of breathing room? So while you’re working, you know, 25 hours in a day, is that what is causing them to not be able to spend the time with someone to build a relationship? Is that an issue? So can we give some breathing room so people can hang out a little bit more beside outside of work or even at work, not thinking work. Would that help?
Jim Smith [00:41:15]:
Yeah. I think that’s true and the blessing and the curse of social media and things like that, and you’re exactly right. People are working a lot of hours a day because we really sort of got beyond that work life balance where you just assume that if you have a problem or a question at 10:00 at night that someone’s gonna be able to respond to you. So the expectations have just gone through the roof. It’s a real challenge. I can’t say we’ve solved that. I think it’s a real challenge. How do I give people back their lives, their work life balance? We had an organization last summer that I think worked every weekend and they just said, well, no. That’s not sustainable. How do you what do you do about that? Part of it is are there tools, are there software, are there ways to do things to make our own organization more efficient, that shoes for the cobbler’s son type of thing. How do we take care of ourselves in the same way? We do a lot of things socially. We have get togethers outside of work, things like that, but you can only take that so far and people do have lives and so all of a sudden you’re saying, well, let’s get together this night after work. People have other things they need to do and responsibilities. So you don’t wanna overdo that, but we have a number of off-site meetings, things like that. Just get away from the office. Let’s just sit down and let’s just think for a while. Let’s brainstorm together for a while. And I think that really helps to build teams. I think that really builds an organization.
Sanjog Aul [00:42:51]:
So if you are to let’s take a first, a quick break listeners when we come back, and let’s talk about the word care. Right? We talked about consistency. We spoke about communication, commitment. Seems like all C’s are coming out, but then when we talk about care, that means that caring has to be developed in such a way so that people think that you think about them as human beings or each worker thinks about the other person first as a human being and then as a fellow worker. And that caring goes a long way because then people are willing to go over and beyond what their so called responsibilities are. How do you instill the feeling of a genuine authentic care among the team members so that within the locker room, these guys are doing high five and also are there to help each other out? Now that’s what you would like to see happen, but how do you instill that feeling of authentic care within the team? Please stay tuned, listeners. We’ll be right back.
Speaker 0 [00:43:59]:
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. Now back to the show.
Sanjog Aul [00:44:51]:
Welcome back. So we’re talking about care, that when people care for each other, they go to bat for them, they help them out, and then teamwork or team performance or camaraderie, those things come naturally. So perhaps if there was a way to instill that humanity or humanizing the very work that you do, a lot of these problems could be solved, but what’s the challenge in that?
Jim Smith [00:45:18]:
Well, I think that’s a very, very important thing. I think that caring for oneself, it comes back we talk a lot about respect, respecting each other and making sure we’re treating each other how we want to be treated. We have this saying, let’s assume positive intent whether it’s us or a business partner or whatever. Things get tense when the deadlines are approaching or there’s a production problem and people can get very quick with their answers, but we always gotta say, let’s assume positive intent. Let’s assume we’re all sort of moving in the same direction. Teamwork is sort of a great thing to think about because as younger people come into the workforce, I’ve read that Millennials are the largest cohort in the workforce now exceeding the number of Baby Boomers. So the world is changing rapidly and we think about teamwork. We work a lot with the universities here in Maine to try and foster that next generation of IT workers and encourage more students to look at Computer Science as a degree. We meet with private companies and universities. We had one interesting exchange where we were talking to the university about computer science things and they were saying, we don’t really do projects. The business and myself are all saying, we need people that can come in and work on a team. That’s what this work is. It’s teamwork. It’s all working together whether you’re just an application team, even if you’re an application team, you’re working with the core infrastructure team, you’re working the database team, you’re working with the security team. All these things are teamwork. If we don’t have that coming out of the universities, then we have to work on that. We need that coming out of the universities because everything is about team and teams care for each other. One of the great things we see is when we do Agile, we do Scrum, we set up a separate building for that so they can have scrum rooms and things like that. Those teams really get close. They really get close because they’re working together a lot and they really care for each other. You can see that’s just a natural outcome of that. They care for each other and they’re to a degree protective of each other. They’re excited because they see success and they want to move forward. They move forward they start to think like a team as opposed to an individual, but the care has to start. From a leadership perspective, there are certain things we have to put in place. Do you have a vision? Where are you taking the organization? Is that vision understandable? Is it a 1 page vision or is it a 30 page vision? Where is that consistency? Where is that ability if you have to change direction? How do you communicate that? It all comes back to how do you show respect for people? How do you give people a career path? How do you give people an environment where they can build? Of course it’s under pressure and there are negatives. How do you get people to embrace that journey? One way is you celebrate success. Put some time into when a team gets an accomplishment or an organization does. How do you celebrate that success publicly both within your organization and outside of the organization? I tell my team all the time, you have to toot your own horn. You have to say, hey look, we all work together and we got this accomplished and this is gonna do x. That’s a very important part of caring for each other: celebrate the successes.
Sanjog Aul [00:48:45]:
So you mentioned about team, is the one which kinda actually cares. And we I wanted to continue the dialogue on the care portion. How do you humanize your IT versus a bunch of people, worker bees, cranking out one project after another. Because a lot of that locker room conversation, scaling, commitment, camaraderie, all of that is going to get better, at least intuitively, when you humanize whatever you do in business. What do you do specifically towards that end goal?
Jim Smith [00:49:23]:
I think part of that is goal setting. It’s strategy and goal setting. Take digitizing things for instance. A state organization, a lot of paper still moves around in organization, but you get people together and say, look, there’s a different way to do things and you get your business partners to look at workflow and why do we do something that way? You flow things out on a chart and all of a sudden you digitize things so people have instant access to information they never had before. You get those kind of goals and you say to a team, here’s our goal, here’s the direction where we’re going. People wanna build, wanna bring efficiency in a drawn organization. People are proud of what they can do. People are proud of having the ability to work with tools and take something from a to b and improve it. We had one process that used to take 40 hours to complete for a citizen. We brought in some new software and some workflow and some imaging and things like that. It went down to 4 hours. It went from 40 hours to 4 hours and made it all efficient. People talk about that. People get excited about it. I still hear people talking about that accomplishment and I think that’s the key to get people there. Give them a goal and then celebrate the accomplishments.
Sanjog Aul [00:50:51]:
And you feel that if we do that continually as part of meeting that end goal and celebrating, they would start caring for each other?
Jim Smith [00:51:02]:
Oh, I think that’s a definite byproduct. We have a 3 times a week early morning meeting where all the different disciplines get together and say, what are the issues? How can we work together? It is amazing what you see get done in 30 minutes. We only get 30 minutes to get through seven issues. Let’s go and let’s get that together. You see those different disciplines in the room and how that works. What is a thrill for me as a CIO is I’m in a position where I just sit back because those teams take those and run. I no longer have to run and push the meeting. Those teams know what needs to be done, they’ll bring up issues, they’ll decide how to resolve them, and they’ll move forward. If you give people that opportunity, we’ve all had that old saying, if you gotta send an email five times about a subject, you probably need to do it a different way. How do you give people the FaceTime? It’s not always possible in every organization, but we strive to do that. Let’s get people together and rather than take a 2 hour meeting, let’s force ourselves to do it in 30 minutes. And you can do it. When you can do that, you can become more efficient and faster. You see teams supporting each other. I’ll take care of that. You have a problem with this one. I’m gonna take that one for you. That’s really humanizing technology. You’re humanizing what you do every day, and you’re saying we do have an end goal, and we do have an end customer, and we wanna do better things for them.
Sanjog Aul [00:52:29]:
One last question for you. 30 seconds or 45 seconds, which is related to ethical or moral values. So what would you do? Because typically, we see organizations immediately inviting HR into the picture because they don’t wanna deal with it, but one of the goals of a leader and an organization is to make people better human beings who may otherwise be tempted to go in an unethical or immoral route.
Jim Smith [00:52:55]:
It’s a 35 second question. 35 second answer. That’s a challenge.
Sanjog Aul [00:53:00]:
Commended. That’s okay.
Jim Smith [00:53:01]:
Yes. No, I think it’s a great question. I don’t think we can probably do it justice in just a few minutes, but I do think it goes back to that question. I’m 65 years old and we have people in the organization, especially interns, that are 20 or 21. You think about do I have the same belief system? Do I have the same morals and sense of ethics? I think you build that into your organization. How do you build pride into an organization? I think that’s really where it comes from. You say somebody says, no, I wanna work here. This is exciting. I wanna work here. We’re doing great things here. I wanna help build that organization. I think those types of things cross generations. On the ethical stuff, I think that’s a challenge. We as leaders have to be mindful that different generations coming in, different value systems, different goals in their lives, and how do we commingle all that to keep us moving in the same direction?
Sanjog Aul [00:54:00]:
On behalf of the show and our listeners, thank you so much, Jim, for taking this time. This was a very interesting discussion. We discussed a lot of different elements, and I believe listeners would take away a lot of nuggets which are actionable. Thank you so much again.
Jim Smith [00:54:15]:
Oh, my pleasure. Thank you.
Sanjog Aul [00:54:17]:
And, listeners, hope you enjoyed it. Please follow us on Facebook. Join our LinkedIn group and also, of course, look at our Facebook page and receive our newsletter. Subscribe to it, please. This was a great conversation. We’ll be back next week. Have a great day and a beautiful week ahead. Thank you.
