Influence: the act or power of producing an effect without apparent exertion of force or direct exercise of command. For most CIOs and their teams, this is the only way to get things done.
Here’s an excerpt from my Persuasive Communication and Influence workshop.
Read my article based on this workshop here.
Do you need to increase your influence? Send me a note and schedule a workshop today.
This article is based on my Persuasive Communication and Influence workshop.
The CIO role spans and must influence all parts of an organization without directly controlling them. Today’s trends — global, mobile, data-driven virtual business — increase the stakes and make CIO influence not only important for the CIO’s personal success but for the success of the company as well. This requires skills and competencies that may not come naturally to many IT leaders.
There are two main trends that are driving a shift in power in IT.
Storm over the South China sea
First is the ongoing integration of information technology into all aspects of business, from the way work gets done to the very products companies sell. This is causing massive changes in both business and operating models, affecting people, process and organizational structures, according to a recent study by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services (note: this is a PDF file). As a consequence, a lot more people have a lot more to say about what happens when it comes to IT.
The second trend is the “consumerization” of IT. Technology is everywhere. Both employees and customers – especially younger ones – transact and interact through mobile devices, easy-to-use applets and social networks. In the process, they have come to expect a certain type of experience – and they increasingly want the choice to be their own.
While these trends in one sense have a kind of democratizing effect, that does not mean decisions about and management of IT are any easier; quite the contrary. To the average consumer, technology seems simple – and that’s a good thing. But as any CIO knows, achieving simplicity in the technology world is not simple at all.
With technology more central to business operations and outcomes, IT has a greater responsibility for company performance and results. At the same time, there are more stakeholders involved, so IT has less direct control over the decisions that will determine those results. IT leaders must learn to lead through collaboration and influence.
Influential leaders share three common traits.
Credibility: They have built credibility with business colleagues and employees by first and foremost delivering the fundamentals. Successful CIOs refer to this as “table stakes” – the price to get into the game. If you haven’t been able to deliver services reliably and securely, no one’s going to listen to or be inclined to go along with your ideas. Credibility is increased when CIOs engage with colleagues’ most important business challenges and successfully devise solutions to help them meet their goals.
Trust: Influential leaders have earned the trust of their colleagues by doing what they said they would do – everything from meeting project deadlines to delivering the right capabilities and results – again and again. Trust is deepened by sticking to commitments even when times are tough.
Relationship: Influential leaders develop strong relationships over time. These relationships are certainly enabled by credibility and trust, but it takes more than that. They also require the less tangible elements of identification and liking. Various studies support the idea that people like and prefer to work with people who are like them in some important way. If you can’t find common ground with your colleagues – if IT is viewed as somehow different and separate from the rest of the business – your work will be that much harder. Fostering positive feelings of liking in this context happens by showing people that you’re interested in their goals, problems and lives – and that you can relate to them on a human level – because – no surprise – people tend to feel kindly toward people who like them! One of the most fundamental laws of human behavior is that of reciprocity: If you like me, I’m more inclined to like you. And if you do something for me, I’m more likely to do something for you in return.
The pace of change today is hurricane force – and IT is right at the center of the storm. The goal no longer can be for IT to keep up with business or end users or customers – things are happening too fast for that – but to make the journey together. Sometimes one group may be out ahead, sometimes another, but in a strong relationship based on credibility and trust, the CIO will always have a leadership role to play. It just may not look like what you expected.
Want to increase your own influence? Build your team’s persuasiveness? Improve the quality of your communication – both inside and outside your organization? Schedule a free call to find out more about our custom workshops and advisory services.
CIOs are facing a dilemma. On the one hand, they must innovate with technology to help their businesses grow again as we come out of the recession. On the other, because the recovery of 2010 will be slow and drawn out, they must continue to cut costs and focus on operational efficiency. In fact, 57% of executives surveyed by Accenture in November 2009 said that innovation and cost reduction are equally important to their company’s ability to achieve future growth.
The list of seemingly competing forces CIOs have to manage is long.
Cut costs Build new capabilities
Be more efficient Be more responsive
Standardize Customize
Be secure Be open
Make IT predictable Make business agile
Execute flawlessly Think strategically
Enterprise goals Business unit goals
And the list goes on.
CIOs have always been faced with competing imperatives, but curent trends have increased the tension. Today it’s not a matter of shifting from one end of the spectrum to the other but of finding a way to do the things on both sides of the list.
Stuart McGuigan, CIO at CVS Caremark, was recently quoted as saying, “Part of creating change involves holding two incompatible ideas in your head at the same time and somehow still functioning. Being highly responsive to our business partners’ and customers’ needs and creating standardized processes and technology platforms can seem like conflicting goals, but doing both is key to maximizing value.”
While there are many levers companies can pull in their quest for profitable growth, IT is one of the most important. According to research by MIT CISR, firms that are IT Savvy are 20% more profitable than their competitors. This is because everything about business is becoming more digitized.
We’ve finally put to rest the question of does IT matter. The question now is how do you make it matter when everyone has access to the same tools? Competitive advantage comes from how well you use technology, and how quickly your business is able to respond to new opportunities.
At this year’s National Retail Federation conference, Rollin Ford, CIO at Wal-Mart, said, “There are very few secrets out there anymore [and by secrets, he was talking about technology secrets]. The only competitive advantage becomes speed. Organizations need to keep embracing innovation and new technology models. At the end of the day, it’s about getting from point A to point B quicker than everybody else.”
A big problem in the quest for speed is that many companies are weighed down by overly complex or outmoded systems that have been built up over the past 20-30 years. Businesses have built up system upon system, feature upon feature, until their infrastructure looks like a hoarder’s basement. There may be useful stuff down there – the furnace, the very foundation of the building, some tools. But try finding what you need when you need it. Most of it is rarely used and never will be.
No one wants to give up their pet systems, but it’s time to clean house. Companies just can’t afford to have multiple disjointed systems – both for cost reasons and because fragmented data is a lot less useful.
According to various surveys, the average company still spends 70% of its IT dollars on non-discretionary fixed costs. Just think if you could shift an additional 20% of that to new capabilities – and make your core systems better at the same time. The goal is not only to reduce fixed costs — but also to reduce operating complexities, making it easier to respond quickly as business conditions change.
Consider this: Companies that spend more of their IT budgets on new rather than sustaining efforts have notably higher revenue growth and net margins than their competitors, according to MIT CISR.
There’s a big gap between where companies are and where they want to be when it comes to leveraging information. 85% of Harvard Business Review subscribers surveyed recently said that information is a key strategic asset, yet only 36% said their organizations are well positioned to use information for growth – and only 7% said they are very well positioned to do so. Respondents blamed organizational silos, a lack of data integration, a lack of analytic skills, and outdated, overly complex information systems for their inability to make better use of information.
It’s not like CIOs don’t know there’s a problem, but optimizing IT, like laying any new infrastructure, takes money. And money is scarce. The good news is that things are starting to thaw. CIO magazine’s most recent economic impact survey shows a big shift in budget direction — while 50% said their budgets were decreasing and only 14% said they were increasing as recently as May 2009, by December those numbers had almost flipped, with 40% increasing and only 28% decreasing. Of course, the size of the increases are still small — not enough to do a lot of new things unless you do a lot of things differently.
There’s really only one answer to the CIO’s dilemma: Simplification. Simplification of processes, standardization of information and technologies – and enabling innovation at the edge. Simplification is not necessarily easy – or cheap — but it’s not brain surgery, either. The practice of IT management is reaching maturity. We have the tools and techniques today to build effective digital platforms.
My presentation, The CIO’s Dilemma, has examples of what a robust yet simplified enterprise IT model might look like. In future posts I’ll drill into these and other examples.
Steve Bandrowczak, former CIO at DHL, Lenovo and, most recently, Nortel, knows what IT leaders can learn from sales and vice versa because he has recently made the transition into a sales leadership role himself. As vice president of global sales at Avaya after that company’s acquisition of Nortel, Steve leads sales, marketing, channel strategy, services and service strategy for Avaya’s data business. I spoke with him recently. This is the third in a series.
Steve Bandrowczak
Steve Bandrowczak: Sales & IT have a lot in common. The thing that you learn from sales and can take back into the IT world is that every customer is different. Every customer has a unique set of challenges in terms of how you communicate, how you work with that individual company or customer.
To be an effective CIO leader, you must understand the different parts of the various groups you serve. The way you speak to the head of sales is different from the way you speak to the head of operations, the CFO or the head of R&D. In order to be effective leading IT, business transformation and change, you have to understand what various leaders are trying to do within their own business area, align with that, and then communicate the value that IT brings.
If you start talking to the head of sales about IT or operational metrics, they’ll glaze over very quickly. If you go in talking to them about how am I going to help you drive sales, how am I going to help you drive sales productivity or lead management, you’ll have a much better reception than if you go in there and simply say we’re going to implement Salesforce.com and give them a project plan. You need to show them you understand their challenges as well as the value proposition of what IT can bring.
Where a lot of IT guys get hung up is they talk about “the data center is up 7/24” and “I’ve got five nines reliability” or “I can role out projects…” But you know what? That’s a commodity these days. The real value that you have is where you understand a business unit and its key metrics. I’ll just take a real simple example: If you’re going to roll out a CRM project, the sales team, in general, is looking for… well, they’d say it’s really about lead management, it’s about getting my contacts in a single database, it’s about making my day easier. No it’s not! It’s about sales productivity and driving revenue.
And oh, by the way, if I don’t understand where my baseline is today and where my competition is – meaning the best in the industry – then I don’t know what gap I’m trying to close and how I’m going to improve it. One of the things the CIO brings is understanding the baseline of what that business is doing. So very simply, in sale, if you know that the average revenue per head in your company is, say, $1 million per head, and you know the best in the industry is $4 million, then your CRM goal should be, how do I triple my productivity, not how do I implement CRM. Big difference.
The more that IT executives understand those business goals and metrics and then can bring successful programs to close that gap – that’s where they’re hitting home runs. What we’ve seen through the years is that, from an IT perspective, people focus on: I hit every single milestone – SAP was in on time, on budget. Then five months later, the company’s going out of business.
What you’re talking about is communicating the value that IT brings to the business, and that’s absolutely essential. If the only thing the IT organization is doing is the same thing that an EDS or IBM Consulting Services or Accenture is doing, the reality is they can be outsourced. And because external companies are variable in cost, they become more attractive. The difference between the two options becomes variable versus fixed cost, and am I lowest cost versus an external provider.
Where I bring value and why we need to communicate about the value that we bring, lies in understanding the business and being able to communicate about the value IT brings to the business and how IT helps to drive that business transformation. That’s where the uniqueness and the challenges come in. CIOs today – and it’s not just CIOs, it’s the whole IT community – need to communicate the value in a business-centric set of communications. That’s where you become much more effective and much more valuable.
Communicating that value is necessary, and it needs to be frequent. We used to do an annual newsletter. We used to do a monthly achievements memo. Whether it’s in staff meetings, one-on-one, big presentations to groups, newsletters, an annual report… there’s never, ever enough communication.
The key there is it’s not just IT communication – it’s we rolled out with the sales force and achieved these things, we rolled out with finance and achieved these things, as opposed to we did an SAP system, and we did it on time, on budget. No, we worked with the finance community, we redesigned the receivables, the payables, collections, and here are the end business targets that we’re going to achieve and the timeframe in which we’re going to achieve it, and by the way, we’ll give you updates on a monthly basis. Much different than you’re tooting your own horn.
If somebody doesn’t understand what I am saying, it’s my fault, not theirs. I have to take ownership that if somebody doesn’t understand something, it’s because I have not communicated effectively.
Bad communication is when you have sent out a monthly communication or whatever it is, and the business is still shaking their head or they don’t understand it or they just haven’t paid attention. If that happens, you haven’t done your job. And you see that from a lot of IT organizations. All too often, IT says, “I’ve communicate that 100 times. Why doesn’t the stupid business understand it?” You know, “we tell them what we’re doing; what’s wrong with them?”
The reality is, everybody is different. Every CEO is different. Some CEOs have a sales background, some have an operations background, some have a finance background. Each CEO likes to be communicated to differently, and you’ve got to be able to communicate the way the business units want to be communicated to.
Each level is different too. The way you communicate to a senior VP is different from the way you communicate with someone inside a call center or warehouse, but equally important. Everyone is important.
So what makes effective communication? When you talk to the business and they understand the last 10 projects you rolled out and how you did it and what the value was. And you’ve got to keep checking that communication vehicle that you’re sending.
Does it mean you do one-on-ones and staff meetings? Yup. Does it mean you do town halls with business units? Yup. We used to have something we called breakfast with Steve and meet your customer where I’d talk to the IT community about a particular function – this is what’s going on with sales, this is what’s going on with supply chain, this is what’s going on with the finance community. Meet your customer. Someone from that function would come in, explain from their perspective what their top 10 challenges were and why they needed IT and how important IT was. That’s the way you close the gap and eliminate this Chinese firewall where they do the requirements and throw it over the wall, you do something, you implement it and hopefully it works for them.
There are a number of things. We used to do quarterly surveys – that’s one mechanism. Also, spending one-on-one time with the senior management team and just getting a feel for, OK, what can we do better? Do you know where we are with this rollout?
I used to have one person on my staff sit in with each business unit/function. My head of operations would sit in with their head of sales, and sit in on their staff meetings and global communications meetings. So we had someone inside the function, understanding what the function was doing, who would bring that back to the IT executive leadership team.
It’s huge. It’s huge in establishing the right set of goals, showing how you’re doing along the path, and when you finish a project, seeing the benefits post implementation. It has to be a running track alongside any transformation initiative.
When DHL acquired Airborne, we had a significant external set of eyes on the integration. FedEx and UPS were just sitting there waiting for the integration to fail, and it would have cost us significant market share. When you do large integrations like that, you tend to do some unnatural things in terms of timelines and the way you put things together. So the communication aspect of that is very important, in terms of why you’re doing it this quickly, with this kind of 7/24, 15-week effort. In that particular one, we were going to lose something like $10 million per day for every day we couldn’t integrate.
When you communicate in that perspective and set that kind of burning bridge, teams understand why the pressure, why you’re making the decisions you are, why you’re taking some risk. If you don’t communicate the reasons, that sense of urgency is just not there, and that’s important when you do large-scale transformation programs like that.
I always pick what I call the top-five burning bridge things. What are the top five things that, when any other question comes up, you raise them against those five goals. So a simple example: Many people do SAP implementations and say, “I need this report before I go live.” So we would say, what is the value of going live? Whatever it is, let’s just make up a fictitious number and say I’m going to gain $5 million per week operational savings. Which means that for every day I don’t go live, I basically waste a million dollars. When someone says, “I need this report before we go live,” you simple say, “OK, where’s the million dollars?” “Well, I don’t have a million dollars.” “Then you’re not getting the report.” It puts the conversation in perspective and gives it a definitive metric and focus so for every single question that comes up, you can target against a broader set of objectives.
We teach IT as a science, not an art. That touchy-feely soft stuff we’ve learned through the years around program management, change management, training – that’s not taught in the schools today. Everything is black and white, ones and zeros, on and off – they don’t really get that communication set of skills. And by the way, many of them don’t have the business set of skills either. What you’re starting to see now is people from the business who have worked on a project coming over and having some of those skills get into the DNA of IT.
When I got to Nortel, they had just completed an evaluation of the entire staff, and they ranked them for me, one through seven, with one being the best. After my own two-week evaluation, the order was completely flip-flopped. The quote/unquote “best” IT person was my worst. Why? Because the best IT person, the way it was ranked, was the best technical person – no business skills, no transformation skills, no leadership skills. Tremendous technically – but I can go buy that. The person who was ranked the lowest was the one who was touchy feely – focused on training, worried about employee sat, retention, customer sat, communications, business value. She didn’t know anything about IT operations, networks, the technical side of it, and that’s what I loved about her. She turned out to be one of my top leaders.
The first thing is putting out a status report that doesn’t have any business impact in it. Focusing on the top 10 IT accomplishments – we implemented a local area network, we had five nines reliability, the data center had zero down time – being too IT centric and not realizing the business doesn’t give a hoot about those things.
The second thing is one size doesn’t fit all. Whatever the format, each function needs to be communicated to in a different way.
Most IT organizations tend to have one or two people who can do that, but it tends not to be widely shared across the organization. The also don’t focus on it, don’t measure it. One thing IT people are good at: when they have a clear set of metrics and goals, they tend to get things done. But go survey the top 100 IT organizations and ask them how they measure the effectiveness of communications. You’ll get blank stares – what do you mean?
There tends to be a certain arrogance around the CIO role. That’s partly because they got where they are because they’ve been successful, and they think they understand. But when you start with, “I don’t know anything, I’m humble, and each business day is something I can learn from customers, employees,” that’s when you really understand the art of communication and can be most effective. When you have arrogance around, “I’ve said it, therefore everyone must understand it,” you’ve got nothing but a lose/lose.
Year Up offers urban young adults a chance at a better life. It also offers a model of training that educators, managers and HR professionals should pay attention to.
I recently had the pleasure of visiting the birthplace of Year Up. Like many successful startups, the original space in Boston’s financial district is funky, distinctive and graced with personal touches. Creaky wood floors are warmed by oriental rugs; high ceilings with exposed pipes provide architectural interest; colorful handprints of the members of the first graduating class claim the wall of the common area, where visitors and students can relax on oversize leather sofas and chairs.
While Year Up’s leaders are fond of their original space, locations in Atlanta, Providence, New York, San Francisco and Washington (with Chicago and Seattle soon to follow) have assumed more corporate settings. This is meant to help the students acclimate to a typical work environment from the start.
This focus on business sets Year Up apart. It combines a powerful vision (“In the future, every urban young adult will have access to the education, experiences and guidance required to realize his or her true potential”) with the application of sound management principles to help students succeed and to provide businesses with a reliable source of well-trained, well-rounded entry-level employees.
The program provides students with marketable job skills (currently in IT help desk, desktop support and investment operations); stipends so they can focus on their studies; six months of business experience through internships with corporate partners, and 18 college credits.
The program includes training in business etiquette and communication. “It’s one thing to train in the technology skills,” says Mary Finlay, deputy CIO at Partners Healthcare in Boston, one of the original corporate partners of Year Up. “There are a number of worthy programs out there that do that…. But Year Up also covers the basics of how to show up on time, how to act [and dress] appropriately and how to deal with difficult situations.” As a result, students are “ready and able” to be productive when they show up for their internships, Finlay says.
Year Up's Values and Guiding Principles
Year Up inculcates a set of Values and Guiding Principles as part of its “high support, high expectation model.” This includes how to give and receive feedback in a positive way.
Another thing that distinguishes Year Up from other programs is that it provides ongoing support once interns are placed. Every intern is assigned an advisor, with whom they meet once a week to receive coaching and talk through new experiences and problems. They also are assigned an outside mentor with whom they speak at least once a month.
Supervisors at partner companies go through an orientation and have access to Year Up staff whenever they want it. First-time managers benefit from the indirect coaching they get from Year Up staff – themselves an impressive lot, with backgrounds in business and non-profit management, academia and international development.
All of this is designed to make sure students are successful or, in the one in 10 instances where things don’t work out, to gracefully move that person out and replace them with another intern, with as little disruption to the company as possible.
There are additional benefits for corporate partners. For example, companies like Partners that care about diversity see Year Up as a valuable part of their sourcing strategy. And managers get a lot out of it too. “My managers love the opportunity to be able to take in an intern, provide mentoring and coaching, and give these young men and women their first break in their careers,” says Finlay. “They see it as one of their benefits.”
Founded by businessman Gerald Chertavian 10 years ago, Year Up has been honored by Fast Company and The Monitor Group with its Social Capitalists Award for world-changing non-profits. President Obama visited the Washington site in June and praised it in his press conference that week.
In its first year, Year Up graduated 22 students. This year the Boston chapter alone turned out almost 300, with over 1,500 students going through the program nationally. But that’s not even close to the most interesting stat. Get this:
This is all the more impressive considering that national retention rates for students at two-year public colleges is only 54 percent – not apples to apples, but it gives you an idea.
Partners Healthcare takes 8 to 10 interns from each class, and hires a number of graduates every year. Finlay is explicit that this is not just altruism. “Right now it might not be so hard to get talent, but the pendulum is going to swing back.” She recommends the program to other CIOs, saying, “develop the partnership now, get used to working with Year Up and make it part of your sourcing strategy so you’re already engaged and not scrambling to get things in place” when the economy picks back up.
Year Up currently operates in Boston, Atlanta, Providence, New York, San Francisco (Bay area) and Washington and expects to open chapters in Chicago and Seattle next. CIOs interested in learning more about becoming a corporate partner should contact the local chapter. Individuals can get involved by serving as guest speakers, job coaches, college application advisors, mentors, curriculum coaches or instructors, or by making a donation.
This is Part Two of my interview with Todd Pierce, CIO of Genentech. In Part One, we spoke about effective communication.
Genentech CIO Todd Pierce
Todd Pierce: The business case for me has always been mobility. It’s one of the most important mega-trends of the last six, seven years. [The iPhone was] smaller, higher functioning, with greater reach – a laptop in your pocket – and oh, by the way, it does an application that everybody has to have called telephone. And then when I saw the touch-screen interface, I said, “This is it.” Because I had been on the Newton, I’d been in on the first Palm, we had lots of Treos, I’ve used every HP device that they had made for the last nine years in that area. And dumping the stylus and going with the finger, I said, this is it. Unbelievable.
The end-user management concern was, is this a toy? Is this frivolous… is this just spending dad’s money? Which was the same thing, by the way, when the Blackberry first came out – there was the question then, like, wow, that’s a lot of money. Who needs to do e-mail real time anyway? It’s better to just do it in the evening, or when you’re at your desk. So, there’s frequently the concern, are we signing up for something just because its cool… are we just wasting our money?
The way you answer that is, well, let’s not prejudge something. Let’s do an experiment. So we did an experiment with initially 120 people. We got a mix of users. One group were heavy Blackberry users – because one question was, why change? Is it going to do anything that a Blackberry doesn’t do? By that time we had 5,000 Blackberry’s. And at that time, it looked like the iPhone was more expensive. So, we got a mix of people who loved the Blackberry and understood the value of mobility and people who were not Blackberry users. They had tried it, but didn’t like it. Those were our two segments. And I was blown away by the feedback.
Overwhelmingly – and now it’s going to be memory recall – something like 90 percent of hardcore Blackberry users preferred the iPhone, which surprised me. Originally when we thought about mobility in these devices, we thought e-mail. What we didn’t fully appreciate was it’s about the web. E-mail is 1980s, the web is now. To have a full-feature web experience on this device was revolutionary. The touch screen, the gesturing, allowed you to navigate – we didn’t have to do WAP or all of this other stuff that really narrows down the amount of content that you can get. The entire web is truly available. That also got our non-Blackberry people, people who didn’t like e-mail.
Originally I thought the lack of push e-mail would be a problem. iPhones have that now, but they didn’t at the time. One of the reasons people liked their Blackberry’s was [laughs] it’s kind of a stimulus to get interrupted every five seconds as the e-mails come in. You never get bored. So what won us over on e-mail was being able to read attachments: the ability to zoom in, roam around. So many of the Blackberry attachments were just unreadable – it was completely worthless. Now you had a device that lets you actually read the attachments.
The business case is mobility. The breakthrough for iPhone turned out to be the web and really being able to navigate through rich, dense attachments.
There are all kinds of ways to have accidental disclosure of information. The majority is through employees: sending information to the wrong people, auto complete on e-mail addresses. [It’s important] not to kill something new for the marginal case when we’re already taking quite a bit of risk. Functioning in the world requires risk, getting in your car and driving to work is very risky. It’s just reminding people that this wasn’t any more risky than other things we were doing. And then it’s the benefit. One of the things that we found was that we got, on average, an hour more work out of everyone that had an iPhone per day. That is enormous, and you get that because people appreciate the ease of use and mobility.
There’s a psychological aspect to all this. We’re moving away from the paternalistic approach to IT – you know: “we’re the IT Department, we’re 10 years behind where you are, but we know best.” We hire smart people and we give them the best tools. We let them have admin rights to their computers. It’s getting out of that mainframe mentality of closed networks and all that stuff and really shaking that off.
One of the things that I said to my staff was, I do all of my banking online. All my money, which I care a lot more about than my e-mail at work, I do it all online. I can’t tell you the last time I went into a bank, met a banker…. So, if I pay all my bills, do all of my transactions on the internet, why can’t I approve an SAP shopping cart on the internet? Our job as IT professionals is to figure out how to mitigate the impact of that. So we did. We put in Junipers, we put in scanning and filtering and other things to help with that. We educated employees, and then we worked with Apple on, hey, here are features that we want that will continue to improve this. And not being late to go up the innovation curve because something’s not perfect. When it comes to innovation, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
I have probably 30 apps that I have written for the iPhone. If I had waited until release 3.0, which was the one that had all the enterprise features – push e-mail and VPN native support, and all the things that corporations said they couldn’t live without – that was two years into the product. Well, I’m two years down the road. It’s a better mousetrap. My workforce got the advantages sooner, and we’ve moved up the learning curve. We have our own app store now – a Genentech app store – with our own apps. We’ve integrated it with various things.
And we give employees a choice. Here we had over 5,000 Blackberry’s. People loved it; it was one of our top-rated devices. We did this little trial and said, great, we’re going to add it to our portfolio of products. We didn’t promote it, we didn’t say, this is better than that; we just put it out there. Today we have over 5,000 iPhones and about 1,500 Blackberry’s.
We license the whole suite for 18,000 accounts. On that, there’s Google docs, and spreadsheets, and presentation, and chat, and IM, and video – all that’s available for everyone. The only thing that we forced everyone onto and had to do a weekend cut over for was calendar. At the time, there wasn’t cal-dev support, and interoperability between calendaring systems, and you don’t want to maintain two calendars because you’ll miss every meeting – plus drive all your admins crazy. So, that was the forced cutover that was the big event. That was October 2008.
Everybody went home on Friday, we turned the calendaring system to read-only and then migrated 2.7 million records into Google. People came to work on Monday morning and I was like, boy, this is going to be a rough Monday. And we only had 460 calendar calls. That was fantastic! I mean, how could you touch 18,000 people and only get 460 calls? So, that was, I thought, a true measure of this is a good thing.
We have about 2,000 people on e-mail. The reason that we don’t have the rest on e-mail is Google has delayed how to handle larger attachments. There’s a 25 Megabyte limit. We’re now moving forward with a voluntary opt-in program so people can move – because for e-mail you don’t have to move everybody at once. You can do server side, or client side migrations, and you can move one person, or 10,000 people.
The rate of innovation at Google is – well I mean, the Oracle, SAP and Microsoft product cycle is five years; Google’s product cycle is five days. It’s incremental. In five days you’re not going to be able to cancel your Microsoft Office license, but in five years, you won’t have Microsoft Office.
It fits into the mobility paradigm very well. Browser-based apps are getting better and better. You can deliver more of that experience and get mobility and simplicity. Because they’re not coming behind your firewall, you don’t have to VPN in. You have a secure session to Google, and you can access your information anywhere, anytime from any device. You don’t have to be on a corporate device, you don’t have to have a VPN fob. And it works on your iPhone, your Blackberry, your laptop, anywhere, anytime. So, fabulous. That would be the thing that people talk about the most.
The second is the integration of all the different tools. If you’re a multi-modal communicator, it is the best experience and the best set of tools and it all works, seamlessly, easy, together. So, that would be the second thing.
Then, the third thing is, $50 a year. That’s it! You don’t have to go to lunch with your sales rep. You don’t even have to know your sales rep. Your contract will fit in your billfold. You don’t need a three-ring binder for it, or a battery of attorneys to tell you what the hell it means. I mean, I haven’t read the Microsoft Licensing Agreement lately, but when they came out with the how’s and the this’s and the that’s, I mean, enterprise assurance, you’d have to be in like a two and a-half hour meeting to get briefed on what you’re buying. Two and a-half hours. And I have a PhD. It’s like, could you make this more complicated? Probably not. Google, $50. And it’s the same $50 from 61 features ago. Sixty-one new products, YouTube for the enterprise, video conferencing. Now, what software company, Microsoft, SAP, or Oracle, would give you 61 new things with no deployment, and no price increase? Introduce me to that software company. They don’t exist. Goggle has an absolutely radical, wonderful – it’s an IT dream come true. I don’t know why there aren’t IT executives all across America marching in the streets, burning their software licenses and saying, “let my people go.” I mean, this is the promised land. I don’t know how it could get any better.
Oh, well, I’m totally revolutionizing the sales part of the business with Salesforce.com. And I would love to revolutionize my HR system with Workday, but I couldn’t get my HR person on board with it. But look at Workday, look at Salesforce.com, and look at Google. Revolutionary. It’s going to gut the whole industry.
Oh, definitely. Just look at iPhone apps. That’s another important paradigm that’s happening: what I call snackable apps. We spent 30 years figuring out how to get 200 drop-down menus with 3,000 features. And a whole industry of training and manuals. And now we’re delivering single-function apps that require no training. And they’re absolutely fantastic. I hooked SAP up to my iPhone for shopping cart approvals; 30 percent of all of our approvals are now done on iPhones into SAP because I stripped away all of that complexity that’s in the SAP mySRM. I spent $10 million making my purchasing system usable on SAP. I spent $10,000 making it usable on my iPhone. You do the math. And, which would you rather do? Would you rather approve the shopping cart on your iPhone? Or would you rather log in, literally, you can answer three e-mails by the time it loads all the tabs and screens and all the pieces, and then try to remember behind which of these mystery tabs is my answer. It’s like playing a game of Jeopardy every time. Is this it? Is this it? Is this where I go? Oh, look, thank God I found it. It’s like a treasure map. And that’s just so you can buy something. I mean, come on.
There are many things happening here that are good for users, good for the IT profession, good for business. It’s just good, good, good. You know, what’s slowing this adoption are all the priests of the past – all the preservationists. All the interests that are built up around the edifice that is enterprise software…. Cloud computing is a dream come true.
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Todd Pierce is senior vice president and CIO of Genentech, the $13,418 million San Francisco biotech company that this year became a wholly owned subsidiary of Roche. He joined Genentech in May 2002. Pierce’s IT leadership experience spans a broad range of industries, including commercial software products, health insurance, clinical care and government. Prior to joining Genentech, he served as CIO and Director of Information Systems for the Santa Clara County Social Services Agency. Pierce holds a B.A. in Economics and Finance from Austin College and a M.A. in Health Policy and Administration from the University of California, Berkeley.
The holy grail of post-recession business will be profitable growth. The very idea of profitable growth is full of contradiction, as growth generally requires investment. With revenues unlikely to outpace that investment in what economists are predicting will be an anemic, drawn-out recovery, companies that have already been doing a lot of cost cutting will have to become even more efficient. This will put unusual pressure on executives to place the right bets when it comes to investments (based on strong customer insight and market knowledge). And it will require excellent management abilities and flexible, responsive, lower-cost IT.
The following presentation focuses on what the mandate for profitable growth will mean for CIOs and their organizations in 2010. I believe IT will have to become more operationally efficient AND deliver agility and innovation, that CIOs will have the great opportunity to delivery operational excellence and all kinds of tech-driven innovation as well.
Some people believe these two areas of focus are conflicting – that a leader (for example, a CIO) or an organization (for example, IT) can be good at one or the other but not both at the same time. They argue that when it comes to tech-enabled innovation, CIOs should offer advice but leave the heavy lifting to product designers and marketers. I disagree. What do you think?
Since the slides themselves are mostly just images, I suggest you view it on my Slideshare page, where you will also be able to view the speaker notes that make up the meat of the talk.
As part of our interview, I asked Genentech CIO Todd Pierce to describe the most important thing he’d learned about effective communication in the course of his career. He gave me not one but seven critical facets of great communication.
Know your audience: Really know who you’re communicating with and what you’re communicating.
Ask questions: [The best communication] doesn’t advocate; it inquires and helps people get to an insight or an inspiration or an action. And it gives you the information you need as well.
Be responsive: Ask, “Is this a good use of our time?” If the answer is no, you have to be able to stop the meeting or reengage in a different way or drop your content and move to where you need to be. People build presentations or communications for their own logical path, and 99 percent of the time, that’s not somebody else’s path. Sensing that early on and being able to move is key.
Be concise: I work on my own communication skills every time I speak to my leadership team. That’s 130 people once a month. I set a goal for myself to not speak more than 10 minutes, and to not use any visual aids. I was used to speaking for an hour with as many visual aids as I want. Ten minutes is about all people can retain.
Get rid of jargon: … and not just IT jargon. Words like inflection point and strategy – things that sound like they mean a lot but have lost their meaning. You need to really strip all that away. I’ve learned that at Genentech, because they’re talking about cancer – how cancer grows or how antibodies work. You can’t teach people 20 years of biology, so they figure out how to strip all the complexity away and still leave you with the relevant points.
Simplify: Too often people relish the complexity – I did – you know, this is so complicated, let me show you how complicated it is. It’s a given it’s complicated. What people really want you to do is find the simplicity on the other side of complexity – and don’t communicate until you do. Say, “we haven’t figured that out yet but we’re working on it.” We’ve spent a lot of time on that.
Do more showing, less telling: Interactivity with IT is so much bigger now. People no longer wonder if technology can do something; they accept that it can do just about anything. But would you want to use it, will you use it, and how useful would it be? That’s a much bigger part of the dialogue. I tell my team: assume [the person’s project] is two hours past due, they’re working from a hotel room after two drinks at 10:00 over a VPN. Is it going to feel good? How do we make it so easy that they can’t resist it? We do more demo’ing and less justifying and explaining.
This is the second in a series.
Todd Pierce
Great communicators focus on the perspectives, priorities and frames of reference of the people they seek to communicate with. At Genentech, that means science. Todd Pierce, SVP and CIO at Genentech, views effective communication as the “circulatory system” of business. Everything he does takes that into account.
Being in the drug discovery/drug development business, Genentech runs on quickly gathering large volumes of information and analyzing it effectively. With 30-40 clinical trials going on at any given time, that’s a lot of information.
In addition to supporting Genentech’s ongoing clinical trials, Pierce is focused on executing the organizational design and 18-month roadmap that are part of Genentech’s recent merger with Swiss biotech giant Roche. The combined organization will move to one set of global systems – which will require 140 integration projects, among other things.
Pierce is also an early adopter of innovative new technologies. In part one of our interview, we discuss how he conveys the benefits of emerging technologies – such as iPhones, Google Apps and social networking – and how he engenders trust in business colleagues and passion in his staff. In part two, we’ll discuss in more detail the decisions around the company’s early adoption of the iPhone and Google Apps.
Todd Pierce: I think of communication as the circulatory system – everything flows around and is dependent upon it. You can’t be aligned if you’re not listening and don’t have a deep understanding of what the business needs and wants, and where it’s going, and what role technology can play in that. You have to be in dialogue. It’s not just one side telling the other side; it’s both sides collaborating to figure out where do we want to be, and how to get there most effectively.
That’s right. You have to have a common language, and people are incredibly busy, so you can’t get them up on the IT language; you have to speak in the language that’s relevant to them. That’s where a lot of communication breaks down.
It’s been very important for me in my career to learn as much as possible about the business: what’s important; how the different pieces work. At Genentech, we help employees understand that by having patients come and talk about products, or having scientists come talk about how we discover them, or researchers and clinicians on how we develop them. Every meeting that we have [in IT], we have some communication from the business about the business in the language of the business to keep us immersed in that.
Patients come in several times a year. They speak very personally about what our product has meant to them, but they also speak very honestly about what missing or what’s left to be done. That’s something you don’t get in the typical corporate communication.
The thing that builds the most trust is transparency and accountability. Even when we’re talking about something they may not understand, or they’re thinking, “wow, that sure is a lot of money; are you sure we need to do that?” we need to be very clear about what it is we’re doing and what we’re going to be accountable for – how we’re going measure our effectiveness.
Second, as an internal service, we have to put pressure on ourselves just like a market would, to continually up our game. It builds credibility and confidence from the business when they see us doing that.
As part of this merger, we’ll be supporting an additional 4,000 people in Genentech with 20 percent fewer resources. So we’ve come up with a series of things to improve our core processes. For example, we said, let’s eliminate 30 percent of all the calls to our service desk. We had no idea how we were going to do it, but we set up a contest and formed teams [to tackle the problem]. We may not actually achieve the goal, but by setting the goal and challenging ourselves, the business sees that we’re always trying to improve our performance. Seeing us do that and seeing our performance improve builds confidence and trust.
Trust is created through every contact and every experience people have with IT. It’s things like, “Does my laptop work?” “Is it easy to connect to the network?” “Are all of my expectations being met without me having to actively engage with the IT department?” It’s constantly staying in touch with users’ expectations and how we’re doing, and really being honest with ourselves about our performance — being self-aware both individually and collectively about where we’re not meeting people’s expectations and what can we do about that.
You want the distance between the creators of information and the consumers of information to be as short as possible, because then you can make sure that people really are using the information and getting value out of it. Things break down when there are a lot of intermediaries, for example, when corporate functions in complex organizations decide to implement something that imposes on other people, and IT gets in the middle of that. I try to make sure we are always thinking about the ultimate end user rather than the entities that are ordering [a new process] or dictating it. That end user often gets lost, so you build systems that people hate to use or find hard to use, and ultimately the business doesn’t get the value out of it.
Getting to yes involves having good controlled experiments. I told my staff, “Let’s identify risk and manage it; don’t hide behind it.” When the iPhone came out, the concern was that it was a consumer product, not an enterprise product, and that it could compromise our information, or it would be hard to manage.… All the arguments about why it wouldn’t work or why it might be a bad idea came up. So I challenged my team to take all of our fears and concerns and test them – to actually go out and get the information.
Within a week of iPhones being available, we had 100 of them in a test. We had the IT people list out all the risks and concerns and then start solving them and working with the vendors to address them. I’ve found that to be very helpful, because it brings along all the stakeholders (legal, IT infrastructure, support, suppliers), getting them around the table, figuring out what the issues are, then running the trial and having some exit criteria that say if we achieve these end points, then we’ll go to the next level – much like we do with our core business of drug development.
The key value is how to continue to have that small company feel inside of a big company. Genentech has grown 3x since I’ve been here. In small companies, you feel like you know everyone, you can talk to anyone and get the information you need.… We all go to the same cafeteria and have a sense of connection and ownership. These informal networks are how creativity and energy and vitality exist in organizations.
When you scale up and you have 50 buildings, and we’re hiring 100 new people every week, you’re not going to have those relationships, nor do you have the capacity to find them and build them fast enough. Social networking blows all those limitations out. It’s all about how can you effectively scale these informal networks.
The key barrier for that kind of technology is the management hierarchy. Management doesn’t see the need for it. They have their chain of command and their processes to get the information they need or do the work that they need to do. My barrier in that case was just how not to get senior management involved in the decision. Because it’s not for them. So I said, you don’t get this, and you don’t need to get this, and I’m not building it for you. This is for the front-line employee, who doesn’t have the hierarchy and everyone sending them status reports and aligning their information sharing around whatever your questions or needs are.
Oh yeah – absolutely. It was kind of an epiphany. The company was spending a lot of time and emotional energy thinking about how do we preserve the culture and scale the company. And I thought, this is perfect! You know, “voila!” But then, whenever I presented [the idea of social networking] to the executive committee, they all had this puzzled look on their faces, like, why do we need this? The epiphany was, “You don’t need this, you’re absolutely right, and I’m not here to convince you that you need it, because you have all the information you need, and if you don’t, you have a hierarchy that will help you go get it. But most employees who are just joining the company or haven’t been here very long don’t have those networks, so how can we build those effectively?”
We were trying to figure out how to explain what this was. If you’re not familiar with it, how do you explain it? We were brainstorming a whole number of things. We didn’t want a cutesy name that didn’t mean anything, you know, some kind of typical corporate branding thing, and a long-term employee said, “oh, it’s like a gene pool: we all put our genes into the pool, and the best things come out. That’s how we grow and evolve and create.” And the minute they said it, the whole room said, “That’s it!” That totally explains why you want to play – you want to get your genes in the gene pool. It’s that bringing together of different ideas, diversity of genes, that will build the best organism.
We also wanted to have this be not another corporate system. There’s application fatigue. We wanted people to think of it not as another beast you’re going to have to feed, but this is actually going to work for you.
It runs the gamut, which just shows you how creative people are and how many communication needs there are within corporations. One of our most effective executive leaders who has 3,500 people in his organization publishes a blog every two weeks. People can write back, respond and interact with him. That just wouldn’t be possible in any other way. Most top executives are in a room with the same 10 people 80 percent of the time. This gives great access and a way to have dialogue that people are comfortable using. He gets more interactivity there than he would in a town hall meeting or if he just sent out an e-mail.
Then there are work groups – dynamic work groups being able to come together, share information, work on problems, publish that and make it searchable and accessible. Think about how much valuable work is redone and lost in organizations.
It’s incredibly low cost – low cost to implement, low cost to operate. It doesn’t have all the overhead that running a big intranet site does with the same amount of content. Every part of the business is using it for communication and collaboration needs that aren’t met by the core applications.
The precursor to this was our intranet, which had 30,000 pages and you couldn’t find anything. It wasn’t clear who owned what, and what was authoritative versus brainstorming. Where it would break down was in the bureaucracy. You know what it takes to sustain a publication – you need a lot of reporters and editors and reviewers; it requires a lot to keep the quality up. What’s nice about Gene Pool is it’s clear who owns information, where it’s coming from, and whether it’s authoritative. You can subscribe to it. It’s faster and easier than what you can do with most of your intranet site beyond the homepage and about two links off the homepage.
This is a constant thing. I tell everyone in my organization I want there to be three things true about everyone here:
First is to love what you do – I don’t think anything great or meaningful ever comes from people who don’t have passion or love what they do.
Second, be good at it – and that requires practice and constant learning.
And the third is be easy to work with – have a good user interface.
Our employee development accentuates all three of those. We have three centers of development: head, heart and body, and how do things get integrated and move from your head to your heart to your body. Someone has an idea, and it ties into their motivation, and then they have a practice to constantly improve; that’s how people grow and change.
We have a year-long development program that’s open to all staff. They meet eight times a year in small learning communities of four or so people. In each of those meetings, they do a head-heart-body check in…. This gives people the language, cultivates their sense of self-awareness, and gives them not only permission but the impetus to do something about it.
I do a three-day offsite with all of my managers, and part of that is finding out, what do they really care about? What do they really love doing? And giving them the assignment to get more of that into their jobs.
There are multiple things we do to tap into that emotional energy. The great thing about emotional energy is it’s one of most renewable resources we have, so you need to constantly renew, reward, recognize, cultivate it.
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Todd Pierce is senior vice president and CIO of Genentech, the $13,418 million San Francisco biotech company that this year became a wholly owned subsidiary of Roche. He joined Genentech in May 2002. Pierce’s IT leadership experience spans a broad range of industries, including commercial software products, health insurance, clinical care and government. Prior to joining Genentech, he served as CIO and Director of Information Systems for the Santa Clara County Social Services Agency. Pierce holds a B.A. in Economics and Finance from Austin College and a M.A. in Health Policy and Administration from the University of California, Berkeley.
Government agencies are in fiscal trauma right now. Billions of dollars over budget, many states are taking drastic measures to cut costs. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra and CTO Aneesh Chopra are aggressively pursuing software as a service and cloud computing as one way to cut costs, and the state of Utah is planning a private cloud to serve local agencies.
Governments are also building next-generation web sites to deliver a variety of services online. According to Government Technology, Utah.gov provides more than 860 online state government services. New features on its wonderfully designed website include location awareness, a new multimedia portal, Web 2.0 services, a data portal, forms search capabilities, and mobile applications.
The following presentation, which I gave at the annual conference of the South Carolina IT Directors’ Association last week, evaluates the current challenges of government agencies to provide services in a new way while continuing to cut costs. IT can definitely help.
To view this presentation with the speaker’s notes, go to my page on Slideshare.
