CIO Classified

Latest Episodes:

How CIOs Moved from the Back Office to Leading Business Transformation Oct 21, 2020

Show notes

Robert Dixon, Former CIO of PepsiCo, and Rick Rioboli, EVP and CIO of Comcast Cable, both remember when the role of the CIO was relegated to the back office. Now, CIOs are leading critical business initiatives as more and more companies go through digital transformations. On this episode of CIO Classified, they discuss how to be successful as a CIO and build with customers in mind.

Key Takeaways

In the early days of the role, CIOs did more order-taking than business transformation. Now, they've developed their role and increased their impact, moving from the back office to the forefront of customer experience thanks to digital transformation.
CIOs need to communicate with diverse sets of internal teams from product managers, to tech incubators within an enterprise, to various engineering teams. Seeing your company from different perspectives gives you a better sense of what work is most important.
When you're optimizing for customer experience, don't lose track of customer identity. One customer interaction might leverage several different cloud services. CIOs need to ensure that those systems powering that experience can track and source a user's identity seamlessly and securely.

Key Quotes

"I've seen business leaders step up in technological transformation. They're coming to the table looking at this as a way to leverage technical capabilities to create better value or new value for customers." - Robert
"Don't feel like your job is just to take orders from the business. Teams should take a step back, understand what's important to their business, figure out how to leverage their technology in an innovative way to change things while partnering with the business." - Rick
"When you see an opportunity to overlap what's needed from a business perspective to create value and what's possible with technology, you put those two things together with the right teams and that's going to be really beneficial for your customer." - Robert
"When we started our digital transformation, identity was at the center. It's hard to have a digital relationship with a customer if you don't have a digital identity of that customer. In our customer experience, that's a key component." - Rick

Links

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Thanks to our friends
Learn more about CIO Classified and find other episodes at CIOpod.com

This podcast is brought to you by Box, Okta, Slack, and Zoom. Modern employees demand the best tools at work. If your company wants to embrace the modern work environment, you need best of breed tools like Box, Okta, Slack, and Zoom.

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Meet the Hosts of CIO Classified Oct 14, 2020

Show notes

Key Takeaways

Even when you're working remote, you can still stay connected to your community. Whether it's sending out a weekly email to your peers, joining a group chat with your colleagues, or checking in on Twitter — you can stay close to the folks you'd normally see at the office or in-between talks at a conference.
Building smart, well-rounded teams can seem daunting. Companies that focus too narrowly on the process of hiring, rather than the people they're hiring, can struggle to build successful teams. It helps to remember that hiring is deeply human.
There's one thing almost all CIOs have in common — their most uncuttable budget item is employee training. Investing in team training is investing in success. Going to conferences, taking courses, and levelling up skills not only makes employees happier in their roles, but more productive, too.

Links

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Thanks to our friends
Learn more about CIO Classified and find other episodes at CIOpod.com

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Building at The Intersection of Social Skills and Security Infrastructure Oct 07, 2020

Show notes

Key Takeaways

What we view as "soft skills" or "social skills" are really catalytic skills that drive connections between coworkers, forge alliances between departments, and make teams more productive. CIOs have to build infrastructure to support those skills.
The idea of building a secure perimeter around a physical location is fading in the age of remote work. Instead, CIOs are focused on securing their infrastructure to keep valuable information protected whether an employee is working from their kitchen or corporate HQ.
Companies can't afford to kick their adoption of Zero Trust architecture down the road, even if they're undergoing constant change. The debate is more centered around how you should adopt the architecture, rather than when.

Key Quotes

"You have to extend your thinking to realize that the large portion of your corporation's infrastructure is now in people's homes, and it's only as secure as that infrastructure is." - Atticus

"The larger the organization and the more legacy there is in place, the more it's about working through planning so that you don't break something. In the end, we all have to keep the business running at the same time we're rearchitecting." - Julie

"Security is a team sport as well. You have to have a strong culture of trusting your employees and enabling them to move fast and to produce great experiences for customers and great products." - Atticus

"What I'm most focused on is really productivity and being thoughtful, not just about, people can get their work done, but are they able to do it in the most effective and productive way that they can?" - Julie

LINKS

Thanks to our friends
Learn more about CIO Classified and find other episodes at CIOpod.com

Don't forget to register for Zoomtopia, happening October 14th and 15th. Learn more at Zoomtopia.com

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Managing Tech Debt and Building Scalable Systems Sep 30, 2020

Show notes

Key Takeaways

The role of the CIO is intertwined with the role of the CTO. To build efficient processes, you have to have the right tech stack in place in addition to the right systems for leveraging that tech stack.
Tech debt piles up when you're moving too fast. When a project's finish line is in sight, don't sprint to it and gloss over dependencies that could bog down your engineering organization for years to come. Be smart, not impatient.
Design information systems for your users to share information easily, and effortlessly. Information silos can lead to coworkers repeating their colleague's work, slowing down your company and taxing your employees.

Key Quotes

"I look at the experience as we can deliver. Our participants are inundated with different people like schools, giving them directions, certification partners, they need coherence. They need information real-time. They need tools that are created and available to them to do their work." - Sandeep Chellani
"What is our core value proposition? What are the things we absolutely have to be really good at? Let's be thoughtful. Let's try to do them in a way that we can create experiments that allow us to build upon successes allows us to make incremental changes." - Grant Ingersoll
"You really need to be set up in a different way of working than the old hierarchical way of thinking. But in addition to that, the pressures from outside to innovate are really large. I think the bar just keeps getting higher and higher when it comes to what people expect from you." - Sandeep Chellani
"We have a very complex ecosystem. Of course, I would love to have more speed, but we have a dynamic as well with our community. We're very much with the community. So, there are times where for us, it makes a whole lot more sense to actually slow down." - Grant Ingersoll

Links

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Learn more about CIO Classified at CIOpod.com

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Habits of an Effective CIO and Smart Cities for Dummies Sep 23, 2020

Show notes

Earl Newsome and Jonathan Reichental are like most CIOs in that they think at scale. But, what sets them apart from the pack is their ability to think so thoughtfully about the future, plan their goals, and accomplish them. On this episode of CIO Classified, Earl and Jonathan lay their plans for the smart cities of the future, discuss why culture is a key ingredient to a thriving company, and dive into what exactly an "infinity crisis mirror" is.

Key Takeaways

CIO's have to be both technically savvy and socially adept. Any effective leader has to have a strong social IQ that guides their work as an orator, telling the story of IT's impact, and as a listener, gathering feedback from their colleagues and understanding company culture.
The smart cities of the future have to leverage technology to make democracy more inclusive and accessible. Town hall meetings can happen on Zoom, as opposed to being relegated to a stuffy conference room. Local representatives can be everywhere, without leaving their office. Technology has to keep constituents in touch with their representatives.
Successful CIOs have to get their business passport stamped. Meaning, they need a ground-level understanding of their company's culture, their competitors' tactics, their sales team's strategies, and their marketing team's movements. This can only be accomplished through experience.

Key Quotes

"You need to know how your culture operates. That's the difference between strategy—what we do, and culture—how you do it. If you're not an effective orator, if you're not aligned with that culture, you won't be an effective CIO." - Earl Newsome
"Empower your people. Great leaders give their teams the room to work, and the tools they need. Then, they get out of the way. When that happens, people will do great things." - Jonathan Reichental
"As we look at this new world of work, we need to be intentional about it. We can choose to let it happen to us, or we can choose to design it. And so I think this is a great opportunity." - Earl Newsome
"The way we work has changed forever. There's a recognition that speed is important, that reinvention is important, and that innovation is daily. It's not something you plan for and put on a to do list. It's a way of working, thinking and behaving." - Jonathan Reichental
Links
Earl's LinkedIn
Jonathan's LinkedIn
Jonathan's Twitter
Jonathan's Book

Thanks to our friends!
This podcast is brought to you by Box, Okta, Slack, and Zoom. Modern employees demand the best tools at work. If your company wants to embrace the modern work environment, you need best of breed tools like Box, Okta, Slack, and Zoom.

Don't forget to register for Zoomtopia, happening October 14th and 15th. Learn more at Zoomtopia.com
Learn more about CIO Classified and find other episodes at CIOpod.com

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Managing Tech Spend and Keeping Students and Employees Secure with Eric Tan and Lev Gonick Sep 16, 2020

Show notes

For Eric Tan, CIO of Coupa, and Lev Gonick, CIO of Arizona State University, succeeding as CIOs has meant finding solid footing in a rapidly shifting landscape. On this episode of CIO Classified Eric and Lev discuss how they're designing IT systems to support remote work, using storytelling as a key tool for tech adoption, and preserving the culture of their IT organizations.

Key Takeaways

CIOs need to embrace the ambiguity that comes with running, supporting, and transforming a business.
You can give your team the right tools, but that doesn't mean they'll use them the right way. To empower remote teams, you need to engage your organization with a story-led campaign that informs them while capturing their attention.
Maintaining the culture and social context of your work environment is critical. If one team's work is centered on face-to-face interaction, they need a technical solution that gets as close as possible to that type of interaction.

Key Quotes

"We're not just buying things and being responsible for keeping the lights on. We're helping people build their success in ways that they've never experienced before," - Lev Gonick
"CFOs are looking for us to provide input in terms of opportunities where we can further automate and use technology to help drive the business." - Eric Tan
"Everyone wants the delivery of the solution yesterday. They want it fully integrated and they want it free. Not all three of those expectations can happen just because we wave a magic wand on it. This, in the end, is about talent. Talent is hugely important." - Lev Gonick
"How do we change our policy, our processes, and stitch all these things together to make sure that people can come to work in whatever shape and form that looks like and enjoy work and remain productive." - Eric Tan

Links

Thanks to our friends!
Learn more about CIO Classified and find other episodes at CIOpod.com

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Secrets for Optimizing Remote Work and Why Digital Transformations Fail with Wendy Pfeiffer and Tony Saldanha Sep 09, 2020

Show notes

Your office probably looks a bit different these days. It might look a lot like... home.
As more and more companies are moving to a remote-based work model, IT professionals are working to stay ahead of that seismic shift in the way we work, by building the systems that we need to stay productive.
On this episode of CIO Classified, we talk to Wendy Pfeiffer, CIO of Nutanix, and Tony Saldanha, President of Transformant, about how they're crafting IT systems that enable their coworkers to stay productive and stay connected while working remotely.

Wendy and Tony dove into everything from designing IT systems that account for the flexibility we need when working remotely, to finding the true metrics of productivity by measuring by objective rather than measuring by tasks, and how they both plan on building for our rapidly shifting definition of "new normal."

Key Takeaways

To be successful while working remotely, the enterprise has to learn from consumer-facing technology. The software your employees use to get work done should be as seamless and as personalized as the apps they use when they're done working.
Sure, you have the right tools for a digital transformation, but are the people in your company prepared to use them? Revamping your technical infrastructure is only successful if you have a cultural infrastructure to support it.
Teams work a little differently these days. It's time to adapt to that new behavior and invest in the ways that your teams prefer to work. Adopting new remote-friendly workflows can make your team more successful.

Quotes

"When we first pivoted to have everyone working from home, we all sort of said it was a sprint. Then everyone was saying, 'Oh, it's a marathon.' There are some folks who have sprinter muscles and some folks who have marathon muscles. And, and so we're all adapting in our own ways." - Wendy Pfeiffer
"Digital transformation is about rewiring an entire enterprise. So not just creating a technology platform, which is what they set out to do, but also changing the DNA of every part of the organization." - Tony Saldanha
" The gauntlet's been thrown down. How can we make enterprise applications and the enterprise experience stand up to the consumer experience that we're surrounded with in our own homes? And how can we still do that securely over public internet with all the other challenges we face?" - Wendy Pfeiffer
"I think that's the big change people are looking at — the ways in which, not just collaboration tools, but the entire workday has got to be redesigned into these three different buckets of work — collaborative work, direct work with teams, and individual work." - Tony Saldanha

Links

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Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Trailer Aug 20, 2020

Show notes

CIO Classified is a podcast that features roundtable discussions with IT leaders about their most pressing challenges and how they solve them. Each week, we sit down with TWO top CIOs for a candid conversation. These CIOs come from different industries, different backgrounds, and company sizes but they share one similarity: They are driving their companies’ digital agenda and building the infrastructure for the future of work. Whether you’re a CIO mapping your company’s next big move, or someone who’s hoping to get there someday - this podcast is for you. Hit subscribe to get a front-row view as CIOs share the strategies, stories, and critical insights. This is CIO Classified.

Subscribe at CIOpod.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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