Digital transformation's impact on the CTO and CIO roles - CTO 047

Machine-generated from the episode audio and not hand-corrected, so names and technical terms may be imperfect. The audio is authoritative.

All right, welcome to episode 47 of the CTO Advisor, where we talk enterprise technology at the CTOs, that senior architect level, whether I'm talking to vendors or actual CTOs, senior architects. This week, we have a special treat. We have Mark May, otherwise known as Sensi Storage on Twitter. Mark is a CTO level executive in his own right. In this week's episode, we're going to talk about the impact of this software-defined DevOps hybrid IT, however you wanna call it, shadow IT, the impacts of moving up the stack.

What impacts does that have on the C-suite, that CIO, CTO level? And then conversely, how does that impact the layman? If you're a senior architect or someone in operations, how does the shift at that C-suite level impact your day-to-day? With that said, let's get started. Mark, introduce the CTO Advisor crowd to yourself. I know you've been on the show before, me, you, and who was the other guy? It was a redhead guy, I can't remember his name. Yeah, that Josh Atwell guy, I think.

Yeah, I think that was the guy. He was supposed to get with us about starting a podcast or something. He just dropped off the face of the planet. That guy, yeah. Yeah, I think Christmas will do that, or the holiday season in general. Yes, it will, in general. So, I'm Mark May. I think hopefully a lot of people know me, but if you don't, I am a senior management at a enterprise company in Ohio, but I also do a lot of blogging, content creation, and things like that.

You can probably find me annoying Keith or some other people on social media, on the Twitters at Sensi Storage, or wherever people are, I like to be. All right, so I really am excited about this particular episode. We were gonna do a year in, the typical, we're recording this on December 30th, and we're gonna do that typical, what was the top three trends of this past year, and then what do we see the top three trends going into next year. Pre-recording, we got into kind of just updating each other on personal lives, and we got into this conversation about the CTO role and the CIO role, and how it's changing.

And then I said, you know what? This is actually a perfect conversation for this audience. So, we shifted gears, and we're gonna talk about the shifting role of the CTO and CIO, but first, let's start at the business. Mark, how do you see the business landscape impacting both the CIO and CTO role in general? You know, I think that's really interesting. As businesses start to rely more and more on IT, especially in the enterprise, I see this merging of the COO role and the traditional CIO role.

And what really that's manifesting itself as right now is the CIO is becoming more involved in the business decisions and the operations of the business so they can actually enable the business with technology. But I think that's shifting as COOs get more knowledgeable about IT, CIOs get more knowledgeable about business. I think it's a logical place that those roles combine, but obviously when we do that, we have to deal with who runs the IT department. Someone still has to do that, right?

Yes, in theory, there's still gonna be, even if you outsource everything to AWS, there's still IT, whether you're managing that relationship, managing the technology itself. And maybe we'll get a chance to talk about what that looks like in this new hybrid IT environment. Like, what is the data center anymore? But there's someone, there's an executive that's responsible for that area of the business. Right, you can't outsource responsibility no matter what. Exactly. So let's talk, let's delve a little bit deeper into the forces that's changing the COO, CIO role.

And I think a lot of that is driven by the cloud and the, I hate saying this word cause when I struggle with pronouncing it, and then we see it all the time, is the demarcatization of IT, the basic capability. As a business user, I can just go out to AWS, provision services that help me to accomplish whatever my business objective is, whether that's doing a new marketing project, research, product development, et cetera. I can bypass IT and I start to build IT intelligence inside of the business itself.

You know, consuming IT infrastructure is just like using Microsoft Excel now. I don't need to be a specialist in technology. I think we like to call that shadow IT, but I think we're really wrong. I think IT innovation is moving out of being purely in IT. And that innovation is also happening in business. It's a throwback to the PC era, right? When you couldn't buy PCs. So rather than worrying about your IT department getting the PCs, you bought a bunch of typewriters as you labeled them on the PO, but really what were they?

They were PCs that were being installed. So that concept of shadow IT is how business is always innovated. We just fight against it for some reason when we really should embrace what they're trying to do and help them do what they're trying to do. Cause honestly, IT works for the business. Business works for IT. We're all part of the same organization with the same goals. And if we just learn to get along a lot better and help each other, we're a much stronger organization.

Yeah, doing my day job, which I also work for an enterprise company, that was actually a transformative marketing thing that our IT, our former IT department went through where the CIO got up and said, technology is business, business is technology. We're no longer IT, we're business technology services, which I think is a accurate definition of what we do. IT is no longer, you know, you don't, you know, you don't grab your iPhone and say, hey, this is my iPhone is a IT thing.

It's just a tool that I use to conduct business. So getting back to the conversation about CO, CIO, this is just a, you're saying this is just a natural progression, right? Yeah, I think it is natural, but I think it's, if we want to look at what's causing it immediately, I think it's the concept of Silicon Valley coming, right? Every business is afraid of being disrupted by the next startup. So what we're doing is we're embracing the one thing in IT business that can change, and that's software.

So as we use, you know, as we embrace DevOps and we become more agile and we start developing products quicker, better, and faster, we have this natural evolution of IT and business being closer together. So then, yeah, I think you're right. The natural evolution is that those two roles start to converge. So what you've just described, this impact of Silicon Valley onto our typical enterprises and this convergence, Gartner and other analyst firms and other pundits call this digital business, digital transformation, basically vertically integrating technology into the business.

And as that happens, there's this natural progression that we're describing here, which is the morphing of roles. The CIO, COO, does that role, does the CIO role go away altogether? What parts of his responsibility kind of merges into the COO and what's left? And who does that? Yeah, so that's interesting, right? I think the traditional role of the CIO has been the captain of the IT ship, right? Steering the IT ship to make sure that we're doing what the business needed.

I think that portion of the role had years ago been that plus what is now the CTO. Like in a pre-CTO role, we had the CIO who was doing the architectural setting of directions because IT departments were a lot smaller and CIOs were a lot technical still. So they were doing the direction and running of the operational and the architectural stuff, or at least had them beneath them, maybe not themselves, obviously in the size of an organization. So we split the CTO role off to its own thing.

And as we did that, the CIO has embraced that business further. And I think what's going to happen is as they do that, we're kind of going to roll what's left, what the CIO does of running the actual day-to-day, the operation side, and we're going to roll that into the CTO's role. So what becomes the relationship between the COO? So effectively, we eliminate what's been called a CIO, effectively. And we create this hybrid COO role, who now, not only he has a high-level understanding of HR and some organizations' sales, other back-office functions, and technology, he's now a COO that has a firm grip on how technology integrates into this whole stack of back-office functions.

What, that role gets eliminated completely, you think? The CIO in a traditional sense? You know, I'm not sure if the CIO role goes away or if the CTO role goes away. But essentially, I think it gets merged, right? As we try to be more agile in our day-to-day operations, we are going to have to be more agile in business. And the way to do that is to eliminate roles in many cases. And I think at this level, that's really what it is.

You know, eliminate the number of people having the conversations, make sure the right people have the right experiences and the right skillset to make those decisions and directions. So yeah, I mean, I don't know if the CIO is going away or the CTO is going away, or if they're just naturally kind of merging. But yeah, essentially, those roles are going to morph, go away, combine, however you want to look at it. So let's go down a level to those direct reports to the CIO or the CTO, this technology leader.

Because at some point, you need someone that leads technology. If you're going to be a technology business, then you're going... If every business, quote unquote, is going to be a technology business, you're going to need somebody who functionally leads technology. Someone's going to keep the lights on, whatever those lights are. Someone's going to set the architectural strategy of what technology is. What are those pillars now? What do you... If you could predict the pillars of the future IT or business technology services organization, what are the pillars of what organization is going to look like in the future?

I'm not sure the pillars actually change. I just think who has ultimate responsibility changes. You're still going to need someone to decide on the architecture of IT. You're still going to need somebody who manages, the managers who manage. You're still going to need that executive level direction setting. You're still going to need someone to sign off on the budget and manage all those things. So I really don't think the pillars change much. I think you'll see them combine and morph.

I think operations and architecture are going to be more friendly. In a lot of companies, it's kind of adversarial because the operations guys think the architectural guys just come up with a solution, send it down to the operations guys and it's their job to deal with it now. I think things like that have been going away and will continue to go away. And as that happens, roles change, but the pillars are still there. So the pillars exist. So this is, I think, an interesting challenge that I've been giving a lot of thought to lately, which is we have this collapsing of roles at the COO, CIO, CTO level where there has to be melding.

What happens at that executive level usually flows down within organizations. So let's focus on the technology organization in general, which has been, as a technologist, I've generally been concerned with, you know what, I don't care if I'm working for a cigarette company, I don't care if I'm working for a hospital, I don't care if I'm working for a manufacturer. I need to understand how packets get from point A to point B and what my, functionally what my company produces is, you know, I pay no nevermind to.

Am I gonna be able to continue that thought process over the next few years? Or is that impact of the merging of technology, technology and business, am I gonna feel that at my level? I think you will feel that at every level. It might take a few years before you feel it. So I think the person who only understands how packets move, I think they're fine if they do nothing for the next couple years, but eventually they're either gonna have to learn more about what the business needs and how the business operates, or they're gonna get left behind.

So with that left behind piece, whenever I hear the term left behind, I think about when I first cut my teeth in the industry and I spent a lot of time getting my Microsoft Certified Engineering Certification. I spent a lot of time getting my Nobel Network Engineering Certification. I got a well-paying job and I paid my dues and then stuff changed. Linux became a thing, the cloud became a thing, networking changed. I went from managing tokering networks to having to manage the Ethernet and I had to adapt and change with it.

But that change was relatively easy for me. It was, okay, I just have to learn new technology. As a technologist, what, doesn't matter the level, whether I'm a CTO type resource, architect, operation engineer, when you tell me I might be left behind, what book should I go and go to, back in the day I'd go virtually to, physically I'd go to Barnes and Noble or some other bookstore, pick up a book on Ethernet and learn Ethernet networking and I kept ahead. What book do I pick up to keep up and stop from being left behind?

You know, that's a great question and I'm not sure I actually have the answer. There's a lot of great books out there, right? You've got things like the Phoenix Projects, which, sorry, which touch on this quite a bit. But in the end, I think it's about learning what your business does and how your business operates. And I don't think you can necessarily learn that in a book or at least one book that everybody can learn that by. If you're an insurance company, you need to learn how insurance works.

If you're selling widgets, you need to learn how those widgets work. You need to learn what it is the business does and how IT drives business value. That way you can continue to innovate because it's not like IT is going away, right? Packets still have to move, IOs still have to happen, all that stuff has to happen. But it's all about how we provide business value, not technology value. And I think this is one of those areas that I've been advocating for the past year plus, which is, you have to pick up business skill and that looks different to every engineer or every architect or even at the CTO level.

What I've observed over the past, especially over the past year, is IT has moved more into an advisory role in which the difference between your CMO or your chief marketing officer or your director of research going to you or going to IBM, Accenture or a third party to solve a business solution is because you, from a technologist perspective, are in the best position to understand that technology as it relates to the business. And the way that that happens is the same way that it's happening, in my opinion, at the COO, CIO, CTO level, which is, you go and have business conversations with the business.

It's practically just rolling up your sleeves and going to have conversations with what we've traditionally called the business. If you move packets, if your business is primarily moving packets, well, you need to start to understand what applications are running on your network beyond what protocols and ports and firewall ports that have to be opened. You need to go and have a conversation. You have to have lunch with your commercial department or your sales department and learn what they're functionally doing and what their challenges are and how technology solves those problems.

Yeah, it's definitely interesting. We've been seeing that we've been developing those tools for a long time, right? We've been developing CMDBs and business service mappings and understanding what the organization actually does. But many organizations, they've been so disconnected from what I'll call the actual customer, the business. And that's nowhere more true than in like an infrastructure department, right? Because you've got an infrastructure department and their customers are the application developers and application support guys. And then their customers are the business analysts and then you've got the business and then you've got the actual customer.

And yeah, I think we have to understand that. I think we have the tools. I think almost every enterprise has been developing the tools and the abilities. You just gotta go have the conversation, understanding what your customer wants, what they're trying to do. You can become that trusted advisor so they're not going out to the PWCs of the world and taking their opinion over your opinion. Because chances are, the opinion of the person working in the company, they know what you need already, right?

They know the products. They just don't know how to articulate that in a way to the business that makes sense to them. And I think that's the biggest skill people need to understand, how to speak to the business, not about technology, but still talk about the technology. So let's leave this on this note. Let's give some practical advice on learning how to speak to the business. How do you develop these communication skills in which you're not only talking to your audiences, not only technologists, but actually business people?

What's like a first step? I think a great first step for everybody at a lower level of an organization is actually talk to your vendor pre-sales engineers. Because a lot of what it is that they're doing are lessons that you can take away. For instance, you walk into a room to meet with vendors, you ever notice they're not sitting together, right? They're always one here, one at the other end. And they're doing those little things so that when you sit down, they don't foster an us versus them mentality.

Those little tiny things that you can start doing today will bleed over to how you can actually interact with the business. And those little tiny things on how they listen, how they understand, or at least perceived to understand and do a lot of listening, and then take those lessons and talk to your business. Like literally say, hey, I wanna talk to you about your product and how we can understand what it is that we do for you and listen to what they do.

Because when you listen to them, people like to be heard, they'll understand what you have to give and what you can offer them. Yeah, that's great advice. I didn't think about that. When I was looking for a job years ago, and I was looking at becoming a pre-sales engineer, I actually picked up a book on becoming a pre-sales engineer, moving from an engineering role into a pre-sales engineering role. And a lot of those skills that you mentioned what were highlighted in that book, I'll see if I can find it and add it to the show notes.

I'd like to add in addition to that, just a simple resource. If you're a podcast listener, which you are, a great non-technical or technical podcast, depending on the time of day to listen to, is the Geek Whisperers. They have a lot of, I'd even go back to when before they pivoted to talking specifically to technologists, they kind of had this focus is where they were talking to marketers who were marketing to technologists. A lot of great practical advice on just how to talk to technologists.

You get the insight of how to talk to marketing people. It's a great, just easy, low-hanging fruit if you like listening to podcasts. Yeah, definitely a great podcast. They have a ton of information out there that you can consume in an audio format. Yeah, so less packet pushers, more Geek Whispers. No, I'm not, I'm just kidding. Packet pushers is a great resource as well. All right, so with that, let's wrap it up. Mark, again, where can people stalk you online?

I know you're just out on Twitter. You blog as well, right? Yeah, I blog. com. A lot of my more business-centric and less technology stuff you can actually see on LinkedIn. So on LinkedIn, you'll find where I talk about actually how to sell your ideas, how to give good presentations, how to be a good panelist, stuff like that. com. You can find all of it on the Twitters too. All right, with that, you can obviously find this podcast in your favorite podcatcher, whether it's iTunes, Stitcher, Dreamcatcher, whatever the podcast catcher is.

I think I'm everywhere. com, that's CTOadvisor on Twitter. Email this podcast to your friends. You know what? If you're visiting folks at the end of the year, it's the end of the year, and you're at your mom's place, and she has a iPad, go to her podcatcher, subscribe to the podcast. Just get it out there. I don't care if she doesn't do IT. Get more people to download and listen. We'll talk to you guys in the new year.

Happy new year. Mark, thanks a lot for joining us. Thanks, Keith.