804: Vijay Sankaran discusses the future of work, the growing impact of AI, and its downstream effects on real estate. Vijay explains the critical role the digital customer experience plays in real estate, the way workspaces have evolved in recent years, and technology’s impact on how companies leverage their physical workspaces. He also reviews the company’s acquisitions in recent years and the effort to bring digital capabilities like cyber, data, AI, and more in-house. Finally, Vijay covers the generational differences in perspectives on hybrid and remote work environments, looks ahead at other trends in technology that he has on his radar, and reflects on the major keys to success from across his career.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Android | Podcast Index | Deezer | Youtube Music | RSS | More
778: Brian speaks about the keys to successful cloud adoption and the benefits of a multi-cloud architecture. Throughout this conversation, we dive into Rackspace’s business, explore Brian’s purview within Private Cloud, and discuss the shared and differing responsibilities with his counterpart in Public Cloud. Brian explains how having a CIO background has been advantageous to him when partnering with the current CIO and the IT organization. With a breadth of experience across companies, disciplines, and industries, Brian shares insights into his thoughtful leadership style shaped by his core values, walks us through his career path, and talks about the impact that both his military experience and his pursuit of higher education has had on his professional career. Finally, Brian covers the advantages of having technologists on a board of directors, looks ahead at the latest trends in technology, and reflects on the secrets to his career success.
771: Sunny shares an overview of Snowflake’s business and what his purview encompasses at the company. Sunny embodies a customer-centric mindset in his role, spending a remarkable 70% of his time directly engaging with customers, and shares how he has built his team to allow him the bandwidth to do so. He explains how he has managed IT during a period of massive growth, built a strong culture in a remote working environment, and drove innovation in the evolving landscape of data. Sunny explains the key differentiators he has seen of successful data leaders and companies that have leveraged data effectively. He also dives into the importance of platform solutions and why he focuses on investing and building platforms at Snowflake. Additionally, he shares the value derived from his board experience, highlights the latest tech trends shaping the industry, and reflects on the keys to his career success.
765: Cisco speaks about transforming Qualcomm into an intelligent company across hardware and software. Cisco shares his insights on Qualcomm’s future roadmap and the role of partnerships in the company’s broader ecosystem. We also explore how Cisco’s team is developing a solid foundation to foster growth, how culture facilitates successful change management, and why a high-functioning IT organization should act as guardrails for the rest of the organization. Finally, Cisco shares his views on how he stays ahead of the curve of emerging technology, the trends on his radar, and how he trains his team members in new skills for the future.
762: Hasmukh discusses his experience in the CIO role at AMD and how his team thinks about sustainability, innovation, and artificial intelligence within the context of the semiconductor industry. He talks about driving AMD’s talent strategy, advocating for the customer’s needs through the customer zero program, and leading M&A in the CIO role. Additionally, Hasmukh talks about the overall evolution of the semiconductor industry, looks ahead at trends in AI on the horizon, and reflects on the keys to his career success.
Now a household name in personal finance, Intuit was founded in 1983 by Scott Cook. The company’s four decades of success — the company reported 2022 annual revenue of $12.7 billion and a portfolio of valued products including TurboTax, QuickBooks, Credit Karma, Mint, and Mailchimp — has been possible in part by the company’s dedication to innovation. Innovation is necessary for modern businesses to maintain a competitive advantage, meet evolving customer needs, and attract top talent. Prioritizing innovation can also improve the IT-business relationship by positioning the IT organization as a partner that is uniquely suited to evaluate ideas and pursue those most likely to succeed.
Two conversations on Peter High’s Technovation podcast with Intuit’s Chief Information Security and Fraud Prevention Officer, Atticus Tysen, and Chief Data Officer, Ashok Srivastava, show how Intuit has reinvented itself through IT-driven experimentation driven by a desire to solve real business problems and foster a strong IT-business partnership in the process. These interviews show how a formalized test-and-learn process, a set of practices formalizing the steps taken to ideate, conduct pilots, analyze results and scale valuable ideas across an enterprise, can be used to systematically scale innovation and deliver a range of benefits. Among them:
–Change the culture of the IT organization to encourage more frequent ideation and support team members in voicing ideas they might not have previously
–Empower the IT organization with data and agility that allows it to show up as a true business partner
-Increase the influence of the IT organization to build trust and credibility with the business
-Eliminate silos and encourage expansive thinking to ensure the creation of durable, enterprise-grade solutions
Intuit’s innovation journey highlights these improvements in action, as we’ll see below. We will also share Metis Strategy’s 10-step test-and-learn process that you can implement in your own organization.
“At Intuit, experimentation is everyone’s job,” said Brad Smith, Intuit’s former Executive Chairman. Building a culture of experimentation and innovation requires creating a safe space to allow risk-taking and encourage more people to bring ideas to the table. Intuit’s IT organization prides itself on its hypothesis-driven testing culture designed to pursue new ideas with clear business outcomes rather than rely on legacy solutions, bolstering the IT organization’s strategic value.
Solidifying a test-and-learn process positions IT organizations to play a more active role with business teams, understand customer needs, unlock innovation opportunities, and change the culture of IT from reactive order-takers who “just” keep the lights on to partners who help shape the future of the enterprise. At Intuit, the test-and-learn process is guided by the company’s two innovation competencies, Customer Driven Innovation and Design for Delight, which drive all solution development and ensure strategic focus throughout the ideation process. These defined principles, outlined and enforced by the Intuit labs, help narrow down and develop winning ideas by ensuring new solutions unlock value and solve real problems.
IT leaders must be change champions to ensure the successful adoption of a test-and-learn process and the subsequent shift in culture required to improve the IT-business partnership. Broad participation in the test-and-learn process happens when the process is accessible and engagement is encouraged across all roles and tenures.
Intuit’s technology leaders incentivize innovation by giving employees unstructured time for ideation and solutioning, which fosters their participation in the test-and-learn process and refines the company’s ideation muscle outside of day-to-day responsibilities. Other incentives used to ensure test-and-learn participation include the Scott Cook Innovation Awards, which recognize employee innovators; mentorship programs to guide new participants through the test-and-learn process; rotational development programs to upskill employees; and workshops to refine critical thinking skills.
By enabling test-and-learn experimentation, IT leaders can begin to change their organizations’ culture and empower the IT organization to become a true business partner. Intuit notes that the test-and-learn culture has enabled a durable competitive advantage that allows the company to differentiate itself from competitors while focusing on what matters most to its customers.
In a recent survey, 63% of CIOs reported that they struggle to communicate IT’s business value to business partners. Formalizing a test-and-learn process can improve that communication by giving IT leaders the data needed to tell their innovation story and tie new ideas to tangible business outcomes.
Test-and-learn experimentation produces data surrounding the feasibility and value of scaling an idea. Ideas that are ultimately chosen to scale are backed by data on their projected success and business impact. IT organizations can also provide their business counterparts with data on risk mitigation and projected costs based on the initial testing.
Tysen names data as the primary enabler for successful test-and-learn experimentation as it creates opportunities to take calculated risks. Tysen and Srivastava work together to break down data silos and democratize data so teams can more effectively derive and deliver insights.
Pairing test-and-learn with agile delivery methods can promote a culture that rewards failing fast, iterating, and delivering value in the shortest sustainable time. Intuit focuses on lessons learned from experiments rather than if one was a success or a failure.
Intuit’s innovation competency, Design for Delight, further showcases agile ways of working by prioritizing constant customer feedback, quick prototypes, and iterative solutions to ensure initiatives pursue maximum customer value.
Since experimentation often happens on top of day-to-day responsibilities, transparent and realistic expectations must be set to prevent under-delivery or delays and preserve working relationships. Tysen manages business expectations by ensuring that the IT organization outperforms traditional IT metrics as a prerequisite for experimentation. Operational excellence builds trust between IT and business partners and creates space for test-and-learn experimentation that builds that trust further via successful ROI-generating innovation initiatives.
The typical IT delivery muscle must be refined, and often rebranded, to position the IT organization as an innovator rather than an expensive bottleneck. Tysen says his organization builds credibility with the rest of the business by leveraging business metrics and KPIs, not just IT metrics, when evaluating ideas generated through the test-and-learn process. Applying business metrics to IT-generated ideas ensures that the IT organization and the business are being held to the same standard and can help ensure fair appraisal and understanding of each initiative’s value.
In a recent survey, fewer than 5% of CIOs reported that they spend time talking about business outcomes or measuring the business outcomes created by the technology they deploy. This is a significant oversight preventing buy-in and limiting the IT-business partnership. Tysen emphasizes the importance of listening to partners to ensure his organization accurately understands their problems so he knows what is needed to create relevant soultions. The consistent use of business metrics across Intuit also ensures the appropriate acknowledgment of IT’s test-and-learn successes.
Test-and-learn experimentation breaks down traditional business silos and seeks to prevent ad-hoc ideation, eliminate repetitive solutioning, and facilitate cross-functional collaboration. It also promotes enterprise thinking, a practice of monitoring cross-functional requirements, scalability considerations, and long-term needs such as reducing future rework and technical debt.
Srivastava notes that Intuit’s process for test-and-learn experimentation relies on conducting deliberate tests that solve specific and identified problems rather than needless, temporary solutions. Test-and-learn experimentation not only brings MVPs to life with speed but also facilitates deliberate and intentional conversations about long-term considerations and dependencies during the product creation process, ensuring that the final product meets as many consumer needs as possible.
When working with clients seeking to streamline and scale innovation, we use a 10-step test-and-learn process to govern the intake of ideas, manage stakeholder expectations, accurately reflect capacity, and capture data to inform a solution’s journey. This process helped a recent client identify and eliminate silos that hindered collaboration while elevating the IT organization to the status of a business partner rather than an order taker.
Implementing a test-and-learn experimentation process enables an organization to narrow an infinite number of ideas and pursue only those that will deliver the most value. The IT organization is uniquely positioned to facilitate this process and help the business identify winning ideas due to its digital testing capabilities and data collection methodologies.
Working closely with business partners can help teams across the organization avoid placing big bets on ideas that may drain their resources without delivering the needed value. Prioritizing resource allocation based on test data and iterating throughout the solution development process creates a virtuous cycle where the business will increase its speed to market for winning ideas while guaranteeing maximum customer satisfaction.
The benefits that come from implementing a test-and-learn process will not be realized overnight. A structured approach to change management and user adoption is needed to ensure an effective transition. It makes sense to start small. With support from internal change champions, consider piloting a beta test-and-learn process, secure quick wins, and use that momentum to facilitate a broader rollout.
Once adopted, an enterprise might face execution hurdles that prevent maximum value realization. For example, a company may not have the discipline needed to define the hypotheses that drive testing, resulting in the creation of tests that do not produce the needed information.
Alternatively, existing data collection and analysis capabilities may not be sufficient to derive conclusive test results. An enterprise may also suffer from “analysis paralysis,” which can create stagnation when a test fails and lacks ownership over revisions. To learn more about avoiding these experimentation pitfalls, see this article that outlines how business experimentation frameworks can help mature a test-and-learn culture across an enterprise.
744: Ria discusses the work she is leading at Intel on developing ethical artificial intelligence solutions with a focus on explainability, fairness, and trustworthiness. She discusses her perspective on what it will take to reach ethical AI solutions, the opportunities and hurdles that she faces, and the value proposition that ethical AI offers to companies and communities. Ria also talks about the skills that she hires for on her team, the collaboration she engages in with external and internal partners, and the medium-term outlook for AI given the rise of ChatGPT and other AI tools. Finally, she reflects on her early start in a career in technology and explains how her passion for poetry and writing has helped balance and anchor her during her more technical position at Intel.
732: Patricia discusses the infrastructure processing unit and foundational network that she leads at Intel and how it has enabled the company to build a software ecosystem for its customers. Having been at the company for nearly two decades, she gives her perspective on the advancements being made in data as a discipline and what have been the difference makers for companies that have successfully adopted better data practices. Patricia also talks about the skills that make up her team and the collaboration efforts both internally and externally. Finally, Patricia reflects on her experience as a board-level executive and the trends in artificial intelligence and data that are on her radar.
To some, the term artificial intelligence evokes images from The Terminator, 2001: A Space Odyssey, or, for the more optimistic, WALL-E. But today AI might isn’t as far out as many might think. Today, machine learning and AI applications are being used to personalize customer experiences, predict behaviors, and improve processes across industries.
On the Technovation podcast, Metis Strategy President Peter High asks tech executives about the trends that excite them and the new projects making their way onto their roadmaps. This year, artificial intelligence was often at the top of the list. In this video, executives from Elevance Health, ServiceNow, Whirlpool, Guardian Life, Levi Strauss, Upstart, and Intel share how they are embedding artificial intelligence into their organizations and ponder AI’s future trajectory. For more insights into how today’s technology leaders are adopting artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies, be sure to check out the full podcast episodes and YouTube channel.
720: Doug discusses the evolution of ethernet and how it continues to be used today. Doug explains the difference between ethernet and other similar technologies it is often confused with, its use across industries, and where it has been used for cost efficiencies. He also shares a personal anecdote about how the technology he works on has been used to impact his life in a meaningful way. Doug then talks about his long career at Intel, the collaboration he experiences across other groups within the company, and the skills he hires for. Finally, Doug looks ahead at trends in autonomous vehicles and other technologies that he is excited about.
