Lead Cincinnati sat down with 25 CIOs to discuss technology and innovation. Click on the 'play' button to the right to begin the slideshow, or click on the names of the individual CIOs below to go to their interview.
In the not-so-distant past, Information Technology was viewed as but one of many resources intended to help businesses accomplish their strategic goals. IT’s role mainly involved data collection and the protection of that information. The business executives would strategically apply that data to business initiatives. Meanwhile, if the technology hardware broke or the information system(s) failed, the IT department diligently made the necessary repairs to regain operational functionality. In theory, it was a seamless transactional relationship: the business executives set the strategy and IT provided and maintained the technological tools to enable the plan.
The term Chief Information Officer (CIO) emerged in the United States in the late 1980s, becoming the first tangible evidence of IT professionals rising to an executive level. Despite this elevation, the functional role of the IT worker, commonly referred to as the “manager of electronic data,” changed very little. The title of CIO was seen merely as ornamental. Yet as the responsibilities and demands of data managers began to change from number crunchers to business strategists, the IT professional occupied a legitimate place at the executive table. Today, one is hard pressed to discover a successful organization that has not integrated the IT executive into the fabric of the business decision-making process.
LEAD Cincinnati sat down with 25 technology executives to understand current practices and trends, as well as successes and challenges within their professions and organizations. Each participant brought a unique perspective based on his or her respective industries, organizational circumstances and diverse personalities.
The discussions revealed common themes. Almost every participant stressed the importance of developing relationships, based on trust, between the technology and business leaders. If the business executives don’t trust the CIO or CTO (or vice versa) then an unstable, transactional relationship results, rather than a trustworthy, strategic partnership. An alignment of business and IT goals is key, but relationships without trust are more prone to failure.
Another theme involves IT’s role within business risk. Business leaders need to know what risks are involved when considering IT options. Is the proposed technology worth the risk? What impact will a system overhaul have on the total cost of ownership? Although due diligence was the assumption, no foolproof formula to reduce or eliminate risk was proposed. Yet the consensus was unanimous – not advancing in technology to avoid risk would result in certain organizational stagnation or even death. Risk is simply part of today’s norm within business/IT strategy.
Sitting across the table with these IT leaders, a fundamental reality became clear: the future of business is technology. Business without the strategic integration of technology and IT experts will become the exception, not the norm.
LEAD Magazine would like to thank all of the participants who made this section not only possible, but enlightening as well.
A brief note from the incredible sponsor of this section, Pride Technologies.
Greater Cincinnati is a driving force in the nation’s IT community. Pride Technologies believes this deserves wider attention and is thrilled to be a part of it. No longer are the East and West coasts the only places where innovation and technology find fertile soil.
While Cincinnati has a rich history of bringing innovation to life, many business and IT leaders outside the region have not recognized or appreciated the region’s vast contributions to technology. Pride Technologies not only appreciates these contributions, but also understands how businesses benefit from a region’s dedication to technology and innovation. To encourage this dedication, Pride Technologies is committed to connecting Cincinnati with the rest of the world’s best possible talent and tools.
Great organizations realize that interlacing innovation and practical solutions takes more than business acumen and technical expertise. It takes personal relationships where innovation and practical solutions can collide and collaborate. Today’s leaders devote more time finding the right personnel fit for their organizations than discovering precise knowledge and skills sets. Even more, IT is progressing beyond the simple transaction of goods and services between business executives and IT groups, replacing that model with relationships powered by trust and driven by strategic insight.
The biggest challenge threatening successful businesses in the region isn’t what one would expect. It isn’t connection with customer base or market differentiation, value propositions or leadership structure. Most business and IT executives agree that the biggest challenge to enterprise success is securing a talented IT workforce. This happens primarily by retaining Cincinnati’s best technology student graduates, as well as attracting global leaders to Greater Cincinnati.
Pride Technologies is invested in promoting Greater Cincinnati to the technology-rich regions of the country and the world. We have spent time with key IT leadership in order to understand the expectations put upon them, as well as how businesses strive to achieve their goals. This knowledge enables us to connect the global IT networks with the needs of the local IT community. In this way, Pride Technologies serves as a “talent gateway” by tapping into our national and global locations, utilizing our strategic offices in the Midwest (Cincinnati, Columbus and Minneapolis), the East Coast (New York, Philadelphia and Miami), the West Coast (San Mateo, California) and around the world (Chennai, India, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil).
Historically, Cincinnati’s hardworking, humble and brilliant IT professionals have kept their boasting to a minimum, despite having nurtured innovation and implemented the best technology in significant ways. Now, however, it’s time to shout those achievements from our rooftops for the rest of the world to hear; it’s time to believe that the soil here is rich with innovation and primed for continuous technological advancement.
Office Managing Partner, Downtown Cincinnati
BDO (formally SS&G)
How do you correlate business risk with IT delivery?
The biggest thing that we are finding in the services industry is the importance of mobility. With mobility there are also security concerns. We continuously work in mobile environments, so having the proper security in place is crucial. We use programs like AirWatch as a means to control that mobility and ensure we have the proper IT securities in place.
Mobility in our industry, being a CPA firm, is absolutely crucial. And security is equally important. Because our staff is effectively on call 24/7 and working remotely they need access to the systems that we deploy here. We use cloud-based systems, which make it a lot easier to see information anywhere in the world instead of having to be on-site all the time. We continue to see more development on cloud and ERP systems. But how do you secure that so the environment doesn’t disclose confidential information? The CPA industry receives access to so many confidential pieces of information. We have social security numbers and in some cases we have credit card information on file. In terms of identity fraud, having that secure environment is crucial to our long-term success.
When is business and technology incompatible?
No matter what piece of technology we are using, in the service industry we cannot afford to break down human interaction. You still have to create some level of visibility, otherwise the relationship becomes very transactional. It’s easy to hide behind technology. It breaks down the human connection. You have to know when to use it appropriately so that you are not overusing it. People will hide behind technology for conflict resolution purposes because they don’t want to address it personally. So, what do they do? They address it via email – but is that really the most effective means of communication?
Humans still have a need for human contact. That is the impasse technology can create if it is not managed correctly. It’s easy to get comfortable sitting behind a desk and responding. We have an instant message (IM) system, and someone will want to IM me from the office next door. It’s kind of silly to have an IM conversation when you are right next to each other. That’s what I mean by the abuse of that technology. I try to make sure we are balancing the use of that technology to do what we do efficiently without severely compromising our need for human touch.
Let’s leverage technology to enhance human connectivity, not replace it. Human connection is still as important today as it was 50 years ago. So how does technology compliment that? It can never replace it – and it should never replace it. It should complement and make it easier for us to connect with each other.
How do you lead your organization away from a transactional mindset to keep that human connection?
You cannot build long lasting meaningful relationships if there is no trust. If the relationship is strictly transactional we will not be able to compete in the marketplace. Thus, we have to train people on the importance of visibility. It is difficult to create high level client acceptance without consistent, intentional visibility. In order to achieve this high level of acceptance you certainly cannot hide behind computer screens. We enforce the issue: Go meet with this client, get on a plane, get in a car or pick up the phone. In addition, leveraging meaningful relationships with a high level of trust and acceptance will create brand loyalty. Long-term success depends on relationships built on trust.
Senior Vice President, Chief Information Officer Retail & Vision Care Services
Luxottica
Business and technology can seem incompatible at times. How do you bridge that gap?
We receive a number of requests for technology capability that from a business acumen perspective, are unnecessary. The challenge then becomes how to enter the dialogue of what our business is really trying to achieve and how we support that desired outcome. At the end of the day, a major part of an executive’s role is to prioritize investments within their organization. To do this effectively, you must have an educated point of view as to what technology investments will deliver the greatest impact in support of the overall needs of the organization, both now and in the future.
How do you see your role with other business leaders in your company?
It is common to categorize IT professionals as order takers and ask how IT drives the business. In reality, it is disingenuous to suggest that IT “drives the business.” While IT may facilitate increased revenue and growth, that capability is sponsored by business leaders who make strategic decisions. In today’s business environment, IT professionals live in a difficult middle space where they are unable to survive by acting as order takers or by constraining other leaders by simply saying no. Instead, we must view themselves as partners with business leaders and work to build strong, lasting relationships. Critical for a successful business relationship is the ability to negotiate and successfully gain alignment. Each technology request represents an opportunity to either educate or provide perspective. A substantial part of our role is to educate our peers as to what is possible and what their choices are. Over time, I’ve learned that while everyone likes the concept of education, no one likes to actually be taught. It is a skill to provide other leaders with context and insight without lecturing or being perceived as someone who is dictating terms to them.
What do you find is the best way to approach change?
As an organization, we’re trying to become more adaptable and build a culture that doesn’t resist change. However, no one likes change and even though we’ve gone through six years of evolution and change education activities with our associates, we still dislike change. I’m probably the chief evangelist for change in our organization and while we must acknowledge that we don’t like it, our true competitive advantage is that we are going to continue reinventing ourselves by evolving our mix of services, structure, and mindset in order to successfully deliver against market and business strategies. As IT professionals, we must adapt what we’re doing and how we’re doing it at all times to ensure that we’re prepared to support what may or may not happen to our businesses in the future. This requires a commitment to application and infrastructure choices that value both flexibility and scalability. As long as we continue to grow and envision new opportunities, we will position ourselves for greater success.
Executive Vice President
Paycor
How does your vision of product development and IT support your company’s core values?
We have nine Guiding Principles that steer decision-making and culture at Paycor. Product Development and IT support these values by taking care of our clients and each other. Their role in that is listening. We encourage every software developer to observe or speak with clients and colleagues who are using tools they have created. We solicit our clients’ feedback right from within our software, as well as through live observation sessions in our usability lab. Client input drives our software development roadmap. It’s a great way to learn and live our values at the same time.
Onboarding is a great example of our client-driven how we listened to clients. Clients told us they wanted a more efficient onboarding experience. We met that need with our new onboarding software and saw success: in the first 45 days after launching, we exceeded our financial expectations for the entire year.
Our phone and electronic support is important to us as well. We are interesting in that we don’t consider ourselves a call center, but a big part of our business is customer service. Our technology systems need to support that.
Customers want a better experience for themselves and their employees. It’s not just about helping our clients be more efficient in their business. It’s about treating our clients the same way we treat our own employees.
How do you correlate business risk back to IT?
We regularly inspect technical and other environmental risks to our business. We even engage third-party auditors. In the business of handling companies’ HR and payroll matters, nothing is more important than ensuring we are “securing the borders” and protecting data. A more prominent risk to our business and our clients is compliance. The Affordable Care Act is bringing additional reporting and tracking requirements to our clients. Product and IT leadership play a role in internally evangelizing the “why” behind the programming changes needed to help clients comply with such changes.
What is the relationship like between IT and the business partners?
Paycor develops software for both our clients and our internal employees. We have a traditional IT function, but we also have a large application development organization. Overall, we have 180 people in Product Management, Product Development and IT. We must be a strategic contributor and collaborator in all of Paycor’s business objectives. We convene in cross-functional initiatives on a daily basis. For software development specifically, we use the Agile methodology. Teams are encouraged to listen to clients and internal team members while seeking the most viable and valuable solutions.
How does data collection drive productivity?
We manage a lot of data, including 75,000 or more web transactions per hour. The data we have is clean and accessed regularly. So the most important metric for us is speed. Response times need to be lightning fast to provide an optimal user experience.
For new products and services, we look to numbers as well. We build financial models with expected revenue and assumed expenses. Once a new product is launched, we hold ourselves accountable to the model, watching for variances, and tweaking along the way.
For efficiency-related IT efforts, we target an expected return. We’ve recently rolled out Cloud Coach, a project management tool that gives better insight into our client implementation process. In early 2015, we’ll roll out Salesforce.com to our client support team. Both of these third-party tools are expected to increase productivity of our teams, but more importantly, to allow us to focus on high-value, personal-touch activities.
Chief Information Officer
LSI Industries
How do you see your role with other business role leaders in your company?
Recently we have gone through some management changes so it’s caused some introspection about the IT mission and vision and how it relates to the broader organization. The thing I kept coming back to is the “trusted advisor.” That’s the role I see us playing from an IT standpoint to the broader company. Both at a company level and an employee level – macro and micro. I want to be the advisor to help the individual employee to know what technologies are available for them to do their job well, to exploit all technology has to offer. But also from a broader context of the overall organization, define the standards and processes we implement that help do that as well.
That idea of being the advisor is the core of it. Back in the early days of computing, you think of the data centers with the raised floors, DECwriters, reel-to-reel tape drives and guys in white coats. An antiseptic environment. Lowly users would approach on bended knee, begging the oracle to bestow on them an application that would make their life easier. Today, you go to the app stores and see there are 1.2 million apps with Apple and 1.4 million in Google Play.
The universe of apps out there is well more than any department ¬-- and certainly my department -- can be experts on. So the trusted advisor is a phrase that resonates because we have moved from that model of IT - knowing it all and going to them to solve their problem. Now we are collaborating with people that are coming to me saying, “We want to solve this problem and I have this app and/or idea. Is there a way we can use it?” Like a broker, I can match up their particular need with the right kind of resources, whether the resource is internal or external, to satisfy that need. I like working with them to figure out how we can bring that in and not feel like I have to be the person that vets all that or finds it all in the first place.
How do you move away from a transactional relationship to one that is more collaborative with your business partners?
At our size organization we just don’t have the luxury of a lot of staff interacting on a project basis with the business. My team does interact constantly with the business, but in kind of a tactical support, transactional way. For example, ”fill-in-the-blank is not working as it should,” so my team takes action on that. Or, “My PC is not working as it should,” so they will respond to that. I need to make sure my team has the education and tools to solve those problems. That is not the project level, but the transactional.
The project level falls to me. We are reaching the point that we need people to consult on a project basis. As an interim, we are bringing in tier one outside providers. If we want to do a project around collaboration with the sales force, we will go to the market and find subject matter experts for that. We brief them on what our infrastructure looks like so they know the background to plug into. They work with the business to further understand those needs and go off and do that project. It’s faster than us trying to come up to speed with all the different things out there. I can be the jack of all trades to the normal things of our business, but there are issues that will come up that need these subject matter experts.
Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer
Western & Southern Financial Group
How do you see your role with other business leaders in your company?
As a partner and business leader with shared goals, I think about Information Technology (IT) as a business function versus just a shared service. IT’s role is evolving and needs to stay abreast of the changing needs and capabilities required to do business today. The role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and IT has become a position that is instrumental in helping to drive the strategic vision of the company. We are the stewards of IT assets and investments for the company. The CIO and IT leaders need to know and understand the businesses they support, act as consultants, trusted advisors and change agents. They need to know the industry and be looking ahead for new emerging technologies and solution sets that can be a solution for cross functional enterprise needs as well as individual business needs now and in the future.
The lines between IT and business are becoming somewhat blurred. This can cause confusion regarding ownership of an activity or area of responsibility. For example, the roles and skills needed for developing digital/social media and data/analytics are many times shared between areas. Defining roles and responsibilities is becoming more important in matrix functions to assure confusion is minimized and partnership is enabled for a successful outcome.
How do you direct these relationships away from being transactional?
Start with the business strategy; identify the outcome needed and how to measure it. As head of IT, I can provide the expertise that other business leaders at Western & Southern need to do their jobs from a technology perspective. However, my team and I rely on those same business leaders for a full understanding of what their strategic needs are. By working together and understanding what those needs are, we will be in a better position to provide the right solutions. This will lead to a discussion of business capabilities required to solve the business case. Collaboration between business and IT is essential in the early stages of developing an idea or initiative to assure that the solution leverages or reuses assets, the design is holistic and of high quality, and the solution is built to be reusable, streamlined and efficient. Collaboration remains critical after an idea or initiative is implemented, to assure that as the needs evolve, so does the technology required to keep it performing properly or – in certain situations – improve with new capabilities.
How do you build trust in these relationships?
You cannot build trust unless you get to know the other person. And that is true both in your personal life as it is in business. Spend time together getting to know each other on a business and personal level. Establish priorities, have fact-based discussions and decisions. Be transparent and align/integrate and measure goals to demonstrate desire to be successful together. I am very lucky to work in a company with such a collaborative executive team – it is part of our strong culture. We are able to openly discuss needs, challenge the status quo and develop the right strategy and approach to determine the right solution. Therefore, it is very natural for us to build the kind of trust in our relationships that allow us to accomplish great things together.
Director of Information Technology
Cincinnati Sub-Zero Products
How does your vision of information technology (IT) help your company accomplish its mission statement?
Our mission is “to deliver world class temperature management solutions to our customer right the first time.” The phrase “right the first time” signifies the quality of work we strive to achieve. The IT department is always learning newer, better and faster ways to get things done with the use of the latest technologies. We have a set training budget each year to continue education and development of our IT team.
“Our vision is to create an environment that allows our team to successfully grow while developing solutions to meet and/or exceed all our customer’s needs.” When we say, “allows our team to successfully grow” as individuals and as a team,” we mean it. We accomplish this with a theme each year for our IT department to focus on and an area to develop. In 2013 we focused on the “soft skills” of the IT team – professionalism, customer service and attitude. In 2014, we emphasized “educate and empower”; learning equals change, personal accountability, staff empowered to take on new tasks and end-users empowered to take on new tasks. In 2015 it’s “LEAD,” which is an acrostic for “Listen, Empathize, Assist and Accomplish, and Do it Again.” All of this is intended to develop the IT team and the end-users in order to keep in step with Cincinnati Sub-Zero’s mission/vision. It’s my job as the IT director to mentor and develop my staff toward this goal.
How do you see your role with other business role leaders in your company?
My role in the organization from an IT perspective is to ensure no one has to worry about IT issues, infrastructure, reliability, etc. We maintain 99.9% uptime on all systems. I see my role with other managers as an encourager, to share information and technology for their benefit. I’m a promoter and evangelist for new technologies when they fit the overall strategy of our organization. I do not believe in the use of technology for technology’s sake. I believe technology has its place in business when selected and applied correctly.
How do you see your department's role in response to business leadership requirements?
It’s an interesting question. If an issue arises with technology, we are seen as the heroes who can save the day. When all is going well, we are seen as folks that don’t have much to do. It’s really my job to promote the IT team to the rest of the leadership. It’s when we are doing our job the best – keeping up with maintenance, monitoring the infrastructure and maintaining the equipment – that we are seen the least by others. It’s because of all the “unknown” work we do that we have such a high system uptime, and no need to save the day. It’s a very unique part of being in IT.
How do you direct relationships with business leaders away from being simply transactional?
It’s about the relationship first. I’ve built a rapport with the other leadership team members. I’ve spent time getting to know them and listening to their needs. I’m called into many meetings to observe and give my opinion on possible solutions. It should be relationship first, transaction second. It would be easy in my position to simply have them ask for something and provide it. A better way to operate is to understand them, their needs and their motivation for asking for a particular tool, and direct them to the best solution.
Senior Vice President
American Modern Insurance Group
What does the relationship between IT and business look like at American Modern Insurance Group?
In the insurance industry, particularly in personal lines insurance, technology and business are converging. Two years ago we began to re-platform our IT systems for personal lines. At that point, it was clear that IT and business had to become even more integrated. Prior to beginning our transformation journey, we took a step back and asked, “Is the path we are on the right path?” We were upgrading systems one product at a time, then rolling it out to 50 states, then starting on another product. It was a system that was selected over a decade ago, and it did not have a lot of robust functionality on the front end. Was a better solution out there? We looked at the software market and decided we needed to change direction, move away from cobbled-together legacy solutions and find a product that offered a suite of functionality for our business needs.
To do that, we didn’t want to continue viewing the initiative as only a technology project. We had to ask, “How do we make this more of a transformative event for the business?” Historically, we were doing 60-70 enhancements a year on the legacy systems that were consuming a lot of business and technology resources. We had to tighten the spigot down on the enhancements to free up capacity.
In addition we needed to streamline our product portfolio and simplify our underwriting rule set. That was a huge part of our business case. So it became much more of a shift from a pure technology replacement project to how do we transform the business. We talked in terms of a comprehensive business transformation, not simply a technology replacement exercise. In the end, we wanted our company to be an easier place to do business, more nimble in the marketplace, have faster speed to market, have more relevant products and exhibit tighter underwriting.
How did IT and business integrate further during this process?
The leadership agreed that the only way we should do this is if both IT and business worked together. We started our claims transformation a couple of years ago. We had claims department representatives working everyday with the IT folks. When we started the policy, billing and enterprise data warehouse project (later called AMSuite), we knew we were going into a much more complicated area of our business, so we amped up this integration even more. We combined the workspace, putting IT technicians alongside product and underwriting people. If you asked anyone in this workspace a question, you wouldn’t know if the person answering was a technical or business person since they were so engrained in the whole process.
We have been using an iterative development approach since January 2014. Each month, technicians and business representatives go through specs, build, test and deploy in a demo environment. At the end of every month we have something to demonstrate live on a screen so our users can actually see it, try it out and see what’s going on with all the major work streams of the projects. It’s very exciting and a very different way to work. The iterative development work is the key to all of this because it has enabled the business and IT folks to work side by side and the business folks can see immediate results. In the past this process would take several months after business analysts “threw the requirements over the wall” to IT. We don’t have that issue anymore.
Associate Provost and CIO for Information Technology
Northern Kentucky University
How does your vision of IT support NKU’s mission?
As CIO I spend significant time working with our administrative systems and leaders to streamline our business processes. In addition, our IT teams take a vested interest in the academic needs and staying in tune with student perspectives. One of the advantages we have is NKU’s Fuel the Flame strategic plan that was approved last year. President Geoffrey Mearns, who is very forward thinking, has led NKU in mapping the future of the university. This has been an exciting experience for the entire campus. Even though IT was in a very good place before this new strategic plan, it gave us an opportunity to prioritize our foundation and services. Through that strategic plan, we built an implementation plan to communicate all the things we are going to do through 2018. The NKU strategic plan is crystal clear; for example, one of the things is innovative, student-centered education. We have several goals in our implementation plan that supports this, including innovative mobile apps. We know students in today’s world are consumers of technology and they want to be able to do anything from anywhere 24/7.
If you look at some of the goals in the university strategic plan, many of them require technology to be successful, so there is a framework underneath to make that happen. One of the key things in the new plan is trans-disciplinary academics, such as taking curriculum from different disciplines and integrating them to bring greater learning opportunities for our students. There are opportunities for technology to impact this work both in the classroom, with online tools and other aspects. You need the tools IT can provide to record lectures and do online learning and hybrid classrooms, so students in the classroom and students working remotely all receive the same experience. There are lots of opportunities to impact the implementation of the new strategic plan through technology and we are focused on working with the campus community to make this happen. We had a plan before, but this new focus on a campus-wide strategic plan enables our efforts to fit in with it nicely.
What is the relationship like between IT and professors and academic leaders?
A lot of the innovation from an IT perspective starts outside IT with a professor who wants, for example, to do something cool like integrating tablets or iPads in the classroom. NKU faculty have innovative ideas on how to leverage technology to increase learning outcomes. In fine arts, faculty and students are using tablets and apps instead of actual color swatches to teach color theory. Journalism students are using tablets and apps to produce their news stories. So innovation can happen when technology is leveraged to meet a need, and there are many emerging technologies that can make a tremendous difference, but we have to figure out how to leverage it at NKU. The academic leaders on campus bring many opportunities to our IT folks and we work together to make it happen.
What are the key objectives for NKU to continue growing?
Under the leadership of president Mearns and provost Sue Ott Rowlands, we are all striving for excellence. We want to be the best at what we do – educating students to be successful academically and prepared for their careers. NKU is focused on key areas such as experiential learning that enhances their coursework and will allow students to be even more competitive in the marketplace. So overall it’s excellence in what we do and that we help each and every student reach their goals both academically and beyond. Our mission places students in the center of all that we do.
Vice President of Operations
ProSource
How does your vision of IT support ProSource’s Mission?
Our mission is to be the “Partner of choice, helping customers win with Office Equipment, Document Automation and Technology Solutions.” We deliver solutions through a combination of systems, software, people and process. Our mission permeates every area of our business. For IT, that means our systems have to allow customers to reach us, and make accessing and activating our solutions simple, quick and reliable. It also means providing a delivery system for our team that allows us to respond quickly and effectively. If customers can't reach us when they need us, we put our customers and our business at risk.
Understanding how people work, and making it simpler and more effective to get the job done, is a win for our customers and our team. I believe the more flexible and accessible our technology, the stronger the business today and for the future.
How do you correlate business risk back to IT?
All of our assessments of risk come down to the impact on customers and our team. We plan, budget and measure our success daily based upon how our customers rate us through real time surveys, our response and our customers’ access points to our services.
Sometimes the risk includes embracing a technology, such as the new evolution of mobile devices like the Microsoft Surface, and putting that idea to a real-time test. We are doing that now with our sales team – deploying enough to test, and assessing how the devices impact our team response to customers. The risk is that the technology fails to deliver to expectations; we negatively impact our customer relationships along with losing the money and the time invested.
Growth means that our core systems and infrastructure become more formal, more process oriented, and as a result, we risk being slower to react to the changes in the marketplace. Riding the wave between necessary process and the flexibility to make changes that deliver a better customer experience is a daily decision that impacts the entire organization, not just IT. The mechanics to measure risk are the same: did we deliver to the customers’ expectations, and did we improve our relationship or not? The risk with IT for us is that customer impact.
How do you direct the relationship between IT and the rest of the staff away from being simply transactional?
ProSource is a community, individuals sharing a common vision and a set of values. Starting with relationships, and supporting one another as people first, we focus on the outcome. This makes transactions a means to the end, rather than a roadblock. Relationships are all about trust, and trust is all about vulnerability. Vulnerability is the willingness to be transparent and say, “Something is wrong, and I don't get it,” along with the willingness to hear that message and react to solve the problem. Negativity or fear on either side of that conversation builds silos, holding back people and the organization. All of our team, including IT, is enveloped in this culture of support, willing to engage for a solution through collaboration. I believe this is more about leadership and not direction; if my team sees me as engaged and trusting, they adopt the behaviors.
Regional executive officer, Vice President of Information Systems for Americas and EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa)
Kao Corporation
How does IT support the vision of the business?
We are part of Kao Corporation, a $14 billion consumer products company, headquartered in Japan.
We manage the IT function for the Beauty Care Business in the Americas and EMEA regions, serving more than 3,500 users. The guiding principles for Kao are called the Kao Way. The Kao Way states that “Our mission is to strive for the wholehearted satisfaction and enrichment of the lives of people globally and to contribute to the sustainability of the world, with products and brands of excellent value that are created from the consumer’s and customer’s perspective.” IS lives closely to Kao Way principles, especially Genba-ism, which “defines the importance of observing things ‘on-site,’ in the actual location and environment, both internally and externally, in order to maximize our understanding of the business and optimize our performance.” That is one component of the Kao mission that we really buy into and model within IS. The Information Systems group has a very robust mission and vision statement that ties to the Kao Way, including global business standardization, optimizing processes and providing information and analytics to enable the business to make good decisions. In this way, IS supports these so the Kao Way can be accomplished.
How does IT move from transactional relationship to more of a partnership with business executives?
We have always partnered very closely with the business. There are a few tenets that we always work under. In any work that we do to provide a solution for the business, we work closely with our business contacts at all levels. On the business process side, we orient all of our support functions by process areas, such as order to cash, forecast to finish goods, finance, human capital development, etc. We ask our resources to become knowledgeable about the business processes, best practices and current market-leading solutions in those areas. We try to be very knowledgeable and collaborate with the business when they say we have this requirement or need, and then we are able to provide perspective. We also encourage our IS team members to engage with the business to influence them to move in a direction of optimization; not waiting for them to come talk to us, but proactively engaging them. Through the collaborative dialog about best practices we can influence what is implemented for the business in a positive way.
How does IT affect change to mitigate business risk?
We have a group that we call the Productivity Management team. One of the disciplines this group owns is change management. From my point of view, there are four key disciplines for change management: 1) training, 2) communication, 3) executive sponsorship, and 4) monitoring role changes.
We go through a process of evaluating the change management requirements for every initiative, from infrastructure projects to new robust systems. Then, for every project that we execute as an IS group we incorporate change management. I have insisted on this from day one of my 16 years here. It is a part of our DNA now. The change management process is a key aspect of how we mitigate risk and ensure we get people through the change process successfully. It is a robust process, but it is really something we must focus on to not only reduce risk, but to also optimize outcomes for the business.
Vice President of Management Information Systems
Sibcy Cline
How does your vision of IT support your company’s mission?
Our Company philosophy has always been that the real estate business is about people, and our IT core values are guided by that business rule. We know we need to provide the best real estate services that are tied with technology. In fact, technology is leveraged in providing excellent customer service and interact with our clients and our Realtors. That is what drives our business more than anything else.
How do we continue to strive to improve our business processes and provide the right resources for our people to do their job as well as they possibly can?
Our concept of “one-stop service” that we provide to our agents for our clients gives our buyers and sellers the ability to not only sell and/or buy a home, but also helps them with the entire real estate process. From mortgage, insurance, title, home services and even relocation services, we are there to help. And, we just started a new line of business called Second Story Auctions. This online auction service is designed for our home sellers who are getting their homes ready for sale by helping them sell their furniture and other household goods they no longer need. A de-cluttered home improves the marketability of it and is much more appealing to buyers. And speaking of home buyers, these people are also using our online auction to buy the things they need for their new homes. In essence, our “one-stop shop” concept is to provide tools, technology and capabilities that allow our agents to do a great job in helping our clients throughout the entire buying and selling process.
How do you see your role with other business leaders in your company?
I see my role as an IT business enabler. I help facilitate the strategic initiatives that our management have targeted and provide the IT leadership to accomplish those strategic goals. If our business goals are for example to improve customer engagement and have more units sold, those key-drivers can be tracked and identified with technology applications. We can then provide technology tools that our agents are able to use that can help agent productivity and have more satisfied customers. In turn, more satisfied customers translate to more business growth. IT provides the tools, capabilities and infrastructure to make that happen. My responsibility is to facilitate the use of company IT resources and in ensuring best Return on Investment for the company for IT projects. IT is the Change agent and Innovation Center to radically improve business. IT helps the business innovate and provide services that help improve customer service and grow the business.
How do you move away from a transactional relationship to one that is more collaborative?
The first step is ensuring that solid transactional capabilities are being provided. Once transactional efficiency is met and you have built the trust of our agents and clients, you take the discussion to the next level. That’s when you are able to have a dialogue on how to improve the business and be collaborative.
You can then use your IT resources and leverage them in the most effective way to attain business goals and provide solutions that improve productivity and communication with your stakeholders. You also need to have an open mind and must constantly consider key developments in your industry. One of my responsibilities is to make sure we continue to look for new ideas that might have significant positive impact to the business. Technology has radically changed how real estate is done now. We have to be looking towards the future and provide solutions and capabilities that help align the gap of what the business wants and what IT provides. We can then deliver Technology and Business solutions that help business grow in a collaborative manner.
Associate Provost and CIO
Xavier University
How does your vision for IT support Xavier’s mission?
I think the thing that really makes my job fulfilling to me is the whole mission, which is at the center of everything that happens at Xavier. But coupled with that mission is our students’ (welfare). Our vision statement actually says “Xavier men and women become people of learning and reflection, integrity and achievement, in solidarity for and with others.” That is really at the core of who and what we are for our students, coupled with the mission to get us here. When we can become enablers for the faculty and the students to experience higher education, whether it’s experiential learning while they’re here or immersion into the service learning perspective, technology can make it such a richer experience.
A perfect example of this is IT’s partnership with our new center for innovation. Through innovation and with technology Xavier can be an exciting place students want to attend and employees want to stay. We want people inside and outside of Xavier to know our story and see how the partnership between technology and innovation is changing Xavier’s identity, and how we can make it a meaningfully unique place to be.
How do you see your role with faculty, staff and students?
I’ve come to learn that, from the faculty perspective, in a lot of cases where technology was the unknown, a lot of it was fear-based. And if you put yourself in their shoes, they don’t want to get up in front of a class of 20 students and go to use some technology and fumble. Students are savvy, they know the technology better than most of us. So, you can imagine, being 18, after a whole life spent using technology, their expectations of the technology in higher education should be even more progressive. Really the root of all of it is embracing the relationship, a partnership. If we have that relationship, whether it’s with the faculty, the business leaders or our development office, who’s out there talking with alumni, potential donors, we’re running together and trying to figure out how, through innovation and with technology we can make this place exciting and someplace the students will want to attend; a place the employees are proud to say they work at, then I can retain them.
How do you go beyond a transactional relationship with the business leaders to go deeper?
I think by showing that we can do it we gained their trust, because they saw it happen. And then by us continuing to do that and starting to – it’s almost like a snowball – we’re starting to go faster and get bigger, because we’re doing more of it, that they’re seeing us lead by example, and they’re seeing that we’re putting our money where our mouths are. They’re doing it. So we’re growing that trust – it’s not just talk, it’s actually happening.
I think the other thing we do a little differently is we just don’t do status quo over and over. For example, when a vendor contract comes up, we don’t just necessarily renew it. We look at it, we bid out almost everything, and we look at whether or not it makes sense to stay with them. When a system comes up and needs an upgrade, I’m known to say, “Why should we stay with them?” For example, our blackboard 2 1/2 years ago came up. The hardware needed it, the OS needed it and the actual application all needed updating. I said, “Perfect time to look to see if we want another solution.” It ended up that we picked one. We formed a little team of all faculty and one IT person, and we ended up picking Canvas, which is cloud-based, agile and the interface is very social-media-like. Students love it.
It’s that kind of stuff that shows the proof is in the pudding and when you have your biggest people that just say they hate technology (actually) using Canvas, which is agile, students love it – and I’m saving a boatload of money – it’s such a win.
Chief Information Officer
Vantiv
How does the vision of Vantiv guide technology’s vision?
At the core, Vantiv’s vision is simplifying payments innovation. That means that we create assets that simplify customer experience with payments. Any asset we think about at Vantiv is a technology asset. Anything we do across the organization is a manifestation of that. Whether we enable Apple Pay, utilize mobile devices or seamlessly connect merchants through our digital ecosystem, the vision is the same.
We are a technology company; it is our business. Sooner or later – 8, 10, 15 years from now – there will be very few businesses that will not consider technology the business itself.
In a technology-centric business, how do you prepare people for change?
The education we went through was the key. Although people are excited about outcomes, people are also excited about the journey to get to that outcome. Change is the mindset. The changes will be the new norm. The sooner people realize that the world around us doesn’t stop, the better, since nothing around us is static. Assuming a static model is not real anymore. It took a while for my organization to realize that change is the new norm and they need to feel comfortable about that and uncomfortable when it’s static. I think I got it to a point where when it is static people get anxious. In order to thrive we have to continuously change in order to see where things are and how to improve.
How do you see your role within a “rapid change” environment?
The days of autocratic roles are long gone. Outside of that we all play multiple roles at any point in time, such as evangelist, coach and team leader. No one has a fixed role. You have to be able to adapt and organize your leadership style to what the organization and the team needs at any point in time.
The important thing to realize is if the changes are drastic, then you have to be able to coach people so that they are successful in their new roles. If someone has a lead engineer role today, tomorrow you may want him to be a lead architect. That individual may aspire to do that new role and you will have to be prepared to coach him into that role. You cannot put someone in a role where they will most likely fail without support. That is the organizational support you need to have when large change occurs.
How do you communicate risk with other business partners?
Business partners care about many things. I see two prominent concerns. First, will the manifestation of the risk affect the client? Second, will the revenue be affected? The business partners wear multiple hats when it comes to business risk and technological decisions. I need to be able to articulate the risk and give them a prediction of the impact, and more importantly, the probability of that impact. If you say risk and don’t quantify it, then you are driving fear.
I have found that the more transparent you are, the more support you get. The more you talk to them, the more they become aware, the more they are able to support you in those positions. Transparency is a huge advantage, unlike 10 years back when it was seen as weakness. When you are in a place to make a decision, you typically have about 15-20% insight. If you make an effort to socialize that with a few more people, then you get a little more insight. The closer you get to 30-40% of insight is when you are ready to decide.
Chief Innovation Officer
Xavier University
How does your vision for innovation reflect Xavier’s core values?
Xavier University was founded by a Jesuit, and promotes Jesuit values. Its original founder, Ignatius Loyola said to his followers: “go forth and set the world on fire.” And that’s exactly what we’re doing do here at the CFI. We’re igniting it. For me, the reason I went into innovation and left the world of finance is I was tired of having to have the conversations about cost reductions or budgets. I thought, what’s the opposite of that? It’s becoming a creator. It’s being the one who creates stuff so we can make money. Then I don’t have to have those conversations. So we built the whole model around it. When we talk about that whole ignite, inspire, connect and transform, it’s changing people’s mindsets. And what I ultimately want is to see what we do at the center bleed over and become one with the university.
What is your approach to correlate business risk with innovation delivery?
The great thing about it is they no longer say that 80% of what you do in innovation fails; they now say only about 50% fail. So at least our numbers are coming down. If you get better and better at innovation, you shouldn’t fail as much. I think we have a great leadership team, a great president, and it’s really helping them understand what the risks of innovation are; and switching the mentality from return on investment to return on innovation. Starting to build metrics around return on innovation. We have to teach students it’s OK to fail. No matter when it falls apart or when things look bad, you have to keep going and you may have to tweak it. It’s really about the spirit of innovation. You put something out there, you tweak it and then you tweak it again. Most of innovation is really what I call renovation. Go in and look at your processes and tweak them. That’s innovation. In the world of innovation, 80% of my job should be about renovation and 20% of my job should be about transformation. Because the renovation aspect will keep the risk lower, and as you build that trust, you can go out and do those wild things around transformation, and say, let’s invest in this. If it fails, it fails. It’s teaching Xavier’s leaders about the different aspect of risk.
How does your definition of success change with that risk in mind?
A metaphor for innovation is the San Andreas Fault. That’s truly what innovation is. It’s tension between what we think is safe versus what risk is. I spend a lot of time with my team helping them redefine their definitions. When someone’s always chasing the dollar, and inflation hits, what happens to your self-worth? It drops even more. What happens to investments? To look at them as a return on investments, that’s a value, but it’s a value that’s going to be going away. We know that 40% of the top 100 companies won’t survive because they’re looking at ROI under an old lens. It’s looking at opportunity differently; not at the cost of what could I lose, and not at all of what can I gain. We’ve got to look beyond these definitions because that’s what has defined business, and limited business, for centuries.
There are universities closing every day because they just can’t make it. Cost of higher education is going up. If higher education is not set up with a new model, universities will be closing their doors every day because people are asking themselves: why do I need to go to a four-year institution? I work for higher education so I believe there is a value to higher education, but what about trades? We definitely need to open our eyes in higher education and redefine what we have always seen as success.
Chief Technology Officer
UPIC Solutions
How does the vision of UPIC align with the vision of United Way?
We have a very similar mission to United Way of helping others, that community service mindset. We just do it in a little different way. We do it by empowering United Way through technology. United Way does it by empowering their agencies, making sure they’re doing the right things, and have the support they need to be successful. These are all the things I think United Way does well and we’re empowering them. In terms of UPIC and our vision, what we’re trying to do is really instill that in the culture of our staff. We’re very customer oriented, much like United Way. We try to make sure we figure out what those new needs are and serve them.
How do you see your role with the business leaders of United Way?
What I think my role in this organization, first of all, is being a strategic listener. If we can’t listen first it creates a big challenge. We can’t just say no. I want to see what the actual meaning is behind that ask and if it’s something that fits into the business. Usually when I ask that question, I’m also thinking in the light of whether this is something that we can operationalize, automate and standardize; if it will make sense and provide value to others. If it can, then let’s do it. If we can’t, I need to decide if it’s worth saying no to a request from one of our large clients. In some cases, we go back to consulting, which is I’m hearing what they say they want but what do they really need? But I think the important part here, and something I’ve certainly learned and become better at, is just shutting up, and trying to listen to what that need is, where they’re coming from. Because until I start listening, I’m really just a roadblock.
How do you move beyond the transactional relationship with the leaders of each United Way?
When interacting with an individual United Way, I have learned to “suggest.” I could command it. I could say this is exactly what we’re going to do. That’s a change I made several years ago. I had to stop doing that and become more of a partner within the business and really understand what was going on. It’s a negotiation, quite frankly, in figuring out what makes the most sense. Large donor companies and United Ways are more challenging in the negotiation process. And at the end of the day, I have to figure out how I make it work within UPIC’s standard service model. That back and forth process is what we’re trying to accomplish so no one feels like they’re on the extreme. Instead, we all feel like we’re on the same team and in this together. That’s just the relationship between UPIC and one United Way, so when we try to get two or more United Ways together to talk, it becomes a little more difficult. So when you get a whole bunch of strong business leaders together and they’ve all figured out how to do it best their own way, how do you standardize that? How do you get them to follow a different model? It takes a lot to do that. So it really came down to that grass-roots effort, spending time negotiating and talking to staff to get those values in the United Way.
Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer
Great American Insurance Group, Property and Casualty Insurance Group
How do you deal with the reality of rapid change in business today?
The phrase, “change agent” is easy to use. Everyone uses it by default. The issue is that everyone embraces change except when it impacts their processes directly. I think in today’s business world, we have an opportunity to bring about that change during a technology transformation. If we miss that opportunity it’s very difficult to pivot yourself again.
There are two kinds of companies that exist today: traditional companies, referred to as legacy native companies, and digital native companies that were born and brought up in the digital age. The legacy native companies have a gap from an operations and customer experience standpoint because in the last 10 years technology has changed completely. A lot of legacy native companies are much further ahead in aspects of technology, but customers’ and employees’ expectations continue to push the envelope as consumer benchmarks for convenience and “ease of use” are being enriched every day with the introduction of new capabilities.
When we talk change, I think over time corporate America has taught us that we all need to have consensus to move forward. This is considered teamwork. (Former British prime minister) Margaret Thatcher defined consensus as “The process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects.” Some leaders are consensus leaders and others are change agents. Consensus leaders will look for agreement from everyone, but to achieve transformation that is hard to achieve. Consensus is the lowest common denominator, a risk-aversion mentality. In any group, if I have to get five people to agree for dinner and sign off on this decision, McDonald’s becomes the easiest choice in terms of consensus. Within a rapidly changing environment, I am not seeking consensus to achieve transformation; instead, it is about empowering the environment. It’s my job to define the strategy, remove barriers and be a cheerleader and continue to drive the vision.
What is the greatest challenge for Great American’s P&C group in this rapid change environment?
The life span of S&P (Standard & Poor’s) 500 companies traditionally lasted 60 years. Now it’s 17 years, and projected to go down to eight years. This means that every two weeks an S&P 500 company is being replaced by a new company. The pressure for traditional companies is huge. The challenge for all legacy native traditions is to stay relevant for the future and the empowered consumer of today. The future consumer expects a very different level of interaction. I don’t mean just the external person, but also the employee. They have expectations that are driven by their day-to-day life experience. While the world is getting complex we have to hide the complexity and exhibit a simplified user interface to the consumer. Just think about it – consumers do software upgrades easily these days by the click of a button. Their question is why does it take corporations six months to do an upgrade? Consumer behavior and expectation will drive much of the corporate environment. Ease of use, design and simplicity drives what we do and how we build it. The challenge is to stay relevant.
How do you measure success?
I think success is measured by analyzing end-user adoption. There are two aspects to technology. One is the technology itself, but the other major part is working on expectations of the user environment as their end-user experience continuously changes. You have to make it easy to use. They need to see the value proposition in that respect. The end-user adoption really becomes the true testament.
Vice President, Information Technology
Ohio National Financial Services
In your opinion, how does IT support the vision of the business?
The way we look at strategy is that IT is part of the business. We see projects as business projects. IT, marketing, product development, actuarial, etc., are all part of delivering the business project. Our goal is to make it look like IT is part of the business and try not to do an “over the wall” process. The corporate strategy is to look three to five years ahead because we want to grow our businesses. Ohio National’s vision is “To be your company of choice through integrity, trusted relationships and financial strength.”
At the end of 2014, we moved into strategic business units with named leaders of each of those different businesses. We expanded our South American operation, leveraging the rapidly growing insurance marketplaces in Brazil, Chile and Peru. In the past, we operated more as one strategic business unit, but now strategic business unit leaders are focused on growing each of our five businesses. Our goal, as part of this new corporate strategy, is to grow these businesses up to scale and the company as a whole.
As part of this new corporate strategy we needed to look at how IT can be prepared to compensate for some of the investments we didn’t make in the past and position ourselves to support that desired growth. Over the last year we hired 190 (48 in IT alone) new people in the company. Since 2008 we have experienced a 50 percent increase to our workforce. A significant amount were hired for IT. We are about making IT a partner of choice with the business. Sometimes you’re going to lead and other times you will follow, but it’s a partnership.
How does IT move from a transactional relationship to more of a partnership with the business?
That is a transformation that we have to make. From both an IT and a business perspective, we want to move out of that transactional. In some cases we are trying to change where the business felt like they were given something from IT instead of really meeting their needs. You may have heard the phrase, “IT found a solution and then came to look for the problem to solve.” We don’t want to do this. We want to understand what the business opportunity is and how we apply the right technology solution. For example, a new administrative platform for our life products was a big need. There was a big collaborative project put together with representatives from business and IT to evaluate the different vendors. As a team, they made a recommendation to senior management. In the past that might have been IT finding a system and then turning it over to the business team. In this case we had the business leading the charge and IT was hand in hand to find the right system that met the needs of the business. We want to enable the business folks with tools that ensure success. That is a big change that we are seeing at Ohio National.
How do you deal with change on the people front and communicating that change to business executives?
It’s all about communication. You have to keep reiterating what your strategy is, whether it is IT or corporate strategy. Constant reiteration. In absence of communication, folks are going to make up their own scenarios. Sometimes it is the right scenario and they move forward by embracing the change. Sometimes it’s doom and gloom and they can’t handle the change. This reality is the reason approximately 90 percent of our employees have gone through change management training. We are making huge changes here. The corporate strategy, including huge investments and hiring new associates, affects everyone in the company. This is where we are go- ing, having a goal to help people get through change.
VP of Infrastructure and Business Apps
First Financial Bank
How does your vision of IT support your company’s mission?
First Financial Bank’s employees share a common vision across the company and that is, “We will exceed our clients’ expectations and satisfy their financial needs by building long-term relationships using a client-centered, value-added approach.” From an IT perspective, our clients are not only our external customers, but each line of business that relies on the Information Technology department to provide a solid infrastructure in which the bank can operate and grow as needed by consumer demands. We could build and maintain the best infrastructure, but if we only did that and didn’t foster a relationship with our business and clients we wouldn’t have the insight of what was expected as technical trusted advisors to the business. Recently, one of our executives wrote, “A bank’s success is predicated on the ability to deliver products and services how, when and where the client desires.” We strive as an IT organization to help the bank accomplish that.
How do you see your role with other leaders in your company?
Our role has evolved greatly in the past several years. If I had to pick a role, I would say “advisor.” From projects, strategic initiatives and roadmap planning to a simple implementation for five users, we want to be involved at the very beginning of the process and sometimes it’s easier said than done. Workplaces in our industry are fast-paced environments and with on-premise software and cloud solutions so easily accessible by anyone at any time, it takes defined processes and relationships to become that “trusted” advisor rather than just an implementer or doer. I’m very proud of our organization and the relationships we have in place to allow us to fulfill that role.
How do you direct these relationships away from being simply transactional?
A few years ago, we started an initiative that reached out to First Financial Bank business leaders in an effort to better understand their organizational activities and objectives. We proposed a more formal and regular process of information sharing that would help both parties effectively manage technology, projects, change and other organizational challenges. The output of this effort would be a stronger relationship between the company’s technology group and the business partners charged with executing the company’s strategic plan. We called it simply the Business Partner Engagement Program. In summary, it was our way of showing IT’s commitment to building a relationship with our business partners. By embracing this model, I feel we are quickly moving away from “we need, you give” and turning transactional into relational.
Sometime business and technology are incompatible. How do you bridge that gap?
In all honesty, business and technology are incompatible quite a bit, and there are numerous factors that could cause the gap; limited budget, exposure/risk, compliance, resources, infrastructure and others. The best way to bridge the gap is to clearly identify the business need and work as a partnership to outline needs vs. wants, and consider the build-buy-leverage process prior to searching for a technology.
Chief Technology Officer
Paycor
How does your vision of IT line up with the company’s core values?
Paycor’s corporate philosophy is one of the bests of its kind. Take care of clients, that’s our first guiding principle. But if you look at the themes around our philosophy, they're hugely about people. Clients are people, too. Our other guiding principles are taking care of each other, fostering teamwork, respecting diversity, improving personally and professionally, and having fun. These are all about our people. We have a huge focus on products and services at Paycor. And our products are really in service to our clients—to increase their efficiencies, their capabilities and the value they get out of our software. Our IT organization is responsible not only for building and improving our products, they are responsible for our clients—in partnership, of course, with our great Client Service teams. We are also responsible for the phones, the computers and everything that keeps our infrastructure running internally. So we treat our own employees as our clients as well. We want to take the pride in providing a great service to all our customers, whether our clients or our colleagues.
How do you correlate business risk back to IT?
As a SaaS technology provider, a key component of our IT function is product development. Our risk in IT is not being able to offer all the solutions our clients need. We solve this risk by building our own innovative solutions and enabling third-party providers to integrate with our core Human Capital Management and Payroll platforms. Our recent launches of Perform Onboarding and Perform Time are great examples of our product innovation in response to risk.
How do you approach your leadership role with your team?
My role is to coach and nurture. Beyond my coaching, I have to get on the practice field and work alongside our people. To continue the sports analogy, while we are in the game, I don’t get on the field and try to do what the players do. Instead, I work to remove distractions, enable my teams and empower my players. You put good players on the field and entrust them to win the game. If I micromanage, I run the risk of my players not knowing what to do if left alone in the game. Trusting my teams also inspires creativity. In the technology field, creativity and innovation are critical. The traditional command and control style probably works well in the military, but in technology, it’s more about empowering and enabling the team.
How important is the relationship between IT and the business executives?
Very important. I not only have to empower and trust my team, but I have to build that same trust in me with our CEO, my peers and the board. Executive leaders need to focus on both the horizontal and vertical hierarchy because they are equally important. Leaders don’t just manage their employees or the executives above them, they manage their peers as well. Without trust at the horizontal level, leaders can be crippled or their success can be delusionary. So it’s about taking your business partners seriously and putting yourself in their shoes, whether that is sales partners or accounting partners. As you build that trust, you will spend less energy fighting for the choices you have to make for technology.
Director of IT Operations
AdvancePierre Foods
How do you correlate business risk back to IT?
Business risk correlating with what IT is doing right now is trying to get as much information as we can because our true facility operations within the manufacturing business unit is requiring more information. So IT is becoming in line with them to help assist the risk factors to add capacity to a plant versus building or purchasing another plant. We have people that play different roles. There is a huge value add when you start utilizing a true information processing system. To have IT drive that or sell that to help them mitigate risk during manufacturing or even getting their raw materials together to minimize waste is a plus. Another aspect is that we are looking to do organic growth as opposed to acquisitions: Where can IT assist for the information they need to know that this is a viable, organic growth path for some of our product lines.
How do you bring IT beyond the transactional relationship with your business leaders?
I come with a background where IT is like the maintenance department, but you want to become more proactive than reactive. You want to handle the break/fix relationship, but fix it before it breaks is better. IT, in history, has been the maintenance department from the beginning, but if you build the team right and have the right resources and focuses, all of a sudden we can become a tremendous asset to the company. That’s what we have been working on in the past five years. I hate being reactive; I love being proactive. I am assisting the IT towers to become more centric in the business. A piece of hardware or software may not always fix things, yet our project management tower has enough IT knowledge that we can help you with a process. It may not require IT intervention, but we have the knowledge. We put our project management office in the meeting and they might have suggestions to overcome the hurdle for a piece of hardware/software.
I left data processing 20 years ago. Now it’s information technologies. We’re not transactional per se. Our systems are, but we are not even hardcore in our systems. Our users are the superusers now. IT is not so much anymore. We have a few because we want to give guides in the right places, but we are not in constant battles over a database. We may help you out with a small program that got screwed up, but others can get in there and fix it. We will assist you to fix it, but we didn’t break it. I don’t look at IT as transactional anymore. People come to me wanting solutions. We come up with the solutions and that’s what I like to be able to present to our customers.
How do you lead your teams through change?
There is lots of change, whether it’s from the priorities of today being changed tomorrow due to something we didn’t have the vision to see or the knowledge that has not been told yet, whether from organizational changes or promotions. I always try to tell everybody that your time is coming. If you cannot accept change, then you’re in the wrong industry. When you say yes to IT it’s 365, 24/7. I set the expectation that change is part of all this. Who wants to be a part of it and who wants to lead it? You have to embrace change or you won’t make it very long.
Chief Information Officer
Convergys Corporation
How does your vision of IT support your company’s mission?
IT is a core requirement of our business. Our biggest asset is our people who answer calls on behalf of our clients. IT’s job is to make sure we provide them with tools that work reliably and predictably so that they can do their job effectively. The technology organization within Convergys starts and ends the day thinking of ways we can help our core business operations. The business of call centers is, to a large extent, an efficiency play. We need to make sure we schedule our agents to come in and be ready to answer the phones when the calls are expected to come in. The forecasting of those calls, scheduling the right agents to come in and have those calls routed to them efficiently are all functions of our technology infrastructure. If we don’t have the agents with the right skills scheduled to be present and answer those calls, the callers could be waiting on hold for a long time causing dissatisfaction and brand erosion for our clients. Our team is constantly looking for ways to improve how we do each of the above-mentioned functions to improve customer satisfaction and brand loyalty for our customers. My job is to make sure that each and every person on our team believes in the same thing and understands the importance of a reliable and efficient technology infrastructure and works toward providing that to our agents.
What have you done to help technology enhance business?
Over the past few years, the IT team has made a conscious effort to get closer to the business. Our team is one of the best in the industry. Many of our IT people have been with the company a long time. Having said that, it is important for them to understand exactly what our agents go through on a daily basis. During the initial few months of my tenure, it was important to me that our team, from top to bottom, understood that. A number of our team members spent time at the call center experiencing first-hand what our agents do on a daily basis. They came back with a different perspective and ideas to help the company do our job better, by providing better solutions for the operations of the call center. We have developed a number of applications that have been touted by magazines like Information Week as “Best Ideas to Steal.” We have some of the best tools to help our associates do their job in an efficient manner. That wouldn’t have been possible without understanding the pain of the user.
How do you move away from a transactional relationship to one that is more collaborative with your business partners?
One word – TRUST. If the business partners believe that we have their best interest and success at heart, there is no reason for them to doubt our capabilities. At Convergys, the IT organization works hard at earning that trust from our business partners every day and maintaining that. In most organizations, IT is looked at as a necessary evil. Our job is to make sure that the investment that the company is willing to make in IT is put to use in the best possible manner and deliver the benefits the business is looking for from those investments. If the business trusts the technology organization and knows that we have their back, approvals for projects get easier and more time is spent on developing great solutions for our core operations than in justifying why we need investment. We fully understand that we have to prove our mettle. Every organization makes mistakes. We have been very successful in minimizing those mistakes and when we do make them, the business collaborates with us to fix it. That’s what I call a true partnership and we have that here at Convergys.
Vice President for Information Technology
University of Cincinnati
How does your vision of IT support the University of Cincinnati’s core values?
We are an interdependent team sustaining and advancing the university through information technology partnerships. Collaborations with students, faculty, and staff make our work meaningful and are foundational to the university’s shared vision for information technology, research and academics.
For example, we collaborated on a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to support a dedicated, high-speed research network. Faculty researchers in the College of Engineering & Applied Science and the McMicken College of Arts & Sciences teamed up with IT@UC to submit the NSF Campus Cyberinfrastructure – Infrastructure, Innovation and Engineering Program grant. The $499,741 award funds the development of UCScienceNet, a dedicated, high-speed research network to facilitate the transfer of very large data sets or very fast transfer of data for real-time visualization and analysis. Joint planning and implementation ensures that the IT investment is fully aligned with the university’s research focus.
How do you see your role with IT students and the IT community outside of UC?
I think it’s tremendously important to connect people with the right resources and partnerships—to communicate authentically and follow up on commitments. That’s the sort of relationship you want to have with your customers, your vendors, and your community network. One of the hallmarks of a successful community is a relational way of doing business based on quality assurance, best practices and reliability.
The Greater Cincinnati start-up community is particularly generous. Recently, I had the opportunity to introduce UC students to the founders of Batterii. These talented and generous entrepreneurs have launched a third successful startup. They are great role models—willing to have conversations and exchange ideas. I know if I send an intern or a student there, they will encounter generous people who will make time for real dialogue.
What is the biggest challenge you have with IT meeting business objectives?
Change is a constant. We are often “building the plane while flying.” Listening, validating and having agreement on outcomes (transparency, deliverables, timeline, cost-benefit, and sustainment) are the keys to navigating effective change management across all areas of enterprise information technology. Project management resources—especially people—help us navigate the course together with our partners. We build trust in one another and that trust—combined with a spirit of helpfulness, communication, and transparency—moves the needle significantly toward mutually beneficial results.
An example of an area of rapid change and transformation is eLearning. At UC, thirteen percent of enrollments are currently in programs delivered completely online. These students experience UC without ever stepping foot on campus.
eLearning is not only about convenience and cost-savings. It’s primarily focused on student success. As the technology organization for the university, we focus our energy on partnerships that support our faculty and ensure students have the very best learning experiences in all environments—fully or partially online, in-person, in classrooms and in the community.
To deliver eLearning well is an evolving science that requires investments of time, talent and budget. This is a major shift in our educational mindset. It’s not just about following trends or the launching of the newest device; it’s about sustained collaboration and complimentary technology choices that assure the best outcomes for our students, our faculty researchers and community partners.
Chief Information Officer
Bahl & Gaynor
How does your vision of IT support Bahl & Gaynor’s core values?
Glenn Warden: One of the core values at Bahl & Gaynor is to provide outrageous customer service for our clients every day. Our goal is to be known as the company with the best customer service in the financial investment industry. The promise we make to our clients is that we’ll work harder for them than anyone else so that they can have the means for a richer experience of life. We enhance their value so that they can do things like pay for college, go on family vacations, retire early or leave behind an inheritance. Our mantra is “dividends pay dividends.” We live by this. We buy stocks that pay dividends and then we grow them. We help people make money so that they can enjoy an easier lifestyle.
How does this translate with IT? Some IT departments rate success as “keeping the lights on and making things work.” My mission, though, is to also provide outrageous customer service to my clients, the Bahl & Gaynor employees. I work hard to maintain a strategic vision for the infrastructure here and then try and put into place the most effective and efficient tools so we track towards this vision. My No. 1 job is to make their jobs easier.
Of course, there are also a lot of things that IT does for the investing clients from a technology standpoint, but my most direct clients are the people here. I work every day to provide outrageous customer service for them so they can provide outrageous customer service for our clients.
When people leave at the end of the day, our software is still tracking, updating and outputting. Our stocks work behind the scenes and so does our IT network. My job is to keep that network humming smoothly 24 hours a day. It’s not an easy task, but neither is theirs.
If we want our investing clients to have a better lifestyle by the way we invest their money, I want my clients to have a better lifestyle here at Bahl & Gaynor by the way we manage our IT.
How do you measure the success of your IT role?
I measure my success through our employees. That translates into making rounds and talking to each one of the business units and sitting with the traders. I want to hear their feedback and understand if they are happy with their work, and if our clients are happy with our products. At least once a year I go and sit in each office for 30-60 minutes. I ask them what they think about IT. Sometimes I send out open and anonymous surveys. I call it “IT therapy.” This is critical in order to understand our success and our weaknesses.
What is the relationship between IT and other business executives?
My goal has always been to build these relationships based on honesty and integrity. I think people at B&G know that I’ll provide honest recommendations with the big picture in mind. In the end, I’ll defer to my clients, but the principles are the same in every relationship in that they are all about trust. I want people to know I understand their needs, and that I have their best interests in mind.
Our clients trust Bahl & Gaynor with their investments. The managers at B&G also place their trust in IT when they hand over their operating systems, maintenance and the security of information. Without the IT systems running properly no one is working or trading or doing anything, so it’s a big responsibility that I don't take lightly.
In general, relationships are an ongoing process. I’m constantly working on them, constantly feeding them and making them better. It’s kind of like a marriage. You have to consistently work on it and give good effort to make it a good one.
Vice President of Technology
Pure Romance
How do you correlate business risk back to IT?
That’s been one of the challenges for us as we grow our team. The past few years we have been working to become better business partners and trusted advisors. Working closer with the business leaders and consultants ensures we understand the actual business needs. As we shift from order takers to stronger business partners, we inherently start understanding the risks. If we truly understand the needs, we are able to deliver solutions that make an impact. If we are not successful becoming better business partners we can end up just getting in the way of progress, in turn slowing growth. If we get it wrong, our consultants struggle to be successful. If they aren’t successful, our organization is not successful.
How do you direct the relationship between IT and your consultants away from being simply transactional?
That is often difficult for tech folks. It requires an intimate understanding about the actual needs of the consultants. It’s mostly creating continuous conversation … having a process that includes the consultants throughout the entire lifecycle of a project. Whether we are building something internally or offering an off-the-shelf solution. Creating these types of processes ensure the team, as well as the consultant, feels a sense of ownership and is invested in the success of each project. It builds a better sense of trust that we have their best interest in mind as we are releasing new technology, more of a partnership. This isn’t always easy, but it is something we work towards every day.
What happens when this relationship breaks down?
RW: It completely falls apart. This is why I say we need to become better business partners. We can create the best tool or best piece of technology and give it to our consultants, but if it does not meet their needs then they won’t use it. These women are business owners. Some of them are very experienced, and as business owners they will find the solutions that meet their needs if we don’t offer them. In the past we have given them the tools that we think they need and not gotten their feedback throughout the development process. (These are) some of the changes we are making now, including them in the process.
We have a group of women we are calling the Tech Council. We want their participation throughout the entire process and not waiting until the release and say, “Here you go, here are your tools, hope it works.”
What is the biggest challenge?
Our biggest challenge is keeping up with the pace of our business. Like I said earlier, we have been on a rapid growth trajectory for many years. As fast as we can deploy technology, there are more opportunities coming in. Even though we have grown our team significantly we struggle to keep up. As much bandwidth we add to the team, the business can consume it. We have a large consultant base with a large range of experiences. They continually challenge us to bring new ideas. It’s a challenge to prioritize what we actually tackle. The business is moving so fast, there are so many things on the plate. It makes it hard to see the future because you are so busy trying to keep up. I have this conversation with our CEO all the time. We just need to slow him down a bit so we have time to put these ideas into fruition. So I would definitely say our biggest challenge is being able to get in front of the business.
Chief Information Officer
Dinsmore & Shohl LLP
How does your vision of IT support your company’s mission?
Our company's mission statement is to help our clients accomplish more of their business goals. For the last couple of years Dinsmore has been on a growth trajectory. In 2008 we grew almost 40% in 90 days. We brought in two different firms from two different cities. I mean, we were running. I don’t want this to sound lame, but I believe my group achieves the firm’s mission every day. Accomplish more on a regular basis. I have not had an increase in staff in probably seven years, which is what we need to focus on. We need to do more with more as the operational side begins to build up. Not just from a tactical perspective since growth creates a short term need. We are no longer just four offices. I look at the growth path of the firm; they want to be a national law firm. We owe it to the business and our clients to have an IT group that can successfully support a national law firm.
That’s what it’s been about. We want to make sure we are doing it in a staged fashion from a growth perspective first. A knee-jerk reaction is to say we need X more workers when we grow. We’ve been able to absorb a lot, but from a long-term perspective that is not what you want to see in an IT group. You want to see people with very specific roles and responsibilities. There is a season to accomplish more with more, but generally we want to accomplish more, smarter.
How do you move away from simply a transactional relationship with your business partners?
I think that you can never get away from the transactional. I think that often times when I get multiples of the same types of requests, that usually tells me that there is something else going on. There may be something else that we need to change. Our users and their clients have a very high expectation of availability. Fundamentally we all have that same goal. While it’s great to have the one-off types of requests, I think they all understand that we have a long-term strategic plan here. We will give you as much as we can for what you need. But it has to be scalable. Attorneys love the word “precedence.” Once you start something it’s hard to stop. Sometimes we have to make sure that the requests we accommodate are the ones that we can do not once, but will also want to do another 500 times.
How do you correlate business risk back to IT?
The example I think of is on the security side of the house. That is probably where we are really seeing the people and the technology intersect. Now it’s no longer just an IT problem. I can build my fortress as strong and tall as I can, but it’s also up to the end user to understand that IT cannot prevent everything from happening. We can educate, mitigate and remediate. At the end of the day we really have to have more awareness that the responsibility is on everyone.
The business side of the firm sees there is a value in what we are doing in the security space. It’s at the forefront. As this is an evolving area, we have been beefing up that particular area for us. That is where changes are coming for us as we look at restructuring internally. Some members of my team have been here for some time and we are developing them into more formal security roles within the firm as well as bringing in top talent in others areas.