The Different CTOs of Today and How They Shape the Tech Industry

Dayle Hall:

Hi, you’re listening to our podcast, Automating the Enterprise. I’m your host Dayle Hall, the CMO at SnapLogic. This podcast is designed to give organizations the insights and best practices on how to integrate, automate, and transform their enterprise. Our guest for today is an influential thought leader in the tech community. He’s passionate about leading technology evangelism, especially when it involves digital transformation and social innovation. And we’re going to push on both of those topics shortly. From being a leader, a mentor, and a trusted adviser to the tech community, he’s one of the key influencers and shapers of today’s tech industry. Please welcome to our podcast, the CTO of Pythian, Paul Lewis. Paull, welcome.

Paul Lewis:

Hi, there. How are you doing?

Dayle Hall:  

Good. Good. Thanks for joining us today. I’m really interested- with some of your background, I’m really interested in Pythian, too. So let’s start with you. Tell us how you got to where you are today on this journey, some of your experience. How did you end up being CTO at Pythian?

Paul Lewis:

I’ve been on this interesting CTO journey. So I started out the first 17 years of my career as a CTO in IT in many ways, worried about data centers, and workloads, and keeping the lights on in red, green, yellow projects. I shifted that in a highly regulated sort of banking world to CTO in OT in the Hitachi side, where the worry there is bullet trains, and nuclear power plants, and bulldozers, and data center technology, digital technology. So you know what happens in the real world to the top of the mountains in the middle of the ocean.

Dayle Hall:  

Yeah, that’s some serious responsibility, Paul.

Paul Lewis:  

Exactly, because the worry there is train stopping, right? It’s human safety and security at that point versus whether you’re going to wake up at 3 a.m. to solve a problem. And then the last two years at Pythian, we’re now CTO in the data side, so about creating innovation, about protecting core assets of an organization, about creating insights for an organization to allow them to grow.

Dayle Hall:  

So I mean, those are two very different types of CTO roles. Are there consistencies in terms of the roles or things that you really care about? You mentioned it yourself, you don’t want the train stopping if you’re working for that kind of company. But are the principles still the same, the people, the challenges still consistent?

Paul Lewis:

Not really. Not really.

Dayle Hall:

Tell me why. Tell me why.

Paul Lewis:

CTO in an IT organization is much more focused on cost containment in many ways. They’re focused on innovation, but inside innovation. They’re focused on, sure, participating in the growth of the company, but in a technological, in your department kind of conversation. CTO in an OT conversation is much more about working with customers in their real-world, physical world problems, right? What happens in the intense heat, what happens in the intense altitude, what happens in safety and security. And then CTO on the data side is much more, in many ways, passionate about the core assets of the organization. How do I create insights from something where it’s not entirely obvious? How do I combine assets I have with assets outside of the organization, third-party data, to create something new. In many ways, it’s about invention, not just innovation.

Dayle Hall:  

Yeah, I like that. It’s interesting, the way you position that, is that when you’re working on technology that has a broader implication, maybe external tomorrow, people like me who may be using some of those technology. You mentioned, you said, that you work more with the customers on those kinds of things. Do you feel like CTOs of the other two types you mentioned, should they be working more with customers as well? Would that help the situation? Do you find, because they’re so involved in cost containment, or they’re so involved in looking at certain types of implementations, that they don’t get that kind of visibility?

Paul Lewis:  

They certainly should. In fairness, the CIO, CTO of an internal- the IT shop has, over the last five years, participated in the business conversations, right? They’ve been at the executive table. They’ve had partnerships with CMO and CFO and COO, so they’ve seen a lot more. In fact, they might even be measured in terms of the growth success of the organization. But that doesn’t take away from the IT, right? They’re still ultimately responsible for all those data centers, all those workloads, all that migration, all that currency. That doesn’t really go away. So their time is still spent in that world.

Dayle Hall:  

Yeah, yeah, that’s interesting. So let’s dig in a little bit on that about working in this type of industry and the different types of industry as a tech leader. You’ve got three very different layers of experience there. But what are the things, you can take one of them or all of them, as a CTO these days? What are you really challenged with? Talk about your current position. What are the things that are keeping you up at night at Pythian?

Paul Lewis:  

Change is the word that resonates the most. And I talked to many CIOs and CTOs, right? Change, especially over the last five years, if not the last 10 years, has been so frequent, so dramatic, so pervasive that it’s really hard to keep up. New technologies and new products, new roles of me, new expectations of the role, new expectations of my team, new diversity of requirements, right? New things to learn, new things to implement, new things, it’s happening so frequently, it’s really hard to keep up.

Dayle Hall:  

Yeah. In my position as a CMO, I could say the same thing around change in terms of the different technology that I have at my disposal, and there’s a slide that shows there’s 7,000 MarTech solutions that you could choose from. But I still feel like for me, if you’re in a company, it’s the same buyer, you’re looking for different ways to get to them and so on. Do you think for the CTO or the tech part of an organization of an enterprise, do you think they see the most change across an enterprise?

Paul Lewis:

I absolutely believe they see the most change and they’re expected to know everything current. You’re going to get an email from the board and an email from the CEO saying, I just talked to somebody about quantum computing, what’s our point of view on quantum computing?

Dayle Hall:

Yeah. What are we doing?

Paul Lewis:

Exactly. Oh, ChatGPT, readily available and using- do we have any chat bots readily available for this purpose?

Dayle Hall:  

Yeah, yeah. No, I definitely- I can relate to the amount of times you must get hit up with different things and different questions about what are we doing there. Do you feel- and you mentioned my roles and across the business, how do you feel like the CTO has progressed or become more involved with other lines of business over the last 5 or 10 years? Because when our line of business, when we talk to analysts, we talk to customers, this is concept of shadow IT, right? Now, I’m not a fan of the term because I just feel it almost makes a scapegoat of if you’re not talking to your own organization, you’re creating something that you shouldn’t. But from your perspective, how do you think that engagement has changed over the last 5 or 10 years?

Paul Lewis: 

Engagement has increased dramatically, and it has had positive and, unfortunately, negative effects.

Dayle Hall: 

Okay. Tell me both.

Paul Lewis: 

So engagement could be seen in terms of the IT spend. Right now, only 86% of IT spend is controlled by the CIO, right? The 14% is now controlled by somebody outside the CIO, could be the CMO, could be finance, COO, the chief digital officer, the chief data officer. If they don’t report into the CIO, which tells you that, and I would agree with that statement holistically, the IT work that’s happening outside of IT is valuable, is needed, is desired, is wanted. Shadow IT is a good thing. It’s not a bad thing.

It essentially is adding more to the IT budget. Say you had a $100 million IT budget, you now have $116 million IT budget. That’s good for the business in many ways. The negative impact is succession. And I know it sounds like a weird thing to hear, but over the last five years, CIOs and CTOs have spent much more time presenting to the board, participating in growth opportunities, doing digital transformation projects on their own. They’ve left it to their VPs and the directors to operate IT. They haven’t brought them along. So now what might have been a two-year gap between VP and CIO is now a five-year gap between VP and CIO. The succession to the CIO has dramatically changed because of this new set of relationships with the executive suite.

Dayle Hall:  

That’s interesting. So you mentioned a term there, which is obviously pervasive across everything that you do, everything that I do, digital transformation. So before I ask you how you work with technologies, with projects that way, how would you as a CTO describe digital transformation? Because it’s a very nebulous term. So how would you describe thinking about, if someone’s out there and saying, oh, yeah, we have digital transformation initiatives, what do you describe that as initiative? What is it supposed to do for an enterprise?

Paul Lewis:

Excellent question. And yes, it happens frequently. And yes, the definition changes based on who you happen to be talking to. I use two perspectives to tell the same story. So perspective number one is digital transformation is changing the behavior of the organization to sell and offer products the way their consumers wish to buy them, right? So you can think of it as saying, it’s not about creating a digital version of a non-digital channel, right? It’s not about going from retail and creating a website. It’s about saying, let me look at all of my client segments and say, how do they wish to transact with me? And it’s not channel. It could be offering. It could be timeliness. It could be level of interaction or professionalism. It could be a whole bunch of things. In fact, I see it as this new interaction requirement to be highly mobile, highly social, highly immersive, highly personalized. All of those things require technology, and behavior, and process, and new things to create a digital experience.

Dayle Hall:  

Yeah, I really like that description, which is focused on initiatives, but to also change the organization itself. It’s not just the technology. It’s the people and how they work. But also with that customer goal in mind, how are we going to- obviously, in your enterprise, you want to sell more, I get that. But trying to solve customer problems, I think sometimes that’s missed when people talk about digital transformation initiatives.

Paul Lewis:

Yeah, which is why it’s taken much longer than the anticipated date, right? It wasn’t a six-month, one-year project. It was a multi-year, multi-hundreds of millions of dollars initiative because it dramatically changed the purpose and goal of the organization in many ways, especially if they wanted to compete. Let’s say we’re a 110-year-old bank, you want to compete with the fintech world. You either created fintech, or you bought fintech, or you became fintech. The only way to become fintech is to say, I need to be data centric, information centric, IT centric in order to create a different experience, personalized or immersive experience with my clients. And that’s the second part of the point there.

IT, in general, but it’s also true of most organizations, are very hierarchical. They spend more time on more. So more people, more projects, more features, more functions, more products, more things for the consumer. That’s what IT knows and thinks about, right? If they have more projects, then they need more people and then more pipe, more paying, more budget.

But the customer experience, the customer demand is about better, right? It’s about highly mobile, highly social, highly immersive. I want to have a one-product, one-year relationship with a company, not a 30-year relationship with a 30-year product. So it’s this competition between more, how I’ve always done it in IT and better, what actually the expectation of customers.

Dayle Hall:  

Yeah. So again, there’s a stat that I think I saw, and that was three years ago, which was something along the lines of 60% of digital transformation initiatives fail. Now the analysts that we all love, like the Gartners and the Forresters, they get paid to put that kind of stuff together, whether it’s relevant or true. I’m sure if you did bundle every digital transformation initiative, because it’s very nebulous, then it would feel that way. But if you’re- why do you think enterprises fail? Is it just because they don’t understand the long-term roadmap because they don’t realize it’s a multi-year journey or it touches every part of the business? How could an enterprise, as they go into something like key parts of a digital transformation initiative, how can they plan better? What can we better do for success?

Paul Lewis: 

I think there’s two parts if you double-click on that step. So the positive double-click is that lots of projects were started, lots of projects were failed, and they failed fast. That’s a good thing, right? I saw blockchain. I thought blockchain was going to make a better intercompany experience for my customers. And in fact, it was a poor use of architectural technology. Got it. You learn that in a month. Perfect. You spent money, but at least you didn’t spend a lot of money. So those are good, right?

On the bad thing part, either they’ve chosen to implement a digital-only versus a digital transformation. They decided to create a new channel but didn’t integrate that channel with the rest of the channels. So they create a new mobile app, but they didn’t appreciate that how people buy is looking at the website, looking at the product, going to store, trying on product, going back to mobile app, buying product. They didn’t appreciate the integration of the channel. Therefore, they didn’t think about the customer journey holistically, or they simply bit off a chunk that was too big, right? They thought they’d do $100 million projects, not appreciating that vast majority of large projects fail just because they’re not consumable by the organization or by the customers.

Dayle Hall:  

Yeah. And I think as you mentioned, it’s something that impacts- it’s not just the technology. It’s not just digitizing the channel. It’s impact on the people who are interacting with the change. It’s the processes that you put in place and where those digital pieces could speed up or create more confusion. Who owns digital transformation? Because you said at the start, 86% of budget is still with IT or CIO, CTO. Does that mean it should come from the IT, the CIO, the CTO’s office? Or is it something that is generally- could be something that came from a line of business as an idea, and then you work together?

Paul Lewis:  

To me, digital transformation is a group deliverable. It’s at the executive level. In fact, the CEO should be the project sponsor of a digital transformation program, for two reasons. Reason number one, it requires more than just technology. Technology, yes, underpins a good portion of those projects, I get that. But it requires process change, it requires tooling change, it requires change management, right? And that crosses the organization. But then, of course, on the other side, it requires investment above and beyond the P&L of any one organization, right? I need to go with the board, I need to apply for funds, I need to get exceptions, I need to use some of the capital, I need to create projects that would be capitalizable, right? All of those things require a sponsorship at the highest level and group participation by the rest of the executives.

Dayle Hall:  

Yeah. It’s clear there’s a wider reach of people and implications that I think a lot of people, that a lot of organizations actually feel. Have you seen ways that enterprises have been more successful with it? A couple of the podcasts I’ve done before, you’ve got people talking about we have councils, we have group steering committees, and so on. Have you seen some of that actually help people be more productive in these bigger cross-enterprise initiatives?

Paul Lewis: 

Certainly, you need appropriate level of governance, right, whether it’s data governance or people governance. But governance only helps in many ways empowerment and transparency, right? Two important things, however, that’s what the goal is. Success is derived from meeting a much smaller objective, right? So the objective is searching for and finding a customer segment that I currently don’t serve using a different customer journey. Success will be derived by saying, last year, I didn’t have teams between 19. And now I have a 20% leadership in that customer segment. That’s where success gets created, right? So I have an objective. I see the results of that objective. And I’ve implemented pointed technology, and to support that digital objective.

Dayle Hall:  

I like that description. What I try and do with these podcasts is we want people to hear some things and think, oh yeah, I need to talk about that in my own organization. So I think that’s a good ending to that kind of digital transformation, initiative wrapper. Let’s talk a little bit about you do more than you’re just a CTO. You’re a mentor and work with other tech students as they’re building their career. And I don’t want to butcher the name, is it the Schulich School of Business?

Paul Lewis:

Yeah.

Dayle Hall: 

I got that one right first time. So tell me a little bit about that and what you’re doing to pay it forward for the next generation.

Paul Lewis:  

 Sure. So I spent a good portion of my time on the academic side of what we do in technology for several reasons. One, we want to be able to mentor and see the new individual contributors that are going to participate in our technology, good corporations. A good portion of data scientists, as an example, will likely come out of MBA programs or post-MBA courses. Those individual contributor technologists need not just the academic background, but they need the real case studies, the real constraints, the real impactful insights that are required for the industry, and they really need to understand what an industry really means. What is retail, what is CPG, what is manufacturing, what is healthcare life sciences, because you can easily come out of those programs having an appreciation of accounting but not really an appreciation for what an industry purpose is.

And then on the other side, one of the bigger gaps in technology right now is technology leadership. It takes potentially a decade for you to go from individual contributor to middle manager, to senior executive. We want to shorten that cycle. Schulich, as an example, now has a program in tech leadership so that we can get out of academic somebody who’s ready for a middle management technology role so that we can create a much faster cycle into the CIO and CTO ranks.

Dayle Hall:  

I like that. And you’re right, it can take a long time to move through those organizations. And we talked a little bit earlier about the amount of tech, the amount of change that these type of organizations have to deal with. How do you go about portraying to these future tech leaders not just the challenges that they’re going to face, but how they’re going to handle the amount of change and how can they be more prepared? Because as you mentioned, this is one of the roles across an enterprise where you’re constantly looking at something new, you’re constantly being asked for different things and changes that are constant across the enterprise.

Paul Lewis:  

This is going to sound odd, but the real answer is you scare them.

Dayle Hall:

Okay, okay.

Paul Lewis:  

When I do a guest lecture series, I will show the data and analytics landscape, which it was mentioned that there are 7,000 MarTech technologies. I show them the 7,000 technologies just in the data engineering and visualization toolset. And I really want them to know that in order to solve a data and analytics problem, one needs to have an appreciation for all of the classifications, right, all of the buckets of content. And then when you narrow down to a single bucket, there’s dozens of products and technologies in that bucket. And you really need to know not just every technology, but the features and functions because it’s the difference in how those features and functions that are applied, and those differences determine whether you actually solved that problem.

Really, the focus, the scary part is I want them to say there’s an expectation for now that you need to be well read. You need to do your homework, do your due diligence. You can’t rely on product demonstrations from vendors. You have to be prepared. I’m saying you can’t rely on it. It has to be, yes, receive product demonstrations, but you better have a pretty good fundamental knowledge of how that vendor, how that product actually fits in the ecosystem of solving that problem. Because it’s not one tech. It’s many techs that would solve that actual problem.

Dayle Hall:  

Yeah, for sure. And obviously, one of the things that- in our time right now, generative AI, ChatGPT, all these things with open AI, and the other ones that are coming from some of the other vendors- I was actually amused that Elon Musk put that note out saying, we should slow down on AI, and now he’s having Twitter develop their own AI model. So that’s interesting. But how do you see that massive, fast growth of generative AI? Has that already been part of the things that they’re learning, that they’re being taught, things to be cautious of? Or do you see it’s just going to accelerate from here?

Paul Lewis:  

What’s interesting about these academic programs is that they change twice a year. Every six months, the content, the curriculum is looked at to see what are the current trends, how do I need to apply them, what’s hot, what’s not. So as an example, what’s hot, what’s not that I present to other CIOs at the moment, what’s hot is GPT-4. What’s not hot is ChatGPT, right? Effectively, the same technologies, but over a three-month period of time, they’ve evolved their implementation. So it’s better training, better algorithm, not just text but now images. It’s gone beyond what the first three months is going to look like, and we can only assume that we’ll get better.

The downfall of innovation that happens so quickly, especially when it comes to LLMs, is there’s going to be a lot of fake implementations, right? There’s going to be a lot of clones that have less training, less primary data, and applied in potentially harmful ways. So now, not only do I have to appreciate the tech underneath the hood, but I have to appreciate what types of technologies and vendors and offerings that are available, especially if they’re free, that might not actually be suitable for the purpose to which I need to implement it.

Dayle Hall:  

Yeah. I think throughout this series, we’ve done more AI relevant topics because, obviously, it’s very hot right now. And one of the things we’ve talked about, responsible AI, ethics in AI, thinking about how it can- sometimes depending on the model, it can be less diverse as whatever’s going into the AI model. So it’s a concern. Do you have concerns about how fast we’re going, responsible AI and the ethics of it? How do you think about that? And I like the fact you scare your students, make them aware of what they’re going to face. But specifically for diversity and ethical AI and so on, how do you think about passing that or your thoughts onto your students so they’re thinking about it, too?

Paul Lewis:

I’m very bullish on AI as a general philosophy, right? I believe that AI will fundamentally impact not just the consumer, but IT, enterprise, commercial use, OT side, right? We’ll be able to have machines that can do a lot of the labor, especially the safety concern-based labor that we won’t be able to worry about in the future. Those are all good things.

What I impress upon the students for the most part, in fact, arguably I impress upon other CIOs and CTOs, is the potential negative human effect of progression of AI. So let me give you a couple examples. Big data AI has the potential of depersonalizing individual people. So let me tell you. The more data that I have, the less likely I’ll be able to apply individual algorithms because I’m talking about exabytes, zettabytes, yottabytes of information. So if I’m walking in a store and I’m being recognized for my loyalty, and I’m walking through the aisles, and it says, here’s a loyal member, I should send them a text on a discount, here’s $1 off chocolate ice cream. Because so much data will be there and the algorithms won’t be able to keep up with the potential processing, it won’t know it’s Paul Lewis. It’ll just put me in a bucket of people that happen to like chocolate ice cream. It’s quite possible that Paul Lewis actually likes vanilla ice cream. But because of other factors, the car I drive, the education I have, the loyalty purchase I purchased in the past, I’m put in the wrong bucket. So it negatively affects personalization in many ways.

The other negative impact is that the control has moved away, right? I used to control my data and the use of my data. But since data is being collected about me without necessarily me even knowing, my web searching, my chats, my video surveillance, anytime I walk around UK, right, it’s all being collected. And now they’re going to start to use that information for purposes that it wasn’t intended for. Imagine your credit score now being based on who your friends are and the type of time you spend in the off hours. And now they’re looking at saying, you know what, he plays a lot of basketball at night. Maybe that’s more risky, and therefore, he should deserve a less insurance risk or credit score. Your power has moved away because you don’t control your data.

And the last part, which I think is the most controlled part, which I think is great, we lack a lot of regulatory and legislative boundaries. Yes, we have privacy act issues. Yes, we have heat in Canada. We’ve got some privacy-level legislation, but we don’t have use of personal data to create value legislation. And I think that has to improve over time. And it has to be a worldwide presence in order to really tone down the potential ill effects of things like AI and LLMs.

Dayle Hall: 

Yeah. I think I’ve said this on a couple of the other podcasts that we’ve done. What I’ve been very happy with is people that are in this field, that have the opportunity to influence this field, are thinking about the things you talked about, or thinking about making sure that we’re going to be as responsible as possible and not letting this thing you’d be used for harm. Because I have this conversation with my father, 77 years old. And we talk about personalization. Because when he has something simple for him, a cookie will pop up on his website. And he’ll say, no, because he’s read all the vitriol about what that could mean. But when you try to explain to him, look, if you’re on bbc.co.uk, they just want to give you the stories that they think are relevant to you. So that’s not a bad thing. Now if you’re going into some random site, and you’re buying something that you’ve never bought before, and you accept cookies, yes, there’s a risk. It’s a calculated risk, but you have to do that education.

When you think about things like AI and generative AI and how it could be used in the future, I feel comfortable as my kids grow up that people like you and a couple of other people we’ve had on these podcasts, I really want to see it as a force for good. They’re not scare mongering. They’re not trying to make people afraid of it, but they want to say let’s make sure we know what we’re doing. Let’s make sure we don’t create more imbalance in credit scores because the data that’s coming in is taken from a bad source. I like the fact that you’re working with the future of some of these future tech leaders because they’ll take that from you. As you talk to some of these students, how do you spot some talent within these students? Like that guy, that woman, they’re going to be successful because they’re thinking about it, not just the technology. But is there a way that you can say those people are going to be successful? Do you see it?

Paul Lewis:  

Yeah, in two things. Either they’re very, very comfortable with ambiguity, right? You can give them a premise, and they can connect the dots, right, to say, okay, you’re not telling me everything, and I could look to see how I need to connect five pieces of source of information and draw them out myself, but then unquestionably want to research and ask the harder questions. So I’ve taught both undergrad and grad. Undergrad is very simple, right? They ask questions because they’re the least read. They might not have even read the material before they walked into the lecture, right? Yes, no, can I do this, not do this. But graduate students, doctoral students, they’ve read probably more information than I have. They have multi-part questions, two-hour lectures, a two-hour Q&A session because you’re back to the whiteboard, you’re drawing diagrams, you’re presenting theories, you’re pushing the limits of your own knowledge because they’re already at the point of connecting the dots. Now, not all candidates are like that, not all students are like that, but those are the ones you look forward to say, you’re a future leader.

Dayle Hall:  

Yeah. I like that, the inquisitive nature, the ambiguity, because I feel like whatever role you’re in, particularly in tech, though, there is a lot of that because we don’t know what’s coming. And there’s all this innovation just around the corner that we don’t know how it’s going to impact. So you have to be comfortable with that and try and keep moving forward. That’s really like that thing.

So we’ll close the podcast. We’ve talked about some of your career in IT and tech. We’ve talked about guiding the students. Let’s talk about giving back. So this is something that I know is pretty important to you. And the teaching is one part of it. But tell me a little bit about the advisor, the consulting work that you do, and giving back to the community.

Paul Lewis: 

Sure. So I have conversations with at least 100 CIOs and CTOs on a quarterly basis, so a lot of people. But it’s always as up here. Some of it’s in networking situation. Some of it’s in roundtables and fireside chats. But I interact with lots and lots of CIOs and CTOs, not because I find it interesting to network them specifically, but what I find interesting is getting a sense for the impact of trends, getting a sense for the capacity limitations, or the budget limitations, or innovation stories, and then sharing them across a variety of people.

And what’s most interesting and most compelling isn’t just the sharing of stories within the industry, but sharing stories outside of industry. Because the reality is I could put five CIOs of five banks in the room, they all have the exact same problem, they’ve all tried the exact same set of solutions. But when I put a CIO of a manufacturing plant and a CIO of a fintech company together, they have very different problem sets but have a relatively close shared potentially solution set. And they get to say, well, I tried x, y, and z, and it doesn’t really apply to me, but x and y does. Z might not be important, but x and y. And seeing the synapses join together and find, okay, this makes sense, let me take a little bit of left and a little bit of right and solve a problem, this is where growth in an individual CIO and CTO needs to come from. It’s not just reading, but it’s about experiencing stories from others and that community sense.

Dayle Hall:  

Yeah. It’s interesting you say that when you bring CIOs, CTOs together from different industries that they can learn from others. Because I feel sometimes there’s a little bit of reticence to that because they feel like if I’m in fintech and you’re in manufacturing, we’re totally different. But it feels like they should open their mind a little bit more to that, because do you see- you mentioned that you have these groups, you see the synapses firing. Do you see this happen a lot? There’s certain things- are there trends that you’ve identified or they can identify that are common across their businesses?

Paul Lewis:  

Certainly, but in fairness, there is still a lot of 30-year, 35-year tenured CIO in single organizations that still have the cost containment mindset, right? They’ll only talk to somebody in their industry of their same peerage and will only solve problems that are about internal IT practices. That’s not all CIOs. And certainly, the trend is to go away from that versus innovation CIO, who might not have been even born in IT, right? They came from marketing. They came from project management. They came from the operations, right? They might have even come from diversity, right? They’ve come from different worlds and said, how do I apply things differently.

Those CIOs are far more open to looking across industries to say, how do I solve that problem? They’ll start with solving people-based problems, right, a cultural-based problem, or a diversity-based problem, or succession-based problem. And that will lead to new ideas from new geographies, from new industries, that ultimately solves technology problems. And yeah, it becomes clear, like architectures, the movement from cloud-first and cloud-only to cloud-also, that came from cross-industry perspectives, right? Multi-cloud came from knowing that cloud A has cognitive services, but cloud B has a marketplace of marketing functions, and I can combine them together to solve a more complex problem. It’s only through those conversations would those kinds of innovative ideas come out.

Dayle Hall:  

Yeah. I’m a marketer, so I’m not in the IT industry. But obviously, I’ve been marketing IT technology for a long time. And I feel these days, those tenured cost containment CIOs, I know they’re going to be there for a while. And I know some businesses operate in different environment. But I feel they’re missing out a little bit. They’re missing out, and hopefully, if they get the opportunity to talk to some of these other CEOs, they can actually see there’s other things that they could be doing to really inspire the business because I feel like the tech part of an enterprise is literally the fulcrum of how everything else can run.

I know we see it from our side. We have really good support around getting better access to data that isn’t necessarily a marketing piece of data. I’ll give you an example. How many cases could a customer be raising on the product, the help desk cases. If I have access to that data easy, and my IT team helped me with that, when I’m trying to run customer webinars or when I’m trying to run customer events, I know exactly what this customer has faced, which helps with my IBM, it helps with making sure that I’m giving them the right content through community, but you’ve got to be open to see beyond just your own purview and then beyond just cost containment. How do we get there?

Paul Lewis:  

I think what you’ve described is really the difference between experience and expertise, right? Those cost containment 35-year tenured CIOs, 100% of their time and effort is focused on expertise. I know my tech, I know my business, I know my company, I know my process, I know the people who work here, everybody in the senior executive or the founders, they focus entirely on expertise. And even when they want to do something new, they will learn Java in 21 days. They’ll read a book over the weekend, and they’ll apply it.

What they don’t have is experience. Experience comes from multiple industries, multiple technologies, fast failing, being a CIO and growing through innovation pains. And it’s applying experience that you’d only get from the partner community, from the vendor community, from external people that can modify the role and behavior of those CIOs.

Dayle Hall: 

Yeah. I think there’s still some out there, but I feel like there’s definitely- the future leaders are going to replace them eventually. Great discussion. As we close, we have a lot of great relevant tech experience. One of the things that I like to ask people is given some of the new technologies that are coming out, specifically for you, it could be Pythian, it could be just in general with your students or just broader tech, what are you excited about the next three, five years, the things that you see coming, changes, working together? Is it technology based, is it people or process based? What gets you excited, Paul, for the next few years?

Paul Lewis:  

In the short term, innovating with data platforms, there’s still some indecision, right? So in the data platform side, there is a, I can choose my own path, I can create a native implementation, the native clouds, or I can choose full-out platform, the Snowflakes and Data Bricks type of world. I’ve got to make that choice. There hasn’t been a winner. We’ve got to evolve a little bit more to see where the best implementation is. So that’s exciting to watch that battle in a real sense, right?

There’s still a cloud migration gap at the moment, right? So we’ve done all the migrations, they were the easy stuff, the lift and shifts, everything that needed to be in the cloud in the cloud. Now the hard part starts, right? Now it’s the modernizations. Now we’ve got to look at much bigger investments, much more architectural differences, much more limitations on whether I even have the source code or the people even built that original system. That’s going to be an interesting financial challenge. It’s going to be an interesting strategic challenge. And then finally, on the innovation side, how am I going to create an insight based on combining not just the data that I have, but data everywhere else, all the third-party data. How do I get a sense for my customers on information outside of my own little world, my own little ecosystem? And that will be a challenge because I now need to subscribe to information, I’m not even aware that exists yet.

Dayle Hall:  

Yeah. Whilst we’ve been talking about big data, and it continues to be a hot topic, and it feels like we’ve been talking about it for 10 years, I feel we’re like 1%, 2% into the journey. There’s still so much more we’re going to learn and we’ve got to achieve. So I think it’s an exciting time to be in tech.

Paul Lewis:

Yep, agreed.

Dayle Hall:

Paul, thank you so much for your time. It was great for the discussion. I appreciate some of your insights. I love some of the things you said around helping others to manage their career, think differently, how you’re helping the future tech leaders. Thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Paul Lewis: 

Thank you very much.

Dayle Hall:  

That’s it for this episode. We’ll see you on the next episode of Automating the Enterprise.