New School IT ™
Is your enterprise struggling to reap the full benefits of AI at this stage of your Digital Transformation? You're not alone, and we can help!
Old-school IT philosophy is to treat the AI business transformation as a one-time project, and unfortunately, that just won't work.
Welcome to New School IT, a Podcast dedicated to the conversation that will set your Data and AI journey on the right course.
Join us and learn the power of how a systemic approach to disciplined agility can drive game-changing Data and AI digital transformations!
New School IT ™
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION - are you Netflix or Blockbuster?
Get clear on: "What even is a digital transformation? How does it affect your life, and do you love or hate it?"
The digital revolution has already claimed many casualties: Kodak, Blockbuster, RadioShack, Sears, and many others. But what separates the companies that successfully transform from those that become cautionary tales? Four veteran digital transformers bring decades of hard-won wisdom to unpack this critical business challenge.
Our hosts have lived digital transformation from every angle. Roland shares his journey through four major transformations spanning decades. John explains how digital disruption derailed his plan to retire at 55, instead inspiring him to build and sell a successful SaaS business. Nasheed reveals how transformation enabled his career of creative, impactful work, while Ryan describes his unlikely path from actor to Silicon Valley enterprise sales executive.
What emerges is a candid conversation about the realities of digital transformation beyond the corporate buzzwords. The hosts don't shy away from what they hate—the existential fear that triggers resistance, the false agility that masks waterfall thinking, and the exhausting battles between those protecting the status quo and those pushing for change. As John notes, "Traditional management skills often clash with the ambiguity of software development."
Yet they also celebrate transformation's power to democratize opportunity, free talented people from mundane tasks, and enable companies to better serve their customers. Their collective advice forms a practical roadmap: ensure top-down sponsorship with bottom-up implementation, surround yourself with people who have both skills and mindset, focus on external benefits rather than internal metrics, and think systemically about connecting people around shared purpose.
Whether you're leading a transformation, experiencing one, or wondering if your company will be the next Netflix or the next Blockbuster, this episode offers essential perspective on navigating the digital revolution.
Thank you. Old school faves are in the past. Make that link. Don't fall behind Digital world. It's redesigned, yeah.
Speaker 2:Hello, this is New School IT. How can I help you?
Speaker 1:Hi everyone, welcome to Episode 1, season 1 of New School IT, a podcast dedicated to the power of happy, focused and connected IT teams driving game-changing digital transformations. If your transformation is not keeping its promise, we can help. I am your host, roland, a 30-year veteran digital transformer with a long list of let's not do that again, and founder of this podcast and of Soda, a system of disciplined agility.
Speaker 5:Hi everyone, I'm John.
Speaker 1:My co-host, john, brings the perspective of a successful corporate leader who then built a SaaS business that he sold to a Silicon Valley unicorn. Hi, I'm Nasheed. My co-host, nasheed is an enlightened data engineer who started his own successful business a few years ago.
Speaker 3:Hi everyone, I'm Ryan.
Speaker 1:My co-host, ryan, got his start on Wall Street before his life took some twists and turns to take him to the Silicon Valley, where he's an enterprise sales executive. What brings us together? I've called them friends for years. What do we have in common? We all have pushed past our boundaries and achieved what we were told we couldn't. We problem-solve with persistence and resilience. When things inevitably get dicey, we adapt and we love to learn, and we each have our own brand of creativity. The main reason for us to host this podcast together is our love of connecting with people and building relationships through curiosity and learning. After all, knowledge is an infinite resource. The more of it we share, the more of it exists. Let's get the episode started. We're going to get you clear on what actually is digital transformation, how does it affect your life and what might you love or hate about it? Ready. Please hold.
Speaker 1:We're going to discuss four questions today to get on the same page about digital transformation, how it has affected our lives, what we hate about it and then what we love about it. And if we were giving advice to somebody that we're mentoring right now, what would we tell them, John?
Speaker 5:Yeah, digital transformation had a big impact on my life. It had been part of my life plan from about the age of about 21, when I left university to retire at 55. And I set everything up. I was running a consultancy business. I'd run it for five years.
Speaker 5:Everybody knew I was going to leave when I hit my 55th and then an idea got in the way, and the idea was for building a SaaS, b2b business in the digital shelf analytics space and it really captured my imagination because I thought we had an angle on that. We changed things by bringing this service to the market and I decided that I was going to devote 55 to whenever to building this business. I wanted to see if my experience, which is largely blue chip CPG, over 40 odd years, would enable me to build a great business from flip chart up, and that's what I set out to do. Best decision I ever made fantastic, well, one of the best decisions just in case Angela's listening One of the best decisions I ever made and a really productive way of using 10 years that I may not have used quite as well as I did in the end.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, big thing, big thing for me, this business was related to the digital transformation.
Speaker 5:Well, yeah, we saw the managing e-commerce and building brands in e-commerce. We saw that as very much in its fledgling state at the time and we felt that we could bring insights that would help marketeers, in particular, and salespeople to a far better job of building their brands through e-commerce stores in particular, and salespeople do a far better job of building their brands through e-commerce stores in particular.
Speaker 1:So you were driving transformation in your customers. In other words, yes, exactly. The product design to do so yeah, perfect, Great Masheed, how about you?
Speaker 4:I say digital transformation has enabled me to have a career full of interesting work because I saw along the way digital transformation has an opportunity to transform the way companies operate and streamline the work that employees do, and too many organizations have not leaned in to deliver on the promise of digital transformation. It's almost as if they're stuck in quicksand, because as the technology changes and you move from one organization to the next, you still see them doing things that are dated, and it begs the question why. You may see a few individuals doing it well, but they don't have the support to scale it. You may see a few rogue departments doing it well, but it doesn't reach the broader organization, and so that's really where I see the opportunity for digital transformation.
Speaker 1:So if you had to nutshell that, what would you say?
Speaker 4:I would say digital transformation has unlocked the opportunity to do creative, impactful work.
Speaker 1:Cool Ryan, why don't you walk us through how digital transformation affected your life?
Speaker 3:Digital transformation changed my life tremendously. So about 10 years ago I moved to the Bay Area from Los Angeles. Los Angeles, I did so many things. I was an investor in many restaurants and also a SAG actor at the same time. When I moved to the Bay Area, I Googled first. I was like what job will get me the most money immediately? Because, we were starting our family and it's funny Back then I don't know if you do it now, but back then it came up as sales, Like you know, SaaS sales. Actually, it said.
Speaker 1:So I was like there you go. Now it's probably a podcaster actually.
Speaker 3:Probably. No, it's probably a podcaster actually. Yeah, probably. But yeah. So I was like, all right, at least it narrowed it down and I was like, okay, there's the companies that I'm looking for.
Speaker 3:And digital transformation was a big topic, especially back then 10 years ago. This was pre-COVID, right. And I landed on video conferencing and I was like, for some reason, I love this, especially coming from a little bit of a actor's life in LA, going to selling video. I was like I could relate to this, I could talk about this, and once I decided on that, it narrowed my search down again and so once I landed this job, it was amazing, a lot of my skills they're transferable skills. So when I was interviewing, I really had to sell them and be like you know what Fine, I've never sold SaaS product before. I'd pitch them on restaurants and they would actually be like all right, you can definitely talk, and that's the biggest thing with digital transformation is selling them on that dream of digital transformation. So thank goodness I was able to do that and I shifted my life because of digital transformation.
Speaker 1:All right. So, if I heard you correctly, it's something like digital transformation has affected your life, because you were able to use your sales skills, but employed in an area where it was very lucrative because everybody needed it.
Speaker 3:Absolutely Okay.
Speaker 1:So how has digital transformation affected my life? If I only count transformations that I worked on for three or more years, this is my fourth. Two of the transformations were industry level and two of them were for specific companies. The first industry transformation was TV and video. It went from analog to digital and then from custom digital equipment. If you guys remember camcorders in the 1990s. It went from that to software and server-enabled, like the Cameronia iPhone, uploading HD video to the cloud. That used to take dozens of people and tons of very, very expensive equipment. The second industry transformation is the one that we're going through right now enterprise IT going digital.
Speaker 1:Both times the digital capabilities produced so much data was being generated by digital that specific products were needed for managing just that part of it. The first company of the two was it decided to build and launch. Dozens of very expensive consultants from were delivering the project to develop a very complex digital platform. I had my own consulting firm at the time. I was brought in by the VP of operations to get his team ready. In parallel, I worked with about 80 people for a year. We defined the whole IT service model from scratch creating operating procedures, connected processes, end-to-end, trained and rehearsed and we were ready. Anyway, they wrote 40,000 user stories. When they were done with that, they handed the whole thing to a whole bunch of developers in a dozen different companies and everybody was working on it separately. When the system launched it took exactly three weeks and one customer for the whole thing to break Two and a half years of work.
Speaker 1:I was gone for a while and then they hired me back in. The head consultant was replaced with a guy from within the company, a bright business guy. He hired me and I was running program operations for them, which included development, and if I had known then what I know now, I would have done things differently. But it became clear that the old school guard of the company was never going to actually learn how to be a digital company. So, rather than failing again, we decided to buy a couple of small digital companies and keep them separate, and then those became something that now is a major digital advertising content platform, one of the biggest in the world.
Speaker 1:Second company where I did a transformation that again took more than three years was there. They had already hired a leader with tons of software experience, so we succeeded spectacularly. It was great. The whole digital journey was just so rewarding and successful and we did so many good things. We took risks and we learned some lessons, but every one of them was intentionally kept small and fast. On the big stuff, we were always disciplined.
Speaker 1:In the current IT transformation, this is the fourth one. As I mentioned earlier, it's too early to call the winners and the losers, but even very large companies will fail if they don't find a way to transform. I think everybody knows Kodak. It was bankrupted by digital cameras. Everybody remembers Blockbuster. Streaming killed it. E-commerce John you maybe participated in this killed Sears and RadioShack in this killed tears and Radio Shack. Right now, there are so many leaders in companies looking for someone who can help and teams looking for something that can guide the journey that it's made me an entrepreneur again. I feel I can help and it's why this podcast exists and why I've started developing something on the framework.
Speaker 4:After listening to that, Roland, I feel like I should go again. I might have misread the question. Please hold.
Speaker 1:Ryan, do you want to start with what you hate about the?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's funny. Just because of my kids I always tell them like, oh, I don't use the word hate because like it's too strong, you know, I just don't want to bring that into the world. In my notes I put like, oh, I don't use the word hate because like it's too strong, you know, I just don't want to bring that into the world. But so in my notes I put like negative, you know, like what I think is negative about it. You are such a sales guy yes, I am, but like I'm kind of twisted on here. So like, please, I'm open to feedback on this, but like just the name digital transfer transformation just sounds so corporate and and scary, because sometimes when you say transformation, it's like oh, shoot, who's getting fired you know, I'm saying like oh shoot, oh, big changes, big change.
Speaker 3:It's not change, it's a big change, it's a transformation. So when you say digital transformation, it's just like all right, um, it's a little scary, so I wish that word was. I don't know, I just wish they had different term, but I can't come up with a better term for it. So, just thinking about what it this will lead towards the positive, which is the next question, I know, but it will lead to the positive. What is the end result? And that's what you should call it. Be like hey, your company will be working smoothly. It's just like hey, here's WD-40 for everything of IT. You know what I'm saying. Oh, there you go, it works. Oh, it's not squeaking anymore. You could do everything, you could clean your surface with it. So think about that WD-40. It's just great to have eventually, but you can't call it WD-40. I just don't like the name. It's just a little too scary for me.
Speaker 1:So where my mind goes with that is, I have a similar dislike. The thought that occurs to me is that part of what is so stressful about that change is that companies are trying to do it internally, right, and there's a lot of resistance. It's almost like an allergic reaction. When I was talking about that example earlier where we ended up buying some companies and kept them external, that was the third round of digital transformation digital transformation there and it went from we're going to do it internally with some consultants to we're going to keep the startup internal. It was somewhat separate, but still within the company and we had email addresses.
Speaker 1:And then ultimately, it was like, okay, we're going to buy, we're going to work with third parties. Like, we're going to keep them separate. They're small, we're going to grow them up from there, right, but the native, native digital is something where you don't need a transformation. So you avoid the transformation by going acquiring or working or investing with native companies. That have always been that way. There's no scary part to it and you keep them like twins side by side, as opposed to trying to make one organism out of it.
Speaker 3:No, that's true and that's different. It's like connecting, which is beautiful, you know, and that's different. It's like connecting you know which is beautiful, you know.
Speaker 1:Don. What do you think?
Speaker 5:Like Ryan, I don't hate things in particular, but I do recognize the challenges, and the biggest challenge I faced in trying to build a business that was digitally focused was my experience had trained me in a very traditional management skills that you would expect in big CPGs financial planning, annual planning, strategizing, visioning, etc. Etc. Etc. I tried to apply these to my startup business and many, many managers will have a similar experience inside big businesses trying to apply those traditional skills to managing and teams that are trying to develop software.
Speaker 5:I'm finding there's quite a tension between building great software in a highly ambiguous situation and waterfall management, and so, for example, from day one, my business had great internal reporting a whole bunch of KPIs looking at financials, looking at customer satisfaction, nps scores, all of those sort of things and we devoted a lot of time to explaining the difference between our paper plan and the reality of the business, and that was a very internally focused discussion, and I think that gets mirrored in big businesses. We'd have been far better served with a far simpler set of KPIs. Within our situation. We only really needed to answer three questions Do our customers love what we're doing and what we plan to do?
Speaker 1:Amen.
Speaker 5:Are our people engaged and happy? And then finally, do we have enough money in the bank? The beauty of answering those three questions is the first two. You answer by getting out and talking with your customers and your people. It changes a lot of your energy from internally focused KPIs to externally. And then the final one, the financial one, is basic arithmetic that anybody can do in about 10 minutes. You know it's easy.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 5:But it's also very blunt and very clear. It actually needs to be taken when the answer to that question is I don't have enough money in the bank. I think that resolving that tension between waterfall management and being agile to enable effective software development, I think is a challenge that many, many of the folks who work in CPG listening to this podcast will resonate with them.
Speaker 1:I'll tell you it resonates with me and I can tell you that I had that exact conversation. Focus on one question Do the users love the software? Yeah, they do. Keep funding. If they don't stop funding, it matters what you just said.
Speaker 5:Yeah, I think that's a good discipline, but very tough, because the challenge for managers in that situation is the rest of the business is thinking waterfall Exactly Annual plan, quarterly reviews, et cetera. It means you need to figure out not only how you train yourself to be disciplined about it as the leader for the work, but how do you educate the rest of the business as to why we're doing it this way and what the benefits are.
Speaker 1:Lots of education, which is why I think these digital transformations the larger the company, the more that educational piece takes and the more institutional resistance prevents it from actually becoming pervasive knowledge. Right, if you have 5 000 people all believing that waterfall is right and you got five people saying no, there's another way of doing it. That tiny, tiny minority of people is not likely to be heard, whereas 50 out of 500, that equation changes a little bit.
Speaker 5:Oh yeah, One of the mistakes that folks can make is they understand agile and agility and they can kind of intellectually understand the benefits of it, but then they try and impose a waterfall management on top of it, not allowing for making mistakes, taking the wrong path, better understanding our customers, changing the destination, and I think that that's. I see a lot of that. I don't know about you, but I see an awful lot of that Waterfall disguised as agility, if you like.
Speaker 1:I want to get Nasheed's take on this too. I'll use the word again. What do you hate about the digital transformation?
Speaker 4:What I hate about digital transformation is how hard people fight to protect the status quo. That's the number one thing I hate. Too many organizations have individuals who resist change, even when they acknowledge that the solutions that are standing them in the face are better. So the way I see it is, there's a perverse incentive to keep things inefficient because inefficiency often protects jobs and job security is more important than transformation. Or they do what feels safe and then they BS leadership. Hey, we're working on this exciting thing. It's going to take us six to eight months, or it's going to take us three years, and I believe that's the problem. People get comfortable with inefficiency. Hey, we have this strategic report that we have to do monthly or quarterly, and everybody's running around with their hair on fire trying to get it done, and what happens is they stay in this cycle that doing the same trick over and over, getting paid well for it, when they could simply invest in optimizing that process and move on to more value creation.
Speaker 1:I've had this conversation with my wife. Well, in a way, she sometimes reminds me Roland, not everybody cares as much as you do. Some people are just happy to go to work and not be bothered. They want to pick the kids up at three, they want to have a nice lunch with their colleagues. And you know, transformation, like I don't care. I've been doing this like this for the last five years. Why would I need to change? Not necessarily be happiness within efficiency. It might just be I'm happy in life the way it is, absolutely.
Speaker 4:That's so true. It's so true. And I think, as you said, if you're wired differently, you're always looking for optimization. Your brain is trained to see innovation, see opportunity. Where others find comfort, it's like, well, yeah, this is good, but good is the enemy of great, and we can always do better. But you're absolutely right. Some people are comfortable and when you talk about digital transformation, you're comfortable until you can't be. And as one of my colleagues always says, he says if you're not a digital organization, you won't be around Kodak blockbuster, Exactly.
Speaker 5:That inertia, people sticking with the familiar for good and for bad motivation. I think that goes all the way up to the C-suite and you can get very senior managers who are very comfortable with their fiefdom and they want to stick with that. And that's why I think that digital transformation is not a bottom-up exercise, it's a top-down. And for true digital transformation, this chief executive in particular has to create the sense of purpose and find a way of getting rid of that silo thinking that says we in this function do it this way, we in this function do it this way, we in this function do it that way and get those barriers eliminated. And I think there's a big point there about to do true digital transformation requires leadership at the very highest level to cut through all of that.
Speaker 1:John, I love that. I'm hearing it a little bit as a provocation, in the sense that in my experience, the actual work to transform digitally happens bottoms up. But what you bring up, which is just as important it's hard to argue which one's more important the sponsorship and the purpose has to come from the leaders, right, because bottoms up without that purpose won't go anywhere. It's what Masheed was saying earlier. There's a pocket of a couple of people over here and a pocket of a team or two over here and they're doing it well, or one division's doing it better than the other. So that's because it's bottoms up. But for the entire company, the entire organization, to make the transformation, you have to have the head. That might be the board. It could go all the way to the shareholders. You don't know how far that has to go, but you have to have the sponsorship of all the executives and the ownership, whether it's public or private, to say, yeah, we do want to become a digital company. And, guys, you need to change how you work. Monday through Friday, every day work's going to look different. And then you marry those two things. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:Let me share what I hate and I'm using the word with a lot of intention. Similar to what you said, nasheed when change is this deep and people feel threatened, everyone gets either passionate or scared. Similar to what you said, nasheed when change is this deep and people feel threatened, everyone gets either passionate or scared. And, to John's point, without leaders who can navigate this, enemy camps are created. I hate the fighting. This is existential fear of oh my God, if we do it your way, I'm going to be out of a job, right? So that level of fighting is just so energy consuming and so time consuming and such a waste, right, and it distracts everybody and you don't get stuff done because you're always going about fighting about who's right or who's more right. So I definitely don't like that. We are going to have to answer the question do we want Darth Vader or Yoda to win in each one of these companies?
Speaker 4:Like the Star Wars reference. That's pretty good. It's deep. Some of it can't be avoided, unfortunately, I know. Unless you're an organization which I love is an organization that recognizes that what they've done won't work, and at that point they're kind of open Like, okay, somebody save us. And that's where you see less resistance and less of a will to fight because they've been beat down by the reality. So those are the organizations that I think are prime, because they recognize the need for change.
Speaker 1:We invite every one of those organizations to call us. We can help.
Speaker 4:We can help right.
Speaker 3:Be the first one to dance, please.
Speaker 1:There you go, exactly. Please hold.
Speaker 5:So, moving on to what we love about it, john, what I love about digital transformation is it is the place where people who are driven by results and intellectually curious are going to thrive. As a leader who gets the chance to be involved in digital transformation, one of the things I can promise you is you're going to learn so much, not just about technology, but about leadership in what is a must-win battle for your company, and I just think it's a great time to be part of that. I can honestly say the last 10 years of my career were probably the most interesting and most developmental because of that, every day being a school day and learning new things, meeting new people, being involved in different situations, having to deal with the ambiguity levels that are just off the chart compared to normal day-to-day leadership and management so I think it's a fantastic thing to be doing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it makes my heart smile when I hear you say that. I agree with all that.
Speaker 4:Spot on. Yeah, the right leadership can veto or block the best change initiatives. And once you've delivered on the technological solution, that's one piece. Delivering it to the customers, getting them to adopt it and operate differently, that requires champions who really take the flag up the hill and take the arrows along the way. So, yeah, what I love about it is when organizations embrace it. It's not about just upgrading tools or software or technology. It's not about that at all. It's actually about reimagining what's possible. The concept of, like the first mover, the first follower everybody has seen that video of that individual starts dancing and then another person joins in and then there's a crowd that starts to follow Love that video and I think of that as presentation of what digital transformation looks like. I love the fact that it gives organizations an opportunity to revolutionize how they do business, and I've seen it work in a number of organizations that have dared to take that risk, dared to try something new. That change doesn't just happen, it accelerates. So digital transformation gives us an opportunity to see what's possible.
Speaker 1:I love the first dance analogy I've done it a few times in my life where it's some sort of a crowd and the dance floor is empty and I'm like, all right, it takes so much courage, right? Everybody's watching and dancing is so I don't know. Private.
Speaker 4:I look a little bit like Elaine when I do. That's how it feels when you're doing these projects. You're dancing by yourself in an organization Everybody's looking like. What are you trying to do?
Speaker 1:Yeah, but it feels good, right. When you finally took that leap of faith, you mustered the courage. You're out there making a fool of yourself, you think, but then everybody joins in and then it's a party, brian.
Speaker 3:The number one thing that I do love about it is it actually just changes two ways. Technically, it actually changes people's lives right, like the daily lives. Sometimes the mundane, boring stuff gets put to the side and be like all right, this is automated now and now I can actually focus on what I really want to do about this projects and the passion comes out. That's the beauty of the digital transformation, the technical part of it. But then I think, once you get all the different parts actually working a little bit, and then things are running smoothly, that's when everyone's working towards the same goals, things actually happen.
Speaker 3:And then all that that bull you're saying, roland, you know, usually goes to the side because it's like, hey, this person wasn't up to speed before. Now he or she's on board because we're all going towards the same goal. It's like a marathon, you know, and like some people are faster, some people are slower, but still let's all get to that end goal. And then you know, once we've achieved this goal, then there's the next one, of course, you know, because this is ongoing. But that's what I love about the big change.
Speaker 1:Yeah, great the things that I love about digital transformation basics. First One, it's given me a pretty good career. Two, one of you said something similar. I find the people who are good at it to be spectacularly rewarding to work with so much fun. What I love about it most is that it lowers the barrier to entry for talented people to find success without having to raise millions in capital.
Speaker 1:For example, youtube 120 million people a day are going to YouTube and content creators don't need millions to produce and broadcast videos, but do this on affordable, everyday sort of tools, publishing some of the most creative and most engaging, interesting content in the world. And all that wouldn't have happened with old school TV. So the transition lowers the barrier to entry and suddenly you have a whole population that wasn't able to do something before contributing. And, yeah, there might be some stuff that you really don't think of as very high quality, but there's also some things, some geniuses, that would never have had the chance to contribute if it had been kept the old way. And the IT transformation I can't wait to see what new school IT departments are going to invent when they have the right tools in place to develop their own software. It's going to be spectacular.
Speaker 5:And Roland, if I could just build on that, because that really sparks for me that. It really makes me sad to see the executive talent and management talent at all levels inside businesses which is sucked up doing routine and mundane tasks, highly repetitive, and using a fraction of their talent uh, that they could be deploying against the business. And I think one of the big opportunities of digital transformation is to free people up of that highly routine, easy to automate type work and then and unleash their energy into doing higher level work. And I think that when people get worried about I need to protect my job, yeah, you may have to protect your job if you're unwilling to embrace the fact that you have a lot more to offer.
Speaker 1:If we can get off the table all that routine stuff, yeah, and now imagine the companies that not learn how to do this are doing it already. If you're in the business of producing food, you're going to be able to do that better. If you're in the business of producing medication, medications are going to get better. If you're in the business of taking care of pets, they're going to have a better life, right. So these things this is what I was saying earlier that the digital transformation actually, at the end, can be traced back to improvements and how we all get to benefit from companies that feed us, clothe us, keep us warm, keep our pets warm, take care of our kids. If those companies get better, life's going to get better.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Think about like you know, it's been chopped around a long time, but the four-day work week, right. It's just like, if you really think about it, that could be actually realistic. Why?
Speaker 3:Because of digital transformation you know, because everyone is a little bit more efficient than having that extra day to spend with your family or to retire at 55, you know, it's because of that, you know, because you're embracing that. So it's just like when, when people are reluctant to it and you kind of shift their mindset, be like no, look at this, you know like. And then all of a sudden they'll be like wait what? You know what I'm saying. All of a sudden they'll be like wait what you know what I'm saying. All of a sudden their mind's okay, let me hear more. But you have to change that mindset and it's sometimes not easy.
Speaker 1:This was part of the purpose for what we wanted to discuss today in this episode, which is what is digital transformation, why would I even care about it? And our questions about how has it affected our lives, what do we hate about it, what do we love about it and what I love about it, and hopefully it'll resonate with the listeners going okay, well, here's how I would answer that question In that spirit. Now, segueing to the last question that we wanted to discuss today, if you were mentoring somebody right now that is going through a digital transformation, what would be the advice you'd give them? Please hold.
Speaker 1:All right, John, what advice would you give somebody you're mentoring?
Speaker 5:I'd give, I think, two pieces of advice. One is surround yourself with the right people and you can test for the right people. The test should have two parts to it. One is do they have the skills and experience to contribute to this work? The second is do they have the right way of doing things? Are they intellectually curious? Will they speak plainly to be understood rather than to show off their expertise? Will they be truthful and straightforward when things aren't right? Will they take on board criticism and adapt to it, et cetera, et cetera. So that's the first thing Surround yourself with people who are the right people to be part of that big change program.
Speaker 5:The second one is, as far as possible, look for the external benefits to delivering benefits. That means something to the user of the company's products, the brands, the retailers who sell those brands, the people who work on the front line distributing and making those brands the better. So try and avoid internal looking KPIs that give you a sense of making progress without seeing the impact on the end users of the product and particularly how they impact the final performance of the company. I work for a big company who had to go through a big transformation wasn't necessarily digital. The mantra that the chief executive adopted is if you can't see how you are helping to make, sell and deliver our products, then you really don't have a clear role within our business going forward, and that would apply to HR, hiring the right people, finance, making sure the money was available, et cetera, et cetera. Everybody had to make that connection and I think looking at performance in terms of how it impacts the people who love our brands is a good place to start. If you possibly can, Nasheen.
Speaker 1:What's your advice?
Speaker 4:I would tell whoever I'm mentoring understand the law of diminishing returns. Headcount doesn't mean what it used to we're. In the 21st century, you can do more with less Scale. Strategically, digital transformation is not a tech problem. I would emphasize communication as a critical skill. The ability to be a coach, a guide, the ability to encourage, reassure, organize, learn, adapt are all critical right now. The technology will change. It will evolve. However, these fundamental skills will enable anyone to navigate these developments, because technology is, quite frankly, the easy part. The right thing to do now is to invest in educating team members and leadership to understand how their life will improve with the innovations or the transformations. It's a marathon, not a sprint, but the journey will be worth it.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 3:This is a tough one because I mean, I was thinking it should come from top down, because they're the ones who kind of have to you know one, see what money you have in the bank. If they could forecast accurately and then kind of level set, like what is digital transformation, so everyone's talking the same exact language, left hand and right hand could speak to each other, because whoever from the top actually did a level set and said here's the language that I like everyone to speak about. And then to other people I would say if you're going bottom to top, think about your must-haves versus your nice-to-haves.
Speaker 1:Those things resonate. The leadership bit and for what it's worth nice-to-have or the must-have is how product managers would look at the world and prioritize what work needs to be done first, second or third when they go to build a product. So, again, quite insightful. My advice first I've made so many mistakes along the way and some were big enough to where they're still embarrassing. But what a learning journey. I have three points that I would share with anyone right now that I'm mentoring. The first one is pretty tactical in a way, but it is central to the IT department's current transformation. Stop chasing AI if you don't have solutions for basic data needs. Good AI and ML rely on good data. If you have to do both at the same time, prioritize the basics, even if it's not sexy. Have that discipline Much of what you just said, nishit. Don't go for the last thing as a leap. You've got to take all the steps, so take care of that. Second advice is, even if it's not clear right now what your greater role if you have one in the digital transformation is until after it's done, always ask yourself what's the right thing to do right now. So that's not asking how is this done correctly. It's asking is this the correct thing to be doing? You've got to look at that first, and if the answer is yep, at our stage of maturity, then that's what we'll do, and that changes. A year from now, the right thing to be doing will look very different. And then the third thing is think system, as we have been talking.
Speaker 1:A lot of the comments that have been made. I'm sure you just talked about communication. It's about connecting people around one main purpose, john. You talked about communication. It's about connecting people around one main purpose, john. You talked about the leader being the mouthpiece of that and the guiding light, but at the end of the day, what the leader does is connect everybody in the company to that same purpose. Here's how that actually works. I don't want to spend two minutes talking about this In real life.
Speaker 1:An example of how you interconnect people and think of it as a system is you're having a conversation with an analyst. She says that it takes her 20 hours every week to prepare the same reports. You were talking about that too. You connect an enlightened product manager into the conversation. He hears an opportunity to build a new tool From there. They connect a designer into the conversation who can prototype mock-ups in a few days. Then you connect a data scientist and a data engineer who prototype a backend for this whole thing. From there you have finalized a usable prototype and then you go into final development for what becomes the product version of this tool without a whole lot of risk. At the end of all this, there's not a question whether the BA is going to think of it as useful because they were connected. Here's how not to do it.
Speaker 1:The executive a very important person in the company, says they need a better weekly report. It goes and hires an agency. The agency interviews 50 people. From those 50 interviews they come up with a few hundred user stories. Those hundreds of stories are now prepped with hundreds of pages of very elaborate documentation. Those people hand it off to yet another set of people who then spend months completing tasks that are status reported by a project manager to the same executive. Months later, there's some sort of a tool that comes out. This is dozens of everything's green project status reports and, along with a 20-page training deck, the project is declared complete. The executive says this is great.
Speaker 1:Management celebrates a win and the BA, not so impressed with the tool, goes it's okay, I'm just going to keep doing the work the way I was doing it before, but you just had to spend a lot of time and a lot of money not transforming yourself digitally. Which is why I was saying earlier, john, that the work has to happen bottoms up, the sponsorship happens top down. Sure, if you separate those things and they're not connected, you're not going to actually transform. My third piece of advice is that when you do digital right, the effects are tangible across the entire organization and they're pretty immediate. Think of digital a little bit like medicine. If it's the correct prescription, the symptoms should be relieved pretty quickly. It might take a while to get completely healed completely there, but you start going digital, you're going to start seeing improvements immediately. If you don't see those immediate improvements, say weeks or months, you're not doing it right. We can help, please hold.
Speaker 1:That's a wrap for episode one of New School IT. Thanks for listening to our inaugural episode. We talked about the highs, the lows and the reality of digital transformation, because it's not just about tech. It's really about people, systems and the courage to change. Do you want to be Blockbuster or Netflix? The choice is yours. Digital transformation isn't a plan, it's a mindset, a mindset that's turned into practical ways of working with Soda. If this conversation got you thinking, subscribe, leave us a review, share this with someone you're thinking right now hmm, they need to hear this. Remember, the more people share knowledge, the more of it exists. Join us next time when we tackle how software drives the digital transformation and what it takes to be good at it, especially if you're not a programmer. Until then, be the first to dance Soda Coming out Soda.
