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422- AI Needs Architecture Before Automation w/Robert Sheesley · You've Been Heard

• 0:09
  Speaker A: All right, well, it's great to have you back for another episode of you've Been Heard, the show dedicated to the IT executives currently steering their organizations and the aspiring tech talent preparing for their own seat at the leadership table. Our focus is always on real, unscripted conversations that move beyond standard corporate jargon to explore what truly makes or to explore what it truly takes to drive an organization forward in this digital age. Robert, a huge welcome to the show. We're so grateful you've carved out some time to dive into these topics with us today for our community at you've been heard.com, you're in for an insightful session. Robert brings decades of experience leading high growth IT organizations across diverse sectors from healthcare to home services. A true gem in his leadership style is his firm belief that IT is not just a support function, but the primary engine for business philosophy. A philosophy that has allowed him to transform complex environments into agile, value driving powerhouses. Robert, we have a lot of ground to cover today regarding your journey. I'd love to start by handing the floor over to you. Could you introduce yourself to our listeners and share a bit about your path to leadership?
• 1:26
  Speaker B: Absolutely. Thanks Mike. It's great to be here with you finally. I know he has some scheduling hurdles to overcome, but I'm glad that we were able to do that. And it's a joy to be with you today and to talk a little bit about leadership in the age of some accelerated and exponential AI and technology evolution. It's exciting time to be a technology executive today. Started my career out in technology. That was not the plan. Coming out of business school. Six years of undergrad and two years of graduate school was more focused on international business, which was my concentration in my mba. And I landed at EDS out of the gate really. The way I describe it is I had a man crush on Ross Perot and I just wanted to work for someone who had such a high degree of integrity as Ross did. But EDS was a great foundational start for me in the technology space. One of the premier, if not the premier technology company back in the early 90s and 2000s and I had a great career leading up to my global enterprise architecture leader role at Mylan. Working for Michael Smith who was our CIO for several years at Mylan Pharmaceutical. I built the global enterprise architecture practice there from scratch. I started with one employee. I think by the time I left we had 30 plus employees that either were direct reports or matrix reports into that global architecture organization. And then I jumped back into the private equity World working in M and A due diligence and M and A integration, which is where I cut my teeth at Anderson Consulting in places like Alvarez and Marcel Business Consulting and Westmore Partners back in the 2000s and the 2000s. But yeah, learning from some CIO luminaries in my career like John golden at cna, Michael Smith at Mylan really had a great foundational start for me as an executive leader which led me into my CIO role at rents Group for seven years beginning back in 2018 and then I exited more recently in the fall of 2024 and have been really sharpening my saw relative to AI strategy, AI architecture and how enterprise architecture is affected and will affect the use of AI and AI strategy for mid market and large scale organizations across the globe. For the past year and a half I've been mostly consulting, doing a lot of speaking. I delivered a keynote address twice over the last. Actually three times over the last two months and the title of that is Synthetic Intelligence and Architecting the Organizational Mind. So my last year and a half has been predominantly outside of some MA due diligence and framework and methodology building for some organizations I've been focused predominantly on AI.
• 4:38
  Speaker A: So I will get us back to this part of the conversation for sure because I got lots of interest in this because we're trying to change that mindset and go through that acceleration in the business. But let's step back just a tiny bit towards coming out of school with focus on the international and working for the organizations that you just mentioned in the 90s and early 2000s and then making it to a CIO in I think you said 2018, 2015, 2018. What helped cause that change in the journey from the business side towards or the international business into it? What helped foster that possibility for you?
• 5:29
  Speaker B: Your CFO doesn't want 47 Internet bills. We help IT teams consolidate multi location Internet into parent child billing with coterminous contracts while still buying wholesale from the best providers. It gets control, finance gets clarity. No disruption, no sales pitch. Just go to you've been heard.com and answer the seven questions to simplify, streamline and save. Yeah, I think I mentioned my interest in working for someone like Ross Perot Ross and that really is what got me involved in technology. I was not a technologist in college. I think I took a COBOL class. I did do a lot of statistical analysis as cobol. Yeah, cobol. So yeah, there are companies out there still running mainframe systems. Yeah. But EDS was a great foundation because I was in The Marine Corps and went through the Parris island boot camp in the Marine Corps. And then I went through the EDS boot camp in Southfield, Michigan, which was their developer program or boot camp. And I gotta be honest with you, I don't know which one was more difficult or more challenging because both were 13 weeks. Shockingly, I guess coincidentally, they were both 13 week programs. But that EDS, they called it phase one of the systems Engineer Development program was pretty. In the Marine Corps, you have a saying high speed, low drag. It was, was pretty dynamic. It was a great learning opportunity for me, someone who was not a technologist to learn the basics of programming.
• 7:00
  Speaker A: I was gonna say I was mistaken in the way I framed that. So you started off into technology really quickly in the 90s.
• 7:06
  Speaker B: I did.
• 7:07
  Speaker A: It wasn't like a transformation in the odds. Yeah, transformation in the niots.
• 7:13
  Speaker B: Yeah. I did start out in technology as a systems engineer and then as a systems engineer manager. And then I spent a year in corporate marketing at EDS before I transitioned over to Anderson Consulting where I started to work in mergers and acquisitions. So that was an opportunistic career move for me. I was hired at Andersen to lead their SAP center of Excellence, which was a joint venture between Anderson and General Motors. And a few weeks after I joined the firm, the talk stalled and the center of Excellence was paused indefinitely. And Bob Denner, I think was the partner at Anderson at the time. He assigned me to an M and A engagement and my M and A career just took off from there. I did several different postal integrations, multi year, multi organizational post M and A integrations. And then I evolved into some leadership roles at CNA Insurance, where I spent four years, two years on the technology side and two years on the business side at cna, again working for what I would consider one of my CIO, Mount Rushmore CIOs John golden at CNA. I learned so much from John relative to leadership and building structure around competencies within the IT organization that not only was technology strong and foundational, what transcended into the business community? John introduced a methodology there called Business Framework, which was all about enabling the business capabilities with technology. So I think he was ahead of his time a little bit back in. What year was that? 2001 when I joined CNA. And I think the history that he left at CNA and he's kind of like the Bill Belichick, I think of CIOs, because if you look at John's lineage and the people that ultimately became CIOs from that group of People at CNA during the years 2000 to 2005. It's in the at least half dozen to dozen people that were leaders in John's organization at CNA that ultimately became CIOs. And so I think it's a testimony to his leadership and the example that he set.
• 9:41
  Speaker A: Yeah, and it definitely sounds like he hit on that one thing that for us has been a common theme. It's learning to understand and listen to the business and apply technology with that in mind. That as the goal, that as the North Star. Because if I just come in telling you about technology and how cool it is and how, how many great things we can do with AI, but I'm not relating it to the business. And so it sounds like he was teaching you guys that right away, not to mention the fact that you had that opportunity playing on both sides of the fence, so to speak.
• 10:17
  Speaker B: Yes, absolutely. Great learning experience. And I carried that forward. That's really where I also cut my teeth in business architecture. I started to study and apply business architecture principles to my director level role at cna. And then one day one of the consultants who used to work for me at CNA who was leading a practice at a consulting firm called me and asked me if I would be interested in joining him and a few others down at State Farm to build a business architecture center of excellence and competency there. And this was back when business architecture was still being discussed in back alleys and dark places and people were, it wasn't mainstream yet. And so again, another opportunity, very opportunistic career movement for me was to join Greg Sudrith at State Farm and Wendy Keene, who needs no introduction. I just saw Wendy in London at the Chief Architects Network summit there. And Wendy and I and Greg and a few others built this magnificent. A business architecture competency within the IT organization of State Farm. And the whole premise behind that was State Farm, their CIO and the vice president leaders of the organization wanted to get better at serving the business. That was kind of the primary objective of this idea of building business architecture competency and tools and templates and processes so that they could get better at serving the business needs of the business stakeholder community. And so we spent a lot of time building business architect, I'm sorry, business activity models, teaching the newly appointed and hired business architects within the IT organization how to build business activity models and then how to build business and technical requirements based on those activities. And so business architecture has come full circle in that it is a competency area of an organization that is Very, very closely aligned to strategy and strategy development, because strategy is the macro level, how you're going to execute on your mission. And the business architecture produces artifacts like business capability models that you can use to describe what the organization does in service of that strategy. The how is ever changing how we do things is ever changing. The process layer and how technology enables those processes is ever changing. And in the case of the last decade, enter AI. And AI certainly is a driver of process change because now we're talking about introducing a fairly significant amount of digital capital into what we call it at future point of view. One of the consulting firms that I work for, architecting the organizational mind.
• 13:30
  Speaker A: So if the term business architecture is kind of new to me, where do I go to start trying to figure out exactly what you're talking about? Because I'm understanding a lot of what you're talking about, but some of our listeners may not have that experience, may not have had that chance or that guidance. So where would they go to figure out what you're talking about around business architecture and then how it fits. All of those things fit together with what you're talking about so that they can advance their organizations, advance themselves and their organization.
• 14:03
  Speaker B: Absolutely. I would point to three resources. If someone had were to come to me and say, where can I go to learn about business architecture and why that would be valuable for my organization. I would start with the Business Architecture Guild. The Business Architecture Guild is an organization, a leading organization within the architecture community. It's once upon a time the Business Architect association was probably the leading association in the practice of business architecture. I actually participated in the development, the very first, I think the world's first Business Architecture certification course back in 2008, 2009, with folks in Chicago like Paul Bodine and Jack Hilty. Paul taught an university course at DePaul called Business Architecture. And so I would start the Business Architecture Guild, the business they own, in essence, the Business Architecture body of knowledge, very much so. The Business Architecture Guild is kind of like the Project Management Institute is a project management. The Business Architecture Guild is to Business architecture. Another area I would go is if you're an architecture leader in organization or you're wanting to learn more about Business Architecture or enterprise architecture, the chief architect network I mentioned, I was just in London with a lot of those folks at their Spring Summit is a great place to get education material, tools, templates and conversations around the application of Business architecture and enterprise architecture. And then the third source or the third resource is Wendy Keen, who I mentioned I worked with At State Farm, she's written a book called Strategy to Reality which I would recommend anyone read that has any role in developing or executing strategy in an organization and anyone who has any architecture role or responsibilities in an organization. She also runs a series of courses called Bizarc Mastery. And I actually as CIO at Wrench Group, I ran a few of my people, some of my leaders through her foundational course and I sat in on a number of those sessions. And I would say that Wende is, she just won Architecture leader of the Year in Europe a couple weeks ago. She definitely is easily one of the top 10 top 15, top 20 architects in the world when it comes to business architecture.
• 16:36
  Speaker A: Okay, how much is AI changing all of that? How much is AI tweaking the business architecture? Because I'm seeing it tweak the, like the SaaS models, the ERPs and, and changing the way people are looking at all of those monolithic applications within their organization. Yeah, well, how do you think AI is affecting business architecture?
• 17:02
  Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's fairly significant. Leading up to, I think the first of the year, a lot of organizations were focused predominantly on experimentation, proof of concept, building out some AI enabled use cases, process oriented. So when I speak of how an organization does something, there's a macro level, how, which is the strategy and there's a micro level, how, which is the process. So the strategy is how are you going to achieve your mission, the process, micro level, how is, how are we going to get work done to do what we want to do and the what as I referred to previously, are the capabilities. So when we start talking about AI and the impact of AI on business architecture and enterprise architecture, I think it's relatively significant for those organizations that are still looking to apply architecture principles and techniques and tools and processes to define what the future should look like. So when I was leading enterprise architecture at Mylyn, we anchored a lot of the work that we did on conceptual models, logical models and physical models as we sought to evaluate our current state, imagine the future state and build a roadmap for the transition state. So current state, what is it? What are we doing? How are we doing it? Future state, we're imagining possibilities. The art of the possible is a term that was, is used a lot.
• 18:47
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 18:48
  Speaker B: And AI opens the doors of opportunity exponentially when you start talking about what does our future state look like. And so when you think about architecting the four layers, and I've seen so many models, but I really like this four layer model that the Chief Architect network introduced a few months back. And it's the intelligence layer, it's the semantic and contextual layer, it's the data source layer, where's data coming from? And then it's the data management layer that includes AI, governance and incorporating those layers of architecture into your enterprise architecture. Meaning. So I think it's important to ground our thinking on what is the definition of architecture. And I have my own definition. There's probably a hundred, but my definition is it's the understanding of the relationship of the spatial and contextual assets of an organization. Now we're not talking about building architecture, we're talking about organizational architecture, business architecture and technical architecture. So words have meaning when you, when you break that down, you say, okay, spatial, that means there's some relationships that are closer than others of these assets. And then when you talk about contextual, you enter the idea of meaning. There's meaning in these relationships of these assets. And when you start to talk about processes, which is in essence an asset of an organization, how you do something, how you take an order, how you process an order, how you fulfill an order, how you serve or care for or provide support to the customer relative to that order, and how you service the customer going forward with other services and products that may have a relationship to something that they purchased within that order. All of that has a relationship to other assets in the organization. Data systems, people. And enter AI, which a lot of people are talking about. AI is a substitute for people, you know, although I hear people are trying to create the first AI operational billion dollar company. I think there's some sort of contest going on for race to a billion dollar company that is all AI and no human orientation, which I personally don't think is possible or is healthy for that matter.
• 21:31
  Speaker A: Yeah, well, and somebody's got to be helping provide the context for the model and everything else. Isn't that the human?
• 21:39
  Speaker B: Yes, yes, for the most part. But yeah. This humology concept which Scott Kalaski invented or created, trademarked 15 years ago and Scott is a good friend and a colleague at future point of view. He's talked a lot about humology and understanding within not only your departments of your organization, but your organization of a whole, where the contribution is to create value from a human capital perspective and a digital capital perspective. And what is the optimum formula based on department and in many cases based on process. When you follow a process end to end and you dissect it and you, you ask the question, how can I make this process better, more efficient, more accurate, a process that can handle volumes of input at a more rapid pace. You can also ask the question, where can AI assist in this? And that's part of, I think, where AI impacts enterprise architecture for the future is when you start to build out these future state views of a process, a department, an organization. You get to ask the question, where can I apply AI that can make the process more efficient, more accurate, able to handle more velocity, and that in turn equates to greater value creation for the organization, presuming that velocity has a direct correlation with revenue and, or productivity gain. Yeah.
• 23:24
  Speaker A: Yeah. Okay. So many different thoughts and so many different things. So the utilization of AI in the augmentation to facilitate that work and to expedite that work, what are the things, what are the challenges that as you're looking at this, as you're talking about this to others about or about the architecture and how it's affecting that architecture, how are you challenging them to look at it? How are you challenging them to find that optimization? I mean, I, I look at what we're doing and I'm thinking, okay, this is, this is where I see the drag on the human, the, the repetitive, the time consuming finding those areas. But you got thoughts around this beyond that?
• 24:13
  Speaker B: Yeah, I think it is really important to make sure if the AI model, if the use of AI is being driven by the cio, and in many cases it is, you have to make sure the business feels as though you're doing it with them, not to them, and you're doing it in a structured enough way that you'll be successful in the deployment of AI solutions in parallel with building that AI architecture for the organization. So from my perspective, use case fulfillment. So as you define, here's an example. So right now I'm a fractional chief technology officer for a private equity firm and I've defined six or seven areas of work that this PE firm devotes time, energy, attention, money to in support of their strategic goals and their mission. They're heavily invested in infrastructure and energy companies. And I went out and defined these five or six macro level areas or functions of their private equity firm. And then I defined use cases within those functions that would be serviced by some deployment of AI, whether it's embedded AI in a system that they're using, or it's an AI agent build. The how isn't as important as the why and the what. So as organizations start to evolve from this experimentation, which we call foundational phase, into operational phase of AI, they're going to need to look at processes across the organization from an end to end perspective and not, just, for lack of a better phrase, cherry pick specific use cases. I think it's good to implement AI solutions for specific use cases so the business stakeholder community can see some value related to that. But there's a bigger nut to crack here in embedding AI into the architecture of the organization and following it from the value streams across these processes of the organization. So here's a great example. After I've presented this, and I'm being somewhat clandestine because I respect the relationship I have with my clients, as I presented this, one of the partners came back and said, let's focus on one area. Let's just focus on investor relations and see what we can get and what value we can deliver in that area and then we can talk about the other areas. Beautiful. Okay, you picked one. Let's focus on that. So we're going to focus on that for the next month or so in really dissecting what is being done in the area of investor relations and where I can make them bigger, stronger, faster to create new opportunity for time, productivity gains and the reduction of time spent on this or that, to free people up to focus their time on more high value activities than the type of activities that AI can automate for them then. So are they that. Yep.
• 27:50
  Speaker A: Are they looking internally at just their processes or are they looking externally at their segment within whatever industry and approaching it from that? Because they could be two radically different solutions with that same kind of goal.
• 28:09
  Speaker B: Yes. So out of the gate, internally within their processes. Right. Okay. And then I was talking about this three, four years ago within the home services industry. I think there was tremendous opportunity that was ripe for the picking to work with providers, equipment and suppliers of material and equipment for the use of the home services industry. One of the ideas that surfaced in conversation at a CIO dinner in Charlotte, North Carolina was the opportunity to work with the air conditioning manufacturers that were providing our company and our brands with equipment and using AI to predict surplus inventories and then to initiate the opportunity for our organization to purchase surplus inventory from one or more particular providers before that inventory was offered to the global population of buyers of that. So AI would then be in a predictive agent role and then as that surplus indicator would provide the opportunity for discounted purchases. You're solving a couple of different problems. You're helping the manufacturer move their surplus inventory and perhaps even outdated inventory much more quickly through the system, and you're offering a dramatic discount on cost on equipment that is perfectly fine to be installed in the home. But Just wasn't the most recent version of a particular piece of equipment. And so this is a cycle that happens all the time. And there really is no automated function in place in the industry that allows for this kind of relationship between manufacturer and home services buyer of equipment, who ultimately installs the equipment.
• 30:24
  Speaker A: Okay, one of the other things that you brought up at the beginning of this was the how, why, and the what was more important than the how. Can you dive into that a little bit more? And exactly why is it more important than the how?
• 30:39
  Speaker B: So I'm a big Simon Sinek fan and he published the Golden Circle a number of years ago, easily over a decade ago. And his primary message is organizations that focus on their why and their employee population understands their why, and the consumers that purchase their products and services understand their why, are more successful. And he held up Apple as an example, which I think is pretty relevant. But in terms of the what, and that is the capabilities of the organization that truly is your business model. What you do as a business is your business model. How you do what you do is forever changing how an organization produced, marketed and sold and serviced products and services. Pre Internet is much different than post Internet. And you can easily say how a company produce products and services, marketed, sold, serviced customers. Pre cloud computing is much different than post cloud computing. And I think the same will be held true for pre and post AI. So the how is significant to the degree that it enables the what, what you do as an organization. And it's interesting because I've produced capability models and we did it, did so at Mylan, and it was a rough go at first, but once we started sitting down with the business leadership of our pharmaceutical organization to show them our stab, right, our, our attempt at creating a business capability model for a particular area or function of the business. You saw the light bulbs turn on in people's heads as we started talking through these capability models. And really what the capability model is, what do you do as an organization? If we can all agree with what we do and then we look at the how do we do it? That is the opportunity for change. That introduces the opportunity for change. Because processes exist to move data along a journey that produces product and produces services to market to consumers and then fulfill the consumer needs in how the product and service adds value to their lives and in the case of business, adds value to other business models. So why and what is so important is because if you don't have a good command and understanding and universal view of the why and what of your organization, you get into spitting contests about the how you do things. And I'll give you a great example real quick. We rolled out an erp and this was a highly quizzitive organization. We always would create a subject matter expert catalog. And when we would take an acquisition and migrate that acquisition to our homogeneous ERP platform, our homogeneous FNA platform, our homogeneous HRIS platform, we would always create that subject matter expert. And we had specific functions within the organization that we wanted. A number one subject matter expert and a number two subject matter expert, ideally a number three subject matter expert, so that we could work with these people as we migrated them onto these new platforms because their processes were going to change not dramatically, but slightly. And we wanted to get out in front of that so that we were practicing good organizational change management. One of the organizations that we acquired said, I don't want you to bother my people. The leadership said this, we will be your subject matter experts. Okay? Okay.
• 34:44
  Speaker A: So you get to go bother your people.
• 34:47
  Speaker B: So well, here's what happened. They provided guidance. They provided guidance along the way, they made decisions along the way. And then as we rolled out the configured systems into a user acceptance testing phase where we were then allowed to bring in the subject matter experts that we had originally identified, the SMEs were like, well, that's not how we do it. So the leadership didn't truly understand the how. They knew the what what they did, but they didn't fully have an understanding of the how they did it. So when it came time to the ta da moment of okay, let's go get the SMEs to do this user acceptance testing, the SMEs, their immediate response was that's not how we do it. And so there was definitely a lot of rework that needed to be applied because how we configured the platforms was grounded on how the processes were described to us.
• 35:48
  Speaker A: Right. And it's right back to that other statement that you made of this was technology that was done to them, not with them.
• 35:56
  Speaker B: Yes, exactly.
• 35:57
  Speaker A: Because otherwise they would have had that input from the beginning and helped. It would have been a one time deal instead of a rework. And it was a sounds like it was a huge rework to get back on target. So one of the things that I'm seeing, experiencing and trying to figure out how to navigate and as I talk to others, I'm hearing I'm not alone in this is who is building these solutions, which with the what and the why for the organization when it comes to the AI. So in that sense, we're empowering our SMEs, our people on the ground. The business side of the house now has a tool set that they've never had before that helps then code and create and craft solutions that they always had to go to somebody else and try to articulate their what and their why and describe it through their how. Now they've got a tool that they can start talking to it and it starts building the what and the why. But then there's that contention between the how of the technical teams and the business teams. So what best practices are you seeing develop around this?
• 37:15
  Speaker B: Yeah, so I think organizations that are out in front of this and we describe. And when I say we, I mean my colleagues at future point of view, who I work closely with on a number of client engagements. We've defined, you know, three AI skill types within the organization and we've also defined. And when I say we. Scott Plusowski is leading a lot of this thought leadership, but it's very, there's a lot of participation by experienced consultant community. We define these three phases of AI evolution, foundational, operational and realization. Meaning operational. It's embedded into your operations, it's part of your organization. Now you're starting to architect with AI in mind and then realization is you're now starting to measure the value of what AI has produced for your organization. The value creation lever. So we, we, we see three types of skills. AI skills in, in the 21st century company in the year 2026, there's the AI user, the AI maker and the AI developer and the AI user. A lot of the activities that the AI user is involved with are casual use, prompting for information, a recipient of AI solutions that deliver search capabilities or coaching in certain areas like customer service. These are also people in the organization debate, maybe multiple AI modal users. So they're using audio, video, text. And then there's certain percentage of those AI users that fall into like an elite AI usage skill category, meaning they're the people, the stakeholders that you want to contribute to that how earlier in the process because they've run ahead of the pack in their use of commercially available AI tools. Then there's the AI maker. So these are people within the organization that are building their own GPTs, they are building personal agents for their own productivity and they're building process agents for the areas that they're responsible for. They're also probably engaging with AI automation vendors that can assist them in the deployment of AI solutions. As an example, I have a client, CT that I've been working with. I helped them define their AI strategy last spring and over the course of the past year, we've been deploying two AI solutions. One is an internal search agent that uses all of their internal knowledge capital as well as OpenAI LLMs that are made available to them. And they're also deploying a coaching assistant for their customer service representatives. That coaching assistant is listening to their calls, listening to their, in some cases their video calls, and providing feedback based on a rubric that the subject matter experts produce on what makes a good call, a productive call, and where areas that customer service agents need to focus on. If a caller or customer falls into any one particular category or profile that has been identified. And then the AI maker also is making automation connections with other systems. So they're using available APIs to connect systems with one another to create these automation capabilities. One that comes readily to mind that I'm certain you're familiar with is robotic process automation. And then the third category, or AI skill type in the organization is AI developer. And this is your vibe code demo structures, your simple personal apps development, the ability to build apps with a back end and a front end using other applications within your organization and the data made available within the organization. Organizations that have created center of truth data source capabilities like a data estate or a data lake, I think are probably ahead of the curve a little bit because they're not having to build connectors or integration capabilities with native applications to use the data made available in those native applications. When I was CIO at Wrench, we built a data lake specifically for the purpose of making sure that new platforms that we were introducing into our technology ecosystem, like Adobe Experience Manager, had available to it. The single source of truth data that a lot of these transactional systems were producing.
• 42:17
  Speaker A: And my mind just went in like 15 different directions. And it's awesome to have to have a conversation with somebody that sparks that kind of activity inside my head. Yeah.
• 42:28
  Speaker B: And I know we've talked a lot and we talked about a lot of things here. Again, that also in from my perspective, shines the light on the need for someone in the organization focused on architecture. How does all this stuff fit together and how do we move forward without leaving someone or some area behind? Again, I'm a huge fan of the experimentation and proof of concepts in parallel with the evolution of the architecture of the organization. Because now you're starting to when you can devote time to each of those tracks, if you will, the experimentation, the use case, fulfillment, you're now creating some credibility with the business community on where AI can produce value in the organization. And in parallel, you're working on your future state architecture to define the most profitable or value oriented areas in the company that will benefit the most from AI.
• 43:35
  Speaker A: So I've got what I think is an interesting question for you or challenge to you around that, because so many of us are being challenged today by the CEO and the highest levels of the executive team who are catching the blip verts in the magazines, in the back of the airplane or in the back of the seat of the airplane. Which tells you how old I am because there have been magazines and airplanes for a long time. But the CEO and the executive teams are coming in and they've got these areas where they know that there's a lot of inefficiency within the organization and they want AI applied to that and they're putting a lot of pressure and force and resources into doing just that. But many of them are not thinking about that architecture like you're talking about. And that business architecture is something that a lot the good CIO is paying attention to because they're trying to help build these systems for sustainability, for scalability, for repetitiveness. And so they can hand it off so that the next generation grabs it and continues to build on that and go with that. How do those who are listening to this or those that are coming up into that realm, how do they bring up that conversation? Where do they start that conversation? Or what's some ideas on how they have that conversation with the CEO so that they can not only start to show or well, show that they understand the the CEO's vision and what they're wanting and whether they're investing in to get there, but how to get them to also shunt some investment into that architecture so that all of this stuff happens? Because if we get focused just on the AI and, and the gifts that it's just going to magically produce for us, you've got makers doing stuff that the developers are supposed to be doing and it's not ever getting back to who was it MIT that was saying that 95% of AI projects are a failure?
• 45:39
  Speaker B: Yeah. And I think there's a lot of truth to that because of the approach that they're taking. So my belief is that to the degree that you can find a business stakeholder champion to talk about capability maturation and they understand that maturing capabilities produces greater value. They know their business better than the CIO and his or her team does, obviously. So finding that partner in the business where you can start talking about capability maturation and where on their capability model, what's the heat map? So if you've got 35 capabilities that make up your organization and we all agree on those level three capabilities and that's not an easy road to get to either, but you can't not try to get there. I would try to find the most courageous, I'll use that word courageous business leader willing to listen to why capability models can help them drive their agenda and use of technology and achieve budgetary approval for investments in technology to make their organization better. So finding that one champion in the business community where you can showcase the value of architectural thinking to build future solutions that enable the maturation of those capabilities and then deliver value to the organization as a result of that. If you can get the business stakeholder, agree. Hey, let's talk about these. Let's talk about the five most important capabilities of your organization. Let's look at these 30 and tell me what the if you could move the needle in maturity in any of these 30 capabilities, which five would you pick? Okay, let's talk about that. How do you view technology serving this capability today? Where are we missing the mark? Where could we get better? Where do we think AI could be applicable to moving the needle on maturation of this business capability? And oh by the way, if we can move the maturity on this capability to ticks, how do you see that impacting the KPIs that are directly correlated to this capability and having those kind of conversations and then working with that business stakeholder on what a future state architecture would look like and then proving that out I think is one way. Not the way, but it's one way to get the ears and the eyes of the CEO to understand why taking an architectural future state view approach to the use of AI in the organization could be valuable. Not to say that these one offs can't produce tactical improvements, but you're not going to see people you like to use the word transformation a lot. It's a cool word. The board loves to hear it. We're progressing on our digital transformation. Oh, tell me more. And it's nothing more than we're implementing some new systems. And oh by the way, we may or may not be applying organizational change management to land the plane without hurting anybody. But this word transformation is achievable if you do it in a thoughtful way and not just one off demonstration of tactical improvements within the organization. Don't get me wrong, tactical improvements are good. Plugging holes and removing pain points for business leaders and their teams is very important. But in parallel I think you got to find that one business leader that's willing to talk to you and even join you in this idea of let's talk about the capabilities of your organization and where you see maturation making the most difference and how technology then can serve the movement of the maturity of that capability.
• 49:50
  Speaker A: And I don't know how many other people heard what I just heard. And of course this is my interpretation of what you're trying to communicate of the challenges around meeting that golden vision that the executive leaders have and that transformation or that growth from where we are today to there, but helping explain how we get there step by step or mile by mile versus the magic of the teleporter taking us from origin to destination. Because we don't have teleporters yet and AI is not the teleportation system. And although it can make it look like it happened, it really hasn't. We've still got to go piecemeal along the way to get to the true transformation we like you're saying we can get that tactical quick win, but to get that fundamental shift it's going to take. It's a lot of communication. It is that has to happen at a level going full circle back to the beginning of this. You really have to be able to understand the business, to be able to talk to them about the business and that change and be able to explain the technology and the leveraging of that technology to incrementally increase the business and. But we also have to recognize today in our world that incrementation cycle has changed radically.
• 51:23
  Speaker B: Yes, absolutely. And the velocity is exponential today. And I know we're at time, but if you were to sit down with a business leader and say, hey, can we talk about our business model evolution? Right. How is our business model going to evolve in the next two, six, ten years? I don't know that you would get a great conversation with your first request to do that because. And I just consulted at a fairly large airplane manufacturer for eight months and I introduced the concept of a technology investment board so that they can look holistically across their enterprise to identify the most value driven technology projects to shepherd through the year versus what a lot of organizations do, they're very cost minded, focused, not value oriented focused. They're focused on the cost of these projects and the performance of these projects, but not necessarily on doing the hard work to define what is the value that's going to be delivered as a result of these projects being being completed. And it was challenging just to have the business capability model Conversation, let alone a conversation around how do you see the evolution of the business model? And these are very smart people who have been wildly successful in their careers. But AI introduces much more opportunity to complete these kind of strategic thinking projects around business model evolution and think about what the organization could look like two, six, ten years down the road. And now's the time to have to start having those conversations. You again. You want AI to do it with you, not to you.
• 53:17
  Speaker A: Yeah, and so many of us, I mean there's so much fear around AI doing to me versus AI helping me.
• 53:25
  Speaker B: That's right.
• 53:27
  Speaker A: So back to the softball that I promised to pitch towards you, which is what will IT leaders be talking about in 18 months that we're not talking about today?
• 53:38
  Speaker B: Well, I think IT leaders are going to be. They're just by necessity IT leaders are going to have to focus on this idea of intellectual, I'm sorry, intelligence architecture. And we've always talked about data and we've used terms like data driven, information oriented decision making. But it's really the intelligence architecture of the organization now that we're weighing the best balance between human capital and digital capital in service of the strategy of the organization. So I think CIOs are going to have to continue to sharpen their saw in this area of applied intelligence to achieve the what of the organization. And continuing to have those conversations with the business community I think is going to be very important. You get a lot of questions and I'm part of the Forbes Technology Council, so I answer a lot of questions that come my way from that platform. One of the questions that continues to pop up is what work should AI perform versus what work should humans perform? And from my perspective, this becomes a work design problem, not a technology problem. Organizations just need to define human and elute policies, autonomous AI processes, AI oversight responsibilities, AI escalation procedures. And I think a lot of organizations haven't thought through that. And I think the organizations I just saw on LinkedIn and I don't know who proclaimed this, but it's the top 50 or the top 50 companies in the world relative to using technology. And there are some great examples. Delta Airlines is one of them. I think Pepsi Cola was one of. Of course you've got the usual suspects at&t apples on there, but they also have deep pockets. So when you start talking to the you having these conversations with middle market companies that don't necessarily have the deep pockets around about way of me answering your question of what should the CIO be focused on? The CIO should Be focused on what is the business value that we can achieve. Right. Versus what is the latest, greatest in technology out there that can be purchased and applied in our organization. So great example is my client in Connecticut. I need to make some recommendations to them on internal risk management. And as they move from Google Suite professional email to Microsoft365, the most obvious choice would be Microsoft Purview. Well, Microsoft Purview is at least the advanced version is not inexpensive. And so you've got to be creative and resourceful as a CIO to look at all of the options that you have available to you to recommend to your business stakeholders and the risk reward related to those options, including cost and perceived value. So you really do need to more than ever before the cio and we talked about this in London. I was actually on a panel and the topic came up is the term CIO Chief Information Officer. Has that time passed? Do we need to come up with something new? Chief Transformation Officer, Chief AI Officer, Chief Intelligence Officer. We could call it whatever he wants. I'm shooting for grand poo ball one of these days. That's the title I want. We can call it whatever you want.
• 57:26
  Speaker A: You're going to get to with, yeah, right.
• 57:28
  Speaker B: There's a lot of buffalo hat. But if you're not talking with your business stakeholders about the value that technology will bring to the organization. And listen, it's not an easy conversation because we're not magicians. But you got to make some bold assumptions, you got to practice some courage on what those assumptions are and have the business stakeholder leader poke the holes in your assumptions, but at least get them out there with respect to what you think the value is in introducing new technology to the organization. And that's a lot of the messaging that I provided my clients when I helped them create all of the material and tools and processes around this technology investment board that they sought to create so that they can have a more holistic view of all of the planes flying in and out of the airport and which ones created the most value for the organization.
• 58:22
  Speaker A: I wanted to latch on one of the things that you said, that conversation with the leadership and having them poke holes through it and to how important it is for the technology people to have them have those holes poked through it so that they can reinforce those areas of what they're talking about and, and so that they have that understanding so that they can have, they can get through that part and get to a deeper conversation and not own it and like take it personal. When holes get poked, their questions being asked. They're fundamental assumptions that we're blind to. And now when that hole gets poked, now I know where that that pain point was. And if I know where it is, then I can address it and then I can move on to the next thing. So take that as the feedback and the value that it's providing to you during those conversations. It's a huge win for anyone in any conversation. When people are poking holes through stuff, pay attention to where those holes appear and how to fortify it or whether it needs to be opened up and let it all drain out.
• 59:33
  Speaker B: Yeah, and I think you hit the nail on the head. You can't take it personally. You need to lean into it as a learning opportunity.
• 59:40
  Speaker A: Exactly. Yeah. That's really where I was aiming at was the learning opportunity of what they're thinking, how they think, so that you can learn to think like them. Also, if there was one other thing that you would love the technologists that are listening to us to walk away knowing that you've been heard. Robert, what would that final thought be?
• 1:00:03
  Speaker B: The final thought would be, and I've been singing this song since 1992. Organizational change management is a thing. I said this in a few other podcasts over the last several years. I was sitting in an Auditorium at EDS on Legacy Drive in Plano, Texas. Peter Singhi walked out on stage. It was February 1992. I was in the EDS Leadership Internship Program, and he started talking about the psychology of change. And up until that point I was a technologist, even though I, I, I became one kicking and screaming, probably. But I was at the time a systems engineer manager. And what he said that day really was so poignant that I've devoted my career to studying organizational change, the dynamics of it, the psychology of it, and how important that work stream called organizational change navigation is to, to any large technology, systems deployment, any growth of any
• 1:01:00
  Speaker A: organization, and understanding and being able to see where you are, where you were, and thus where you're going. And to me, it's amazing that you're still carrying that message forward 35 years later, because we obviously, as any industry, haven't learned that lesson. Some have and they've made leaps and bounds in front of others. But without learning that lesson, every organization still struggles without that. Yeah.
• 1:01:32
  Speaker B: And it's incumbent, I think, upon the CIO or whatever title, Chief Digital Chief Transformation. It's incumbent upon that leader to make the case for resources related to organizational change that need to be presented and, and part of the team. Because organizational change management isn't the COO picking up the phone and telling all the leaders of the organization, this is important. That is not organizational change management. It is a process. It is a methodology. There are at least three dozen frameworks out there. I particularly like the one that we used at West Monroe Partners that quite frankly, I mean I applied it at Wrench Group as the cio. I took the best pieces and parts of that that some of the leadership at West Monroe contributed to. And we applied it especially in the post acquisition migration of these companies that we acquired onto these homogeneous platforms. Their world was changing, their processes were changing. If we didn't win their hearts and minds and find informal leaders within the various groups of those organizations to prop us up and to support us, we wouldn't have been nearly as successful as we had been. And the longer, and I'm just talking about M and A specifically, but the longer an acquisition integration runs, the less productivity, the less opportunity to scale. Scale right. The organization. And it could be a potential negative impact on really, really important KPIs.
• 1:03:14
  Speaker A: And it almost sounds like a version of the 8020 rule where 80% of the effort's going into 20% and that 20% is not making 80% of the value. It's definitely that low end value of that percentage. I could continue this conversation for quite some time. It sounds like you could too. Truly appreciate all of your time today, Robert Sheasley. And thank you for your time and your effort and for yes, the scheduling challenges and we finally overhand them.
• 1:03:45
  Speaker B: We made it. What? Mike, I appreciate you being patient with me.
• 1:03:49
  Speaker A: Oh, I appreciate the reverse patience because it was definitely a two way street on this. So thank you very much for your time, Robert.
• 1:03:56
  Speaker B: Thank you, Mike.