The CIO of a sweet company
To the tune of Crazy Train —by Ozzy Osborne, we interviewed Carlos Amesquita for Rockin’IT.
Carlos is an amazing leader, CIO, Director in multiple Boards and strategic advisors to a few non-profits. We focused on multiple aspects of technology today with an angle of the vision of a CIO and how it has evolved in the different environments he’s been throughout the years, and how this transformation changes with the availability (and challenges) of data.
It turns out, unsurprisingly, that Carlos believes CIO’s are different these days than 15 years ago and he shares his views into what a modern CIO should be today, as compared to the backoffice function of data processing of yesteryear. Keep in mind, he’s been a bi-modal CIO recently, but he also was a traditional one back in P&G when he was the LatinAmerica CIO.
“For modern CIOs, Job One is to maintain operations, meaning to run the business, however, they also have another role. They become aware of how business should be done, run and leveraged for differentiation”
We’ve heard it before, but he is adamant that “data is the new oil”. With it you can optimize and improve processes, differentiate and take/defend decisions, sure, but Carlos also recognizes that data is dirty and needs to be cleaned, integrated among other sources, make it available, and extract insights. This takes time and effort.
“You need to refresh, purge, merge data constantly so you can make the best of it” This explains why the title of his role, is Chief Information Officer, although he recognizes that in certain companies, these titles are as varied as Chief Technical Officer or Chief Digital Officer.
But, what happens when data that is not necessarily within the control of the organization’s boundaries, systems of record and knowledge workers? Maybe the data is coming from strategic partners, markets and customers, which brings another set of challenges that we lightly touched on but grant a lenghty conversation: consumer privacy and data control.
Moments of Truth
One interesting segment of our conversation is when he defines the 3 different moments of trust that they used at Procter and Gamble for lifecycle and customer journeys. I won’t spoil it for you, so go take a listen.
Digital Transformation
He doesn’t like to call it that (and I don’t blame it), but acknowledges that it’s an useful term sometimes to get projects approved. At the end it’s the adjustment of new processes, people and technologies (IoT, Machine Learning, Data Science) to adapt to the new digital reality.
People and corporate culture are tough to change. The later is nothing more than the values, principles and behaviours that the corporation incents, and if caution and risk aversion are part of the culture, you need to change that.
“In the digital world you need to move fast, fail (cheap fail) and learn”
Since he used to partner with many technology vendors as a CIO and now is at the Board on the other side of the equation in companies like Cigniti, ZScaler, NowSecure and Incture, we asked him about the saying from Jim Ryan, CEO of Flexera, who claims that “Software is the most dysfunctional supply chain in the world”.
“Some of my most hated work came from those audits with SAP where we needed to cough up more money due to the need to catch up with licenses. Governance is very important”
I look forward to the time where technology is paid for like an utility. If I use a lot, i get charged accordingly”. Governance is fundamental, and who you hire to help you (bringing the outside in) is crucial.
Audits are audits. You need help to take care of the longtail of the vendors, and not just focus on the big ones. Lot of money can be wasted in there. This is a function that needs to be centralized”, which curiously, contrasts with what Liz Reich told us in the last episode.
Lastly, he shares his thoughts on the 5 E model, his approach to leadership that includes:
- Envision (what do you want to do and achieve)
- Energize (communicate to people)
- Empower (select key people to lead with accountability)
- Enable (to be able to go around the roadblocks)
- Execution (of the strategy)
“Strategy without execution has no outcomes. no results”/
Don’t miss the part where he calls the five years he spent in Caracas, some of his happiest years in life. That’s at the end of the episode. Don’t skip ;).
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You can find Carlos Amesquita here
As always, to support this Podcast, visit those that sponsor it: Flexera.com. Leaders like Carlos rely on Flexera to inform their decisions, reduce risk and reallocate capital from “audit defense” and cloud spend waste into strategic projects to help their organizations.
