TechTalk Building Relationships With Other CXOs
Keeping in contact with your peers can help your business identify new strategies to manage today and transform for the future.
By Insight Editor / 3 Jun 2020 / Topics: Cloud As a service
By Insight Editor / 3 Jun 2020 / Topics: Cloud As a service
The tech world changes rapidly, but you don’t have to journey it alone. Senior Vice President and General Manager of Connected Workforce Mike Gaumond discusses the importance of building connections with peers — highlighting his relationship with Dorien Weijts, SVP and chief information officer at Blue Yonder.
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Audio transcript:
Published June 2, 2020
[Music]
Jillian
All right, Mike. So we're here today to talk about the CXO Corner, and in the Spring 2020 issue of the new Insight Tech Journal, our CXO Corner featured Dorene Weets, who is the Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Blue Yonder. Now, Blue Yonders a client of Insight but more than that, Dorene has become a friend of yours. Can you tell us how you met and what that connection means today?
Mike
Yeah, um, Dorene has been CIO for several years and Insight and Blue Yonder have had a relationship for probably four or five years and in fact, I met Dorene first at their headquarters. We were doing a tour with the CEO of Blue Yonder of their new offices, and Dorene was in the hallway. We just did a brief introduction. And then later, the sales team asked me to follow-up with Dorene to become the executive sponsor for our relationship with Blue Yonder as a client. So I did that and we started having monthly one-on-ones. You know just the typical executive sponsor relationship, but we've gotten to know each other, and we kind of joke that we start every one of our monthly meetings with ten minutes of banter about what's going on with the kids and the family, and little league, and in her case little league. My kids are older than that now. So yeah, it's been a great relationship and a great partnership between Blue Yonder and Insight.
Jillian
That's so great. Now, in her interview, Dorene details all the actions that needed to take place in order for Blue Yonder to transition to a SAS model. That's really primarily what she talked about and there's a lot that needs to happen. Now, as she relays with the company achieved, it seems like two elements were really critical to their success. The first being, effective organizational change management, or OCM. And then the second, she talked a lot about the importance of their partner or vendor relationships. Now, you've worked closely with a lot of clients, on very similar transformations. Is this a pattern that you see across the board for organizations?
Mike
Absolutely. And it was interesting when you think about Blue Yonder is actually a software company. That's what they do for a business, for a living. And the product side of the business, you know, they develop a supply chain optimization software for their clients. Particularly with a pretty heavy focus on retail and over the past few years they've aggressively moved their own solutions that they sell to their customers from an on-prem to a SAS model. And in parallel, Dorene has been migrating their traditional corporate IT systems. Many of those either from a private data center to the cloud or from a traditional premise based software offering to a SAS offering hosted by one of their partners. So a similar journey that we see a lot of other clients going on. And I think what Dorene was eluding to from a changed management perspective was that there's as much of a cultural change when you think about how you do product development for a company like Blue Yonder or as well as how IT operates for a company like Blue Yonder. When you shift to a cloud SAS model. It's not just a different location for an application or piece of software to run. I mean that's a part of it, but the way you use the application as an end user, the way you do development, continuous integration and continuous deployment. The way you leverage DevOps. The whole kind of end-to-end process, from a development to a support to an end user, actually changes pretty significantly. So that's what, you know, I think led Dorene to highlight the importance of having organizational change management, to help their organization. Again, whether they're a user or product developer or in the IT organization, to shift to this new model. And we've been a partner and we've helped with some of that by providing some of the organizational change management services and planning and done some of that work with them.
Jillian
So sounds like she was really aware of the importance of OCM from the start. Was there anything else that you really admire about the way that Dorene or Blue Yonder as a company handled their transition and transformation to a SAS model?
Mike
Yeah, I think the thing that Blue Yonder did particularly well is they looked at it from an external perspective looking inward from a user perspective. So, again, they're a software company so that user could be their client. So they looked at it for their core products and said "let's adopt a client perspective and understand what they need our of our solution". And Dorene, actually, came out of her original background, before she got into IT was as an executive in finance, so she was in fact, a customer of the internal IT organization for a long time before she took the role of leading the IT organization. So she brings a lens that's looking at this from what does an end user need and expect out of the IT organization. So I think when I think about what Blue Yonder did particularly well is that, you know, for their core products, they looked at it from a customer perspective. For their internal applications, they looked at it from an end user perspective, and then kind of drove backwards, if you will, from there.
Jillian
Makes sense! So, we're in strange times right now. Let's talk about adapting to change. Dorene has this great quote that I love from her interview, and she says, "Becoming effective leaders in our rapidly changing environment, starts with ourselves. First and foremost, we must be resilient, adaptive, and have a passion for change. We must become change agents". Do you agree with that?
Mike
(chuckles) You know, I agreed with it when Dorene said it, probably, I think was in, you know, January, December of last year, or January of this year. You know the tech world is always changing very quickly, and I've always believed that leaders have to continuously learn and adapt to be effective at what they do, and it's part of what I admire about Dorene. Fast forward 3 months, I don't think any of us have lived through a period of more drastic and rapid change than the COVID pandemic has unleashed, right? We've seen some industries hit incredibly hard, in fact, decimated, and nearly shut down. If you think about hospitality or cruise lines. We've seen other industries that are actually, you know, overwhelmed with work, like our healthcare systems, etc.. So, and then we've seen companies shift very very quickly to remote work and enabling their workforce to work remotely. So, its never been more important than today to adapt quickly to an incredibly rapidly changing environment.
Jillian
Yeah. And you mentioned that, Dorene and you talk regularly. You kind of have that banter in the beginning, but imagine you spend a lot of time really addressing the changes that companies are having to deal with today. How important is something like the CXO Corner or any other opportunities for people in this C Suite to connect and kinda share almost, ya know, not war stories, but, ya know, how you're handling change and how is that interaction, impacting or informing the decisions that you make today?
Mike
I think it's a huge opportunity for CXO level executives, to number one, hear what's happening in other companies and understand that they're not the only one going through whatever the current change or challenge they're embracing and seeing some ideas of how other companies approach this. It can help them, I think, formulate their own plan so that they can successfully drive this change forward. And then I think the second reason that's really important, and hopefully people are taking advantage of this is, I'm hoping that some of the CXO folks who read that and were particularly interested in what Dorene had to say, for example, reached out to her, via LinkedIn and said, "hey could we connect? I'd love to share some ideas. I'd love to build my network. We can share ideas and be thought partners for each other, as we're going through this". So I think, when you think how important digital and social is as a means of connecting from a business perspective today, CXO Corner provides a great vehicle for executives to do that.
Jillian
Mike, thanks again so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. Have a great day!
Mike
Thank you, Jillian. Happy to help any time.
[Music]
Sr. Vice President, Portfolio, Insight
As a results-oriented change agent with a track record spanning startups to the Fortune 500, Mike and his team provide industry-leading installation, integration, consulting and managed IT services.
Marketing Manager, Insight
As marketing manager for the Insight brand campaign, Jillian is a versatile content creator and brand champion at her core. Developing both the strategy and the messaging, Jillian leans on 10 years of marketing experience to build brand awareness and affinity, and to position Insight as a true thought leader in the industry.
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