ADAPT advisor, David Heacock, says senior tech execs who have risen through the ranks due to their understanding of how their organisations operate, now face a new challenge.
“They have to raise money; they have to convince people to change. They are part of large-scale transformation operations and now the language they speak, and the value sets they need to engage with, have shifted fundamentally,” he says.
Heacock recalls asking a CIO he was coaching to write a memo to a senior stakeholder requesting $100 million to replace systems that were end-of-life. While this reason might resonate with senior architects across his organisation, he says it’s not the only driver.
“We now get into this space where he needed to speak a completely different language of value, and those truths were no longer self-evident.”
ADAPT’s report, ‘The CIO’s Moment of Truth: Why Australia’s Tech Leaders Face Their Biggest Test Yet’, highlights that technologists often have great ideas, many of which go unheard.
ADAPT advisor and former Tabcorp CIO, Alan Sharvin, says honing his communication and storytelling skills has been a career focus, and these skills are even more valuable as organisations look to the CIO to explain of the benefits of technologies like AI.
“Becoming fluent in the business…talking about customer conversion or churn analysis… [things that are] meaningful for people around the business and those outcomes [which I] think starts to build that influence around the table.
“It also helps when you get into delivery too because when there’s a shared understanding of language and ‘the why’, there’s a lot less friction, not just for the funding but when you need support to co-create those outcomes.”
The superpower of product thinking
Many Australian organisations are shifting from a ‘project approach’ to tech deployments, which focuses on completing tasks within a fixed timeline and budget, to a product methodology that prioritises long-term value creation and customer satisfaction.
Sharvin says he’s worked in companies using both methodologies. He believes a superpower of product thinking is alignment – connecting the wider business and the technology group to focus on the same KPIs and outcomes.
“When you’re looking at the marketing data, the customer analytics and what’s coming through in those metrics, it starts to change from… [a binary conversation around], ‘is this done or not’ towards a more ongoing focus on the customer or the product. That iterative model, I think that’s when you start to get allies,” he says.
He adds that under the product model, regular audits on project costs and delivery times are less prevalent.
“In some of these product models, there’s persistent funding; the product team costs ‘x’ per year, and that [money] is allocated at the start of the the year. Then you don’t talk about cost or funding for the rest of the year; [you] just take it off the table.
“Everybody is shifting towards [a conversation about] how we are getting value for money…there’s not even a conversation about cost at that point,” he says.
Meanwhile, Heacock says public and private sector organisations are unable to meaningfully move away from budgeting cycles linked to statutory reporting cycles.
“I have a saying that when Jesus returns, his miracle will be to turn CapEx into OpEx so that we can finally do product-based approaches,” he jokes.
Heacock says smart people have created ‘buffer funds’ or ongoing funding for persistent teams and ‘converted CapEx to OpEx’ to keep these teams sustainable.
He says the benefits to this approach is staggering.
“I implemented this in the Middle East in in a large-scale operation, and we were achieving a minimum of 6 times speed improvement over the traditional waterfall way of operating, [with] a significant boost in customer and internal staff satisfaction.”
But the change was difficult, it challenged the status quo and came at a very high social cost, he says.
“I’ve seen it fall apart in government, in particular, because it becomes all too difficult to manage product-based agile operations. Then there’s a wrapper over the top of a waterfall [methodology] that’s never going to go away.
“This great [product] approach is very difficult, and I think it will take another generation to fully embed.”