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The IT Masters
An IT podcast unlike any other, where technology’s top leaders share their winning strategies.
The IT Masters
The Real Work of IT Leadership: Culture, AI, and Executive Influence with Trude Van Horn
Aligning IT with business strategy isn’t optional—it’s essential.
Tech Titans Hall‑of‑Famer Trude Van Horn shares how CIOs can lead with influence, manage tech debt, prepare for AI adoption, and build high‑performance teams
👉 Download the Executive Influence Roadmap and tell us your leadership challenges.
Welcome to the IT Masters podcast, where technology leaders share their strategies shaping the future of IT. Hosted by Robert DeVita, CEO of Majetics. We bring you candid conversations with CIOs, CTOs, and enterprise architects who are driving digital information. From AI-driven security to cloud innovation and IT modernization. We cut through the noise to bring you real insights from the brightest minds in tech. No sales pitches, no fluff, just thought-provoking discussions with the masters of IT. Subscribe now and join the conversation. The IT Masters Podcast, where the best in IT share their journey.
SPEAKER_01:All right, my name's Rob DeVita. I wanted to welcome Trude Van Horn, a legend in the DFW technology space. Trude has spent time at a number of amazing companies like JP Morgan, Amex, Office Depot, Joanne's Stores, NCH, and Rimini Street. probably best well-known for her presence among her peers for giving back in the industry and fostering some of the best relationships in the DFW area. She's either the founder or a board member of the following organizations, DFW Alliance of Technology and Women, Prime Women, Tech Genies, the SMU Tech CXO Leadership Program, and the International Women's Forum. Thank you, Trudy. Appreciate you being here today.
SPEAKER_00:Great to be here, Rob.
SPEAKER_01:Thanks. Let's start off with some personal and professional journey stuff. You've had a Hall of Fame impact. You've been inducted into the Tech Titans Hall of Fame. That's an incredible achievement. Tell me what that means to you.
SPEAKER_00:So it's an award that I would have never expected to get. It is really humbling. I mean, the people who have won that award are amazing. But, you know, you get an award like that, a Hall of Fame, it kind of validates the journey, right?
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. Does it come with a gold jacket
SPEAKER_00:like the NFL? No, it didn't. And no bust. No. But the thing I think it did the most for me was make it even more important that I try to give back. You know, I feel like with that honor comes some obligations to help other people as well. But it's amazing to have that credit to my name. It's amazing.
SPEAKER_01:That's one person a year, right? I mean, it's
SPEAKER_00:a great honor. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:That's great. Yeah. So your career spans a bunch of different industries, right? Retail, manufacturing, financial services. How did working in all of those diverse industries shape your perspective of technology and how it relates to different business drivers?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so I feel really fortunate to have started my career with JP Morgan and American Express. And I was so lucky to be there when they were both named the best company to work for and they were on the cover of Time. So I feel like I got great leadership training and I worked with great people, had wonderful people to look up to. And then my career kind of bounced around. Those were the days that tech senior people bounced around every 18 months to two and a half years or so. And the ability, I think, to be successful in various different kinds of organizations, sizes, verticals. I think that's really key now. Everything in tech right now is about being really, really agile and resilient. And I feel like having been in so many different kinds of industries and private companies and public companies, I spent almost as much time in private companies as I did public, and they behave very, very differently as well. And the motivations of a private company towards technology are very different than a a Wall Street banking firm, right? So I think all of that gave me versatility in my job, understanding that no challenge was going to be too hard to take. These are all variations on the theme of technology and business.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I started off my career at AT&T, and it's got its pluses and minuses, right? Oh, yeah. But I can tell you from my time there, I could not have done anything else in sort of my journey in my life without getting all the training that I crammed into there. Exactly. Because these large companies have such a great training platform to get young employees sort of a little bit of taste of everything. And it really, as much as I didn't like being there because I couldn't really help a lot of customers, the training that I got there enabled me to help them later on in my career.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. And that foundation, you know, knowing the principles of great leadership and prioritization and how to get things done through a team, all of those are critical, no matter where you are in your journey and career.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, I was young when I started there. And I remember my boss telling me, you catch more bees with honey.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_01:You need to treat everyone inside of the organization who needs to help you to help your customer. It's like that person has to be the most important person you deal with, right? Because all they're doing is moving paper and, you know, moving a widget from one step to another. He's like, but if you need to widget move faster, you're going to get your widget move faster by being nice to them and saying, hey, what makes you successfully in your role, right? So how do I help you get a better performance review or do better with your metrics, right? And that's something that stuck with me 20 years later.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think everybody that you come in contact with, there's something to learn from everybody, right? And some of the lessons are what to do and some of the lessons are what not to do or never to do. But yeah, I think everybody that surrounds you has a lesson for you. Same with accomplishments and failures, right? It's all about having an opportunity to learn One of the gals I know, Kimberly Zanotta, who runs a recruiting firm, she says, I either win or I learn. It's not win or lose. It's win or learn. And I think that's a great way to look at life.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I belong to the Entrepreneur Organization here, which is a bunch of just entrepreneurs. It's a big global organization, but we've got a chapter down here in Dallas. And they break us up into small groups called forums. So there will be eight, you know, different founders or CEOs inside of this. And the funniest thing is that, you know, I can run an IT consulting shop. This guy can run a multi-tenant real estate firm. Someone else can run a pizza shop. We all have the same issues. Oh, yeah. It's all the same problems. And the best thing about it is the experience shares, right? I can share with somebody how maybe I did something wrong three years ago and what I learned from it in hopes that if they're coming on the same situation that it can help them a little bit.
SPEAKER_00:And it's a great point. And I tell people through the SMU tech leadership program or even the ones I mentor, building that network of people that you can ask those questions to. As you get higher and higher in the ranks of any corporation, there are fewer and fewer peers you have in that corporation to ask about, how do I do this? Or what do you think we should do? But having that forum around you, the tribe of people that you trust that give you great advice, and particularly if you've got tech leaders that are finding other technicians, they've been through these problems. They've got some advice for you. They can hook you up with a vendor or a consultant or someone that's already done that. And I think those connections are so important.
SPEAKER_01:That's a great point, right? Because, you know, you could have a peer or, you know, a friend that is, you know, the head of finance someplace or the head of HR. Those are very different sort of business needs than someone in technology right so you know asking them for some help it's it's great to get their point of view but someone who sits in your chair every day and goes through what you need to do and hey how do I get a technology initiative passed when I'm talking to people that are in technology
SPEAKER_00:right right and quite often the folks that are in the senior technology roles have kind of grown up because they were great technicians and we tend to be a little you know reticent think we need to be the smartest person in the So we're not likely to ask for any advice, but getting that. Early in your career, understanding the value that other people bring and their perspectives and being willing to ask other people about their thoughts I think is really important.
SPEAKER_01:That's a good point. People ask me, hey, you're a technology consulting company. Who's your biggest competitor? I tell them it's not people who do what I do. It's a technology leader who thinks they know everything. We're here to help. Once we get into an organization and we're able to help them, it's like, oh my God, you did a great job on this project. I I need help with this one now and this one now. It's when people really buy into what we do where we feel like we're really helping and they're really getting a lot of value out
SPEAKER_00:of it. Right, and that is a culture fit, a relationship fit, the ability to have, maybe you don't have all the expertise they know, but you know how to connect them to someone who has that expertise. Yeah, it is about having to navigate. We're in a place in technology where some of it is just so brand new. It takes a lot of people. to help you navigate through that. And having someone who can connect you with others who have that experience or know someone who's been through that is really, really important.
SPEAKER_01:It's funny, you brought up culture. And when we're looking at vendor placement for customers, right? You know, I've got an IT project. It's usually three or four things that we look at, right? Number one, do they meet the technology need? You know, that's first and foremost. The second is, you know, is the price point where it needs to be to be able to get this initiative passed through? And the third is, The third, which I think it's overlooked a lot, is the culture of the vendor and the culture of the customer. There are certain large enterprise customers that need to deal with Gartner, TopRite, Magic Quadrant people. Historically, those are some of the hardest vendors to deal with. But, you know, some people, it's a must-have. But it's important that, you know, when we're looking at, you know, vendors and customers, that we at least have that culture conversation because some customers don't want to be a number to a vendor, right? They want to be known by name. Right. You know, when they call up, you know, if they have an issue, right? Yeah. And some don't care. They said, hey, and... You know, I'm a global company, I need global support. All right, there's a handful of people who can do that. But yeah, that culture, it's really important when we're talking to customers, because I want them to know what they're getting into, right? And you've got to understand, hey, how are my issues going to be handled? And I think that's a really important factor that needs to be addressed during the procurement vendor selection
SPEAKER_00:cycle. And in the business that you're in, when I'm across the table from the vendor, I can have a great relationship with someone who's selling me the services. But I want to have that same great relationship with whoever is the account executive and the technicians that are coming in. So that cultural fit needs to be on a variety of levels. And you're right. different companies do business a different way. Some are process heavy, some are much more agile and decision oriented, fast decision oriented. So you need to have somebody who has the ability to understand how that customer behaves so that they can mirror that. Not that you need to be bogged down in somebody else's paperwork, but you need to appreciate that their processes are there for a reason and you trying to make them go faster is not going to help.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, it's funny, you know, you talk about some of these big companies, right? I consider them like a train, right? They're going to take a million people from point A to point B. That's what they do and they do it really good. You're buying a ticket on that train. You're looking for someone that needs to go right or left. This probably isn't the right place for you, right?
SPEAKER_00:Not the right train.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, you know, but if you need to go from point A to point B and that solution fits what you need, buy the ticket. It's much easier. Yeah. Right, but if you, you know, you got to go sort of You want a little bit of customization, this may not be the right place. You've contributed to significant IT transformation initiatives. What emerging technologies or strategies do you see as the next big driver across the industry?
SPEAKER_00:So, of course, AI is going to dominate everything. And I think that... You know, a lot of companies are looking at AI as a solution for the problems that they have. And I get that. But I think the bigger picture is really about elevating an organization to understand AI so that they understand where it can plug into the efficiency of a human anywhere, right? Rather than just a point solution. So I think that's really important. The other thing in IT that we're all dealing with, particularly if you're in an established company, you know, that tech debt continues to get more and more daunting. And, you know, at some point, it's a barrier for competition. These greenfield companies that start up that are starting with the newest and the best and the greatest and the, you know, people with newer skills are in a different kind of position than folks who are bogged down by this tech debt. So I think that whole smart approach to technical debt and how to get it resolved or how to leapfrog over it, I think that's really important. And I know that's not a new emerging tech, but it is a barrier for the agility that some of these older and more long-term companies have developed over time. And I think that's really something that people need to look at. And I think the third thing that I worry about, just as a CIO being around the block, we've all invested millions in ERPs. And we're all at the point where it's not really cutting it for what we're paying for it. So how do we wrapper some of those ERPs to get at the data, to make it, you know, expose it so that AI can use it. Those are some of the three things that I think about all the time. I know that there's great promise in AI, but if you don't bring the entire organization along, you're not going to get everything out of AI. And then, understanding how to get rid of the tech debt or how to alleviate the tech debt, and then finally, how do you master those ERPs and the data within them?
SPEAKER_01:Yep, so on the AI front, I sort of see it two different ways, right? There is the the end user ability to use AI, right? How does it make their job a little easier, right? How does your C player go to become your B player? Your B player, your A player, and your A player exceptional, right? How does it help them in their daily tasks, right? And then there's the other part of it, which is more business process oriented, right? How do I automate business data that's dynamic by being able to utilize AI for that. I don't see it as a big people replacement. I see it more as freeing up people's time, working smarter, not harder.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. But again, it needs to permeate throughout the organization. I worry about... boards and C-suites, right? People who have spent a long time in their career getting to where they are. How do we get them trained quickly? How do we get them to the point that they're comfortable in talking about AI and opening up the blinds for them to see where they might be able to use it? And I think that that level of training, you know, we almost assume it within our operational teams, but I think at the very senior levels, I think that in investment in bringing everybody along on that that education journey is really important
SPEAKER_01:i was talking to a cio probably two weeks ago we had dinner um and she was talking about the adoption of co-pilot and you know she'll walk into other people in the seats so the c-suite and you know she'll sit with them and show them hey you know this is how co-pilot can help you be more efficient and they're they're blown away oh of course but i think it's you know how do you get people to proactively go out and get that learning, right? Especially, you know, older generation people like me that, you know, they're not, they don't really love sort of new technology, right? Unless you have like a thirst for it. I think there's an adoption there
SPEAKER_00:that needs to be overcome. But it is something that needs to be intentional because people don't like to change. So left to their own devices, they're not going to find a way. And unless they have some prescriptive cookbook or a training session they can go to or go watch these 10 YouTube videos, I think it's harder for those people who have been in their positions a long time. And because they're green-lighting the funding, they really need to understand this stuff.
SPEAKER_01:Yep. That's funny. We had... two two-hour trainings on ChatGPT. We had somebody come in and really sit with us from the basics of how to prompt someone, how to create a persona. And then it got into how do you build custom GPTs. And we use it every day now. In a lot of what we do, it just makes us more efficient. It's the small stuff, right? If we're on a Zoom call and we use Zoom's AI to take the notes for us, we don't miss things now when we're scoping opportunities like we would have before. Because we've got the notes in there, we've got next steps. And then you can send those notes to everybody on the call so everyone's on the same page. Yeah, so the AI thing I think is really... It's adoption-based, like you said. It's adoption and it's education-based. If you put the time in, you're going to get the business output out. It's like a gym membership. You don't go, you're not getting anything out of it. You're going to sit here
SPEAKER_00:and be fat and ugly. But the efficiency we can get out of ChatGPT is just astounding. It's just maybe a year, really, that it's been around. And think how it's going to change in the next couple. So if we don't bring those people along with us, they're going to fall farther and farther behind. And again, if they're greenlighting the initiatives, we want them to understand what the goodness is in all of this tech.
SPEAKER_01:This is how people are going to lose their jobs. It's not from AI is going to take your job. It's that someone else knows how to use
SPEAKER_00:AI. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Leveraging the tech.
SPEAKER_01:We also talked about technical debt. It's got to still shock you. Look, it shocks me that there are still AS400s out there inside of people's environments. Oh, yeah. Like running core business functions. But that's another. And
SPEAKER_00:PCs that people are afraid to shut down that sit in a server room somewhere.
SPEAKER_01:You can go into data centers and people are like, don't go near that. Do not breathe on that machine.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And you're like, I can't. But it's 2025. Yeah. But that also goes into the AI adoption, right? It's so much easier to adopt. Exactly.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_00:Right. And that, that being able to, we, as, as we progress, we lose the folks who had all the experience and that those old technologies or the old application software, whatever it was intended to do. You know, I, I've inherited many times I walked into a company and what does that do? You know, Susie used to take care of that, but she's been gone like three years. We don't really know, but nobody wants to touch it. You know, that, that is, That's a big challenge for corporations because how many of those pockets do we have to keep running? And how much goodness is left in there that we're not having as part of our data lakes or our assets that we're querying for AI?
SPEAKER_01:Talk to me a little bit about what you see on the security front, right? It is... From my perspective, it's almost impossible to plug every hole, right? Oh,
SPEAKER_00:it is. You only have 10 fingers. No one can afford it. Even if you could identify it, you can't afford it.
SPEAKER_01:And then we'll get to the affordability part, right? You have a blank checkbook once something happens. Before something happens, from what we've seen, it's very hard for technology leadership to get proactive money on security, right? There's a certain budget that's allocated to it, but once something happens, It's a blank checkbook. What are you seeing as sort of the biggest... What do you have to protect first?
SPEAKER_00:Oh, wow. That's a great question. You know... Our biggest loopholes remain the user interface, right? That is still the biggest problem for all of us. It's still somebody finding the passwords of someone who has amazing access. That continues to be the problem everyone's dealing with. The other thing that we need to prepare for is with AI and quantum, pretty soon all of those security and password capabilities that we built they're going to be cracked instantly with AI. And that's probably going to take a couple years to be replacing that with whatever new technology there is. So those are just on the basic front. I think there's been tremendous progress in tools. What I worry about, and I talk about this often with security vendors, Everything is just a layer on top of what you've already got, and you still need this piece of software to do this much, and then you layer on this other thing, but you need this other piece of software to do this other thing. Boards don't understand that. C-suites don't understand that. And they can't figure out why they need to fund 50 different tools. So the challenge for CIOs and CISOs is not just protecting the environment, but telling the stories to the people who have to fund it. It's a difficult story to tell. And it assumes a lot of... knowledge ahead of the conversation and that's never the case. So I think that there's a lot to be said about teaching more of our top security executives how to tell those stories in a different way. I was on a call last week talking to firms who were building new pieces of software, and it happened to be in the security space. And their whole pitch was around all the new cool things that they were doing at very, very low level in identity access management. And I kept saying, you know, I get what you're trying to do, and I understand the deck that you've put in front of us, but the C-suite, the CFO, the COO, they're never going to understand why one more tool. So that needs to be really crystal clear. And I think if we were more diligent around understanding and classifying the various layers, I think we could get to a more holistic approach to security, but I still think we're a ways away. And it appears that only the largest companies can afford the best security. And that's a shame. It needs to be ubiquitous.
SPEAKER_01:Yep. We also talk to our customers about you could have every security tool in the world. Something's going to happen at some point, right?
SPEAKER_00:Oh, absolutely.
SPEAKER_01:It's the quality of your backup. You have to have quality backups. And they've got to be geographically diverse. They've got to be point-in-time copies. And you'd be surprised, and you can probably tell me, how many companies don't have quality backups of things.
SPEAKER_00:That's one thing. The second is, once Humpty Dumpty's broken, who in your corporation can put it back together? That's really, really important. We talk about doing tabletop exercises and what happens if it all falls apart. But really, in the middle of the night, who's the person that's going to run point on recovering? Because you might have great backups, but if everybody doesn't know where they are and what sequence they have to come back in, you're still screwed. And those people are are getting fewer and fewer and fewer. The more we outsource across the globe, the fewer people really know that from soup to nuts how to put a data center back together once there's been a breach.
SPEAKER_01:And there's a difference between disaster recovery and business continuity.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, absolutely.
SPEAKER_01:And there's different playbooks for each one of them. I mean, I remember back in the day, we'd put these giant, giant binders together.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, yeah. That no one ever read.
SPEAKER_01:Correct.
SPEAKER_00:But we got a checkmark for doing it. That's
SPEAKER_01:right. And that's how I feel it is now when people are going for cyber insurance. They're just checking the boxes, and they'll come back and check those boxes again a year from now when their policy expires. This world is very rapidly changing. You can't just look at this stuff one year at a time. It's got to be a constant evolution of... hey, what's going on in the space, right? And how do I, you know, protect myself from these new, you know, bad actors that are out there?
SPEAKER_00:Right. One of the things that I talk about in the Tech Seek, so excellent program that we teach, you know, a lot of times we believe there's a lot of goodness in the contracts and somebody else has figured that out. But I tell everybody, you have to read your cybersecurity contract And you have to read it from top to bottom. You need to know exactly who to call. You need to know what vendors are on the list if you need to call them. You need to have pre-existing contracts because you don't want to spend the first three days of a breach writing contracts for the guys that you need to work with. I mean, understanding all of that in really, really finite terms, right? What is our ransomware policy? Do we pay? Do we not pay? Where's the FBI? group that we have to get involved. All of those things that come at you in the middle of the night, you need to be prepared for that. And it's well beyond doing the tabletop exercises. And there is so much to be learned in reading your policy. How much will you be reimbursed for any of the public statements you need to make or prepping a senior executive or writing to 1,000 customers and clients across the world. All of that should be called out. And if you've not read that policy, you really are going to have to use it at one point. And if you don't know what's in it, it's just going to take you longer to recover.
SPEAKER_01:Yep. So let's talk now about... you know, cost optimization and upgrading the infrastructure, you know, how do you balance those two things, right? Cost optimization, but also trying to transform, you know, systems and software and infrastructure, right? Yeah. I would assume, and you tell me, very rarely do you go, okay, how much do you need for this? Don't worry about it.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, yeah. That never happens. I think it's incredibly important to understand continue the dialogue at a very senior level. Because the things that we're dealing with with replacing, unless that story's been told at a very senior level, it's going to take a long time to get the money. You know, if you need to replace your major storage, that's a huge project, that's a huge job, and it's an enormous cost. So to be very clear with the operations team, the finance team, the budgeting group, and the C-suite about what shape our infrastructure is in, how much does need to be replaced, what the priorities are. You'll never get them all done. So can you afford for that storage array to sit in the corner and just age for a while while you're working on new things? It's not just making those choices, but it's also how much do we invest in emerging tech as well? Yep. We have a lot more options than we had before around cost optimization You know labor arbitrage is really really easy to get a hold of so that's one place where you can at least improve your cushion, right? I think that there's a lot of data center expertise out there that can help you with kind of leapfrogging over your old gear to decide, but it's still, it's a huge, huge task and it's a huge cost.
SPEAKER_01:When you look at, is it harder now to replace CapEx, which was you would just go buy gear, right? And you'd figure it out yourselves. You'd throw it in the data center.
SPEAKER_00:Capitalize it.
SPEAKER_01:And now everything is out of service. It's sort of like, you know, I've got 27 apps to watch television, right? I'm just getting, you know, killed by paper cuts at$9 a piece from, you know, a monthly recurring, you know, number. There's so many as a service things now in the IT space. How has that shifted the way you talk to a CFO about getting money, right? It's no longer an$8 million capital expenditure. It's a$27 million SaaS application.
SPEAKER_00:Right, and it's not just that. We begin with SaaS applications. We add in security concerns around SaaS applications, and then we're also adding in data and data privacy concerns, and then the AI concerns. Every one of our vendors who's a SaaS vendor some nifty AI package on top of it that they're touting, but nobody really knows what's in that black box. Nobody really knows what that code was trained on. And if I, as the CIO, buy that SaaS tool and there is a major issue it's my fault for buying that tool, right? So the obligations that you have are enormous now. And I think people are, we loved SaaS in the beginning, right? Get all that goodness really fast and get these changes every three months or six months. Now, everything that we've built around the outside, the APIs, all of the customizations, every time you upgrade that, you've got to retest all of those things around the outside. So it used to be we were in control of the upgrade cycle, so therefore we could control the testing. We can't do that anymore. And you get to the point where it takes you as long to test And then you get the next release coming in from Salesforce or wherever. There's a lot of issues around SaaS. But the software is strong. It's beautiful. It's fast. You've got to love that. It's the gift that keeps on giving. You pay and you pay and you pay.
SPEAKER_01:We do a lot of robbing from Peter to pay Paul. Right. Hey, I've got this initiative. I need to roll out on the money. All right. Well, let's go look at this. Are you still on, you know, an old MPLS network? Right. There's huge cost savings there. Sure. Are you still on, you know, an outdated, you know, on prem phone system or contact center? Right. How do we get, you know, take costs out of that? You know, are those conversations happening now? in your departments also because that's how we look at trying to get cost optimization and give money back to the IT organization. Are you guys looking at that also internally?
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. Cost optimization and cost efficiencies are something that need to be factored into every strategic plan and every strategic planning cycle, right? Every time you're doing the budget, it's like if you're going to add back new, nobody's going to give you a net new budget for that. You've got to find it from within. It's a constant struggle to figure out... Every corporation has Zoom and they have Teams and they have Google Meet and, you know, And we see CRM systems the same, multiple CRM systems in a corporation, multiple ERPs through acquisition, right? And sometimes you have to bite the bullet and get rid of that licensing in order to make room in the budget. But nobody likes to do those make room projects. You know, they take your good resources. They take good capital to develop those. And still you're left with the target project that you really wanted to do. That comes in next. It's almost like you get to pay double.
SPEAKER_01:We're seeing still a lot of cleanup from COVID, right? What we saw during COVID was blank checkbooks and business units being able to make their own IT decisions. So we'll go into a company that's got six or seven different business units. Each one of them will have a separate unified communication platform. Absolutely. It'll have a separate contact center. All those different tools. And now they're like, well, this really wasn't the smartest way for us to do this, right? How do we get down to one or two strategic vendors? How do we get down to two management planes?
SPEAKER_00:But again, quite often, that's part of the culture of a corporation, right? Who Who is allowed to have whatever tech they want because they're bringing in the revenue most? And then who's looking at the future problem that that's going to cause by allowing that? So we love and we hate the procurement guys, but procurement has to be hand-in-hand with the process and the structure and the governance. It gets out of hand really, really fast. I've seen multiple divisions have... Honestly, their own copy of the same software, running it in the data center separately because they just don't want to be tied down by what the corporation is dictating on the mothership copy.
SPEAKER_01:Let's talk about building teams. not Microsoft Teams, Teams at Work. What's your secret to building really proficient and high-performing teams? What do you look for when you're building your team?
SPEAKER_00:The most important thing in building a high-performance team is trust. Everyone has to trust one another's communication, their priorities, the choices they make, and their expertise. And finding that out requires great communication at the team level. There's a book about how to find the perfect teammate, and it's Hungry, Humble, Smart, right? And that's really what you need, Hungry, Humble, Smart. Somebody that's willing to do the right thing on behalf of the team, to share their worries with the rest of the team. Clear goals, clear accountabilities, access to training. High-performance teams need that, right? It's their lifeblood. And then recognition. things are what you need to surround a team with. But access to leadership as a motivator, as an inspiration point, asking good questions, keeping them on track, all of that's important. That great communication and that underpinning of strong culture and candor between the teams. Lots of answers, but I mean there's a lot of things that go into the special sauce of a high performing team.
SPEAKER_01:How often are you meeting with your direct reports as a group and then how often do you do one-on-ones?
SPEAKER_00:My favorite was always to have a meeting with the team once a week. If you've got If you've got a big organization you're running, you need to know where everybody's hot points are. And if you're only talking about the top critical initiatives and you're only doing it once a month in some kind of portfolio review, it's just not enough. And I like to meet one-on-one every couple weeks with staff. So I think that's important.
SPEAKER_01:Have you done... sort of skip levels where, you know, not your direct reports, but some of their folks, right? Because I think when I was in larger organizations, that's really how I was able to figure out what was going on.
SPEAKER_00:Oh,
SPEAKER_01:yeah. Like, what are you struggling with? That's not making it up the food chain, that we can help make your job easier. Where do you need help? Where do you need an escalation?
SPEAKER_00:Right. I think that's really important, those skip level meetings. But the other thing I would say for most technology people, I think you need to get out of your office and do a a voice of the customer review. Much like we talk to our staff in a skip level. What are you struggling with? What do you think we should do better? What are some of the things that make us less efficient? Same thing with our customers. The customers need to know that their opinions matter, their priorities matter, and they're not going to stop you in the hall necessarily and tell you what they don't like about you or your organization, but they're going to tell whoever their boss is or the board or the CFO, right? So get ahead of that. Understand how your organization is perceived. Find out if it is a perception issue or it's a true observation and then how to deal with it. So skip levels are great, but do the same thing. with the business people.
SPEAKER_01:You go into a lot of new organizations. You're coming in at the top of the pyramid. What do you use to either get your culture into the business or slightly tweak the culture that they have there? Does that happen often where you've got to go in and change culture? Talk to me a little bit about your thoughts around just culture in general inside of organizations.
SPEAKER_00:As technology leaders, we do have the ability to change culture and mold the culture within our organizations. It's a whole lot tougher to do it for a corporation. But what you can be is the bright shining star of how culture can change. by your success, then others will be interested, hopefully, and help to participate. But I think creating that candor, the sense of teamwork, the, you know, it's not about me, it's about us, I think those are things that can be brought out within an organization and then showcased, sorry, brought out within a function and then showcased throughout the organization.
SPEAKER_01:Is culture harder now with work from home than it was in
SPEAKER_00:office? Oh, yeah. Everything's harder with work from home. You know, I think... I know my IT teams were almost twice as productive being home. But that lifeblood of keeping in touch with everyone, making sure we're still all on the same goals. People aren't making up their own goals. That requires a lot of work. You know, the... The job of the middle manager I think is harder than it ever was. You know, we as executives are not dealing with 30 people who are working from home and issues with the dog and with the kids and with bandwidth at home. You know, we've got to We've got a different expectation for our direct reports. But that middle manager is generally ill-equipped and has everything thrown at them from the kitchen sink. I mean, that's a really, really tough place. And yeah, that's a hard job to keep culture, but to keep all the plates spinning too.
SPEAKER_01:We do a lot of work out at TCU. They've got a sales center out there where they teach kids how to prospect and how to use CRMs and stuff. But when we talk about culture with them and we talk specifically about work from home, it was shocking to me that like 80% of the students that they surveyed want to work in an office environment. And then I sort of thought about it and like, these are the kids that lost their senior year of high school. These are the kids that lost their freshman year of college, right? They were isolated in some of the most, you know, the times where it was, you know, the most camaraderie between their friends, right? So it makes sense that, you know, they don't want to be isolated anymore. They want to be in some type of office atmosphere, whether that's three days a week or five days a week or two days a week, as opposed to being just, hey, I want to work from home.
SPEAKER_00:Well, when you're talking about working with very technical teams, technical teams are bogged down by all of the meetings, right? There's a lot of folks that just, I need a full day to code or I need a full week to code, right? And they're not getting that when they're in the office because we have open bullpen offices as as well, right? So everybody can do a drive-by, the workplaces are fairly noisy. I think there's a lot to be said for people that are truly doing technical jobs to be in an environment where they are comfortable and can concentrate 100% without interruption around them. I think as leaders, though, our leadership is generally through the influence and the communication with others. So having someone be at home certainly makes that more difficult. I know for the kids that we had during COVID, who were the interns, they absolutely wanted to work in the office because they'd never worked in an office before. So the few people that were working in the office, we pulled up a desk for those kids to work with, those interns to work with. I think that's different when it's your first experience and you've never worked in an office versus when you're under a pressure deadline and you just need quiet and you need to concentrate and you can't get that in the office. And I think that's something we have to think about. You know, I was at one company where they were very proud about their satellite offices and when I saw the satellite offices, I thought, oh my God, I'd rather be shot than work here. It's one of those, you know, a bar table and just lots of PCs and keyboards lined up on that bar table. It's like, how do you get your privacy? How do you get your deep concentration? It takes a little while to get in the zone. How do you get in the zone when there's people just up and down at that bar table all day long? It's tough. And I don't know that necessarily the HR and facilities planning people are factoring that in to people who really need to concentrate on the work they're doing.
SPEAKER_01:those are the people who are not getting the$400 Bose noise-canceling headphones, right?
SPEAKER_00:Yes, exactly. Exactly.
SPEAKER_01:So you've done some great work with SMU. We talked to us a little bit about that. And then after that, what... What kind of advice do you give someone aspiring to get into the C-suite from a technology perspective? Someone, you know, who's a manager or director or VP, right? How do you get to that next level? And what does what you're doing at SMU, how does that help them achieve those goals?
SPEAKER_00:Great. It's a great question. So one of the most important things, as someone who aspires to the C-suite, the most important thing is business first mindset. You have to have really, really strong business acumen and really strong financial acumen. And that you don't get by just working in the IT team and staying at your desk and doing a great job in IT. You really need to understand the business. You need to understand how the corporation makes money. You need to understand what are the issues that they have in the field or in the manufacturing side or in the sales side. Those things are really important. And if you know about those issues and you can begin to start thinking about solutions for those. Then you become a very, very valuable partner. So business first mindset is really important. Financial acumen, you know, putting a budget together, understanding capitalization, right, and amortization. That Quite often, a technology executive gets to learn all of that when they move to the C-suite and they're responsible for the budget, right? You've got to learn that before you get there. The network's really important because you're going to get loads of problems you can't solve by yourself, but somebody else has solved. So you need to build those relationships now. And then curiosity. You need to be curious and you need to be learning because the technology's turning over so fast. So things that the SMU program does. We do an entire module on financial presentations, budgeting. One of the days is dedicated to mock board presentations. We have CIOs and CTOs and CXOs sitting in the seats as board members critiquing the IT person's program. We have lawyers coming in talking about the obligations of the C-suite executive, first as as a C-suite executive, but also as driving tech. What are your responsibilities if there's a breach? We have seen CISOs being sued and named in suits because of their lack of follow-through in security. So we give all of these people a look around the outside of IT. We tell everyone, you know, Being a great technical resource is the table stakes. Now you need to learn everything around the outside, and that's what we try to bring.
SPEAKER_01:It's funny, we were working on a large deal for a customer, and they're big proponents like everyone else is, right? No PowerPoints, right? We don't want PowerPoints. You need a spider diagram on this, and go through all this due diligence. And then we're getting ready to put the presentation together for the board. It's like 72 slides for the board, right? And no one's going to read 70, but you have to have every single item covered in there. But the biggest thing that I took away from that was, hey, Rob, we need pictures. I'm like, well, what do you mean? They're like, we need pictures to depict anything that you want the board to understand. It needs to be in pictures. Numbers are good. Pictures are better. Any type of technology verbiage is pretty much worthless here. You've got it. you know, show us graphically how this is going to help improve the business. But it was just funny that it went from no PowerPoints to PowerPoints and then to pictures and not really numbers and really no technology jargon in there at all.
SPEAKER_00:Well, but it needs to hang together. You know, you talk about all the personas you meet as an IT executive and who you face off against. The marketing person wants something completely different than the CFO wants. The sales guys want something completely Completely different. So you still need to have all that detail wherever it lives. 72 slides. It's all in there. But, you know, I think the greatest example of presenting in pictures is Stephen Jobs. I mean, if you go through and look at the way he put presentations together, he looked so relaxed. And the few pictures that he showed were poignant and got his point across. We all thought about that. But it took him weeks to practice those. It's so great to know that. That's the other thing that we tell people. You can't spend all your time just putting the data into the slides. You've got to figure out how you're going to present it. You are great at storytelling. You're a great storyteller. You've got lots of great examples. IT people, not so much, right? We just want to get the facts and then get out of the room. We don't like any of that exposure. So understanding how to present that data and to present to a screen that's only a picture, that's hard work. I mean, it sounds like it would be easier, but it's much harder.
SPEAKER_01:It was funny. When we were doing this deal, we were transitioning 22,000 employees off of old PBXs onto a cloud-based phone system. And what was surprising to me is that, like, hey, we need to put together a comms package. I'm like, well, what do you mean? They're like, we need comms on to every single user on how to use the phone. I'm like, really? I'm like, this is a thing? And they're like, yes, this is a big thing. And, you know, working with marketing and, you know, internal training teams on, you know, if they've got an issue, you know, what does this button do? Like, we need an answer for this, right? We had an answer for, you know, for the last 20 years for this button, but now the button's on the screen, it's not on the phone. So it was really, it was intriguing to me that, hey, there's a whole communications process out here that needs to go out to help them understand how to use a new technology, right? Right. How does that get into our learning management systems? And where are the videos located? We can't just send them to YouTube. It's got to be on our internal system. They've got to get credit for it, right? Because everyone's got to get a badge. But yeah, it was that part. It's something I didn't even think about.
SPEAKER_00:But you have two kinds of users, right? You've got one kind of user that is going to figure it out and play with the buttons, and then the other one that doesn't want to touch anything unless they've read the manual.
SPEAKER_01:Yep. Let's see, if you could influence one major shift in the IT industry over the next decade?
SPEAKER_00:It would be education around AI. I think that's the most important thing. Yeah. We also suffer with not enough people in IT jobs. So if we pursue that AI education, that might get more people interested in being part of the technology pipeline. You know, I read something today. They expect there would be 85 million jobs in technology that can't be filled by 2030. Think of that. That's ridiculous. How can that be? So let's get a few more people comfortable with the tech, the more people, the more diverse people we have working in technology that are proficient in technology, the better the tech's going to be. If everybody looks at it a different way, like those two different users, the one who needs a manual and the one who's just going to play with it until it works, we need both of those kinds of people that are helping to build technology for the future.
SPEAKER_01:So I've got two daughters. I've got one in college, one in high school. how do we get more women into tech? And I can tell you that they are super proficient on doing things in the Microsoft Office Suite that I would never know how to do, right? Because they were fortunate enough to go to a school where Melinda Gates graduated from, and they're a Microsoft profile school, right? So they can do things inside of the Office Suite I could never do. So they know tech. Right. How do you sort of flip that switch to, hey, I know how to use stuff. And now I want to go be in tech. Right. Because I think there's a divide there where they're super tech proficient. But how do we get the tech job to be cool?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Like the marketing job or.
SPEAKER_00:It's a great question. You know, there was a survey done in 2022. They found that 92 percent of the software developers were male employees. That's staggering. That's staggering. So how do we get women to be more interested in tech? You're cool. You're
SPEAKER_01:not a nerd. I don't know what the persona is.
SPEAKER_00:DFW ATW, the thing I love about what they're doing, they're helping young girls get into tech and then women to get into tech. So proud of DFW ATW. They recently graduated a class of 75 women out of their Ignite program and those 75 women increased their salaries collective 2.5 million dollars and it was through certifications scrum master or Salesforce certification then on the flip side I think we need to get girls before they're 15 right we need to get them interested in tech We need to start in third grade. I tell everybody, go talk to a third grade class. Go talk to a Girl Scout class. Tell them everything that we look out, everything in this room is tech. We're wearing tech. We're using tech. We rely on it in our phones. But I don't know that the kids see it that way. They think the part of the tech that they don't like is the coding part. I think we need to get them immersed in that. We have put 500 young girls through the program at eight I lead in STEM. And they go in to the program and you ask them why you're here and it's like, my mom made me come. And then you talk to them when they get out and it's like, this is so cool. I want to be in technology for the rest of my life. It changes the trajectory. But it's an immersive program. We take them to companies and see what it's like. We have speakers come in. We teach them coding. We teach them about life sciences and projects that they're working on. So that immersive thing, I don't think that we're doing enough for that.
SPEAKER_01:It shouldn't be that hard. Just to get the information to them and have them think, hey, this is something that was really interesting. It's something that... that I want to do. It just seems that we should already have a process in place where we don't have to go and create special programs. It's great that we're doing it, but we shouldn't have to. It should already be there.
SPEAKER_00:But it's still not cool to be smart. It's still not cool to be nerdy. And that's a problem for girls, right? Girls are tough on one another, right? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I mean, I think it's both guys and girls now, right? It's so much easier to go be an influencer.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And not that that's not a hard job. Yeah. You know, it's just it's a different mentality, I think, that's out there now. And I think that's going to continue to keep growing. And I think it's going to be harder to get more people into, you know, more technical fields.
SPEAKER_00:But, you know, we just need to do a better job of getting out to the schools. The schools are just... failing us, right? They're not putting enough people into the pipeline for the kinds of jobs that society needs and what the future holds for us. So I think there's, we see it most pronounced in technology and in girls, but I think in general, we're just not getting the people, our people, our kids, the training that they need for the future. Even when you look
SPEAKER_01:at the trades, right? You know, plumbers and electricians, those are very good paying jobs.
SPEAKER_00:They are.
SPEAKER_01:Right? You don't need to go to college to go get those jobs, right? And they're very important to the overall sort of economy. And on the tech side, like cablers and installation people, like those are, again, very important jobs that are just going to, we're going to need more and more of those people. So it's not even like it's got to be a big education thing. It's got to be, I think, more of an overall adoption of, hey, the stigma around, you know, Do I need to go to college to have a great career? Not necessarily. Sort of on that lower scale of trade work. Those are very important jobs that pay very well and have very good job security.
SPEAKER_00:But the whole notion of hard work, that work ethic, right? Is it more fun to just be on any YouTube video than to be working out math problems?
SPEAKER_01:So just in closing... Tell me about a podcast that I must listen to or a book that I must read, and pick either one.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, wow. I am trying to do, every morning, I'm trying to spend 30 minutes doing something in AI. So I'm going through just YouTube videos that are talking about, you know, what's the difference between DeepSeek and OpenAI. So that 30 minutes... Getting time for a whole book, not so much. But that 30 minutes of finding out who's talking about AI and what the companies are saying, that's what I'm doing to try to get re-skilled.
SPEAKER_01:That's awesome. That's great. I appreciate your time today. This is awesome. You are our inaugural guest, so thank you very much. Hopefully it wasn't too painful. No,
SPEAKER_00:this is great. Sorry, my voice is going.
SPEAKER_01:We'll let our great marketing team take out any of our hiccups.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks. And it's wonderful that you do a podcast. I think that's fantastic. More leaders should do
SPEAKER_01:that. I think it's important that people are able to hear what IT leaders are going through. You can't service someone if you don't know what issues they have or where they need help or what do they think is important. I think it's Not doing this, I think, is doing a disservice to myself and my own company, but also the customers that we talk to. How can I better help and support them if I don't know what they're going through?
SPEAKER_00:Right. I agree. I agree. Well, good stuff. Thank you again for coming in. Thank you. It's great. Love being here with you.
SPEAKER_02:Thanks for tuning in to the IT Masters podcast, where technology's top leaders share their winning strategies. Subscribe now and stay ahead in the ever-evolving world of IT. Until next time, keep innovating and leading the way.