 Welcome back, Lisa Martin here, talking with Lorraine Knudsen, a CUBE alumni. She's the Chief Transformation Officer at Broadcom and a founding member of the BizOps Coalition. Lorraine, I'm excited to talk to you about an interesting topic today. Welcome back to the program. Thank you so much. Glad to hear it. Yeah, we're gonna be talking about the pros and cons of adding a chief digital officer. You say there may be some friction there, but it's going to be temporary as the benefits will be long lasting. So let's dive right in. Talk to me about what the role of a chief digital officer is. Is this something that a CIO can take on? In some organizations, I think the CIO is taking on this role. And it's primarily focusing on what we're calling the digitization of the organization. So it's across more than just IT though. So it's looking at what kind of digital marketing should you be doing? What are your competitors doing? How can you make the most bang for your buck essentially across your entire organization? So it also includes parts that generally haven't been included in digital transformations like your legal team or your finance team and the interactions with them. Can your contracts be digitized? Can they be made more efficient and more automated? So it's looking at the entire organization both internally and externally and looking at the strategy for how do you accomplish that? And how do you truly make your organization as effective as it can be? Is this person almost like a bridge between the different lines of business and IT to get that external internal focus? Yeah, many people in IT don't have that business knowledge. That's a really good point. And so this person will need to have not only business knowledge but technical knowledge so they can essentially translate the verbiage that is used in the different organizations and the jargon that's used to make the understanding between the two of what's needed more smooth, the communication more smooth within the organization. Also focusing on customer value and making sure that both sides are saying the same, when they use the same words they're saying the same things. So doing that translation and that organization across the entire company. Looking at it from the holistic perspective you know, I know that the BizOps Coalition Survey also showed that something that we hear that digital transformation isn't just about the technology. It's got to be all of the factors coming together aligned on business outcomes, aligned on what's the impact and the value to the customer. How is the chief digital officer role going to facilitate that? Not just understanding but putting in practice that digital transformation is not just about technology. Well, yeah, 95% of companies are confirming that right now they're focusing much more on business outcomes than just on technology. And so there really is that need to, what does that mean? When you're focusing on business outcomes it often includes a lot of technology but there's a different path to take to make sure that you're focusing on your customer outcomes. There's a lot of organizations that are looking at their apps and realizing their customers find the most value when they never have to use them. So how do you accomplish that, right? That's not adding new features in, that's not doing something new for the customer other than making sure everything runs so smoothly that they never have to access your app. We're running into that with a lot of business organizations like insurance companies or banking, phone, telco companies, things like that where people really don't want to use the products you're creating for them if they don't have to. Right, adoption is always something that we talk about that can be a KPI but also a challenge. One of the things that I noticed that information that Broadcom provided was that Gartner size in the next 12 months, 67% of organizations are going to be looking at hiring a chief digital officer. Let's have you talk us through, what are some of the forcing functions behind that? Obviously the last year has been quite filled with quite a bit of uncertainty but we look back a couple of decades, there wasn't talk of a chief digital officer. So why is there such a big uptick in the need for this role? Well, it's interesting because Gartner originally talked about the chief digital officer in about 2010 to 2012 timeframe where they were talking about the need for it and it was a lot of, I think fast moving companies and the companies that really have made a lot of advancements in their effectiveness and their customer centricity have really grabbed onto this concept whether they've called it a chief digital officer or not but in the last year, it's forced everyone to have a digital footprint in the market. If you'll notice even your local restaurants that are family owned now have some sort of way to order their food digitally, right? So we're digitizing the entire thing and COVID is really required every company to look at much more how they can do things electronically any type of digitization, whether it's like I've said before the marketing or even how do you handle all of your contracts when there's no in-person signature and no fax machines to send things back and forth, right? It's all of making sure that all of that's secure and protected so it's going across the entire organization and that's really creating that need for somebody to be able to look at how your company can do all of those different things because quite frankly, the CIO already has a day job, right? Your chief marketing officer already has a day job. So trying to look at how to be really innovative in these areas creates a gap, right? And people aren't finding that extra time to be able to do that and to look at how to be really streamlining their organizations and taking that innovation in with both internal and external viewpoints. Well, I'd imagine you mentioned the CIO, the CMO, the CFO having day jobs, but also one of the things that sounds to me like is important for this CDO role is to have objectivity to be able to rise above all the different functions, the different technology stocks and probably silos that are there and really look holistically across the organization. So talk to me about some of the skills that are really required from the chief digital officer. Is this someone that needs to have both an IT background and a business background? Does it matter? I think as long as they have the knowledge of either side, where they came from isn't gonna matter, but the problem is gonna be finding the people with those dual skill sets, right? Because you're gonna need somebody that can understand your business and your technology side to marry the two together, but they're also gonna need to understand all the intricacies of the legal aspects that need to go into creating your products or the financial aspects of tracking what happens with your products. So they're really gonna need to be not only very well educated and have a lot of experience, but the other thing they're gonna need is that emotional empathy and that ability to work with everybody in the organization. Essentially, if they do their job right, they'll be coming in and working with every other vice president or chief in your organization. So they'll be helping to influence all of those people. And that can create a lot of conflict at first because you're having somebody else come in to give the CIO insights into how they can innovate technologically or to give the chief marketing officer information on new ways that they can do their jobs, that they can digitize the marketing to be more effective and the right frame of mind to be able to do that. Hiring's gonna be another place where these people will have a large imprint because they're gonna need the knowledge to be able to interview all across the board for people that can help them get these new innovations into place. For example, if marketing needs to expand into more of a digital footprint to actually get the imprints that they need, right? How do you interview for that when as a marketing leader you've never run a digital organization before? So it's really having the ability to partner with every other department in the organization and work with them, which to your point, that can cause some conflicts to start off with, but in the long run, it should be well worth it. It sounds like that friction is probably unavoidable in the beginning as this person really works to understand all of the inner machinations of the organization and really identify what's best for the overall business. You mentioned empathy and I think that's something that we've heard a lot about in the last year as leaders really needing to adopt that. And it sounds like this role for it to be such a catalyst of IT and business element as it sounds like it really can be that empathetic gene really needs to be turned on pretty high, I think. A hundred percent, right? They need to be able to be really understanding of the organization and the other people that they're working with that those people do have a great bit of knowledge about the company that they're joining, right? Generally, and that they'll understand their jobs on a day-to-day basis, but the innovation parts, right? Is where the chief digital officer will come in and if the chief digital officer does this well, they can actually have a really big impact on the corporate culture as well, which is a huge area that people are focusing on these days, especially as every employee is remote. So it's a big job and a big ask and it's gonna be really important for companies to hire the person with the best fit for their organization in this new world. You mentioned culture and that's something that is imperative, but digital transformations won't be successful without the right cultural transformation, but that's easier said than done, especially for organizations that have been around awhile and they're so used to the way they've done business for decades that it's hard to change that mindset, but it sounds like the chief digital officer role should be one that is an influencer of that cultural change. How do you see them being able to do that within a, you know, stodgy legacy institution? What are some of the things that they would be able to unlock? They should be able to re-energize portions of the company, right? If you're bringing in innovative ideas into a company that has had some difficulty hiring, there's a lot of companies that before the pandemic hit were only starting to look at agile practices and things because quite frankly, they couldn't hire anyone out of college to work there and they were afraid most of their workforce would retire out. So they're trying to get those people that wanna be innovative, the high, the people that graduated top of their class, you're gonna need the organization to change and this is a perfect example of somebody that can come in and be a catalyst for all of that. So if they're coming up with new innovative ideas, if your marketing department wasn't transforming into a highly digital marketing department, they can come help invigorate that, right? And come up with a plan to get people in, but also to train the people that are there that do wanna learn these new skills in order to bring the whole organization along with them. And I think they can have a huge impact and get those innovative culture cycles changing. I'm curious if you think that, given the last year and the amount of uncertainty that the pandemic has brought to the market, to the economy, now some of the challenges that leaders say, we're still gonna have similar challenges in 2021 and we still have a good percentage of our workforce remote. Is the role that the chief digital officer can play, is that potentially going to help companies is it gonna help make a difference between those companies that really not just survive this time, but thrive like the winners versus the losers of tomorrow? I think it can, right? And a lot of this is gonna be how the people that hire in the chief digital officer and how much that team is willing to work with them. One of the things that we notice is the companies that do advance their culture a lot and advance in their customer centricity, the leadership level of the organization acts as a team as much as they expect to the frontline crews to act as teams. So you've gotta be working together and that goes all the way through, right? Your HR departments can't be incenting one group to work against another. You can't incent two people to have a goal, to reach a goal in a different way and incent them differently so that they end up working against each other, right? This has to start being a real collaborative effort and it'll end up impacting the entire organization, but it's those companies that start looking at their leadership organization as a team where they're all playing to make the same goals, to make their customers the most successful they can be. That's when you really start getting those changes and you really see a chief digital officer having an impact versus those organizations where they'll be on the job for two to three years and it'll just go away because they've fought against themselves and they've not formed that team culture. The impact can be tremendous from what I'm hearing. When we think about digital transformation, people, processes, technology, that culture that's so important, we're also talking about that in the context of how do organizations use all their data and make the most sense of it as more data sources become available, data's coming in faster. How does the chief digital officer align with all of the data folks within an organization so that they can all have access to the right information to make data-driven decisions that are really for internal and externally looking benefits? Right. They can help make sense of the data that the company's collecting. One of the main things we're hearing right now is a lot of organizations are collecting a ton of data and they're either having some organization that creates metrics out of it and that group just doesn't know really what the business does. They're relatively new to the business as a lot of data organizations are. So they go grab standard metrics and just provide, shove as many metrics out, that's their output point, right? Where they get brownie points for every metric they create. And so we're hearing from a lot of leaders that they're getting literally hundreds of metrics a month and they have no idea what they're supposed to be doing with them or what this data is supposed to be showing them. And that's really of no benefit to anybody, right? It's a waste of time all through the organization. So the chief digital officer, again, will be looking at what are the right business metrics to be tracking for that business and be working with those data officers to get the right innovation in so that you can see how well you're transforming, how well your company's actually doing, how much your customers actually do like what you're creating and the impact of the changes that you're making. So another thing we're being asked a lot of is, I'm funding things and I'm being told they'll provide my customer's value but when they get released I have no idea if they are, right? And the chief data officer will help be putting all the metrics that tie that in and showing telemetry gets built in so that they've got the metrics that you need to truly run your business well. And so again, that'll be another part of the organization that the chief digital officer would be working with along with the CIO, they'll be working with the data organizations as well. Well, there's so much opportunity that the chief digital officer role can deliver and unlock value in an organization as you've talked about. It'll be interesting, Lorraine, to see what happens in the next 12 months. Do we see what Gartner is predicting? 67% of companies are going to be adopting this role. I'm curious to see what the BizOps Coalition finds in the next year or so but thank you for sharing this insight. This definitely sounds like a role where every day will be interesting, unique and not boring.