 ServiceNow Knowledge 14 is sponsored by ServiceNow. Here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. This is Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick. We're here live at Moscone South. This is the Knowledge 14 conference. This is theCUBE. theCUBE is our live mobile studio. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. We bring to you independent media at these events. Try to bring all the perspectives. You can follow the hashtag at poundno14. I'm at Dave Vellante. He's at Jeff Frick. If you want to tweet us questions. We've got a crowd chat running right now. Crowdchat.net slash no14, if you want to tweet there as well. Martha Heller is here. She's an author. She's the president of Heller Search Associates. And she's been working with the CIO Decisions Council here running around the table. Martha, welcome to theCUBE. It's great to have you here. Thank you. It's nice to be here. What's going in there? What's the vibe? I'd say the vibe is positive. There's a lot of good energy, a lot of talk about innovation. I think a little apprehension because every time you create a change, particularly when you're talking about infrastructure, there's opportunity for risk on a global scale. So I think there's excitement about the future, but maybe a little bit of apprehension about the journey to get there. So you follow, obviously, the CIO space very closely. Your book, The CIO Paradox, Battling the Contradictions of IT Leadership. What are some of those contradictions? And what is the CIO Paradox? So despite the fact that I appear before you today, a very young woman, I actually have been working with CIOs for more than 15 years now. And when they get a new job, a new CIO role, I tend to like to set up some time to talk to them. And I always ask them a question, what did you inherit? And the answer, 99% of the time is I inherited a mess. IT is over budget, no credibility in the IT organization, no IT strategy, the sourcing model is broken. And so then I say, well, what are you going to do to fix it? And they've got great plans. Well, three years later, that guy's out. The next one comes in. Prepare three envelopes. Exactly. The next one comes in and it's the same thing. I say, well, what did you inherit? It's a mess all over again. And so the thought occurred to me, these CIOs who take these jobs, they're not idiots. They're smart, they're accomplished, they're well-meaning, they're well-educated. Why is IT failing so often and failing in such a major way? So what occurred to me is that there are a series of contradictions in managing IT and I call those contradictions the CIO paradox. What I've done in my book is I've taken 12, 16 of those paradoxes and I unpack each one, address them and ask CIOs to offer solutions for breaking the paradox. So that's what the CIO paradox is. If I may take a moment and talk about a few of them. Yeah, please, some of the more interesting ones. I'd love to hear. And so the one that is the most interesting to me is futurist versus archivist. So IT is all about the future, changing customer demographics, changing technology marketplace, changing customer behaviors. And yet, unlike every other C-level functional executive, IT, the CIO, drags behind it the past. The legacy decisions made about technology probably made 15 years before that CIO even joined that company. So the futurist archivist is, IT is about the future, but you're dragging along the past. So if you think about an infrastructure like an iceberg, you've got the tip of the iceberg, which is 10%, 20%, if you're really lucky, 30% of the budget of the infrastructure and everybody can see it and it's gleaming in the sun and it has predictive analytics and big data and mobility and consumerization and all of the things that the business and your CEO wants for the company. But lurking beneath the surface, beneath C-level is the rest of the infrastructure which has suffered from years of neglect. It's bloated, it's expensive, it's not secure, it's not integrated. And it is the CIO's job to dismantle that iceberg so that the mortgaging of the technical future comes to an end and we can actually start doing some of the cooler new technologies at a faster pace. So that futurist versus archivist paradox, to me is the great equalizer because legacy begins the day you put something in. So how are CIOs, take that example, the futurist versus the archivist, how are some of the CIOs that you work with dealing with that? Because it sounds great, it was actually really, he stated that very nicely, but it's not trivial because you've got business processes, you've got capital equipment that's depreciating, you've got legacy folks that have a mindset that don't want to change and they have a lot of power in the organization. How do people lead out of that mess? I think it, a lot of it depends on the lifecycle of the company and what the state of the infrastructure is. But one approach toward dismantling the infrastructure is using finance and the language of the business to tell the story. Because if you walk into a CEO who says, I want predictive analytics and I want everything to run on tablets and I want to be one face to the customer and all of our product line should come together in a mobile app and you're gonna explain to them what kind of infrastructure they're running, that you're running everything on, you're gonna be met with glazed eyes, you're gonna be met with a lack of understanding. So it is learning to tell the story of the infrastructure in terms of capabilities, business goals and budget and finance. I think that is a skill CIOs need to have now more than ever. The irony is those are all business skills. And we've been saying for a long time CIOs need business skills, but the archivist versus futurist paradox is also an architectural conundrum. So it is not only being business oriented and telling the story in terms of the business, it's also having a deep technology understanding of the architecture. So that's a heady brew for CIOs right now. We've been telling them for years, don't be technical, be businessy. But now they kind of need to be technical too. So that's, again, very interesting sort of line of thinking. One of the skills is sales. I mean, IT people generally are not great salespeople. They tend to undersell if anything. They tend to not market themselves. Now maybe the CIOs different, but what do you see there just in terms of the CIO's ability to sell a concept into the organization? I think it's been a challenge for CIOs since the beginning of IT. If CIOs were very good at sales, they might have gone into sales and had a great career in sales. I think a real sort of uber ultimate paradox is that that which attracts us to the black box, that's what attracts us to a career that starts out in writing code is that which sort of repels us from that sort of networking, glad handing role of a salesperson. But a CIO's ability to paint the vision for the future, that storytelling skill to get everybody on board, that's a critical skill and it is very challenging for CIOs, but the most successful CIOs are the ones who can get up on stage or get in front of their board or get in front of their CEO and find the metaphors that are gonna resonate with that audience and with that business and tell the story of IT strategy and IT investments. So, Bart, this is good line of thinking. So part of Frank's keynote was really having the CIO leadership come from the business ranks. So now you're kind of looking at the opposite side of the same coin. If you come in with more of a business perspective and then are now charged with running the IT side of the house, clearly it's a different set of challenges. Are you seeing that? Are they being able to, you know, yes we want to start ripping and replacing and fixing things but do they have the requisite knowledge of what that means and or is it maybe better that they don't? In very, very large companies that have resources to hire a whole suite of technology executives under the CIO, I think CIOs who come out of the business can be successful. But in smaller companies, you know, running IT, let me back up and say, I did an article for CIO Magazine. I've been writing for them for years and I did an article called My First Job in IT Was CIO. And I interviewed people who had grown up in marketing or supply chain or what have you and they're now CIOs. And first of all, they were all terrified. They all had that deer in the headlights look and what they said was the thing I'm struggling with is what I'm great at is building teams. I'm great at building great teams. But this IT organization, this is not a team that I recognize that I've ever known. I mean, running IT means you need to know things about SDLC and ITIL and project management and vendor management and many disciplines and capabilities that don't exist in other functions. So I don't think CIOs who come from the business fail and many of them do fail. I don't think they fail because they're not technical. I think they fail because they don't know how to run IT which is a very unique and specific function which is complicated and filled with people who are really creative except they also really like structure. I mean, it's a heady brew those IT professionals. I know, I've worked with CIOs for a number of years too and I'm older than you are so I've been around a lot of time. I didn't want to mention that. But one or the other I wonder if this came up in your book. A lot of times, CIO, everybody to call CIO, it's the senior IT leader, but a lot of times CIOs don't have the juice in their organization. They've been pulled into application development or the infrastructure people or the line of business or all of the above and it's a real challenge for them to actually get stuff done as a result of that. Is that something that you see as maybe less common? I mean, is it maybe a problem that's five or 10 years old? Well, it's funny you should mention that because I have a paradox for that and I call it strategy versus operations. So you ask any CEO what they're looking for and they're CIO and they say I want a CIO who's gonna turn IT from a necessary evil to a major strategic lever for our company. I want IT to be a strategic advantage. Strategy, strategy, strategy. So then we check in with that new CIO a couple months later and he or she says I'm stuck in the weeds. The weeds are growing around my ankles because we're putting out so many operational fires. It's gonna be two years before we get to the really high value strategic work. In fact, I talked to a CIO of a global manufacturing company and I asked him to weigh in on this paradox and he said well it's hard to be strategic when your pants are on fire and I thought that kind of summed it up nicely and I think the thing to recognize for that those CIOs should recognize is sometimes it is important to recognize that shoring up operations and getting your house in order and running IT like a well oiled machine, that is the most strategic thing you can do before you try to move on to fancy strategy or you'll fail. So one of the skills that successful CIOs have developed is I call it cooling your jets and it's getting all of the business executives who want these new capabilities to be patient and to chill out while we get our house in order so that we can really fix what's systemic and therefore be more agile in the future. A lot of complaints that you hear from CIOs are just under the budget. I don't have the budget to transform. Legitimate complaint or are there ways around that? Is that a crutch? I think they don't have the budget but I think where the crutch is and is in saying and there's nothing I can do about it, everybody's clamoring for the budget. It is very competitive among executive members of the executive committee to get a piece of that budget and the most competitive person wins and what makes you competitive? It's telling the story, explaining the capabilities and saying if we invest in this, look at all this revenue, look at this return on this investment. If you can't build a business case for the budget you need to be strategic and innovate, you probably don't deserve to be in the CIOC. Go get it. Now how did you arrive at this position? Are you a technologist? Are you a psychologist? Are you just a smart person? How did too much time with the IELs? You ever said beautiful. You never even remarked on my physical beauty. We try not to do that in the queue. You get yelled at every time we look at anything. But it's funny, I'm not at all a technologist and my teenage daughters who are more technologically savvy than I am, they laugh that I'm even in this role. I started out in journalism and I actually became the cover story writer for LAN Magazine, local area network magazine, a very sexy publication in New York City back in the day. So I really come to all of this through journalism and then I moved into executive search where I placed CIOs in their roles and I helped CIOs place their senior executives and boy, that gave me a new vantage point to what's really going on in IT organizations when you're trying to place the talent to be successful in that environment. Really awesome, Martha, the CIO paradox, battling the contradictions of IT leadership. Really fresh perspectives, straightforward advice. Appreciate you coming on theCUBE. Thank you, it was a pleasure, a new and unique experience for me. Excellent, all right, keep right there, everybody, we're right back. This is Dave Vellante with Jeff Kelly. This is theCUBE, we're live from Moscone. This is Service Now Knowledge 14, we're right back.