In this interview series on inspiring digital technology leaders, we take an inside look at how enterprise technology leaders make systems work in some of the largest and most complex business environments in the world. Meet the Individual, Understand their Challenges, and learn about Their Vision of the Future.
An Interview with Phil Smith
Introduction
Phil Smith’s insightful perspective on helping modern, fast moving organisations deliver on the promises of technology takes us into the ideas of how data is the lifeblood of your future success, how understanding technology is now key to certain types of IT Leadership roles more than it has ever been, and how managing relationships is essential to making IT a key driver in the success of the business.
Phil Smith is a Transformative IT Leader with a technical background that has made him a successful leader of complex programmes and high performing teams in today’s modern organisations.
Bitesize Takeaways:
Creating great teams is how you build your engine for change
Knowing how tech really works, helps to make bolder, less risky decisions
Blindly follow the crowd at your own peril
No matter how much you externalise delivery — the accountability is always yours
You need the business to truly buy into tech — relationships with stakeholders are the key
Brilliant short term execution can hide (but not replace) the need for good long term strategy
Technology projects must have economic value — forget that & you’ll fail
Change is complicated and more than just a process or technology
We see the same old cycles (4GL, OO, SOA, EA, Digital, etc) but have yet to get it totally right
Environment Automation, Connected Everything, and Security are the things to focus on
Meet the Individual
Q: Tell us a bit about what you currently do:
I’m currently an IT Director for a large company, with around 4000 people across 1000 locations and £400m revenue, I’m the board level lead for IT and responsible for transformation of the organisation from a technology perspective. A modernisation programme is currently underway that is intended to improve the operation of the business, improve our web presence through some significant changes, and other fundamental initiatives such as GDPR, security, and getting the basics right. I focus mainly on leadership, strategy, and execution — developing and encouraging the right ways of working and driving performance within the team.
Q:What motivates and inspires you to get up and go to work everyday?
Two things: Firstly, I really enjoy leveraging technology to make business outcomes a reality. Secondly, is the reward of building great teams. As I’ve gotten older, my focus has moved toward building an environment where people enjoy working, can develop themselves and their careers, and where people can really make a difference. So motivation is a big component of that. I enjoy the mentoring aspect, and providing the clarity that is necessary for progress. In particular, I want the team to feel like a truly integrated part of the business itself, not a separate side function doing IT separately.
Q: Tell us about your journey to get to where you are today?
I actually got into IT by accident, through a University sponsorship scheme, and it seemed as interesting as anything else, so why not give it a go? It’s fantastic how things work out for the best. I’ve grown up doing the classical consulting piece with one of the big 4 consulting firms, progressed to working in supplier organisations and ultimately working with end user organisations — with roughly even split across the three.
I spent the first part of my career doing technical & engineering work, and the latter part has been about functional leadership in IT director & CIO type roles. It has felt like a very natural progression — first the intellectually challenging roles in consulting, then moving into more of an ownership role where I’ve focused on creating the vision, executing the vision and showing value. Fortunately my career has been well aligned to my interests as it has developed. For the foreseeable future I see myself continuing working with End User organisations.
Q: Do you think the technical background has helped you as an IT Leader?
Yes, this is one of the things that differentiates me. Comparatively, few CIO’s come up through the architectural route, many come through the programme director or operations manager routes. Being an ex-designer gives me confidence to push bolder technology innovation on business critical projects.
What I sometimes observe is peers making technology leaps of faith based on what they have seen other organisation do. And of course, it might work for that particular organisation, but gaining confidence that a particular technology or architectural solution will work in the context of your own environment is essential to effectively assess risk — and obviously there are comparatively few unbiased sources of insight around. .
You can externalise some of that risk through fixed price contracts and other such mechanisms, but the reality is that it is still your failure as the CIO.
Q: Do you think that there will be a greater demand for technically literate IT leaders in the future?
It is not so much about the individual skills but building a team that has the right mix of skills to meet the organisation’s needs. Some organisations see IT as a pure technical function (the classic dot com CTO if you like), but I think most see it as a business support function nowadays. As such technical competence is probably a nice to have — more valuable in my view is strong business accumen. And of course the relative commercial, technical or operational skill of the leader needs to be blended with the strengths of those in the senior management team.
Q: If you were to do anything other than what you do now, what would it be?
Sometimes I think I would have liked to have been an architect — a “real” architect that is designing skyscrapers or bridges. Norman Foster, for example, can express himself in a way that affects so many people with both the aesthetics and functionality of his buildings. However, at 18, seven years of training just seemed too long. As many designers in different disciplines have commented, the process of design is fundamentally similar irrespective of what you are designing, and I appreciate that.
Q: What books or podcasts do you recommend for Enterprise Technology Leaders?
Two books from opposite end of the spectrum — the Mythical Man Month is still relevant today as to why big programmes go wrong, and The Agile Manifesto to remind yourself that methodology wars aside, Digital/Agile is a simple construct and you should focus on the core values.
Understanding Their Challenges
Q: What is the most important thing you focus on to make the organisation successful?
Without a doubt it is about managing the interface between IT and the other senior stakeholders, principally at CXO level. Most of the bad things I’ve seen and experienced have come out of that orbit — essentially IT’s mandate comes from the business, in most businesses it is a support function, and all support functions have to justify their existence.
IT is usually the most expensive support function, so if you lose that mandate, or don’t establish it, then you will really struggle to effect change. Strategy is important but as the saying goes brilliant execution eats strategy for breakfast — certainly in the short term. The challenge is this can lead to a false sense of security and high levels of technical debt building up.
So for me the key is to balance the need to progress a core strategy whilst consistently meeting short terms goals. You have to be very strong at articulating why the investment to do things will stand the test of time. The classic answer to a funding request is “can you build a business case?” — but business cases are inevitably on a one or two year return, so those long term plans need to have shorter term payback. The board level relationships are what enables you to maintain this balancing act.
I tend to spend 60% of my time managing stakeholder relationships, around 20% of my time mentoring/coaching the team, and the remaining 20% getting involved with strategy and architecture and protecting the IPR coming out of that.
Q: What are the most expensive mistakes you have seen made in organisations, and how did they happen?
The biggest mistake I’ve ever seen was a major government change programme that could have delivered significant financial benefits to the public purse but instead tried to do too much, and expanded to become a white elephant. If you look at how much has survived to today, there is relatively little. If it had been more focused, it could have produced something really worthwhile.
Outside of that, I was involved in a transformation programme in the Utilities industry, that tried to create a universal operating model/platform that would operate across all utilities (e.g. Gas, Water, Electricity). If you were to look at the classic business process reengineering level 0 processes of these businesses, you can see consistent processes that seem to offer a great opportunity to normalise. So, we spent a good amount of time and tens of £millions seeking to build a design that would do just that.
This taught me that you shouldn’t rely on BPR to determine strategy. Whilst the processes have considerable similarity at level 0, they diverge radically at the task level and have fundamentally different economic and risk drivers. In short, the strategy was fundamentally flawed. It took considerable investment to prove this.
The morale I learnt from this is that no technology solution can be truly successful unless it creates an economic outcome. Whilst you can take a leap of faith “build it and they will come” and it can work in genuinely disruptive business models, more often it won’t… you end up with a “solution looking for a problem” scenario.
Q: What are the things you look for to support success?
I like to ensure we have some formal R&D funding and keep this separate from transformation. By preference the R&D budget should be built into the annual budget. If you’re going to do something really big, prototype it first and demonstrate its value and feasibility. This enables subsequent investments to be evidence based.
To make something work, you need three things to line up: Business Outcomes, the ability to execute business change, and technology solution. They all need to line up. If not, it is likely to fail. As an industry we need to be better at making sure all three are delivered. Too often, organisations try to do business transformation without formal support.
Doing genuine transformational change is different to BAU change. Complex change requires a change function and processes in the same way you would for IT changes. This has to be proactively managed across all the different disciplines.
The human aspect of change is definitely a challenge. Poorly executed change can be a bad thing, and people are right to resist it. Resistance to change is often typified as people being defensive, but it may be that they have not been adequately engaged, have legitimate observations or contributions, or simply do not understand the drivers for change. By effectively engaging we can get a better outcome both in terms of adoption but also solution quality.
Q: What drives the complexity in your Enterprise Systems?
Nowadays there are a couple of dimensions: the need for data to be universally available in real time, always accurate, with increased analytical complexity is certainly a challenge, particularly when extended beyond the organisation. Data needs are increasing exponentially. Potentially conflicting with that is the counterbalance of data security — securitisation, access management, authentication etc. A lot of complexity is driven in those dimensions, which cascades down into the way we create, control, access, and maintain data.
I’ve yet to see an organisation that does that perfectly, and if managed tactically, those challenges become problematic. It is easier to build a business case to add a new capability than to rationalise capabilities you already have. This is why you see the emergence of the data lake, digital, etc as proxies for fixing what is already there. Sometimes I think we as an industry expect to solve too many of our problems with silver bullets. The reality is, for most organisations you want to get to a landscape where the data is in one location, accessible, immutable, accessible by multiple front ends, and exposed through a security layer, with localised processing and interpretation. The required engineering is understood — the politics of funding and prioritisation is more difficult.
Q: Will this get better with new blood and modern thinking, or is it a time old problem?
I don’t think it will get any better any time soon. In my career I’ve experienced the trends of 4GL, Object Oriented, SOA, EA and now Digital, and on to whatever the next big thing is in the future. None of these adequately address this problem — and the demand keeps increasing.
Q: Where do you see EA fitting into this?
I’ve never seen an exec team where EA in a pure form could truly work. If you were to execute EA fully, then whoever leads that is effectively leading the organisation. But typically that individual doesn’t have that ability in today’s incarnation of EA. You could split by CIO (IT and Tech) and COO (Business Operations), and separate responsibilities that way, but how do you resolve the tensions between all the layers. And things move so fast, that the current EA techniques don’t really move fast enough.
But EA can add value as a common language and communication tool to provide insight and build consensus if used pragmatically. I use a motto of “Just enough EA, just in time” — capture the architecturally significant elements and manage these practically delivers 80% of the value for 20% of the effort and most importantly without slowing progress.
Q: Do you see the difference between EA and Solution Architecture/App Development as analogous to the difference between city planning and building development?
Yes, EA should stop at zoning, and Solutions should focus on building the tower blocks. Once you get below city planning, you need the right tool to do the right job. E.g. SAP is well suited to HR, Finance etc, but the website you change every day would benefit from a different technology solution.
Q: What are the most frustrating challenges when designing, building and managing enterprise systems?
I don’t think I would describe them as frustrating, but the challenges are around building consensus (on multiple levels) and the various data challenges we have already discussed. Stakeholders (not unreasonably) expect things to get faster, cheaper and more innovative. Traditional technology vendors have a vested interest in continuing to maximise revenue streams, and not always with corresponding incremental value. So we often find ourselves in the middle trying to keep everyone happy — and that is the core of the exec role.
Their Vision for the Future
Q: What are the 3 key changes that Technology Leaders should focus on in the modern world?
The first one — the big operational advantage that has emerged in the last 5 years that is making a big difference — is the environment automation piece — on the fly you can build an environment and deploy to production. This provides a whole new world of opportunities and ways of working. There is comparatively little in the “Digital” space that is really new, but this one thing really does make the difference in getting an idea into production quickly and reliably. I believe that this more agile way of working will cross pollinate back into waterfall environments, with both being enriched and better for it.
The second thing is the connected enterprise — where data needs to be universally accessible, processed in realtime and in vast quantities, where everyone and everything is connected — from partners and external users to the internet of things, connected homes, etc. Less and less the enterprise is separate from the world.
The third is security. Most large corporate are now effectively under permanent attack. There have already been some high profile incidents yet I predict this will get worse with some companies going bankrupt or experiencing ownership changes due to security issues in the coming years.
Q: What is one thing about the future of technology that you believe in, but most people generally don’t know, or disagree with?
It’s all about the data. I started my career in the early 90s and back then data management was quite new and considered important, but it went out of fashion in the 00s, focusing on functional capability and speed of change instead, assuming that the data problem had ‘been sorted’. A lot of people still rely on a technology fix for data, maybe through micro-services or using an ERP solution, but this doesn’t cut it as far as I am concerned. I think we will see data management becoming increasingly important going forward.
The thing that represents commercial value is the data — For most companies, it is the data rather than business process that represents long term competitive advantage. For most businesses, process and/or technology solutions can be replicated or substituted by competitors. Data is much harder to replicate and thus creates a more sustainable USP.
Phil kindly provided his time, knowledge and insights in this interview as part of my research for an up-coming book: Mastering Digital: how technology leaders, architects, and engineers build the Digital Enterprises of the Future
You can contact Phil via LinkedIn.