CIO Leadership Live from the CIO100 with Bryan Wise, CIO, 6Sense and Lee Rennick, Executive Director, CIO Communities, cio.com

00:00 I’m Lee Rennick, Executive Director of CIO Communities for CIO. And I’m thrilled to be here at the CIO Symposium and 100 with Bryan Wise, CIO of 6sense.
00;00;20;02 – 00;00;38;51
Unknown
Bryan, thanks so much for joining us today. And congratulations on your CIO 100 award winning project. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, happy to be honored. Let’s see I 100. It’s a great honor. Well, it’s great to have you here today. So 6sense has put together a really great project. I read through, actually, I was one of the judges.
00;00;38;51 – 00;00;59;12
Unknown
I happened to read through some of those applications. And it’s an award winning project called Automation Domination. So could you tell me a little bit about it? Yeah. One of the things that, I usually come in as a CIO for sometimes pre-IPO companies, okay. All the time when you come in to an environment like that. Yeah, there’s a lot of fast growth, right?
00;00;59;12 – 00;01;31;22
Unknown
And there’s a lot of situations where, sort of your business processes are not really as mature as it should be. And because of speed, maybe you’re doing things that are maybe manual and in sort of nature and you got to start maturing, right. Because end to end process is to be as efficient as possible. So automation domination is a program we put in place to really change the way that the company is thinking about, you know, how efficient automation of their processes and sort of not accepting the status quo, right.
00;01;31;35 – 00;01;53;49
Unknown
And so the idea behind it was, we made it a top level company objective. And the key result was to save 67,000 manual people hours. Incredible way we came up with that was we took our employee base, about 1200 toys, and we said, what if we could save one hour per week per employee for the entire year?
00;01;53;50 – 00;02;19;31
Unknown
So that’s the rough math of why 67,000 hours hours became the goal. Yeah. And, the real meta deliverable, though, that was the key result of track. But the real meta deliverable was to change the culture and the way people think about what they’re doing. It was also to create an environment where people also thought about what they do and how it affects other groups.
00;02;19;32 – 00;02;43;13
Unknown
So in turn breaks down silos. Yeah. And, really just make it so that it becomes ingrained into our environment. And then for me as a CIO, I know there’s going to be process improvement, efficiencies, ultimately speed that helps our customers in the end. So we really did focus a lot on the, on the sales and marketing as a sort of, because that’s what we do.
00;02;43;16 – 00;03;06;17
Unknown
Yeah. And, it was just a great experience and it was so successful that, we are doing it again. And so our goal, our next goal is to say 100,000 hours. I should have said we actually save over 91,000 hours. My original goal, our next goal is 100,000. And and I already told the team I think it’s sandbagged and we need to actually increase that.
00;03;06;18 – 00;03;28;45
Unknown
So it’s a pretty awesome, experience. And now it’s sort of changed the entire culture. And I don’t have to really cheerleader anymore. You just hear. Right. Our team members are employees talking about it all the time. Yeah, because I’m sure they’re able to report back on productivity they’ve achieved through their business through through this great opportunity of really automation, domination and all that stuff.
00;03;28;45 – 00;03;52;48
Unknown
So that’s really cool and that’s really important. Right. And that idea of internal productivity, which is really enhancing your customer experiences too, is great. So I want to talk to you about that a little bit. I speak to a lot of CIOs about data and cloud. And some have moved out, like during Covid a lot when a lot of people put their data in the cloud and then, you know, they were looking at costs around that of processing data.
00;03;52;52 – 00;04;11;26
Unknown
And, you know, some are now saying, well, I’m now thinking of bringing it back down on Prem, because I want to keep my most important, important data, right, right on prem or maybe on the edge of the cloud. Yeah. So I’ve talked to a lot of people about this. I would love to learn more about your approach to that around data and cloud.
00;04;11;31 – 00;04;35;54
Unknown
It’s really interesting to to think about what is the cloud going forward. So when you think about truly like on prem physically. Yeah, yeah, those would be data centers. And the world has changed a little bit that your data center is your cloud provider going forward. Right. You can control that. So it is really interesting sort of change in landscape.
00;04;35;59 – 00;05;03;52
Unknown
And then like sixth sense where digitally native computing. Right. So our company never had anything on. Right. Right. Exactly. Always been in the cloud. Yeah I do think it’s some it is makes it faster because you can deploy products much faster. You have all capital intensive infrastructure. You need to buy, but it does require, a certain mindset of like controlling costs, right.
00;05;03;57 – 00;05;28;38
Unknown
Because of that ease of use into that computational sort of resources, you can get carried away. It also brings up interesting questions around, well, where is my data exactly? Yes. So there’s like data sovereignty. Yes. Where is it going? And so while it is simple to go to the cloud, it adds other complexity you have to consider.
00;05;28;43 – 00;05;50;06
Unknown
Yeah. Going forward, I do think that, most of the world will now be just digitally native. We have already seen that in tech companies. There are some exceptions depending on the industry you’re in. Yeah, but then there’s going to be situations in the future where if you get large enough, you know, you will start saying, what’s the cost benefit analysis on that?
00;05;50;18 – 00;06;21;20
Unknown
And you might want to bring some of that back. Yeah. Prem, we’re we’re a long ways from that. But I do know some of the larger fortune 500 companies. Yeah. Are definitely thinking about because the complexity of data residency is even more than something like $0.06. True costs in the cloud versus doing it yourself, maybe more control. It’s a really dynamic, sort of topic that I think is going to evolve over time as we all push to the cloud and now potentially some cases pushing back from the cloud.
00;06;21;29 – 00;06;43;13
Unknown
Yeah. So I think you’re really getting at this hybrid approach. And some of the big players in the space, computer players, manufacturers, they’re thinking more and more about this too. I think it’s also one last thing. I’ll just say it’s interesting is that most of the skill sets now are really around shifted to cloud first.
00;06;43;18 – 00;07;04;16
Unknown
Most of the products that are being built to sort of augment how you handle cloud services are cloud first. Yeah. The big challenge coming next. It used to be it was like, how do I address pushing to the cloud and will all the things work. And now you’re going to say, all right I got to push back right.
00;07;04;16 – 00;07;23;41
Unknown
Skill sets. Right. Well true. You know it’s like it’s really interesting to think about that shift potentially back. Sixth sense isn’t going to worry about this for a long time. But I do think there’s going to have to be this sort of common plane of how do you manage all of that going forward. Okay, so this is interesting.
00;07;23;41 – 00;07;46;26
Unknown
I’m actually going to be hosting a panel on ESG tomorrow around, you know, we talk a lot about the cost of cloud data, edge to cloud computing and things like that, and obviously how generative AI has been, you know, on top of all of that. Right. As one CIO said to me, you know, garbage, garbage in, garbage out, if you don’t have the right data in, then you’re not going to be producing the best stuff going out.
00;07;46;26 – 00;08;02;11
Unknown
And so he was referring to generative AI. And like my data is not in good shape, then I’m not even going to overlay it onto my system until I get that right, which you were just talking about. So what are you seeing in the area of like enterprise innovation with AI right now? What are you, you know, what are you experiencing?
00;08;02;15 – 00;08;23;34
Unknown
Just what are you hearing out there? Well, first of all, as a big AI engine. Yeah, right. So one of the things we do is we provide B2B intelligence for marketers and sellers to understand where they’re either existing customer base or future accounts are in their buying journey. That’s what we do. And the way we do that is a big, I imagine every day.
00;08;23;34 – 00;09;01;15
Unknown
Right. But to your point around, you know, I think on the generative AI side where things are going, you know, it used to be a situation where you didn’t have enough data, and now we have tons of data. So yeah. Of data. Yeah. Quality paramount. Right. I think managing those data sets, getting a lot of utility out of them and insights and of course the quality of that data is just going to be paramount, especially this generative AI space where LMS are going to be the new paradigm shift.
00;09;01;20 – 00;09;23;42
Unknown
There’s many other ways to take this, but really understanding your data in a real, actionable way. Yeah. So I think that the quality piece is only going to get it’s going to be exacerbated. That’s something you have to get. Yeah. And I think we really have got to figure out a way to ensure that we talk about hallucinations.
00;09;23;47 – 00;09;51;42
Unknown
We talk about maybe there’s going to be situations where you might get report back from that data. That’s not correct. Yeah. And you piece can be very real. It’s a really bad outcomes. So there’s going to have to be a real, mindset on making sure that data is high as high fidelity. I guess the one thing I’ll say there too is that it’s your issue about lens illuminations.
00;09;51;46 – 00;10;10;00
Unknown
It’s really forcing us as a world to make sure that data is going to be of high fidelity. Yeah. So we’re going to we’re all going to have to focus in on that. Yeah. That garbage in garbage out statements. Totally true. I think it was it was true before. Now it’s really yeah. Like never you know. Yeah I agree.
00;10;10;00 – 00;10;27;24
Unknown
And in the discussions I’ve been having today, it’s like we’ve all been talking about data, just the quality of data that we have so that we can really ensure that the business can move forward right at the acceleration that Gen I’s, you know, putting in that space right and taking us right. We can’t even start talking about quantum yet.
00;10;27;24 – 00;10;50;42
Unknown
But anyway, we’ll leave that to the next interview. But, the last question I wanted to ask you was around leadership. So we, produced this the the state of the CIO report. We, had 1100 CIOs, you know, contribute to that, globally. And 79% of those CIOs said that the CIO now has an educational partnership with the board of directors and the C-suite and the CEO.
00;10;50;56 – 00;11;22;07
Unknown
So we just love your I’ve been talking about that a lot today. There really does seem to be that’s what most people are telling me. They really have that connection and partnership, and it’s an educational piece. What’s your experience? My experience right now is being a CIO today has never been more sort of powerful, energizing. I think a lot of CIOs over the last few decades have really wanted to be taken more seriously, a larger presence in the boardroom.
00;11;22;07 – 00;11;56;33
Unknown
Right. And with all the technology shift that’s going on in the commoditization of a lot of technology, it’s allowing CIOs. I know there’s exceptions to the rules of all the stuff that’s up and speaking and sort of generalization. Yeah, it’s allowing CIOs more freedom to really influence the company more than ever. And, it that that heavy burden of infrastructure around the business that was consuming 80% of your resources, say, ten years ago, that’s all change is.
00;11;56;37 – 00;12;20;33
Unknown
The whole paradigm is change to have, you know, I think 20% on the business. I think it depends on individual or company or whatnot, but it certainly has swung the other way. I think the other thing that’s really interesting is because technology is becoming commoditized in many ways, right. You can partner with the business even more effectively because they have a point of view.
00;12;20;33 – 00;12;44;09
Unknown
They’re more tech savvy. They can take on more of, I would say, sort of the the grunt work that CIOs and big business technology teams have to do. And I’ll just bring it back to automation domination. The very fact that we can lower the technical barrier for a lot of these services and enable the business to do a lot of the heavy lifting.
00;12;44;19 – 00;13;10;21
Unknown
Yeah, because they know their processes better than, you know, really, a business technology. Yeah. Yeah. It just accelerates everything and changes the whole engagement. And it’s it’s a pretty awesome time to be a CIO now and then the amount of sort of ASPs that come up, CIOs especially gentlemen, my point of view, what is your strategy? How are you going to really help our bottom line?
00;13;10;21 – 00;13;34;12
Unknown
Yeah, those those sort of conversations have just increased exponentially. And it’s a it’s just it’s a great time to be a CIO. And I, I continue to see that being, an area that’s going to mature in all organizations across every industry. Well, I appreciate your insights on that, and I appreciate interviewing you. I, I learned so much from these interviews myself.
00;13;34;12 – 00;13;49;09
Unknown
So thank you so much for joining us here. Sharing, automation, domination. What success is doing in just your role as a CIO? I appreciate it so much. Thanks again. Lee, thank you so much for sort of organizing us. And, it’s been a great event and I can’t wait to come back. Thank you.