Hyland CIO Stephen Watt on emerging purpose-built AI platforms

00:00 Hello. Good afternoon and welcome to CIO Leadership Live. I’m Maryfran Johnson, CEO of Maryfran Johnson Media, and the former editor in chief of CIO magazine and events. Since November 2017
this video show and audio podcast has been produced by the editors of cio.com and the digital media division of foundry, which is an IDG company. Our sponsor for this episode today is Ohio based Hyland Software, which provides industry leading enterprise content management and process management software. Hyland’s content solutions empower its customers to deliver exceptional experiences by connecting their systems and managing high volumes of diverse content that accelerates and automates processes and workflows. Visit the hyland.com website to learn more. And now onward to today’s guest, which I’m very pleased to say is the Senior Vice President and CIO at Hyland Software, Stephen Watt, Steve is responsible for the global delivery of corporate IT services for Highlands, rapidly expanding employee base now encompassing more than 3500 Highlanders around the world. He joined Highland 20 years ago as an is infrastructure administrator, back when the company had only 185
employees and an IT team of six people as the business grew rapidly and expanded globally, Steve played key roles in the deployment of new technologies that supported the company’s explosive growth. He served in several key roles during his long tenure, much of that focused on infrastructure, systems, process and policy, and he was promoted into the CIO role, officially in early 2021 prior to Hyland, he worked as an IT director in the education industry and an independent IT consultant. Steve, welcome and thanks for joining me here today. Thank you very much. Maryfran, it’s a pleasure to be here. All right. Excellent. Now it is, as we talked about earlier, as we were getting ready for this show today. It’s really rare I went and I think I called you a unicorn, and because it’s rare to find a CIO who has such a long tenure with a single company, talk about what has kept you challenged and engaged at Hyland software all of these years.
Yeah, for me, personally, it’s been, it’s been quite a journey.
You know, when I was working in the IT field, especially as I was finishing school,
you know, I was planning on a career in electrical engineering, and I happened to get in contact with what Hyland was, and really over this time,
you know, it’s a couple of specific things for me, I was really interested in the IT front on a company that was sort of in that mid market, that was on a growth trajectory, You know, striving to become enterprise.
And that was very that was very attractive. And then really, what’s kept me here is that with our growth and everything, there’s never been a, you know, a slowdown in the number of challenges that we’ve had to solve. And I love solving interesting problems. And then the cliche answer of it is that I’ve truly enjoyed the people that I’ve worked with over this amount of time. I think we’ve all had those jobs where we worked with people that we did not enjoy, the people that you were working with on a day to day basis, but Highland, I think, has had a unique position to attract great people that I’ve really had an honor working with, and, you know, being a part of that journey with them. So that has been a big part of it, as well as just the pleasure I’ve had with my colleagues and, you know, solving big problems together is a great way to spend your time. Well, tell us too, a little bit about Hyland’s market, the people that buy the Hyland software that has expanded over time as well. Tell us a little bit about that customer base out there that has part of that explosive growth?
Yeah, definitely. We sell into almost any vertical market that you can think of, whether it’s healthcare, financial services, commercial manufacturing. Our software is pretty ubiquitous in its application, and that’s just, you know, a lot of it is due to the configurability and the in the, you know, the number of solutions that we can offer our customers today, that is that has been exciting. Our customer base has continued to grow significantly since I’ve been with the organization. And it’s been interesting to see how that, how that presents itself comes with its own unique challenges as you enter into like highly regulated markets like health care or financial
but again, it’s it’s fun to solve those interesting challenges. So yeah, and around the world at this point, you’ve got somewhere around 15,000 customers. That is correct. Yeah, around 15,000 customers across two.
Pretty much every vertical market you can think of. Okay, now let’s talk about the size and scope of your technology team. Those six people that you started out with back 20 years ago is now about the size that the entire company was when you joined. It’s a upwards of 170 folks in it now. Yes, that is correct, yeah. So that’s been kind of a surreal experience of itself, and that growth of seeing that when you’re running a department that’s the same size as the entire organization was, kind of puts in perspective, you know, what the stakes are, and the fact that you shoulder a lot of responsibility to help the organization continue to move in the right direction, yeah. How have you, how have you structured that technology team to deliver the most value to the rest of the business? And I take it that’s changed a great deal over the 20 years. So what is your most kind of, the most recent snapshot of what your org structure looks like for the technology group? Yeah, you know, the way that we’re structured now is, is, it’s definitely not a unique perspective on on what we do, but we try to organize in sort of a service delivery methodology, really around that classic plan, build, run type of framework. And really, you know, the key to why we do that is that we’re always looking for driving efficiency in our operational side of our business, you know, and all of the sort of keeping the lights on activities, we want to make sure that we’re, you know, doing that in the most efficient way possible, so that we free up, you know, our budget dollars otherwise, to make sure that We can continue to invest in innovation, you know, in the future of what we need to do as an IT organization that really gives us a good delineation of how, you know, all of our work comes in and gives us the flexibility that we need to, you know, kind of strategically assign where we are, investing in those dollars, investing In those teams and trying to move our solutions forward. Okay, now the when we talked earlier, you mentioned that there’s another part of the organization, the Chief Technology Officer, part, which is more directly linked to the customers. Tell us about that. How does that division work? And is this CTO, someone that you work with on a day to day basis. Yes, we work very closely with our technology org, so all of our customer facing infrastructure operations and delivery happens underneath that umbrella. So my organization, you know, provides a supportive function for the business operations that they rely on, but we like to keep that part of our business separate, so that they are 100% focused on that customer experience and the customer journey through our cloud solutions. And so it’s a great organization. They do a great job in supporting our customers, and we try to do everything we need to as well to make sure that they can do the jobs they need to do. Yep. Okay, great. Now you’d also mentioned when we talked earlier that you’ve spent a lot of time on several major key systems over the last year or two. Tell us kind of give us a snapshot of what’s going on deep in your operations. What sort of accomplishments has your tech team been delivering in the last year or two? Absolutely. Well, we had, we had just gone live last year. In 2023 we have gone through a pretty large two year lead to cash transformational initiative. And really the key with that project was to overhaul a majority of our systems that go, you know, from the entire gambit of contracting all the way through revenue recognition, billing, really, to ensure that as we continue to evolve and build a new generation of products for Hyland, that our systems are ready to go to support that and to support our growth as a company. You know, over time, we all know that you amass a lot of technical debt around systems that have been around a long time, and we felt it was time to do a pretty major revamp, and it was a tremendous amount of work across the entirety of the organization. And, you know, it’d be green. There’s a lot of change, and there’s a lot to work with. After that go live, we’ve had a lot of work to do to, like, make sure we’ve got all the sort of second phase features and work out any bugs, everything that needs to happen in those platforms. But it’s been a tremendous accomplishment over over that time for my team and the other parts of the organization that worked on that project. Well, it’s interesting, because even companies, whether you’re in the tech industry or in one of the other many industries that Hyland serves, technical debt is something that starts amassing within a few years of the creation of a company. So what is that journey going to look like going forward for you, you’re a 20, let me see the highlands been around since the early 90s, since 91 So is there an end goal where you think you ever get to a.
Point where you can say, okay, all of our tech debt is cleaned up now. Or
is that just that would actually be, no, I don’t think you’re ever, ever done. I mean, I think it’s part of the reason that, you know, switching to a more agile, product based methodology and the delivery of our systems, which we had done, you know, probably going on eight years ago now or more, that we really like to look at what we deliver as a product like you would anything else. And the idea is that you should always be improving. You should always be addressing those things. And it’s not about sort of being done. It’s about how do you continuously deliver value? And that’s what we strive to do. Okay, okay, talk about some of the common problems that and this may be something you discussed with your other with CIO peers, things that they’re tackling across those various customer segments that you all solve, especially in the enterprise content management space. What are the common problems that everybody is wrestling with these days.
I think it’s a it’s a lot of the same thing. I mean, I think the forefront, and we talked before, it wouldn’t be that long till we got to this answer, is that AI is the front, you know, on the front of everyone’s mind for the content management space in itself. I think what we spend a lot of time thinking about is, where do you have those silos of information, those silos of data, and how do you how do you unlock it? You know, I think a big part of what our go forward product strategy is going to be about is how to bring that content that you have locked up, potentially repositories that aren’t our repositories, but even you know other repositories, and create a fundamental AI platform that allows you to, you know, build workflows and AI generated content using any of it sort of ubiquitously, which is an exciting it’s kind of an exciting place to be. I’m excited to be part of a company that’s that’s trying to that’s trying to build that internally. We’re in the place where a lot of people are of looking to the future, of trying to figure out where are all the places that we think we can build effective AI use cases that are going to help us, you know, with our own strategic initiatives, you know, and strategic things that we are trying to improve, whether that’s customer experience external or employee experience for our own internal folks. And again, where do those investments need to happen? Because there’s no shortage of companies, obviously, that are building and selling and marketing AI solutions, so you have to be a little bit prescriptive in your application. Yeah. Well, I find it really interesting, especially talking to CIOs, who are inside various tech industry companies, because you don’t just have your business folks asking you about well, what are we doing with AI? You’ve got all your customers expecting AI to be built into more products. And so is an AI platform any different from a data and enterprise data platform. Are we talking about an entirely new thing, or is an AI platform essentially an evolution of whatever data platform you’re using? I would say what we’re trying to build is something brand new. I think with what they’re you know, what we plan to deliver to our customers is going to unlock and access to data that, to my knowledge, I don’t think it exists anywhere else and the market, and I think that’s why it’s so important to us, on why we see this as a transformational stage of where content comes into play and gives you, you know, the ability to use that content from any repository, not just what you’re doing inside of our own, you know, content services, you know, systems and storage today,
right now, like the where the market is, is every player kind of is niched into their to their own solution, right? Their little add on, their little pieces. And this was something that, you know, I was even asking analysts, you know, when this kind of started two years ago, is that, are there any players out there that are that are not trying to be tied to a specific solution, but be more uniform, you know, where you would have a more generalized AI platform that you could, could tie together in it, and it wasn’t really Something that was happening. So when that started to synthesize within our own organization, and I started to hear about it, and when our CEO was on stage at our own user conference, kind of, you know, announcing this and what we were doing, that’s why I definitely think it’s a very exciting time for, you know, to be an island for me, I’m excited because it’s something that I think is going to have an impact for our customers have an impact for us internally. I’m, you know, I’m just as excited to be a user of it as, you know, to see us sell it to customers. That’s, that’s interesting, well, but you also made the point when we talked earlier that CIOs as a group are further along what I think Gardner calls the high curve and might be heading into the trough of despair.
Yes, I do think that is true. I think there’s, you know, there’s a lot of, you know, people that have tried a lot of things, and in some cases, haven’t unlocked the value that they think has been there. I’ve heard of great use cases that have unlocked tremendous amounts of value. And I think now everyone’s trying to just figure out, you know, what it is, and there’s a lot to balance, right? There’s a lot to balance in your budget or your investments as we go into 2025, and beyond that, if you’re going to be spending new dollars on these AI initiatives, you know, where are you backing out of and how do you do that? So I think one of my favorite expressions I had that I had heard from a peer recently was that you want to make sure, with AI, that you’re not going so fast that you get a speeding ticket, but you can’t go so slow that you get a parking ticket. So I think we’re all trying to find where’s that sweet spot. And you know, how we evaluate these solutions, how we evaluate the value to the organization where those investments should be. It’s, it’s just a lot of work to kind of narrow that down. Yeah, well, and you had mentioned to me as well that you think AI is starting, is driving a lot of the decision making that companies are having to do about the right level of investments. How are you approaching that at Highland. Is this something do you does this get involved all the way up to your new CEO? Or is this just something you and the CTO work out together? How do you decide on the investment levels? No, it’s definitely something that’s being talked at at all levels. On the executive side, for our internal use, we have, you know, a lot of work that we do around, like a lot of companies, we’ve we’ve formed an AI council that, you know, we review business case from, you know, from around the organization that come to us with ideas of how they might either want to invest, or there’s an there’s an add on. So we look at AI in that council from a lot of different ways. We look at like, you know, what’s our return on investment going to be, if it’s something that’s new that we have to purchase, how are we going to make sure that this keeps our data or our customers data secure? What are the trickle down effects from any kind of training of AI models or what they do around it? We decide whether we need to do full POCs to make sure that we, you know, gather KPIs, back on how that that solution is being used, even if it’s something we’re not paying for. We want to know, you know, we’re still investing time, and we’re investing effort into building a solution that might be on it. How are we going to come back and show that group that, here’s what it really changed for us, so that we can make an informed decision going forward, because I do think there’s going to be aI use cases and solutions where we see tremendous value, and then I think there’s going to be some where we end up pruning the tree, if you will, that maybe just die on the vine and don’t really provide as much benefit as we thought it was going to. And we have to make sure that we kind of cut our losses where we need to, and then reinvest our time and energy and other things, and we try to do that, you know, through that group, to make sure that that we have a good process to continuously evaluate where we are. And when you say through that group that you’re referring to your AI council that is correct, yes, okay, tell us more about that. How did, how did, how did that get formed? Who runs it, who’s involved in it, is that something that a lot of companies, I’ve experienced, a number of CIOs, talking about having an AI special projects or an AI Innovation Council. So it’s getting to be kind of almost de rigueur out there in the industry to have an AI council. So tell us about yours. Yeah. No, it’s, you know, the way it kind of came to formation at Highland is that we knew that there was a lot of requests already coming. There was a lot of interest in these technologies. We knew there was a lot of interest in how we build them into our products. Our chief legal officer is actually who was kind of the driving force around it. Originally, a lot of thoughts around risk and risk and cyber security is still a big part of what we review. But then we quickly knew that this was going to be a bigger activity than just a risk assessment, that we needed to be looking at things more holistically and over time, as we met, we’ve added in additional components. Initially, we didn’t spend too much time talking about the cost of the tool with that. You know, with the council, it was more about just, you know, are we comfortable with the use case and how we’re going to evaluate it? But then we started thinking about, well, no, like the ROI becomes just as important as we as we knew that this volume was going to increase, that we wanted to get into the numbers a little bit more. So it provides a great venue to have a healthy dialog, both with the executive team that participates and with the you know, the people that come from our business with these use cases, they’ve got a very clear, direct line of communication with leadership on.
Kind of proving out their idea and having that discussion openly so that we can move as quickly as possible, which was part of it, too. We didn’t want each of these decisions kind of being made individually in a vacuum. We wanted to be able to have a more holistic view of what was happening around our use of AI company wide. Yeah, well, and you probably have a lot of AI along with machine machine learning and robotic process automation all that stuff. It all seems to have evolved together, although AI has pulled out far ahead of RPA and machine learning machine language in terms of recognition by the business community. Do you already have a number of I mean, are there things in Highlands products that you could point to and say, Oh, well, that’s an AI process right there. You know, in other words, it’s been there for a number of years. Absolutely, there’s a lot of things that you could say with Hyland that we’ve been in sort of the AI space for more than a decade. You know, we sell an RPA product. We use that internally as well. We have a
some of our capture tools are very, you know, ml focused, one of our main products, brainware is all about, you know, intelligent processing of forms. Our Hyland IDP software is, similarly, you know, all about adding intelligence to your form Capture and Processing. So we’ve been doing a lot in that space for a long time, I think now, like where the big shift is, is obviously on that generative AI side. And you know the explosion that was open AI, and now you’ve got so many other companies that have kind of brought to market and finding new and inventive use cases for that which, which is a bit of a paradigm shift, because it doesn’t require as sort of, once you’ve got your models trained, it doesn’t require as much manual intervention of continuous training and help, you know, along those stacks. So I think it is a very exciting technology, and a big reason why Hyland is investing so heavily in it. Okay, does that also let’s pivot over and talk about the talent side of this equation,
just in a couple aspects. And since we’re on we’re on our AI train right now, how do you make sure you have the talent on board that you need for the AI development? Do you work with outside consulting groups? Or is this? Are these talents that you are encouraging and developing internally? I think it’s a little bit of both. I mean, within my own work, my focus has been on elevating, sort of the base level knowledge across all of my team members, because, you know, our internal folks, they’ve got a significant amount of domain expertise that it’s not about, you know, replacing somebody that just knows about AI, especially when you’re talking about internal IT delivery, it’s a lot more about that AI is being threaded into every solution that those engineers and administrators are responsible for, and they need to have fundamental understandings around how that works before they even get into the sort of the product specifics. So we have focused a lot in the last 18 months on, you know, training initiatives, incentivizing additional training, spending time getting certifications to sort of raise the floor, if you will, across all of the IT organization within our products, obviously, there’s been a tremendous amount of learning, and we’ve also had strategic hires across our product organization as well. Fundamentally, for you know, some of those folks that have, you know, been on the bleeding edge of designing and implementing, you know, generative AI based solutions, things like that as well. So it’s been, it’s been a little bit of both. And it’s been, it’s been exciting to see, yeah, yeah, I would imagine. And it,
do you find that the talent that you’re working with at some point, do they just say, well, we’ve been doing this stuff for a while. Where are we headed with it? Do you have ways that when you talk about this with your own staff, and are you mapping out, you know, career enhancing positions that they might head into as the AI interest expands, I don’t know that we’re necessarily like defining AI around our job, but we are trying to highlight the importance that for a majority of roles, AI is going to be another bullet point that there’s an expectation for. So really, what I’ve spent my time championing with my teams, are that
this isn’t something you can just idly watch go by as a as a passive you know viewer, that if, if you’ve got plenty of time, unless you’re ready to retire soon, like if you have plenty of time left in your career, that you kind of need to jump in with both feet.
And be ready to embrace this technology. I don’t think it’s a fad. I mean, yes, there’s hype, there’s it’s going to solve everything, and we all get on that bandwagon at times, but I do think this is going to be ubiquitous over, you know, the next several decades. It’s not going to be something that is just here and gone. I don’t think we’re going to be talking about it the same way. Okay, yeah, it’s going to look as we often talk about, waves of technology change, you know, like the mainframes to mini computers, minis to PCs, I know. And then for a while the cloud providers, everybody was talking about how cloud was the next really big wave. And it really does seem like the focus on data and AI is truly the that that way it doesn’t go away. Yeah,
someone that you know needs to needed to learn cloud. Well, guess what? Cloud’s still here, and that needs to be part of your repertoire. Gen AI needs to be part of someone’s repertoire if they want to continue to be competitive in their in their technical field, it’s just something that’s going to become table stakes. Okay, now, still on the topic of your staff and the talent. A lot of companies, I think Amazon’s made a lot of noise about this, are starting to say everybody needs to come into the office. But when we talked earlier, you said you have a very, fully hybrid model of working since the pandemic. Is that? Tell us about that. How is that? Is that anything that you’re considering making changes in or is a hybrid model for in the office and out of the office working best for you, yeah, for my for my part of the organization, the hybrid model is definitely working. It has allowed us to
attract and retain talent, you know, in a much larger space than we potentially wouldn’t have in the past. I mean, we had remote employees well before the pandemic. It wasn’t about that, but that definitely was not the norm. And so the big, you know, 180 degree shift has been where a majority of my staff is hybrid, and at this point, we have no plans to kind of change that for our how we’re working within our group,
and we found ways to be effective, to be honest, and for a lot of our employees, it is a key differentiator still, that we’re here a company that’s remaining hybrid. You know, not that we don’t have, you know, events in the office, or bringing people in the office and look to get them here. And that’s something we’re continuing to, to try to find unique and innovative ways. I think our HR group has been doing a great job trying to encourage, you know, the right level of engagement when the opportunity is there to get folks in person. And I think people do get value out of that, but they want to see to their point. They want to see value of doing it right, like it’s not just mandate a day to have a day. It’s well, what are you going to be doing? You know, if you’re going to schedule a meeting, how do you do other events around it? Or how do you do so, whether it’s team building, you know, learning and development, maybe you, you know, you have some sort of, like a guest speaker, or something like that, like anything that could, could kind of, like bring people together, is something that we’re looking for to steal someone else’s quote. I think it was the CEO of Cisco recently that said about their spaces that you, you know you want it to be
a magnet, not a mandate. Yeah. Magnet, not a mandate. Thank you. Yeah. Magnet, not a mandate, which I think is a great way to sum it up, right? Like you want, you want to create an environment that entices people to want to come in for those interactions, and you make it purposeful,
not you know, something that you’re just dictating that they have to do, yeah, well, and you’ve seen an interesting cultural difference too, in the fact that the the part of your staff that’s over in Calcutta is, I think you said 100% in the office, as opposed to at home. How does that? How does that work differently for you as the CIO,
yeah. I mean, it’s definitely something that we have to plan around a little bit more perspectively. I mean, we have some amount of employees in our in our Kolkata office that are working remotely, but the majority are close and in office all the time.
And so there it’s a lot more normal culturally, you know, and there’s been some sort of government interventions that have kind of pushed that into that market. And I’d say they’ve, they’ve gotten kind of comfortable with with that as well. Now at the same time, you know Highland Saginaw is we definitely still try to provide as much flexibility, even for our international employees in our Calcutta office, either
for them to not feel like it’s something that’s only being forced upon them and nobody else. So I think flexibility has always been a key part of.
We how we run our operations and how we work with our employees, and I don’t think, I don’t think that is something that Hyland has intentions to change. So, okay, okay, back for just a second to AI, you had mentioned use cases a couple of times. Is there any one I have noticed with CIOs that often the first place where AI is escaping out of it and has more to do with their customer base, usually has something to do with like helping with improving customer search capabilities or self service capabilities, that sort of thing. Do you have? Are there any of the use cases that you have been experimenting with or rolling out. Are they worth talking about in terms of what you’ve seen on the good and the bad there? Definitely, yeah, this has been a big focus of ours over the last several months. So internally, through, you know, kind of a citizen developer program that we that we try to always encourage as well. We’re a software company, you’re going to have a lot of people with a lot of ideas. We had started working on an internal tool that was for accelerating our support reps. So the idea was that, how do we get our support reps to be able to get them to the right information, to help the customer during an issue, as quickly as possible, and that’s been pretty successful with where we’ve gone with that so far as an internal tool. Really, what we see as the next phases is that we want to get the same tool into the hands of our partners and then ultimately into the hands of our customers through our customer portals.
That type of thing will allow us to empower customers, because at the end of the day, I think nobody really likes having to contact support or, you know, be on beyond a support ticket, working through an issue, what you’re trying to get to as a resolution. And we do see opportunities to, you know, look at how we use these tools and what we’ve initially deployed internally, put them in the hands of our customers so that now they can get to the answer even themselves more quickly, with potentially never having to kind of engage with support directly if they have these tools. So we’re excited about it, you know, I think it’s something that we’ll see coming in, you know, 2025 hopefully not too late, as we kind of ramp up what we’re doing, a lot of internal testing going on now, and we have, you know, a few partners that have started to use the tool as well, and so far, things have been looking good. I think there’s, you know, a lot of ways that we can help support customers with some of these tooling, and it’s something that we’re going to continue to focus on. Yeah. Now, have you always had citizen developers inside of Highland, and I can say always, because you have been there for 20 years, so if they were around, you would have noticed them. Yeah, no, I would say, you know, in the beginnings of when I was here, we had, you know, like, like, a lot of IT organizations, at that time, we took a much more sort of constrictive approach to how we manage technology. They were shadow it right, but we were still a software development company, so we had plenty of apps that, you know, developers would kind of do on their own time, and we would find out about it later. Where we’ve gone since then is that we have tried to partner with different groups to encourage that. If they have people that are interested in, you know, one of our platforms, either working within our communities of practice, or, you know, getting them in touch with the teams that sort of manage those systems, and then, you know, work with them to promote that more. It really, technology became so, you know, open as the shift to the cloud and SaaS apps and everything else, that trying to kind of keep it all reined in was not going to work for Hyland in the long term. So what we try to do is encourage that we get people connected with the right tools. You know, they develop things or work on things in the right way, and then if and when it’s appropriate, if something, somebody works on something, and it’s time for it to go enterprise wide, you know, we try to have the right hand off for how that happens. So, yeah, well, and I think you mentioned that one of these citizen developers came up with an AI model used to search your knowledge base, yeah, yeah. Well, we’ve now brand Highland assist started with
a really great individual within our services organization who had been kind of dabbling with what he could do with some of the open AI services that we exposed through our Microsoft Azure platform. And, you know, built, kind of mocked up an initial, you know, capabilities that we could look at, and from there, you know, we were able to accelerate, do some more with it, tie it to some more developers, and build it out more fully. And it was a great example of, you know, wasn’t something that we had sort of had the time or focus on yet, but when we were able to see kind of what he had done so far, it made sense that.
It, you know, hey, this is going to be pretty impactful. Let’s, let’s build on this, which is great, in my opinion, is a great success, yeah? Well, I hope somebody came up with an employee the month award or something for that citizen developer, right?
Let’s pivot over to the kind of your top level strategic technology and business priorities as you go into 2025 of course, we’ve talked a lot about AI. As you know, I joke that it’s practically a federal law now that we spend a lot of time discussing AI, I’ve had so many CIOs who say, Okay, we’ll talk about AI, but you know, it’s just math. And I figured they’re saying that to just scare me off, so I won’t ask too many questions about it, but let’s talk about the things that are kind of your very top priorities. We mentioned the technical debt, which, of course, is kind of an ongoing but what are you looking forward to in 25 that’s going to be really exciting for your staff to get involved in?
Yeah, I don’t know the level of excitement, but like I said, we had gone through a pretty large lead to cash transformational process that, you know, part of that involved a large expansion and the number of solutions and and systems that were involved in our day to day operations, like a lot of transformations, we probably overshot where we needed to be. So next year, you know, I think we’re going to be spending a lot of time doing some, you know, now, some, some additional rationalization, as we’ve been, you know, past, go live, you know, over, over a year now, and really looking at like, did we make any investments that we need to reevaluate? Do we need to do any consolidation, maybe, where we, you know, over solutions in any areas. Because, you know, I can’t really stress enough the scope and how big some of these transform, you know, transformative product projects become that it’s easy and you want to think like, oh, like, you don’t want to mention that, but it happens that you might over engineer, over compensate, over by over solution something. And I feel like we’re coming into this point where we’re going to be re evaluating some of that and making sure that if there’s some places where we want to pull back a little bit refactor, just get things honed in and sort of, you know, as perfectly running as we can, that that’s going to be that’s going to be a big focus for us next year, for sure. I’m excited about it because it’s just a continued culmination of, you know, us getting to where we need to be. You know, what our systems were in place for over 10 years. I want to get them to the place where they’re ready to go for the next 10 years. Right? The core? Well, that is, that is kind of exciting too, isn’t it? Because the company is never slowed down since you got there that we mentioned, the explosive growth. So it’s probably pretty smart to brace yourself for what the next 10 could bring, right? Yeah, it’s, it’s a lot. I mean, it’s, and it’s, it’s a difference. Obviously it’s a big difference running, you know what we need to deliver from a capability standpoint, from where we were when we were $100 million company to where we are as a, you know, over a billion dollar revenue company. It’s just, it’s not the same, and we want to be braced for when we become, you know, a multi billion dollar company. So from the, I guess, the next big number after the 1 billion mark, is to get through the 10 billion mark, and then, and then they get exponentially bigger, 50 billion, 100, I like the idea of going up an order of magnitude. I think our CEO would too. So yeah, I’m sure he would, yeah, yeah, he’s probably he’ll be applauding quietly when he when he sees this the later, I hope
also talk about your data governance strategy. You mentioned that you are working that that is a new part of your strategic priorities going forward. And data governance, it always sounds a little bit like, oh, governance, how boring. You know, it’s a bunch of regulation, but it’s so essential to doing the job, right? So talk about that and what you’re doing with that. Yeah, and I have no problem, you know, saying here that, like a lot of companies, Hyland has had some starts and stops in the governance side of things. You know, I think one of the big things that we struggled with is that, for a while, we kept trying to kind of put governance only under the it umbrella, and
kind of this thought that it was a problem, that it was there to fix. And in a lot of cases, governance has nothing to do with the technology, the specifics of the technology, it has a lot to do with business process and rigor around ownership of data and a lot of different things. So most recently, what I’m excited about is we’ve we’ve kind of shifted where that sits inside of our Chief Strategy Office,
which gives it a lot more holistic, company wide view around how we’re managing and governing our data. We’re taking a top down approach, starting with the data sets that we think are most impactful to our business operations, and expanding from there. So.
So now I like it, because I think the other problem with having an IT is that, you know, obviously we have to deal with the fallout of data decisions. So you might have a tendency to kind of pick the the outcome that makes the work you have to do sort of the easiest to deal with. But that might not always align with what’s best for the business. Here, I love supporting it where it sits now, because, you know, I want to make sure that the way that we’re dealing with data isn’t just the way that makes it easiest for, you know, my teams on how we manage or develop our systems, but make sure that it meets the criteria that the business needs fully for how they need that data to help support their operations day to day. So that’s kind of exciting, and I’m excited for the work that group is doing now. Okay, where does and how does your cyber security approach and the operation of that play into all of this? Because I know you really can’t talk about the data side of the coin without immediately saying something about cyber although I understand you can’t say much, but how does that kind of, how does that wedge into how you approach data governance?
Yeah, I think it’s, it’s a partnership. You know, we have a CISO that’s that’s very keen on ensuring that, you know, all parts of our operation are secure as possible.
You know that means looking at this from really all angles, right? It means tooling, it means systems. It means knowing where your data flows are. He also manages our compliance arm. So he’s very attuned to how you know data flows and mapping, and how we, you know, kind of
control where our data is used and how it’s used, is a big part of us being able to accomplish our whether we’re talking Compliance Certification or, you know, fulfillment with customer contracts. So keeping everyone in step is the key. I mean, no one group can work kind of in a silo for that to function appropriately.
And definitely cybersecurity is at the top of our mind pretty much always. That’s probably been the only term that’s been kind of unseated by AI, right, like you like cyber security was the safe answer that you’re always focusing on. It never goes away, but it’s not as sort of fun and and market friendly is talking about AI. I know there’s no Gen AI version of a cyber tool. You know? It’s just people panicking that they’ve gotten hacked. Yeah, no one gets really excited about privileged access management or zero trust networking
around in the real world, having to deal with Norton Utilities, or whatever it is you’re supposed to have on your on your PC. Yeah,
it’s it’s tough to be a cyber security professional, I think.
Yeah. Let’s also talk about how you prioritize and focus the innovation work with your tech team and your business colleagues?
No, yeah, we definitely try to make sure that we’re focusing as much time as we can in the right sort of percentage of our time on innovative activities. You know, it’s been a little bit of a struggle as we came out of our especially for our sort of platform development teams, as we came out of lead to cash, because we had just a lot of work to do with after a go live. As anyone who knows, you go live, and you know, they’re going to be bugs, so you spend a significant amount of time trying to stabilize and kind of get them all out of the system. You know, anything that was missed sort of prior to go live. But you know, I’ve got a I’ve got a great individual, a senior manager on my delivery side that came to me, and she advocated pretty heavily that we needed to, you know, sort of re institutionalize what we put in as innovation sprints, which give our engineers the flexibility to kind of, you know, either identify systems issues that are never going to be prioritized by The business because they’re more back end architectural, where a refactoring of code could mean that the next time I need to fix this, I don’t have to redo this for the seventh time,
or tribute for it, or give them the opportunity to look at, you know, what are, what are, you know, new developments within the platforms that we support, that we should be looking at those capabilities, and they Need some time to like, either test in sandbox or see how they could build a use case that, you know, in a lot of cases, the business might not know how that function could help support them, because they don’t tie the technology to that aspect of it. In our engineers, you know, while we have analysts and we have other other groups that work within our business, I think the engineers have a unique perspective. So giving them that flexibility during those sprints, which we try to do at least one a quarter, is our goal. Really allows them to explore some of those things that maybe they’re going to pan out. Maybe they’re not, but when they do pan out, they tend to be really impactful. And so we want to be able to support.
That type of innovation within our group at that level? Yeah, now, are there areas of when we talk about emerging technology these days, we everybody almost always falls back into talking about AI or the latest with, you know, some sort of Data Innovation. But is there anything beyond the field of data and I AI that is especially interesting to you, like, do you watch what’s going on with quantum computing? Or, I don’t know what’s going on at the space station? I you know things that are beyond AI, because as a CIO, a CIO and a long time technologist, you are naturally interested in how things are developing. So are there any that you are keeping an eye on?
Yeah, I mean, definitely, I I’m a big, I’m a big tech geek. So I like, I like to keep up to speed on, sort of all of the things that are, that are happening, you know, in the field, and what’s there,
you know, I still think, you know, quantum computing definitely is, is, you know, interesting academically, academically, to me at this point, you know, I think it’s outside of, like cryptography and, like, some of the security implications, like trying to comprehend, like, where this is going to play into sort of day to day business operations on a go forward standpoint, is interesting to me. But the fact that they’ve started, like, looking at a quantum computing when you’re talking about, like, financial platforms and stock market trading and things like that, is pretty interesting as well. I’m also still a little bit, you know, bullish on seeing, you know, are there more and unique, innovative things that are going to come out of crypto and blockchain and some of those things as well. You know, I think I would say I’m a very interested sideline participant, and seeing what that is.
We have some of our own solutions in Hyland that are based on, you know, Blockchain type of technologies, which is great, but I’m interested to see, I think there are still potential use cases that haven’t been tapped into. So that’s one area that I’ll continue to monitor as well, and just kind of see with those. I think what’s so interesting about it is that they’re such a paradigm shift of like what you would think about in those sorts of tools, that it’s sometimes it’s hard to even see what’s going to be the the outcome of how that might be applied. I feel like blockchain is taking, definitely taking a little bit of a back burner with AI and everything else, but I don’t think it’s going anywhere. And I think there’s still going to be some things that are that are pretty interesting, so Well, I wonder if blockchain is going to be one of those. We used to all the time be looking for CIOs, who had, this is 510, years ago, when I was running our CIO events like our CIO 100 innovation conference, and I was always looking to get financial CIOs to get on stage and talk about what they were doing with Blockchain. And nobody wanted to touch it, like, oh, yeah, we’re playing with it in the lab. And, yeah, no, we’re not going to talk about it publicly. But it seems like one of the, it seems like one of those very slow motion, important technologies that may take 20 years to get to that point where everybody suddenly it becomes a big deal, or it’s maybe still behind the scenes. You’re not going to know until, yeah, yeah, you kind of just, it’s explained to you that it’s there, yeah, well, almost the way we used to get excited about programming languages everybody was talking about, you know, like the the latest, this or that, and then it became incorporated in what everybody was doing. And I know, from a tech media standpoint, we lose interest in things once, you know, it’s the school it’s the school busses that don’t arrive, that everybody wants to write about, that kind of thing.
Tell me about as we wrap up here. What have you learned about your own leadership style? You’ve gone through this. This is your IT organization. I mean, you have been there from the very early days, and are now the big boss over you know, the 175 people. How does that change the way you work with your staff or manage them? What? What have you learned during all of during all of your wonderful time there and your long tenure, especially that you want to give as advice to other up and coming? CIOs, yeah, this one’s This one’s easy. I actually recently responded to somebody on LinkedIn about this, what I felt was the thing that I’d learned the most and and my career, that if I could go back and change and especially in the technical field, is it, like I said, I love working with the people that I’ve worked with, or why I’ve stayed at Highland so long. But on the flip side of that coin, I would say that early in my career, definitely prior to Highland. And even, you know, when I first came to Highland, I valued the idea that being sort of the the Savant from a technology standpoint, was more important than anything else. And I definitely.
Devalued how much the relationships were the important part of how you efficiently drive, you know, your strategies forward and what you need to execute on.
And so, like in the early part of my career, I was, I was definitely all about, like, wanting to be the person that knew the most about whatever, whatever we were talking about, you know, from a technology standpoint later. You know, I think it really started to dawn on me that the support that we can give each other in an organization, especially a growing organization, in a lot of ways, can far outpace the value of the technology alone. And so I encourage people to like, build those relationships early,
you know, be meaningful, and what you do make sure that you, you know, honor the commitments you make and how you kind of present yourself at work, because they’re going to serve you well in the future. And you want, you want those to be strong relationships. And so that’s something that I think it’s hard to know, because when you’re kind of in the weeds, you know, in the tech field, it can be hard to think that, you know, where I need to be spending more of my time is really, you know, getting to know the person that I work next to, or who I support and what’s important to them and why, and all of that,
you sometimes can kind of not see that when you’re just focused on the tech side of it. So, yeah, well, I’ve talked with some CIOs who have been surprised at how unwittingly they can quash discussions by being, for instance, the first one to give an opinion. You know, there’ll be a problem and like, Well, how should we approach this? I think maybe this and that, and then everybody else will just kind of fall in line. And when you’re thinking just in a technical mindset, you feel like you’re more like one of the developers, you know, but, but you’re not, yeah, I always try not to solution anything. When I’m meeting with my team now, and I tell them, if I start to tell me to stop. And then, yeah, but yeah, you don’t want to be the first one to talk. I think it might have been Jeff Bezos who actually said that famously, that in his meetings, he always wants to be the last person to say anything, right? Because you do have to realize that, as a leader, that if in that environment, that you could end up, you know, if you give your opinion first, you might definitely dissuade anyone from sharing a dissenting opinion. So it’s best to hear everyone out. Yeah, it’s very, very true. Well, it sounds like you have never regretted a moment of your very long 10 tenure there at Highland. So congratulations on that. It really kind of does my heart good to see CIOs, they get into company, whatever industry the company is in, and then they really find that their home, you know, because for a while, CIOs were just moving around a lot, you know, like every year or two, they were out. And that is, that is such hard work, isn’t it, diving into a you probably know, a lot of people in your network that have done that, and
I feel very lucky to have had this opportunity, and I feel lucky that I have always felt very supported, and have always really enjoyed my time here at Highland. It’s been, it’s been, it’s been a really great 20 years, and I look forward to many more. Well, good, and you still, and you still have all your hair, so I’m going to say you’re probably going to have 20 or 30 more, right? Let’s see. I don’t know it’s, it’s kind of thin and out, so we’ll see. Yeah, well, again, now, all right. Well, thank you so much, Steve for joining me here for this today. Fran, I really appreciate it. It’s been a great, great discussion. Good, good. I’m glad and I hope you are listening audience here and watching audience that you enjoyed today’s conversation with CIO Steven watt of Hyland software as much as I did. This episode is the latest addition to our extensive library of CIO leadership live podcast, which includes more than 150
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