Bask Iyer has always had a different orientation as a chief information officer. As a divisional CIO at GlaxoSmithKline, then as the Group CIO at Honeywell, and as the Group Senior Vice President of Business Operations and the Chief Information Officer of Juniper Networks, he developed a close relationship with the businesses that he was a part of. He believes that is one of the key factors in his rise at Dell and VMware.
Iyer has the rare distinction of being both the CIO and chief digital officer of both companies in addition to being the Executive Vice President of Dell Digital. As such, he has leadership roles in two publicly traded companies. (Dell has a majority ownership stake in VMware.) He began his tenure with the companies as the CIO of VMware alone, when Michael Dell asked him to take over the same responsibilities at Dell. To Iyer's surprise, he was not asked to relinquish responsibilities at VMware.
As such, he has led dramatic digital transformations of two very different companies: a Silicon Valley software company and a much larger and more traditional technology company. Iyer notes that the key to his success has been focusing on people and process before technology. He highlights the changes he has ushered in and the methods he has used in this interview.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 39th interview in the CIO-plus series. To read the prior interviews with CIO-pluses from companies such as Intel, P&G, Biogen, Kroger, and Cardinal Health, please click this link. To read future articles in this series, please follow me on Twitter @PeterAHigh.)
Peter High: You are the Executive Vice President of Dell Digital as well as the CIO and CDO of both Dell and VMware. Could you unwind all that you do and describe what it entails?
Bask Iyer: I was the CIO of VMware for a long time and had additional digital responsibilities. Nearly two years ago, the Dell-EMC merger happened and Michael Dell and the executives in the Dell-EMC family asked me to help with the integration. They were bringing two cultures together, two different CIOs together, and two IT teams together. Little did I know that my role helping out would turn into a job.
I have a challenging and interesting job. VMware is an independent company and therefore Dell owns only 80 percent of VMware. Additionally, Dell is big partners with a great deal of their competition, and because of this, VMware has to have that independence. It is an independent company with its own audit committee among other independent entities. Because of this, I have to think of it as two separate jobs. As the CIO for VMware, the audit committee asks me questions to ensure that my job for VMware is not being compromised. Moreover, the Dell audit committee and management ask me the same questions.
At Dell, part of the role is the traditional CIO, which covers all infrastructure, all IT, all end-user applications, the program management office, and security, among other areas. Additionally, I am part of the executive team on both sides, so I can understand the strategy and translate it. An interesting part of the digital side of the job, which is a little unusual for IT, is that Dell's E-Commerce team is supported and run by my team. All the product developer people for e-commerce, who are not necessarily IT employees but instead are product development employees, are a part of it. It is a robust e-commerce platform, it is growing, and we want to put more products for our customers on the Dell e-commerce services. That part of the job is certainly interesting and creative. Similarly, with VMware, we are going to a digital subscription model. My team at VMware works closely with [research and development] to ensure that the products and subscription models we develop can be built and have visibility to end customers. Additionally, the subscription model is a product that IT develops to go in part and parcel with the offering that VMware has. Overall, it is both digital, and it is traditional IT that people understand, but it is two separate jobs. That being said, it is a family of companies and therefore it is a friendly environment. While both executive teams always make fun of me as both believe I am not with them, they have always been supportive. I could not have done it without the support of the two CEOs, presidents, and executive teams.
High: Could you talk about your personal organization structure? Specifically, how do you divide your time between Dell and VMware, and how is the report structure broken up?
Iyer: Previously, the digital and IT resources at Dell were two separate organizations, but that did not work well. Sometimes, it makes sense to have two separate organizations to get a step ahead and to be a little faster, but you do not want to have a slow IT and a fast IT. This creates problems for people who are perceived to be traditional or slow IT. Instead, we brought the two organizations together. Because we believe digital is the way to go, we have renamed and rebranded to Dell Digital, and all IT leads to Dell Digital going forward. In fact, I do not call it an IT organization at Dell. With VMware, digital has been a part of IT from day one, so in this case, we did not have to make the same change.
We have two separate staffs. I work for Dell and I am a person of interest at VMware. Moreover, my assistant is an employee of VMware and a person of interest at Dell. Apart from the two of us, there are no shared employees across the board, but instead, two separate teams. At VMware, the function is relatively straightforward traditional IT which has worked efficiently. I have a head of infrastructure, a head of applications, and a head of information security and physical security. Additionally, there is a Chief of Staff and I personally have somebody who does end-user services as well as somebody who handles architecture, similar to the CTO role.
At Dell, since the apps are huge, we still have shared infrastructure and shared end-user services across the board under a leader for all operations, similar to a COO role. On the application side, it is split into portfolios such as corporate systems, which includes finance and HR. We have a portfolio leader for all of the supply chains, which is similar to a CIO role, for sales and the front office, and for services and marketing. The trick I learned from Michael Dell is since he gave two jobs to me, I am giving two jobs to everybody in the organization, but with one salary. This seems to be a good formula as people seem to be motivated, and they are working well.
High: Could you talk about the strategies on both sides of the house? Specifically, can you talk about what the teams are focused on and some of the imperatives that you are pushing forward?
Iyer: With VMware, the focus will be on going to a new subscription business model. VMware is heavily focused on the hybrid cloud environment as we run massive amounts of compute on our cloud. I believe it is the best hybrid cloud environment in the world and we want to showcase this efficiency to our customers. To ensure this, we work closely with our R&D team to make sure the product is up to enterprise quality and reliability. We collaboratively give feedback by leaving suggestions on how to improve those products both on end-user services, networking, compute, among other areas. Additionally, there is a strong focus on innovation at VMware. We want the end users at VMware to have the world's best experience. We want the experience to be better than a startup or anywhere else. To ensure this, much of the focus is centered around innovation, creativity, mobile, and the cloud.
At Dell, we just finished our successful integration with EMC. The priority has been centered around wanting our customers, suppliers, and employees not to feel the burden of this integration. You do not bring two large companies together without delivering synergies to get operational excellence in savings. Currently, we are doing a digital transformation at Dell, which is not just about technology, but also a people and process transformation. I tried to take the digital transformation from VMware, and cut and paste it into Dell, thinking that it would be easy. Unfortunately, I got frustrated halfway through, because it was not happening as fast as expected. I forgot that in order to make this transformation, we have to start with the people, the process, and then the technology. Because of this, we had to go back and restart. At VMware, we had done it intuitively; and being in Silicon Valley, we were able to land there quicker. On the flip side, with a traditional company, it is a more complicated process. While Dell is a tech company, it is a huge company and therefore we had to hire the right people. I had to streamline my leadership team, and the number of senior leaders at Dell in IT had to be reduced. We had to get people who were more motivated to work for the new company and people who had their hearts and minds in it. We had an initiative called “Putting T back in IT,” where we hired a large number of technical people. You cannot do digital without people and therefore acquiring the right people has been a big journey for us. Instead of outsourcing and offshoring in an effort to make the problem go away, which we were originally doing, we are insourcing and getting the best people. It is essential not to treat these people as commodities. At VMware, people get AI [artificial intelligence] and Agile as that is how the software developers work. On the flip side, at Dell, when you talk about these areas, it becomes just about an IT transformation. Instead of this, a digital transformation must be company-wide, not just across IT.
At Honeywell and GE, they use Lean and Six Sigma to put a religion into a company to do the transformation. While it came from manufacturing, people like myself had to get green or black belt certified in order to get promoted. We had a single language and a single way of working that significantly helped drive efficiency. With all these new processes and with the help of Pivotal, which is part of the family, we created the Dell Digital Way. This is an incorporation of the best practices of agile, CI/CD, and pair programming. It is the best practices for creating dojos where you work together with business people rather than writing requirements and throwing it over the wall, especially offshoring and outsourcing.
People are excited to do this and because the right people are in place. The good news is that the leadership team at Dell has seen the amount of progress, change, and the excitement created at Dell, IT, and Dell Digital. They are now asking, “Why not use this methodology for HR and why not use this methodology for communications?" I believe we are entering the age of Agile for the entire enterprise rather than just IT or digital. It is exciting to see more of the big culture and process change that is happening at a large company in Dell.
At VMware, the people and processes are in place. The focus is all on products as people want to talk about blockchain, AI, and [machine learning], among other areas and we have examples and people excited to do that. That being said, I believe that you cannot get there without the people and the process being in place first.
High: You not only hold the chief information and digital officer roles, but you also work with a great number of people who either have the combination of the two or companies where the set of roles are divided across multiple executives. From your own perspective, what is it about the CIO role that makes them particularly good in running the digital agenda on behalf of the entire organization?
Iyer: I have seen both models. Sometimes companies and CEOs who do not believe they have the time to fix it look for shortcuts by looking to just get somebody in and sort it out. They make the same mistake we did with outsourcing and offshoring as they are looking to just make the problem go away. When I started this business as a CIO, the role was just the head of IT. Specifically, the CIO was about putting in the networks and making sure everything worked. This entailed managing the hardware and software as well as running the cables and programming. From that, you had to learn to become a leader, a GM, and a salesperson internally. A CIO will not get any projects done if they cannot sell it internally, and sometimes it is more difficult to sell it this way. From there, you go into increasingly larger strategy among other types of roles. To do change management and to do this change across multiple places, that background is essential.
What happens with most places that are trying to do digital is that they come back with some ideas and say something along the lines of, "Here is a smartwatch that does this, here is how we go digital." From there, however, the integration from the prototype stage to generating revenue and making the engine work falls apart. This happens because it is not that simple, but instead, a complicated process. While it could work, you have to find two collaborative people with the same agenda, working for the same purpose and team to make that happen. It is difficult to get senior people who do not create their own empires and politics.
At Honeywell where I started as a CDO, it worked because the CIO, Larry Kittelberger, was my mentor. Larry was smart enough to include me in his team, mentor me, and guide me. The two of us worked collaboratively and at the end of his career, I ended up taking his job as CIO. Unfortunately, this scenario is rare. Additionally, I do not believe you should have two finance people. You do not want to have the CFO running the company and another finance person to say, "This person is good with [Wall] Street. Let him talk to the Street.” That does not make sense. At some stage, the people would only speak to the real CFO and not to the spokesperson. It works in certain places and it works to jump-start a process, but it sometimes creates more problems than it is worth.
High: You mentioned that you think it was not smart to have both fast and slow IT as you are developing the new digital methods of practice for the organization. Different executives take different stances on this. Some are big believers that you have to have two different styles of IT working simultaneously. Do you see, at the end of this, everyone operating with the same processes and the same new methods? Specifically, you mentioned that it is people, then process, then technology that is needed to transform digitally. Are there ways in which you organize that change so that you do not keep this bimodal perspective?
Iyer: I have looked through the bimodal approach and in special circumstances, it may give you a jump start. A digital transformation of a new company is relatively trivial. Anybody doing a startup would be using the latest technology by being all digital, all cloud, and all mobile. This, of course, is not a complex problem and a CIO is not needed for this type of situation. The complexity comes when you are a traditional company that needs to be transformed. There are two ways you can take it. To put this in perspective, if somebody wants to transport a large number of containers to China, they can either take a speedboat and do five hundred trips or they could take a big ship and make it more efficient in transport. The combination of a large company is you have got to move the entire organization over. Otherwise, you may have some quick deliveries you may want to do, but sooner or later, you will not get any mileage from the company unless you get the entire engine going that way.
Do not put it under two different departments. Put it under a leader and then let the leader create this flexibility, and do it without creating these caste systems within IT. You cannot get good people to work for the slow IT team as nobody wants to work for the slow IT team. This creates a plethora of problems that I have seen which causes it to fall apart. If you want to do something similar to that, you do it for ninety days. If you have a big critical launch coming up; for ninety days, you carve out somebody and hit it, but with the intention that everybody is going to be able to participate in that type of mode of working. I believe that not only does IT have to go Agile, but that the entire organization does and that every company is a digital company. Furthermore, I believe that every CEO has to look at Agile Management. Bureaucracy was invented by people to get some scale and while scale is a good attribute, the bureaucracy must be busted. Most companies become calcified after a period of time and they get stuck in their old ways. You cannot go digital and you cannot compete with the newer ones unless you break that calcification. It is human nature to not want to do the hard work but still be able to get there. IT has to do that work and help transform the entire business. In terms of the time period, I would say two to three years is the best term to do.
High: I know that you have an interest in AI. This is a topic of great curiosity and is a great investment in many cases within enterprises. If you were to take fifty CIOs, they would be at fifty different stages of AI maturity, as nobody is advancing at the same pace. Could you give an assessment as to where you see things standing, and some interesting use cases you have seen for AI today?
Iyer: Sometimes we create all these buzzwords and terms and sometimes we reinvent them. My dad reminded me that thirty years ago my thesis for my master's was in AI. You have to look at it carefully as it is not a new term. The only aspect that is different is that we now have compute which gives us some interesting abilities. I used to work on vision systems which would not recognize anything. It was so complicated to make it recognize a ball versus a rectangle. The speech systems were terrible, as was the natural language processing. I struggled at the time to write an algorithm that knew whether Larry Bird was a person or a bird as the processing could not handle it. We have come a long way as has the computer which makes AI significantly more interesting. I believe that AI is going to remove all the mundane, mind-numbing, and repetitive jobs that were not meant for humans to do, which excites me. You start with something such as robotic process automation, but even that is just a start. It creates more opportunities to take the staff you have and allow them to do more interesting work. I believe we have solved some of the problems such as the ERP and the network problems. You cannot get into AI without solving the basics. Most CIOs are getting on top of making sure that the numbers are closed and that you do not have to babysit the books to get them closed. They are ensuring that the network is working, the WiFi is working, and that the infrastructure is automated. When you do all this type of work, you can then focus on these critical areas.
The places that are interesting for us on AI are areas that we have not automated such as monitoring and reacting. We get so many alerts and I do not know what to do with the alerts, so let the computer handle the alerts and figure out what is important and what is not. Additionally, we are looking at facial recognition. It is nice that your iPhone knows it is you when you look at it, but imagine what you could do with enterprise systems and other areas where you can do identity management. That part is especially exciting for me. An example of where we are doing a significant amount of work is in areas such as troubleshooting expert systems. People dial call centers and they want to get the right answers. Nobody wants to talk to another human to answer their problems, but instead, they either want the systems to fix it themselves or when they go look for it, for it to automatically give them a better knowledge base.
What also excites me is the Internet of Things. The IoT wave is coming and it takes a little bit of time to take hold. That being said, the computers are going to call you when they are failing and tell you that there is something wrong with them and that they need to be replaced. They will tell you that their life is ending and therefore they have ordered their replacement so you do not have to worry about it. This is exciting because it takes the humans out of the equation.
High: You mentioned your teams, your organization structure, and your vision on how to advance those teams with the practices you talked about. One of the aspects that underlie all of that is culture, and as you are growing teams, making sure you are fostering that productive environment. You have had a keen eye on ensuring that people from across generations work well together, something that can be a worry for many organizations. Could you reflect on some of the practices or methods that have worked best for you?
Iyer: I do get concerned with the simplified aspects of the technology area and with high tech especially. We are finally putting some focus on women and inclusion, and while it is still not there, at least there is some focus on it these days. That being said, inclusion does not mean exclusion. Specifically, multi-generation workplaces are especially important to me. The millennials are fantastic and I am a diverse mentor as I learn a great deal from them and they learn a great deal from me. I am concerned when people say, "We need young blood and we need to retire the old folks." Innovation is not just the rights of the next generation. Many of those that are from older generations are going to be part of the workforce for a long time and are going to be a great value to society. Because of this, companies who overlook this are going to lose out on the wisdom, empathy, and years of experience that are required to meld with the younger generation.
People are excluding certain minorities whether it be people with disabilities, veterans, or older individuals. I look at it as an opportunity for companies to focus on those areas. In the days of unemployment being this low, you have to get all the talent that is available for you. Diversity has to be fully diverse, instead of just singling out a particular age, gender, or another minority.
At the same time, we have to make sure that there are metrics, so we do not go out of control. We do not want to say, "Let the businesses take care of themselves," and then find that we are breaking the laws. Legally, it is important; but at the same time, you have got to make sure that we do not exclude people. It is exciting when you put multi-generational folks together in that environment. The people with experience get energized by the youngsters coming in and the youngsters learn a great amount. Personally, I learned a great deal when working at Cape Canaveral straight out of college. I thought I knew everything, but I was working with some real rocket scientists which quickly humbled me. I was put in with people who have done these challenges and programs which made me think "My God, there is a great deal to learn." The learning I got in that year and a half at Cape Canaveral remains the best in my life. I am especially passionate about the belief that if you build a company, people are going to be the core. My style is spending a significant amount of time with people. In a way, it is inefficient because you would rather do a one-on-one on the phone or just send an email. Love, trust, authenticity, and empathy are without a doubt back in style. The best employee is going to work for a good manager and a company with strong values.
High: You previously worked at Juniper where, as the CIO, you were a peer to many of the people who were the customers of your business. As a result of that, you had the ability to have an impact on the product. With the perspective of the IT's ability to impact product and think of the way in which IT is run, how would you advise other CIOs even outside of the technology industry where that may be less apparent?
Iyer: The bottom line is we are in a business and therefore having a business mindset helps. I started my career selling refrigerators, and I happened to find this gold mine that is IT, learn the craft, and become a CIO. You must be a business person at heart, because that is what drives the whole reason for existence for the company, so I would suggest to people to get as close to the business as possible. There is an advantage in going to work for Juniper, VMware, and Dell. You not only get to work with people such as Michael Dell, but you get to work with people such as Pat Gelsinger, and people who have created these technologies. As a CIO, you have an opportunity to showcase and implement which allows you to get close to product development.
I do not think there is any company that I work for now or have worked for before that is not going to be impacted by digital. When I say that, I do not just mean running your email and back office system. If Honeywell does not get its act together on digital, it would allow competition like Nest. Therefore, it is not a thermostat, but a smart thermostat. In all the pharmaceuticals, they still create far more paperwork and documents than actual products. Because of this, digitizing, automation, and reaching people in a digital way directly, is critical. Furthermore, with the cars, we love the new cars because they are digital. I used to be a guy who looked at the turbochargers, engines, many cylinders and how much horsepower a car had. Today, what people want to know is if a car can drive and park itself. I believe that every business is becoming digital and therefore it is the CIO’s opportunity to seize the day. The value of IT has grown every year that I have worked in this profession, and IT is just starting out. I believe the information revolution is only thirty to forty years old, and therefore it is almost in my generation. The value of IT is going to get bigger and more critical with companies depending more on them. I believe it is an exciting time to be there and I would say to get plugged in. Every business is a digital business.
Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. His latest book is Implementing World Class IT Strategy. He is also the author of World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs. Peter moderates the Forum on World Class IT podcast series. He speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @PeterAHigh.
