Introduction
This week I’m joined by Steve Comstock who is the Chief Information Officer for CBS Interactive. Steve is not your typical CIO and brings a very unique perspective.
Our conversation takes a markedly provocative look at the changing CIO role from technology focus to business partner. We discuss the relationship between Shadow IT and the Rosetta Stone and how humility plays a role in failure. During our discussion, we push boundaries on how the CIO as a technologist is no longer a differentiator and how the CIO evolves to the COO and CEO roles.
Speaker Profiles
Steve Comstock LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevecomstock/
Steve Comstock Twitter: https://twitter.com/surfinbabaluga
CBS Interactive: https://www.cbsinteractive.com
Audio File
Featured Hashtags
#CIO #ShadowIT #Partner #Trust #Board #CEO #DigitalTransformation #CIOitk
Podcast Transcript
Tim Crawford 0:05
Hello, and welcome to the CIO in the Know podcast, where I take a provocative but pragmatic look at the intersection between business and technology. I’m your host, Tim Crawford, a CIO and strategic advisor at Avola. This week I’m joined by Steve Comstock, who is the Chief Information Officer for CBS Interactive. Steve is not your typical CIO and brings a very unique perspective. Our conversation takes a markedly provocative look at the changing CIO role from technology focus to business partner. We discuss the relationship between shadow it and the Rosetta Stone, and how humility plays a role in failure. During our discussion, we pushed the boundaries of how the CIO, as a technologist, is no longer a differentiator, and how the CIO evolves to the COO and CEO roles. Steve, welcome to the program.
Steve Comstock 1:02
Thank you, Tim. It’s a longtime listener, first time caller, so super excited I got through.
Tim Crawford 1:07
Great, glad you made it. And let’s just dive right into this. You and I have had a number of conversations around some pretty provocative topics over the years. One of those happens to be with the CIO role, you’re the CIO of CBS Interactive, and you know we often talk about the CIO role and how it’s really different. I want to kind of jump in with what’s your take on how things have changed in the CIO role from years past to today and moving forward,
Steve Comstock 1:41
yeah. Thank you. It’s interesting. I heard this at a conference the other day, and I couldn’t agree more. Is in the past we were just plumbing, and I actually, I remember ages, ages, ages ago, a financial planner had called me up and asked me what I did for a living, and he goes, “Oh, you’re going to be a VCR repairman, you know, in about two years, and it was kind of insulting, but he wasn’t too far off. Was we were just, hey, you’re the guy we go to for a PC, a Wi-Fi, you know, you’re the guy who can get me a power cable, right? And I think the change is especially in some organizations, I can’t say it’s an all, but in a lot of the transformational organizations you actually are part of the overall team, and you play a very, very specific role, and it’s not the guy with the power cords, it is anything from a defensive lineman to an offensive lineman, depending on if you’re doing security or if you’re trying to break into a market where your business partners are really going to count on you to do your job and really contribute to what should we do and how should we do this, you know, take the big idea and go with it, which is really a fun and exciting change, and it’s kind of fun to watch who can adapt and who can’t, because you know if you’re sitting there handing out power cables for 15 years, and then someone says, hey, you know, we want to do streaming the Super Bowl on 12 different platforms with potentially 4 million concurrent streams. Hey, you got about six months, how are we going to do it? You know, and you can’t go down. It’s like, oh yeah, cool. Let’s, how are we going to do that? How are we going to test it? What do we need to do? What sort of organizational things do we need to put in place, etc. Or looking for those opportunities to improve the overall revenue stream, whether it is improving the customer support experience, or improving the pipeline for sales, or optimizing the logging of the pipeline for sales, or metrics around sales, or whatever. We normally wouldn’t have been part of those conversations, and we’re starting to get included in those as people are realizing we can add a lot more value than just power cables, right?
Tim Crawford 4:03
Right, yeah. And when you talk about the streaming, you’re, you’re gonna need a few more power cables than you probably have in the,
Steve Comstock 4:10
yeah, yeah, exactly. And a lot of Xanax
Tim Crawford 4:14
when analyze product placement, so when you, when you think about how you’re engaging with customers and how you’re building those relationships with the rest of the C suite, I mean, going from power cables to figuring out a new business angle or a significant change is not a trivial step, I mean, you and I were involved in a recent conversation amongst a group of CIOs talking about customer engagement. How do you start to think about where you get started? How you build those relationships, so that you’re prepared for those questions that are going to come your way, but then you also have the relationships in place where people think of you more. More than just, you know, a power cable dealer.
Steve Comstock 5:03
Yeah, absolutely. It’s really interesting, and it was quite the transformation for me when I talked for four or five years ago at a keynote about Shadow IT, and everyone was like, “Shadow IT? Oh, but my point of view on it was Shadow IT is really like the Rosetta Stone of technology today, and you know, if you don’t know the Rosetta Stone, it was there’s an emperor ages ago, there were three different languages in his province, and no one could understand each other, so they basically put one language on one side, translated it to the language on another side that translated it to another side, and one of those languages was hieroglyphics, and that’s how we were able to translate hieroglyphics, right? So, if you take business need, business value, and make that hieroglyphics, or maybe you really, maybe it’s a tech that hieroglyphics, and that everybody else is speaking a normal language, but I was using shadow it at some level, where I’d see it, and then say, ‘Hey, help me explain. What are you trying to do? How does this help your business? And really just be engaged in the moment with my partners, and I think this is a key word, my partners, not the business, not the customer, my partner, because we’re in this together. Our checks say the same thing, and really sitting down to understand how does their business work, if they’re the tight end on the team. How do they run their route, and why do they run the route that way? And if I could help, maybe they could run a route a different way. Or taking the whole football analogy, and by the way, I know little to nothing about football, but I’m going to run with it, you know. If I’m the right guard, and I know the tight end is going to do something, if I can maybe shift my movement and block for that person to help them be more successful, that’s my job. And you build that trust by doing that over and over and over again, and it really is a very humbling and transparent thing that you have to do. Where I will walk into an office of someone, and I know I screwed up, I know I made a huge faux pas, a huge air, and I will come to them before they come to me and say, hey, you know what, I screwed up, and this is probably what’s going to happen. These are the things I put in place to make sure it doesn’t happen again. This is what we probably should do to move forward to recover, so you still are successful. I’m going to just be very honest with you. This is what happened, and let’s keep going, and it won’t happen again. And two things, one is they’re like they know that they don’t have to search and figure out what happened, because you’re going to come to them, and two, they know that you’re not going to do it again, that you got them, and that you’re looking out for them, you’re looking out for their welfare, their budget, their whatever, you’re in it to win it with them, not the other way around, right, or you’re not just hiding in an office somewhere, so if it was totally cultural, and you know, again, we’re probably going to get this, but you know, one of my favorite sayings is technology without culture is just technology, and you got to break that barrier where you’re not just looked at as a technologist, you’re looked at as a critical partner in the success of whoever, HR, finance, your GM of sales, your GM of entertainment, whoever you are, they know that if they pick up the phone and they’re having a crap day, they can bark at you, and you will help them fix their problem, and you are in it with them, and side by side, arm in arm, and you got to take an arrow for them, so they can be more successful. You take that arrow, and that’s the way I’ve always operated, and it seems to be the way we have to operate moving forward. If you’re going to be in that circle,
Tim Crawford 8:53
yeah, it seems that you know from what you talk about in the stories that you tell, part of this is not just taking that arrogant approach of hey, we got this, we got this, we got this, but when it’s time, adding a little humility into it, and being able to fall on your sword and say, look, you know what, we’re all in this together, yes, this is on me this time, but let’s figure out how we can move forward, and that seems to be a cultural shift that’s very different than the past, it where there was no room for making mistakes, which I find kind of ironic, considering we tout that we want to be change agents, but at the same time we want to invoke this this level of experimentation,
Steve Comstock 9:42
right?
Tim Crawford 9:43
Curious, your thoughts on that.
Steve Comstock 9:44
Well, I think you have to be open to that. I mean, the failure is not an option. You do not want to fail, but you’re gonna fail, and the character of a person is how they respond to adversity. So, let’s just kind of run with that for a minute. The character of a person also is how they respond to failure, right? Do they acknowledge the failure? Do they look at that failure? Do they learn from that failure and know that the reality of that situation is this, and the next time this happens, this is how we’re going to do it. And one thing that was really interesting, Tim, as I was going through this, is there was at first I took a lot of fricking arrows, and a lot of my business partners were more than happy to put me under the bus, just to kind of deflect response, not responsibility, but maybe the ire of whoever was angry. But what I found is, as we matured together, I was no longer standing alone, and that was big, right? Because, again, you give that sort of humility of, hey, you’re going to fail, we know we’re going to fail, right? And we know where the failure points are, and so we’re going to do everything we can to protect it, but we know that there’s a certain place of failure, you know, and if there is a failure, we did everything possible. Then that means that we didn’t know that was a problem, or that was an area of failure, right? Because if we did, we would have done something about it, right? And if we can’t, we would have said something like, like, one of the things, you know, we’re talking about streaming is one of the things I learned was that we kept trying to predict we were advancing television and broadcast into the internet with streaming, live streaming, direct to consumer, you know, all this good stuff, and launching things like Star Trek Discovery, and we didn’t really know, right, and so for our longest time was we do these things, it would be a conflict of, well, we’re going to get this many people, this much stuff, blah blah blah blah, and so we always just took kind of whatever data points we could and build toward it. The pivot was, we said, you know what, let’s find out where we fail and when we fail, and then keep pushing, keep testing, keep pushing, keep testing, so that I know if you hit this level, you know it’s going to be sketchy, but we have a plan to move back down and get it running. Do we hit this level? We broke the internet, and we should be doing anything possible to get it back together, but high fiving a little bit too, because if we’re breaking the internet, that means we’re crushing it from a business value perspective. It’s so popular that we need to do more shows like that,
Tim Crawford 12:23
yeah.
Steve Comstock 12:23
But anyway, I interrupted you.
Tim Crawford 12:25
No, not at all. You’re the guest, I’m just the host. Is part of this, I think. You know, success is exciting, but success is also very scary too.
Steve Comstock 12:38
Well, you don’t learn anything from success. I mean, that’s kind of a weird thing to say, but if you do it right every time, and trust me, there’s so many people out there that will never admit to failure. I mean, how many conferences have we been to where it’s a virtual happy hour of all our success, and look how great we are, and we never talk about the failures, because the failures are where you learn, the failures are where you mature, you grow, you innovate, you, you pivot. If you never fail, then you’re not growing. And you know, I read an article the other day, or maybe I should be really transparent, I read the title of the article, I didn’t actually read the article, but the title was, If you’re not afraid of losing your job because of failure, you’re not pushing it as far as you should, something like that, right? And it was really provocative to me, going as a CIO in our roles today, we should be pushing the edge, because if we’re not pushing the edge of it, that, let me say, adds business value, helping move your business forward, you’re not doing your job, we should be pushing things in the most stable, reliable, secure way to help our business get a competitive advantage in whatever market we’re in, and that could be utilizing technology or utilizing technology to build better workflows or optimizing the employee experience, or whatever. We should always be looking to push that, and to your question of failure, when you’re pushing that the chances of failure are high, they’re actually very high, right? And if you’re not doing that, what’s your role? Well, here’s another cable. Thanks. Here’s another network cable, thanks,
Tim Crawford 14:16
right?
Steve Comstock 14:17
Because you’re not adding value, because that’s because your your business partners, the people who are at the top, they’re looking to see how they can move our business forward, and if you’re not there with them, going, “Hey, we’re going to take this chance, this is going to push it, but I know it’s a very calculated move, it’s a very educated move, but there’s risk, but we’re going to go for it, because if we don’t, someone else is, and we’re going to get left behind,
Tim Crawford 14:41
right? In a lot of ways, companies don’t really improve by making incremental improvements. They have to take those big bets, and those big bets do come with risk, but, like you said, it’s how you manage the risk, it’s how you respond to the risk, how you prepare for the risk that. Really kind of defines how you are set up for success in being able to take on those big bets.
Steve Comstock 15:09
Yeah, and you know what, I just kind of riffing on it. I think it defines who you are as a CIO, too, and how you’re going to lead, because you’re going to lead the team the way you look at it, or the way you make those bets, right, and your team is going to respond, or your partners are going to respond to how you do that leadership, and I couldn’t venture a guess, it’s also going to define where you work, right. I personally am probably not the best person for a very old school bank, right, that doesn’t want to take a lot of bets, unless they’re doing a huge digital transformation. Then I’m the perfect guy for them, because we’re going to go make big, huge change, big ideas, and we’re going to try to really capture a market, right. So I think it really defines kind of who you are and what your brand is, if you’re afraid to make a change, or if you’re afraid to make a bet, or afraid to get enthusiastic about something. I don’t know, you’re just not me, that’s who I am. I am willing to take a bet, I’m willing to take a chance.
Tim Crawford 16:14
Yeah,
Steve Comstock 16:14
and you know what, that’s what makes the job fun. And back to your original question, I think that’s how it’s pivoted too, is we’re allowed to take those chances, where before we weren’t.
Tim Crawford 16:24
Yeah, I think that’s a huge difference between the traditional CIO and the transformational CIO. Is I have a list of attributes or traits that I’ve developed as part of this model, and the traditional CIO tends to be very risk averse, and the transformational CIO is much smarter about how to take on risk, but is less conservative and far more aggressive in being able to shift the business, which kind of leads me into a shift in our conversation a little bit, where I want to bring the conversation into technology and talk about some of the emerging technologies that come into these big bets, things like AI and cloud and edge and IoT. Where are you finding that these are really kind of advantageous for you, or are there some that kind of scare you a bit?
Steve Comstock 17:18
Yeah, and then some that are more myth, and are you know, you put the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, and the blockchain, you know, they’re all kind of the same, right? I mean, God granted, there’s going to be a huge mark for blockchain sometime, but I don’t know when, you know, some of these technologies I think that used to be emerging, and you used the word emerging, and then you said cloud, which I find interesting, because cloud is kind of table stakes at this point. If you’re not moving into cloud, you are probably already four or five years behind, in my opinion, because it’s really the model of how you can culturally change your organization to be more agile, to move faster, to scale quicker, to scale back, because one of the things about cloud that I thought was really interesting, and I’m a huge cloud advocate, so anybody out there who’s a data center person, you won’t like me, but the thing about data centers, etc. that were always a challenge was it was a fixed cost, so if depending on your business model and the business model we have, our revenues variable based on seasonality, right? You have football season, you have the Grammys, you have the Super Bowl every three years, you have premiers, you have new show launches, right? So, up, down, up, down scale shopping season, right? So your revenue is variable, but your data center cost is fixed always, and that’s a challenge. Is when you have these really big events, you got to go up and down, etc. So the thing about Cloud is really interesting is you can go and kind of ride the wave. The other thing I think about Cloud that’s really fascinating to me, and I’ll tie into AI ML, is have a data science team, and that we really wanted to pivot quickly, and AI and ML two three years ago, and if you’re listening to this in 2025 this was recorded much earlier than this, but it was early, right? And so technology is changing, TensorFlow is kind of changing, people want to make models quickly. We want to do big data sets and procure big data sets. We couldn’t keep up, and my data scientists were looking at me going, “What are you going to do? So we ended up moving to a big cloud provider who had just spectacular large data processing capabilities with really good AI, ML, and the amount of innovation that could start popping out of that group was just stellar, and if it was slow, it wasn’t because of technology, it was because they couldn’t keep up with the requirements, but I think really, Tim, if you dive into it, though, one of the fallacies, I think the CIO fallacy. That we have is we’re always looking at emerging technologies, right. It’s like, what’s that new big emergent technology, etc. AI, IoT, blah blah blah. And I think, and I had this epiphany just recently, like within the last six months, is sometimes you miss the business opportunity or the business value in the most unexpected places, like there’s like we as humans tend to bucket and categorize things, right? We, we stereotype stuff, right? So you look at something, you go that is a cabinet, and that’s always going to be a cabinet. The only thing that cabinet is good for is, you know, storing documents well, maybe not. What if you put a tabletop on it? Now it’s an end table, and then what if you do blah, it could be, you know, put a planner on top of it. Now it’s a garden. I just noticed this just again within the last six months. I think we missed some of the areas that are really starting to get disruptive that are becoming value adds, like I came across a company in the UCAS space, and you know, I probably just by saying UCAS put most of your audience to sleep, right? Because it’s so boring, it’s just not exciting, you’re getting rid of a phone now. It’s like I’d rather write a presentation than do UCAS, but I came across this company that integrated in their platform, super simple. You can click on it with LinkedIn, and I was like, okay, that’s kind of interesting. But what else? Oh, Google or Office 365 I’m like, oh, that’s kind of cool.
So now here’s the hidden value, right? Is now my phone system that has no value. When my salesperson calls out to you, if it’s connected into LinkedIn, they could see who your contacts and go, ‘Hey, Tim, you know Steve, Steve, Steve, and I are friends, we’ve gone a long way, blah blah blah blah. Hey, would you take this call? Or if they already connected with you and they have emails, they could say, ‘Oh, Tim just sent me an email that said wtf, and he’s calling me right now. I better read this email before I answer this phone call, because I bet it’s about this right, or it didn’t share a doc, or had a meeting. But okay, that’s kind of cool, right? But then you add in like Salesforce integration, where it auto logs phone calls, because salespeople, you love them. Their job is not to be document managers. Their job is to build relationships, have conversations, and they’re horrible about logging calls. But if you could auto log a call or notice that, hey, we’ve called Tim 16 times as last week, maybe we should give Tim a break and call on Steve, and have all that Salesforce integration be able to take notes right on stay in that phone system again, it makes the phone that you would traditionally look at a phone and go it’s just phone, who cares, it’s just a phone, right, and then integrate like ServiceNow, now here’s I’ll tie it together, Tim, watch this, you integrate that in with natural language processing in AI, you and I can have a conversation, and what do you do when, like, we’re having a business conversation, right? You’re, you’re trying to pay attention, you got a notepad or your computer, you’re typing notes, and you’re half listening to what’s going on, and but you’re trying to take notes. Add in natural language processing, you and I can have a conversation and go, “Hey, Tim, you know we should make an action item of this, and do this, or just kind of riff on it. The system itself will record all that in real time and give you a summary with all your action items, and then you can go back and look at it, and go, oh, that’s what we’re doing. And what that does is opens us up as humans to go, let’s have a real conversation. Now, I don’t have to multitask, let me just focus on you, and then you take that, you add it into things like a support center, where you can do sentiment analysis, or things going wrong, you open it up with sales going as a marketing message, right? And as people are objecting to things in the marketing message, that marketing people can look at it, and then you can tie all this data back into your business, and go, if I’m a subscription business, and I have this, I’ve had so many bad sentiments and so many good sentiments. How can I tie it back to a potential subscription loss or return rate for the people who are calling in? Maybe it’s a horrible show, or maybe the price is too high, or maybe the streaming service doesn’t work so good to come see, right? Or whatever, you can tie that back, and that’s hidden value that, if you just looked at the phone, said that’s a phone, you would have never seen that value, and you would have never contributed back to revenue and the consumer experience, as well as your employee experience.
Tim Crawford 24:34
But I think that’s a piece that kind of taking this full circle back to where we started this conversation. It comes full circle back to it’s the changing way that the CIO works. Instead of just being that power cord distributor, you’re now thinking about the customer journey, you’re thinking about the employee journey, you’re thinking about how these come together, you’re thinking about I’ve got this myriad of different. Tools, and you and I were in a different conversation recently, where there was some conversation around macro solutions versus micro solutions, and how do you start to bring these together to integrate to find that value, and I think what you just said was so eloquent and so incredibly important, but I think it also exemplifies the shift in thinking around who the CIO is? It’s less about kind of in the weeds and in the nuts and bolts and speeds and feeds, but thinking about how you change the employee journey and the experience that they have, as well as the customer journey and the experience that the customer has.
Steve Comstock 25:40
Absolutely, and you know the funny thing about it, Tim, too, is, is you know, traditionally we always looked at budget as our budget, like, okay, I got budget to go buy, you know, four Wi-Fi access points, and blah blah blah, right, but that’s not it anymore, it’s the company’s budget. How can we help our partners be more efficient and find ways to help them be more successful, and again, it’s you got to build that trust, but you do two or three of those, and people come to you and go, you’re my favorite CIO, and then they’ll say, but I am the only CIO here, and they go, yeah, that’s why
Tim Crawford 26:14
you’re my favorite, right, and so,
Steve Comstock 26:16
but so it’s kind of like, you know, it’s single child syndrome, but you’re right. I mean, that’s absolutely right. And I think that’s the journey as you start looking at that, and I think that’s so important because that’s the value that we can add. Right, I said this a couple times. We’re so talented as a discipline. I mean, who else can look at budget? Who else can look at workflow processes? Who else can look at technology? Who else has the whole view of the whole company and all the interaction points, and if you’re just doling out cables, you’re missing, you’re missing a very exciting thing, and it’s like you get back to your point, the whole macro, the macro environment of all, how does this all work together, and then all the little micro pieces that feed that macro engine is just.. it’s.. it’s a beautiful thing, and I think some people are just so focused on just handing cables that they kind of don’t see the beauty that’s in front of them.
Tim Crawford 27:16
Yeah, and I think this is also where history has not served us well, to kind of help change that mindset over time. We’ve had this role that has been doling out cables and fixing projectors and connecting people to the internet and installing applications, and we haven’t really stopped and said, “Okay, how do we think about that customer journey, that employee journey. How do we think about our business? How our business makes money, how it spends money. So, as is, we kind of wrap here on the conversation, put a bow on this. You’ve talked a lot about what’s exciting you, but if you were to kind of hone in on what excites you most about the CIO role today, and where it’s headed, and kind of where technology fits in, if it does in your mind, what would you say?
Steve Comstock 28:07
I think the most exciting thing about it is the CIO role is becoming a business role versus technology role, especially as you look at some of these companies as a mature. Full disclosure, I was on a digital company, we still did digital transformation, but I was in the valley, but everyone’s a technologist anymore, and so the differentiation of being a technologist isn’t there. So just the fact that we’re able to start becoming more business partners and business roles, and looking at that component of it is so exciting, it really is super exciting, because I’m a coder by trade, you know, I can look at code and that’s fun, you know, I can, I can create something new that’s fun, but really be instrumental in changing someone’s, maybe it’s just too highfalutin, but their life and their work experience, because we spend so much time at work that you can change how that when they come into work they feel like they’re getting stuff done, at least from a technology perspective, from a business perspective that you’re helping move a business forward, and that you know you can go high five your business partner, you know when you have a great release, or when something goes really well, or when we crush numbers, or whatever, because you were part of that party, and we’re part of the game, and we’re part of that, we’re part of the family. It’s not just like we’re that crazy uncle who sits in the corner on the Commodore 64 anymore, right? It’s like we are the crazy uncle who’s right there in the middle of it, partying it up, saying, we got to do this, guys. This is going to be awesome. A double dog dare you to jump off that roof, because this is going to be cool, right? And that is the fun part, because you really becoming business partners, you know. We can’t go as far as we have a PNL or a revenue line, and people say, well, we should have a revenue line, and it. I kind of really question that, because it dilutes from what you should be doing, but at least you can affect other people’s business line, and you help them, and you just being involved and being brought into some of these things is so much fun, and I think that’s the exciting part, is that big transformation. One last comment is, you see it with a lot of the CIOs who are transforming themselves into the COO role, right, which would have never happened before. That was just not even – we weren’t even considered for something like that. And you see it, you see CIOs who are living into the CEO roles, right, of companies that maybe aren’t tech companies. You’re like, “Wow, how did that happen? That is so cool. And that, I think, is a big thing, is, and that just supports my thought, is we’re becoming business business people who have strong disciplines in technology, but that’s exciting to me, Tim. To be honest,
Tim Crawford 30:51
that’s great. That’s great. We’re gonna have to leave it right there. But Steve, thanks so much for taking the time to join the program, and hopefully I can have you back again for a continued conversation, and maybe unpack some of these thoughts a little further.
Steve Comstock 31:06
Absolutely, and I’m just doing for everyone’s thing, just a virtual mic drop. That was a lot of fun, Tim. Let’s do that again, and I think this is a super exciting thing you’re doing here. So, keep it up.
Tim Crawford 31:17
Great, thanks, Steve. For more information on the CIO in the No podcast series, visit us online at CIO itk.com or you can find us on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, and SoundCloud. Don’t forget to subscribe, and thank you for listening.
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