Introduction
This week I’m joined by Mark Settle who is the Chief Information Officer for Okta. Mark has served as CIO for a number of companies prior to his role at Okta including IHS, BMC, Corporate Express, Arrow and Oxy. Mark is also author of the book ‘Truth from the trenches: A practical guide to the art of IT management.’
During our conversation, Mark outlines the value of IT in today’s enterprise and how IT can generate value through seismic changes. Mark outlines the challenges that many CIOs gets caught up in and how they can escape the vortex. We discuss the role of the CIO and get Mark’s very interesting and enlightening perspective on ‘data as the new oil’. Mark outlines his perspective on how technology orgs lose sight of the problem and how they can realign themselves.
Speaker Profiles
Mark Settle LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-settle-293b5/
Okta: https://www.okta.com
Book – Truth from the trenches: A practical guide to the art of IT management: https://www.amazon.com/Truth-Trenches-Practical-Guide-Management/dp/1629561932
Audio File
Featured Hashtags
#CIO #Leadership #CX #Diversity #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 Avoa. This week I’m joined by Mark Settle, who’s the Chief Information Officer for Okta. Mark has served as CIO for a number of companies prior to his role at Okta, including IHS, BMC, Corporate Express, Aero, and Oxy. Mark is also the author of the book Truth from the Trenches: A Practical Guide to the art of IT management. During our conversation, Mark outlines the value of IT in today’s enterprise, and how it can generate value through seismic changes. Mark outlines the challenges that many CIOs get caught up in, and how they can escape the vortex. We discuss the role of the CIO and get Mark’s very interesting and enlightening perspective on data as the new oil. Mark outlines his perspective on how technology orgs often lose sight of the problem and how they can realign themselves. Mark, welcome to the program.
Mark Settle 1:14
Glad to be here. Good morning.
Tim Crawford 1:15
Good morning. So, Mark, you are the Chief Information Officer at Okta and have served as CIO for a number of other companies. I just want to kind of dive right into the CIO role and talk about what is different, if there is something different today. What is different in the CIO role today from your perspective?
Mark Settle 1:35
So I would say it’s changed and will continue to change in the future, but by the same token, there’s certain aspects of the role that remain the same as well, and in some ways the part that remains the same to me sort of outweighs or takes more importance than some of the more recent changes. So, when I think about the value that it can deliver to a company, I kind of think of three different dimensions: one is just the efficiency and internal effectiveness of it itself in managing costs and delivering services and meeting the expectations of employees and executives within a company. Second is partnering with the business to enhance existing processes, whether it’s an order management process, a supply chain management process, but to show that you, the IT group, can understand the problems that the business faces, work with them collaboratively and actually enhance business operations in some fashion, and I think if you can successfully show that you’re running a tight ship within it and you know how to partner with the business, then you get to sit at what I call the big boy table, you know, and talk about strategic initiatives and ways in which you know it can really think about tackling some of the bigger, harder problems like opening up new markets, or dressing a new sales demographic, or getting into a whole different kind of product line, or globalizing the business. So, there are a lot of big strategic issues, but I think you’re it’s unlikely you’re going to be asked to participate substantively, you know, unless you’ve built up confidence on the other two sides. Those are kind of maybe time-tested principles or perceptions about how it works, I don’t think are going to change a whole lot, whether we’re dealing with, you know, yk problems or digital transformation, you know, everything that happened in between. So, but what is a little bit different today is, you know, we’re kind of drowning in technology. So I just reflected in a recent blog about the 15 anniversary of cloud computing, you know, if you go back and look at when Salesforce went public and when AWS introduced the Elastic Computing Cloud, EC two, depending how you measure it, we’re about 15 years, you know, from those early pioneering days, and you know, cloud really does kind of revolutionize the way you think about supporting business operations.
Tim Crawford 3:40
Yeah,
Mark Settle 3:41
you know, Apple had a marketing tagline called There’s an app for that that they used to market their phones in the early days, and I think it was really intended to address the variety of consumer apps that were out there that people could use, but it’s sort of come back with a vengeance in the business world as well, so there’s literally 1000s of different applications that do everything from large end to end business processes like order management down to really niche things like helping to plan a user conference and register people that want to set up their agendas for what sessions they’re going to go to and a wide gamut of capabilities in between and so how you manage an application stack in that kind of a world, and then start to backpedal away from being responsible for data center operations and worrying about security and use of mobile devices. You know, the landscape that we manage is very different, but I’m sure you could go back and, you know, people that went from mainframe to client server or went from client server to, you know, internet slash ecommerce kind of technologies would probably all say that they went through some seismic changes as well, so the technology will force you to change, but the way you generate value, I think, is pretty time tested and pretty much stays the same.
Tim Crawford 4:51
Yes, and it’s interesting how you’ve connected yk to digital transformation. I think you’re the first person I’ve
Mark Settle 4:59
heard the day. Myself, there, but you know,
Tim Crawford 5:01
well, I think many of us have been through YTK at least once, if not twice. If you switched companies around the late 90s,
Mark Settle 5:10
maybe my scars are just a little deeper,
Tim Crawford 5:13
but well, healed over when you get past what I call kind of the table stakes, right? The efficiency piece of it really should be table stakes at this point for someone that is carrying the CIO title. If you have that title, Chief Information Officer, and you truly are operating at that level, not just because you were promoted to it, not just because it was the next title they could give you, regardless of whether you’re actually exhibiting the traits, but if you truly are a CIO, isn’t the table stakes really the efficiency piece? And then looking beyond that is really where the meat comes in.
Mark Settle 5:52
Absolutely, no, that’s absolutely right. But you know, in certain organizations, some individuals become myopically focused on that. I mean, they somehow lock their perspective into thinking the only way I generate real value is, you know, managing costs efficiently and worrying about my customer sat scores on the service desk, etc. And especially in companies that have been challenged financially, where, you know, cost control was a big issue for a long period of time. This has happened to me in the past, you kind of refine those muscles, you’re working those muscles all the time, and then if things change, you have a new job opportunity, or the business turns around, etc. you know, your innovation muscles may have atrophy over that period of time, and you’ve got to kind of realize the situation that you’re in, so unfortunately many of our peers have gotten kind of captured in the black hole of just a myopic focus and obsessively myopic focus on cost management, and some just don’t escape the vortex.
Tim Crawford 6:50
Yeah, how much of that is driven by the outside perception as well by the rest of the C suite in terms of what they view it’s function or the CIOs function as
Mark Settle 7:03
to answer that question in a slightly different way, you know. It organizations tend to spend a lot of money for lots of different reasons, and you know it’s been my experience that people are just confounded by where does that money go. You know, you’re spending x million dollars, like what do you do with that, and it’s because you know it addresses so many different needs within the business, there are very few people in the company that really understand that full gamut of responsibilities, and so you know they interact in some limited capacity with the IT function. So I’ll tell you an anecdotal story here. I remember one time of one of the executives, this is a past employer, complained that the IT group had gotten too large, and we had about 400 people in it at the time, and we were spending way too much money. I think we’re spending $100 million and you know, there’s two guys you have over there, you know, Larry and Tom. I love those guys. I think they’re great. I said, well, you know, so you like two guys. If I had, like, one person for every other FTE in the company, it organization would be much larger than 400 people, so like the fact that I can keep people happy with 400 you know, is incredible testament to how effective we are. But I do think, you know, there’s aspects of day-to-day operations. Well, take a data center, nobody out in the business really understands what it takes to run to a data center, nor should they. I’m not suggesting they should.
Tim Crawford 8:20
Yeah, and I think that’s the other piece that kind of goes with this question, right, which is really around that relationship between the CIO and the rest of the C suite, and how it’s changing. And does the CIO need to, and you’ve heard this question as much as I have, but does the CIO need to learn more about the business, or does the business need to learn more about it and technology.
Mark Settle 8:43
I think very much the former, right? So, I think the IT organization, it’s very easy to get drawn into conversations about technology and operational issues, etc. within IT, and the folks who the CIO, his or her direct reports, you know, just look at the way people use their time. How much time do they actually spend visiting the warehouses, or visiting the manufacturing facility, or going out on a sales call, you know, or really trying to understand the world as it’s perceived by, you know, the other leaders of the organization. And what’s doubly criminal about this is that, you know, the CIO and his or her direct reports are uniquely, I want to underscore them, uniquely qualified to do that. You know, a director, with all due respect, or a senior director, is much more limited in their ability to kind of branch out and have those opportunities. It’s been my experience that whenever I’ve invited myself in, so to speak, my presence in those conversations or activities has really been welcome, frankly, kind of enthusiastically, after initial shock, you know, overcome somebody that, oh, the singer wants to actually go to the warehouse, you know, once they get up past that stage, it’s like, yeah, that might actually be used. I’d love to come with me on my next trip.
Tim Crawford 9:52
That kind of fits in with where I wanted to take the conversation, because I know you spend a lot of time in front of customers, a lot of time. It, and that seems to be kind of a unique trait amongst CIOs, yet a growing trait among CIOs. Can you talk a little more about how you did that? Because I can’t imagine that you just showed up on a sales call or went to the head of sales or to a sales rep and said, “Hey, when you go out tomorrow, I’m going to be in the car with you,
Mark Settle 10:21
so I’ve had the good fortune of working at several companies where the product that we produced was sold to an IT organization, so again we both have peers in many cases software companies where maybe they’re providing some kind of a B2C service or they have a B2B model in which the software they’re providing could be like an Autodesk. The capabilities that an Autodesk would produce are not really substantively useful within the IT organization itself. Whereas if you’re a storage equipment manufacturer like NetApp or Pure Storage, you can use that to support internal operations. Your company, like Okta, we can use identity management tools to support the way Okta operates, and so you just develop much more practical insight into how to implement these tools and obtain the greatest benefits, and so I think it’s not just a courtesy kind of a conversation or a courtesy that hey, our CIO is here to kind of pay his respects at a C level for your business or demonstrate the level of commitment that we have to turning you into a customer, but there’s a lot of practical knowledge and experience that I’ve been fortunate to be able to kind of communicate through those opportunities, so we would have other peers that would, you know, really struggle because of the nature of the product. Now, having said that, I think one of the highest callings for any IT executive is to try to bring the voice of the paying customer into the IT organization, and this has been a source of annoyance to me for a long time, probably more than annoyance, because if you really step back and you look at most organizations and all the different functional teams that are out there, any kind of a demand signal that’s coming from the true paying customers is getting processed in a fairly nonlinear way through the personalities and politics and priorities of the sales ops team, or the supply chain management organization, or you know, the manufacturing council, or whatever, that’s within your company, and so if you’re an IT, you know, somebody saying, well, this is our highest priority, you know, connect the dots all the way back to the paying customer what they originally asked for, I think there’s a lot of loss of signal to noise, you know, in the translation, and so anything that you can do to, like, expose yourself. I mean, it could be as simple as rotating people into the customer support center and just mic in and listen desk side to what some of the common problems are. You may be solving problems that are exponentially more complicated and complex than what the paying customers are really asking for at the end of the day, but there’s no way you can kind of argue that point where the demands are being placed on you by these different operational teams, unless you arm yourself with that kind of knowledge and experience. So, there’s no prescriptive formula for how to do this, it’s defined by the company, the business model, and the way it interacts with its paying customers, but CIOs need to really take a leadership role here, and you know, find a wedge that they can drive between the functional teams to get to the real world perspective of what the paying customers really want.
Tim Crawford 13:11
Yeah, and I like how you kind of pulled that out, because there are a couple of things to unpack there. One is the type of company, so being in a technology company, like you, are with Okta, and being able to speak firsthand to the person across the table. I mean, that’s the other piece to this, is you may actually have a relationship with that CIO that you’re sitting across the table with. You may know who they are ahead of time, it might not be someone that’s new to you, and so, of course, that creates kind of an implicit level of trust in the conversation, but the other thing is that lost in translation piece, especially for technology companies, I think is really key and valuable, but the piece that I really want to underscore is what you said right there at the end, where the CIO needs to take that initiative to drive that wedge, it can’t be something that they’re invited to or asked about, and they wait until that happens. They have to take that drive, and I think that’s something that we see a lot in our peers, that they’re sitting back and waiting and waiting and waiting, and they’re going to be waiting for a while.
Mark Settle 14:18
So, Tim, I haven’t patented this idea yet, so I want to put that out there as a placeholder in case I get my act together and do this, but many of the listeners here have probably heard of a parlor game that folks play called Six Degrees of Separation from Kevin Bacon, and so there’s a theory, or that’s based on the principle that anybody you know in the entertainment business, especially movie making business, can somehow connect the dots between other actors they’ve worked with, and directors, and writers, etc. and kind of find easily six connections or less to get back to Kevin Bacon, and I’ve sometimes fantasized about making that a game for people in it to think about either roles in IT or activities that were performed and try to connect the dots back to that paying customer. Up, so you know, if you’re at the service desk and you’re supporting a salesperson who’s calling in with a laptop problem, who’s on his way or her way to a meeting with a customer, you know, you’re two connections away from the customer, but there’d be many other jobs, you know, if you were the server admin down in the data center, it would take a lot of leaps to kind of get to interface to the customer, and I think the way we generate value is to stay as close to that customer interface as possible. And history has shown that the farther you are away from that interface, those kind of roles, activities, and responsibilities tend to get commoditized. There are economies of scale that can be achieved by third parties that you’re not going to be able to achieve yourself. The real equity or value that the IT function is providing is through the business systems analysts or people that are configuring certain platforms or daily updates to the e-com system or whatever, and the closer you get to that paying customer interface, I think it’s good for it, it’s good for the company, and frankly, it’s good for everybody’s personal job security.
Tim Crawford 16:00
Yeah, you know, I had moderated a couple of panel discussions last year, talking about CIOs engaging with customers, and one of the things that I kept hearing was that CIOs, rather than being in front of the customer, would rely on reports as a means to understand the customer, and I want to kind of shift the conversation to data, but before I do that, what’s your take on that about relying on reports as opposed to in front of the customer?
Mark Settle 16:28
So, build that all else. What kind of a report, like a written memo or a document or a statistical analysis?
Tim Crawford 16:33
Yeah, more of a statistical analysis of here’s kind of the personas of customers that we’re engaging with either coming from marketing or coming from sales, and then using that as the guidance to understand what the customer looks like.
Mark Settle 16:49
So I think personas are hugely valuable, largely because of the exercise that it takes to construct a persona, in effect becomes an educational process for people back at corporate headquarters who have relatively limited interaction with the customers, so I mean, obviously serves a purpose for directing marketing resources and you know determining the size of different teams you want to put in place to pursue sales opportunities, you know, with different types of companies and industries, etc. but I think the process of constructing the personas kind of forces the headquarters team to really take much more seriously in a much more focused way. To your point, Who’s really buying the product at the end of the day? How do they think about the value that they’re obtaining with the product, etc. In the absence of the persona framework, I think people can become pretty easily confused, and they can kind of, you know, mix and match different perspectives that the buyers may have, and really just get unfocused in terms of how to articulate their value proposition. So, I think those are very important.
Tim Crawford 17:53
Very good. So, data – we hear about data is the new oil, is it the new oil? Where do you believe data and digital kind of fit in as a whole?
Mark Settle 18:05
It’s funny you use that term, oil, so I kind of think of data in two ways. So one is I think of it as a lubricant, there’s your oil analogy in routine business processes, and so I think you know the challenge is, you know, how can I squirt the right data slash information into a process like, you know, order fulfillment or stock management, you know, or health and safety, etc. Like, what do people need to know at different stages of this process, and can I supply it in a timely, consistent, and accurate way? It doesn’t have to be a lot of data, I mean, not tons of reports or anything like that. It could be really quite focused, so data serves an incredibly valuable purpose if it can be mustered and delivered at the critical moment of utilization or engagement, whatever. Not just, again, I don’t mean with customers, I mean even internally, you know, you could have a 17 step process just to get the initial order just through the final invoice and receipt of payment type of thing, and so if you can squirt some of the right data along the way, maybe that becomes an eight step process.
Tim Crawford 19:09
Yeah, let me back up on that a little bit, though, because I agree with you, but at the same time, doesn’t that require some level of understanding of what your business processes are in the first place, and I don’t mean just an individual business process, but how one ties to the next ties to the next, so that you know which process is going to be most valuable to squirt that data into
Mark Settle 19:33
exactly right, but to your point, there’s a hierarchy of processes you can, that’s the beauty of this, is you can kind of start small and tactical and kind of build out, because again, I’m not talking about huge dashboards, you know, or dumping tons of data, you know, logs, or whatever, it’s yeah, it’s just having enough insight into the business process, as you correctly point out, to know, like, what are those critical three things that somebody should know at this stage before they provide a delivery date for this. Order, or you know, commit to this timetable, or
Tim Crawford 20:03
yeah,
Mark Settle 20:04
so that’s the one, but the other thing you alluded to, which to me is the other side of the coin, it’s more the ad hoc kind of analysis, you know, that you’re really trying to provide business insights that are going to be used to drive bigger decisions and possibly strategic initiatives, so
Tim Crawford 20:20
which then sounds like that could be a great entree into the CIO being able to get more involved in those conversations.
Mark Settle 20:28
Absolutely, here’s a good illustration. So, let’s say you and I were working for Sephora, you know, tactically it might be important to know foot traffic versus time of day at all of our Manhattan locations, and that might help us with product placement, etc. Then you know the more strategic ad hoc kind of analysis might be, let’s look at the credit card information that was generated through sales on those same days and kind of look at the demographics of who was buying what once the traffic got into the store, right? So separating those two things out, you might use traffic to drive product placement, particularly as you start discounting things towards the Christmas holidays, and then you take a deep breath after Christmas holidays and say, like, who really bought our stuff this year, and back your personas, like, what is the customer base, and are we correctly presenting ourselves and marketing our capabilities and differentiating our products for that new rediscovered demographic base,
Tim Crawford 21:24
yeah, and I wonder how much of the thinking starts to shift beyond just kind of looking in the rearview mirror as to who has purchased and what they look like, but rather to say why did they purchase that, so for example, maybe the weather was bad in Manhattan, or maybe there were other external factors that kind of drove that, could be economic, it could be social, it could be political. Have you ever thought about how that might come into the equation? I mean, it’s a pretty complicated question, right,
Mark Settle 21:56
but that I think that kind of analysis is done on a much more regular basis, I think people would be kind of surprised. I worked for an organization where one of the services that we provided was a return to market report for car buyers, and the data that went into the analysis included exactly what you’re talking about, you know, at a zip code level, or even a sub zip code level, census information about the economics of the zip code, the voting habits of the zip code were in there as well, number of children, weather conditions, price of gasoline over the period, you know, the whole thing. And the service was purchased by the OEMs, the people that build the cars, and they would try to decide, gee, you know, Mark always buys a Ford, so, and he’s done that for like 20 years, and every car he’s ever bought for himself, his wife, or his kids has been a Ford, so why would Toyota want to like worry doing one to one marketing to Mark, but somebody else may be going through a different stage of their life, the kids may have moved out, they may have shown a proclivity to shop around and try different models, etc. etc. Then that might merit a small investment of marketing dollars to try to get the attraction of the interest of that individual, so I think a lot of that kind of analytics has been around. I think what happens is companies just don’t brag about it, because they don’t want you to know what they’ve
Tim Crawford 23:17
done. I mean, arguably it could be taken as a little big brother. I mean, if you look at the number of public data sets that are available today on all of us, if you were truly to put it together, it would be pretty scary.
Mark Settle 23:28
There’s a perfect example of that. So, over the weekend, I listened to some old rock music on YouTube, and as you would know, Tim, our annual user group meeting is going to be held here in San Francisco next week, and so when one of the YouTube recordings came up. I was invited to register for the conference, so somehow YouTube knew that I had an interest in Octane 19 that I don’t even want to think too long about how that association
Tim Crawford 23:51
sounds good. Well, speaking of technology, you know, there is a lot of fast-moving emerging technology that is plastered all over the place these days, right, we’re getting hit right left and center. You mentioned cloud and its 15 year journey, but of late it’s been machine learning and AI. Where do these fit in rather than where they fit in? What’s your take on these emerging technology? I mean, how do you approach
Mark Settle 24:16
it? I mean, you really always have to come back to sort of a business benefit of the business value, all too often, and I don’t mean to impugn the utility of any particular technology, but you know, we’ve all been guilty way too many times of finding an interesting hammer that we found at the hardware store and chasing around trying to find a problem that, or an egg we can break open with the damn thing, we kind of lose sight of, you know, the problem that we’re trying to solve, or problems that we’re trying to solve. I’m thinking of a story here that comes to mind of episodes in the past where I’ve fallen in love and organizations would try to pursue different agendas. Actually, one in the not too distant past was around the use of AWS, and I was working for a company that had a very entrenched set of data center capabilities and operations. Large number of people that work there, longstanding relationships with strategic vendors. I managed to get a subset of the folks over there to go up to Seattle, you know, to take a little training and exposure. You know, I put the seeds in the ground and I watered them, but I just couldn’t get them to flower in the period of time that I was there. So the technology doesn’t solve itself. You’ve really got to go find that compelling business problem, and this is another kind of related story. So, one time I was with one of the venture capital firms here in the Bay Area, and I asked the VC guy, like, a lot of these companies all sound exciting, and it’s kind of an interesting take on some new capability. So, what do you see, like the ones that succeed and the ones that fail? Like, why is that? Because they all appeal at certain level, and he says pretty simple. So, what I see happen is some of these startup companies, you know, they latch on to maybe a big name prospect – I’m going to make it up, Johnson and Johnson, you know, Procter and Gambler, whatever. So, they’ll take 10 meetings in a row with that prospect, trying to convince them that their blockchain technology, or their machine learning technology or their mobile technology, you know, will generate real benefits and needs to be purchased and adopted and utilized by that big name brand company. So those are the guys that fail. So the ones that succeed is they have 10 separate meetings to try to find a problem that the blockchain technology can actually
Tim Crawford 26:19
solve,
Mark Settle 26:19
and so rather than trying to force the big name company to come to the realization that, aha, blockchain is great, and I could use it to do this, you need to place your bets more strategically, and just kind of keep banging away at opportunities until you find one that has a problem that’s the right one for you to go off and solve, and you know, unfortunately, when I reflect on that, I thought, you know, a lot of it organizations do the same thing, people come back, and much like I did in the organization I referenced before, I was convinced that AWS was going to be a significant strategic solution for us, and kind of, damn it, I was going to force it down their throats, you know, one way or another, whether my own team thought it was cost-effective or, you know, useful to do, or whatever
Tim Crawford 26:58
it might have been, because you were in Redmond trying to do that,
Mark Settle 27:01
well, that’s true. Yeah,
Tim Crawford 27:03
so as we kind of wrap on the episode, so what excites you most about the CIO role today, and it as a whole? If you were to just say kind of the top thing that comes to mind, what is that?
Mark Settle 27:16
I think business models change, you know, on much shorter time scales these days, that’s not true universally. I mean, there are companies that are offering the same products today as they did 10 years ago, the way they sell it and make it, and everything has probably changed. And because it is uniquely positioned to enable the revenue-generating business processes end to end, it has got a finger in every aspect of that, whether it’s the same product, but it’s being manufactured differently, or be marketed differently, or the customers have changed, the delivery mechanism has changed. Phones are the currency by which people are placing orders, as opposed to sending something in the mail, like they would have in the past, etc. I think it’s the change in the pace of change. I mean, it’s a kind of a trite answer, but a lot of times I ask people, like, why they got into it, they’ll tell me it’s because things change around here, and that’s really true. So, if you’re easily bored, it is probably one of the best professions you can get into.
Tim Crawford 28:06
That’s great, Mark. Thank you so much for taking the time to be on today’s episode.
Mark Settle 28:11
Thank you, Tim.
Tim Crawford 28:12
Always great to chat with you, and look forward to more conversations. We’ll leave it here, but hopefully we can have you back for another episode in the future.
Mark Settle 28:20
Super,
Tim Crawford 28:22
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,
Unknown Speaker 28:37
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