Starting with the customer and working backwards with Prakash Kota

Introduction

This week I’m joined by Prakash Kota who is the Chief Information Officer for Autodesk.

In our discussion, we talk about how Autodesk changed from a company that shipped software to a subscription-based business. We talk about the role of the CIO and what it means to work backwards. Prakash shares his perspective on digital transformation delving into how cloud and AI are providing greater value and making the work more exciting. He talks about the value he gets from his CIO to CIO interactions and his perspective on the CIO role moving forward.

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Speaker Profiles

Prakash Kota LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prakashkota/

Autodesk Twitter: https://twitter.com/autodesk

Autodesk: https://www.autodesk.com

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Audio File

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Featured Hashtags

#CIO #Leadership #CX #CustomerEngagement #Cloud #AI #DigitalTransformation #CIOitk

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Podcast Transcript

Tim Crawford 0:04
Tim, 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 Prakash Kota, who is the Chief Information Officer for Autodesk. In our discussion, we talk about how Autodesk changed from a company that shipped software to a subscription-based business. We talk about the role of the CIO and what it means to work backwards. Prakash shares his perspective on digital transformation, delving into how cloud and AI are providing greater value and making the work more exciting. He talks about the value he gets from his CIO to CIO interactions and his perspective on the CIO role moving forward. Prakash Kota, welcome to the program.

Prakash Kota 0:58
Thank you, Tim. Thanks for having me.

Tim Crawford 1:00
Prakash, you’re the CIO, the Chief Information Officer for Autodesk. Might be good for our listeners that aren’t familiar with Autodesk and aren’t familiar with you to talk a little bit about who Autodesk is and your journey there.

Prakash Kota 1:15
Sure, so to set context, right, first at Autodesk, our vision is to help people imagine design and make a better world, so basically what we do is we make software so that our customers can make anything that they can dream of, literally anything, so we fill, we help our customers design and make anything like from skyscrapers and smart cars to bridges and blockbusters, if you look at all of those things before they come to the real world, our customers design and the digital world, and so we are in the business of helping them to automate the whole design and make processes, and as a company we have existed for 38 years, lot of our customers or folks know us through the computer aided design software AutoCAD, but we are more than just AutoCAD, and I’ve been with the company for 15 years. This April, I’ll complete 15 years.

Tim Crawford 2:14
Wow,

Prakash Kota 2:15
15 happy years, I would say that’s

Tim Crawford 2:17
great,

Prakash Kota 2:18
especially in Silicon Valley, you know, this – it’s not common to have leaders be here for a long time, but I’ve had a journey where I grew up or played different roles with an IT organization over this course of 15 years, like I’ve played 11 different roles in 15 years. In the last couple of years, I’ve been their CIO.

Tim Crawford 2:39
Wow, that’s great. And I want to talk about that journey and what you’ve seen over that period of time. I mean, I go back to AutoCAD, well, many years ago, I’ll say 30 plus years ago, when I was in school using it for electronic design, and of course that was the CAD space, but as you’ve seen the change happening both within Auto, within Autodesk, but then also outside of Autodesk, how has the CIO and the role of business and customers changed over that period of time?

Prakash Kota 3:14
Yeah, totally right, and that’s where the fun part is, because as a company we have gone through huge business model transformation in the days when I first joined Autodesk. We used to ship software to our customers as part of the onboarding program. In the first couple of weeks when I joined, I was sent to Warehouse as part of the onboarding program to see how our DVDs are printed, and then they are packed, waiting for a truck to pick them up, and then how do we do invoicing and fulfilling in our SAP ERP system back end? So, from those days to now, we give access to our software in the cloud, and we are a complete subscription-based model. So, that journey in the last 1015 years, what we have gone through is tremendous. Like the company. I feel like it’s a total different company.

Tim Crawford 4:04
Well, I want you to know, and I want to dive into the technology in just a couple of minutes, but one of the things I know you do on a regular basis is you’re constantly out there and you’re engaging with customers, and I hear this from some of our peers, you know, how this has really changed, especially for the role of the CIO. Is that engagement with customers? Maybe you can take a minute and share your perspective of how you’re engaging with customers, and more importantly, what you’re gaining from that in that CIO role.

Prakash Kota 4:35
Totally, one thing that we all know is typically in any company, enterprise company, CIOs are typically purchasing software or selecting vendors and choosing, and so we have a very common portfolio, irrespective of whatever company that you come from, and so it’s very important with our new model of how we operate, we put customer at the center, we are kind of obsessed with our customers. Previously, we are like more product-based. Now we are like customer at the center, and anything that we do is like, how do we add continuous value to our customers, which means we want to learn more about the customers and share with our customers our digital journey too. As you probably, this is probably a buzzword also, there everybody is going through a digital transformation, and for us, when we say digitization, it is removing friction from our end users, whether it is customers, employees, or partners, and with that regard, I spend a quite amount of time with our enterprise customers and their CIOs to understand what kind of transformation are they going through, and if we are going through similar, whether it’s leveraging Autodesk products or not, we always share notes, compare notes, and share best practices, and that’s always advantages. The same thing, like how we do, we connect offline in the valley to compare notes. Hey, I’m starting to work with this company. Have you exposure to it? What are we doing? And that similar thing that we are sharing with our customers and spending time and giving value is tremendous to understand how our customers using our products and what are they expecting, so for that reason I do spend quite some time with our customers.

Tim Crawford 6:09
How does that help you from an IT perspective? Like I could connect the dots between having that information and applying that into the product or into engineering, but from an IT perspective, where do you connect the dots?

Prakash Kota 6:25
So, as an example, right, we have gone through this whole initiative, we’re going through this initiative called Digital Workplace, which is almost like providing virtual desktops for engineers who are using our complex software, which requires a lot of GPU-intensive workloads and whatnot, so we have been trying to do that for our internal engineers, and so when I speak with our customers and their CIOs, they are trying to digitize their environment, and they are trying to not need to give some huge, expensive laptops with heavy, powerful machines, but they really want their employees to also use some of this complex software anywhere in any device, and that’s where understanding that thought process definitely helps me to think, okay, what am I doing for my engineers, and can we extend that kind of similar services to our customers. I think that’s where the comparison definitely comes from, CIO to CIO,

Tim Crawford 7:19
and it sounds like it’s more than just the Autodesk product, but it’s also just how we work, that how we support our different stakeholders in the mix. You mentioned we see each other outside of this podcast, outside of the work that we do independently, and in some cases it’s not just in the valley, right? We just ran each to each other recently at a conference somewhere else, but you mentioned about that CIO to CIO connection. I know you’re, you’re engaged just like I am with other CIOs, both in the valley, but then also outside of the valley. What do you get from that community? Why do you spend that time, invest that time with those folks you mentioned, you know, sharing how you’re supporting stakeholders, but in your own words, you know, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but what is it that you get from that community of other CIOs?

Prakash Kota 8:13
I think the big thing that we all get is there’s no happy talk, and that’s the real thing that I would want, right when we go and we hear these 1000s of pitches, all the vendors want to get our time to tell how great they are, and probably a lot of them are really great in what they do, but ultimately we all have common business problems that we’re trying to solve. It’s not just about the technology, and technology is definitely enabling us to solve those business problems. So, when we all connect and compare notes, it’s the real straight talk that we all have. What works, what doesn’t work? What are the scars that we have had, and what mistakes did we do? And how are we so.. how can we help each other out, so that we don’t repeat some of those, or I don’t do what you did, or you don’t do what exactly I did and misfired, so that we compare notes, and that’s what is much more powerful for us, being in the valley and sharing and comparing notes and helping each other out. That is what I look for when I reach out to any of our colleagues or you to say, ‘Hey, I’m running into this, or ‘I’m starting off this huge ERP modernization. Have you worked with this vendor? Have you used this SI? What is your feedback? What to look out for any of those things that peer to peer quick reference checks and other things are super impactful,

Tim Crawford 9:27
and you find that that’s more valuable than maybe the public conversation around those vendors or around those processes.

Prakash Kota 9:34
It is in addition to all of those. Right, I think this peer to peer conversations are much more impactful because we also get to know the good, bad, and ugly, not just the great things that we always hear, and that’s what I talked about, not just the happy talk.

Tim Crawford 9:49
So, CIO, let me get, let me kind of put a bow on this. So, CIO to CIO conversations are not happy

Prakash Kota 9:56
talk, not only happy talk,

Tim Crawford 9:58
that’s great, you know. One of the things in past discussions I know you’ve talked about, and something you’re passionate about, is this concept of working backwards. Maybe you can share your perspective on what does that mean? What does working backwards mean, and how it’s impacted your role, the company, your customers?

Prakash Kota 10:18
Yeah, sure. So, working backwards is not a new concept. It’s widely used in Amazon as a principle on how they prioritize and approve work. That’s something that we incorporated within my division. The main reason, which led me to start using that, is being in a software company and working with a lot of technologists. We are so attached to technology, we get just, we get excited seeing new technology and other things, but at the end of the day, it’s not just about technology, and technology is probably the easy piece. Where I want my engineers to start thinking is all about the customer, whoever that customer is, whether it’s an employee or a real end user who’s using our products, or the partner, really keeping that in mind, what the end state is. So we talk about when anybody comes up with an idea or an outcome that we are trying to drive, we really think about imagine yourself that you’re already done building or incorporating whatever you’re envisioning on the day of launch. How would you launch this? What will be the press release, and that should not have any technology elements in that one pager, and it’s all about business capabilities, value that it brings, and whatnot, and that almost becomes like, and that’s very one pager is very tough to write, trust me, people, so many of them don’t come back with that one pager, even though they have that brilliant idea that keeps coming up, and have to complete that homework. It’s only 50% of them that come, and then we really look back at that one pager and connect it to our corporate goals to see how is that making an impact and moving the needle, and that becomes our frozen kind of work thing that we are focused on. And from there to achieve those business capabilities, how do we get to that state and that becomes our state of what we want to goal that our objective that we want to achieve and then work backwards to achieve all of those capabilities and then start going into user stories requirements and how to get to those state and then talk about technology that needs to be leveraged to enable those capabilities and that’s how we approach to things, so that we are results and outcome driven, not cool technology that we want to bring in, that will be used by me and my dog.

Tim Crawford 12:29
I love that, by me and my dog, but you’re really kind of flipping it on its head, so instead of saying, “Hey, we got this cool technology now, let’s find the business problem that we can solve with it, you’re saying, “Let’s write the press release first, that one page press release, so it’s got to be tight, it’s got to be direct and to the point, it can’t be flamboyant, has to be something that a customer can understand, and then let’s work backwards to figure out how do we start to develop solutions and products that actually will realize that

Prakash Kota 13:01
exactly, exactly, and that changes the way every engineer has this empathy and design thinking, and the way they think, keeping customer in mind, not technology alone in mind, and that has changed their behavior, is what I see.

Tim Crawford 13:15
That’s great. That’s great. How do you make that connection for, let’s say the most junior developer in your organization, and I use this as the extreme example, but the most junior person in your organization. How do you help them connect the dots to understand what the customer is saying in the way that the customer says it, so that it’s not too filtered and isn’t creating too many dots to connect? Right, you’re out there meeting with customers. How did they get connected with customers and get that information and insight?

Prakash Kota 13:47
I think we, with our new business model and keeping customers at the center, we also have a lot of data that we leverage and insights that we get to see how our customers are leveraging our products, and metrics are the key elements of any of these capabilities that we are launching, so we follow these OKR model objectives and key results. Everything needs to be specific, and any capability that we launch, it’s not just we’re launching it and we’re done, we went live, it’s more about adoption and usage, do, and that’s a new mindset of how I’m expecting every engineer to operate. It’s not only launching a capability, then how are we measuring on the usage if you’re expecting certain amount of addressable market or serviceable market that needs to be consumed? How do we get to that if people are not consuming it? How do we start divesting that? So all of those elements are something that I expect every engineer who is really thinking through to think through the entire lifecycle and not just thinking about launching a capability or bringing a technology in, and once it’s live, okay, it’s down to operations, and I’m done with it. I don’t have that. I’m looking for end-to-end people to have ownership on any capability that we launch, including adoption, usage, and trying to see, okay, what are customers who are really using it and. What additional value can we generate, and that’s how we calculate the whole TCO of it, and not just through the SAS costs or licensing costs of whatnot.

Tim Crawford 15:09
So, the incentives and OKRs for those folks are focused on those business objectives, as opposed to technology objectives.

Prakash Kota 15:17
Totally, it’s all business outcomes.

Tim Crawford 15:19
That’s awesome. I, you know, but I do want to switch gears a little bit and talk about technology for a minute, and I would, I laugh at this because I would be remiss without asking you about cloud and artificial intelligence and some of these newfangled really cool things that are out there that provide significant value. The question is, how do they provide significant value, but let’s start with cloud and AI. These are top conversations for our fellow CIOs. What’s your take on the two of them? And feel free to pick them apart.

Prakash Kota 15:52
Yeah, so I would say let’s start with cloud, and again, we are no different than any other. We definitely want to take advantage of these public cloud providers that are out there, I’m in the process of really not having my own infrastructure as such. I’m like, why do I need to, because they are probably delivering more values, more services, more capabilities than even if I can, whatever I can imagine. So we are in the process of migrating off all of our, or shifting off from our data centers for our IT footprint to leverage public cloud providers again, wherever it makes sense, we are leveraging appropriate cloud provider and SaaS solutions. So I am a big proponent of leveraging cloud to our advantage, and also for security. It’s more about agility. It brings a lot of business agility in the way we can deliver quickly and resilience these things cloud comes with if we design and architect it properly born in the cloud applications brings a lot of resiliency and uptime and like active active kind of thinking built with multi regions multi zones than however traditional hosted applications are built so that’s where we are headed completely as a company, from our systems to support our cloud business, as well as our subscription business. And as a company, we are growing, so when we need to grow and scale, I see that as the only way. I’m not expecting us to really build our own data centers and expand, so that’s on the cloud front, and I also think that it brings a lot of enterprise security elements along with it, so it also brings that consumer experience and enterprise security a balance and agility that is needed for the business.

Tim Crawford 17:30
How much of that is how much of your decisions and strategies around cloud are influenced by the fact you’re based in the Bay Area?

Prakash Kota 17:39
We’re the global company, we may be headquartered and based in Bay Area, but we have our presence across the globe. I don’t think it’s because, and probably it could be I’m biased, probably because I sometimes you don’t know that you’re based in Bay Area and you’re making these decisions unless you compare notes with folks outside of Bay Area, but I do think that’s where everybody’s headed, is how I feel, and that could be again a Bay Area kind of thinking.

Tim Crawford 18:04
Sure, somebody not Bay Area should be this commenting on, but this, but this goes back to the value of that peer to peer, that CIO network. Totally,

Prakash Kota 18:13
yeah. And I feel like this is a common theme, and coming to AI, right? I would say we are leveraging more as we collect more data, whether it’s our employee or whatnot, from insights, right? Our goal is, how do we convert that into insights, and how do we leverage AI, ML to, whether it’s chatbots, whether it’s RPA, or whatever it could be, right? It’s more like digital workforce, is what I call, how do we augment our existing workforce with digital workforce, so that we can get more value, especially wherever there is monotonous repetitive work that needs to be done. I think that this is a huge advantage for us to start leveraging AI to augment with our existing workforce, because we all struggle for talent, and again in Valley, that is another problem. Again, we are located everywhere as well, and we recruit everywhere, but we continue to struggle for the same talent. So, our goal is, how do we make the work for all of our engineers, or anybody in the organization, more exciting, so that they are not doing monotonous work? And that’s where we leverage some of these AI cool technologies to augment our workforce, and we are experimenting in different areas and leveraging as it comes,

Tim Crawford 19:25
so many people will take different, or people will take different approaches to what they’re using AI for. It sounds like your starting point is, How do I get my workforce more focused and get the rote tasks away from them, so that they can be doing more meaningful work at some point. I would think that that shifts to providing you with greater insights around your customers for faster, more accurate business decisions.

Prakash Kota 19:53
Yeah, exactly. And that’s more than the IT friend that I, whatever I examples I gave, and there is so much effort in the products. Pace again, leveraging instrumenting within our customers’ usage and getting insights and giving more value to our customers. There’s a separate AI practice for that, that they’re completely focused on adding more value to our customers, but whatever examples I gave is more on the portfolio that I oversee and manage.

Tim Crawford 20:18
Excellent, excellent. So, as we kind of wrap on the episode question I always like to ask, and I think based on our past conversations, I’m really excited to hear your response to this, but what excites you most about the role of the CIO, both there at Autodesk, but then kind of more broadly, both today and moving forward?

Prakash Kota 20:39
I’ve seen it just within Autodesk, too, I’ve seen last 15 years how this role has evolved, and mainly I think this is the most exciting time to be a CIO, because previously I would say CIO’s roles was almost like you’re responsible for everything that nobody cares until something breaks, is what I used to tell, but now you have this unique opportunity to work across the company to leverage technology naturally to enable them to make quick decisions and get the desired outcomes much faster, because the rate at which things are changing is dramatic, and I think we are in that unique position now where the focus is on value delivery and how do you partner with different organizations across the company to equip and enable them so that they can do whatever they need to do to be effective and productive and so that partnership I think this is the best time to be playing this role it’s no easy it looks all sexy, but I would say, unless you are passionate and interested in it. If you’re interested, I’m telling you, this is the best time to be playing a CIA role, and the technology also that we all have that we can leverage to enable our business partners. I would say this is probably the best time. I’m thoroughly enjoying it.

Tim Crawford 21:57
That’s great, Prakash. It’s been great having you on the program. Thanks for making the time.

Prakash Kota 22:02
Thank you, Tim. Thank you very much. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you.

Tim Crawford 22:07
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, and SoundCloud. Don’t forget to subscribe, and thank you for listening. Thank.