Introduction
This week I’m joined by Karl Mosgofian, the CIO at Gainsight.
We discuss how the role of the CIO and IT has changed…and continues to change. Karl talks about his perspective on the CIO’s role in business transformation and customer engagement. He talks about the changing landscape of how solutions are used within a company and the role of the CIO. He takes it further by outlining his perspective on why the CIO needs to look beyond deploying and operating tools to how they are used.
Speaker Profiles
Karl Mosgofian Twitter: https://twitter.com/karlmosgofian
Karl Mosgofian LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karl-mosgofian-4594a2/
Gainsight: https://www.gainsight.com
Audio File
Featured Hashtags
#CIO #Leadership #CX #DigitalTransformation #CIOitk
Podcast Transcript
Tim Crawford 0:00
The companies are looking for new ways to transform their business to remain relevant and differentiated within their industry. Technology now plays a central role in this transformation. Hello, and welcome to the CIO in the Know podcast, where I take a provocative but pragmatic look at the intersection of business and technology. I’m your host, Tim Crawford, a CIO and strategic advisor at Avoa. This week, I’m joined by Karl Mosgofian, the CIO at Gainsight. We discuss how the role of the CIO and IT has changed and continues to change. Carl talks about his perspective on the CIO’s role in business transformation and customer engagement. He talks about the changing landscape of how solutions are used within a company and the role of the CIO. He takes it further by outlining his perspective on why the CIO needs to look beyond deploying and operating tools to how they were used. Karl, welcome to the program.
Karl Mosgofian 1:04
Hey, it’s great to see you,
Tim Crawford 1:05
Karl Mosgofian, CIO at Gainsight. You know, to kind of get us started, why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are and your role as CIO at Gainsight?
Karl Mosgofian 1:16
Yeah, I’ve had a long career in IT, mostly in the application space, but also pretty much everything at one time or another. You know, I’ve been a been a CIO now a couple times. Was very lucky to get into such a great company as Gainsight. You know, a lot of startup energy and, you know, category creator, and in the customer success space, which I think is just a fantastic place to be today, and as CIO here I am responsible for security IT operations and applications, so pretty standard kind of set of responsibilities, I would say, with the exception that I’m responsible not just for sort of standard IT security, but also for the product, which has been interesting,
Karl Mosgofian 2:02
really interesting, and I’ve really enjoyed learning a lot in that space and having that responsibility as well.
Tim Crawford 2:09
No, that’s great. And I do want to ask you, as we get through the conversation, a little bit about it and the rest of the business, but let’s start off by kind of more of a softball topic. You know, a lot has changed in the last year, plus now for all of us. If we look at that from a CIO perspective, I mean, what, what has changed from your perspective in terms of the role of the CIO and the role of it?
Karl Mosgofian 2:36
Yeah, it’s interesting in terms of, you know, the what’s happened in the last year, specifically, it has been a sort of a challenging year logistically, but also I think in terms of what CIOs have been asked to do. I know that for me, you know, responding to COVID, and you know, the sort of large numbers of people working from home, as opposed to in the past, which we already had a lot of people working from home, you know, so for us it wasn’t a complete shock to the system, but still, you know, it really meant not just thinking about technology, but also culture usage, right, when everybody started to, I remember looking at the stats on Stack on Slack usage going through the roof, right, and obviously suddenly everybody’s on Zoom, and the question was not just how do you make sure that people have a platform for doing video teleconferences, it was things like how do you help people deal with Zoom fatigue, it was topics that have not necessarily always been considered it topics, but the fact is that we’re we’re the technology people, and that encompasses more than just, hey, here’s the buttons you push, sometimes it has to do with here are the, you know, the ways to use this technology without burning yourself out or here are the norms of usage in a tool like Teams or Slack, so that they’re actually adding efficiency and not actually taking it away, right, because those kind of tools can can kind of be a two-edged sword, and so sometimes if people are just are using tools in ways that actually get in each other’s way, you know, you’re actually losing productivity, it’s you’re going the wrong direction. So, yeah, I found it very interesting. It has been much more involved with things outside of quote unquote traditional IT technology stuff.
Tim Crawford 4:40
So, how does that work? I mean, you have, you have some responsibilities within the core product of the business, but then also within it. Talk to me about that relationship, and it – this doesn’t have to be specific to Gainsight, but just the importance of that relationship from your perspective of. It non it, and where things like trust come in, and the role of it, and how people look at it. How has that changed as well?
Karl Mosgofian 5:09
Yeah, I think it’s, you know, first of all, I think when this topic comes up, the thing I always try and keep in mind is some things I think have changed a lot, and some things I don’t think have changed a lot, and it’s good to understand both of those. Right, the fact that things are in the cloud now doesn’t mean they’re simple. It doesn’t mean you don’t need business analysts helping to print, right? So,
Tim Crawford 5:32
so I don’t just take my credit card, swipe it, and I’m good to go. Yeah, exactly.
Karl Mosgofian 5:38
It’s no, not at all. And, and so you know things like the role of a business analyst in helping translate business requirements into technology solutions. I think in some ways it’s even more important than ever, because it used to be at least the technology solution was some sort of monolithic ERP system or something. Now it’s 100 different SaaS applications that need to be integrated, and you need to understand how the data talks to each other and what means what. Where it’s a super complicated world, and it’s very easy to get started, so the business group can, in fact, swipe their credit card, so to speak, SaaS application, right? You know, and that’s creating a little bit of a different dynamic, but the thing is, is that at some point they’ll come to it, yeah, right, because they’ll run up against something. It’s like, hey, this isn’t what we do for a living, this is actually really hard, and we need somebody who can, who can actually do that. And so I think in some ways it is more important than ever, but the role is a little different, and it’s less of a controlling everything role and more a facilitator, and really with a very strong partnership. So you know, you mentioned trust, it’s it’s huge, right? Because if you don’t have that, frankly, the business won’t come to you, and they’ll get themselves in all kinds of trouble,
Tim Crawford 7:04
but I mean, are there techniques, maybe, that that you have found that are good things, lessons to learn about building trust with those outside of it?
Karl Mosgofian 7:14
Well, the the approach that I’ve taken that I think has worked pretty, pretty well is really that thinking of yourself as a facilitator more than a sort of a dictator, right? And I found that that’s worked really well. I think once people understand that you’re not, you’re not trying to take over, you’re not trying to take away their freedom of being able to try things and move quickly, you’re really trying to help them. Then you start to build some trust, and you can build on that, and start saying, well, you know, maybe you don’t actually need to do all this stuff. What if I did some of this, and you know, at a certain point people are like, yeah, that would be great. I’m actually finding that what used to be 10% of someone’s time to administrate some little application in my group is now becoming almost a full-time job, and that person is frustrated because they never really signed up for this in the first place, or they love doing it, but they want a career path right around working with applications and I can’t give it to them, I just have this one thing, in you know, in any case, probably the right place for them is it, and so those kind of things can happen naturally when you have trust, but I think when, when, if you try and come in with too heavy a hand and say, okay, it’s a new sheriff in town. This is, this is very much, I think, something you need to think about when you’re a new CIO, is sort of what sort of tone you set early, but I personally liked it to have kind of a light touch and build that trust, and then, and then you can bring stuff in, as opposed to trying to sort of take over and risking people getting up on their hind legs, yeah. And then once they’re in a defensive mode, it’s just very hard to ever get past that.
Tim Crawford 9:11
Yeah, it’s, you know, it’s that command and control, right, that mentality that I can recall growing up within within it, and that might have served us well in the past, but it’s not going to serve us well moving forward. When you think about moving forward, you know one of the things that companies are having to go through during this time is business transformation, and we hear a lot that’s talked about with digital transformation, but I want to start with business transformation. How much do you think that plays a role, and what do you think the role of the CIO is in that business transformation, or shifting how a company engages with its customers? How it, and I’ll get to customer engagement, maybe in a minute, so maybe we could tease those apart, but Cheng. Is the way it operates changes the way it thinks, the way it approaches problems, and what’s the role of the CIO in that?
Karl Mosgofian 10:08
Yeah, again, I think it’s a huge role, and I think there’s two things that are why the CIO is so important in that. The first is it’s hard to think of any business transformation right now that isn’t going to involve technology, right? I mean, it may or not be digital transformation, quote unquote, but there’s just almost nothing that happens in the modern company, right, that’s not driven by systems. But I think even more importantly, the CIO has a vision across the whole company, and I think in almost any organization you look at, you would find that each individual group is good in their space, right, and, and that where all kinds of organizations struggle are, you know, the cross-functional business processes, except that it seems like everything’s cross-functional now. I mean, that’s the thing about the modern enterprise, is that it’s much less siloed than it used to be. And so when you start saying, hey, we’re going to do this business transformation, we’re going to change how we sell, we’re going to change, you know what kind of markets we go after. We’re going to change how we operate. That’s not one department, that’s a bunch of departments, and really the only department or person or executive in a company often who has a real understanding of business process in each of the groups and how they all connect to each other, is the CIO, and in the IT group, and so I think that that’s incredibly important, because the number of failed or struggling projects that we see because of those problems of the interlock between different groups or different business processes or different systems is tremendous, like that’s a huge risk, and it is, is the is the mitigation for that risk, making sure that in fact a group is not off trying to do something that really needs to be a cross-functional effort.
Tim Crawford 12:13
Yeah, I love the way you think about that, because this is this kind of ties into two things that I’ve talked about in the past, one is it is one of the few organizations that has visibility across the entire organization. The next closest is probably HR or finance, but then the other piece to that is when you think about externally facing and you think about the process of how your company operates, and this will get to something I wanted to ask you about with customer engagement is, you know, Tim Crawford to marketing, in some cases, is a different Tim Crawford to sales, is a different Tim Crawford to support.
Karl Mosgofian 12:52
Absolutely,
Tim Crawford 12:52
and those silos tend to hurt us, because Tim Crawford is just Tim Crawford, and when I engage with a company, and this kind of gets to what I wanted to kind of talk to you about with regards to customer engagement, is how do you think about that, and how does the CIO step into, or what is the role of the CIO from your perspective in terms of helping that conversation or helping improve that situation, and I know this is this is kind of front and center for you and your role there at Gainsight.
Karl Mosgofian 13:25
Yeah,
Tim Crawford 13:25
but kind of, what’s your perspective on that? Because I think this is an important aspect,
Karl Mosgofian 13:30
I think it’s super important, and I think it’s, it’s interesting too, because I feel like there’s sort of an evolution in it. You start by saying we need a system to process transactions, right, and to like pump work through a system, and then at some point people are like, well, this is great, but the data is terrible, right? Like, this is all you built this gleaming, beautiful machine, but the works are being gummed up by the fact that my customer data is terrible, right, and so then you got to dig into things like data quality, which in some ways is harder. I mean, this – it’s ironic. I think that something like just keeping your customer master clean, which seems like not as hard as building a whole CRM system, is often the Achilles heel that kills the whole thing. It’s one of the reasons that at Gainsight, you know, when we built our product, a big part of it was a way of modeling customers that enables people to handle that and say, you know what, we’ll kind of normalize things in our system, so that even if your data is a little crazy and disconnected, at least in Gainsight, you’ll have a clean 360 degree view of customers, but you know, Gainsight is not the only way to do that, but I think everyone, everyone’s either needs some sort of tool like that or needs to be thinking about it on their radar, because if it’s not biting you today. It probably will, that that whole issue of, you know, trying to connect all of those, all those different data sources, and again, in the new world, it’s, it’s, it’s almost only getting harder, because there are more systems that have customer data and product data, and all these different pieces of master data that need to be synthesized and managed and governed, so super important.
Tim Crawford 15:26
How do you kind of keep your tabs on who the customer is and how the customer is evolving, you know, as the CIO? Because typically, or historically, that would have been maybe the role of marketing or the role of sales, but it seems like the CIO needs to be part of that as well. How do you kind of keep plug, keep yourself plugged into that equation?
Karl Mosgofian 15:51
Well, I guess for me, I, it’s, it’s a little bit easier at Gainsight than it might be in a different situation, because I actually have an external role, so I have a, I have an internal set of responsibilities, but I also have a responsibility to connect with the CIOs of our customers, which is fantastic. It’s part of my job that I really love,
Tim Crawford 16:15
great,
Karl Mosgofian 16:16
and it also really lets me have my finger on the pulse of what’s going on the market. What are people struggling with out there? So I’m, I’m pretty close to our product, certainly a lot closer than I’ve ever been at any other company that I’ve been at, and I’ve really enjoyed that. So, you know, but I, that’s sort of cheating in a sense, that if you’re not at a at a company that you know, if you’re not at an IT company that actually, you know, CIOs know what your product is, and right, or a company that
Tim Crawford 16:48
sells to the CIO,
Karl Mosgofian 16:49
yeah, exactly, you don’t, you don’t necessarily have that, have that advantage, but I think you know there is a tendency I’ve seen in my over my career for actually both sales and marketing, but especially marketing, to sort of do their own thing from a technology standpoint. There’s quite often they’ve got a little mini IT department in marketing, and I think in the past, to be honest, I’ve sort of let that be a bit of an excuse to say, well, okay, they seem to be fine, and I’ve got plenty to do, so not entirely sure what all the heck they’re doing over there, but you know, not sure I need to, right? And I think now I can’t get away with that anymore, and, and in the modern world, I think that if I think about my career in it, it’s very been very much been a movement from sort of back office to front office, and I think that just reflects the priorities of of companies and of the technology space that you know, that that front end, the seat, you know, we had ERPs, then we had CRM, and then we had a whole explosion of tools and technology, and and just much more sophisticated thinking about who our customers are, and how we market to them, and how we manage the funnel. I mean, that stuff used to be much simpler, and, and it’s not anymore, and it, the new fangled stuff works great, but it’s complicated, and it’s, it’s important to have some understanding of it,
Tim Crawford 18:20
and it’s, it’s technology, it’s not just, you know, it’s not a spreadsheet, it’s not on paper, it’s technology, and so if you kind of bring those pieces together, right, companies are having to change and evolve through business transformation, we have to think about how we’re engaging with our customers, oh, and by the way, our customers are changing, especially in the last 12 to 18 months. How do you kind of evolve that? And then guess what’s underpinning all of it is technology. So, why wouldn’t the CIO be involved? Or having the right CIO is going to be critically important, I would think.
Karl Mosgofian 18:59
Yeah, no, absolutely. And you know the other thing that we talk about a lot at Gainsight is kind of specific to our product is this whole question of tech touch, right, and how you segment your customers, and you make sure that you know there are certain customers that need white glove treatment, but there are other customers, the long tail, where it would kill you to do that, you know. So you really need good technology solutions to make sure you’re staying well connected with your customers, but frankly, you’re not just sending out like some dumb, you know, stock email to a million people that they all ignore, right? I mean, you really want a pretty sophisticated system, so that you’re communicating to people in a digital way, right, in an automated way, but that’s frankly smart, that’s responsive, you know, that’s dynamic, and also ideally that can include human touch, right. So we, for instance, in our, you know, we use Gainsight ourselves a lot, right, and so. Or you know, in Gainsight, we set things up where someone will get an email, let’s say, about a new, a new feature that we’re trying to drive adoption on, and you know, we’ll have a whole workflow laid out that says, you know, we send them this email, we send them this other communication a week later, we send them this, and then, you know, at some point we say, well, we haven’t, you know, no one’s opening this, no one’s happening, so now we’re going to actually route an action to a person, right? So we, you know, we, it’s a combination of tech touch and human touch, so that you’re being very efficient, right, but you’re also not saying, “Hey, I’m just going to do an email blast of million emails and hope for the best.
Tim Crawford 20:37
Yeah,
Karl Mosgofian 20:38
that’s not really enough either, right? So it was
Tim Crawford 20:40
the there was a saying that people would use all the time, spray and pray, you kind of just go out and you just try and launch this and hope for the best. One of the things you talked about with regards to that is, you know, software as a service and cloud, and you know there’s a proliferation of that that is taking place within the organization, not just in it, and you mentioned that you know with marketing they might be going off to do their own thing, but maybe there’s a way to kind of loop that back in. How have these SaaS-based solutions kind of impacted the CIO?
Karl Mosgofian 21:18
You know, it’s it’s huge, and it’s a, it’s a bit of a sprawling mess in some ways, although you know, I had a recent thought, which is that I was thinking back to what my landscape looked like 20 years ago, and you know what it looked like was a couple of big core platforms like SAP and Siebel at that time, probably, and then a ton of internal custom applications, and so in some ways I think our world is very different. In some ways I think it’s not right. When people say, “Wow, you’ve got 200 SAS applications, that’s enormous. I think back, and I remember when at one point I think we had something like 100 Lotus Notes applications, right, custom little mini things. So I think in some ways it’s always been like this. There’s always been all these very specific pockets of need that are not addressed by some giant monolithic platform, and the difference is now those are all individual SaaS applications, as opposed to a bunch of custom applications, so you know there’s good and bad about that, but I think the biggest difference really is sort of what we were talking about in terms of the fact that the business is now so much more empowered, not only to fire up an application, but even in some cases to do some of their own integration, you know, which used to be the last frontier, right? And, like, you could say, ‘Look, you guys go knock yourself out, but you’re going to have to come talk to me at some point,
Tim Crawford 22:56
right? When you want to connect me again, who
Karl Mosgofian 22:58
can?
Tim Crawford 22:58
Yeah,
Karl Mosgofian 22:58
yeah, who can pump data in and out? And now people are like, “No, watch this. I fired up this little easy-to-use integration tool, and you know, when I first started hearing about that, my response was, “How the heck are you pulling the data, because you don’t have like admin rights to anything? And they’re like, “It’s fine, because I’m just pulling the data that I have access to myself. I was like, oh, okay, so actually you can go quite a long ways on that. So it’s, you know, the businesses groups are empowered, that means that we need, I think, to take a much more partnering kind of approach with them, but I think in the end it’s good. I mean, I think it’s driving us all to a better world than the extremes of either sort of the wild west of business groups being completely on their own or it trying to completely control and manage everything that’s going on everywhere all the time,
Tim Crawford 23:51
yeah, and you talked a little bit about how you bring these applications in, and I know we’ve had conversations in the past about this, bring applications in, and you, you lay them down, and you move on to the next, but you’ve started to kind of identify some changes to that, and one of the areas is collaboration, you know, everyone’s on Zoom or Teams or Webex, or any number of platforms, I think everyone now, it’s some in some way, shape, or form. They touch, you know, Zoom specifically, or Teams, probably for most of their interactions, but you’re looking at this a little differently than just simply, how do I deploy these collaboration tools, whether it’s video conferencing, or you know, something like Slack, or can you talk a little bit about that? Because I think that’s really interesting, how you’re thinking about this.
Karl Mosgofian 24:48
Yeah, I just, to me, collaboration is a, it’s kind of a broad topic, and so there’s the obvious things like Slack and Teams, and there’s things like Zoom, but I think if you go to any company. Right now, you’ll find, you know, this group is using Trello, and this one’s using Monday, and there’s like a bunch of these different kinds of collaborative technologies, and you know, Google Docs or Office 365 are being used in all kinds of different ways, right, things like Box, people are doing all kinds of collaboration inside those tools, and not necessarily just a file repository, right? And I think the big danger there is, is not that we don’t have enough tools, but we have too many tools, and people don’t know what the heck to use for what, and then they can’t find anything, right, because it’s everything is all spread out, and so I think it really has a role in providing some sort of rationalizing that tool set and helping people understand which tools to use for, for what, being careful not to try and mandate too much, because I think you get into trouble with that, you can do some of that, you can have some standards, right? You shouldn’t be running multiple, you know, Slack and Teams and other things like that. But I think when it comes to the smaller, like project management things, different groups do have different needs, right? In this group, Smart Sheets really works well for them, and for someone else, Trello, where it really works well, and they’re pretty different tools, so that’s okay. I’m not trying to sort of force fit everybody into the same tool, but when a new person joins and they look at a landscape of 20 different tools, I also want to guide them and say, hey, if you’re doing this, this is the right tool to use for that, and I want to, as much as possible, reduce the number of tools, you know, without, again, without being too heavy-handed about it, but because I just think it just creates this chaotic environment, and everyone is like frustrated, and again, these tools are supposed to help make your world better, not be negative productivity,
Tim Crawford 26:57
right, so this is not getting it down to the right one tool to use, but rather to say get it down to the right smallest number of tools to use.
Karl Mosgofian 27:09
Yes, I think, I think the the dream of one tool is it’s a beautiful dream, and we should probably still be trying to move in that direction, but but not at the expense of, frankly, making everybody just ignore us and go do their own thing anyway. But it’s that’s the danger, right? If you’re too, if you’re too draconian about this, people will just ignore you, and then you’ll have even more tools.
Tim Crawford 27:35
Yeah, but how do you do that? How do you start to understand and walk me through kind of how you would approach that problem
Karl Mosgofian 27:43
to me, I, I really think the key thing is to, is to actually have someone own that, you know, so I would make the observation that traditionally a lot of those tools have been owned in, like, an IT operations group, and you know, their job is to is to install the tool and make sure it’s running, but you know they’re not necessarily spending a lot of time thinking about adoption and usage and norms of how you use the tool and naming conventions, right. It’s funny what a big deal simple thing like naming conventions can make to making you know a box folder more useful, right. And so really the thing that I’m, I’m trying to do is actually create within it, actually have a person who is a collaboration person, frankly, who owns that. I feel like in the old days, we had sort of the major silos were sort of applications, and then sort of it operations, and I feel like that there’s a new silo called collaboration, and it’s somewhere in between, and it’s not just an infrastructure kind of thing, although there’s a big chunk of that, like you got to make sure that stuff is working,
Tim Crawford 29:03
sure,
Karl Mosgofian 29:04
it’s not like a pure business process thing, it’s really kind of its own thing. So I think it’s super important to figure out somebody on your team who can really own that and run with it, who has a passion around it.
Tim Crawford 29:17
Yeah,
Karl Mosgofian 29:18
and again, who’s interested not just in pumping tools out but in helping people really get the most out of them.
Tim Crawford 29:23
Does that, does that change when you think about kind of this navigation that we’re all doing of work from home versus return to work? I mean, how did, how does that kind of layer in here?
Karl Mosgofian 29:34
Yeah, I think it just makes it more important, right? It’s, you know, people have it’s the huge cliche now that all this is done is accelerate trends that were already in motion, and I think that’s absolutely true, but it just ups the ante, right? So tools that were nice to have before are now must have, and tools that you could get away with them just working okay, like. Just, okay, is not enough, because you know when you were sometimes dialing into a meeting using some sort of telecom software or something, and it wasn’t that great, okay? Like, you didn’t do it that often, and so it was a little frustrating, right? When you’re all day long in Zoom, Zoom better work really well, and you know those tools better be really good, so I think that’s the thing, it just puts so much more emphasis on it, and so the good thing about that is I think people are now starting to really appreciate the importance of that collaboration technology, and that it’s something you need to make some investment in, you need to put some resource on, you need to take it seriously, otherwise you’ll just kind of have a bunch of tools, but you won’t really necessarily be running a super productive organization.
Tim Crawford 30:47
Yeah, no, that’s great. That’s great. Well, we’re gonna have to leave it right there. Carl, really appreciate your time today, and kind of sharing your perspective as we think about the changing role of the CIO.
Karl Mosgofian 30:59
Yeah, this was really fun, and it’s always great to talk to you.
Tim Crawford 31:06
For more information on the CIO in the Know podcast, visit us online at CIO in the know.com You can also find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Please subscribe, and thank you for listening.
Unknown Speaker 31:19
Thank
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