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In a Changed World, Communication is King
CIOs Sound Off on Key Technologies Keeping Businesses Connected, Engaged
The CIO 100, IDG’s annual event to recognize exceptional IT leaders, celebrates 100 IT organizations for driving digital business growth through technology innovation. It is in the spirit of these awards that we’ve put together this series of interviews with CIOs from leading organizations, with a special focus on innovation in communications. Read on to learn how IT leaders in award-winning organizations are boosting productivity, streamlining collaboration and redefining the nature of work.
The Benefits of Standardizing on One Cloud Communications Platform
An Interview with 8x8 CTO Bryan Martin
IDG recently sat down with Bryan Martin, Chief Technology Officer for 8x8, to talk about how the pandemic-driven business environment has created an opportunity for companies to rethink their communication tools to create a more integrated, streamlined experience both internally and for customers.
What communications challenges are companies facing today?
The environment that we’re working in now has made communications a paramount priority. Many companies have acquired a lot of disparate legacy communications systems over time. Now they want to standardize on a common cloud solution to rationalize, simplify, and save money, but more importantly, to make communication across the business more efficient and productive.
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What benefits are IT leaders looking for in migrating to a common communications platform in the cloud?
These days, we all have to work from everywhere, not just anywhere– and to work effectively in a large organization, you need to be able to find and connect with people you don’t know, no matter where they are. So end users need a simple, understandable experience that delivers all the communications features they need.
One key thing a common platform enables is a searchable, actionable global directory of your entire employee base. It lets you search for people by skills, location, position, and so on. You can see their pictures so when you do meet them in person, you know who they are. You can see what time zone someone is in and tell whether they’re online and available. You can start a chat, turn the chat into a voice call in one click, and escalate that with just one more click into a full multi-point video session
Bryan Martin
EVP
Bryan Martin is the technological visionary at 8x8, which is a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications, as well as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape for Worldwide UCaaS providers. At 8x8 Bryan leads the company’s drive to patent a range of disruptive and innovative technologies. At 8x8, he has held the positions of Chief Executive Officer, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Technical Officer and Senior Vice President, Engineering Operations. Martin holds 65 United States Patents in the fields of semiconductors, computer architecture, video processing algorithms, videophones and communications.
CTO, 8x8
EXECUTIVE VIEWPOINT
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and bring other people into the conversation. That same simplicity in the contact center allows your agents to find the experts they need quickly, whether they’re in a call center or working from home.
How long does it take to make this shift?
IT leaders worry that this heterogeneous mess will take forever to unwind, but you can do it at whatever speed makes sense for your business. It’s surprisingly simple when you have a trusted partner for planning and implementation support.
What about cost savings?
If you start with three or four different vendors of communication services and six different carriers connecting you to the PSTN, rationalizing that into a single cloud platform from a single provider delivers huge cost savings. We frequently see our clients’ telecommunications costs drop by up to 50%.
Watch the video interview with 8x8 CTO Bryan Martin
WATCH
INTERVIEW
Visit
8x8.com/8/cio-playbook
to learn more about the benfits of a common cloud communications platform.
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What are the IT advantages of a single communications platform?
It’s a single hand to shake. You replace different vendors supplying different capabilities and blaming each other for problems and incompatibilities with one partner who owns support issues end-to- end. You also don’t have to worry about how multiple systems interact and share data. There’s only one security audit, and the vendor does it.
Administering one system globally from a web browser anywhere also dramatically simplifies moves, adds, and changes, even as your users are accessing the network from all over. Outsourcing capability to the cloud and letting the cloud vendor do the heavy lifting for you frees your IT team to work on other things.
Sanjay Shringarpure
CIO, E & J Gallo Winery
Sanjay Shringarpure is the Chief Information Officer of E&J Gallo Winery. With $4.6 billion in revenue, the California-based winery is one of the largest private companies in the United States. As CIO, Sanjay has overseen a major technology transformation designed to shift IT from a traditional order-taking or- ganization to one that is a strategic partner to the business. His foresight and planning set E&J Gallo apart from competitors, as his focus on communications technology and culture has set the company up for continued growth.
Right before the pandemic hit the U.S.! What prompted the communication shift years ago?
Gallo is very Modesto [California] centric, but it is easy to forget we have sales offices all around the country. We’ve had a distributed work force and hire lots of digital natives. In IT, we bring in more than 30 interns and hire about 10 annually. A lot of IT departments stopped internships when global sourcing and outsourcing took off, but we kept that flowing and it has delivered dividends.
What’s driving the modernization of your communication systems for the enterprise, particularly now?
Gallo culture is very inclusive, even if you check the engagement surveys for our IT department. That being said, we have this engaged community – and all of a sudden, everything’s remote. We fortunately had the collaboration platforms in place. The collaboration tools really helped us navigate the initial disruptions. We moved to our first platform five years ago, and then moved away to an integrated platform. It rolled out in January 2020.
A Culture of Engagement Pays Off
How communication technology helped a California winery stay ahead of the pandemic
Started almost a century ago, Central California’s E & J Gallo Winery has built its success based on customer intimacy, deep-rooted culture, and long-standing tradition. And under the leadership of CIO Sanjay Shringarpure, the grape business prioritized the most fluid tech communications – years before the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Shringarpure shares how the entire company supported a remote business, why there were prepared when the pandemic unexpectedly came, and the concern of his, and all businesses, for the future.
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What thought process went into choosing the best communications tools?
If you’re having a conversation where you’re not taking initiative, then you’re not clear on the vision. When you go to partners with “What should I buy” or “What are your requirements,” you have not done the homework. Too many IT professionals serve the requirements – not a bad thing, as we still need them – but why not take your own version of what it should look like? Let them break it apart and change it, but then you work together towards this shared vision.
How did you advocate a tech-forward approach to such a traditional business?
In 2014, Gallo as an organization decided tech would be one of the tenets to drive the Gallo ecosystem. That helps a lot; recognition that tech will be a competitive advantage, and as a CIO I had access, if not a seat, to the board meetings, advisory committees and such, where we can help discuss, modify and evolve the vision.
Honestly, we didn’t start with the toolkit or functionality. We established themes: We need to deliver agile updates weekly, if not daily, how we need to collaborate, and so on. We focused on the process, then found the tool.
Collaboration is great and we have the tools. The next concern is, “How can we not lose the culture?” As we become more physically distant, we need the ability to not just be transactional or quid pro quo. That’s weighing on my mind. How do we create the soft side of that culture that isn’t formulaic or forced? It’s going to be a fundamental issue that organizations, particularly IT, will have to face as more and more people don’t come into the office.
Sarah Naqvi
Executive Vice President and CIO, HMSHost Corporation
Sarah Naqvi is Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer of HMSHost Corpo- ration, a world leader in creating dining for travel venues. HMSHost operates locations all over North America, and is part of Auto- grill Group, the world’s leading provider of food & beverage services for people on the move. Naqvi efforts to prioritize and integrate communications into the overall business strategy has helped position HMSHost for sustained growth and resilience.
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Obviously the food and travel industries have been directly impacted by the recent year. What have been the biggest changes to your communication needs?
The diversity of communication was suddenly not OK. Once decided, employees have to be trained on it, the tech needs to be deployed and essentially everything done overnight. The effect is that now we’re coming back post-COVID, we’re using a single communications platform, and now we’re asking, “Do we still need VOIP, too?” And if we do, to what level?
What’s driving the modernization of communication systems for the enterprise, specifically yours?
We are a centralized organization – our East Coast headquarters reaches out to 200 North American offices – and that presents a challenge. It’s not just basic communications like email, but also servicing and resolving issues from afar. The members of our workforce are diverse in language and communication channels, they may be mobile, and English may not be their primary language.
Platform, Technology, Strategy—Building a Resilient Communications Infrastructure
Reliability, Connectivity Must-Haves for Successful Collaboration
The coronavirus pandemic seriously paused eating together and traveling abroad – the bread and butter of service leader HMSHost. Executive Vice President and CIO Sarah Naqvi helped the international company get its post-pandemic footing, find its communication gaps, and restrategize spending so more money is available. She explains how.
Pre-COVID, we all had preferred channels for communications. I might use Zoom, someone else might use Microsoft Teams, and that was OK.
Instantaneously, we needed to standardize the communication channels and use something that can support our masses.
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Communication strategy has been ignored. We invest in the platform and we invest in the technology. Now we need to invest in the communication.
What is the main recommendation you’d give to other tech leaders putting together a modern enterprise communication strategy, particularly post-COVID?
The need for communication was always here, but the focus wasn’t there. Speaking for myself, I didn’t have a strategic focus on communication and collaboration, or at least it wasn’t grounded or thought out. We have to ask: What is the demand? What region are we serving? How are we serving? Communication strategy has to be part of the overall strategy.
What are the main benefits you’re looking for in a communications solution? How has that evolved in the recent year?
Two, we’ll take a better look at our employees’ connectivity. Some work in areas where there isn’t a good signal. As we look at 5G and other tech, there will hopefully be enough advancements for us to reach all the employee subsets well, too.
In another example, we work with Burger King and rolled out [touchscreen] kiosks everywhere. But who wants to touch a screen now? Now we use QR codes so customers can use their own mobile phone.
The demand of remote conferences is up, too. We had 30,000 employees pre-COVID. We are used to talking to all of them at once, but platforms usually don’t scale to that. Now we have [communication] tiers within our organization.
One, the reliability, resilience and uptime. There are so many issues with collaboration tools, and we don’t need that when reliability becomes imperative. As we move forward, we’re looking at the infrastructure to diversify dependence – data centers, multi-channels, or other options.
We also must not approach communication in a fractured way. Our groups were implementing Microsoft Teams, and VOIP, and WebEx. This is a great time to take a step back. What are the channels and what will it look like?
It’s been great from a financial standpoint. For example, we reduced the VOIP spend and were able to invest elsewhere.
David Behen
Vice President and CIO, La-Z-Boy
David Behen has served as Vice President and CIO at La-Z-Boy, Inc. since June 2017, leading the IT function across the enterprise, aligning technology with the La-Z-Boy business objectives. Behen led La-Z-Boy’s IT Reinvention project, started in 2018, to redefine IT culture to reflect a focus on innovation, operations and business partnerships across the company, including talent development, customer experience, and cybersecurity.
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What are the actionable insights you need via data and analysis from your communication system, particularly now?
We looked at our priorities with business partners: La-Z-Boy is a manufacturer, wholesaler, runs retail stores, supports independent dealers and has distribution centers. Another priority is insights around our customer care unit. A lot of people are fixing up their homes and buying home furnishings. We’ve seen a significant increase since the pandemic, as people aren’t eating out or traveling, so they have more discretionary funds on furniture.
What’s driving the modernization of communication systems for the enterprise?
The pandemic accelerated the modernization of some of the tech we were doing. For example, in January 2020, we piloted [a cloud communications and collaboration platform] – starting with IT. The pandemic arrived here shortly after. We got lucky, and I give a ton of credit to our end users as they were open to the idea of adopting new tech. We were thinking about these things, but when the pandemic hit, it is now just the way we are doing business.
Communication is Key for Resilience, Digital Momentum
La-Z-Boy VP CIO David Behen Charts Post-Pandemic Course
How do tactile businesses pivot during the social distancing era? According to La-Z-Boy Vice President and CIO David Behen, the furniture company already had its eye on remote solutions and smart virtual communication – and the COVID-19 pandemic gave them the opportunity to pursue them with vigor.
Behen explains the permanent tech changes happening at La-Z-Boy, the insights gained from a year of leading while sheltering-in-place, and why communication is always key.
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What are your tips for putting together a modern enterprise communications strategy?
My biggest piece of advice? Overcommunicate — especially CIOs and other IT folks. Over the years, we have sometimes forgotten that communication is key. We now have the tools to do it – and I can’t stress enough — never have I gotten into trouble with overcommunicating, but I can always stub my toe when I don’t communicate enough.
What are the main priorities you have from a communication solution and how have they shifted since the pandemic began?
For all our verticals, I think now they will look at tech in a different way. Tech has always been an enabler, but now it’s transforming their business. As far as the demands on CIOs and IT departments, it will get intense for us. Sometimes you have an unwilling business partner, but now we could have an aggressive one.
We are emphasizing certain projects now because of the pandemic. For instance, we do virtual in-home design sessions. Before, we’d have a world-class design program come to your house, sit with you, come up with floor plans, and design the whole thing. Now you can do that [via video with a cloud communications platform.] The demand filled up really quickly.
Our President of Retail [T.J. Linz] said, “Let’s try it and fail fast” if we need to. And now there’s no going back – not only for our customers, but for our stakeholders who will demand more technology. They got a taste for it, and now they have an appetite for it.
phoenixNAP
Learn how phoenixNAP elimin- ated the risks and costs of maintaining their complex on- premises phone system and why they turned to 8x8 for their digital transformation needs.
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CASE STUDIES
Acer
Learn how Acer created an operate-from-anywhere work- place and improved their customer experience without increasing costs
Find out how Live Oak Bank’s cloud-first strategy allowed them to create branch-like experiences in every virtual interaction.
Live Oak Bank
I wouldn’t say our priorities shifted a lot. We still did an IT reinvention – not a reorganization, as it was a fundamental change in how we did IT, and again, we had these ideas in the hopper. Truth be told, though, they may not have happened for another two years.
