422- AI Needs Architecture Before Automation w/Robert Sheesley

422-Robert Sheesley

Host: Mike Kelley

Guest: Robert Sheesley

Mike Kelley: All right. Well, it's great to have you back for another episode of

You've Been Heard, the show dedicated to the IT executive currently steering

their organizations and the aspiring tech talent preparing for their own seat at

the leadership table. Our focus is always on real unscripted conversations that

move beyond the standard corporate jargon to explore what truly makes, or to

explore what it truly takes to drive an organization forward in this digital

age. Robert, a huge welcome to the show. We're so grateful you've carved out

some time to dive into these topics with us today for our community at

youvebeenheard.com, you're in for an insightful session. Robert brings decades

of experience leading high growth IT organizations across diverse sectors, from

healthcare to home services. A true gem and his leadership style is his firm

belief that it is not just a support function, but the primary engine for

business philosophy, a philosophy that has allowed him to transform complex

environments into agile, value driving powerhouses. Robert, we have a lot of

ground to cover to today regarding your journey, I'd love to start by handing

the floor over to you. Could you introduce yourself to our listeners and share a

bit about your path to leadership?

Robert Sheesley: Absolutely. Thanks, Mike. It's great to be here with you

finally. I know we had some scheduling hurdles to overcome, but I'm glad that we

were able to do that. And it's a joy to be with you today and to talk a little

bit about leadership in the age of some accelerated and exponential AI and

technology evolution. it's exciting time to be a technology executive today.

started my career out in technology. That was not the plan coming out of

business school, six years of undergrad and two years of graduate school, was

more focused on international business, which was my concentration in my MBA.

And I landed at EDS out of the gate. Really? the way I describe it is I had a

man crush on Ross Perot, and I just wanted to work for someone who had such a

high degree of integrity as Ross did, But, EDS was a great foundational start

for me in the technology space. one of the Premier, if not the premier

technology company back in the early nineties and two thousand and, had a great

career, leading up to my global enterprise architecture leader role at Milan,

working for Michael Smith, who was our CIO for several years at Milan

Pharmaceutical. I built the global enterprise architecture practice there from

scratch. I started with one employee. I think by the time I left, we had thirty

plus employees that either were direct reports or matrix reports into that

global architecture organization. And then I jump back into the private equity

world, working in M&A due diligence and M&A integration, which is where I cut my

teeth at Andersen Consulting in places like Alvarez and Marcel Business

Consulting and West Monroe Partners back in the two thousand and the twenty

tens. but yeah, learning from some CIO luminaries in my career, like John Golden

at C and A Michael Smith at Milan really had a great foundational start for me

as an executive leader, which led me into my CIO role at wrench Group for seven

years, beginning back in twenty eighteen. And then I exited more recently in the

fall of twenty twenty four, and have been really sharpening my saw relative to

AI, strategy, AI architecture, and how enterprise architecture is affected, and

will affect the use of AI and AI strategy for mid-market and large scale

organizations across the globe. So for the past year and a half, I've been

mostly consulting, doing a lot of speaking. I delivered a keynote address twice

over the last, actually three times over the last two months. and the title of

that is, Synthetic Intelligence and Architecting the Organizational Mind. So my

last year and a half has been predominantly outside of some M&A due diligence

and framework, and methodology building for some organizations. I've been

focused predominantly on AI.

Mike Kelley: So, I will get us back to this part of the conversation for sure

because I got lots of interest in this because we're trying to change that

mindset and, go through that acceleration in the business. But let's step back

just a tiny bit towards coming out of school with focus on international and,

working for the organizations that you just mentioned, in the nineties and early

two thousand and then making it to a c I o in, I think you said twenty eighteen,

twenty fifteen, twenty eighteen. what helped cause that change in the journey

from the business side towards or the international business into it? what

helped foster that possibility for you?

Robert Sheesley: Yeah, I think, I mentioned, my interest in working for someone

like Ross Perot.

Mike Kelley: Ross.

Robert Sheesley: And that really is what got me involved in technology. I was

not a technologist in college. I think I took a COBOL class. I did do a lot of

statistical analysis as, as a yeah, COBOL. so yeah, there are companies out

there still running mainframe systems. Yeah. but EDS was a great foundation

because, I was in the Marine Corps and went through the Parris Island boot camp

in the Marine Corps. And then I went through the boot camp in Southfield,

Michigan, which was their developer programmer boot camp. And I got to be honest

with you, I don't know which one was more difficult or more challenging because

both were thirteen weeks, shockingly. I guess coincidentally, they were both

thirteen week programs, but that EDS, they call it phase one of the systems

engineer development program was pretty, in the Marine Corps, you have a saying,

high speed, low drag. it was pretty dynamic. and it was a great learning

opportunity for me, someone who was not a technologist to learn the basics of

programming.

Mike Kelley: I was going to say I was mistaken in the way I framed that. So you

started off into technology really quickly in the nineties and I did wasn't like

a transformation in the aughts.

Robert Sheesley: Yeah.

Mike Kelley: Transformation in the nineties.

Robert Sheesley: Yeah. I did start out in technology as a systems engineer and

then as a systems engineer manager. and then I spent a year in corporate

marketing at Editas before I transitioned over to Andersen Consulting, where I

started to work in mergers and acquisitions. So, that was an opportunistic

career move for me. I was hired at Andersen to lead their SAP Center of

Excellence, which was a joint venture between Andersen and General Motors. And a

few weeks after I joined the firm, the talks stalled. And the center of

excellence was paused indefinitely. And Bob dinner, I think was the partner at

Andersen at the time. He assigned me to an M&A engagement, and my M&A career

just took off from there. I did several different post-deal integrations, multi

year, multi organizational, post M&A integrations. And then I evolved into some

leadership roles at CNA insurance where I spent four years, two years on the

technology side and two years on the business side. At CNA. Again, working for

what I would consider one of my CIO, Mount Rushmore CIOs, John Golden, at at c n

a. I learned so much from John. relative to leadership and building structure

around competencies within the IT organization, that not only was technology

strong and foundational, but transcended into the business community. John

introduced a methodology there called business framework, which was all about

enabling the business capabilities with technology. So I think he was ahead of

his time a little bit, back in what year was that? Two thousand and one when I

joined c n a and I think the history that he left at c n a and he's kind of like

the Bill Belichick, I think of CIOs because if you look at John's lineage, and

the people that ultimately became CIOs from that group of people at CNA during

the years two thousand to two thousand and five, it's in the at least half a

dozen to a dozen people that were leaders in John's organization at CNA that

ultimately became CIOs. And so I think it's a testimony to his leadership in the

example that he set.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. And it definitely sounds like he hit on that one thing that

for us has been a common theme. It's learning to understand and listen to the

business and apply technology with that in mind that as the goal that as the

North star. because if I just come in telling you about technology and how cool

it is and how many great things we can do with AI, but I'm not relating it to

the business. And so it sounds like he was teaching you guys that right away.

Not to mention the fact that you had that opportunity playing on both sides of

the fence, so to speak.

Robert Sheesley: Yes, absolutely. great learning experience. And I carried that

forward, that's really where I also cut my teeth in business architecture. I

started to study and apply business architecture principles to my director level

role at CNA. And then one day, one of the consultants who used to work for me at

CNA, who was leading a practice at a consulting firm, called me and asked me if

I would be interested in joining him and a few others down at State Farm to

build a business architecture center of excellence and competency there. And

this was back when business architecture was still being discussed in back

alleys and dark places. And people were, it wasn't mainstream yet. and so,

again, another opportunity. Very opportunistic career movement for me was to

join Greg Sudduth at State Farm and Wendy Keane, who needs no introduction. I

just saw Wendy in London at the Chief Architects Network Summit there. and Wendy

and I and Greg and a few others built this magnificent business architecture

competency within the IT organization of State Farm. And the whole premise

behind that was State Farm. Their CIO and the vice president, leaders of the

organization wanted to get better at serving the business. That was kind of the

primary objective of this idea of building business architecture, competency and

tools and templates and processes so that they could get better at serving the

business needs of the business stakeholder community. And so we spent a lot of

time building business architect, I'm sorry. Business activity models teaching

the newly appointed and hired business architects within the IT organization how

to build business activity models, and then how to build business and technical

requirements based on those activities. And so, business architecture has come

full circle in that it is a competency area of an organization that is very,

very closely aligned to strategy and strategy development, because strategy is

the macro level, how you're going to execute on your mission. And the business

architecture produces artifacts like business capability models that you can use

to describe what the organization does in service of that strategy. The how is

ever changing. how we do things is ever changing the process layer. and how

technology enables those processes is ever changing. And in the case of the last

decade, inter AI and AI certainly is a driver of process change because now

we're talking about introducing a fairly significant amount of digital capital

into what we call it at a future point of view. One of the consulting firms that

I work for architecting the organizational mind.

Mike Kelley: So if the term business architecture is kind of new to me, where do

I go to start trying to figure out exactly what you're talking about? Because

I'm understanding a lot of what you're talking about, but some of our listeners

may not have that experience, may not have had that chance or that guidance. So

where would they go to figure out what you're talking about around business

architecture and then how it fits all of those things fit together with what

you're talking about so that they can advance their organizations, advance

themselves and their organization.

Robert Sheesley: Absolutely. I would point to three resources. if someone were

to come to me and say, where can I go to learn about business architecture and

why that would be valuable for my organization? I would start with the Business

Architecture Guild. the Business Architecture Guild is an organization, a

leading organization within the architecture community. It's, once upon a time,

the business Architect association was probably the leading association in the

practice of business architecture. I actually participated in the development of

the very first, I think, the world's first business architecture certification

course back in two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine. With folks in

Chicago like Paul Bodin and Jack Hilty, Paul taught a university course at

DePaul called Business Architecture. And so I would start with the Business

Architecture Guild. the business they own, in essence, the business architecture

body of knowledge. Very much so. The business Architecture Guild is kind of like

the project management Institute. is to project management. The business

architecture guild is to business architecture. another area I would go is, if

you're an architecture leader in organization or you're wanting to learn more

about business architecture or enterprise architecture, the chief architect

network, I mentioned, I was just in London with a lot of those folks at their

spring summit is a great place to get education material, tools, templates and

conversations around the application of business architecture and enterprise

architecture. And then the third source or the third resource is Wendy Keane,

who I mentioned I worked with at State Farm. she's written a book called

Strategy to Reality, which I would recommend anyone read that has any role in

developing or executing strategy in an organization. And anyone who has any

architecture role or responsibilities in an organization. She also runs a series

of courses called Bismarck Mastery. And I actually, as CIO at ranch Group, I ran

a few of my people, some of my leaders through her foundational course. And I

sat in on a number of those sessions. And I would say that Wendy is she just won

architecture leader of the year in Europe, a couple of weeks ago. She definitely

is easily one of the top ten, top fifteen, top twenty architects in the world

when it comes to business architecture.

Mike Kelley: Okay. how much is AI changing all of that? How much is AI tweaking

the business architecture? Because I'm seeing it tweak the like the SaaS models,

the ERP and changing the way people are looking at all of those monolithic

applications within their organizations. So how do you think AI is affecting

business architecture?

Robert Sheesley: Yeah, I think it's fairly significant. leading up to, I think

the first of the year, a lot of organizations were focused predominantly on

experimentation, proof of concepts, building out some AI enabled use cases.

Process oriented. So when I speak of how an organization does something, there's

a macro level. How. Which is the strategy. And there's a micro level. How. Which

is the process? So the strategy is how are you going to achieve your mission?

The process micro level, how is how are we going to get work done to do what we

want to do? And the what, as I referred to previously, are the capabilities. So

when we start talking about AI and the impact of AI on business architecture and

enterprise architecture, I think it's relatively significant for those

organizations that are still looking to apply architecture principles and

techniques and tools and processes to define what the future should look like.

So when I was leading enterprise architecture at Milan. we anchored a lot of the

work that we did on conceptual models, logical models and physical models as we

sought to evaluate our current state. Imagine the future state and build a

roadmap for the transition state. So current state, what is it? What are we

doing? How are we doing it? Future state. We're imagining possibilities. the art

of the possible is a term that was, is used a lot around.

Mike Kelley: Yeah.

Robert Sheesley: And AI opens the doors of opportunity exponentially. When you

start talking about what does our future state look like? And so when you think

about architecting the four layers, and I've seen so many models, but I really

like this four layer model that the Chief Architect network introduced a few

months back. And it's the intelligence layer. It's the semantic and contextual

layer. It's the data source layer, where's data coming from? And then it's the

data management layer that includes AI governance and incorporating those layers

of architecture into your enterprise architecture, meaning. So I think it's

important to ground our thinking on what is the definition of architecture. And

I have my own definition. There's probably one hundred, but my definition is

it's the understanding of the relationship of the spatial and contextual assets

of an organization. now we're not talking about building architecture. We're

talking about organizational architecture, business architecture, and technical

architecture. So words have meaning. When you when you break that down, you say,

okay, spatial. That means there's some relationships that are closer than others

of these assets. And then when you talk about contextual, you enter the idea of

meaning. There's meaning in these relationships of these assets. And when you

start to talk about processes, which is in essence an asset of an organization,

how you do something, how you take an order, how you process an order, how you

fulfill an order, how you serve, or care for or provide support to the customer

relative to that order and how you service the customer going forward with other

services and products that may have a relationship to something that they

purchased within that order. All of that has a relationship to other assets in

the organization. Data systems, people and enter AI, which a lot of people are

talking about, AI as a substitute for people. Although I hear people are trying

to create the first AI operational billion dollar company, I think there's some

sort of contest going on for a race to a billion dollar company that is all AI

and no human orientation, which I personally don't think is possible or is

healthy for that matter.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. Well, and somebody's got to be helping provide the context

for the model and everything else. Isn't that the human? Yes.

Robert Sheesley: Yes. for the most part. but yeah, this homology concept which

Scott invented or created, trademarked fifteen years ago. And Scott is a good

friend and a colleague at future point of view. he's talked a lot about homology

and understanding within not only your departments of your organization, but

your organization of a whole where the contribution is to create value from a

human capital perspective and a digital capital perspective. And what is the

optimum formula? based on department and in many cases based on process, when

you follow a process end to end and you dissect it and you ask the question, how

can I make this process better, more efficient, more accurate? a process that

can handle volumes of input at a more rapid pace. You can also ask the question,

where can AI assist in this? And that's part of, I think, where AI impacts

enterprise architecture. for the future is when you start to build out these

future state views of a process, a department, an organization, you get to ask

the question, where can I play? Apply AI that can make the process more

efficient, more accurate, able to handle more velocity. And that in turn equates

to greater value creation for the organization. Presuming that velocity has a

direct correlation with revenue and or productivity gain. Yeah.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. Okay. So many different thoughts and so many different

things. so the utilization of AI in the augmentation to facilitate that work and

to expedite that work. what are the things, what are the challenges that as

you're looking at this, as you're talking about this to others about or about

the architecture and how it's affecting that architecture. How are you

challenging them to look at it? How are you challenging them to find that

optimization? I mean, I look at what we're doing and I'm thinking, okay, this is

where I see the drag on the human. The repetitive, the time consuming finding

those areas. But you got thoughts around this beyond that. Yeah. I think.

Robert Sheesley: it is really important to make sure if the AI model, if the use

of AI is being driven by the CIO and in many cases it is, you have to make sure

the business Feels as though you're doing it with them, not to them. And you're

doing it in a structured enough way that you'll be successful in the deployment

of AI solutions in parallel with building that AI architecture for the

organization. So from my perspective, use case fulfillment. So as you define

here's an example. So right now I'm a fractional chief technology officer for a

private equity firm. And I've defined six or seven areas of work that this PE

firm Devotes time, energy, attention, money to, in support of their strategic

goals and their mission. they're heavily invested in infrastructure and energy

companies and I've went out and defined these five or six macro level areas or

functions of their private equity firm. And then I defined use cases within

those functions that would be serviced by some deployment of AI, whether it's

embedded AI in a system that they're using or it's an AI agent build. the how

isn't as important as the why and the what. So as organizations start to evolve

from this experimentation, which we call foundational phase into operational

phase of AI, they're going to need to look at processes across the organization

from an end to end perspective, and not just, for lack of a better phrase,

cherry pick specific use cases. I think it's good to implement AI solutions for

specific use cases, so that the business stakeholder community can see some

value related to that. But there's a bigger nut to crack here in embedding AI

into the architecture of the organization and following it from the value

streams across these processes of the organization. So here's a great example.

after I've presented this, and I'm being somewhat clandestine because I respect

the relationship I have with my clients. and I presented this, the one of the

partners came back and said, let's focus on one area. let's just focus on

investor relations and see what we can get and what value we can deliver in that

area. And then we can talk about the other areas. Beautiful. Okay. You picked

one. let's focus on that. So we're going to focus on that for the next month or

so. In really dissecting what is being done in the area of investor relations

and where AI can make them bigger, stronger, faster to create new opportunity

for time productivity gains and the reduction of time spent on this or that, to

free people up to focus their time on more high value activities than the type

of activities that AI can automate for them. Then so are.

Mike Kelley: They.

Robert Sheesley: Are they? Yep.

Mike Kelley: Are they looking internally at just their processes? Or are they

looking externally at their segment within whatever industry and approaching it

from that because they could be two radically different solutions with that same

kind of goal.

Robert Sheesley: Yes. So out of the gate internally within their processes.

Right. Okay. and then, I was talking about this three, four years ago within the

home services industry. I think there was tremendous opportunity that was ripe

for the picking to work with providers, equipment and suppliers of material and

equipment for the use of the home services industry. one of the ideas that

surfaced in conversation at a CIO dinner in Charlotte, North Carolina, was the

opportunity he worked with the air conditioning manufacturers that were

providing our company and our brands with equipment and using AI to predict

surplus inventories and then to initiate the opportunity for our organization to

purchase surplus inventory from one or more particular providers, before that

inventory was offered to the global population of buyers of that. So AI would

then be in a predictive, agent, role. and then as that surplus indicator would

provide the opportunity for discounted purchases, you're solving a couple of

different problems. you're helping the manufacturer move their surplus

inventory, and perhaps even outdated inventory much more quickly through the

system. And you're offering a dramatic discount on cost, on equipment that is

perfectly fine to be installed in the home, but just wasn't the most recent

version of a particular piece of equipment. And so this is a cycle that happens

all the time. And there really is no automated function in place in the industry

that allows for this kind of relationship between manufacturer and home services

buyer of equipment who ultimately installs the equipment.

Mike Kelley: Okay. Yeah. one of the other things that you brought up at the

beginning of this was the how, why and the what was more important than the. How

can you dive into that a little bit more? And exactly why is it more important

than now?

Robert Sheesley: So, I'm a big Simon Sinek fan and he published the Golden

Circle, a number of years ago, easily over a decade ago. and his primary message

is organizations that focus on their why and their employee population

understands their why and the consumers that purchase their products and

services understand their why are more successful. And he held up Apple as an

example, which I think is pretty relevant. but in terms of the what and that is

the capabilities of the organization that truly is your business model. What you

do as a business is your business model. How you do what you do is forever

changing. how an organization produced, marketed and sold and service products

and services pre-internet is much different than Post-internet. And you can

easily say how a company produced products and services marketed, sold, serviced

customers. Pre cloud computing, is much different than post cloud computing. And

I think the same will be held true for pre and post AI. So the how is

significant to the degree that it enables the what what you do as an

organization. And it's interesting because I've produced capability models and

we did it did so at Milan and it was a rough go at first, but once we started

sitting down with the business leadership of our pharmaceutical organization to

show them our stab. Right. Our attempt at creating a business capability model

for a particular area or function of the business. It's you saw the light bulbs

turn on in people's heads as we started talking through these capability models

and really what the capability model is, what do you do as an organization? If

we can all agree with what we do? And then we look at the how do we do it? That

is the opportunity for change. That introduces the opportunity for change,

because processes exist to move data along a journey that produces product and

produces services to market to consumers, and then fulfill the consumer needs in

how the product and service adds value to their lives and in the case of

business, adds value to other business models. So why and what is so important

is because if you don't have a good command and understanding and universal view

of the why and what of your organization? You get into spitting contests about

the how you do things. And I'll give you a great example real quick. We rolled

out an ERP. And this was a highly acquisitive organization. We always would

create a subject matter expert catalog when we would take an acquisition and

migrate that acquisition to our homogeneous ERP platform, our homogeneous fat

platform, our homogeneous h r I s platform. We would always create that subject

matter expert, and we had specific functions within the organization that we

wanted us. A number one subject matter expert and a number two subject matter

expert, ideally a number three subject matter expert, so that we could work with

these people as we migrated them onto these new platforms, because their

processes were going to change not dramatically, but slightly. And we wanted to

get out in front of that so that we were practicing good organizational change

management. one of the organizations that we acquired said, I don't want you to

bother my people. The leadership said this. We will be your subject matter

experts. Okay, okay.

Mike Kelley: So now you get to go bother your people.

Robert Sheesley: So, well, here's what happened. they provided guidance. They

provided guidance along the way. they made decisions along the way. And then as

we rolled out the configured systems into a user acceptance testing phase, where

we were then allowed to bring in the subject matter experts that we had

originally identified. The SMEs were like, well, that's not how we do it. So the

leadership didn't truly understand the how they knew the what what they did, but

they didn't fully have an understanding of the how they did it. So when it came

time to the ta da moment of, okay, let's go get the SMEs to do this. User

acceptance testing the SMEs, their immediate response was, that's not how we do

it. and so there was definitely a lot of rework that needed to be applied

because how we configured the platforms was grounded on how the processes were

described to us.

Mike Kelley: Right. And it's right back to that other statement that you made of

this was technology that was done to them, not with them.

Robert Sheesley: Yes, exactly.

Mike Kelley: Because otherwise they would have had that input from the beginning

and helped. It would have been a one time deal instead of a rework. And it was

it sounds like it was a huge rework to get back on target. So one of the things

that I'm seeing and experiencing and trying to figure out how to navigate and as

I talk to others, I'm hearing I'm not alone in this is who is building these

solutions? with the what and the why for the organization when it comes to the

AI. So in that sense, we're empowering our SMEs, our people on the ground. The

business side of the house now has a tool set that they've never had before that

helps them code and create and craft solutions that they always had to go to

somebody else and try to articulate their what and their why and describe it

through their how. now they've got a tool that they can start talking to it and

it starts building the what and the why. But then there's that contention

between the how of the technical teams and the business teams. so what best

practices are you seeing develop around this?

Robert Sheesley: Yeah. So I think organizations that are out in front of this

and we describe and when I say we, I mean my colleagues at future point of view,

who I work closely with on a number of client engagements, we've defined three

AI skill types within the organization, and we've also defined. And when I say

we, Scott is leading a lot of this thought leadership, but it's very, there's a

lot of participation by our experienced consultant community. we've defined

these three phases of AI evolution, foundational operational and realization,

meaning operational. It's embedded into your operations. It's part of your

organization. Now you're starting to architect with AI in mind. And then

realization is you're now starting to measure the value of what AI has produced

for your organization, the value creation lever. So we see three types of

skills, AI skills in the twenty first century company, in the year twenty twenty

six, there's the AI user, the AI maker and the AI developer and the AI user. a

lot of the activities that the AI user is involved with are casual use,

prompting for information, a recipient of AI solutions that deliver search

capabilities or coaching, in certain areas like customer service. these are also

people in the organization that they may be multiple AI mobile users. So they're

using audio, video, text. And then there's certain percentage of those AI users

that fall into like an elite AI usage skill category, meaning they're the

people, the stakeholders that you want to contribute to that. How earlier in the

process, because they've run ahead of the pack in their use of commercially

available AI tools. then there's the AI maker. So these are people within the

organization that are building their own gpts. they are building personal agents

for their own productivity and they're building process agents for the areas

that they're responsible for. they're also probably engaging with AI automation

vendors that can assist them in the deployment of AI solutions. As an example, I

have a client, Connecticut, that I've been working with. I help them define

their AI strategy last spring. And over the course of the past year, we've been

deploying two AI solutions. One is an internal search agent that uses all of

their internal knowledge capital, as well as open AI, LMS that are made

available to them. And they're also deploying a coaching assistant for their

customer service representatives. That coaching assistant is listening to their

calls, listening to their, in some cases, their video calls and providing

feedback based on a rubric that the subject matter experts produce on what makes

a good call, a productive call. And where are areas that customer service agents

need to focus on if a caller or customer falls into any one particular category,

or profile, that has been identified. And then the AI maker also is making

automation connections with other systems. So they're using available APIs to

connect systems with one another to create these automation capabilities. One

that comes readily to mind that I'm certain you're familiar with is robotic

process automation. And then the third category are AI skill type in the

organization is AI developer. And this is your vibe code, demo structures, your

simple personal apps, development, the ability to build apps with a backend and

a front end using other applications within the organization and the data made

available within the organization. Organizations that have created center of

truth data source capabilities like a data estate or a data lake, I think are

probably ahead of the curve a little bit, because they're not having to build

connectors or integration capabilities with native applications to use the data

made available in those native applications. when I was CIO at wrench, we built

a data lake specifically for the purpose of making sure that new platforms that

we are introducing into our technology ecosystem, like Adobe Experience Manager

had available to it the single source of truth data that a lot of these

transactional systems were producing.

Mike Kelley: And in my mind just went in like fifteen different directions. And

it's awesome to have have a conversation with somebody that sparks that kind of

activity well inside of my head.

Robert Sheesley: Yeah. And I know we've talked a lot, and we talked about a lot

of things here again, that also from my perspective, shines the light on the

need for someone in the organization focused on architecture. How does all this

stuff fit together and how do we move forward without leaving someone or some

area behind? again, I'm a huge fan of the experimentation and proof of concepts

in parallel with the evolution of the architecture of the organization. because

now you're starting to, when you can devote time to each of those tracks, if you

will. the experimentation, the use case fulfillment, you're now creating some

credibility with the business community on where AI can produce value in the

organization. And in parallel, you're working on your future state architecture

to define the most profitable or value oriented areas in the company that will

benefit the most from AI.

Mike Kelley: So I've got what I think is an interesting question for you or a

challenge to you around that, because so many of us are being challenged today

by the CEO and the highest levels of the executive team who are catching the

blipverts in the magazines, in the back of the airplane, or in the back of the

seat of the airplane, which tells you how old I am, because there have been

magazines and airplanes for a long time. but the CEO and the executive teams are

coming in and they've got these areas where they know that there's a lot of

inefficiency within the organization and they want AI applied to that. and

they're putting a lot of pressure and force and resources into doing just that.

But many of them are not thinking about that architecture like you're talking

about. And that business architecture is something that a lot the good CIO is

paying attention to because they're trying to help build these systems for

sustainability, for scalability, for repetitiveness, and so that they can hand

it off so that the next generation grabs it and continues to build on that and

go with that. how do those who are listening to this or those that are coming up

into that realm, how do they bring up that conversation? Where do they start

that conversation? Or what's some ideas on how they have that conversation with

the CEO so that they can not only start to show or well, show that they

understand the CEO's vision and what they're wanting and where they're investing

in to get there, but how to get them to also shunt some investment into that

architecture so that all of this stuff happens. Because if we get focused just

on the AI and the gifts that it's just going to magically produce for us. you've

got makers doing stuff that the developers are supposed to be doing and it's not

ever getting back to who was it? M I t that was saying that ninety five percent

of AI projects are a failure.

Robert Sheesley: Yeah, and I think there's a lot of truth to that because the

approach that they're taking. So my belief is that to the degree that you can

find a business stakeholder champion to talk about capability maturation, and

they understand that maturing capabilities produces greater value, they know

their business better than the CIO and his or her team does. obviously. So

finding that partner in the business where you can start talking about

capability maturation and where on their capability model. What's the heat map?

So if you've got thirty five capabilities that make up your organization and we

all agree on those level three capabilities. and that's not an easy road to get

to either, but you can't not try to get there. I would try to find the most

courageous. I'll use that word courageous business leader willing to listen to

why capability models can help them drive their agenda and use of technology and

achieve budgetary approval for investments in technology to make their

organization better. So, finding that one champion in the business community

where you can showcase the value of architectural thinking to build future

solutions that enable the maturation of those capabilities and then deliver

value to the organization as a result of that. If you can get the business

stakeholders to agree, hey, let's talk about these. Let's talk about the five

most important capabilities of your organization. Let's look at these thirty and

tell me what the if you could move the needle in maturity in any of these thirty

capabilities, which five would you pick? okay. Let's talk about that. how do you

view technology serving this capability today? Where are we missing the mark?

Where could we get better? Where do we think AI could be applicable to moving

the needle on maturation of this business capability. And oh, by the way, if we

can move the maturity on this capability to ticks. How do you see that impacting

the KPIs that are directly correlated to this capability? and having those kind

of conversations and then working with that business stakeholder on what a

future state architecture would look like. and then proving that out, I think is

one way, not the way, but it's one way to get the ears and the eyes of the CEO

to understand why taking an architectural future state view approach to the use

of AI in the organization could be valuable. Not to say that these one offs

can't produce tactical improvements, but you're not going to see, people. You

like to use the word transformation a lot. It's a cool word. The board loves to

hear it. we're progressing on our digital transformation. Oh, tell me more. And

it's nothing more than we're implementing some new systems. and oh, by the way,

we may or may not be applying organizational change management to land the plane

without hurting anybody. but this word transformation is achievable if you do it

in a thoughtful way and not just one off demonstration of tactical improvements

within the organization. Don't get me wrong, tactical improvements are good.

Plugging holes and removing pain points for business leaders and their teams is

very important. But in parallel, I think you got to find that one business

leader that's willing to talk to you and even join you in this idea of, let's

talk about the capabilities of your organization and where you see maturation

making the most difference and how. Technology then can serve the movement of

the maturity of that capability.

Mike Kelley: And I don't know how many other people heard what I just heard. and

of course, this is my interpretation of what you're trying to communicate. Of

the challenges around meeting that golden vision that the executive leaders have

and that transformation or that growth from where we are today to there. But,

but helping explain how we get there step by step or mile by mile versus the

magic of the teleporter taking us from origin to destination because we don't

have teleporters yet. And AI is not the teleportation system. And although it

can make it look like it happened. It really hasn't. we've still got to go

piecemeal along the way to get to the true transformation. We like you're

saying, we can get that tactical quick win. but to get that fundamental shift,

it's going to take, it's a lot of communication. It is, that has to happen at a

level, going full circle back to the beginning of this, you really have to be

able to understand the business to be able to talk to them about the business

and that change and be able to explain the technology and the leveraging of that

technology to incrementally increase the business. and, but we also have to

recognize today in our world that incrementation cycle has changed radically.

Robert Sheesley: Yes, absolutely. And the velocity is exponential today. yeah.

And but when and I know we're at time, but if you were to sit down with a

business leader and say, hey, can we talk about our business model evolution,

right? How is our business model going to evolve in the next two, six, ten

years? I don't know that you would get a great conversation with your first

request to do that because, and I just consulted at a fairly large airplane

manufacturer for eight months. And I introduced the concept of a technology

investment board so that they can look holistically across their enterprise to

identify the most value driven technology projects to shepherd through the year,

versus what a lot of organizations do, they're very cost minded focus, not value

oriented, focused. They're focused on the cost of these projects and the

performance of these projects, but not necessarily on doing the hard work to

define what is the value that's going to be delivered as a result of these

projects being completed. And it was challenging just to have the business

capability model conversation, let alone a conversation around how do you see

the evolution of the business model? And these are very smart people who have

been wildly successful in their careers. But AI introduces much more opportunity

to complete these kind of strategic thinking projects around business model

evolution and think about what the organization could look like two, six, ten

years down the road. And now is the time to start having those conversations.

you again, you want AI to do it with you, not to you.

Mike Kelley: Yeah, and so many of us, I mean, there's so much fear around AI

doing to me versus AI helping me achieve. so back to the softball that I

promised to pitch towards you, which is, what will it leaders be talking about

in eighteen months that we're not talking about today?

Robert Sheesley: Well, I think IT leaders are going to be there just by

necessity. IT leaders are going to have to focus on this idea of intellectual.

I'm sorry. intelligence architecture. and we've always talked about data, and

we've used terms like data driven information oriented decision making, but it's

really the intelligence architecture of the organization. Now that we're

weighing the best balance between human capital and digital capital in service

of the strategy of the organization. So I think CIOs are going to have to

continue to sharpen their saw in this area of applied intelligence to achieve

the what of the organization and continuing to have those conversations with the

business community. I think is going to be very important. you get a lot of

questions, and I'm part of the Forbes Technology Council. So I answer a lot of

questions that come my way from that platform. One of the questions that

continues to pop up is, what work should AI perform versus what work should

humans perform? And from my perspective, this becomes a work design problem, not

a technology problem. Organizations just need to define human in the loop

policies, autonomous AI processes, AI oversight responsibilities, AI escalation

procedures. And I think a lot of organizations haven't thought through that. And

I think the organizations I just saw on LinkedIn, and I don't know who

proclaimed this, but it's the top fifty or the top fifty companies in the world

relative to using technology. And there are some great examples. Delta Airlines

is one of them. I think Pepsi-Cola was one. Of course, you've got the usual

suspects, AT&T, Apple's on there, but they also have deep pockets. So when you

start talking to these, you having these conversations with middle market

companies that don't necessarily have the deep pockets, a roundabout way of

answering your question of what should the CIO be focused on? The CIO should be

focused on what is the business value that we can achieve, right? Versus, what

is the latest greatest in technology out there that can be purchased and applied

in our organization? so great example is my client in Connecticut. I need to

make some recommendations to them on internal risk management. And as they move

from Google Suite professional email to Microsoft three hundred sixty five. The

most obvious choice would be Microsoft Purview. Well, Microsoft Purview is at

least the advanced version is not inexpensive. and so, you've got to be creative

and resourceful as a CIO to look at all of the options that you have available

to you to recommend to your business stakeholders and the risk reward related to

those options, including cost and perceived value. So you really do need to,

more than ever before the CIO and we talked about this in London. I was actually

on a panel and the topic came up, is the term CIO chief information officer has

that time passed, do we need to come up with something new? Chief transformation

officer, chief AI officer chief intelligence officer, we could call it whatever

we want. I'm shooting for Grand Poobah one of these days. that's the title I

want. We can call it whatever you want. You're gonna.

Mike Kelley: Get the hat too, with.

Robert Sheesley: The. Yeah. Right. The water buffalo.

Mike Kelley: Hat.

Robert Sheesley: but if you're not talking with your business stakeholders about

the value that technology will bring to the organization and listen, it's not an

easy conversation because we're not magicians, but you got to make some bold

assumptions. You got to practice some courage on what those assumptions are. And

have the business stakeholder leader poke the holes in your assumptions, but at

least get them out there with respect to what you think the value is in

introducing new technology to the organization. And that's a lot of the

messaging that I provided my clients when I helped them create all of the

material and tools and processes around this technology investment board that

they sought to create so that they can have a more holistic view of all of the

planes flying in and out of the airport, and which ones created the most value

for the organization.

Mike Kelley: I wanted to latch on one of the things that you said, that

conversation with the leadership and having them poke holes through it and to

how important it is for the technology people to have them have those holes

poked through it so that they can reinforce those areas of what they're talking

about, and so that they have that understanding so that they can have they can

get through that part and get to a deeper conversation and not own it. And like,

take it personal when holes get poked, their questions being asked, their

fundamental assumptions that we're blind to. And now when that hole gets poked.

now I know where that that pain point was. And if I know where it is, then I can

address it. And then I can move on to the next thing. So take that as the

feedback and the value that it's providing to you during those conversations.

it's a huge win for anyone in any conversation when people are poking holes

through stuff, pay attention to where those holes appear and how to fortify it,

or whether it needs to be opened up and let it all drain out.

Robert Sheesley: Yeah. And I think you hit the nail on the head. You can't take

it personally. You need to lean into it as a learning opportunity.

Mike Kelley: Exactly. Yeah. that's really what I was aiming at was the learning

opportunity of what they're thinking, how they think so that you can learn to

think like them also, if there was one other thing that you would love, the

technologists that are listening to us to walk away knowing that you've been

heard. Robert, what would that final thought be?

Robert Sheesley: The final thought would be, and I've been singing this song

since nineteen ninety two. Organizational change management is a thing. I said

this in a few other podcasts, over the last several years, I was sitting in an

auditorium at EDS on Legacy Drive in Plano, Texas. Peter Senge walked out on

stage. It was February nineteen ninety two. I was in the EDS's leadership

internship program and he started talking about the psychology of change. And up

until that point, I was a technologist, even though I became one kicking and

screaming probably. but I was at the time a systems engineer manager. And what

he said that day really was so poignant that I've devoted my career to studying

organizational change, the dynamics of it, the psychology of it, and how

important that work stream called organizational change navigation is to any

large technology systems deployment.

Mike Kelley: Any growth of any organization and understanding and being able to

see where you are, where you were, and thus where you're going. and, to me, it's

amazing that that you're still carrying that message forward thirty five years

later because we obviously as any industry haven't learned that lesson. Some

have. And they've made leaps and bounds in front of others, but without learning

that lesson. Every organization still struggles without that.

Robert Sheesley: Yeah. And it's incumbent, I think, upon the CIO or whatever

title, chief digital chief transformation. It's incumbent upon that leader to

make the case for resources related to organizational change that need to be

presented and part of the team because organizational change management isn't

the CEO picking up the phone and telling all the leaders of the organization,

this is important. That is not organizational change management. It is a

process. It is a methodology. there are at least three dozen, three dozen

frameworks out there. I particularly like the one that we used at West Monroe

Partners that quite frankly, I mean, I applied it at wrench group As the CIO, I

took the best pieces and parts of that that some of the leadership at West

Monroe contributed to. And we applied it especially in the post acquisition

migration of these companies that we acquired onto these homogeneous platforms.

Their world was changing, their processes were changing. If we didn't win their

hearts and minds and find informal leaders within the various groups of those

organizations to prop us up and to support us, we wouldn't have been nearly as

successful as we had been. and the longer and I'm just talking about M&A

specifically, but the longer an acquisition integration runs, the less

productivity, the less opportunity to scale, right. the organization and it

could be a potential negative impact on really, really important KPIs.

Mike Kelley: Okay. It almost sounds like a version of the eighty over twenty

rule, where eighty percent of the efforts going into twenty percent, and that

twenty percent is not making eighty percent of the value. It's definitely that

low end value of that percentage. I could continue this conversation for quite

some time. It sounds like you could do, truly appreciate all of your time today.

Robert Sheesley and thank you for your time and your effort and for, yes, the

scheduling challenges. And we finally overcame them.

Robert Sheesley: We made it work. Mike, I appreciate you being patient with me.

Mike Kelley: Oh, I appreciate the reverse patience because it was definitely a

two way street on this. So thank you very much for your time, Robert.

Robert Sheesley: Thank you Mike.