Transforming Business with Technology: A CIO’s Vision with Shannon Bell at OpenText World 2024

This is Textron tv. Hello everybody. We're back at OpenText World in Las Vegas and we're here with Shannon, who is the CIO and Chief Digital Officer for OpenText.

And you made, even by Las Vegas standards a pretty big bet today. A billion dollars in savings in 10 years. It's not a bet.

Uh, a billion dollars in savings in 10 years, we will absolutely achieve as part of our plans. Yes. All right.

So walk us through how that's gonna be accomplished. I know there's a mix of hard savings and soft savings and what does that look like? Yeah, absolutely.

Um, the billion dollars in savings is really the result of an aggressive program to deploy our own technology. And so it's based on our program of OT trust, sot where we've deployed over 60 of our products, uh, that have a large focus on, um, helping operations. So we have a portfolio of IT operations, management products and developer tools and so on.

And so by deploying those products, we're reali we're seeing real savings. And the savings roughly break down in about five categories, um, which is focused on our, um, footprint in terms of our hardware and data centers. Um, optimizing those, consolidating those, optimizing our cloud costs.

Uh, we have an amazing finops platform that, that we use internally, um, which drives some of our, our financial savings around cloud optimization. Um, we see automation, AI and process management. ai tool, which we use as our internal knowledge management.

Again, driving cost out, uh, by putting knowledge at people's fingertips and using that intelligence, uh, from a service management perspective, we're taking cost out in terms of employee productivity and efficiency. I shared in my keynote today that we've actually been able to reduce 25% of our level one help desk staff, um, by deploying our service management platform. And so when you look at the breakdown of productivity, efficiency, automation, data centers, um, and as well as cost avoidance, I mean those are real savings contributing to the $1 billion in terms of soft costs.

Again, not part of the $1 billion buildup. Um, but we see massive benefits for our customers as well by adopting our own technology. Um, number one, from an operations management perspective, it means we can be much more proactive in terms of addressing incidents and helping our customers in terms of resolving those incidents.

So there's major upside for customers as well. As part of that overall $1 billion program. Do you have milestones to hit or is it just after 10 years we're gonna have this amount of savings?

Or is every year is there a target? Oh, absolutely. We've set up targets as part of the program.

Um, it wouldn't be a formalized program if we didn't have targets. And so as we deploy new technology, as we, um, are introducing new capabilities, uh, we've built business cases to show the value. Um, and these are business cases that our customers as well can realize by adopting our technology.

And so we are absolutely measuring it. My team is very aggressively measuring it. Um, and that's why we had the confidence to share the story today here at OpenText World.

You mentioned thin ops and that's kind of an emerging discipline in the land of it, and yet, you know, I scratch my head sometimes 'cause I'm kind of like, well, were we not paying attention to how much we were spending in the first place? Or so, you know, what is finops? How do you implement it?

And you know, 'cause it's almost, to me it's about culture as much as it is tech. That's, It's a great question. You're right.

It is a culture. Um, it is culture as well as technology. And I think the, the world of finops has evolved as people have been spending more and more on the cloud.

And so I see finops not as a basic practice to manage my financials in it. I see it as a very specialized area where we're looking at our cloud costs and optimizing our cloud costs and managing those very proactively. And I think for many organizations, the move to cloud meant that they were either lifting and shifting technology onto the cloud, which in some cases people found to be more expensive than running it in their own data center.

Where the real value comes is when you, um, optimize your products for the cloud. And that's where finops plays a key role. Inside our organization, we use one of our own tools, um, which is part of the IT om portfolio, uh, for financial operations management.

Um, but we have a team whose focus is developing placement strategies around the cloud and looking at constantly, um, how to, um, right size what we have in the cloud and optimize what are the cloud technologies that are available, are we using them? So it's very, very much a part of the, the, um, uh, culture of the organization to understand the cost and the benefits and the business case for why you're doing things. Mm-Hmm.

And you're also the chief digital officer and a lot of organizations, the CIO and the chief digital officer are not always the same person. And now we're starting to see the rise of everything from chief AI officers and chief data officers. Um, and I can't help but wonder if that maybe is too many silos and maybe a little counterproductive and maybe is everything coming back towards the CIO in the first place?

It's a great question. I it has evolved and you've seen it kind of expand and contract. I think that depending how your organization is set up, depends what roles you have.

Um, data is also part of my responsibilities and uh, and we have a data team that's part of our IT organization. Again, different organizations set up differently. I think for me, what's unique about my role is that, um, in addition to managing the corporate IT side where I'm supporting our 22,000 um employees, I'm also managing our commercial operations, supporting our 330,000 plus customers.

And so those pieces coming together has been, um, has been fantastic in terms of, you know, driving real commonality and standardization in our approach and meaning that we can actually deliver better experiences for our internal and external users. So you can call me what you want, I think. Um, but uh, but I, I know my role, my role is to drive the best possible experiences for my internal stakeholders and my external customers.

One of the questions kicking around the show is with the rise of ai, if I look inside it today, there's a lot of silos and each of those silos has specialists. And I can't help but wonder what the rise of ai will we see some sort of reorganization of the way IT teams themselves are structured as we kind of change those workflows? Yeah, it's a great question.

I think that, um, AI brings a lot of capability and a lot of possibility for how you, um, design and build and test and run your applications and your code. And so we definitely are constantly looking at, at that in the IT organization. I do think that there's always a need for domain expertise and you're not inherently getting that out of AI today.

It doesn't mean it might not be there in the future, but definitely I don't see that there today. And when I say domain expertise, I'm thinking about, you know, my ERP system, um, my HR systems, um, my service management, you know, definitely there's knowledge and experience in terms of those systems and business processes and capabilities, um, that when married with technology means that you can actually deliver great products for your business users. And so where I see the rise of AI is, you know, more in the repeatable tasks and areas where I'm designing and test or I'm build, sorry, building and testing and running versus that design phase where I really need that domain expertise to make good business decisions and drive the strategy for the products and applications we're rolling out.

Mm-Hmm. It sounds like you're all in on AI and other organizations are still testing the waters and some people are even resistant. Um, what do you know about using AI today that you kind of wish you knew maybe a year ago?

I think that, um, you know, being all in on AI doesn't mean that you're deploying it for every single use case. And I think that's been an important learning because in the early days of AI and lots of organizations are still in that test phase where they're doing a lot of pilots, they're figuring out what works. I think that, um, that is critical because you need to have that learning curve for your organization as, as well as figuring out the business case for what makes sense from an AI perspective.

And so, you know, if I looked back a year ago, I would tell myself, don't rush. Take your time, figure out what makes sense and make sure you're getting real business value out of what you're trying to implement. Because not every use case you can implement anything in software.

I always tell my team we could do anything in software. The answer is always yes, everything's possible, it's software, but it doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. And so it's the exact same with ai.

It's possible, yes, but it doesn't mean you should do it. And so really understanding the drivers, the business case, the impact on the organization, um, you know, looking at the whole, um, security and risk profile, making good decisions that are right for the organization takes time. And you need to learn and understand the technology.

Your teams need to understand the technology. And so there's always going to be a journey for organizations. And I think that's what excites me the most about our approach to AI At OpenText, we are bringing AI and the aviators to the data.

And so in a lot of organizations, and you know, when CIOs that I talk to, they tell me they're struggling with moving all of their data into a cloud that could take them a year, 18 months, 24 months to do. And then they've gotta build the AI on top of it and the use cases then they're trying to figure out as well. Whereas our approach is we have the data, we're bringing the use cases and the aviators to the data.

So you eliminate that phase, um, and that investment that's required by organizations to move the data and you're able to get to the business value much faster. And that means you have a greater tolerance for test and fail as well, right? Um, because you haven't had to make that massive investment.

So I really believe we're spot on with our strategy and that's why I'm very bullish on the opportunity with ai. Old timers will tell you that moving data, nothing good ever happens. Um, and you're talking about bringing the compute essentially to the data.

Have we come full circle on that? 'cause in the cloud era, we were moving data into the cloud all the time, and now maybe we're coming back to some fundamental principles In some sense we, we have come full circle and I think, you know, you see that a lot in technology. We end up coming full circle on many things.

Um, and concepts that held in the past, you know, become true. Again, I think that um, you know, there, there, there can be cases where you want to move data, uh, there will always be those organizations that are striving to move data. Um, but the less data movement, um, is better for organizations, especially when you're trying to secure and protect your data.

Um, you've got re regulations that you have to abide by, your customers are concerned about data protection. The less movement you're making of that data, the better. And so bringing AI to the data makes a lot of sense.

Alright, There's an old joke about what CIO stands for. I think everybody knows what that is. Career is over.

Um, what do you say to your fellow CIOs about where they are in their positions these days? Is it is now the best time to be a CIO in memory or is it kind of in a state of flu somewhere? I think it's a great time to be a CIO and I think the CIO has never been more important to the business.

And I think that, um, you know, I always tell my teams and and my colleagues that, you know, CIOs need to focus on driving real outcomes for the business. And where CIOs fail is when they're implementing technology for, for technology's sake. And, you know, we're technologists, that's kind of fun.

Um, but that's not a path to success. And so I think, you know, really embracing driving business outcomes and being a strong partner with the business and you know, business leaders are becoming more and more tech savvy and so they want to work with the newest technology and they want to embrace it. They want their teams to be part of that journey.

And so that makes, um, you know, I think that makes it a fantastic place to be these days In that regard is we've had this divide between IT and the business that people have talked about for decades. It's clearly getting better, but I can't figure out if it's, are the IT people understanding the business better or are the business people really understanding technology better? It's both.

It's absolutely both. I think that, um, good IT people spend the time to understand what's driving the business and the challenges they're facing and they frame the problems they're solving in business language. Similarly, great business partners understand technology and are able to translate.

And so when you have both teams coming together, um, that's when magic happens. And you know, when projects go wrong, it's usually because one team or the other is not meeting in the middle and someone's trying to compensate. So I do think both is happening.

I think that, you know, you talk to finance leaders, you talk to, um, sales leaders, HR leaders, they're all talking about technology and they want to understand how they can use ai, how they can use new tools to become more productive and meet their KPIs. And so there's um, definitely a vested interest in getting the right technology and that that makes life easier for IT partners, uh, because they're not trying to drag the business along. The business is in partnership with some.

Um, so I think it's definitely both As CIO. What is that number one priority for you right now? What's at the top of the to-do list?

What's the thing that you're like most focused on in the next few months? Well, definitely the operationalization of the plan I talked about today. Um, so we need to continue to deliver on that.

Um, but I think it's supporting the business objectives. I think, you know, number one, knowing and having a team that understands each and every day how we contribute to driving the outcomes of the business, the top priority. And that will translate into a set of activities the team needs to engage in to support the business, but it's not transforming this system or that system or introducing this new technology.

It's really tying our strategy to the business strategy and knowing exactly on a quarter by quarter basis, how are we helping drive the outcomes for the business. Um, that's where I want my team focused and that's where I'm focused. One of the things you will hear from application developers is they think that because of AI tools, they might be writing more software in the next couple years than they wrote all last decades.

Are we from an IT perspective, prepared to deploy and manage that volume of software? Yeah, that's a great question. I think equally as um, developers become more productive with new tools, it becomes more productive in being, in terms of being able to, um, launch products, manage products and operations.

And definitely if you looked at the ratio of applications to um, resources, it's grown over time. So, uh, the, the capacity that you have is able to manage a larger set of applications because there's tools for deployment, there's tools for release management, there's automation around upgrades and so on. And so I think that, um, that value chain of having, um, automation and capabilities for developers follows through into how you deploy and manage.

So equally, I think that, that, uh, that landscape will grow for it. All right, folks. You heard it here.

Hey, when it comes to it, AI and being in this industry, there's more opportunity than ever. A great man once said, all we have to fear is fear itself. And it's probably still true today.

Hey, thanks for being on the show. Thank you very much. All Right.

We'll be back in a minute.