Eduardo Conrado, Chief Innovation Officer, Motorola
Eduardo F.
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Eduardo F. Conrado is Senior Vice President of Marketing and IT at Motorola Solutions, Inc.
Previously, he served as Chief Marketing Officer and Senior Vice President of Motorola Solutions, Inc. since January 4, 2011. Mr. Conrado was responsible for global marketing, including commercial value propositions, product positioning, pricing, and the publication of systems roadmaps in cooperation with engineering division product management teams.
Mr. Conrado served as Chief Marketing Officer and Senior Vice President of Global Business & Technology Marketing at Motorola Solutions, Inc. and also served as its Vice President of Global Marketing and Portfolio Management. Mr. Conrado was responsible for the annual portfolio management cycle, including ongoing review of market dynamics, current investments and business performance to recommend adjustments in engineering investments. In addition, Mr. Conrado heads the media and industry analyst relations, and brand management and marketing communications efforts for Motorola Networks. Prior to this position, he was Senior Director, Business Operations, Marketing and Quality for Motorola Networks' network infrastructure business in the Latin American region, a position he held for three years.
Mr. Conrado has worked in multiple areas within Motorola including: Paging, Joint Ventures, Satellite Products, and Mobile Devices. He joined Motorola in 1991. He served as Vice Chair of Business Marketing Association from 2011 to July 1, 2013 and serves as its Director. He serves on the board of directors for the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and the Business Marketing Association (BMA) and on the advisory board of Thunderbird School of Global Management. He holds bachelor's degrees in Industrial Engineering and Operations Management from Texas Tech University; an MBA from ESADE in Barcelona, Spain; and a Masters of International Management from the American Graduate School of International Management (Thunderbird).
Michael:
(00:03) Hello, welcome to episode number 62 of CXOTalk. I’m Michael Krigsman and as always with my incredible, really he is, incredible co-host Vala Afshar. Hey Vala
Vala:
(00:19) Michael how you doing
Michael:
(00:20) How are you
Vala:
(00:21) Good seeing you
Michael:
(00:21) It is good to see as always, and again we have a tremendous guest here today.
Vala:
(00:25) We have an incredible guest here today and a unique guest. In 62 episodes, we have not had a guest with this mix of responsibilities and I’ll let you talk about that.
Michael:
(00:37) Yes our guest today is Eduardo Conrado, who is the senior vice president of both IT and marketing for Motorola solutions. Eduardo, how are you today?
Eduardo:
(00:50) Doing great, good afternoon Michael and Vala.
Michael:
(00:53) Thank you so much for taking the time and joining us.
Eduardo:
(00:56)My pleasure.
Michael:
(00:57) So Eduardo, you are the boss of both IT and marketing, that’s a pretty unusual combination to bring together. So tell us briefly about your professional background, and maybe describe your role at Motorola and what do you do.
Eduardo:
(01:16) Perfect, that’s a great question and you know it is an unusual combination. I think, when I gave a talk about marketing and IT, somebody called me a strange beast. Something that you don’t set out in the wild that often.
Vala:
(01:31) I only hear that at home!
Michael:
(01:36) So very briefly, what’s your professional background.
Eduardo:
(01:39)So I’m an engineering by study. I’m an undergrad of studying engineering, and I actually only worked as an engineer for a couple of years out of school for Texas Instruments. And the last 20 years I have been both in consumer within marketing in Motorola, so pretty much my career has been spanning from product marketing to traditional brand and out to field marketing. And for the last six quarters I’ve also had IT responsibilities under me.
Vala:
(02:11) So how did the marketing and IT combination come about? At the scale of Motorola, your role is truly unique in the industry based on my perspective.
Eduardo:
(02:24) And that is true, I think when we had the discussion on the value that IT provide to the business, I think it gets reflected on what IT reports into within the executive committee. So I think in rough numbers about a third of the CIOs report to the CEO, which was not our case over the last six years.
(02:45) The other two thirds traditionally report either to the CFO or operations. So if you report to the CFO, and I’m generalizing, IT tends to become cost centre and focus on a lot of the back office applications.
(02:58) If they were to report to operations, it tends to be supply chain driven, so factories, distribution centers. And as part of our strategy, Motorola solutions wanted to be focused all around the customer. So start with the customer first and then work our way back, and as we were looking to realign IT, that’s where we wanted to put IT. Not so much in the back office, but front office, customer facing channel and sales facing.
(03:29) And if it was not going to report to the CEO, the two other areas that are customer facing our sales and marketing. So I held my hand up and I said, do you know what, I think I know the IT area very well. I be working therefore the last 10 years on the marketing side. And I thought I could change the strategy of IT, both organizationally on the processes that we run inside the company, but also a holistic view around the architecture and adding value around the front office.
Vala:
(03:56) Well you wrote a beautiful Harvard business review blog that challenged marketeers, especially B2B marketeers, noting it’s time for us to rethink the four P’s, which is something that you learn through studying marketing, and trying to practice that and can you talk a little bit about that, because you just mentioned being customer focused solution orientated. You know, customers I’m thinking about products just pop in mind. Can you talk a little bit about that, because I think it really helps with the logic behind a technology driven company like Motorola, having someone overseeing marketing and IT
Eduardo:
(04:34) I agree, so when maybe four years ago, my team and I were looking at how does Motorola evolved to be a solutions company from being a high-tech product centre company. And we reverted back to the four P’s – the simplest definition of marketing.
(04:50) If you think about it, we were created in the 60s, that’s CPG-based models that were mostly consumer focused, and if you turned that and focus around high-tech solution companies, the four P’s were outdated.
(05:01)So we started looking at how the ever louche and will take place both in the organisation, and then the skills, and ultimately the technology that marketing will use to talk to our customers. So we said, products have to move over to a solution. And it sounds simple, but it’s a mindset and if you think about (audio breaking up 05:20) and that gets split (audio breaking up 05:26) around vertical and the value that you bring to your customers at the end.
(05:33)The same thing with price. When you think about price, you get into a conversation in that should be more based around value. What’s the ultimate problem you’re trying to solve with the customer, and get into that value discussion and not so much around speeds and feeds?
(05:47)When you think about place, it actually becomes around a conversation around access. So as you start thinking about, not only talking to the customer face-to-face, traditionally through the websites. But most customers are consuming information way before they talk to our sales people.
(06:08) So holistically if you’re think about access, you’ve got to think about the whole ecosystem of information consumption by the customer, including social, digital and how do you push that information out there. And ultimately I think customers are trying to learn and create more information. So if you’re doing promotions I would think with a customer, you actually go into education and that’s where we came up with the safe model.
(06:32)Where you have the thought leadership’s point of view where the future is, start with the customer then back into what the solution is or actually, how do you solve the problems. I’m not necessarily talking about technology right now but the product itself.
Michael:
(06:44) Well it’s very interesting you know you talk about the CIO having the value discussion rather than just feeds and speeds. And we have a comment from Gregory Yankelovich, and I hope I’m pronouncing his name correctly on Twitter, who makes the point regardless that I’m quoting from his tweet. He makes the point, regardless of where the CIO reports, the primary obligation is continuity of the business i.e. risk management. And that’s a very traditional IT perspective and so how do you reconcile the feeds and speeds perspective with the value conversation.
Eduardo:
(07:22) That’s a great point. So I think continuity of the business and I would add security into that to me are table stakes on what a CIO should do. That’s a requirement, base line. So assume that’s a requirement for every role, but if you back into how most IT departments are set up they function inline. They function for HR, finance, supply chains, sales, and marketing and I think that’s the wrong way to kind of view IT.
(07:54)So what we ended up doing with my team, similar to your question around the four P’s, blowing them up and making a new approach. We did the same thing a couple of years back with IT and does a traditional IT set-up actually match the requirements of customer expectations and the company expectations. And we ended up blowing up that functional alignment of IT and actually have six key areas of IT that provides value.
(08:25)And it centers around the customer, it centers around operation and security. So there are four main areas it centers around the main processes or values that we have. So we’ve (already heard from? 08:35) Jeffery Moore and we said, the front office, all the relationship systems that the company has, the systems of engagement, one lead for that, which the encompasses marketing, sales, and services. And it flows from the customer back into the company.
(08:54)And that area has responsibility for the master data strategy for the company. So instead of the data residing in the back, we said, the system of engagement of where the customer lives, at the responsibility for the master data strategy for the company to be able to drive analytics.
(09:11) Then we flipped it and we said, all the backend systems that are transection in nature where finance/supply chain lives. Or systems of record, one lead for the company that looks at the overall end-to-end processes. And that way, the customers flow from systems of engagement back into the systems of record.
(09:29) And then we get it to other systems which many I think IT departments forget, we said, there’s innovation that gets developed in the company., all around the engineers that we have, both in software and there is a whole set of tools and systems that they use. so we created a systems of innovation team as one lead and focusses around engineering community.
(09:52)And lastly, when you think about the employees, they’re people, they live within the company, but most were enabled by technology. By the day-to-day interactions and that impacts the culture of the company.
(10:06)So all the tools that employees has, that has a huge impact on the company is the systems of collaboration. And we have one lead looking at that holistically, not just telephony, email, the social platforms that we use inside, and now, we do video among major locations. So as you step back and look at IT – not a function on alignment, but if you look at systems of engagement and look at relationship, systems of record, transactions, systems of innovation on how we develop solutions. And ultimately , at systems of collaboration or how do we enhance the culture of the company, through the tools that we have put in place.
(10:41)And foundationally, cyber security and operations which enable the continuity of the business going forward.
Vala:
(10:47)What percentage of your time is IT versus marketing? Because again, as a chief marketing officer, I’m pretty busy just marketing the management function. So I’d like to know the percentage of the time you spend. And then maybe your organizational structure in IT supporting your marketing needs.
Eduardo:
(11:13) I try to balance it out 50/50 in terms of my time between marketing and IT. Some quarters like this quarter, since we are doing our three-year planning for IT, so is little bit heavy on the IT side. But I have got a good team underneath and I can step back and forth between the roles. If you look at the IT structure that supports marketing, that resides within the systems of the engagement team. There, we have a single lead for marketing, sales, and servicing in the company.
(11:47) And the reason we did that, that is that if you look at the systems of marketing News, that is actually a continuum between marketing automation systems or CMS platforms for running dot com, or social platforms. They tie into the sales automation systems that, in how we manage leads end to end, and ultimately that ties into our services systems within the company.
(12:13)So we have an IT team that is dedicated into marketing, but overlaps with sales and services.
Michael:
(12:21) When you talk about IT being customer centric, what exactly does that mean? So who is your IT customer and then how does that intersect with marketing.
Eduardo:
(12:36) That’s a good one, so when you think about IT centric, IT, and the systems of engagement so all the relationships sit in the front office, we start with let’s say and end user customer that we have. How do they interact with the company along all of the touch points that we have, both digital and non-digital?
(12:36)In all cases, we have a system sitting in the back that does that. In the past, and if I go back five years, we would do a systems implementation where we would start with the software. And how do we architect that software out towards the customer, and looking within the silo. So if we were doing salesforce automation, they would do a salesforce automation implementation within that silo.
(13:17) Now, if you flip that, and you start the customer, we actually have user experience experts sitting with the IT team right at the beginning. Not at the end where they are doing the UI and UX design, but at the beginning where they are looking at the whole customer journey. And they’re designing along with the IT architects, what does that journey look like from the customer and the impact that it has on the digital footprint of the company.
(13:46) And ultimately that has an impact on the requirements that we give IT, is to build out the system of architecture that we are going to put in place.
Michael:
(13:56) So the marketing designs the customer journey, but does so in conjunction with IT so that the technology and the customer goals are moving in lock-step all the time.
Eduardo:
(14:11)That’s right and an additional benefit to that, that we haven’t had in the past is when we look at the funding model and the projects that we’re going to be running for the next two years around the front office. We actually have marketing, sales, services, and IT sitting in the same room. So when we do the portfolio planning, we look at all across the touch points with the customer, and how we’re funding them over that time period.
(14:39) So instead of IT talking to marketing, and a separate IT talking to sales on individual projects, we look at all the relationship systems that the company has and have a single conversation where we all agree on, and then that creates a tight interconnect between all the groups around the customer.
Vala:
(14:58) You mentioned marketing automation and understanding the impact of your campaigns and lead nurturing. So when you’re looking to add you know data scientist or folks with deep analytical skills, to perhaps understand the whole customer acquisition funnel and marketing automation. Are you hiring data experts into IT or into marketing, or both?
Eduardo:
(15:27)So initially we started hiring data experts into marketing. Where we are right now in the discussion is that, as we evolve the capabilities, the data experts are actually going to go into the systems of engagement team that are sitting within IT, that are working with marketing, sales, and services. So that we have a single pool that allows us to architect the data correctly within our internal systems, and that allows us for us to view the data as is required. And then ultimately, provide value to it.
Michael:
(16:06) We’ve been talking a lot about the IT side, but tell us now a little bit about marketing and what the marketing team is doing from the digital perspective and how that group interfaces with, but again this time from the marketing perspective.
Eduardo:
(16:31) Perfect, so if you think about marketing and sales we work together on the digital strategy for the company, since we are heavily B2B on what we do. We look at the complete funnel for the corporation, so when we think about marketing automation, and campaign management for outbound and inbound.
(16:52)We work very closely with the IT teams to tie that into the sales tools that we have, so when we launch a campaign, we may get a lead to one of our systems. That lead, we can actually track it when we give it to one of our channel partners or one of our direct sellers.
(17:09) It’s changed in the thinking of how marketing enables the funnel and it changed our ability to rethink on how we view data – not just the top of the funnel in terms of where marketing ends and our marketing qualify leads. But we take it all the way down to sales and then to ultimately to closure. Even if we don’t close the sale, we will continue the conversation with the customer using those digital systems.
Vala:
(17:36) It’s just a tremendous amount of discipline you know, from culture to the right people and skillset to the right processes to achieve what I think all of us in marketing want to better understand, which is the effectiveness of a campaign. And you know, you mentioned marketing qualified lead and sales accepted. I mean ultimately, when it’s serious decision or (Marquette Marcoil?) or whomever, there’s about seven traditional stages in the marketing funnel, and it is incredibly important for IT and marketing to lock-step, to be able to capture the insights that you need. What type of collaboration tools or processes do you use, so that all of the stakeholders have a common view of what you are trying to accomplish in terms of the analytics.
Eduardo:
(18:35)So that’s a great question, and when you talk about collaboration tools, one of the things that we looked at was that traditionally we had been an email centric company. And when you do that you communicate too one to many or one to one, but you lose the knowledge that’s within the email to the broader population.
(18:55) So a year back, we ended up actually putting a social platform within the company and that enables a broader collaboration across all the teams, and great by knowledge to spur ideas.
(19:11)We tied the collaboration platform actually to our HR system. So that when we look at the profiles and we were talking a little bit earlier about LinkedIn, in most companies employees have a better LinkedIn profile than what they have in their HR systems inside the company. So we just made it easier for employees to take the HR system, look at the profile that they have, build on it, and actually pulling from LinkedIn if they want. Tie the collaboration platform to that, and so when you are trying to look for an expert, it’s easy to find an expert within the company. As you collaborate in closer open groups, our social platform enables that knowledge to be brought up to the forefront.
(19:56)And what we’ve been seeing is, is almost sales talk. Somebody might post a question in the community and you get people jumping in from all over the world, so I think we have been able to break down walls between functional areas. But also break down businesses between teams that are located in different countries. It’s a huge plus in communication and collaboration using that platform, versus the use of traditional email.
Vala:
(20:19) Is this a custom solution or from another vendor
Eduardo:
(20:26) No, it’s a solution that we’ve got from a software vendor. We ended up customizing it in terms of the look and feel for the company, and then linking that into some of the other systems that we have and just to make it easier for adoption.
Michael:
(20:42) You have said in the past that IT should drive culture change. You don’t hear is too many people talking about IT being the ones driving culture change. So maybe you can elaborate on that.
Eduardo:
(20:56) IT and marketing play a huge role on culture change. So the marketing side it’s easy, right. When you’re a purpose driven company and you are based on brand value that impacts the culture of the company internally. And marketing and HR work very closely on that. IT has an equal impact with the employees in that area. But if you think about it, (broken audio 21:20) in the company 9 broken audio 21:25 - 21:33) enabled through IT systems.
(21:36) And that’s the part that IT can enable, when you look at how we communicate as an employee base, social platform, huge impact on culture in creating connectivity and breaking down that boundary. Like today, we’re using video, and in the past most people communicated through email and phone. Email happens to be impersonal, and with the phone due to lose the emotional link because you don’t get to see the face.
(22:02) (Broken audio and unclear) able to deploy video capabilities within the company. So, as you put in video, you put in social platforms and you break down those boundaries, you can definitely change the culture of the company.
Vala:
(22:16) You’re leading. You’re active on social media. I see you on Twitter and I see all video blogs and obviously I reference you in the Harvard business review blogs. So you are active externally and clearly you are active internally with collaboration. What are some of the challenges or cultural barriers or training tools that you needed to put into play to have IT embrace, and I’m assuming that it may be a bit more difficult to have IT adoption of social, but maybe that’s not accurate. You know, what are some of the ways where you’re championing in collaboration throughout Motorola?
Eduardo:
(22:51) I think part of it has to do with changed management. We’re an 86-year-old company, and through that you end up building certain ways to communicate.
(23:03)The systems of the company are the tapestry of the history of the company in many cases. But what we have put in place has been done through requisitions and investitures and what you have is a network based off of that.
(23:15) I think when you are going forward and trying to change change management on getting people on doing things different is key. I think you’ve got to lead by example, and as people get more comfortable you get to see it taking off like wildfire. So you mentioned that I’m active on Twitter and video blogs, and when we put our social platform inside the company, you started seeing employees around the world actually almost taking that same approach inside.
(23:43)Taking a point of view, sharing content that they’d seen in other places and then the employees started writing blogs inside the company, with the point of view that they have either something going on in the industry or something that they’d seen with a customer. And that enables learning to happen inside a company that’s not formalized. You’re learning not through a course, but you are learning through employees sharing and that’s the beauty of systems enabling that culture change.
Vala:
(24:10) How big is your IT organisation, I’m just curious – employees
Eduardo:
(24:12)So the number of employees, I think we have stated that there was 21/22,000 employees around the world. Around the IT organisation we are a little bit South of 400 IT employees from the Motorola batch. We have outsourced over the last 10 years with a lot of the App support and operations so from the Motorola batch, we have a few hundred that are out there.
Michael:
(24:39) We have a few questions from Twitter, so let’s go there, and to begin with is Lauren Brousell, who is a writer at CIO magazine asks to questions. Question number one, is what kind of employees do you hire at Motorola. So let’s start with that, what kind of employeesdo you hire?
Eduardo:
(25:10) So mixed bag of employees. We have employees that are fresh-out, coming out of Universities around the world and moving into entry level positions or new skill sets that we’re bringing the company.
(25:21) We also have employees that have been with the company many years, so a long term employees around the world. So we may have an employee’s that’s been 20 years with the company, or somebody that’s fresh-out. But that ties directly to a challenge that IT has where I think one of the researchers had done a study, that as employees of the company from around the world and said, if you have better tools at home or at work in terms of communication. And they meant social tools, video. I think over 50% responded and said, hey, I got better tools at home. The younger you got, the higher the percentage it became right.
(26:04) So if you’re in your mid 20’s coming out of college, I bet 70% of the kids will say, hey, I’ve got better tools at home.
(26:12) If you fast forward that on what the company will look like in 10 years from now, you’ve got to start thinking of the fresh-outs coming into Motorola and how do you set up a IT infrastructure or a systems of collaboration that enable our employees to communicate the way that the do at home, inside the company.
Michael:
(26:33) So you have a mixture of old establish people who know the history of the company and younger folks as well. Now Lauren, her next question is, what social platforms are you currently using and my guess is that she wants you to name, so if you are comfortable naming names then do so, if not then don’t.
Eduardo:
(26:55)So inside the company as I mentioned earlier, we do have a social platform that is tied into the email systems and all the other systems that we communicate and I think that has taken off like wildfire in terms of usage and value that we are seeing.
(27:11) Then externally in terms of social platforms, we use the traditional ways and means of Twitter, Facebook, and private blogs and private social sites where we enable our customers and general customers to collaborate and even provide us with product ideas and product enhancements that we should make.
Vala:
(27:31) We hearing more and more on the phrase of digital business transformation, you know, I would like to know your definition of what does that mean and then perhaps your mid to long term vision and roadmap in terms of digital business transformation within Motorola.
Eduardo:
(27:51) So within using that term with inside the company and also if you think about when I took over IT a few quarters back, one of the reasons for that was to better align IT with the business strategies of Motorola Solutions. So how do we enable the acceleration of moving to be more of a solutions in the company. Not only in the way that we sell, and in the way that we create solutions and products for customers but also, how do we collaborate across the expertise around the world?
(28:23)When we step back, there was four key areas that we looked at. Traditionally, IT was running silo programs as I mentioned for functional areas and when we step back and treat our IT investments in the Motorola portfolio of the company work interlinked. We wanted to move away from systems of implementations and software implementations that was tied into the program, and have IT enable end to end processes within the company.
(28:52)And that spans across multiple silos or multiple software that we may have in place. So a broader architecture of end to end processes in how the customers flow.
(29:05)We also wanted IT to look at data not locked into a software, ERP data or salesforce automation data. But to look at data as an asset of the company and provide insights based on that data. So when you talk about analytics, analytics only happens unless you architect your data in a way that enables it to be rich of insights that can be provided out there. And then ultimately move on to IT to have more of an agile approach of getting away from multi-year project implementations and so actually have quick wins as we went along.
Michael:
(29:47) Now very often, in many companies there is a significant tension that exists between IT and marketing. As a matter of fact, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that many CIOs – or at least a lot of CIOs believe that marketing is a kind of a funnel to take away budget that rightfully belongs to them. And at the same time, IT complains that marketing doesn’t respect the need for security in all of these things. And marketing complains that IT is too slow. So how do you reconcile these almost kind of natural tensions that exist between the two groups, and they both roll up to you.
Eduardo:
(30:34) That’s right, I mean if that applied to us in what you have just described, there would have to be a couple of dozen of appeals to kind of be able to manage.
(30:45) But I think traditionally that does happen, and as I mentioned earlier, in most companies IT is so focused around the back office systems, that it tends to forget the customer facing systems that impact both marketing and sales. And that is what leads to the creation of tension, which goes back to budget allocations. So if you’re focused on ERP deployments or manufacturing and distribution systems deployments, those are multi-year projects that tend to suck up most of your budget.
(31:18) If you have that balance between systems of engagement and your front office relationships of systems, and systems of record in your back office, where you look at them both with the same importance and you balance the investments both between the back office and front office, that would tend to defuse the tension and increase the collaboration between the teams.
(31:39) So I think that’s why you kind of see that traditional tension happening between marketing and IT. First, it is where IT has been focusing on in the past, second is where the IT budget is allocated, and third we have left to marketing putting in their own operational money and making decisions on the front office and depending on IT.
(32:02) So the benefit that I have in Motorola, is that we have first, both of the areas are combined on my preview, but more importantly I think I’ve broken down those functional silos and try to balance or invest on the portfolio review on both the front and the back office
Vala:
(32:23) So a growing title in the C-suite for the last couple of years has been the Chief Digital Officer. You know an individual that perhaps has one foot in IT and one foot in marketing. You served that role but I’m wondering in perhaps of your system of engagement function, do you have an individual or individuals that are responsible for defining the vision roadmap for a mobile, social, cloud, big data, applications and you know other technology trends that are typically the responsibilities of a Chief Digital Officer?
Eduardo:
(32:38) Yeah we do. I think our lead for systems of engagement or relationship on the front office basis systems is as you described as the chief digital officer. And I think I would like to change that title from chief digital officer to actually chief experience officer. Because what you are enabling is an experience to happen is digitally in some cases and some cases might be personal but powered by a digital system in the backend.
And if you have a chief experience Officer, kind of taking that role they are looking at end-to-end experience with the customer that is digitally enabled and I think that’s where you get the beauty of the combination of those two roles.
Michel:
(33:38) So is it correct to say that you’re spending quite a bit of time in terms of mapping out that end-to-end experience both on the level of customer experience on the one side and the technology to support that customer experience, whether it’s a physical experience or digital experience?
Eduardo:
(34:03)That’s right and one of the end benefits that I’m seeing as we started doing that is as you map out the digital experience for the customer in say the front office, and you start matching that up with the architecture in the company, you start seeing things that you would do different. Because you are having conversations that spans across marketing, sales, and services and looking at the architecture holistically.
(34:31)And then so you start making decisions on vendor’s, on stacks that you’re going to be putting in place, on how the data is going to flow across the system. And so there is additional benefit that I think your customers are going to see from the way that they interact with you. I think one of the benefits is on the budget but also (unclear audio 34:52).
Vala:
(34:54) To what extent does shadow IT exist within Motorola and what are your views on that?
Eduardo:
(35:02)So I think we’re getting to a point whereas it’s minimal. I have this ability to – probably 98% to 95% of all investment that is made within the company.
Vala:
(35:17) Technology investment?
Eduardo:
(35:18) Technology investment, and the budget may not be sitting in the IT budget in many cases, but I get to see the projects, and I get to slot into within the portfolio view we. Are getting better and better, so when you think about shadow IT, when you have rogue projects that might surprise you, we’ve been trying to minimize that because, we go in and talk holistically in terms of the portfolio management that we do over a three-year period. And everybody sees the value of what the projects fit in.And if it makes sense doing a project now or not.
(35: 49) If we run out of IT funding and we decide to fund it out of a business budget, then we do the discussion at that time. So it minimizes the shadow IT component within Motorola.
Vala:
(36:01) How about shadow marketing.
Eduardo:
(36:07)We actually set of shadow marketing 10 years ago
Michael:
(36:12) Shadow marketing is marketing that no one ever sees! Lauren Brousell from CIO magazine asked a follow-up question, and I was wondering this too. So you were talking about driving alignment between IT and marketing through budget allocations, which naturally leads to the question and this is her question; who has the higher budget? And she also wants to know and in the future who should have the higher budget. So how do you do the allocations between marketing and IT?
Eduardo:
(36:43)So the to her first question, IT has a higher budget than marketing. I wish I had the IT budget in the marketing side. And then when we do the allocation we actually base it on the business strategy of the company. To tell you the truth, if you kind of elevate it, IT being a business enabler, we’re actually sitting in the room where we make the budget decision in the portfolio for the next two years.
(37:10) Not just marketing and IT are sitting in the room, but there is marketing, IT, sales, services and even our supply chain of financing. So holistically when we look at all of the investments that we make, we all push to say, okay, this will make sense for the company and not necessarily just a function.
Vala:
(37:28) What are your views on cloud computing.
Eduardo:
(37:32)So we’re from our compute lines, you know we have data centers all over the world with servers that are sitting out there. We have been moving heavily into virtualizing that into our cloud. We have done cloud for about 20% virtual come to the end of this year we are going to be over 70% virtual and sitting on the cloud.
(37:54)More and more of the investments that we’re making on software. There is software sitting on a cloud environment. It might be a private cloud that we might be running, but we are moving in that direction heavily both on the computer side and the way that we deploy software around the company.
(38:10) So we have another question from Twitter and soon we’re going to run out of time, so I’m going to ask you to keep your answers relatively short so we can get in as many of these as we can. So this is from Brian Fanzo, who, that I have just saw on Twitter he is a community manager, so he asks how do you train your team to show you the value of creating experiences and engaging with the community. So how do you train your team from the value of engaging the community?
Eduardo:
(38:47) First you got to provide some guidelines to get the people comfortable with participating, so that they feel safe by having an opinion and even been active on the community externally. I imagine this is an external question in terms of external communities.
(39:05) Once you started doing that communicating the do’s and don’ts of participating in the community and not putting roadblocks for people to do it, they start to see that people have a point of view and opinion in getting active on an external basis.
(39:17)That is not so much of an issue in the internal communities, because I think that if you haven’t opened culture you are going to have people feeling comfortable with the participation and providing a point of view.
Michael:
(39:25) So the key point is making sure that people feel safe, and that they can engage in the community without fear of reprisal.
Eduardo:
(39:33)Exactly, that’s a key point there.
Michael:
(39:35) And then we have a question from Irving Amundsen, and again I hope I’m pronouncing your name correctly. He would like to hear more on why a chief digital officer is a chief experience officer.
Eduardo:
(39:55) I think it’s a nuance on chief digital when I think about that. I think technology. When you think chief experience, you think end user and customer that is enabled through technology. And a small nuance, but I think user centric design is the future of IT, and that nuance of the chief experience officer enables you to kind of start with the end user and work your way back into the way that you architect your system.
Vala:
(40:28) Do you foresee sometime in the near future marketing hires will have to have a technology background; mathematics, statistics, computer science, engineering design. It feels like it’s more of a science and art as we look to serve our customers across multiple channels and multiple technologies.
Eduardo:
(40:54) I think it will be, because I’m biased. We’re technology company but more and more we’re hiring fresh outs, and your question I think somebody had earlier from the University of Illinois, management and technology program where they are almost hybrid. They are sitting in the business skills, but also taking technology courses. So they feel comfortable dealing with technology as an enabler. They feel comfortable with data as an enabler. So I think you’re still going to have creative types in marketing, but you are definitely going to see an increase on technology background.
Michael:
(41:29) Here’s a question I get asked surprisingly often and it’s usually coming from parents, who have kids in junior high school or in high school. And the question is, what should my kid do, what’s the you know it’s got to be something related to technology, so what should my kid do. Should they become a CIO?
Vala:
(41:54) Application developers.
Michael:
(41:56) What’s your advice for these folks?
Eduardo:
(41:58) I agree with your recommendation. I think a technology education and depending on if you want to be a CIO or not, it’s foundation. You can do business, you can do marketing. I think it opens many more doors. Ultimately, what you want to do in terms of becoming a CIO, or becoming a developer, personal preference you’ve just got to have passion behind what you do. Technology foundation and a little bit of passion I think will guide you along way.
Michael:
(42:26) Tell your kids to become a data scientist, it will guarantee employment for the next number of years.
Vala:
(42:31) According to McKenzie for sure, they claim we are going to have a 200,000 shortage in data scientists and analytics by the end of this decade. So I’m going to as you are tough question, and I’m going to put you on the spot, so I apologize in advance. Which do you like more the IT side of the marketing side? And this is just amongst us, nobody is listening. You know, I just want to know, because you’re in such a unique position of scale and the magnitude of resources and functions you have. I’m not sure I could name another executive of your scale that has both marketing and IT, so it is a very unique position based on from my experience.
Eduardo:
(43:19) That’s a great question, and to tell you the truth I’ve been working in marketing for many years, and I love what marketing can do. I’ve come to appreciate IT, in terms of the value that it provides the company. And 80% of the time I love IT – I mean to tell you the truth, thinking about strategy in how do we impact the customer, and how do we impact the company? Being knee deep in technology is awesome, so the IT component, 80% of the time love it. The 20% of the time that I don’t love, is when I get a call on a Saturday or Sunday…
Vala:
(43:51) One of the 120,000 employees.
Michael:
(43:56) Well you know, I think it’s just about that time.
Vala:
(44:00) That’s a fast 45 minutes isn’t it.
Michael:
(44:01) A very fast 45 minutes. We have been talking with Eduardo Conrado, who is the senior vice president of both IT and marketing at Motorola solution, and this conversation can go on a long time but we’re out of time. I’m Michael Krigsman, my delightful co-host, Vala Afshar, Vala.
Vala:
(44:25) Michael great show.
Michael:
(44:28) And we want say a heartfelt thanks to our guest, Eduard will Conrado Eduardo, thank you so much for joining us today.
Eduardo:
(44:36) Michael, Vala it’s been a pleasure.
Michael:
(44:37) And to everybody watching, I hope you will tune in again week and hope you have a great weekend in the meantime, bye bye.
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