Can you give us some examples of how the resources freed up, or the focus or the mindset of going
to the cloud enables you to participate more fully and be more responsive to the business?
Yeah, it's a good question.
Now, remember I built this team.
So, it's not as if suddenly resources were more available.
I will say my infrastructure team right now is about four people, which I think is tremendous.
And we have some people who help with the desks and going around.
So, [a] four-person infrastructure team, with $18 billion dollar business, I mean, those
are pretty good numbers.
That said, we do leverage Avanade heavily to help us with that; and a lot of the space,
especially around Microsoft and SharePoint.
But, we've got a managed service provider and that's the relationship we're going to
have there.
So again, we're not doing a lot of our management around things that don't add the most benefit
to your business.
Now, as I say that, adding your networks up, having everything work, is very important.
Downtime you can’t have there.
But when that’s up and working and running, nobody in the organization tends to see that
as you providing that to them, right?
So working in a managed service model, reducing the costs with the cloud, and getting the
majority of the focus on the applications, and changing those, and making those better
for the business, that's really where you're going to see the savings.
And even when I talk about four infrastructure people, two of them work almost full-time
with the application development teams.
So, [it] really brought down the focus on my team for a lot of the infrastructure work,
and then we focused back again on applications, data stores, producing new opportunities.
----------------
We have another question from Twitter.
Again, from Wayne Anderson.
And he says, “What was the single most important trait or factor to contribute to vendor trust
for you?”
And my answer is “delivery.”
I mean, well, a couple things.
When I have a vendor who can come in and deliver on their promises, that’s crucial to me.
A vendor who’s transparent.
So, consequently, there’s a problem with what they’re working on, they let me know.
They let others come in and help ─ also really important.
The worst thing is for a vendor to go off, have an issue, and let you know later.
Ones that are very strong in the competencies they have.
And then their ability to move resources out when they don’t work…
Sometimes, resources aren’t working for talent, and sometimes its cultural fit.
The ability to say, “This isn’t happening and get those changes very quickly,” is
important to me.
They have to be trusted advisors with me.
And in some ways, the lead of these managed service providers that I've used; those people
are on my team.
They meet with my team, and they feel like a part of our organization.
So, we don't treat them like they are something different.
But, those traits: really being good at what they say they’re good at; having transparency
into what they’re doing ─ when they’re having issues, and what’s going well; and
then also the ability to work with us on resources is key.
You earn that trust, don’t you?
Wow.
Now, I want to continue with this theme of the relationships with vendors.
And, I know that you’ve been working very closely with Avanade, and so where does Avanade
fit into this picture?
And, you’ve kind of alluded to it, but where does Avanade fit?
They were key with the network rollout and we had a couple good Avanade partners who
were on the floor.
When we talk about this network rollout ─ five cities in seven weeks, and some of these offices
─ two hundred desks.
I mean, just unloading the boxes sometimes.
We changed every technology component on the desktops in that transition.
Just getting the equipment on the boxes, setting it up on the desktop, hooking it to the network.
I loved when I was in Chicago and half the people we had here to do other things … So,
I’ll come in the week and I’ll help you with that.”
So, we had people of all different backgrounds helping us basically set up desktops, and
those were our Avanade partners with us.
So, we’ve leveraged them around the Microsoft Suite of SharePoint desktop.
They help my ISO with the cybersecurity decisions and looking at that.
They helped us with a lot of the early architecture around the cloud.
I actually remember going to Avanade and talking about what we wanted to do.
And, one of their key partners said, “You know, everybody else Mary is halfway down
this marathon.
You guys are standing at the end line saying, ‘Where do we go next?’”
And it was a really good insight to why we were having trouble getting answers to certain
questions because we were in a place other people weren't looking at.
But, I appreciated [that] they've helped us look down that road and look forward, and
try to find new solutions.
On top of that, they really helped build up our relationship with Microsoft, making sure
we were talking to the right people.
Any time you’re doing this kind of project that you’ve described, which is so encompassing
and especially on a very tight timeframe, it’s always fraught with complexity.
And, it’s hard enough to do that if everybody works for you inside your organization and
reports to you.
So, in that relationship with Avanade, how did you manage all of these pieces?
And how did you ensure that everybody was working on the same page and moving forward
in just the right way since you're dealing with multiple organizations?
To your point, people don’t always want to tell you about the problems they’re having.
We had a very open door about that.
And it was more.
Again, I bring up this transparency because what you’re talking about and the ability
to do this type of work so quickly … If people don’t feel like a group can walk
into your office and go, “Mary, we’ve got a problem!”
You’re not going to get through it because these problems are going to linger in the
background.
We had a very open door on that, we talked about problems very openly.
Problems were brought to the forefront, and this is where I’m going to get to the agile
mindset.
It wasn’t like, “Oh, I have a problem I had better hide it!”
It’s “I got a problem, guys!
Help me solve this so we can move on to the next thing.”
You know, Avanade brought their management around that.
I think I mentioned their senior person is one of my team and a partner to us.
I think having … It was both the managed services working with them, but also having
this very open mindset of problems are things to discover and solve, and not to worry about
and hide.
But you can’t write all, as you said, you can’t write all this down into a contract.
And so, when you’re working with Avanade, just as an example, how did you make sure
that that trust was there?
I mean, what did you do?
What advice can you offer other people who are staring into a huge project with external
vendors, and they’re terrified?
That’s a complex question.
I have done it a number of times.
I think 1) Bringing them into your team and bringing them into your fold, and treating
them as part of the project is very important.
Don’t delegate to them that they’re going to do this, and [that] you’re not going
to have any oversight.
Staying very clear.
Having those meetings with them.
We would also have meetings between the technology departments, [and] the business areas we’re
working with.
We talked about issues openly.
You have to be very actively involved.
You can’t be hands-off.
But on top of that, I guess that’s where I talk about moving people out if they’re
not working out.
If you see someone who isn’t fitting the culture and the vision, having honest conversations
and having a firm that will have those with you.
And migrating people out when you see them not either being transparent or making decisions
around technology that is taking us backwards.
We ran into that with certain people.
I don’t ... I think the big answer there is, you can’t just delegate it.
You still have to own that project.
You still have to own that firm that’s doing it, and you know, build trust but verify.