American Cancer

welcome to episode number 167 of cxotalk.i’m michael krigsman, and our show today is going to be a great show. we’re talkingwith jay ferro who is the chief information officer of the american cancer society. we’regoing to talk about digital transformation inside this very large non-profit organization.and jay how are you today? michael i’m great. thanks for having me.it’s great to be here. well thanks so much for taking your time andjoining us here today. let’s begin, tell us briefly about the american cancer society.i think everybody has heard the name, but tell us about what you do. yeah, you know the american cancer societyis a global organization. very simply dedicated

to eliminating cancer as a world health problem;we do that a lot of different ways through obviously research where i think we’re knownfor. we’re the largest governmental funder of cancer research in the country. patientprograms, prevention early detection programs, patient services, advocating, lobbying work,all kinds of things. we’re in thousands of communities around the country, reallyaround the world now. and we have one simple mission, and that’s to eliminate pain andsuffering from cancer. helping people detect it early. prevent it to begin with. once theyhave it you know and get it cured and you know, we’d love to put ourselves out ofbusiness michael honestly. how did you decide to take the cio role inthis non-profit?

well you know it’s funny. when i first gotoffered the job at acs about four years ago i told a good friend that i was thinking aboutjoining acs as cio. and he looked at me and said, ‘well are you still going to keepyour full-time job?’ and i think he thought i was going to be a volunteer or somethinglike that, and not recognizing how big we are you know.but this has been my first non-profit and it’s been a real privilege, which i camefrom aig, a company and before that, mariner health care and a number of big, large kindof multinational or global entities. but a lot of people may not know this, but i lostmy wife pricilla, and of course i don’t go very far, my beautiful wife pricilla tocervical cancer in 2007. so in 2012 when i

had an opportunity to come here and do whati love, which is be a cio, but more importantly do it for an organization that’s dedicatedto eliminating what took my wife and my three boys mother. i mean how can you say no tothat? you’re too passionate right. so it’s a very professional mission foryou but also obviously a very personal mission. it is. it’s a crusade. i always tell peoplethat i think in life you can have a job, you can have a career, and you’re lucky if youhave one of those over a job. and the luckiest i think has a crusade. and i’m very honoredand privilege to have a crusade. so that crusade, the america cancer society,one thinks about it as these volunteers and raising money but as an organization i thinkit’s larger than most people are aware.

so give us a sense of the size, the scope,the activities again of what the organization does. yeah, no i think it surprises everybody whenthey hear about how large we are. we have a little over 6,000 employees all around thecountry. we have 2.5 to 3 million volunteers at any time that are our life blood. and betweendonors and constituents and you know, all the folks that have helped us, you’re talkingabout 75 plus million customers at any given time. so we’re very honored. fund raisingis not all we do clearly, but all we do depends on it.so from an it perspective what does that mean? we’re the best of probably three differentworlds; health care, maybe a little bit of

higher ed and research and even you know retailto a certain extent because we make millions of transactions. we work in all the majorplatforms, you know social, mobile, across all the digital landscapes. so we have allthe big major challenges that any large entity does, but you know our product just happensto be our brands, our information, our cures, our volunteer network etc. so your product is essentially research andservice, because you’re also the largest cancer researcher outside of the federal governmentas i understand it. that’s right yeah, we’re the largest non-governmentalfunder of cancer research in the country. so we’ve played a part in just about everymajor cancer breakthrough since the early

70s. we’re very very proud of that. i meanyou can track and linage of many of the treatments today like for septin and in many others tofunding that was started at acs. you know that was funded by acs.we get a lot of great researchers early in their careers. we’re proud to have had ithink the number is 47, 46 or 47 of our researchers have gone on to win the nobel prize. so wehave 47 nobel laureates with acs ties. i mean you just don’t see that kind of intellectualcapital at a lot of places. so you are this very large distributed organization,and you’re also trying to use technology to further the mission and the activitieswhich the organization engages. so can you shed some light on the kind of changes thatthe american cancer society is going through

and the impact on technology and how you’reusing technology to further the mission of the organization? no absolutely. so when i joined we we’re12 independent divisions plus one corporate. so there was a huge opportunity right at thebeginning to do a whole lot of improvement of doing the blocking and tackling of it right.you had 13 different independent it companies, very common in the nonprofit space or in thefor-profit space to have this federated model. and we became one unified global functionalbased it organization. once you kind of stem the bleeding and takeadvantage of some of those early economies to scale, we had a real opportunity to transformthe way that we interact with our volunteers,

the way we interact with our donors. and it’snot just about taking digital technology and applying it to our old business process. allthat does is make old business processes faster, and that’s not always a good thing. sometimesit is; there’s modernization. but it’s about rethinking the way that we interactwith our constituents and our volunteers. let me give you an example. you know the millennial’stoday and again i think they’re painted with a very broad brush at times, but thereare some truths. they are very used to highly customized experiences. that’s the samein a not for profit, or fundraising, or volunteering perspective.so all the systems that are behind that; cloud based identity, and customer identity andaccess management. you know a more robust

crm, mobile technology, all of those things.geo-fencing at events you know that we’re rolling out later this year where you canwhere i know if michael shows up at an event and i can personally thank you. and you know,just some of those coolest technologies are going to change the game for us. but it’swith the intent of attracting, retaining donors and volunteers, all for the purpose of furtheringour mission right. and you know if we can do that it’s going to be a game changer. so again the impact of technology on this,how do you work with other senior leaders in the organization to convey to them wheretechnology add strategic value to the mission in some of the ways you were describing.

that’s been a journey right. so my bosstold me when i came here, my old boss and he’s since retired. but when i came herehe said jay, it is a four letter word in this organisation, which i didn’t really wantto ask what he really meant. but he said you know, you’ve got your work cut out for youand that’s why you’re here. so what that really meant is multifaceted.one, it was you know not where it needed to be. it wasn’t a strategic partner and beyondthat it wasn’t even a good order taker. so we had to re-establish credibility. therewas no way i could have walked in you know 3⽠– 4 years ago and said, let me introduceyou guys to digital transformation. they would have looked at me as if i sprouted a secondhead and said, ‘let me show you the door’.

and i would have walked out, because nobodyreally cares about digital transformation when email and all the table stakes aren’teven working properly. so you know for me i had to earn credibility.so going back to your question, one of the ways i got folks to begin to listen was to you know, i don’t know of any cio – youhave a honeymoon period, but there’s no way we could have achieved this without youknow kind of eliminating some pain points out of the gate. and you’re never goingto get everybody all that once michael, it’s never going to be a ballroom experience whereeverybody just nods their head and looks at

you and go, ‘oh yeah, i guess he does knowwhat he’s talking about’. you’re going to partner one by one, two by two. so thefirst couple of partnerships that we established right out of the gate was with hr, was withcorporate communications, with marketing. we have eight horrific relationship with ourmarketing group. there is no daylight between us, it’s amazing. so, you know this wholecmo/cio thing just doesn’t exist here, because we speak daily and that’s been terrific.other groups were a little slower to come along.no audio it goes just beyond are like eating togetherand liking each other and speaking kumbaya. we do genuinely like each other and we havethe kind of same mindset. she’s a terrific

partner and we agreed early on that we weregoing to try and nip it in the bud and create shared goals. that meant sharing resources.that meant sharing our actual business and strategic goals from my organization and hers.and that’s all wonderful, but if i can’t execute her strategy or our organization strategyfrom a marketing perspective, all that sentiment is going to go away pretty quickly. we haveto continue to become a more nimble, more responsive, more reactive it organization,because marketing tends to move much faster generally than it does.and in order to keep up with that pace of change – and it’s not without its pitfalls.i’ve screwed up, and i’ve given her permission – not that she needed it, but to call meout when she needed to call me out. and she

has done the same thing. so it all startswith the human element. me looking at her in the eye and vice versa and saying, lookthe only way we are going to be successful is doing this together and creating that mutualrespect. and it trickled down to our teams and i’m happy to say it has worked out verywell. how do you manage the fact as you said themarketing organization has very short timeframes, and it has a different set of constraintsthat can affect the timeframes in which you can operate. so how do you reconcile the differentrequirements of it and the marketing organization together? well i looked at some of the technologiesthat they wanted to roll out ver very quickly,

whether it’s you know campaign managementtechnologies, multi-channel marketing strategies, digital, mobile, rebranding all of our webproperties, it forced it. well first of all let me go backwards.any new cio in his or her role has to find out who’s on the bus pretty quickly. youknow who’s on the bus, and you know if people have heard me say either you change people,or you change people. so we had to change our culture and it tobe a far more streamlined, simplified, standardized, responsive, forward-thinking organization.but how do you do that, it’s more than just a mindset. you’ll reduce the complexityin your it organization. you shut down legacy. you streamline processes. you’re invitedearly to the meeting, you say yes and you

never say no. you say, well let’s talk aboutthat we have options. so, there’s a lot of very technical things that go into beinga better partner. it forced us to come out of our comfort zone.it also forced us to you know maybe give people sandboxes and let them play in it. i say thisall the time. if i can get another department in the sandbox, we talk about shadow it. ifthey can stay in the confines of that, meaning they are not going to evaluate security. they’renot going to put the organization at risk, let them play in the sandbox. some of thebest ideas that we’re ever going to get are is if we provide them tools and that kindof environment to play in. the flipside is that we’ve had to educate about security,about threats - digital threats that are out

there, and we meet in the middle. i don’tthink we’ll ever move as fast as they want us to, but i don’t think we are slow asmay be that we are told from time to time. we have an interesting question from twitter,arsalan khan asks when you’re talking about first improving the operations and then transforming,would it help if the cio and the coo, the chief operating officer were the same person.is that away to help address this issue. wow what a terrific question! selfishly iwould say yes! that’s a great question, thank you for tweeting that. i will say this,in a perfect world i think effective all really good cios make terrific coos. and it wouldcertainly eliminate a whole lot of handoffs if that cio had operations as well.i can tell you that as an organization we’ve

mature; we no longer have one, a coo, butwe have the functions that would normally have you know record up to a coo and theyare simply are called by me and my other group. so i think that’s a vote of confidence youknow by my boss, our ceo that he respects our ability to deliver operational initiatives,so but going back to the question, in a perfect world and that would be great. you know, whynot be a ceo at the time to but that jobs taken right now. so one of the core things that any nonprofithas to do is manage donations, is find ways of getting those donations and managing thosedonations, and you were talking earlier about the importance of having the broad view ofthe customer and customer experience. can

you elaborate on the customer view? talk aboutthe customer view for us and how you interact with your customers and what do you do asfar as that goes. yeah what really spawned this for us is youknow obviously there’s the retail model that i referred to earlier. and we’re primarilyknown for probably three for four different fundraising models around the country, reallyaround the world now in 25 countries. relay for life is by far our largest, so if youare in one of 5,000 communities around the world you have probably seen a relay for lifesign near a school or near a track or near you know a park or something like that. thatis our primary fundraiser. we have 5,000 of them, 2.5 to 3 million participants in thatevery year. it’s an amazing thing. i mean

120,000 teams take millions of transactionsleading up to the actual events. the models changing though, and it used tobe back in the 80s, 90s etc. that you build the event and people come, and they clearlystill do and the relay is amazing. and this is one of many examples but the paradigm isshifting now. you know michael, the millennial or even the gen xer or the gen zer wants tofund raise on his or her own terms. you may want to attend a really once a year, and that’sgreat. but you may want to have a bikathon, so we’re pivoting and putting some of thefundraising power back into the hands of the individuals versus making it an event centricfocus. well what does that really mean? well it means i need to know michael. it meansi want to know michael the fundraiser. i want

to know michael the patient, the survivor,the caregiver, the donor. i want to know all aspects of michael so i can provide that tailoredexperience, that rich fulfilling experience that you walk away going, ‘i just made adifference. i enjoyed my time with the american cancer society. i’m moving the needle inthe battle against cancer’. and the technology behind that comes in theform of more robust crm, identity and access management you know from a constituent perspective,linkages and the integrations between all of those. you know, we’re building somethingcalled the customer or constituent 360 hub which all applications will be able to feedfrom. so at any given time let’s operationalize that.michael makes a call to our 24/7 365 call

centre to ask a question. i want to be ableto see that you have also been a relay captain that you’re a survivor and you’ve beenon our website so i can thank you. i want the mailings that you get. i want the emailsthat you get for michael not from me, and we can do that to a certain extent with segmentationand all of those other things and that is table stakes. but i want it to be for michael,not for a 40 something white male and so and so. i want it to be from michael krigsman.and we’re getting there and why? because you walk away feeling that we are your americancancer society, and i’m not serving up data that’s irrelevant or content that’s irrelevant,and making the best use of your donor dollars and your time, because unlike the irs, youdon’t have to pay them or give us anything.

i mean they’re volunteers for a reason,and their donors. you have an option to go other places and you know we've got to earnthat investment in us. as you have undertaken these technology programs,it’s interesting i say technology programs because there’s technology obviously involved,but more importantly these are business program changes that technology is enabling. so asyou have undertaken let’s say these business programs what about the culture of the organization,how has that have to have changed? well you know it’s funny. i was talkingto somebody even earlier today about this very topic and i laughed because there weretimes even in the first two or three years where occasionally you would get that olderemployee perhaps who has been here 20 – 25

years. maybe has never been anywhere else,and is not used to it being a strategic or enabler, and they would introduce you. like,‘this is jay ferro, our chief it guy’. and you just kind of stand there going, yeahyou know, and if you need any help with windows i’m happy to help. or if you get a bluescreen of death let me know and i’ll come over and reset it for you. i said, but you’vejust have to have my desktop knowledge. it’s been a while since i’ve been an it guy.but all kidding aside you know, some executives and folks who have come from the outside primarilyknew about the power of it and that had come from more progressive organizations. our employeebased skews some very young millennials and gen xers have an expectation that technologyis fairly far along.

some of the – and this is not age you know,but some of the folks that may be have been here for a long time weren’t at first isused to ‘what does the it guy think he knows about all of this strategy. who is he talkingabout our programs?’ and again, you and the credibility. not just through it deliverybut showing that you’re a business leader and not just an it leader.you’ve heard me say michael that cios are business leaders first and technologist second,or at least good ones but that means me showing up at events. that means me fundraising. i’mhappy to say that of 100 plus thousand teams around the world for relay my it team is inthe top 20. well yeah, i want the money that comes along with that for the organization.almost as it important is that all of my it

staff all around the country, we have to eatour own cooking. we have to use the mobile apps, the web apps, all the systems that weroll out. we show up at events and we talk to folks who are using them and the learningshave just been terrific. that’s just one way i’ve earned credibility and our teammore importantly has earned credibility that they might know what we’re talking abouta little bit. so this is such an interesting topic and justdrill into this point for a moment if you would. so you’re the chief information officer,information technology role and yet at the same time of the focus of what you do is aset of business activities, and again how do you reconcile that technology job withthe business role.

that’s right, so we do have an it strategybut it’s a subset of our business strategy. in fact that’s a very clumsy way to putit. let me rephrase that. we have an it operational improvement and continual improvement strategy.you know, we have all of these other things that we talk about whether it’s social,mobile, analytics, cloud, all of these things where we want to reduce cost and improve efficienciesand security. the big strategic projects that we’re workingon are not it projects, yet every single one of them has it as a leader in it, right. ourstrategy, my boss said it best. he said, jay, and he said this on an enterprise wide call,‘there is nothing we’ve done, there is nothing we’re doing, nor there is anythingwe will do that doesn’t have it as a strategic

enabler or as a leader’. and he’s deadon. i don’t care if it’s research. i don’tcare if it’s our new partnership with ibm watson. i don’t care if it’s any of that,it is at the table but i don’t go in as the it guy. i go in as a business businesswho understands what we’re trying to accomplish and then i lay along how we’re going toaccomplish. so you know, too many cios or it walking with cloud this or cloud that andour bits and bytes and blinking lights, and racks and use and line speeds all super important.all super important. they will yawn you out of the boardroom unless you can give thema real reason to care. and you know, the onus is on us as cios to understand and lead ourbusiness not for the business to understand

and lead it. so how do you give them a reason to care,what do you do? got to prove it. got to execute, and you knowyou’ve got to show them at times that’s requires us to build proofs of concept thatprove our understanding. i’ll give you a perfect example of. our mobile app which wejust rolled out a new iteration that we can take credit card, we can scan checks, peoplecan check on their teams. you can use social login, our new fundraising app. it’s terrific.we just did a soft launch, so next week is our big – a little sneak peek there, butit’s raised millions for us. even in the old iteration which did half of what our newiteration is.

the reason i bring this up is because ourorganization at first never asked me for this. they never said, jay we need a mobile appthat does all of these things. they said we need to do more with mobile. they said wellboy wouldn’t it be great if we reduced our dependency on checks and used more than justa mobile web page that was very pretty, but something beyond that. but nobody said jaywe need a mobile app. we listened and heard all the business problems. i give my peoplepermission to tinker to use a percentage of their time at all times for quick wins, fortinkering, for innovation. and we created a proof of concept that scanned credit cards,safely using paypal’s technology but very transparent. partnered with apple, partneredwith a whole bunch of folks that helped us

design it and brought it back to the headof marketing at the time, and they all kind of stared and said, ‘i didn’t know wecould do that’. and they said you’re solving business problems.you’re actually applying technology in a way that we hadn’t even thought of. andthat’s just one of dozens of examples where we’ve led the conversation. now, what theydid is they said, ‘but wouldn’t it be great if it did this’. because once theysaw that proof of concept and that strawman, we were able to iterate from that point onbecause we got some credibility right out of the gate. they realise that, hey, you guysmight actually know our business processes. that’s pretty solid for a first effort’.so i challenge you know folks to listen, learn,

and when you have an opportunity don’t waitto take the order. don’t wait for the ‘i need the full business requirements’. ifyou’re listening you know 80% of it. go iterate, create a proof of concept and bringit back. if you miss, you miss. at least you tried. so the foundation is having real clarity andvery very strong cooperation with the business, otherwise you wouldn’t understand the nuancesof what they actually need in order to build an app that meets their needs. that’s exactly right. that’s exactly right,and i think too often it professionals get enamored with the technology, and we do itfor technology’s sake. we built that not

for our own edification or because mobileapps are cool; and they are. but because we saw a business problem; we were taking toomuch paper. we were taking too many checks. at events we couldn’t process credit cardsfast enough. we couldn’t send out machines to read them fast enough. we didn’t havea great peer-to-peer technology, where you and i are sitting at dinner and i say wellyou know, would you like to make a donation to my team – yeah, i don’t have checkbook with me. don’t worry i can take this right here and securely pci compliant, allkinds of things. and that was something they just hadn’t been exposed to it, and theydidn’t know it could be done, and we knew it and created a strawman.

so part of that customer relationship thenis using technology to allow people working that the american cancer society as salespeople say always be closing. always be closing. always be closing. youknow the thing is though i love what we do. i love my it organization, but what i’mmost proud of is michael about everything we do is that it’s never for the glory ofit. now we love what we do, don’t get me wrong, and we’re very proud of the technologysolution and we always want to get better, you know. we are our own harshest critic.and if you’re a cio and you’re not harder on your team than the businesses, you’renot going to be a cio very long. that said, we love what our organization doesand so the passion for our mission, the passion

for our ‘product’. the passion for ourresearch, or fundraisers god bless them our volunteers. our field staff who just workstheir butts off who are amazing, community managers, we want to make their lives easierand we’re very passionate about that. yeah, i mean multiple reasons right. firstand foremost i think we dipped our toes in the way that everybody does payroll and timeand labor maybe you know with adp, they’re like we’re in the cloud, we’re a partnerwith company x. cloud is not a one size fits all, you know,it’s a tool that a cio has in his or her tool belt. and we looked at it and i saidthat if somebody can do something better, faster, cheaper, or more securely and it offeredme more capability for the same or less. or

even more if it is significantly more capability,i want to have a discussion. i want to get rid of the commodity technology.so the first big foray was getting off of lotus notes and moving to microsoft 365, andthat was huge for us. i mean notes had been here since 1998; you get 5000 applicationsin lotus notes. and moving so moving to sharepoint, moving to the cloud, moving to all of thatwas a huge cultural change more than it was a technology change. but it proved, and itwas very very successful that but enabled so many other things. it enabled cloud-basedstorage. it enabled cloud-based collaboration with our volunteers. it enabled all of theseother things, voip, ucas solutions for some of our smaller offices where we were beginningto allow using some of the more advanced stuff

that microsoft is rolling out now.why? better capabilities, more security, faster, iterations that i can do. for me to replicatewhat they’re doing – and again it’s not limited to microsoft. there are dozensof terrific cloud providers out there that we’re looking at all have used.for me to replicate them it would be cost prohibitive, and nor would i want to investdonor dollars, so i want to be able to look at our constituents in the eye and say, iam squeezing out the most i can for the dollars that we’ve been given.other things we are looking at our future state’s crm. right now our crm is on-prem.it’s a legacy’s crm. it’s huge install, and it’s a heart of lot of what we do; almost77 million constituent records, huge by any

measure. whatever we select here later thisyear it will not be here. i want it to be in the cloud. i want it to be mobile first,and i want it to enable our workforce out in the field, because they are the peopledoing the real work; them and our volunteers, not me or not us. our job is to make theirlives easier, and not have them beeping on in and standing on one foot, dance in theircircle in order to get what they need. i want it on their terms in a platform agnostic,mobile enabled secure way. is there any part of your systems technologydata that you plan to keep on premise because you don’t want the cloud. if so what wouldthat be? yeah, some of our research data right now.i mean longer term we may look at those. we

have a lot of research studies and epidemiologydata that probably we will you know not look at right away. you know, we are slowly movingdr. when i joined we had a couple of hundred datacenters, and i’ll qualify data centers as a closet in michael’s office that had arack and you know a local active directory replica, local router, and local file andprint server. i am happy to say we pulled out 90% of that, and we are now at a pointwhere you know i can hand off dr and i can hand off these commodity technologies to acloud provider. but there’s a handful of things, particularly around the research arenaand some of our cancer control information, and other things that short to mid-term willprobably keep on prem. but i can’t imagine

a scenario where longer term we wouldn’tconsider the cloud for just about everything that we do. you mentioned earlier that changing over tothe cloud required a culture shift, which again is one of those things i find so interestingbecause on one level the cloud is a change in technology. it’s not a change in mind,but actually it is a change in mind, so maybe elaborate on that point. yeah, the cloud i think you know three yearsago when we first kind of dove in headfirst was a little bit of a scary thing for someof the older school folks, it and non. we took great comfort and the warmth of our blinkinglights, and the fact that i could go in and

touch the silicon and all of that.i think just getting folks comfortable that first and foremost our data is secure thatwe are truly going to capture the efficiencies that we are going to capture. so we put togethera business case. i said, look, let me put my money where my mouth is and let’s measureroi, let’s measure the benefits that we’re getting. and i’m happy to say that theyall bore out, and it was really more a fear of change than it was actual fear of reality.and you know, one of the things that has helped us michael, and i would be rude if i didn’tbring this up, is that we’ve established champions all across the countries. so i’mtalking about non-it folks, who are more tech savvy that want to be early adopters of technology,that want to be change agents. you hear me

and my good friend david bray, and so manyother people talk about being change agents. and i’m proud to say that we have a numberof change champions and change agents around this organization that are terrific, thatare early adopters that want to become evangelists. whenever we roll out a new technology, whetherit’s our mobile app, or 365, or new business and analytical capability, new mobile crmcapability, we establish these groups of eight change agents around the organization to beatit up, provide feedback. and they’re allowed to be brutally honest with us about what works.and guess what? they feel like they are in the fold and they are; they’re invaluable.and when we do roll it out you have built in evangelists that are at your defense youknow whenever you roll out a big technology.

so it’s worked really well on multiple fronts jay, you mentioned david bray, and for folksthat don’t know david bray is the chief information officer for the federal communicationscommission. yeah he is and i should have said that anddavid is a terrific change agent and a terrific cio and a good friend. so historically we thought about change managementas very often you’re rolling out a new erp system and central hq is sending out newslettersand everything’s going to be great. oh you’ve been here! so what is change management in today’sworld?

well it’s about transparency and inclusivenessquite frankly. you know, i heard a change manager once tell me you can’t communicatetoo much, which i think is a bit of an overstatement. but to me, it’s all about setting the rightexpectations about what is and what isn’t going to happen, and being as inclusive andtransparent as you can. describing and being very articulating the desired outcomes andthe reason is that you are changing. and being as open and as honest about those as you can,and god knows when you screw up admit you screwed up.you know, when we decided to move to office 365 and one of the things we also did wasimplement the email retention. well, you know as well as i do that when a cio tries to leademail retention it doesn’t go very well.

so i enlisted our general counsel and ourcoo at the time and said if i’m going down i’m taking you to with me. but it was ahuge change. people were using email as a file retention system, and that was just nota good place to be. and this is just one kind of small tactical example, but we had to bevery open and honest about why we needed to change. i know it’s tough. we’re givingyou these alternatives. come along with us for the ride. trust us it’s going to beokay. we’re giving you these different ways of collaboration through team sites or throughour new intranet or through all these other things like yammer and other technologiesthat we use. i promise, just take the leap, it’ll be worth it.i’d say 95% of the people were okay with

that, and when we did screw up it wasn’tsome cryptic message from information technology. it was an email from jay ferro saying whoops,you know when it was a big enough error i said, look i expect better. we should havedone better, and you won’t see this happen again on my watch. we’re going to do everythingwe can to prevent it. and that earns credibility along the way too. so if traditional – god i don’t want toinsult any of my friends who are in change management. i’ll say it anyways, if traditionalchange management is about whitewashing and getting the corporate line out there distributingthe corporate message, then modern change management is blank and i will ask you tofill in that blank.

transparency. transparency, okay, so is change managementtoday then also to some extent an influencer relations function as you were describingessentially. oh absolutely it is, absolutely it is. youknow the reason so many change management initiatives fail is because they’re incomplete.we think that sending out a bunch of to your point, whitewashed memos to the organization‘well we told you. you didn’t read the memo?’ or putting cover sheets on the tpsreports these days. maybe you know, did you, you know not get that?and you know that’s not change management, that’s an email, and that’s a memo. sowe put into a multi-pronged communication

change management strategy within it wheni first came where it’s, these are all of our different communication vehicles. theseare out different constituents. this is how we communicate to them. so we have this wholecommunication strategy which actually garner did a case study on, but we’re very proudof it. it’s we wanted to open the kimono as much as you can.now, here’s what i’m not saying. there is proprietary data or proprietary thingsyou can’t discuss. i recognise that, so you always kept that one interarea and that’sgoing to be like, ‘oh, you can’t talk about salary’. i know you can’t talk aboutsalary information and personal data and all that. but where you can be open and transparentyou need to be. this is what we’re expecting.

it’s going to be hard. i apologize in advance,and we’re going to be living in a dual system role for about three months. i know it stinks,but thank you for your patience. thank you. when we get here we are going to save theorganization millions. i may get here you’re going to be able to do this. come long forthe ride with me, and it required me and my leadership to be extremely visible. recordingvideos, walking around, visiting sites, thanking people you know is part of being a servantleader. we’re almost out of time, but since youbrought up the concept of servant leadership, maybe you can elaborate on that very brieflythough because we’re really just about out of time.

yeah, you know to me if you’re not readyto serve you’re not ready to lead. and you know it’s all about enabling your team,providing strategic direction, thanking them. you know, getting out of their way, knockingdown barriers, disciplining when necessary, but with a servant’s heart in mind. andrecognizing that the best way to lead is to serve and maybe people think it’s a positionof weakness and it’s the complete opposite. the big misconception is there a big finiteamount of glory or recognition, a finite bucket. and the reality is that the more that yougive away the bigger the bucket becomes. and you know, my dad taught me that years ago.i don’t know that i appreciated it michael and i was a young man. but the older i getthe more i realize that guy was right about

a lot of things. we had a guest, sanjay poonen who is, do youknow sanjay? i do yeah. and he spoke at length about servant leadership,but we are just about out of time. but let’s finish, what advice do you have for both ciosand their organizations to get the maximum value, the maximum benefit from it. start with the problems you’re trying tosolve. start with the customer in mind. start with the product you’re trying to deliver.start with the service that you’re trying to provide. don’t start with the solutionin mind. educate yourselves, reach across

the aisle. relocate, knockdown the barriers.at the end of the day i see michael, the biggest problem, the biggest challenges that in anyorganization is that people just don’t communicate. they don’t get in a room, and everybodyis worried about turf, they’re worried about credit, and they’re worried about head count,and they’re worried about all this other stuff. worry about outcomes. what are youtrying to accomplish in this organization, there is plenty of glory to go around. there’splenty of work to be done, and just roll up your sleeves, check your ego at the door,focus on the outcomes. focus on transforming and delighting your customers, and good thingsreally begin to happen and the technology, i promise will fall into place.for cios, never take your eye off the operational

ball while you’re doing all this. nobodycares that you want to set sail to bora bora while your boats taking on water. you’llbe underwater pretty quick and you won’t get out of the harbor, so we get to do both. okay, wow lots of wisdom on how to be a goodcio and how an organization can take advantage of technology in the business context. youhave been watching episode number 167 of cxotalk, and we’ve been speaking with jay ferro,who is the chief information officer of the american cancer society. jay again, thankyou so much for being with us today. michael, thank you and it’s been terrifichere and congratulations on 167, that’s quite an accomplishment.

you know just relentlessly doing it. everybodythank you for watching, and again thanks to jay ferro and come back next time. bye byeeverybody.