#37 The Future of Digital Business and Technology: A Conversation with Chris Hood

   Hello 

and welcome to a new episode of the CT O Show with Mehmed.  My name is Mehmed. I share daily insights about technology, news, and their use in businesses. Also, I share stories about entrepreneurs and their innovations. Today in this episode, I have a special guest. I have with me Chris Hood. Chris is a thought leader in technology and business.

He have a long career, , in Silicon Valley, and I would like to welcome Chris on this episode. And Chris just can you introduce yourself and little bit 

about what you do?  Absolutely. Thank you for having me. My name is Chris Hood. I'm a digital strategist. I have well over 35 years of business and technology development.

I've worked in the media and entertainment industry for quite some time as well, but throughout that I've gone in and out of different types of industries. Again, all based on technology and business and, and some marketing.  And today I spend a lot of time writing and speaking and podcasting. With people like you and, uh, sharing insights to, uh, different audiences on topics like innovation and digital acceler.

Great. Great. Thank you again, Chris, very much. And just to, uh, without further ado, as they say, the first question I want to ask you, because I covered this topic also on the podcast couple of times now, how you can explain a simple way,  the difference between digital transformation or digital acceleration.

Are they two different concepts you think, or are they the same? , they share the same, uh, 

 They don't share the same meaning. And let's kind of break that down. The, the overly simple version of what digital transformation is, whether you've covered it or not,  multiple times. I think there's a, a multitude of different types of interpretations of what digital transformation actually is. But if we go all the way back to 2012, The original definition of digital transformation was to digitize your products and services to meet the continuing expectations and demands of customers.

So it wasn't just about changing technology for the sake of changing technology or to keep up with technology. It was rooted in that customer's needs. For technology was rapidly evolving and companies had to keep up with it,  which gets us to today. If we kind of think about digital transformation, it sounds complicated, it sounds time consuming, and it also sounds like it's a project.

The reality is, is that we're never going to stop evolving our digital properties.  . And so if we think about it from a digital acceleration perspective,  there's a much clearer expectation that this is something that has to happen faster, that it has to happen now, and that it's continuous. Because when we accelerate, we're continuing to accelerate.

And that's the whole goal here because the, the technologies that we are engaged with as consumer.  Are constantly evolving and companies are going to have to continue that process in order to be able to keep up.  So all I've simply tried to demonstrate is that  we have to think beyond that transformation, right?

Th this has to be an ongoing mindset within organizations so that you're successful. So 

it's, so it's a journey 

basically, right?  Sure. It's, it's a journey. I mean, I think any transformation is a journey, but it's also the process, uh, a company might have to go through. Let's break it down. Uh, uh, maybe a different way.

Think about.  Development, and we came up with this concept several years ago called Agile in Scrum, right? So you've got the agile methodology, which is your ability to develop content or develop new services applications on a continuous basis much quicker, right? One week, two week sprint. Well, how do you do that with digital transformation,  right?

How do you evolve your technology every two weeks? So that you can keep up. That's really the mindset.  Yeah, 

I agree with you. Now from here, I want to.  Maybe start to think from a customer perspective. So for someone who decides that, yeah, it's time to start this journey, what do you advise them about? You know, which strategies, which key elements they should focus on when they decide to take this first step towards digital transformation? 

The number one, always, no matter what is your,  So you, you kind of set that up for me, but it's, it's always your customer. You do not digitally transform just for the sake of doing it. There's no point in it.  I will even argue that in a lot of cases, organizations are trying to decide what new technologies to buy or I want to implement some type of new thing or feature within my services. 

and they start with this perspective of I need to figure out the technology and then I'll figure out how to package it and sell it and send it off to the customers. What you should be asking is, what do my customers want?  And let's figure out how we create features and services and products that meet those needs, and then figure out what technology you want to bring in that's going to help you do. 

and, and so we call that an outside in perspective. You start on the outside with your customer's needs in mind first, then move your way inward to reach the technology that's going to execute that.  

Yeah, I agree with you a hundred percent. And this is also my own,  thought about the topic.

Whenever I speak to someone, I say, okay, why you are doing this? So they need to have the why and the why for them should be about the customer Now.   people, usually they start, they put this strategy, but I see them struggling later on  measuring their success. From your experience, what are the main, I would say, maybe KPIs that they should focus on to track their progress , on this 

journey? 

Yeah, it, it's a great question and it is something that a lot of organizations struggle.  There should be KPIs in the entire process.  So when we talk about customers, if customers are first, then you have to start thinking about what KPIs do I wrap around my customer?  That's an interesting conversation because in most cases, KPIs are internally focused around operations, and it's what has our team done successfully?

and have we met that, you know, that requirement. But if I start to say, well, what is our  customer's needs and goals? And for the sake of this conversation, let's say our customer has a specific goal and you know, maybe it's, uh, they need to get support faster.  Well that becomes a k p.  How quickly have we been able to help customers get the support they need?

Uh, what is the  response rate of that, uh, interaction? Uh, have we been able to reduce the number of support tickets that we've had, right? But, but they're all focused on that one customer objective or goal, which is I want to get support faster from the customers outside in point of view. As we move inward and we start to do things like, well now we've gotta design the experience, we've gotta build that customer experience.

We have to pick the technologies that are going to support that. We've gotta generate business value from that. And each one of those steps, there are KPIs. And you could say again, uh, if it's something like developing a customer experience, maybe the KPI is. How many times are we adjusting our, our experience each month?

You know, is it once a week? Is it once a day? Is it once a year?  Uh, how are we able to accelerate and keep up with those changes?  You should be able to track that, and ultimately, this boils down to data. You have to have the data to be able to understand what the customer.  The data to make decisions that are in the best interest of the customer, and then the data to track if it's actually working through your KPIs. 

Um, 

I have, I came to agree with you and always I tell. You know, people I speak with, you need to think about it like a cycle and the cycle. Start by digitizing and this is where the data comes from, and then you need to keep monitoring this data and, , take actions and maybe pivot your journey based on that.

So, yeah, , I a hundred percent agree with that. Now,  shifting topic a little bit, so, um,   while doing , some research. I saw that you talk a lot about the culture of innovation  now. Can you give us some insights about what you mean by building successful cultures of innovation? How you describe this?

What do you mean by that?  

Yeah. The, the basic premise of a culture of innovation is one by which you changed the actual culture at your company. In order to enable and support innovation.  And so innovation by itself is this very broad term. A lot of people might think of it as lightning in the bottle.

Right? I've created something amazing and, uh, it's gone viral and it's really successful and we're blowing up and yeah. Wonderful. And, and then you have people like, well, I, I can't replicate that, or I can't do that.   and, uh, how am I going to create new and interesting and exciting products? Well, innovation isn't about capturing lightning in the bottle.

It's about understanding that as customer needs are evolving, you're able to find ways to accelerate, transform, and keep.  . So it's all the same, right? Innovation is going to help you achieve that, and a culture of innovation is going to enable you to be more successful in that process. So when we think about that culture, we're thinking about things like failure. 

Uh, it is okay to fail at something. Failure is looked at as an opportunity to learn.  . And so if we think about something as simple as like the light bulb, right? Right. Thomas Edison went through hundreds of versions of the light bulb before he found one that worked. Each one of those was a failure.  Yeah.

But you have to keep trying until you get it right.  And so you have to build  safety within your framework of, of your company.   that says, look, we're going to allow people to fail,  but we're going to learn from that so that we can evolve and produce better things in the future.  So culture is all about your team structure, your uh, ability to allow for failures, your ability to learn through the data, and uh, you know, we call it psychological safety.

Giving you free range to make ideas, uh, possible.  And it's also about coming  to new ideas from the outside.  We often discount our own customers in the innovation process, but we get feedback all the time from a customer saying, Hey, I really wish you had this, or, I really wish you would do this. Listen to that, that's free advice.

It's coming directly from the customers and it could help you innovate. But there's hundreds of companies out there that don't listen to their customers and miss out on that opportunity to be able to leverage those ideas for innovation. And that's all what you build the culture around. 

So if I might add my point, and I will also ask for your feedback so that. 

Companies need to think really like startups and tech companies at the same time, right?  

 Yeah. I mean,  when we think about a startup or an entrepreneur, they're usually focused on creating these really  innovative new ideas. And it's constant, right? Because you're always trying to evolve  at a startup.  Great thing about startups is that they're small and so they are nimble and they're able to change and adapt much quicker.

When we get into larger organizations  with thousands of employees, it is much harder for them to change as rapidly as a smaller So abs, absolutely. If you can institute that innovative,  Entrepreneurial type of approach into your teams, then they can also be enabled through this culture to come up with new ideas and, and be able to execute on them. 

And 

this brings me to the next question. So,  I see sometimes people are not aligned and  there is kind of gap. So how do you advise usually companies to bridge the gap between what technology can do and what the business want, and what is the best approach to overcome this challenge?  

Talk 

It's, it's funny because I, I actually was just sharing this story with somebody. And I, I once went into a company and, uh, sat down with the business team and I said, you know, tell me what you're working on. Tell me, you know, what some of the challenges you're facing.  And they said, well, our, our biggest challenge is that we have these ideas and, uh, we hand them over to the development team and then they just kind of disappear into a black. 

And I was like, oh, well that's interesting. So I go over to the technology team and I say, Hey, hey, tell me what you're working on and what are some of their challenges? And they say, well, you know, we, we get these, you know, tickets from the business side. We work on them and we toss them back over, but we don't know if they've worked or what they're for or how they're being used.

And I said, right then it, it's clear that the business teams and the technology teams are not communicating with each.  , like just get into the same room here,   and share your ideas. Hey, this really can be that. Simple  conversations can solve a lot of problems, but if we begin to dissect things like the culture of innovation or the outside in perspective and looking at the customer first, those are rooted in leader. 

Mandating that that's what you're going to do. And so you have to have some sort of top-down approach that says, look,  customers are first and business teams. You have to develop business strategy that's based on what the customer wants and technology team, you have to also understand what the customer wants so that you can execute that and you get those teams together and you produce something.

But too often, like you said, that gap is there. Not because you've got technology in business and they don't understand each other. It's mostly because they just don't talk to each other. 

Yeah.  Another thing which I saw also, uh, but I actually, I don't have, you know, very much clarity and this way I'm asking you,  I hear from people saying, okay, we wanted to start and we found a problem that it's worth solving with,  this technology. 

but by the time they start to implement, they found out that there's another type , of another technology coming up. So how do you usually see successful  organizations tackle this problem of a very fast ever evolving 

tech?  Yeah, and that goes back to our original.  It's not, it may not just be, Hey, we want to implement a technology, and all of a sudden there's a new version or variation of that technology and then you're trying to play catch up.

It's your customers are using that technology already.   and even the technology that you first pick, you're already behind, and then the technology that's coming, that's better. That's also behind because the customer is leapfrogging over all of it.  So it's a perpetual challenge of how do we get technology in place that is going to support that ever evolving mindset from the consumer. 

And really the best way that I've been able to explain this is you have to find technologies that are foundational and adaptable to whatever changes.  So oftentimes that means something that's off the shelf, uh, or a SaaS product may not be your best bet because they're selling you something static. And then, A new technology is going to come, and even that SaaS product may not be able to keep up. 

But there are technologies again, that are foundational. I, I talk a lot about APIs, application programming interfaces. APIs have been around since the sixties, and APIs will continue to be around for another, we'll say 10 years or plus.  APIs are the foundation for everything we do.  We are chatting right now and recording on Zoom.

We are using multiple APIs to do that, right? When you publish the podcast and you push it out to the world, people who are listening to this podcast are going to be using APIs to do so.   and so on and so on. If you go to a grocery store and pay with your phone, you're using an api. When you check the weather, it's an api.

When you turn on your, uh, music, it's an api. If you've got, uh, smart homes, APIs, smart cars, APIs, et cetera, you get the point. Yeah. APIs are everywhere. They are foundational.  So one way you could look at this is you want to invest in your APIs.   because those are not going to change, and those are going to allow you to evolve and be able to transcribe your data into whatever new  technologies come. 

Even like cloud and security typically are foundational elements that are going to grow with  wherever technology is going to.  . And if you think about it from that mindset, like I'm gonna take these foundational components, wrap everything else around that so that I can pull off this or pull off that, but the foundation is still there.

That's the best way to keep up.  I can't agree 

more because one of the.  Topics that comes always when I speak to customers, they say, okay, why you didn't, for example, choose this technology for doing that? And what they will tell me, oh, we have this legacy system in place. It's something maybe built in-house 20 years back.

And guess what? We are not able to  , we're not able to, to move it to the cloud. We're not able to do anything with.  , but I said, okay, I understand you cannot do it now, but on the long run, you need to start to think that, okay, this, it'll become a piece of junk, honestly sitting in, in, in your data center. So you need to really do something about it.

And I agree with you on the point of the APIs because when you make things all speak together  in programmatic way, things to scale and to build on top, become.  Much more easier. And I like the idea of the foundation, so like cloud as you said, security and other ones. And  just one more topic, which is hot now, which is ai.

Yeah. Like where do you see it, whether in the digital transformation that we are talking about and, , this journey and, , taking the customer experience into, into consideration, or whether on the general run, uh, how, how do you see it evolving?  

It will take over the world.  . Okay.  Uh, you know, I, I don't know where we will end up, but the rate by which AI is evolving today is  astronomical. 

And  I think,  so I was having a conversation with my son this morning as I was driving him to school  and we were talking about ai.   and he said,  well, what's interesting is we're in this in between points where AI can respond, but it doesn't quite get everything right.  And I, I agree with that. And he believes that, you know, in, in another year, two years, a lot of the problems that AI has in terms of being able to  accurately answer something,   are going to be improved. 

That's probably true as well. But where I don't think we are at, and I just wrote an article on this and it's on my blog,  uh, is around customer relationships. So if we take this all the way back to the beginning of our conversation and we're talking about customers, We talk often in business about having customer relationships while AI is replacing those customer relationships.

And the question becomes is can the AI learn to be more human? Can it understand emotions? Can it understand,  uh, sympathy? So when you have a problem and you're  dialing in or calling in to get support, is.  A feeling coming through the AI that says, Hey, look, I, I get it. I understand I'm here for you. Uh, don't worry.

We're gonna get this right.  Or is it continually going to be a script that just executes what it's told?  That emotional connection from a customer perspective  is needed, and I don't know if we'll get there. It will be simulated either way.  But it will be very interesting to see how that relationship side of the AI evolves to continue to support businesses. 

Um, 

for me, I always,  whenever someone asks me about the same topic, I give similar answer. Cause I said, as long as the ai, cause people think ai, , Terminator kind of thing. , and I said, look, uh, what you are interacting with is just a model. It's a, you know, large I'm talking about, which is now, , the viral thing.

So you are interacting with a large, uh, machine learning model. It doesn't have sentiments, it doesn't have consciousness. Right. So Right. It, it, it's not alive. So. Right. And, and this is where I see.   and I tell people like, you should not be scared of AI in the stance. It'll replace your job. And I tell them, okay, if you are doing a repetitive task, yeah, you should be scared.

Like if you just sit behind a screen and just keep refreshing, for example, to do some task or approve some, some stuff, yeah, definitely AI will take over that. But whenever it's like something requiring critical thinking or empathy as you said,  definitely the human factor will, will stay over there.  Final question for you, Chris, and this is again, because I've seen, you know, your profile and you have a long experience  without mentioning the name, but have you seen ever a customer that have done it right  from beginning to end when they went to this digitization, digital transformation journey? 

Yeah, absolutely. I, I've seen a lot of companies do it right  and.  I think the key in here is not, did they do it right?  The key in here is how long did it take them to do it right?  And I think there's a lot of perceptions out there that believe,  hey, we can start our digital transformation journey. We can begin looking at the outside in perspective.

We can begin building a culture of innovation. We can do all of these things.   and we're gonna get them done this year, 2023, and we're gonna be successful.  I'll look, I would love it for you to be able to get it done in 2023,  but it, you're most likely not going to get it done in a year. This, these types of changes take a long time  and they take. 

A lot of communication and a lot of, uh, vision and leadership.  Uh, two of the best examples that I have, and, uh, I, I'm happy to mention names. Yeah, sure. One of them is Experian. They're a credit company. Uh, they're global. Yep. And then the other one is Domino's Pizza. I mean, dominoes is, you know, obviously a name brand, global Pizza. 

Both of them have been extremely successful in meeting customer demands and expectations, evolving with those needs, and establishing themselves as innovators in their spaces while also growing their business, all because they've done it successfully.  In experience case, it took them four years.  From the moment they decided they wanted to change to the moment that they saw, uh, substantial  value and profit improvement from that change.

And Domino's, it took, I think three years. And in Domino's case, the CEO came out, made a big executive announce.   and they took a year to evolve, and then over the course of the next two years, they went from the number four pizza company in the world to the number one pizza company in the world. Yeah. So  you can have success if you decide that this is what you want to do,  but you have to also recognize that it's hard and it takes time.

and it's challenging  and it takes people, um, but you know, you've gotta make the decision to do it. And then I think if you can and you execute all these things we've talked about, uh, then you can find incredible success. Yeah. 

Spot on. Because a lot of people think it's like, uh, let's say magic wand, right?

Yeah. You.  We deployed cloud. We are digital. I tell them, no, sorry, it's not the case. So, okay. You took first step, but you didn't define the goals and so on. So, uh, Chris, just before we close, like if people want to follow you or to read your articles where they can 

find more?  Absolutely. You can find me@chrishood.com.

C h r i s h o o d.com. And there is my blog, my podcast, which is coming.  And, uh, my social network. So anything you want to do, you can connect with me there. Yeah, 

I have all the details. I will share that in the description of both the podcast episode and on the YouTube video as well. Chris, thank you very much.

It's slate for you. I know, and thank you for coming and joining me today in this episode, and I hope that we, uh, will have a chance to, uh, meet again in the near future. Thank 

you very. Absolutely appreciate it.  

  📍