Tim Crawford: 0:05

Companies are looking for new ways to transform their business to remain relevant and differentiated within their industry. Technology now plays a central role in this transformation. Hello, and welcome to the CIO in the Know podcast, where I take a provocative but pragmatic look at the intersection of business and technology. I'm your host, Tim Crawford, a CIO and strategic advisor at Avoa. This week I'm joined by Edward DeVries Sands, the CIO at Eversana. We discuss Edward's perspective on the changing CIO role and how it includes serving as the chief context officer. Edward discusses how he leverages a product operating model mindset while focusing on business outcomes and value. He describes counterintuitive thinking around the CIO and the impact it can have. Finally, Edward outlines how he creates time to spend in other areas while actively learning and growing. Edward, welcome to the program. Thank you, Tim. Great to be here. Edward DeVries Sands, CIO of Eversana, and so glad that we could make time to have this conversation. I always think that you bring a really interesting perspective of the role of the CIO. But before we kind of get into the meat of the conversation today, why don't we get started by having you tell us a little bit about yourself and your role as the CIO?

Eduard de Vries Sands: 1:36

Absolutely. Thank you, Tim. So my name is Edward DeVriesens, and I'm originally from the Netherlands, as you probably hear from my accent. So I love straddling both worlds, being a European and in this beautiful country, the US. And as a CIO, I kind of do the same. I straddle this line between the technology group and our business group. And then I'm constantly translating between them and helping us be successful. Now, I'm very lucky because I've got an amazing team at Aversana in the IT group, but we have a lot of technology people in the business as well. And the goal is how do we orchestrate this to maximize the value we create together? And that's what I see as my role as a CIO.

Tim Crawford: 2:10

No, I love that. And we're going to dive right into that because I think one of the aspects that I find really interesting is how you think of that role of IT and the CIO today. Because some might listen to this and go, well, that's a little different than kind of how I was thinking. Maybe you could talk a little bit about your view on that.

Eduard de Vries Sands: 2:30

I think IT is becoming more of an enabler. Technology in the past had to be in, you know, in the IT group because it had to be managed by a CIO. I think that's the old world. I think the whole story about shadow IT is the old world. I want my technology teams to be where the revenue and the margin gets created. And I want my business unit president to make a decision. Am I going to invest in a team to develop a new technology solution for my business unit or a new sales team? What do I get the most revenue and market share from long term? That means that within my IT group, we really have to focus on how do we enable these teams? How do we provide the highway, put the guardrails down, and then I can tell my business units, you take the road and you drive as fast as you need to get the business outcome you want. That also means that over time the direct control of IT will become less, but the influence becomes a lot more. And I believe the CIO role is really becoming a more and more of a business influencer. And this when I talk to a CIO, I figure out in two, three minutes like how much of a business person are they? Because at the end, I get paid to generate business outcomes or enable them and not to run servers and cloud solutions because that's becoming more of a commodity slowly.

Tim Crawford: 3:36

Yeah, that's something that's so key. I don't think that a lot of IT leaders have necessarily picked up on that. But when you talk about kind of engaging business and thinking a little differently about how IT engages with business, how do you view that role? Because I want you to share with the audience kind of your perspective on this. Because I think it's just it's so important, so critical to how you think, but I think it's also very unique too.

Eduard de Vries Sands: 4:07

Thank you, Tim. And look, the thinking is influenced by a lot of conversations we've had, all us have had. I'll give you this example. This Wednesday, we had a quarterly board meeting in person, and we sat down. And at times we have an amazing board, but that's somewhat more distance from the us running the business on a day-to-day basis. So we're explaining to the board, hey, this is the context, this is how this happened. And then in the afternoon, I had a quick check-in with my leadership team to kind of tell them what came out of the board meeting. And I was doing the same the opposite way. And I was sitting there, I'm the chief context officer. I'm constantly creating context for everyone so they can execute on their role. If you translate this into, I would say, my second charge at Aversana, besides being the CIO, it's also for one of our larger divisions to really move to a product operating model. So, what does that mean? That means we will long term not have a technology team. Long term the technology and the business operations team will be integrated and they'll be driving towards a business outcome. So we're moving away from the old model of like project management and funding it per delivery. But we're going to say we're going to create outcomes our clients are willing to pay for. Yeah. And that's a really fundamental difference. It's not what our business units are willing to pay for. So that means for me, there's not a week I don't talk to clients, external clients, because I'm trying to understand what is valuable in the market and what can be valuable a year from now. And I take what I learn and then work with our teams to make sure we deliver that and we drive for that. So the role of the CIO is really transforming into how do I really set the right goals? How do I create the right context? And then get teams who, with really good people, we can execute. Because we need to find the opportunities and then capture them. And that to me is an amazing role to be in. I feel very lucky that we get to like straddle those worlds and connect them and be the bridge.

Tim Crawford: 5:54

No, I think that's incredibly powerful. But something else you brought up is that product mindset as opposed to project mindset. How does life cycle management kind of come into that? Because that's part of a typical product mindset.

Eduard de Vries Sands: 6:09

If I think about it, like so you work backwards, and it's almost I'm using the Amazon terminology here, but what are we trying to achieve? And in the past, we've all done these, you know, I've done an SAP transformation for an $11 billion company, and the goal was to implement SAP. Well, I can tell you this: that company didn't have shareholders, but the shareholders would not have gotten better out of it. If I would have said we are able to manage our business better, to make better business decisions, to consolidated supply purchasing with that funded, that was the outcomes we were driving for, but we didn't understand that. So well, I think where we're really going with this is that we need to say, how do we define the outcomes which are valuable? And then how do we work backwards from that? And that's then also the lifecycle management. So at some point, the new things we build together with our business friends should be so good that in a lifecycle management, people keep moving forward. It's a value play. And I think too often in the past we've done IT as a cosplay, and that just doesn't work. The other thing I would say is the project mindset is really a short-term mindset. That is, what do we deliver in two, three months? But I'm trying to make sure that I'm doing two things. Number one, I need to, for my business, continue to reduce the cost to deliver my business results. But that is what is necessary to be competitive. Without that, I'm going to lose in the market. That doesn't allow me to win. What allows me to win in the markets is really have a differentiated offering, a different business outcome my clients are willing to pay for. So I'm trying to play that dual track and help my business units to really drive both sides because you can't do one of them and win anymore in this economy, I believe.

Tim Crawford: 7:42

That's really powerful. And you're talking about some things that are kind of counterintuitive to thinking for the CIO, but there's a balance to be struck. How do you kind of walk through that, striking that right balance?

Eduard de Vries Sands: 7:57

Well, it's hard. I mean, many of us, you know, want to build something which is lasting. It's, you know, build our legacy. So even I have amazing IT teams, but they want to build monuments at times. So how do we make sure that we don't build monuments, but that we really say, maybe there's certain areas we want to shrink a little bit and we want to reskill our people so we can move them from legacy environments to something we're driving with the cloud and something we're driving with AI. We constantly have to reassess what we're doing, which is scary at times, because if you're the manager of a legacy team, you've got to see, like, hey, we might move people over, but eventually there's a pathway for me to go as well. Because if I don't provide the pathway, I will have internal resistance and any change creates resistance. So that's why I think earlier on I said we have to be more of an influencer as the CIO, but we also have to show the inspiration. Why do we do what we do? And why does it get us to get the right long-term outcome? Because otherwise, change for the sake of change is a bit scary.

Tim Crawford: 8:57

Yeah. You know, in the past you've talked about resistance and how the antibodies come out, which I would have found that to be interesting.

Eduard de Vries Sands: 9:05

But that's true. It really happens. And think about it, even when there's change, I mean, I love to create change, but when I have to change, I'm also sometimes have to swallow deeply and say, well, I know it's the right thing long term, but short term, it's a bit of a pain. We need to help people across those bridges because if we don't, we will get stuck and other companies will pass us.

Tim Crawford: 9:23

Yeah. No, I think you're yeah, I think you're spot on there. Let's talk about value for a second. Because this is something that comes up again and again, and there's always this conversation about cost and cost center, especially when you talk about IT. What's kind of your take on CIO focus around value?

Eduard de Vries Sands: 9:44

I think there's two it goes to the two buckets again. There's one bucket which I would almost call the commodity services. At our company or at home, I buy electricity and never look where I can get the better electricity, because it's just electricity. We have to accept that a number of the services we provide are like that today. You know, networking, storage, all these things. We just need to run them at the lowest price point we can run them so we can shift more of our people to the places which really drive value, which really enable our business to get value. And that value in my mind is client-paid value. So what we've got to do is take our commodity services and drive them down. Those costs have to continue to be driven down. And whether you do it in the cloud or somewhere else, that's a detail. But it's about directionally, I want to minimize my spend there so I can maximize the spend where I generate a larger return. And as a shareholder, that's how I generate enterprise value. By generating value for my clients, we're unwilling to give me a share of the value I've created. So we really look at it like that as a stick. And even sometimes in our management meetings in IT, we'll draw it on the wall and we'll say, look, there's $100 available. What can we do to make it $120? So how can we create $20 additional value for our clients? And will we have the right to take five or seven of those dollars to generate the additional $20? And if you start thinking in those terms, the solutions you find as a technology group become different. And it's a lot of fun to do it.

Tim Crawford: 11:11

That's fascinating. If I kind of double-click on that for just a second, when you talk about maybe even some of the infrastructure pieces versus some of the higher-level applications or things that are closer to the customer, closer to the employee, how do you think about the that value as it applies? Or is it not specific to what we ostensibly would call the stack? And is it more tied to something else?

Eduard de Vries Sands: 11:37

I think the stack is a part of it. And I think you have to be very clear where am I differentiated? Where can I create value just by doing the same as everything everybody else does? So, for example, let's say you buy a platform like Salesforce. It's a really good platform, but my competitors buy the same. So that might be the best way to get what I need. And it's going to give a certain amount of base value, but it's not going to allow me to win in the market. To win in the market, I need to say how do I apply this platform in a unique way that creates value for my clients? So maybe it is that I do certain things in the background with data, that I do certain things to find insights my competitors don't have because I've got this expertise and I've got this team. But you've got to be very careful to not think you're going to get significant value from deploying an out-of-the-box platform. Because those are the past days.

Tim Crawford: 12:25

I think there are many different ways that you could apply that thinking. How do you walk through that and how do you prioritize that thinking?

Eduard de Vries Sands: 12:35

I think as a team, you do that, but then at the end of the day, you prioritize it together with your business partners. Because I, you know, and my team might come up with certain ideas, but at the end it's my business partners, it's my division heads who bring in the revenue and the margin. So we will come up with certain hypothesis together, and then we'll say, what is the cost also to prove or disprove the hypothesis? Can we do this as a very small scale, at a relatively low cost, and accept that we want a certain betting average? So if we say we're going to do 10, you know, experiments, ten bets in a fairly low cost, I'm completely fine if seven of them fail, as long as the three, once we scale up, create so much value that the invest the small investment for the seven become irrelevant. So it's about learning quickly, cutting all things off quickly, and experimenting together as a business leaders, because it can't be that IT, I don't want another proof of concept which then becomes production. I want to say test it out and then scale it up or shut it down.

Tim Crawford: 13:31

Yeah. And of the ten, making sure that the three outweigh the negative from the seven.

Eduard de Vries Sands: 13:38

You need to, at a very early stage, determine it and you've got to be ruthless because you've got to kill the other seven early, because otherwise the model doesn't work. But then it becomes a betting average game. And I think over the years we've gotten pretty good at it. As long as you're rigorous and you're willing to, even though the baby might look good, you've got to say, this is not going to work and make the decision early.

Tim Crawford: 13:56

Aaron Powell In our conversations, one of the things that's kind of struck me is how you're able to swing between the conversations you have with your board and the conversation or at a board level, but then also the conversations you're having with your staff, with your team, and then also your peer group. So it's kind of up, down, horizontal. How do you organize that in your mind from a leadership standpoint? Like what is top of mind for you and where do you focus your time?

Eduard de Vries Sands: 14:28

And I think this, you know, this has evolved over my career. I tend to have really good people reporting to me. And I keep them engaged because most of them have a choice to go somewhere else at the end of the day, because good talent does. So, how do you keep people engaged? That means giving them space to operate at the top of their license, because then they will in return do it to their staff and et cetera, et cetera. So you can go down the chain. So, number one, if you think about it, the people who are in their specific area will always come up as better IDs than me. So give them the space to do it. But this gives me time so I can then say I can spend less time managing my organization and more time spending it with clients to find the opportunities, spending it with my peers or with the board. And I think long-term as a CIO, you have to do that. So, for example, I think I'm on one or two steering committees. Most CIOs are on 27 steering committees. I don't go there because every time if I go there and I make decisions, I take power away from my leaders. And my leaders will probably make better decisions than me because they're more aware of the context of that specific area. So it's about creating space for yourself and then giving coaching to your people to keep being successful. And I think with that you also get morale up and it really creates a certain energy in the organization. And then when we see opportunities on the outside with clients, we can capitalize on them fairly quickly because we've created the space and the mechanisms to quickly change our direction.

Tim Crawford: 15:50

Yeah. I think one of the things that is fascinating, what you're saying, is allowing that space for others to grow and also making time for yourself, because this is one of the problems that IT leaders, CIOs have is there's only so much time in the day. It reminds me of an experience I had in my own life when I started scuba diving. When I first started scuba diving, one of the things that I realized is if I can focus on controlling my air consumption. And for those of you that are scuba divers, you'll understand what I'm talking about. But men over women tend to consume air much more quickly because we have larger lung capacity on average and chew up air more quickly. And so I thought if I can manage my breathing, that will give me more bottom time that then I can work on my other skills. And you're talking about this from a leadership standpoint. How do I start to enable others to be able to do things and maximize my time so I can allow time for me to spend in other areas?

Eduard de Vries Sands: 16:55

And I think part of that is making very conscious decisions. So it's about what are the meeting cadences you do? What meetings can you get out of? But it's the same time, for example, I don't really schedule one-on-ones, not with my people, not with my boss. Same time the rule is if you need me, I will always be available the same day. So then what's starting to happen, a lot of your meetings are one-on-one meetings, always two or three people, which are very productive. Instead of the 30, 40, 50 people meetings, which let's be very honest, we're all doing our email, it's not productive. Well, let's just be real and let just say, I'm not going to show up. If I don't need to make a decision there, or we can do this in an email, you'll be surprised if you're really rigorous about this and accept that some people will have some hurt feelings in the beginning when you decline their meeting, but then things become significantly more productive. And actually, it's more exciting as well because I get energy out of talking to one, two, three, or four people and have a really great debate. Nobody gets excitement out of meeting with 30, 50 people. It's just you have to do it. So it's amazing how much space you can create up in your organization to get out of that meeting culture, and then to say, well, how do we replace that meeting culture? We need to put certain cascading connecting points in place so we actually have information flowing up and down. And at the same time, some of the things have to be written or on tools like Teams or Slack so I can know what's going on without having to go to all those meetings. And that also allows me to, I would say, still, you know, I'm not saying I work 40 hours because none of us do, but I also don't want to work a hundred hours either every week because I can't keep that up physically.

Tim Crawford: 18:21

I think that's really important. And you kind of talked to in passing how your leadership style has changed. Maybe we could double-click on that a little bit and talk a little more about what you've learned over the course of your career. Because I think one of the things that that listeners get out of these episodes is really to learn from others and even seasoned CIOs listening to this and really trying to pick up something here, there, or elsewhere. When you think about how your leadership style has changed over the years, what are some ways that that you've kind of gone through that journey, but then what you've picked up along the way?

Eduard de Vries Sands: 19:00

Absolutely. And it was interesting to listen to your episode. I think it came out on Monday with the CIO of Adobe. It's always interesting to learn from other leaders, as you said. I think for me, what I've learned is that earlier in my career, I had to be the guy who could find the answers. And I think then I got to the stage where I have to build an organization, a team, which can, you know, which has the answers. And I think now I'm at a stage where I've got to have an organization where we can quickly find the answers. And it's interesting because sometimes I still get a question like, hey, how do I do this and this application? And the chance that I've been in that application is just about zero, but I can now type it into Chat GPT, and I can get an answer probably as quickly as our expert in that specific application. So it's all about it, all becomes now about the teams being context aware, being and understanding where the value is, and driving there, and then trying to hand off the low level tasks to have the applications do it, to have AI do it, and pretty soon we will have AI agents do it for us. So again, we're constantly creating this space to almost move up in the value chain. Because that's what we have to do in technology. We have to start to focus on what's the next level of value, and you only get there by understanding where the value of your clients has created. So that's why I always go back to that and then work back into our organization. So then we say some things are basic, they just have to happen. Some things are special. So how do we create enough time to work on those things which really create value? And if you talk to two other CIOs, a lot of them are amazing and they actually probably have the answers, but they get so stuck into delivering the day today and making sure the network stays up. That's important. But I've got great people. They will keep the network up. They don't need me. And I probably am more of a distraction than an added value to them. So if you're self-aware enough of that and you make sure your people get to respect, and if something goes wrong, you take the blame. You create an organization which punches above its weight and has a lot of fun while they're doing it at the same time.

Tim Crawford: 20:58

That's cool. I mean, but you're also talking about something else, which is not just that your leadership has changed, but also how you are moving people within your organization to think differently and get them to grow and expand their capabilities too.

Eduard de Vries Sands: 21:13

Absolutely. And I run a town every month. I mean, that's still from the COVID days. Partly, I just love to interact with it. And it's interesting. I love that we have a running chat. We have a few hundred people on, and you can get questions the whole time. But I probably spend a quarter of the time explaining like how is our business doing? Um, what are our competitors doing? I'll pull in some Wall Street Journal articles like, hey, this is what's happening with other marketing agencies. It's important for me to make people understand you might be on the service desk, you might be installing new PCs, but in our business, because of what you do, we were able to get that patient their medication. And I think when we can draw that line, that inspires our people, but it also allows them to make better decisions. Because maybe in the past they would say, Well, I have a process and I need to go two levels up to share, to ship something overnight. Well, I know by now my service desk people, if they know it's for somebody who gets specialty medication to infants, they're not going to ask it. They're just going to do it because they know it's the right thing to do. And if they make a wrong decision and the impact is small, live and learn and get over, make sure we do it right the next time. So I think a lot of it, I have to show my team I'm constantly learning and growing, and then I have to empower them to do the same. So that also means we have certain subscriptions with Gardner where our people are able to get training all the time because I want them to continue to be upskilling. And your listeners can't see my background, but I have more books than a human should own because I love reading. But it's the same thing again. Like, how do we keep growing? How do we learn from other industries? How do we learn from oil and gas, what we can apply in the industry I'm in right now? There are more similarities than differences. And if you go back to the fundamentals, which I think we can do as an executive, it takes you one or two months to really figure out how does this division create value, and then you can move on to the next one. If you understand that context and you can get your team to understand the context, I think you can move out way faster.

Tim Crawford: 23:00

Yeah, and that's something that learning process, that curiosity trait. You referred back to the episode with Cindy Stoddard, CIO at Adobe, and she talked about this. And I've talked about it in my past and teams that I've led, we would hire to Curiosity. It was one of the traits we would seek out. When you think about how you're learning and growing, how you are expanding your capability and your knowledge base. You mentioned the books, which I have the pleasure of seeing on the screen, is all the books in the background. But what are some other ways that you are constantly kind of going through that process, that being that lifetime learner?

Eduard de Vries Sands: 23:41

I think it's every conversation I have, I try to learn from people. So when I sit with a client, I'm trying to understand what are the bigger issues they're facing, how is their market going? I was in Italy a few weeks back and I was on an Uber and I asked them, like, how is the economy going here? Everything is a data point, and you don't know where the connection is, but over time we start to see the patterns. I'm really lucky that my boss, a CEO, and our board, they will share analyst reports as well what's happening in the industry. And over time, you build a fairly broad network of input you get, and you then try to keep up with reading it. And lastly, I have a habit like for Christmas, I give my team books. Other people I'll talk to, like, oh, you've got to read this book, send it to you. So in return, people start to do the same as me. But the same as articles, you have to constantly read and then say, what knowledge can I share and apply in the right place? Because there's not many things we're discovering for the first time. We're often taking innovations and applying them in our industry or in our specific market. So the more I learn, the more I see opportunities for value and I can bring them to my business. And look, as a shareholder, that helps me at the end of the day.

Tim Crawford: 24:44

Love that. Love that. So as we kind of wrap on this episode, I always like to ask, what excites you most? When you think about the role of the CIO, where technology is headed, you think about how business is evolving too. I mean, let's not talk about technology in a vacuum, as you mentioned, but thinking about that intersection between business and technology that I often kind of tie in together. When you think about where the role of the CIO is going, where technology is going, where business is going, what excites you the most?

Eduard de Vries Sands: 25:15

I think what excites me the most is how integral technology, AI, data is in the business. Before we could talk about we had business and then we had technology, that doesn't apply anymore. Today, every business discussion we have, every product or service we sell, technology is a component of it. So now instead of saying, oh, I wish I had a seat at the table, which I think some of our predecessors, they had to have that conversation 10, 20 years ago. Now the question is, can I sometimes get away from the table so I can actually, you know, help my team get there and spend more time with clients? So I think it's a very exciting time. And the key is we have to give up control. I think the key is like there's some guardrails we've got to put in place because I'm never going to criticize on some of our security, our compliance things. But at the same time, we've got to be build a federated model where we enable and empower our business leaders to make the right solutions, to apply technology to their businesses to drive value. And then we're there as an influencer, as a consultant, saying, hey, maybe there's an opportunity there, or can I help you there? That is the model we have to get to, because the old model doesn't scale. And then lastly, I would say if you work for a business which was starting in the last 15 years, great. I'm a little bit jealous. But most of us don't work for digital natives. So how do we move these, you know, I don't want to call them legacy business. How do we work these businesses which have a lot of expertise, a lot of clients, a lot of revenue margin? How do we get them to apply technology, which sometimes you can cannibalize a little bit of your existing revenue, but the upside is so good. And if you don't do it, one of these digital natives will eat your lunch. So how do we balance that? And then how then we go back to the beginning and how do you enable that change, which sometimes is a little bit scary, but that's the right thing to do. The CIO is lucky. They get to be a key part of this, and they get to maybe not lead with it all directly, but we sure get to influence a lot of it and make sure if it goes well that our business units get the credit, because at the end of the day, it helps our company to be successful, and that's why we're there.

Tim Crawford: 27:10

Love it. We're gonna have to leave it right there. I always learn something new from you every conversation we have. Thanks so much for taking the time today to join the discussion.

Eduard de Vries Sands: 27:21

Absolutely, and thank you for having me, and I look forward to our next discussion.

Tim Crawford: 27:25

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