>>Ben Fried: Hi, Iím Ben Fried.
Iím Googleís CIO.
And Iím here with Ed Yourden to talk about
his new book, or newish book, CIOs at Work.
CIOs at Work, there.
See, whereís the camera?
>>Ed Yourden: Not at play, just at work.
>>Ben Fried: Yeah, that would be a much shorter
book.
[Laughter]
>>Ben Fried: So, anyway, a little bit about
Ed for those of you, who might not know, might
not have heard about him.
Ed has been in the computing industry for
over 40 years.
Author of
dozens, over two dozen books, many, many,
many articles, is a consultant, expert witness.
Heís written, I think, kind of books that
iconically identify elements of the last 20
years
in technology.
Iím thinking of titles like, Death March,
Decline and Fall of the American
Programmer, Rise and Resurrection of the American
Programmer.
As well as the work he did in
the '70s on structure analysis and the work
on object oriented analysis and design that
followed in the decades afterwards.
As I said, the most recent book is CIOs at
Work which is
interviews with sixteen CIOs from kind of
all walks of industry and organization.
Private
companies, governmental organizations and
many, many, many industries, thereís the
CIOs,
some of them include the CIOs of American
Airlines, Microsoft, NASA, Verizon, University
of
Miami, The Educational Testing Service.
I would have some prime questions for the
CIO of the
place that does the SATs, but thatís a different
matter.
[Laughter]
>>Ben Fried: And, you know, perhaps not least
the CIO of Google is also one of the interviews.
Anyways, a fascinating read, a very quick
read, I recommend it.
So letís, some kind of
background questions on the book.
How long were you working on this and what
inspired you,
what was kind of the objective that you had
for the book?
>>Ed Yourden: Well, it went fairly quickly.
The interviews themselves were only about
an
hour long and they were spaced out over probably
six months.
The most time consuming part
turned out to be the just the turnaround of
getting things edited and getting various
CIOs
to own up to what they had said.
You know, Oh my God!
[Laughter]
>>Ed Yourden: I have to take responsibility
for this.
But the reason I wrote the book was
twofold.
I wanted to provide some more attention and
awareness and respect for this
particular role that we now see everywhere.
I donít think youíre lacking any respect
necessarily.
But there are a lot of ñ.
>>Ben Fried: Oh, I do.
[Laughter]
>>Ed Yourden: Well thatís your problem.
[Laughs]
>>Ed Yourden: But there are a lot of CIOs
who I donít think are getting enough respect
and
thatís because even though we all know we
live in the information age the culture in
a lot
of companies is still based on how that particular
company got started a hundred years
earlier.
You know, weíve always made widgets, weíre
in the widget business, we praise and
respect widget makers and then we got some
computers over here.
Because the widgets used to
be just bare metal but now theyíve got a
couple of computers in them and somebody has
to
look after that.
I was curious to see what role the CIOs actually
were playing in a lot of
these companies, beyond just keeping the lights
on, you know, running the networks and the
data centers and so on.
And it was very interesting to see how CIOs
are trying to help their
companies become more profitable doing whatever
they are doing as well as looking for
completely new opportunities in areas theyíre
not doing at all right now.
>>Ben Fried: So one of the things Iím really
excited about the opportunity to interview
you
is, unlike some of your previous works, yours
is a much quieter voice in the sense that
youíre
attempting, your voice as the interviewer
as opposed to add a commentary, and a commentary
sometimes does come out in the form of questions
and the way you direct the dialogue.
But
itís certainly the voice of the opinions
of the people you interviewed far more so
then
yours.
So Iím really interested in taking this opportunity
now to learn a little bit about
what you concluded or kind of the opinions
that maybe you donít share that are actually
in
the book.
And I guess the first one I have, along those
lines, is how similar or different
is the role of the CIO across all of these
tremendously diverse organizations?
>>Ed Yourden: Well, it is relatively similar,
I think.
Of course, there is a great deal of
diversity in the organizations, particularly
between the public sector organizations and
private sector.
I interviewed the CIO of the United States,
which is kind of cool, as well
as the CIO of the British Parliament.
And thereís an organization thatís a thousand
years
old that still has data written on scrolls
of parchment that they have to maintain.
But,
within the private sector, as I was saying
a moment ago, most CIOs have the common role
of
just running the operation, the computers
out of the operation.
But in terms of helping
their companies figure out where their new
areas of business might be located, that was
quite different from one company to another.
Some companies I got the sense that they
werenít really involved in that at all.
And in most companies they were so heavily
focused
on helping the business unit managers do a
more effective or more efficient or more
competitive job at businesses they were already
in.
>>Ben Fried: Now are the differences in these
IT organizations and CIO roles and functions
of the organization age or culture or industry?
>>Ed Yourden: To me it was more age and size
than anything else.
I mean, obviously thereís
some difference between companies like you
guys that are doing nothing but information
or
other computer companies versus the widget
manufacturers of the world, the auto companies
or what not.
But thereís, I think, a profound difference
between a company, well, order of
magnitude like you guys being ten years old
with ten thousand employees versus a company
thatís a hundred years old with a hundred
thousand employees.
Just an enormous difference
and you see that reflected on several different
levels.
It means the CIO, someone like your age
is likely to be someone in their 60s and who
vividly remembers what it was like 40 or 50
years ago.
>>Ben Fried: So I guess given such diversity
and differences in age companies, is there
some kind of conventional path for these people
that they follow to have gotten into the
seat that theyíre in?
>>Ed Yourden: It turns out not, indeed, one
of the surprises I got, one of the things
I
didnít expect is at least when they talked
to me, knowing that they were gonna be on
the
record, virtually all of these people said
they had no aspiration to become a CIO when
they
started nor did they have any idea what they
were gonna do if and when that role ever ended.
I mean, clearly all of them had moved into
some kind of management oriented path.
They may have started off, indeed some of
them did, many of them did start off as technicians.
And there were a few, including, for example,
the CIO of the New York stock exchange with
a PhD.
Not necessarily in computer science but people
with a really strong technical education and
a strong technical beginning to their career
for whatever reason moved into management
and they just went from one step to the next.
But they all said that that was not part of
their plan starting out.
Nor did they have any strong advice in terms
of education or preparation for those that
might aspire to be a CIO.
You know, I said, ìIs it really important
to get an MBA?î Generally they all said no.
Is it really important to have a technical,
a computer science degree or double E or something
like that?
And I got a lot of wishy washy answers, not
a lot of--.
>>Ben Fried: One of the surprising things
that I saw was that Tony Scott, the CIO of
Microsoft, previously of Disney and CTO of
General Motors, or maybe divisional CTO of
General Motors, Iím not really sure and so
on, his degree is in parks and recreation.
>>Ed Yourden: Yes.
Yes.
[Laughter]
>>Ed Yourden: Not from the TV show but
[Laughter]
>>Ed Yourden: It turned out, as was often
true back in the 70ís, is that people in
a variety of the most unlikely sorts of jobs
and industries and professions stumbled into
computers, one way or another.
And, often, they were the only ones in the
entire organization so they became the star,
the wizard and that launched their career.
Most of them did say to me that they had also
found a mentor.
Usually unwittingly or even unknowingly but
somebody who really set them on the path that
ultimately led them to a CIO position.
>>Ben Fried: So you talked about kind of the
surprises that you encountered in the book,
in
researching the book.
What were the other surprises, the unexpected,
that came out through
the interviews?
>>Ed Yourden: The main one was this idea that
they had no idea where they were likely to
go,
and I was surprised that none of them, at
least admitted to me, that they wanted to
be a
CEO.
It might seem to be the next logical step.
And that none of them had started off with
that role in mind that they had just kind
of fallen into the job.
Iím sure that there were
some other surprises that will come to me
probably as we continue talking but that was
one
that really occurred to me the most.
>>Ben Fried: What were the, I guess the, so
it sounds like youíre saying that the biggest
thing the CIOs have in common is this operational
responsibility, is that true?
I was kind
of wondering where, you know, if you had a
cocktail party with all these people, brought
all
the CIOs together, what would they all kind
of converge on as things that they had in
common?
>>Ed Yourden: They all have in common this
operational responsibility but I donít wanna
say
they take it for granted, but they just assume
thatís done, thatís okay.
Curiously, now
that youíve started raising these questions,
I was expecting a lot more of them to say
we
have an enormously difficult job getting our
projects finished on time.
Which is an
operational responsibility and itís been
the central part of my career, you know, helping
people figure out how to get systems built
on time that actually do the right job.
None of
them admitted to any difficulties there.
They seemed to feel that they had that under
control.
They all worried about security, in terms
of conversions.
If I got a bunch of
these people in a cocktail party and said
whatís the thing that keeps you awake at
night,
and I asked you this question too, every single
one of them said security, followed
immediately by the statement that they had
the best security people in the world.
[Laughter]
>>Ed Yourden: Which I thought was rather amusing.
But none of them seemed to think or at
least admit that security at times could put
them out of business permanently.
They all
certainly said it could cost us a lot of money,
it could disrupt our business, it could do
various bad things but what they worry about
at night in the privacy of their own home
might be different.
But in any case, security was the single area
of convergence.
>>Ben Fried: Now, on the subject of this cocktail
party, Iíve hypothesized that it might
actually not be such a spectacular event because
I think a lot of people tend to think of
IT and us CIOs as being cautious, conservative,
slow moving, ergo not such a successful
cocktail party, perhaps.
First of all, have you observed that to be
true in these
conversations?
And secondly, why do you think that is?
>>Ed Yourden: Well, I think it is true and
I think there are two main reasons for it.
One is the corporate reason and the other
is the personal reason.
As I was saying a little bit earlier, thereís
a profound difference between a company thatís
a hundred years old, thatís been building
widgets for a hundred years and has a legacy
and has a culture.
I mean, you have to ask yourself, for example,
why is it that Kodak could not have created
Instagram and instead was visibly going bankrupt
at that very moment?
Thatís even more important for me
[Clears throat]
>>Ed Yourden: personally because I happen
to know, personally, that in the early to
mid 80s
a new CEO came into Kodak and said, ìWeíre
now in the information age, digital is gonna
be
important.î Kodak, by the way also invented
the digital camera and the Kodak culture said,
ìOh my gosh, what are we gonna do?
We better go buy some computer companies because
we donít
know anything about this.î And they bought
my company, which is why I know about all
this.
A year
later the CEO was gone, he was running Ross
Perotís presidential campaign which was
interesting.
[Laughter]
>>Ed Yourden: And then the Kodak culture said,
ìWhy do we have these computer companies?î
And they sold us off and went back to making
little yellow boxes.
And, you know, they could
not change their culture.
And I think thatís one reason that the CIO
is immersed in the
culture that finds it incredibly difficult
to change.
And you guys may feel that that
doesnít affect you right now and I get the
impression that some folks at Google are
beginning to talk about and worry about it,
but youíre only 10 or 12 years old, you know,
when youíre 50 or 100 years old itís really
a profound thing.
And on a personal level, for
the bigger, older companies, youíre talking
about people that have reached the pinnacle
of
their career after 40 or 50 years.
So theyíre used to rising up through the
organizational
hierarchy, there used to the political games
and theyíre used to being visible.
Theyíre
also used to about a decade of experience
where the life expectancy of a CIO is 18 months.
[Laughter]
>>Ed Yourden: So theyíre very cautious and
very conservative.
Theyíre also very accustomed,
they have been until very recently when companies
like Google began turning things upside
down, theyíre used to having the vendors
coming in and telling them whatís in the
technology
pipeline, whatís coming along, whenís the
next mainframe gonna appear?
Theyíre used to be
consulting firms like Accenture and McKinsey
coming in to lay out their wisdom.
So that
just tends to make them very cautious and
conservative, I think.
>>Ben Fried: Yeah, I mean, the next question
that I have is one that I struggle with a
lot.
I donít know if youíre a fan of old comic
books, in the first issue of detective comics,
Bruce Wayne has decided to become a super
hero
[Laughter]
>>Ben Fried: And heís sitting under a window
contemplating what his approach to crime
fighting will be and a bat flies through the
enormous gothic window of his, of Wayne mansion.
And he says, ìThatís it.
Iíll take the form of a bat.î He says something
like, ìCriminals
are a cowardly, superstitious lot and Iíll
strike fear into their hearts.î Iíve always
thought that phrase, not always, but Iíve
come to realize that maybe that phrase, ìCriminals
are a cowardly, superstitious lot,î could
also be applied to CIOs.
[Laughter]
>>Ben Fried: Whether thatís a deep comment
on my own psyche or not, Iíll leave it to
the
audience to determine.
[Laughter]
>>Ben Fried: I think the kind of existential
question that I actually have is, you know,
technology is such a fundamental source of
disruption, right?
Computer information
technology is such a fundamental source of
disruption.
Is it possible for the CIO to
actually be the agent of that disruption?
Or are they fundamentally a force of moderation
in that disruption?
One of the things that you mention in the
book is that BYOD, bring
your own device, IPads coming into the workforce
has been kind of one of the big sea
changes, several people talk about it.
Vivek Kundra and others kind of talk about
it and the
importance of that.
But CIOs didnít create that.
CIOs were forced to deal with that, right?
So I guess the question is, is there this
existential dilemma which is taken on the
form that
the tools which we ask CIOs to invest themselves
in, they are fundamentally unable to
realize the full capability of, which is the
maximal power to disrupt within their
organizations?
>>Ed Yourden: Thatís probably true.
That is probably true.
Itís particularly interesting
with this BYOD and also social network phenomenon,
part of what I was expecting when I
went through these interviews was the same
uniform rejection that I had seen about four
or
five years ago.
Which sometimes seems like a lifetime but
itís not that far ago.
[Laughs]
>>Ed Yourden: If you talk to the average CIO
in 2007 or 8 he would say, ìItís a communist
plot.î
[Laughter]
>>Ed Yourden: ìItís evil.
Weíre gonna keep it outside the corporate
walls.î Blah, blah, blah.
Two or three years ago, they were grudgingly
allowing some of this stuff to happen.
But they
really werenít happy.
And now, at least when you talk to them, they
give you the impression
that theyíre on board and that theyíre in
favor of it and so on.
But, as you say, they
certainly were not leading the charge.
And part of that, I think, goes back to this
issue
of a generation of CIOs that is as old as
I am and who remembers growing up in an era
when
computers were scarce and expensive and had
to be protected and controlled and where
anything that disrupted the status quo was
just viewed with great terror.
And I think you
had generations of technology-based companies
that were rebellious and disruptive and so
on
when they began but then after a couple of
decades, well, look at Microsoft.
>>Ben Fried: They became established, right?
They're part of the firmament.
>>Ed Yourden: Yeah.
And itís particularly ironic when you read
that Bill Gates spent
enormous amounts of time studying how it was
that IBM and Deck had missed the next
generation of tidal waves, what can you do
to prevent it.
But now theyíve got a culture
that they will fight tooth and nail to protect
and defend.
>>Ben Fried: Thatís fascinating, the kind
of, the bureaucratic inertia is incredible,
an
incredible force isnít it, inside these large
organizations.
>>Ed Yourden: And yet, there are some tidal
forces that they seem to be very much aware
of
and very much behind.
And I asked the typical CIO what they thought
was gonna be the
important technology of the next few years.
I mean, everyone said that mobile computing
is
just getting started and will be far more
powerful and important than we can possibly
imagine, everybody was in favor of cloud computing
and this is one that I think will also
illustrate this generational difference, everyone
said Mooreís Law would continue
indefinitely.
Now, that probably doesnít mean anything
to you guys cause itís been true
your entire lives.
>>Ben Fried: Howís that gonna happen?
We canít scale a clock frequency
>>Ed Yourden: But hereís whatís important,
again, imagine a CIO who is in his mid 60ís
like
me and who remember, I donít know if any
of you remember when Mooreís Law was published,
when that paper was published.
Itís a mere 47 years and 11 days ago on April
19th, 1965
about a month before I graduated from college.
Youíre welcome to look it up, thereís this
search engine that might be of some use to
you
[Laughter]
>>Ed Yourden: But what you may not be aware
of is that when that paper was published,
Gordon Moore said, ìI think this amazing
phenomenon is gonna continue for 10 years.î
[Laughter]
>>Ed Yourden: And so people of my generation
said, ìWow!
That means weíre gonna have this
enormous run for 10 years, and then weíll
coast the rest of our lives.î Well, 10 years
later
Intel said, ìYou now what, it might actually
go on for another 10 years.î And then they
said another 10
years and now, the latest estimate Iíve heard
is itíll keep going on till 2026, by which
time I wonít
care one way or another.
[Laughter]
>>Ed Yourden: But I think that a lot of todayís
CIOs are saying we donít know how itís
gonna happen, we donít know whatís doing
it, weíre not inside Intel, we donít know
the
basic technology thatís gonna make it happen
but weíre taking it on faith that itíll
continue.
Which is an interesting thing and one for
you guys to think about yourselves, is
this something you should take for granted
the rest of your career?
That every 18 months
computer power will double?
What if that should stop being true someday,
then what?
[Sigh]
>>Ben Fried: Wow.
[Laughter]
>>Ed Yourden: Thereís a metaphysical question.
>>Ben Fried: Yeah.
Then all those algorithms become real important
when you canít just
rely on faster clock speed and slower dies,
smaller dies, etcetera.
So hereís an unknown
unknowns kind of question for you.
What did you not here that surprised you?
And whatís
not on CIOs minds that you think should be?
>>Ed Yourden: I would say that the one that
occurred to me most was the importance of
the,
your term, social contract.
This notion that you actually have to do something
to make a
place interesting and challenging and exciting
to work at, they still seem to take it for
granted and just think itís gonna happen
and that they donít really have to do very
much to
make it happen, so you donít even have to
talk about it.
Or if you ask them a couple of
questions, they rear back.
One of the questions I asked several of the
CIOs is whether they
heard of this phenomenon of groups of college
graduates applying for a job en masse.
>>Ben Fried: As in we were a team in college,
we wanna be a team at our first employer.
>>Ed Yourden: Itís either all of us or none
of us.
>>Ben Fried: Yeah.
>>Ed Yourden: Almost every CIO that I asked
that question gave me a knee jerk reaction.
>>Ben Fried: Like I would never want that.
I would never wanna hire them.
>>Ed Yourden: Itís bad.
Itís evil.
>>Ben Fried: Communist.
[Laughs]
>>Ed Yourden: Yeah.
But it also clear that they had never even
thought of the question
before that.
And the term that you used of social contract
is something that I didnít get
the impression had really entered their consciousness.
That this idea of a two way
relationship, now, again, itís interesting
for my generation because when we graduated,
my
friends and I, there was a social contract;
you went to work for IBM and it was a job
for
life.
And you were guaranteed to get attention when
you were 65 if you were still alive.
>>Ben Fried: Guaranteed benefit pension, I
would add.
[Laughter]
>>Ed Yourden: But that all disappeared ten
or twenty years later.
And now itís coming back
in some organizations but not in most, I think.
>>Ben Fried: So, I had a great question on
the tip of my tongue and of course the eloquence
of your answer wiped it from my mind.
[Laughter]
>>Ben Fried: Oh, I know what it is, so although
the social contract might have been
something you did not hear much of, Paul Strassman,
Paul Strassman, right?
From NASA and a
story, been the CIO for like 50 years or something
like that?
>>Ed Yourden: Right.
>>Ben Fried: He did make a comment that I
thought was consistent with this idea of a
social
contract.
Or certainly you could put on the continuum
of thought that leads it which is
that in the early days of computing when he
was first a CIO, the capital, the computer
was
the dominant expensive and that people were
cheap, right?
>>Ed Yourden: Yeah.
>>Ben Fried: And I think that, in some sense,
the social contract may exist because that
proposition has been inverted, right?
Computers are, relatively speaking, inexpensive
and
people with a talent needed to do significant
things with them is incredibly expensive.
Did that kind of, I view that as a kind of
a precursor to realizing there needs to be
a
social contract, did that kind of theme about
the changes and capital structure versus
>>Ed Yourden: I didnít see that come up.
>>Ben Fried: as opposed to staffing come up?
>>Ed Yourden: It didnít.
And itís interesting that you raise that
because this gentleman,
Paul Strassman, is an amazing man.
Without trying to get commercial, this book
is worth
reading just for the Paul Strassman interview,
if not for Benís interview.
[Laughter]
>>Ed Yourden: This is a man in his early 80s.
He fought in the Czech underground in World
War 2.
He was the CIO at Xerox when Xerox PARC was
being created etcetera, etcetera,
etcetera, etcetera.
And, though he certainly did make this comment
about this turnaround of
the relevant cost of computer gear versus
people, he was also very critical of the current
generation coming out of college.
He was very concerned that they were too superficial,
too shallow and not really properly educated
in fundamentals.
But he certainly did put that
emphasis on the expensive nature of people
today.
Which everybodyís aware of except that we
are still very much stuck in this phenomenon
of there's lots of cheap people over there
in India
or various other parts of the world.
So, people here are too expensive, weíll
just
outsource it, you know, make the cost go away.
Thatís been going on for about 10 years.
Everybody knows that, and it probably never
was true completely and certainly wonít
continue to be as true in the future.
But I think that still is a major factor driving
a lot
of companies today.
>>Ben Fried: Certainly if you believe in free
trade then ultimately you believe that the
cost
of labor is gonna equalize over time, right?
I believe, from my scattered reading of the
Economist thatís kind of one of the principles.
[Laughter]
>>Ben Fried: Is that ultimately thereíll
be equalization, right?
>>Ed Yourden: Yeah.
And by the way, youíve reminded me of a thing
that didnít come up for
conversation very often and whenever it did
I wasnít sure I trusted the kind of glib
answers I was getting from CIOs and that was
the relative importance of free software.
Particularly when put in the hands of people
whose labor costs are minimal at the moment,
of which obviously you guys have got several
wonderful examples.
When I began asking CIOs
of more traditional companies, ìhow important
is gonna be that a million people in Africa
or a million people in Asia or a million people
anywhere to use free tools on essentially
free mobile devices to create valuable stuff?î
They said.
ìOh yeah, itís important.î And I
didnít feel that there was anything behind
that.
>>Ben Fried: Do you think that, um, CIOs,
especially at larger more established companies,
are they close enough to the domain, to technology
anymore?
I mean, I wonder if the answer,
the reason for that question if your job at
some point is to manage a large organization
and
a large budget and a group of managers who
manage other managers who manage other managers
and so on and so on, it can become hard to
have these insights that really require one
to stand at
the coal face of the problem, right?
Since you yourself, you own the coal mine
you donít
stand at the coal face, perhaps, right?
>>Ed Yourden: That may be true.
Particularly if you have no had your companyís
and your
empireís existence threatened by such things.
I had a good example, myself, or a good
experience myself in that area just a couple
of months ago.
I took one of these weekend
photography seminars here at the International
Center of Photography.
It was a weekend course
on doing photography with your IPhone and
with the current model of IPhone youíve got
a
decent camera, finally.
But what I didnít appreciate was the enormous
variety of apps that
are anywhere from 99 cents to zero which collectively
are almost equivalent to Photoshop.
And I thought, ìMan, if I were the king of
the Photoshop empire, I would be terrified.î
Because thereís this stuff out there thatís
just amazing to see what itíll do and if
thatís
true for digital photography itís true for
any number of other things.
>>Ben Fried: Is that emergence the rise of
free, accountable for the rise of free software
or is that a function of, is that yet another
one of the ways that technologyís serving
consumers first is kind of different from
the past?
>>Ed Yourden: I think itís all of those things.
Yes, it certainly does depend, at least to
some extent, on the idea of going out to the
consumer market place first and then later
on
bringing it into the company and percolating
upwards.
I think itís also a function of what
Clay Shirky calls the cognitive surplus, youíve
got an awful lot of people with time on
their hands, maybe 3 hours in the evening
and free competing power who say, ìHm.
I can
create a clever little app which does one
little thing but has clean interfaces.î I
mean,
itís the Unix paradigm, as well, so they
can be connected to other things that we donít
even
know about yet.
I think itís several of those things that
are all converging to create a
collective impact that, again, the traditional
CIO who's got a very big empire, I think is
incapable of recognizing.
>>Ben Fried: Man, itís kind of a, I mean,
I think these are the things that make our
industry so fascinating, right?
How many other industries change so much over
the course of
five, ten years, right?
>>Ed Yourden: Yeah, yeah.
>>Ben Fried: So, along the subject of change,
based on whatís happened since you started
the book, for example, based on what you learned
by writing it, are there questions you wish
you had asked but didnít?
>>Ed Yourden: Um, sure, yeah.
One of the questions I was particularly interested
in and
actually thought Iíd be able to ask but couldnít,
was how companies that are in the same
industry are using information to compete
against each other effectively.
I mean, you look
in the auto industry, how is it that Honda,
Toyota and General Motors and so on, can compete
using
information?
Take the financial services industry, actually
that one also illustrated
another one of the biggest surprises that
I had working on this book which is the number
of companies that were not about to let me
talk to their CIO.
I anticipated that with CIOs
who were too busy.
I tried to get the new CIO of General Motors,
too busy.
I knew that
some CIOs would be embarrassed.
>>Ben Fried: I think heís no long there.
>>Ed Yourden: Oh, is that right?
[Laughs]
>>Ben Fried: Yeah, they changed CIOs recently.
>>Ed Yourden: Oh dear.
Oh well.
>>Ben Fried: I think he had less than 18 months.
[Laughter]
>>Ed Yourden: Iím not surprised, actually.
I tried to get the CIO of British Petroleum
a few
months after the Gulf oil spill.
[Laughter]
>>Ed Yourden: Well, I knew that was a lost
cause.
But then there were the CIOs of the Wall
Street financial community and there I got
just this hostile stone wall of resistance.
They
did not want to talk to me at all which I
had not anticipated.
But if I had been able to
talk to the CIO of Goldman Sachs, Merrill
Lynch, you know, blah, blah, blah all of those,
Iíd wanna know how they use information to
effectively to compete against each other
and I
suspect I would not have gotten a very full
answer because youíre kind of giving away
the
crown jewel.
>>Ben Fried: The irony is almost everyone
who works on IT on Wall Street, which is
thousands and thousands of people here, has
some idea to the answer of that question,
right?
Itís the interesting unusual things that
theyíve done become widely known.
People in, I
worked in Wall Street for awhile so I know
a little bit about it, but thereís so much
movement.
Historically thereís so much movement from
IT department to IT department that if
someone spends a decade in Wall Street IT,
chances are they know people at, or they
themselves have not been at one of these major
companies and they know something about the
IT secret sauce is or was in a particular
area.
>>Ed Yourden: Probably so.
The other question I wish I had been able
to ask but probably
would not have gotten a straight answer to
is how the decision making goes up the chain
of
command, if the company is facing a severe
crisis that was ultimately caused by a computer
problem, and what made me think about it was
all the news we were hearing about a year
ago
about the alleged engineering problems in
Toyota automobiles.
>>Ben Fried: Oh, right, what was that, what
was it the floor mats?
>>Ed Yourden: The floor mat, accelerator or
whatever.
>>Ben Fried: Brake pedal?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
>>Ed Yourden: Now, there was a lot of talk
that that was a software problem.
>>Ben Fried: Right cause it turned out the
brake pedal or that accelerator doesnít actually
control the flow of gas.
Iím a New Yorker, I donít really understand
cars.
[Laughter]
>>Ben Fried: Iím not the right person to
ask but apparently its multiple servos and
AD
converters and so on and low level controller
software.
I thought it was just a lever
controlling a valve somewhere but no, naÔve
of me.
>>Ed Yourden: And you can imagine a number
of other companies in a variety of industries
where a flaw of some kind, whether hardware
or software or combined, ultimately causes
a
severe crisis that causes a management reaction
up the chain of commands.
And then
ultimately some decision or statement is made
by a vice president who probably doesnít
know anything at all about the underlying
engineering.
And I was curious to see how that
might take place in a Japanese company versus
an American company versus a German company.
>>Ben Fried: Thereís been these other interesting
examples like, that speaks kind of
similarly to that.
There were the centrifuges which are in Iran,
right?
Destroyed by the Siemens
they used a Siemens industrial controller
>>Ed Yourden: Right.
>>Ben Fried: And probably some nation state
introduced this software attack
[Laughter]
>>Ben Fried: into these things that actually
permanently damaged these difficult to obtain
ultra
centrifuges, right?
But thatís another example of software having
such a real concrete
problem in the operation of an organization.
>>Ed Yourden: Yeah.
>>Ben Fried: And then similarly thereís all
these people working on software and critical
infrastructure and itís gotten to the point
where itís too depressing for me to read
what
these people find.
You find these videos of a bug that causes
a steam generator to explode
or things like that, ya know?
>>Ed Yourden: Itís interesting that you mention
the Iran thing because, again, the question
is how did that discovery of the Siemen problem
actually percolate up the chain of command
and how many people got executed as a result?
[Laughter]
>>Ben Fried: I donít think my next CIO job
will be in Iran.
[Laughter]
>>Ed Yourden: Or in North Korea, hopefully.
>>Ben Fried: Yeah.
Oh yeah, thatís right, failure to launch.
>>Ed Yourden: So, I think those are the main
questions I wish Iíd been able to ask.
Since
computers are so essential to virtually everything
that every company is doing these days,
doesnít always go right and when there are
severe problems, how does the executive leadership
deal with it if theyíve come from a era that
didnít really understand the technology to
begin
with?
>>Ben Fried: So I think that this raises a
really interesting point which is that computers
are critical everywhere.
Theyíre in everything; theyíre in the gas
pedal, right?
I mean,
theyíre in things that I certainly didnít
expect to be, kind of, computational devices,
right?
Having met with CIOs from so many diverse
industries, do you think that there is
enough talent, enough computing talent in
the world to support this use of, you know,
the
fact that computers are everywhere?
Do you think that they all have access to
the people
they need to do the jobs they need to do?
I mean, this isnít just the, ìCan you hire
enough
people question.
Iím trying to ask the slightly deeper version
of that which is do these
organizations actually function at the level
that they need to?
>>Ed Yourden: Well, that is a philosophical
question that could keep us going for quite
a
long time.
When I was just getting started in the field
people like Edsger Dijkstra arguing
that we shouldnít even be attempting to build
things as complex as we were building because
we have no hope of ever proving theyíre running
correctly.
>>Ben Fried: Yeah.
>>Ed Yourden: So that we ought to scale down
our expectations and do very simple things.
Well, obviously society hasnít agreed with
that.
So, I think whatís happening is that, we,
and our various companies are building things
right up to some threshold of collapse and
failure and muddling along.
I donít think most companies have the caliber
of talent that
they really need in their IT department.
It was because of that, quite frankly, that
I was
so concerned that the Y2K problem would be
much bigger than it turned out to be.
It actually
turned out to be much bigger than newspapers
ever admitted but thatís whole other
discussion.
Weíve got these systems that are barely wobbling
along and a major disruption
of almost any kind could bring them to their
knees, whether itís competitive or economic
or
malicious.
Thatís, of course, one of the things that
we have to be a lot more worried about
today than we might've even ten years ago
is the malicious deliberate attempt to bring
our
systems down.
>>Ben Fried: Yeah, I like the way that Strassman
kind of referred to the martial
implications of computing and is one concern
about infiltration and one concern about
exfiltration is there always been a tax on
the supply chain or maybe it was Vivek who
talked about thereís always been a tax on
the supply chain and how the supply chain
is
cyber as well, right?
>>Ed Yourden: Yeah and heís doing a lot of
consulting and a lot of lecturing down in
the Pentagon
on those topics.
>>Ben Fried: So was there a CIO you wish you
couldíve interviewed but didnít?
Or was there
was that you thought this man or woman would
really have been--
>>Ed Yourden: Well, thereís a bunch that
I wish I had been able to interview.
Yeah, I
didnít get anybody from the auto industry
and given the number of computers and the
amount
of code that is in the typical automobile
today, I really wish I'd been able to get
a bit more of an insight.
I wonder how worried they are whenever any
car goes roaring down the
highway.
ìIs this stuff actually gonna work?î
[Laughter]
>>Ben Fried: Thereís a group, I think at
UCSD that looks at tech, IT and cars and kind
of
attacks on that and so on, itís fascinating
stuff.
I could send you some papers of the
attacks on these
>>Ed Yourden: Iíd be interested in that.
>>Ben Fried: cars and how it works and how
you can get in the control systems from the
peripheral systems.
Itís scary, especially for someone like me
whoís a New Yorker and
doesnít really drive much.
[Laughter]
>>Ed Yourden: And some of the critical infrastructure
people, I wish Iíd been able to have
more interviews with them.
I interviewed a couple people from traditional
utility companies
but even they are involved in some pretty
amazing things these days.
In terms of the
concerns that they expressed about what would
happen if their part of the grid came down.
So it would have been interesting to hear
a bit more about that.
>>Ben Fried: Yeah.
>>Ed Yourden: But thereís always time for
another book
[laughs]
>>Ben Fried: Yeah, well Iím glad to hear
it.
The book was a great read.
I think weíre
probably at the time we should go to questions.
Is there, I donít know if there was a
moderator page with questions put up or if
weíre just gonna do questions, live questions
from the audience?
Are there questions from the audience?
[Pause]
>>Ben Fried: Alright, a brave man.
>>Ed Yourden: Thereís always the ice breaker.
[Laughs]
>>Ben Fried: Yeah.
Thank you.
>>male #1: Hi, thanks for coming.
So you mentioned cloud computing early on
and you said
that was one of the issues that kind of across
the board you were hearing CIOs say that
that was gonna be in the near term future,
what they were considering for operation.
One
thing I always that would be interesting about
that is that fundamentally if you wanted to
do it right and obviously we at Google, big
bet on cloud computing, you have to actually
give up
some of the control you have as a CIO.
Did you see any of that kind of playing out
in your
discussion and what were the CIOs opinions
towards that?
>>Ed Yourden: I didnít hear that connection
[Coughing]
>>Ed Yourden: between acceptance of cloud
computing and loss of control which is an
interesting one.
Actually, more commonly, I heard the opinion
from some of these older CIOs
that cloud computing is just a new word for
an old idea, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But
the general point about giving up control
is one that had occurred to me in a couple
other
respects that also did not get addressed.
One of the things that I wanted to ask about
was
agile computing and theyíre all in favor
of it, they all thought it was a great idea.
But
when you listen to them they all just thought
it meant doing the same old stuff faster.
[Laughter]
>>Ed Yourden: As opposed to some of the stronger
opinions about agile computing, it does
require giving up a lot of centralized control.
But on the subject of cloud computing, no,
I donít know whether they were in favor of
it or against it.
We just, we didnít get there in that part
of the
discussion.
They all just agreed, whereas, again, five
years ago they would have said never
over my dead body, blah, blah, blah.
Then three years ago theyíd say nah.
And now they will
tell you some concerns and cautions and theyíll
point to a trouble or a horror story somewhere
that
theyíve seen in the trade journals.
But they all know that itís coming and a
lot of them
will say itís a good thing.
But the idea that it may require them to give
up some control,
like I was saying before, I think thatís
a really deep cultural thing in a lot of these
companies that theyíve had a mindset of control
for 30 or 40 years.
Particularly because
computing hardware in networks and databases
and so on were amongst the most precious and
most scarce and most expensive resources and
assets that a company had.
It had to be controlled and protected.
And the idea that itís now free and plentiful
and pervasive and so on, theyíre still getting
used to that idea.
>>Ben Fried: So I thought, Iím sorry did
you have a follow up question?
>>male #1: No, thank you.
>>Ben Fried: I thought on the subject of the
cloud, I thought the interview with Vivek
Kundra who was the United States CIO at the
time was fascinating.
Because unlike many of
your CIOs, essentially, he was dropped in
at the top of the organization, the federal
government spends I think he says like 80
billion dollars
>>Ed Yourden: Yeah.
>>Ben Fried: And thatís not including the
black part of the budget, right, thatís just
kind of, thereís 80 billion dollars that
we can see them spend on IT
>>Ed Yourden: Right.
>>Ben Fried: And itís controlled by these
departmental CIOs, right?
I mean, thereís, I mean,
they have entire conferences of federal CIOs
as I understand it, thereís lots and lots
and
lots of them.
And hereís this guy dropped in on top of
all these people, he had very little
actual authority over them but trying to give
his boss and the American people, you know,
levers and transparency to what was going
on in all of these small IT organizations.
For him
the cloud was incredibly important.
There was so much waste, thereís what, 2000
federal data
centers or something like that?
Operating on something like 26 percent utilization,
something along those lines.
>>Ed Yourden: Yeah.
>>Ben Fried: And I was fascinated reading,
hereís a CIO whoís actually trying to be
an
agent of change, whoís trying to fight the
forces of inertia that existed at this lower
level of CIO, underneath him.
I thought that was, in that way, the interview
with him was
very different from most of the others where
all these people were much more the commanders
of
their organizations, I guess.
>>Ed Yourden: Thatís true, although, Kundra
left about a month after I conducted the interview.
[Laughter]
>>Ed Yourden: And itís interesting also that
nearly 30 years ago, Paul Strassman, whose
name
we mentioned already
>>Ben Fried: Right.
>>Ed Yourden: was a deputy secretary of the
defense department, in charge of their IT
and
said the same thing; 2000 data centers blah,
blah, blah, and Iím gonna change it.
And he
was ready to shoot them all if he had to,
given his Czech military background.
[Laughter]
>>Ed Yourden: But he said what he had not
anticipated was how stubborn these people
could
be knowing full well that when the next administration
came along heíd be gone.
These people
are protecting their empire over a 20 year
period, their career and they can outlast
you,
they can hold their breath, said they donít
really care.
So it was interesting seeing Vivek
Kundraís thing.
To me, one of the more interesting examples
or stories from this Vivek
Kundra interview was his very simple experiment
in the city of Washington to get people to
write little smart phone apps and he didnít
pay them all but he said, ìIím gonna have
a
contestî and the winner gets a thousand dollars
or something like that.
And he ended up
with dozens, if not hundreds of smart phone
apps that have been created by ordinary citizens
and contributed whose collective business
value was astronomical.
So this idea that society
is available and has got a lot of smart people
and we can take advantage of crowd computing
and so on, I think they really woke up a lot
of people in the Washington bureaucracy.
We got
a question down here.
>>male #2: Yeah, so I guess I have a meta
question since youíre talking about culture
so
much.
So, you know, in computing of course itís,
generally itís a young field and we all
hit college and we knew that we knew how to
do it and these people twenty years older
than
us were dinosaurs using Mainframes or Windows
or whatever their old tech du jour was.
Of
course, now by the time youíre CIO youíve
kind of almost become, I wouldnít say necessarily
a dinosaur
[Laughter]
>>male #2: Particularly because Benís my
boss.
[Laughter]
>>male #2: But
>>Ben Fried: I think of myself more as a woolly
mammoth but ya know.
[Laughter]
>>male #2: But Iím curious how do the CIOs,
did the CIOs come across as kind of, ìOh
these
kids are snapping at my heels and oh this
changeî or did it come across, ìThis is
awesome!
The worlds changing, new tech!î
>>Ed Yourden: I think it was in between, I
think.
Ben has expressed some frustration that
they donít seem to be radical enough or aggressive
enough and so on.
I was expecting the
first characterization of this generation
of young kids there, you know, theyíre
unmanageable and theyíre unwashed and theyíre
uncivil and blah, blah, blah.
I didnít get
that at all.
And I asked that question just about to everyone
and was surprised at how
positive they were about the education, the
skills, the work ethic and everything else
you
can imagine of the current generation of college
graduates.
With the exception of Paul
Strassman who said that they were shallow
and superficial and glib and they expected
too
much and so on.
But generally they were all very, very positive
which was encouraging.
And
this is from a group of CIOs that ranged from
their late 20s early 30s up to their early
to mid 60s.
So the older ones I was expecting to be very
negative with lots of stories
about the good old days when men were men
and we all walked to work barefoot and so
on.
I
didnít get that which was interesting.
>>male #2: Thank you.
[Pause]
>>female #1: I actually have a follow up question.
>>Ed Yourden: Okay.
>>Ben Fried: Can you use the microphone so
that you can be recorded for posterity.
[Laughs]
>>female #1: Um, just a little follow up to
that question.
Did they talk in specific about
any kind of changes that they could foresee
about with the younger generation coming in
the
workforce who are, perhaps, more comfortable
and more familiar with technology either in
the IT department or any other areas of the
business, good or bad?
>>Ed Yourden: I didnít hear that discussed
in term of changes but rather just one of
the
positive attributes of the younger generation,
that they were more familiar and had been
exposed to computers their entire life and
probably had gotten more an education in
whatever computing sciences were appropriate
then had their own generation.
Many of whom
came out of school with all kinds of non computer
related degrees and had to scramble a
bit to pick it up.
So they were generally positive.
And they didnít seem to suggest, well,
they suggested that it was gonna perhaps lead
to a better work home life balance because
it
was less likely than it had been in the generation
before that people would work 7 days a
week, 18 hours a day until they dropped from
exhaustion at age 32 or 65 or whatever.
But
aside from that I didnít hear anything.
The other thing that was interesting, by the
way,
just going into the broader area of change
when I say, ìWhat do you see in the future?î
They all said, ìI would be crazy to make
a prediction about anything more than 18 months
or 2 years in the future.î Whereas if I had
written this book 10 years ago, they all would
have given me grand predictions about where
they thought technology was going and thatís
probably because thatís what they were hearing
from IBM and Accenture and whoever.
They
were so used to the idea that vendors will
come talk to us and weíll tell them what
we
need and theyíll tell us what theyíre doing
and so weíll be able to see 5 years into
the
future and there were lots of 5 year plans,
you know?
>>Ben Fried: So to speak.
>>Ed Yourden: Twenty years ago.
And they werenít doing that this time around.
So that was
encouraging.
>>female #1: Okay, thanks.
>>Ed Yourden: Sure.
I think weíve got another question.
>>Ben Fried: Yeah.
>>male #3: Hi.
First I wanna thank you for what you said
about Y2K in the 90s because it
really, I think it kicked everyoneís butt
in a way that needed to happen and that people
wouldnít have paid attention to the issue
if people werenít saying the things you were
saying.
>>Ed Yourden: Well, thank you but I took a
lot of heat for it.
[Laughs]
>>male #3: And thatís why I wanna give you
some gratitude cause I saw huge projects that
were really needed and they wouldnít have
happened any other way.
My question has nothing
to do with that though.
I was wondering, you mentioned most CIOs tended
to fall into the
field and obviously thereís no, you canít
go to college and major in CIOness
[Laughter]
>>male #3: But Iím concerned that so much
of the computing world is staffed by people
that
fell into it and I was wondering, and the
reason for that is, I think, computing is
becoming
like the air we breathe.
Itís very important or as important as healthcare.
And Iíd rather
go to a doctor that followed a prescribed
educational plan to become a doctor than one
that
was kind of, you know, fooling around with
medicine in his home and decided to go into
this
field.
[Laughter]
>>male #3: So
[Clears throat]
>>male #3: My point and I do have one, is
what do you see is needed in the educational
field
for IT and computer science in the next 5
or 10 years?
>>Ed Yourden: Wow.
Thatís another kind of philosophical question
that could keep us occupied
all day.
The fact that a lot of employers now feel
they have luxury of insisting on a
computer science degree or a software engineering
degree itís certainly a radical change
from when I entered the field.
In fact, when I graduated from MIT, there
was no computer
science degree.
So employers said, ìMath?
Electrical engineering?
Mechanical engineering?
Astrophysics, anything?î So that has changed.
Now, they can say we wanna hire people from
this level of university with these kinds
of recognized diplomas but within the academic
institutions themselves, there has been a
lot of soul searching for the last 40 or 50
years
at, ìWhat should we be teaching this year?î
ìIs it still relevant to teach language X
given
that no one in the real world is using it
anymore?î I think thatís gonna continue
as long as
our technology continues changing as rapidly
as it does because itís very hard for the
institutions to change that rapidly themselves.
Thereís a deeper and more controversial
question behind what youíve asked, though,
that I thought you were gonna get to and that
has
to do with licensing of IT people.
As I understand it, a doctor is not allowed
to practice
unless heís not only gone through medical
school but also has a license of some sort,
which
is true of a lot of fields, not software,
not software.
And I donít think thatís gonna
happen in our lifetime.
>>male #3: We have certifications which are
taking that role at least for lower level
positions, I think.
>>Ed Yourden: Yeah, though, again we could
get into a long philosophical discussion.
The
certification is, in some cases, a demonstration
that you know how to use certain tools.
You know, you can get a Microsoft certification
in all kinds of things that may not
indicate whether or not you really know anything
about computing.
As I understand it,
youíre not allowed to build a bridge or a
building unless you have a license from some
engineering society that provides, at least,
some confidence that it wonít fall down the
minute you finish building it and thatís
not very much true in the computing field
at all.
And there was no discussion of that, thatís
one of the questions I wish I had asked of
the
CIO, do you think we should be insisting on
licensing of computer people.
Because I probably
wouldíve gotten a variety of answers.
>>Ben Fried: Yeah.
>>Ed Yourden: Iím not sure what it would
have been.
>>male #3: Thank you.
>>Ben Fried: So maybe a final, I think weíre
just about out of time, maybe a final question
for you maybe in the philosophical realm as
well, but looking at, and so many people you
interviewed identified consumerization of
IT as such a trend and if you look at so much
of
the way of cloud computing and BYOD and kind
of all the trends that were frequently
identified, I think it makes me want to ask
the question of will IT be necessary?
And I,
in 15 years, right, or will, for example if
you wanted to have your own stealth salesforce
right now inside some company all you need
is web browser to use salesforce and you could
use
PayPal or whatever to, or Google wallet to
manage your, or Square or whatever, you can
handle
payments in different ways.
You could have CRM tools, you could name almost
any part of
what you wanna do and you can just get access
to it all through a web browser without the
IT
department having to do anything for you.
And is the logical conclusion of this that
kind of
the shores lick at more and more and more
of the sands IT leaving us a smaller and smaller
island to
manage or defend that people need less and
less from it?
[Sigh]
>>Ben Fried: Not that does technology go away
but does the notion that the department thatís
responsible for technology, is that as dated
as like reading about terms like the motor
pool
or something like that?
>>Ed Yourden: It may be.
It may be.
I certainly think that technology is gonna
become more
and more diffused through every aspect of
our company.
I, very much like the gentleman over
here was saying, itís almost part of the
air we breathe these days.
But I think that we may not
need programming and coding and a lot of the
traditional technology aspects of IT but we
are
still building systems that are very large
and very interconnected that, I think, itís
gonna
require reasonably smart people to figure
out if you scale them up.
Just like we need very
smart people to build the tools in the first
place, you know, if Iíve got a company with
a
hundred regional offices all using salesforce,
I would probably still need some systems
level thinking to figure out how best to fit
all that together even if I donít need any
Cobalt programmers to write the underlying
code.
[Laughs]
>>Ed Yourden: But I think, thatís probably
another question that I should have asked
and I
suspect that the typical CIO would be very
much against that because youíre talking
about
his or her job going away.
I asked a little bit of that question, I remember,
of Lynne Ellen
is her name, the woman who was, until recently,
the CIO of Detroit Energy.
I said, ìIsnít
it true that you get people coming out of
college today thinking that they know everything
about software engineering because they know
Excel?î Or no, she was the one that used
the
Excel metaphor but I said, you know, ìDo
they have an over confidence about their technical
skills?î And she was the one that said, ìJust
because you know Excel doesnít mean you know
software engineering.î And she said we try
to throw a lot of our younger graduates into
complex situations knowing that theyíre going
to sink but hopefully giving them the
opportunity to learn that things are a lot
more complicated than they think.
>>Ben Fried: Scaring them straight, kind of?
>>Ed Yourden: Yeah.
[Laughter]
>>Ben Fried: Yeah, sorry I think that, I think
weíre out of time.
