It was a couple of years back when I took a decision which even my team was stunned — we stopped the infrastructure overhaul, in the middle of the road, to first invest in developer experience. Our engineers were at the center of attention instead of flirting with a new "big" tech stack, we simply made their daily work without hassles by automating deployments, fixing legacy code, and granting more autonomy to the teams. What we didn't expect was the outcome. Productivity went through the roof, innovation came as a natural consequence, and employee retention did better than any bonus program could. Thus by enabling developers, we inadvertently put the accelerator on every other initiative that followed — cloud migration, client delivery speed, etc. The advice that I would give to technology leaders is the following: the smartest tech decision is not always about technology, sometimes it is about people. When you make life easier for those behind the systems, business results are more likely to follow.
Moving our team to a hybrid cloud model was the one decision that I made as a CIO, and it led to unexpected positive outcomes. We avoided the full premises and complete on-cloud approaches as they were lacking the flexibility offered by the hybrid. The hybrid model came with disaster recovery options. This major shift also initiated the collaboration across various departments. The teams started sharing resources and expertise to speed up the innovation. The costs dropped due to smart resource allocation, and we were able to roll out new tools faster than before. The greatest lesson that I learnt was that technical decisions can provide new cultural and operational benefits. My advice to the other tech leaders is, look for the solutions that not only address IT needs but also give chances for new connections.
A lot of aspiring CIOs think that a technology decision's success is a master of a single channel, like IT metrics. But that's a huge mistake. A leader's job isn't to be a master of a single function. Their job is to be a master of the entire business. The unexpected decision was mandating that all new IT hires spend their first week working directly in the heavy duty warehouse, manually tracking OEM Cummins parts inventory. This taught me to learn the language of operations. We stopped thinking about IT as a separate cost center and started treating it as an operational enabler. The unexpected positive outcome was a dramatic improvement in our ERP system's user experience (UX) and data integrity. The IT team, having experienced the operational pain, proactively redesigned the inventory input screen, reducing the Cost-of-Mis-shipment by 20%. The lesson is that the bottleneck is usually not the code; it is the lack of empathy for the user's operational reality. The impact this had on my career was profound. I went from being a good marketing person to a person who could lead an entire business. I learned that the best technology in the world is a failure if the operations team can't deliver on the promise. The best way to be a leader is to understand every part of the business. My advice is to stop thinking of an IT decision as a separate feature. You have to see it as a part of a larger, more complex system. The best leaders are the ones who can speak the language of operations and who can understand the entire business. That's a product that is positioned for success.