CIO at Oracle. A veteran tech exec with experience in cloud infrastructure services for the enterprise.
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Coming into an organization as large as Oracle, with over 133,000 end-user employees, my leadership team and I wanted to adapt the culture to be more empathetic to the needs of our stakeholders while also giving our technology-driven organization a greater sense of ownership and satisfaction. During this journey, we found three core ideas particularly useful, which may also help your company improve the services it provides to customers.
• You build it, you own it.
• The customer-centric mindset.
• Metrics matter.
These concepts focus on instilling a sense of responsibility through end-to-end ownership of every project, advocating customer-centricity and aligning on a common set of goals and measurable outcomes. We developed a data-driven work culture, streamlined and automated how we build, test and operate our services and changed and adopted a new set of tools and technologies to implement these DevOps and software-driven automation practices and principles. I’m sharing my approach and experience in hopes that it can help you build a culture of ownership in your own organization.
You Build It, You Own It
We had a siloed organization with separate engineering and operation functions—one team did the engineering, design and implementation, and another did testing and operations—resulting in disjointed ownership. For instance, developers were focused only on releasing the features quickly, with no sense of how they would be released in production. Operations, on the other hand, was focused on stability but without enough understanding of how the new features worked.
If your company is struggling with siloed functions, here are some ways to streamline operations that worked for Oracle.
• Consolidate a set of core functions to facilitate coordination as well as eliminate duplicated efforts and unnecessary complexity.
• Build and automate a streamlined methodology and a set of common foundational tools for planning, building, testing, deploying and operating services.
• Put in place a process for constantly improving the design, deployment and testing with automation.
• Invest in upskilling your staff with training and certifications and recruit some new hires focused on development as well as program and product management.
• Shift from manual operations to end-to-end automation at scale.
We gained significant improvements in agility, consistency, quality and velocity as a result of these changes.
Customer-Centric Mindset
When you think about a product, you should think about the end-to-end delivery of finished goods to a customer—not just your little piece of the project. We had engagement managers and business analysts doing tactical order-taking instead of being strategic, agile and customer-driven. This was a result of being primarily project-oriented, with siloed teams focusing on their own piece of the tech stacks and their own timelines rather than focusing on the customers’ problems.
This is a common problem across companies. Here are solutions you might want to adopt that made an impact on my organization.
• Incorporate the new agile tools and processes described above into a larger view of how you collaborate and track your work across partner teams.
• Modernized your collaboration tools to ensure your developers work closely together, share ideas, communicate rapidly and fix problems.
• Foster a customer-centric mindset into your work setup by creating personas of your users, which should illustrate how one set of capabilities doesn’t work for all users and that there are different needs based on the use cases. These personas should be developed and updated through continuous data collection and the creation of feedback loops so your teams know your users and what solutions are needed.
These principles and methodologies allowed our entire team to take ownership of the end-to-end experience we deliver to our stakeholders—the customer-centric mindset.
The Right Metrics
Not only can you not track what you don’t measure, but measuring the wrong things can lead to increased dissatisfaction among your customers and employees. After we reviewed and adapted our metrics, we found that they were focused almost exclusively on costs.
The following approaches can help ensure you get the whole picture.
• Incorporate other important factors such as delivery times, service quality, customer satisfaction, developer productivity, ROI and the total cost of ownership into your metrics.
• Create a feedback loop so you can regularly review and modify your metrics as necessary.
Another benefit of measuring what you do is that it provides guard rails, so while you’re thinking and acting innovatively, your solutions still deliver on the core requirements of being timely, cost-effective and efficient.
In summary, create a plan that puts the customer at the center, with clearly expressed goals. Then, move fast and iterate so you don’t lose momentum or delay the execution plans without showing any progress. These principles can help an IT organization quickly deliver high-quality and well-tested code and lead to internal productivity gains that you can track and report to the rest of the executive committee.
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