Podcast with Dr. Alex Heublein

[00:00:03] Jason S. Bradshaw: Hi, everyone and welcome to another episode of Chats With Jason. I am, of course, your host, Jason S .Bradshaw, and this is the show that helps you transform the experience to transform your business. Now, today I share with you a conversation I had with Dr . Alex Heublein.

[00:00:42] Jason S. Bradshaw: So during the chat, we really deep dive into some of his key insights on how you can leverage digital technologies, digital disruptions, if you will, to help transform the experience, to transform your business. So without further ado, let's jump in to my chat with Alex Heublein.

[00:01:05] Jason S. Bradshaw: Today, our guest comes to us with a wealth of senior leadership experience in the IT industry, helping businesses really prepare themselves to weather any storm that comes their way and continue to grow no matter the challenges ahead of them. But that's only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to his experience. Alex, thanks for joining us on the show.

[00:01:30] Jason S. Bradshaw: I really appreciate it. Now, Alex I alluded to you having over 30 years of experience in the IT industry. Do you want to share with our listeners today some of your background?

[00:02:17] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, I'm working with companies like IBM, HP, Oracle, and Red Hat. Certainly, the who's who of technology. I'm sure given your background, you would have seen significant disruption in the industry and some huge monumental flops when it comes to technology and of course, some really great pioneering changes in the industry.

[00:03:08] Alex Heublein: You know, I think there's a couple of reasons for it, right? One is, for companies that have been around for a while, one of the challenges they run into is that they've adopted technology over many, many years. And if you go to some of these bigger companies, they've got one of everything, right? They were like, oh, this is the great new technology, we're going to go implement this; we're going to try it out. And so they've ended up in a situation where many of them have so many different and divergent technologies that it's very, very hard to change those, right? It's very hard to keep pace with those things. And I always tell people, when it comes to things like adaptability and innovation, complexity is your real enemy.

[00:05:01] Alex Heublein: But a lot of times people look at the bottom line. Look, here's the money we've got to be able to do this. How do we do it at the lowest cost? And they're not thinking about 10 years from now, or 5 years from now, we're going to have to change this technology. We're going to have to change these business processes.

[00:05:17] Jason S. Bradshaw: I think another trap that I've seen at least is that a lot of organizations go, well, we just need to start with doing what our old system did. And so they don't realize any benefits. And then of course, the CFO is going to be saying, well, we just spent all this money to get the same egg at the end of the day so why should we invest?

[00:06:00] Alex Heublein: When I have to deal with CFOs, I mean, there's two things they care about, right? They care about return on investment and they care about total cost of ownership. And it's really the latter, right? A lot of people get very focused on what's my return on investment. What's my payback period of particular process or system or technology that I'm going to put into place. They get really laser focused on that. And too many times people try to focus on that when they're trying to sell this into the C suite, they'll talk about ROI. They'll talk about, oh, look, the payback period on this is only nine months. What they don't talk a lot about is total cost of ownership. And if you look at most systems and most processes you put in place into a business, it's the long tail economics that get you right? That's where 80% - 90 % of the cost is. It's not in that upfront implementation. It's in that total cost of ownership. So you've got to speak that language, right? You got to learn that term TCO and really hammer the TCO part just as much as you're going to emphasize the return on investment in the payback period.

[00:07:22] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, I think we've got really good at working out ways to continue to connect to the mainframe system with new systems as opposed to dealing with the legacy system. Thinking about that hint around total cost of ownership, when I was in procurement, I worked as a director in procurement for a period of time. One thing that I always tried, not always successfully, but always tried to do, was baked in unlimited usage or very high usage caps so that when you were having those conversations around total cost of ownership, the CFO couldn't turn around and say, well, okay, we put on one extra employee and suddenly the bill's gone from a million to 2 million.

[00:08:08] Jason S. Bradshaw: Now, when it comes to future proofing your business being resilient against the change, I think, it's easy for people to say that this is the worst time or the best time to be in business, right?

[00:08:53] Alex Heublein: I think one of the underlying assumptions there is that procuring technology going forward is about buying systems, or it's about buying these SAS applications or monolithic applications or what have you. What we're starting to see in the industry is a big change there. We're starting to see people look at this much more from a process standpoint, as opposed to a system standpoint. And I think that's absolutely critical because you're right. You'll see a lot of people going in and say, Oh, we're going to implement this big ERP system or the CRM system or what have you, they spend a ton of money on it and then they realize, wow, we're actually not getting what we thought we were going to get out of it. So I think there's a couple of things can do there. One of them is really to make sure you've got a very, very iterative strategy, where you're actually trying things out, you're piloting them, you're doing proof of concepts, you're iterating through these things as you're evaluating them. And even as you're implementing them, right, not go big bang on these things, so I agree with you. Yeah, being able to negotiate really, really high usage caps is great. But it's only great if you know, you've made the right decision, right? Getting to that point where you know, you've made the right decision is absolutely critical.

[00:10:25] Alex Heublein: So it's a tricky calculus you have to get into there. You want your processes to work in a way that's going to be the most efficient and most productive for your business and supports your customers and the products you're selling out in the marketplace well as you possibly can. But sometimes you have to say, you know what, this is actually good enough and we'll be able to save a tremendous amount of money by maybe making some tweaks to our processes as opposed to trying to shoehorn every system into the process way of thinking. It kind of cuts both ways, but I think that's very, very important. And having this very iterative, very dynamic strategy where you can go in and you can take multiple technologies, put them together to achieve your needs as opposed to trying to buy a complete platform. I think these sort of monolithic platforms are on their way out and our ability to develop much more bespoke systems using technologies that are emerging. If you look at what's happening in the artificial intelligence and generative AI world, our ability to create custom applications, custom processes custom automations for those processes, the cost of doing that and the difficulty of doing that is being reduced every single day. And we've seen this out in the marketplace. We've seen what's starting to happen with software development. I think that trend is just going to continue and accelerate over the next few years.

[00:12:00] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, and all of a sudden you're 12 months or two years of steer code meetings become a nightmare meetings as you're trying to rescue the project.

[00:12:30] Alex Heublein: Right, right.

[00:12:32] Alex Heublein: Buy the best one.

[00:12:44] Jason S. Bradshaw: And now they have a million different products that they bolt into their cloud. And it's still cumbersome experience because people are just then going, oh, well, they can do it all. I'll buy it all, but not realizing that there's actually different technologies designed to do different things, and you've got to start with that end in mind. So that's really great.

[00:13:17] Jason S. Bradshaw: First question should be fairly simple, and I hope that we're aligned on the response. But the first question is,

[00:13:22] Jason S. Bradshaw: Is AI going to just cut my workforce and allow me to automate everything? And the second question, because you might want to answer them together- is AI truly that panacea that's going to transform the efficiency of my business?

[00:15:33] Alex Heublein: When we talk to prospects and customers alike, there's maybe one in a hundred that get it, that can actually see what's happening in the technology space around AI. Most of them they're like, yeah, you know, I've used ChatGPT and it's really, really cool and, you know, I can parse through documents and I can ask it questions and things like that. But they're only seeing the tip of the iceberg of what's possible. So I'm a big believer in using artificial intelligence to enhance people's capabilities, to free them up, to focus on the things that are uniquely human, to focus them on the creative pursuits. And I don't mean created just in terms of art or things like that, but being very, very good at what they do and bringing innovation into their business. That's what you want your people doing. You want them servicing your customers. You want them building relationships. You want them innovating. You want them coming up with new ideas for products and services. Not, oh I've got to go process these 300 invoices and I've got to do it manually. Taking that out of the way frees up people to do what people do best.

[00:17:11] Jason S. Bradshaw: I also love the comment around improving how people work. Having someone in the accounts team, it's an easy example, manually inputting invoices to be paid is not an effective use of their time. Having them interrogate those invoices, look for patterns is much more beneficial to the company, making sure things aren't, paid late or overpaid or underpaid, you know, all those sorts of things are much more beneficial than sitting there keying in paper invoice. So great there. And I think AI really allows us to spark curiosity. You know, go back five years, someone presents you with a report or a system generates your report and it was difficult to say what if this scenario had changed. Where with using AI tools, you would know better than me, you can give it 50 what if scenarios and, and then run into the problem of information overload. But it's that curiosity that it unlocks that I think is a real enabler for businesses. So great take there on AI. Where do you see technology going in the next 24 months when it comes to enabling business success?

[00:19:44] Alex Heublein: So I think having that notion that AI isn't just here to automate things. It isn't just here to do some things for us, it actually enables us as a business to become more adaptable and more flexible and more resilient as an organization. Capitalizing on that and using that when I can make a change in an hour versus making a change to the systems that takes me a month to go make the change and then a month to test and then a month to get it out into production. If I can do that in hours now with similar results, well, now I've got something that is very, very difficult for my competitors to emulate, right? You know, business is all about competition. At the end of the day, you're always looking to get a leg up on your competition. And I'm a firm believer that flexibility and adaptability it's very hard to implement. It's very hard to do, but it's very hard to copy. It's very, very difficult for your competitors to do the same thing. So if you can move faster than they can, and you can move with more flexibility and adaptability than your competitors, then you've got a sustainable competitive advantage, at least for some period of time.

[00:20:51] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah. It was just keeping that in mind when you're building out solutions for today's problems, right? How can I build in that flexibility or that adaptability so that if I do need to pivot, if I do need to move, I can do so quickly. Anyone that's followed my work knows that I believe strongly that the experience of our customers and our employees is ultimate to long term business growth and success.

[00:21:24] Alex Heublein: Well, I think you can improve both, and I think the trick is using it in the right way. We've seen that people try to automate customer experiences with technology with artificial intelligence. And a lot of that has not gone particularly well if we're honest, right? One of the key things to me is how do I free up time from my people to go have those very rich interactions with my customers, right? How do I free them up from all of the things that they're doing today that aren't high value added activities? How do I free them up to actually have those deeper conversations and build those deeper relationships with my customers? That's what I think customers want to see, at least in most of the industries that I've worked in. They want to know that they have a connection with people. They have a connection with the companies that they're buying products and services from. So I think on one hand, you can use technology and you can actually create a wall between you and your customers if you're not careful. But if you use it right, you can free up people to focus in on how do I build those deeper customer relationships? How do I work more closely with my customers? How do I get them to view me as a strategic partner, not just a vendor? That's the holy grail. I think for a lot of companies out there. The problem is a lot of them look at this and just say, well, we can just cut a bunch of costs here, and it's like, that's great. But take some of those savings and invest those in working very closely with your customers and building those richer experiences. So I think we can use technology to do both.

[00:23:06] Jason S. Bradshaw: So as we look to wrap up today, I really hope that you, our listener has got some really great ideas out of today's conversation, but it'd be remiss of me to let Alex go without one last question.

[00:23:31] Alex Heublein: I think the one thing that I encourage everyone to do is to take adaptability and flexibility and make that a key initiative within your organization. Not just as an add on, not just as an afterthought, not just as a, oh, you know, yeah, we should probably make this process more adaptable a little bit or this system or make that something that's front and center for your business. Because look, we're going through unprecedented change. Now, every generation says that every new technology comes out. Oh, it's unprecedented. And we've never seen anything like it. But I think we are in that situation where we are going through an era that over the next 3 to 5 years, we're probably going to see more change, not just in technology, but in the way we do business than we've seen in the last 20 or 30 years. And so if you're not designing adaptability into your culture, into your systems, into your processes and your interactions, if you're not making adaptability a key performance indicator and a key initiative within your business, you're probably going to fail because someone else will. One of your competitors will do that. They'll be able to out compete you by moving faster and moving more flexibly. And then in the end of the day, if you don't adapt, you really will perish as an organization. And we will see more companies go out of business in the next five years than we saw go out of business in the last 20 years. So to me, it's not just a nice to have. It's not just something that, oh, yeah, we should be a bit more adaptable. It's an existential threat to most organizations, and so you can decide you're going to meet that threat head on by designing adaptability. And again, it starts with your culture. It starts with your people, and then that permeates through the rest of your systems and your processes and your interactions with your customers. If you don't make that one of your top priorities as an organization, you probably won't have an organization in 5 years.

[00:25:29] Jason S. Bradshaw: Alex, you've been a fantastic guest on the show. I really appreciate you sharing your insights and your time with us today.

[00:25:38] Jason S. Bradshaw: Thanks so much. Appreciate it.