In this episode of the CIO Confessions podcast, host Gert Jan van Halem sits down with Rasmus Rasmussen, Demant's VP (Enterprise Platforms, Infrastructure & Security), a global leader in hearing healthcare. This episode explores the unique challenges and opportunities of leading IT within a company dedicated to empowering millions through the richness of sound. Discover how Rasmus deals with the complexities of a global organisation spanning hearing care retail, hearing aid manufacturing, and diagnostic products.

Learn about Demant's divisionalised IT structure, designed to align closely with diverse business needs, and the strategic approach to managing global IT platforms and infrastructure... Gain valuable insights into balancing innovation with the sensitive nature of healthcare and the critical importance of data security, particularly in light of past cybersecurity incidents... This episode also delves into Demant's unique, research-driven culture, the challenges of attracting IT talent in a niche market, and their global strategy for building a cohesive team across diverse geographical locations.

5 Lessons You Will Learn From This Episode

• The importance of aligning IT strategy closely with diverse business units in a complex organisation.
• The critical and often underestimated role of IT security, especially in sensitive sectors like healthcare.
• The ongoing balancing act between leveraging cloud technologies and maintaining on-premises infrastructure, driven by factors like cost and specific workload requirements.
• The significance of people, both the end-users and the IT team, in driving success, even within a deeply technical company.
• The unique challenges and innovative solutions required for attracting and retaining IT talent in niche markets and across global locations.

[00:00:16] Jingle: This is the CIO Confessions, a podcast by Devoteam.

[00:00:43] It is a global company with a presence in more than 30 countries and a staff of more than 22 000 people. With this team, they cover hearing care, hearing aids, and diagnostic products and services. The synergies between their business areas enable Demant to help millions of people experience the joy of hearing for [00:01:00] many years to come.

[00:01:25] Welcome, Rasmus. Great to have you in our podcast. You have a lot of experience in leading IT organisations, so looking forward to hearing all your insights. Could you first of all introduce yourself to the listeners?

[00:01:44] Before that, I worked in other Danish industries companies, actually started my career in bank and finance fast forward to the last let's say 16, 17 years I've been in IT management, different levels of that.

[00:02:06] So you do hearing care, hearing aids and diagnostics. That seems to be quite different things to do in one company. So what challenges does that bring?

[00:02:31] That same goes for us. We have a job you need to book at a time and then you can go and get your hearing aid fitted or serviced. That's one business unit. That's something totally different from our hearing aid. IT solutions where we have where we produce our hearing aids. So it's R&D, it's sales and marketing, it's production of it.

[00:03:16] And not for a mask, where the hearing aids are more for a mask. We do that. So it's very different. So we, what we have done in IT. I've been here 13 years. Before we looked at everything as the same, but 4 or 5 years back, we changed our organisation to be more close to business, to understand the way they think in those business units.

[00:03:58] How can we improve in that? How can [00:04:00] our R&D be better? And the same goes for our diagnostic business. How can we do that? I have the responsibility that goes across, so everything that they, that are not focused in these different business units, stuff like when you have been out traveling, how do you do concurrent when you have been out traveling what about business intelligence?

[00:04:35] But it has changed a lot since we did the reorganisation. So we are close to business to understand business much better.

[00:04:52] Rasmus Rasmussen: That's complicated, right? But we have, so if you talk to business. They don't understand it, but our business IT understands it. [00:05:00] So they understand, okay, I really need a platform for this. When we do Azure for all our R&D, R&D people, they understand it. That's not a problem.

[00:05:23] But it helps us that it goes through IT people.

[00:05:43] Rasmus Rasmussen: Yeah, it is. The bigger market is more important. So if we have invoice handling, all right, it's a very sexy topic, but it is needed, right? You have to get it. You have to get it. So invoice handling, it is more important to get that up and running if it's broken, [00:06:00] or improve it in the U.S. where we have 40 percent of our income compared to Holland, right? So we have to give them more rather than care in the bigger markets. That's the way we do it. Of course, if it's also regulations from the local countries, then we also need to focus on that. So it depends on the situation.

[00:06:43] It's, you try to put a lot of stuff into a very small machine .

[00:07:04] It's still stigmatised to have a hearing aid. So we really want to do it as small as possible. And we put more and more technology in. AI engines in the hearing aid. We have to be rechargeable. Be as small as possible. We have a lot of microphones. A lot of amplifiers. A lot of loudspeakers in it.

[00:07:28] Gert Jan van Halem: Yeah. And that's somehow the weird thing, right? Because I didn't hear of Demant before. I think a lot of people don't, everybody knows what a hearing aid is.

[00:07:49] Rasmus Rasmussen: That's very niche. I think there are if you look at the global market, there are only five players in the global market.

[00:08:14] Gert Jan van Halem: Great to see, and it probably also means that as the IT department, you're not even the most key department around.

[00:08:34] But we were heavily hacked more than five years ago. And then we figured out. Wow, IT is very important for us. If you are a R&D engineer, you can have your own toolbox, you can have your own whatever you can do, but all of a sudden you can't exchange data, you can't do so all of a sudden the IT department was the kings of the castle for a short period of time.

[00:09:08] Rasmus Rasmussen: Oh the biggest learning.

[00:09:55] Handling people under huge pressure is not easy. Because they [00:10:00] normally you know how they work, but if they are under huge pressure, they totally turn into somebody else. And understanding how people are working, looking in the eyes every morning, every night, we worked around the clock for those six weeks, looking at people.

[00:10:27] Gert Jan van Halem: And is that because that's not telling them to do and what not to do is not a technical discussion probably, but it's more on how do you act? What do you do? When do you stop? When do you continue?

[00:10:59] We did that [00:11:00] in, then they work in shift. So 12 hours, 12 hours, send them home, go home in a taxi because you cannot drive a car anymore. And other people that are more in the admin part, they worked less. So that was my eight hour shifts to cover everything. So we divided that up.

[00:11:26] Gert Jan van Halem: And after that after six weeks, it'll be a little bit longer.

[00:11:36] Rasmus Rasmussen: You know we had so after that, it takes some time to get the bruises off and, get back, we have people that were ill and stuff like that, if you work like this.

[00:12:05] Maybe when it happens again, right? Sad to say. We discussed what we're going to do. And we did it in, in, in three levels. Get the basics right. I thought we were in a good shape. We figured out we were not IT wise. So that was the first couple of years we did that. Next level was more into how can we secure next level.

[00:12:45] So the Board of Directors were also very interested in what's going on. Our CIO was presenting for them. And now we are in that good, in a decent place now. So we only present for them once a year now.

[00:13:03] It's about the people we want to take care of you. And even in stress situations, we tell you when to stop. And when we were allowed back again, but that's also I could imagine that working here is a special kind of people how do you find the right, because it's also a market where it's not easy.

[00:13:20] Rasmus Rasmussen: Oh well good question. So now we have you, you are sitting in the outskirts of Copenhagen, right? The young kids, they want to work in city center. That's the way it is. So we have a hard time attracting people, even though it's the most sexy business I've been in technology wise we have a fantastic environment, but it's still hard to attract people.

[00:14:02] So we are building a lot in in, in Szczecin, in Poland and also in Warsaw where we can attract people. But we also did a research on where Should our next hubs be to find the right talent to attract them. So we have maybe 200 people sitting in Szczecin so we are the biggest player in in Szczecin because we have a factory there as well.

[00:14:44] So we have a tech hub in Malaysia as well. But it was not easy to find, figure out where should that be, visiting universities to see where they get, where do they produce enough IT people to, to create a hub there.

[00:15:10] Gert Jan van Halem: But it's also, from a people perspective, Poland's relatively close to Denmark, culturally relatively close. This is other side of the world, other time zone, other culture, other people. How do you bring that Demant's feeling there? How do you make them one team?

[00:15:36] So we are huge in Australia, we are huge in Japan, China, whatever. So the support for that area need, is needed. That's one thing. But it's also to support our global set up, they do that. They can also support in European time zone. But they work mostly in their time zone. To bring the Scandinavian and the Demant culture into a Malaysian office is not easy.[00:16:00]

[00:16:27] Now we moved him to to KL we moved him to Southside, but he also wanted it, right? So he brings his family there and now he is building up the same. So we have both the Poland and the Danish culture in KL to bring some kind of the Scandinavian and the Demant culture in that.

[00:16:43] Rasmus Rasmussen: It is, it is, it's working very well. But it's not easy for us because you are. You are another time zone, you're far away. It costs some mileage in an airplane to get that in control, but yeah.

[00:17:05] Or is it one organisation with everything everywhere?

[00:17:26] Then they have a hub for that. In, in, if you look at my area, we need to support the same globally. We cannot create a division or a setup there with doing service. No, we need to support them 24/ 7. So that's spread. So all the people have a global manager. And they work within network server or HR systems and depends on where they sits in the world.

[00:17:55] Gert Jan van Halem: Yeah. So that, and I, if it's okay, I want to step back a little bit to the research part [00:18:00] and the platforms that you have to support them because I'm not sure, but the research people normally also have their very specific applications and tools that they need to get their stuff done.

[00:18:15] Rasmus Rasmussen: Yeah, yes. Working with R&D can be challenging because they really know what's going on in their area. That's their area. We support them in some of the areas and some areas they do it themselves. You can call us Shadow IT. But it's so close to our products and so close to what we do that if we from IT come and come, all those rules, you can need to do this and that, we will break it.

[00:18:58] How do we, I need this [00:19:00] and that on my Azure yeah, but then you consume so much. Okay, it makes sense then. So the FinOps stuff is very important for Azure. Because if we let it go, it will be extremely expensive. Because nothing wrong with R&D, but they don't think a lot about financial stuff.

[00:19:26] Gert Jan van Halem: Yeah. And then it's bringing together, this is what we need to do from a corporate perspective.

[00:19:33] Rasmus Rasmussen: Yeah, that's the way it works and been working for a lot of years So we are in some areas. We are a startup company That's the way it is. We have that can do attitude. It's very important for us.

[00:19:51] Gert Jan van Halem: Yeah, and you also you don't want to limit R&D people, right? They have to be on top of front of their field.

[00:20:03] But of course you have to be in control. So it's a dialogue.

[00:20:09] Rasmus Rasmussen: No. So we do, we have a strategy, that's a fantastic word. But normally we say cloud first, if it makes sense. And it makes sense. For a lot of those software as a service, we have those Salesforce or all those service now, that's of course, that's native in the cloud that's needed then we have platforms where we have a lot of stuff done on Azure, mostly for our services in R&D that's on Azure.

[00:21:01] And the cost for that is non comparable to what it is if we do it infrastructure in the cloud. We can handle that out much cheaper ourselves, but we look at the workload, what is needed, what is not needed every time. We actually look at some of the platforms now, can we do a mesh for that?

[00:21:32] Gert Jan van Halem: But that also brings the traditional question, is my test environment comparable to my production environment?

[00:21:54] That's something that we are playing around with to, to improve the costs because it is, it can be costly if we [00:22:00] don't monitor it very closely.

[00:22:05] Rasmus Rasmussen: So it's it's based on what is the need. So if it's a web service that supports all our websites or whatever globally, it doesn't make sense to have that in a basement in Denmark or wherever it is.

[00:22:36] But when we peak, maybe we can do that by ourselves. By the more compute power in the cloud. So we can do that mesh as well. So we have our own service. And if we break the level, then we can do some more in the cloud. That's that's what we're working on.

[00:22:59] You [00:23:00] invested in that already to make the hybrid cloud

[00:23:15] It, they will, that's going to work within, A few months, that would be natural for us to do that. And also so talking about Haprikite, it could also be looking at Google or looking at other environments, AWS. Can we move that compute power around? It is not that easy as many years in IT, Gartner back in those days says that's going to be the shit.

[00:23:41] Gert Jan van Halem: Yeah, but it's interesting efficient to say, okay, I want to have that flexibility in my platform. But yeah, the technology I've seen a lot of cases that we tried it with. It's a hard thing to crack.

[00:24:13] And of course, one of some of my friends, they also in IT business, they're mostly like, like use CTOs and they should just go for the cloud. It's simple. Yeah, but you also have to look at the cost, right? But it depends on your situation.

[00:24:30] Where do I use it? And then find the best place that makes a lot of sense.

[00:24:41] Gert Jan van Halem: And then being a deep technical company, there are more deep technical companies that also see hearing aids might be a niche that we want to move in a bit.

[00:25:07] And I thought that might be some kind of a disruption or maybe you are building that disruption yourself already or

[00:25:27] And nothing wrong with Apple and their products and what we call over the counter standard solutions that are you can fit yourself, but we are firm believer of your fitting that is, so you, so we amplify these areas where you need it and don't amplify where you don't need it.

[00:26:01] Gert Jan van Halem: So in that sense, you don't really see this competition or disruption.

[00:26:09] Rasmus Rasmussen: We're not focusing in it, but but we're, of course, we closely monitoring what's going on, of course, but we don't have any products for that for now. So we think that you should see professional services instead of doing yourself.

[00:26:26] Gert Jan van Halem: Yep. Thank you so much Rasmus for your insights. I think my key takeaway is it's a people business. We can talk technology even in a deep technology company like Demant, but still, it's a people business. And it's about how do I work with my people and how do I make my people shine in their environments?

[00:26:58] Part of our IT [00:27:00] strategy, because we are spending so many hours in the office, we need to be fun. And I know when you are. Let's look at football players or soccer players, whatever you call it. Kids playing, if they have fun they're going to be good at that. If they don't have fun, they're going to do something else.

[00:27:24] Gert Jan van Halem: I would say that's the best conclusion ever. Thank you. Thanks for your time. And for all the listeners, thank you for joining us again today and hope to see you or hear you in the next one as well.

[00:27:36] Jingle: Discover other podcasts on devoteam. com slash podcast. Devoteam AI driven tech consulting.