Is your C-Suite helping or hindering your data strategy?

Rob Huffstedtler, Global Head of Solutions Architecture at Sitecore, brings decades of cross-functional experience to this question—and the answer isn’t always obvious. In Episode 11 of Go Beyond the Connection, Rob explains why aligning executive leadership with technical goals is the difference between meaningful innovation and organizational gridlock.

Through compelling stories drawn from his journey in IT, sales enablement, and even competitive chili cookoffs, Rob explores the hidden forces that shape how companies use (or misuse) their data. He argues that data is only valuable when aligned to business outcomes—and that alignment begins with the C-Suite.

“If data clarity and alignment don’t happen at the C-suite level, silos form. Then data becomes a tool to justify decisions, rather than a shared language for making the right ones.”

This episode offers tactical advice for anyone selling into—or advocating within—enterprise organizations. If you're tired of managing by anecdote, struggling with siloed KPIs, or being treated as a cost center, Rob’s insights will help you change the conversation.

🎧 Listen at http://www.gobeyondtheconnection.com

🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-huffstedtler

🌐 Sitecore: https://www.sitecore.com

Rob Huffstedtler Podcast Transcript

[00:00:22] Steve MacDonald: I'm gonna have you talk a little bit about your background here, but it gives you a magnificent view of the industry and the topic that we're gonna talk about today, which is the pros and cons of C-Suite involvement on data and network architecture—what we're doing and why that's important.

[00:00:56] Steve MacDonald: You're a dog owner. Interestingly enough, it aligns with my background—you were a music major who briefly started in the music industry. I always like to know a little bit more about the folks we're talking with here, but I would like to take off on that and explain more about your background before we get started.

[00:01:31] Rob Huffstedtler: Transitioned from that into more of the artist management, publicity-type stuff. But this was when the whole industry shifted towards Napster, and record labels were starting to see the pressure there. So, I decided this wasn't where I wanted to go from a career standpoint.

[00:02:15] Rob Huffstedtler: Now, moving to the vendor side. I came to Sitecore to do partner management. Then, I moved into helping the revenue side of things, which is now—I connect a lot of the dots on the revenue side of things so that we can have a clear view of what's going on and make the day-to-day work of the folks who are selling a lot easier which is also time for the obligatory safe harbor statement: All of my opinions are my own. They may or may not reflect my employer's point of view. Anything I say that sounds smart, I've probably inadvertently stolen it from someone else. Anything I say that sounds dumb, I will take full responsibility for myself.

[00:02:49] Rob Huffstedtler: And pretty routinely place second or third. I've not taken one yet, but my two big tips—three big tips. The first one is super important to some of the stuff we'll discuss later: Know your audience. To the degree that you can guess whether they're bean people or no-bean people. High spice, low spice.

Third one: you can use some dried chili powder, but your base needs to be chili paste from your own set of peppers. I use a mix of guajillos, pasillos, and anchos. So try those if you don't improve your standing in the next one.

[00:04:04] Steve MacDonald: I'd love to take a step back and just—why data matters, as the predecessor to that question.

[00:04:25] Rob Huffstedtler: What matters is what we're trying to accomplish, right? Every bit of data we have is an enabler of making a decision—delivering something—to deliver ultimately to a customer who values it in some way. A lot of data management has gone off the rails on trying to be very purist about how the data's organized and all that, without thinking about how this data is going to be used in a process that drives that the only way you get there is through C-Suite involvement.

[00:05:30] Steve MacDonald: What's interesting about that—kind of what I'm taking away from that too—is you used the word "siloed," right? And data lives all over the place, right? This is why we look really heavily at things like edge computing. We're in multi-distributed locations throughout the country—the world sometimes—and so access to that data is a big deal.

[00:06:14] Steve MacDonald: What are some of the challenges that you've seen with the C-Suite? You work with a lot of organizations outside of just Sitecore. What are some of the biggest challenges to the C-Suite in putting together a network infrastructure and data organization like you just described?

[00:06:53] Rob Huffstedtler: So I think that it's not to start with asking the question again of, "What are we trying to do here?" And silos are not necessarily bad.

[00:07:14] Steve MacDonald: If the C-suite doesn't grasp the importance of data and the network and the connectivity, then what are the downsides, right? What happens as a result?

[00:08:12] Steve MacDonald: So here's an interesting take on all of this—because you're now, in a big way, in the sales enablement and revenue function inside of the company, and you're selling solutions in this space all the time. When you are selling in, if the company you are selling into doesn't have that kind of C-suite visibility and vision, how much more difficult is that sell? Because there's no overarching understanding of the importance to the company itself.

[00:09:26] Rob Huffstedtler: As a selling professional, what you want to be able to show is that when somebody purchases from you, it's going to drive results for overall business—which, at a personal level, is going to increase their stats or influence within the industry, increase the revenues, and so on.

[00:09:58] Rob Huffstedtler: It's returning to the data thing. The only way you can show that is if they can give you some of the data necessary to build a value.

[00:10:40] Steve MacDonald: Because in a lot of ways, the technology units can be looked upon as a support function inside of the organization—where you and I both know it's absolutely one of the most critical drivers for delivering overall success, not only revenue success, but from the customer experience side, internal enablement, decision-making, and coordination between departments.

[00:11:15] Rob Huffstedtler: I hear an invitation to get up on my soapbox. Now, I have a strong opinion about this that I work into almost every conversation in my life, which is to learn the language of the people you're talking to.

[00:11:55] Rob Huffstedtler: —the data management side of the world, it's going to be how many terabytes of data we have and what our velocity of getting data in and out is all that. When you're talking to a CFO, he doesn't care—or she. What they care about is essentially four things.

[00:12:41] Rob Huffstedtler: —here's how we're going to be able to tell an incredible story for our shareholders of how we've created value for the business. I see many functional leaders in various areas who feel it's other functions' responsibility to learn their language. You could debate that all day long. The reality is—it's not going to happen. So you better learn their language. And the one language that's common across every function is accounting.

[00:13:29] Steve MacDonald: Those are your external customers, but you've got internal customers. And as much as we think about—this is what I'm taking away from what you said there—we have to innately understand our external customers to serve them, as well as their challenges, their language, and how they think about things. What you're saying is we need to do that internally—our customers internally are the decision-makers that we have to influence for them to make the decisions that allow us to do what we know we want to do and can do. We've gotta understand them the same kind of way.

[00:14:21] Rob Huffstedtler: The other thing I don't like about it is our external customers have a lot more choice than internal customers do. They can refuse to buy from a different vendor.

[00:14:49] Steve MacDonald: But your point, though, is well taken, which is just—we have to understand what's important to them. We have to understand how they're making their decisions. And a lot of times, we have to think as businesspeople instead of technologists. And that's a big transition.

[00:15:45] Rob Huffstedtler: You're reminding me of a conversation I had 20 years ago, maybe 25 years ago, when I was very early in my career, and I was working as a—I think at the time I was a project manager inside a teleradiology company. And one of my responsibilities was our PACS system, which is PIP—archival communication system. It's basically content management for medical images.

[00:16:38] Rob Huffstedtler: If people only notice your function when it's perceived as not delivering, that's going to be a huge barrier to getting investment, to advancing your career, and so on. I think we've got to start treating availability as table stakes. And observability—I think we might talk about that a little bit later.

[00:17:06] Rob Huffstedtler: Those are—we shouldn't even have to discuss those because we should be doing those so well that they're not top of mind. From that, regardless of function, I'm starting to think about how I will connect to what the company as a whole is trying to do?

[00:17:55] Steve MacDonald: If we can move beyond—there's a lot of departments within an organization that feel like, "I'm just a big cost center, and that's the way that I'm viewed here." And I think you're helping to unravel that today. And I wanna get to what you were just talking about too, so let's do that now. The idea—the difference between availability and—did you say accessibility or observability? Tell us what you're thinking there.

[00:18:39] Rob Huffstedtler: Sometimes, whether you're working with hardware, people, or money, or whatever it is—you can't make a decision of any quality without knowing what's going on. And in the absence of good telemetry, for lack of a better word—let's use networking terms here—in the absence of your systems or your people giving you this constant feed of information about their state.

[00:19:42] Steve MacDonald: So what I'm taking away from that is that—you tell me, what's our takeaway from that? What should we be learning from what you just said?

[00:20:01] Rob Huffstedtler: get out your pen. Think about the last three or four decisions you made, and look at how you got to the point of making that decision. What were the facts—whether they were facts or not—on the ground that made you say, "I need to decide this," and what were the data points you used to decide your options? And see how many of those are driven by any sort of data versus anecdote.

[00:20:56] Steve MacDonald: There is a big trend that's—that is well documented, written about—the wireless-first trend in network infrastructure. I just wanted to get your opinion on what you think of the wireless-first. We're already there, right? We're already connecting to every wireless connection we can, and satellite connections, and different things like that.

[00:21:25] Rob Huffstedtler: I think the advantages of it—the mobile revolution has been a huge part of this, right? There were use cases that you can't do in a hardwired environment because you need the mobility of some resources, and you have things where you would want to gather data—either sensors or actuators—either want to gather the data or you want to do something in the real world that aren't in convenient places to run whatever we're running today.

[00:22:32] Steve MacDonald: And how does this tie into the big trend in edge computing and pushing out all the benefits of edge computing with a wireless-first network?

[00:22:49] Steve MacDonald: Here's what—I guess one of the final questions here could be that in a wireless-first world, there's also not an option these days to wait for that—the next mile of fiber to be laid. We're constantly—especially with the trends that are going on in the industry, like with dispersed workforces and dispersed client bases and things—it's not an option anymore.

[00:23:31] Rob Huffstedtler: Yeah, I would think that wireless-first—like, I would definitely invert it from where we were 20 years ago. Like, wireless was still beginning to penetrate. There were concerns about security, there were concerns about bandwidth, concerns about manageability, all of that. All of those have more or less been solved, except for absolute extreme high-throughput use cases. Whereas the time to get something stood up—

[00:24:20] Rob Huffstedtler: But they did some natural disaster support stuff too. And in that environment, you need something built now and got no infrastructure on which to build it. Why wouldn't you go wireless-first? Start with what's gonna work and push it to the limits. Before I would question what the use cases are—outside of high-performance computing in a data center—where wireless networking doesn't give you anything you need and is no longer the constraint on performance.

[00:25:15] Steve MacDonald: This isn't something that I should still be considering. The whole world is already headed this way. But I have one last question for you, 'cause we've talked about a lot here—from chili kickoffs all the way to wireless-first. If there was one thing that you wanted the audience to take away from our conversation today, what would that be?

[00:25:44] Steve MacDonald: I love it. I have people that go on for five minutes and give me about ten things. That was great. I love it.

[00:25:53] Steve MacDonald: I did. Most people don't listen to that question. Here's what I know is gonna happen:

[00:26:04] Rob Huffstedtler: Yeah. That's the best way to get me. It's also where I post most of my thinking pieces. I've got a blog, but it's linked to from—LinkedIn's really my starting point.

[00:26:29] Steve MacDonald: We know we are the wave of success for the business, and so thanks for helping to create not a dotted line, but a direct line on that today. I really appreciate it.