IBM'S IT Modernization with Fletcher Previn, CIO at IBM

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Fletcher, the CIO at IBM, and we discuss how to progress your career, what IT modernization looks like in the government sector, and how to balance the long-term effects of working remote. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:33) So when you were on The Late Show, when you did the internship with David Letterman, did you guys ever have any days where you had complete technical disasters?

(Fletcher Previn at 00:00:42) I'm trying to think if there were any big technical disasters. I worked as an intern at both the Conan O'Brien show and the David Letterman show, and they were very different experiences because at the Letterman show, you're in the Ed Sullivan Theater. So everyone in that building is just there for the Letterman show, and that creates a certain kind of energy. And then at Conan, you're in 30 Rockefeller Center, and it's like you're an employee of GE, and there's shared resources between Dateline and Good Morning America and all these other shows, and you really felt more like you were working in a large corporation.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:01:17) But I don't think there were any big technical disasters, although there was a fire where the fire department came in, and they had some kind of really elaborate liquid nitrogen-fueled air conditioning system because Dave liked to have the ambient temperature of the auditorium at like 39 degrees or something much lower than a regular air conditioner could get it. Because once you get hundreds of people in there, that makes the temperature go up anyway. But then just the feeling is the comedy's fresher if it's cold. And so there was all this concern about a potential explosion, but it didn't happen.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:56) Well, that's interesting. Why did you decide to do those types of internships? How did they come up?

(Fletcher Previn at 00:02:01) Yeah, well, you know, entertainment's kind of more the family business. Both my parents—my dad was a musician and my mom's an actress—and my grandfather was a director. And so, you know, there was a period of time where I thought I might go into entertainment in some capacity. But I always had this strong kind of technology thread, and I remember getting, you know, I think the Commodore 64 was my first computer and then saving up and building my own x86 white box and then getting a Mac in 1984.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:02:31) And even when I was at the Letterman show and I worked as a production assistant on some movies and things as well, I remember, you know, being really interested in the technology they had, the phone system. They had an early—it's called, I think, Elvis, the Electronic Linear Video Information System. And it was this huge room with a tape robot that would spin around in a circle like in a science fiction movie. And just being so interested in that. And then when I was in college, because it was the people I was friends with and it was just fun to hang out, I got a job working at the help desk and then what we called the Advanced Technology Lab.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:03:07) But I just loved being around people that were working on kind of, you know, IT-type issues and enjoyed it. And at some point, I came to the conclusion I should really stop fighting this and just accept it. This is what I love to do. And I remember, you know, I graduated in 2000, and so it was right kind of at the crest of the dot-com boom.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:03:31) And I went to a small liberal arts college, which I loved, but placing people in technology companies was not their thing. I remember going to the office of career services and they were like, "What do you want to do when you graduate?" And I said, "I think I really want to work in tech." And they were like, "Oh, that's going to be tough." So I knew it was kind of going to be on me.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:03:49) And so in spring break of my graduating year, I flew out to Silicon Valley and, you know, it was kind of early days of things. And I went to a Kinko's and bought a San Jose Mercury News and started looking for job postings and trying to get a job lined up for July after I graduate. And I ended up getting a job offer at a company called bigvine.com, like Big Vine. And, you know, at the time, it seemed like a good idea. It was a B2B model.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:04:23) And the idea was if I'm Hertz and you're Hilton and I've got unused cars and you've got unused rooms, we'll agree to make a swap. And, hey, it had the right keywords around it. It was B2B and, you know, they had a big shiny office. So I graduate from school. I get in the car with my then-girlfriend, now wife, and we're in my Volkswagen Golf, and we get as far as Utah with all my belongings in the car.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:04:50) And I get this call that says, "Hey, I'm really sorry to do this, but we have to rescind our offer. You know, the bubble's kind of bursting. And believe us, it's better now than later that we do this." And I thought, you know, it's easy for you to say. I'm in Utah. But we ended up deciding to just continue driving out to the West Coast and did the same thing, applied to jobs, and, you know, my wife got a job and I got a job. And that's really how I got kind of started in the tech field.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:24) Is that when you started working at IBM?

(Fletcher Previn at 00:05:27) No. So I was out on the West Coast, and I was at a company that was a spin-off of Intel. They did material science and semiconductor analysis and things. It's not what I did. I was doing kind of very basic IT help desk for them.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:05:44) And about a year into that job, I got a call from a friend of mine who I'd gone to college with who said, "Hey, I'm a systems administrator at this company that was called homewarehouse.com, and we just got acquired by Walmart." And it turned out that Walmart had decided that the best way for them to have an e-commerce site was to acquire the technology and the talent on the West Coast. And they bought homewarehouse.com and the shopping cart and all the people. And he said, "And so they're looking for a Windows administrator."

(Fletcher Previn at 00:06:16) And I didn't really know anything about Walmart at the time. And so I called a friend of mine on the East Coast and said, "Hey, you know, a friend of mine called me about this potential opportunity at Walmart. What do you think?" And he said, "Hey, regardless, you know, Walmart's a fantastically run company, and you will learn a ton. I would grab onto that job with both hands." And so I went and I interviewed and ultimately got hired, and I came in there as a systems administrator. While I was there, I ended up getting Microsoft MCSE certified and Cisco certified and became engineering manager and was really enjoying working there. You know, I just—it was like being in an IT boot camp.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:06:59) And my friend was right. You know, Walmart is a technology company masquerading as a retailer. And the basics of excellent change control and IT discipline and how you really run things at scale—getting an appreciation for those things, it was a great place to work. And I was very happy there. But my father lives in New York, or lived in New York, and he started getting ill, and I really needed to be back on the East Coast to help care for him.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:07:27) And so that's what led me to look for opportunities on the East Coast, and ultimately I came to IBM.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:34) Nice. And then you've worked your way up. You didn't just start as the, you know, the head of IBM's technology. You worked your way all the way up. Tell me about that.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:07:43) I did. I started as an IT architect working on ibm.com. And I think probably, you know, they saw walmart.com and figured ibm.com. And then I had been at IBM working in the .com division for a little bit of time. And then, you know, as you do when you've been somewhere for a few years, kind of had some soul-searching about what am I looking to get out of this job, and had a conversation with my manager that I was considering maybe taking a role in the public sector working for the government.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:08:17) And in the end, I decided not to take that job. But mentally, I thought, what I'm going to do is I'm going to stay at IBM, but I'm going to really commit to my job with the same level of intensity as if I had taken that job. And I'm just going to be in it like 120% and see what happens. And that's really when things started moving fairly quickly for me at IBM, and I ended up getting an opportunity to be the chief of staff or the executive assistant, we call it, to the then-CIO. And learned a ton.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:08:51) And then about a year later, she promoted me into a director role, mostly employee kind of productivity space, which was the area that I had asked to lead. And then the next CIO promoted me again, and then again after that. And then when he left, again, to my great honor and surprise, offered me the role of being the CIO for IBM. And at IBM, it's a very centralized global IT function. So, you know, we don't have kind of business unit CIOs or geography CIOs.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:09:26) There's one IT department and one CIO for the whole company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:30) Now when you first started—something stood out to me there that I want to talk about. So when you first started to try, like you said you're going to work this job with the energy that you had taken the other job—did that create a shift, a ripple that went throughout your whole career? Was that a big moment of transition for you?

(Fletcher Previn at 00:09:51) Well, I think, you know, I've sort of come to reflect on that moment as it is really healthy every two or three years to just really recommit to either the job you have or go get the job that you want to have. And yeah, I mean, I think it was a helpful lesson that, you know, we all kind of own our destiny to some degree. And I think it was an interesting experiment, and there was shared accountability on both sides. And IBM responded when I dialed it up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:26) Yeah. You get what you put into it, right?

(Fletcher Previn at 00:10:30) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:31) So you mentioned that you were interested in the public sector. You talked about this is a public sector job. I saw you had some education—it was like some political science education. And I was curious, what got you interested in the government sector at all?

(Fletcher Previn at 00:10:47) Well, you know, I'm a citizen and I'm an American, and I think public service is noble, and I always really enjoy the opportunity to spend time with people who are passionate about what they do. And I think for the most part, the people that I've interacted with in the U.S. federal space are by and large very smart, high-integrity, hardworking people who could be making a lot more money in the private sector but choose to do this because they believe in their mission. And that's attractive. I feel like I'm very mission-driven.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:24) And so you wrote this article about government IT transformation. And I was just curious—I'm stumbling around a little bit because I read the whole thing like six times.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:11:35) And I

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:35) was like, what's the best questions to ask from this? And the only experience I've had recently is when COVID happened, our state's infrastructure crashed for the unemployment. And I happen to know some of the technology leaders and political leaders at the state level. So I called them up and I'm like, "Guys, what is actually happening? Scale the servers up." And they're like, "Joel, this is written on like 1980 stuff, okay? And it's very, very difficult to scale, and we're just trying to—it's a huge engineering challenge, and we're just trying to figure this out." And I was like, "Oh, wow. Our systems today that are processing were written fifteen, twenty years ago."

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:13) They're old systems just being maintained. And so that's completely fine as long as everything, you know, stays status quo. But when we surge or double or triple traffic for an international emergency, they just go down. And so I was just curious what your experience has been like through this, you know, COVID pandemic, because you have so much experience in the government sector. It looks like you work with different governments around the world.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:12:40) Yeah. Well, and I think what you're highlighting is sort of the same conclusion that all IT organizations are coming to, which is these modernization efforts were important before, but they're really critical now. And to some degree, the main sort of impact of COVID is not so much that it's dramatically altered the strategy or the trajectory that we were on. It's that it's accelerated everything. So it's almost like our whole lives are on fast forward.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:13:09) And, you know, you've got to kind of take ten years of work and get it done in ten months or ten weeks. And so there is a whole separate discussion around, you know, IT modernization for governments, which I think is incredibly important, and a lot of great work being done there around hybrid cloud and 5G and network modernization and AI and otherwise. With respect to COVID-19, I think we've kind of experienced that in three waves, and they were technology, cybersecurity, and culture. I remember being at work in late February watching video clips of what was happening in Wuhan and saying, you know, we're in the business of running mission-critical workloads, really things that just cannot fail for critical infrastructure or high-consequence mission sets. And so we're always modeling out, what do we do if there's an earthquake or a data center disappears into the earth or an ocean or in a fire or geopolitical instability?

(Fletcher Previn at 00:14:13) But we don't typically scenario out, what do we do if the whole planet has a problem? And we started to have some conversations around, you know, what would we do? Are we prepared for a scenario where all 350,000 employees here would have to work remotely or almost all? And that drove a sense of urgency and a different set of actions around modernizing our remote access and our endpoint strategy and our VPN. And there was a lot of kind of, you know, getting hands and feet into data centers and VPN appliances racked quickly and circuits spun up.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:14:53) And do we have enough remote access capabilities? And then once we kind of got past that hurdle of, let's say, in our case, ramping—by the way, prior to this, about only 22% or so of IBMers were working remotely. Mostly people were in the office. So once we got, you know, 3x our remote access capacity, very quickly after that, the conversation became, well, now we've extended our attack surface to everyone's homes. And so you've got people doing school at home, playing with iPads, playing with video game systems.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:15:25) And so what do we need to do to secure our perimeter when that's now an even more porous kind of thing? And that drove some leveling up of our endpoint cyber capabilities. And then once we got comfortable that, you know, we've now got split tunnel VPN, and we don't need to backhaul all of the traffic into IBM to be able to inspect it, and we have a good awareness of what people are up to and have pursued zero trust for things where you don't even really need the VPN for a lot of activities because we're authenticating who you are, where you are, what device you're on, what the status of that device is, and what activity you're trying to do, and is that out of profile for someone in your job? Then we get into this—what is the longer-term consequence of working in this way for an enduring period of time, and how do we maintain our sense of purpose, our sense of togetherness as a community, our relationships with each other? You know, in the beginning, it all kind of works quite well just organically because we already know each other.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:16:27) It's like your relatives. You don't stop being close to your parents just because you don't live at home anymore. But as new people come into the organization, you know, what role can technology play to create these kind of more meaningful relationships with each other? And I sometimes talk about it as a relationship bank where, you know, if you and I are in the office together and I stop by and ask how things are going and maybe we go to lunch together, those are deposits in our relationship bank. When I'm asking you of things in a work capacity, those are withdrawals.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:16:57) And so if all we have are scheduled thirty-minute meetings and I'm just making withdrawals all the time, we're in a relationship deficit. We don't really have a personal friendship. And so how can we kind of simulate those moments when we're working in this different way is part of, I think, what we're all working through right now. And we've gone through this kind of incredible stress test of our IT systems and of our business continuity, and it's held up incredibly well. We've continued to be able to serve our clients, and we continue to operate as a company successfully.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:17:30) And actually, our employee engagement numbers are very positive. But it has required really putting our shoulder into it. It's not gonna go back to exactly the same way as it was before. This is a modified way of working and it requires a slightly different approach.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:47) Yeah. Because you're a global company, right?

(Fletcher Previn at 00:17:50) We are a global company. Yeah. We have a worldwide footprint. As I said, hundreds of thousands of employees all over the world and thousands of offices, and now a large number of them working remotely as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:02) So when you needed all those computers, did you just call up Bezos and be like, hey, I need a big shipment?

(Fletcher Previn at 00:18:09) Well, luckily, IBM has a commercial procurement arm and established relationships with a lot of providers and supply chain, and we were able to get everybody the equipment that we needed and help clients of IBM do the same.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:24) Now while we were going through this, like, us as a company, we were going through a security review, like, getting into a larger company. And so COVID and everything slowed that down a lot. It was already a long process. But I was talking with Mike from SecurityScorecard, and they're a security company. They do this thing where they assign a security number, like a credit score. I don't know if you've seen this, but when I saw it, I thought it was like the future because it allowed you as a business or an organization to have this security rating and all your information saved so that when you get new customers, they can pull all that existing information and questionnaires and everything like that. And one of the community questions we got from our Elevate community is how you handle, like, being such a big company, you being at the top. Like, how do you think about the security of third-party vendors?

(Fletcher Previn at 00:19:13) Yeah. It's an excellent question, and that gets really to the heart of the issue, the flow of data and what's happening. And directionally, the trend line continues of advantage going to bad guys, not good guys. And we've all read in the news this week some fairly significant attacks that have been underway. And so this really consumes a lot of my time. And you can imagine the kind of clients that IBM has and the kinds of data that we're stewards of and the kind of missions that we're helping our clients execute. We spend a lot of time worrying about our data, but even more worrying about client data. And so this really becomes an exercise in making sure that we understand our global networks and the systems that underlie those networks better than the adversaries that are trying to break into them. And that's a moving goalpost. It's a 24 by 7 challenge.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:20:09) We only have to let our guard down once. It's called an APT, an advanced persistent threat, for a reason. That two minutes that you turn off a firewall to debug something and let your guard down for even a minute, and that can be a problem. And so this is something that we are really focused on and tremendously vigilant about. I think your point about scorecards is a good one because what you measure is what improves and sort of sets the priorities for the organization about how success is rewarded and measured. And so as we've embraced agile ways of working and more recently augmented by objectives and key results, we have a whole bunch of OKRs around security and compliance and our regulatory obligations and penetration testing and insider threat and all of that. And even just the more pedestrian low-hanging fruit. You would not think in 2020 we would be talking about patch management and cyber hygiene. But probably the number one thing I could do to help keep IBM safe is take advantage of software improvements by way of updates and make sure that those are getting out there. It doesn't sound complicated, but at our scale with thousands of servers, it can be.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:19) One of our community questions was from Phil, and this is I think it's a fantastic one because he wants to know, how do you have a, like, what is your system? How do you choose what you focus on?

(Fletcher Previn at 00:21:32) I wish I could say it's some sort of a trick or a skill that I picked up somewhere. I think the honest answer to that is that I just love what I do. It's endlessly interesting to me. And so my hobby is my work. My work is my hobby. If I'm not during the work week for IBM, I'm doing very similar IBM-type activities or IT activities at home and building out a lab and reading and learning new things. And so it's the whole, maybe it's the whole sort of ten thousand hours of mastery of something discussion. I think if you love what you do, you'll likely be good at it because you'll, and I'm not saying I'm good at it, but I think, you know, it's not forced. It's not a chore. It's what I enjoy.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:22:20) And so getting into the details and knowing how it all works and discovering where other companies that I admire are headed and how they're solving problems and making sure we're open to always learning new things is what makes the job endlessly fun and challenging and rewarding. And I think if you could ever be on top of everything, it wouldn't be as rewarding a job. There is no way that I will ever be able to know everything in this field, but I'm always trying.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:51) It sounds like ten thousand hours plus kid in a candy shop because people ask me about the podcast, like, how do you do it?

(Fletcher Previn at 00:22:57) How do you do it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:58) How do you do so many of it? I was like, it's the best thing in the world is how I do it. I wake up every day and I get excited and pumped up to get to talk to these amazing people about technology and I love hearing, you know, if I wasn't doing this, if I was still developing like I've been doing for the past seventeen years, I'd just be doing different projects in different industries from real estate to law because I like the variety and learning and solving new problems. I just, I'm a really like ON-type of person.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:23:24) Yeah. And as a result of that, you're great at what you do and it's always new, it's always changing, it's always evolving, and I think IT is very similar. And I think especially if you love IT, you're in an opportunity to be part of the group that is helping define what our future world looks like. And that is a really exciting thing to be a part of. We're not passengers.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:23:48) We're all kind of to some degree in the driver's seat as the designers of these systems and these experiences and how governments will serve their citizens and how people will consume services and content and how we will operate as a society and get health care and all these other kind of big issues. There is no area of our life that is not really heavily touched by technology today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:12) Yeah. In your article, you mentioned this concept of like a common ID. So you'd be able to go into, like, you know, renew your driver's license or your social security or all of these different government services using a common login ID. Now I don't have that in my city, state, whatever, as far as I'm concerned or as far as I know. Have you seen other countries do this? Is this something that's happening?

(Fletcher Previn at 00:24:36) Yeah. There are examples of other countries doing this for various citizen services, elections, entitlements, benefits. And to some degree, we have that in our personal lives today. I think directionally, it is gonna be where governments head. If you can have a secure digital identity, it's just a much more efficient way to deliver functions out to your population. And I think there's a lot of benefit in terms of democratizing access to the government services.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:05) And then with, I'm gonna change directions here.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:25:08) Sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:08) So you mentioned earlier that, you know, there's not a bunch of different business units with different CIOs, things like that. And so I'm curious, like, what are your direct reports like? Like, are they, how does that work?

(Fletcher Previn at 00:25:22) Yeah. So the way that we've kind of carved up the IT pie, if you will, and, you know, I should say, in my case, two-thirds of almost everything I do in the IT department is really for the benefit of other business units in IBM, and about one-third is sort of core IT because we've centralized all of the IT. So we have things like finance systems, manufacturing, supply chain, logistics, and all of those, we're kind of running all of those systems. But we've got the sales and marketing systems under one of my direct reports, the finance and supply chain systems under another one. I do have a person obviously responsible for assured identity and cybersecurity operations, another person responsible for network engineering, another person responsible for a lot of our SAP estate, kind of the ERP and the quote-to-cash stack, as well as a person responsible for all of the employee endpoints, you know, your phone, your tablet, your laptop, and the productivity software that's on there.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:26:31) I have a developer team that builds mobile apps for internal use within the company, but also our corporate intranet. I have an infrastructure person who does our hybrid cloud, our Red Hat OpenShift stack, our data center operations. And then one of the first changes that I made when I became CIO was creating a new function reporting to me of a person responsible for user experience and design. And if you were to ask me sort of what's the thirty-second or what's the five-second version of what's your approach to how you think about delivering IT to the company, it's to lead with the user experience and design and engineer from the user in instead of the IT department out. And so we've really baked that into our interpretation of agile.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:27:18) How we approach problem-solving is very sort of design-thinking-led and data-driven, and that our definition of an agile squad includes a design component. And design to include things like editorial content, information architecture, yes, visual design, but user research and all of the things that sort of go into an experience, if you will. And so anything that we build, whether it's a mobile app or a web app or an email that goes out to a lot of people or a sign that we hang on an elevator, if a lot of people are gonna see something, we make sure it goes through that team so that it comes out the other end looking like something from your consumer life that is intuitive and well-designed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:02) Yes. Thank you. Okay. I'm excited. I'm a big design geek. So when things look good, it actually affects and impacts your mood. Like, I can open up a website and feel like relaxing. I'm like, oh, this is beautiful.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:28:18) Right? Yes. And it's interesting, sort of what things look like is more than just the visual aesthetic. It's the overall experience. And so I think that's been an important component of this user experience team. The visuals are certainly an important component, but it's all the other kind of disciplines that come together to create an experience, including that the words make sense.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:28:44) You know, the, and having some discipline around how we communicate with the rest of the company, and that emails don't come from us that look like router command line output, but that, you know, make some sense. Why am I receiving this? And some, you know, earlier on, there were good conversations about it doesn't take anything away from the team that did this complicated thing. But do people really need to know about this? Are they gonna care about it? You know? And sometimes less is more. And do we really, you know, is there some action required, or is this just us letting everybody know we did this complicated thing? And so getting that kind of muscle built around, let's have fewer communications and have them be really good when we need to send them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:28) Oh, I love it. I love it. And when you do like large, like, future projects or just normal-size future projects, like investing in quantum computing or something of that nature. How does, do you get directly involved with that? Is there an area of the company that like handles that and pitches projects? How does that work?

(Fletcher Previn at 00:29:46) Well, there is an entire research arm of IBM that, you know, is always out at the bleeding edge of, you know, what's gonna be next, whether it's AI or quantum computing or blockchain or hybrid cloud technology or otherwise. And so, you know, I'm lucky in that regard because when we have some problem that there's no, excuse me, when we have an issue or a problem that we're trying to solve from an IT perspective and there doesn't appear to be any commercial solution to that, I can go and engage with IBM researchers and say, here's what we're trying to do. Can you help us figure out a way to solve that problem? And sometimes that ends up becoming a commercial product that IBM sells.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:30:33) And then sometimes it goes the other way, like, you know, hey, we've invented a quantum computer. Are there problems that a traditional computer would take ten thousand years to solve that would be interesting to work on together? And so that's an ongoing dynamic of our IT department, and it happens all the time. You know, we wanna do this in the Wi-Fi space or in the 5G space or in the AIOps IT realm, or we wanna do this experiment with lattice cryptography or quantum-proof cryptography and so on, and I'll work in partnership with IBM Research on that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:11) What are you really excited about today that's geeky? Like, do you have a research project you can talk about that you're excited about or just a general area?

(Fletcher Previn at 00:31:20) I think in terms of general areas, you know, AI is very top of mind for both the opportunities and the challenges that it will bring to our world. You know, things like AIOps are really interesting for me in my IT role. Can we develop systems that have an awareness of what's going on in the environment and automatically take corrective action and have human decision-makers in the mix, but overtake a lot of the sort of grind of IT operations and automate that stuff? That stuff's really kind of interesting for us. And actually, an example of where we've really deployed that or kind of a straightforward IT example is we used to replace everybody's laptop every four years or three years depending what kind of job you did.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:32:07) And there's a lot of people for whom getting an email that it's time for a new laptop is not a positive development in their life. It's always exciting for me because when I get a new laptop, it's like a birthday present. But that's not always the case for people in other job roles, and to them, the device they have, they feel is working fine, and this is just a disruption. And so moving from age-based replacement of devices to building out these AI predictors of failure and understanding, taking telemetry off those endpoints and knowing what the performance of that device is, and is it exhibiting any early signs of imminent failure? And if it's not and it's performing well, we'll just leave it be until we think there's gonna be a problem or the person reaches out to us.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:32:53) And what that allows me to do is kind of come out and say our policy is actually that you can get a new laptop or a new device whenever you want. Because statistically speaking, that's a small percentage of people. But it tends to be the people for whom there's the biggest benefit, like engineers and software developers and people who really kind of want the latest and greatest laptop. And then in the cyber space, you know, AI and then eventually, especially AI and quantum, is gonna create a whole new category of cyber threat. And, you know, if you can take some sort of a vulnerability and iterate on it thousands of times a second and use AI on that problem, the only thing that will combat AI is more AI.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:33:34) And so it's gonna totally change the cyber landscape in a very significant way. I think 5G will be really interesting for what we're able to do at the edge in terms of edge computing and low latency and increased bandwidth and better security, and that'll open up a whole new category of things we can do that'll be really interesting. Hybrid cloud is more sort of here, not more, you know, more than some of the longer term quantum things. That's something we're really on this year, and it's been really helpful even in COVID, where we've moved things from traditional data center environments to our platforms powered by Red Hat, managed in OpenShift. We get huge efficiency from that being able to swing workloads from public, private, or hybrid cloud environments with no downtime, handle patching differently, automate a lot of things, get a lot of operational and cyber efficiencies.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:34:28) That's an interesting space for me. I think, selfishly, you know, personal interest is autonomous driving. I bought a car with autopilot for that reason, and I'm sort of of the opinion that within our lives, I bet it will be illegal to drive manually in certain places. You know, if you sort of think about having a conversation with somebody twenty, thirty, forty years from now where you go, "You know, we used to get in a 5,000 pound steel box and drive 70 miles an hour down a road," and the human body is sort of engineered to go like five to 10 miles an hour. And on an annual basis, fifty thousand of us would just die doing this.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:35:09) And it sounds like a crazy activity to be doing, and that something like 90 some odd percent of cars are not in use at any given time. It's very inefficient. So I think that's gonna be a really interesting opportunity if you can just summon a transport pod to take you somewhere and be able to be productive while that's happening. That's kind of exciting, I think.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:31) We're there. I mean, the technology is right at the doorstep. In some countries, they're already doing it. I saw a map the other day of where there's autonomous vehicle access in the United States. It was far larger than I thought.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:45) They have many cities. I think it was over like fifteen, twenty cities where there's active autonomous testing going on.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:35:52) I think it's gonna be hugely beneficial for society for elderly people, you know, for people that are just learning how to drive. You know, driving is kind of a big issue for certain parts of your life or if you live in certain locations. And if you can go to the doctor without having to be able to drive yourself there and get access to services, and maybe you don't have to live in a city just because of other things. And I think it could be a real game changer for society.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:23) Yeah. No. A lot is changing. And I was curious to know about Red Hat, right? So I got to talk with Chris Wright over there and they seem like they had a really great culture.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:35) And then you were talking a little bit about culture earlier and I was just curious, were you part of that merger or purchase?

(Fletcher Previn at 00:36:43) Well, I was a part of it in the sense that, you know, I'm the IT department of IBM and, but they're, you know, they're a separate company. They're part of IBM, but they have their own IT department and their own identity. And but, you know, I know all of the people over there very well, and the CIO over there and I talk regularly and exchange ideas and work together on things. And so I think we're getting the best of each other. There are things that IBM does really well at scale that we can provide to Red Hat that's useful, and then there are things that Red Hat does that I'm already taking advantage of and getting a lot of benefit out of.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:37:21) So but yes. I mean, I was certainly involved in the process.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:28) Yeah. I mean, they're a great company, and I really enjoyed getting to meet Chris. And so what's the culture like? How would you describe the culture on your team?

(Fletcher Previn at 00:37:38) Well, I think it's something that I've spent a lot of time deliberately working on, and it's first and foremost, I'm looking for people who are kind, passionate about what they do for a living, and believe in our purpose as a company. And if we can surround ourselves with those kinds of teammates, we'll be successful in whatever problem of the day we happen to be working on. You know, that'll always be changing, but our culture is kind of the only unique thing that you have. And if you sort of think about over time, people steal your technology or they try to, it's just kind of what happens. But it's pretty difficult to steal somebody's technology.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:38:15) Excuse me. It's pretty difficult to steal someone's culture. Right? And so we spend a lot of time thinking about IT as a driver of culture change. And this idea that the state of IT or the quality of IT is a daily reflection of what the company thinks and feels about its people.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:38:37) And so if we really believe that to be true, then how well we're doing our jobs is not trivial. It's actually really core to creating a high performance culture and attracting the kinds of people that we want to work with. In our space, I think our culture is, first and foremost, treating each other respectfully, where it's a safe place where people can give each other constructive, respectful feedback, and that we've worked hard to delayer the organization, embrace agile ways of working, take hierarchy out of our way of working, and really be focused on sometimes not even knowing who reports to whom, but teams that have come together to solve a technical challenge. And I think we've made great progress on that. And it's interesting when you can do that, if you have people that you can really trust in the role, then you get speed because you don't have all this checking up and down the line all the time.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:39:37) Right? The teams are empowered to make decisions quickly, and, you know, you don't have to be involved in all decisions necessarily because you can rely on the fact that you have hugely talented smart people working on these problems.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:48) That's what I keep hearing from everybody. They said it all comes down to the people.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:39:53) It does all come down to the people, and it's the lazy person's way out of any problem. Hire smart people, and then you can rely on them to solve it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:00) You wanna look good, hire smart people, and then take care of them. Right?

(Fletcher Previn at 00:40:04) Yes. Well, exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:06) Now do you do any sort of mentoring or anything like that?

(Fletcher Previn at 00:40:10) I do mentoring. IBM has a very robust mentoring program where people can go and search for a mentor if they want one, and they'll pair people up. And then there are more informal mentoring relationships as well. And it goes both ways. Right?

(Fletcher Previn at 00:40:26) You can be mentored or have mentees.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:30) What are you learning from the people that you've been mentoring?

(Fletcher Previn at 00:40:35) I think it goes back to what I was saying before, which is, you know, if you figure out what you love to do, everything else just kind of falls into place. And so good things will happen if you know what you really enjoy doing. And if you make your manager aware of what your goals are, you'll be orders of magnitude more likely to achieve it than if you leave it to chance. And I think, you know, all of us will spend more time at the office or at work than we will doing other things in our lives. And so this shouldn't be transactional.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:41:08) It needs to have some sort of deeper meaning and you need to feel fulfilled by what you do every day. And that is worth the time to be thoughtful about and take an active role in managing the career and the future that you wanna have.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:25) That was beautifully put, my friend.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:41:28) Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:28) Have you ever gotten to meet any of your technology heroes because of, you know, your position, the job, your love of technology? You ever get to run into Elon Musk?

(Fletcher Previn at 00:41:39) Well, I think one of the exciting things about working at a place like IBM is that's a brand name that opens a lot of doors. And so I've had opportunities to spend time at companies that I've admired for a long time and was hugely exciting to just to be there and to meet people. And so, you know, I've gotten to go to Apple and spend time at the Apple campus and meet Tim Cook and fulfill some childhood dreams that were pretty special.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:07) Oh, did they have their new campus built yet? Like, the crazy spaceship looking one?

(Fletcher Previn at 00:42:12) Yes. I've been in the spaceship.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:13) Woah. That is so cool.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:42:16) It is extremely impressive.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:18) So, yeah, we're about ready to wrap up. I wanna be respectful of your hard stop. But was there anything else that you wanted to get out there into the world or anything else on your mind?

(Fletcher Previn at 00:42:30) No. I mean, I think this has been a challenging year in a number of ways, but, you know, shared difficult experiences can bring people together. And I think that's kind of been the silver lining of this year is that in a lot of ways, this, I think, has brought teams even closer together and provided a lot of challenges for sure, but also some new opportunities to explore different ways to handle things and have virtual happy hours and reach out to people that may be geographically far away and have more of a virtual global community. And so it hasn't been without its positives as well. And so I think as we go forward, we'll try to retain the best of what we've learned this year and put some of the hardship in the past.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:25) Yeah. That's how you grow though. Right? These difficult times, they create strong people and you use strong people and you get more innovation, better society. And whenever I start getting down, like, I'm in one of these moments of my life that's very difficult.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:42) I say, okay, that's like a flag. That's like an indicator. We need to start finding the positive and figure out what's on the other side of this difficulty because it doesn't just get difficult and stay difficult forever. It's always this, you know, spectrum of this up and down flow. And so it's important to shift, you know, or flip the flow, I guess.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:44:00) Yeah. I'd be curious to know what is the most creative thing that you've heard as a sort of virtual fun thing that people have done? You know, I'm running out of things to eat and drink, the things that I can do with my team. Have you heard anything really creative?

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:16) Yeah. Well, so my teleprompter broke before this. So I'm in this new environment. And what actually saved the day is the gingerbread house that we're having a gingerbread house building contest. I have a box, a kit, a gingerbread house building kit under an iPad that's on a stand cause that happened to be the perfect height to come up below the teleprompter.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:39) But yeah, so we decided to build, we all, we bought kits for all of our team. They all got the same kit and we're holding a gingerbread house building contest.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:44:50) That is an excellent idea. I like it. Although, I think you should lean into it, and next year, it's the gingerbread teleprompter holder contest. Right?

(Fletcher Previn at 00:44:59) Yeah. I like the gingerbread house building kit. I may have to steal that one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:04) Please do. There was another, we actually that was like a steal from another company that did something with like a popcorn ball decoration thing. I don't know what the popcorn ball is, but somebody said that and then they said, "What else could we do that's not a popcorn ball?" We said, "Let's do a gingerbread contest." So I'll send you some pictures of how it comes out between the team and who wins.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:45:26) Okay. We did do a, I with my direct reports, I did a home beer brewing experience, which was kind of fun, but complicated and didn't end well for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:35) How do you do the taste testing?

(Fletcher Previn at 00:45:37) That's two weeks later.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:38) So you guys ship each other, like, bunch of beers?

(Fletcher Previn at 00:45:40) Yeah. You gotta send the hops and the all the stuff. You make it and then you wait for it to ferment and then you, unless people don't drink alcohol. But then they still can do the fun of making, they can just drink it right away, and then there's no alcohol in it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:54) Was that your favorite one, or is that the most creative one that you guys have done?

(Fletcher Previn at 00:45:58) You know, I think ultimately they've all been good. We've had, you know, virtual breakfasts together and happy hours and bring your own beverage. What has really been nice is just coming together more frequently and spending time together even if we can't physically be together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:16) Yeah. That human connection is just incredibly important.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:46:20) And I think it's actually kept, I know it's kept me sane during the quarantine and the pandemic because I'm talking to all of my friends and colleagues all day at work. And so that sense of isolation is much less than if I didn't have that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:37) Yeah. And we get to still when we interact, we get to complete projects, and that gives us that nice hit of accomplishment. Like for me, even if I talk to people, if I don't complete something or work on something during the day, then I just go to bed feeling like I just didn't do the day right. So, yeah, I like getting that thing. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:56) Sense of purpose. Definitely. Well, thank you so much, my friend. I really appreciate it.

(Fletcher Previn at 00:47:02) My pleasure. Thank you. It was very enjoyable and thanks for making it easy on me and good luck.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:12) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.