Episode 701 ·
TECH TITANS: Being the Mentor and Mentee with Fletcher Previn, then CIO at IBM
Today we have an episode of our newest podcast, Tech Titans. It features summary episodes of our best leadership advice from Modern CTO. We’re bringing you a throwback from 2018: Fletcher Previn, then CIO at IBM, joins us in this episode to share his greatest leadership advice on how he leveled up in his career and how he is both the mentor and the mentee in his professional relationships.
All of this, right here, right now, on the Modern CTO Podcast!
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Produced by ProSeries Media.
As IBM’s Chief Information Officer, Fletcher Previn leads a global team of over 12,000 employees whose mission is to prioritize user experience and provide secure, global IT, at scale for ~350,000 IBM employees worldwide. The CIO organization operates in a highly centralized shared services model as IBM’s single IT department, enabling IBM's transformation to an AI and cloud platform company – a cognitive enterprise.
Under his leadership, IBM pioneered new ways of delivering IT across the world’s largest network, established an agile culture of breaking down big problems into small ones, and embedded design into operations (DesOps).
Fletcher was the first to identify opportunities that enabled IBM to offer a device choice program at the enterprise level, leading to consistently reduced IT support requests and record high customer satisfaction. This allows for new and creative ways to deliver support, including a number of Think Desks where IBMers can get personal service from experts. In October 2019, he announced IBM's plan to open source the "choice program" code to help others transform how they enable IT for employees. His team also established a program to allow employees to purchase their workstation after a four-year period which resulted in a substantial reduction of tickets for damaged machines. And, with Watson AI technology, Fletcher’s team is reducing the IT burden of managing its network of complex systems and over a half million devices.
Fletcher joined IBM in 2006 and has held several key roles in sales and technology. His extensive experience spans reinventing desktop computing environments (Windows, Mac, Linux), industry leading solutions for sellers and mobility programs, transforming IT infrastructure, delivering productivity tools and Agile transformation.
Prior to joining IBM, he managed the Enterprise Systems Group at Walmart.com.
Fletcher holds Microsoft and Cisco certifications and is a graduate of Connecticut College with a degree in Political Science.
About IBM:
At IBM, work is more than a job - it's a calling: To build. To design. To code. To consult. To think along with clients and sell. To make markets. To invent. To collaborate. Not just to do something better, but to attempt things you've never thought possible. To lead in this new era of technology and solve some of the world's most challenging problems.
IBM is a leading cloud platform and cognitive solutions company. Restlessly reinventing since 1911, we are the largest technology and consulting employer in the world, with more than 350,000 employees serving clients in 170 countries. With Watson, the AI platform for business, powered by data, we are building industry-based solutions to real-world problems. For more than seven decades, IBM Research has defined the future of information technology with more than 3,000 researchers in 12 labs located across six continents. For more information, visit www.ibm.com.
Transcript
(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're bringing you an episode of Tech Titans, and this one is a throwback from 2018. Fletcher, then CIO of IBM, joins us in this episode to share his best advice on how he is both the mentor and the mentee in his professional relationships. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Tech Titans.
(Joel Beasley at 00:00:23) And then you've worked your way up. You didn't just start as the head of IBM's technology. You worked your way all the way up. Tell me about that.
(Fletcher Previn at 00:00:32) 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. And in the end, I decided not to take that job, but mentally I thought, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna stay at IBM, but I'm gonna really commit to my job with the same level of intensity as if I had taken that job. And I'm just gonna be in it 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 00:01:40) And then about a year later, she promoted me into a director role, mostly employee 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. There's one IT department and one CIO for the whole company.
(Joel Beasley at 00:02:19) Now when you first started, something stood out to me there that I want to talk. So when you first started to try, you said you're gonna 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 00:02:39) 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 00:03:15) Yeah. You get what you put into it. Right?
(Fletcher Previn at 00:03:18) Yeah.
(Joel Beasley at 00:03:20) So I'm curious, what are your direct reports like? How does that work?
(Fletcher Previn at 00:03:28) 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 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. I have a developer team that builds mobile apps for internal use within the company, but also our corporate intranet.
(Fletcher Previn at 00:04:44) 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 30 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. 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 00:06:08) Yes, thank you. Okay. I'm excited. I'm a big design geek. So I let when things look good, it actually affects and impacts your mood.
(Joel Beasley at 00:06:18) I can open up a website and feel relaxing. I'm like, oh, this is beautiful. Right?
(Fletcher Previn at 00:06:24) 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, is 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, you know, 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?
(Fletcher Previn at 00:07:03) 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.
(Fletcher Previn at 00:07:19) 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 00:07:34) Oh, I love it. I love it. Now do you do any sort of mentoring or anything like that?
(Fletcher Previn at 00:07:41) 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 00:07:57) You can be mentored or have mentees.
(Joel Beasley at 00:08:01) What are you learning from the people that you've been mentoring?
(Fletcher Previn at 00:08:05) 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. It needs to have some sort of deeper meaning, and you need to feel fulfilled by what you do every day.
(Fletcher Previn at 00:08:44) 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 00:08:56) That was beautifully put, my friend.
(Fletcher Previn at 00:08:58) Thank you.