The CIO of $45 billion AutoDesk walks us through the 'slap' technique that tech chiefs should use to make themselves understood across departments
- Companies are creating billion-dollar programs to educate employees on technology like blockchain and artificial intelligence.
- While those efforts are aimed at getting workers more comfortable with the advanced applications, that doesn't mean everyone will become an expert.
- That's why chief information officers need to speak like a person when working outside the IT department, a skill Autodesk CIO Prakash Kota calls "slap."
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Companies are spending billions of dollars to get employees comfortable with the newest technology.
While that helps to improve tech literacy, it doesn't mean everyone is going to be an expert on cloud computing, artificial intelligence, or other advanced systems that are increasingly common across corporate America.
So chief information officers still need to be especially careful to "speak like a person" when working with individuals outside the IT department, a skill AutoDesk CIO Prakash Kota refers to simply as "slap."
CIOs must be "a technology evangelist within the C-suite, where you're working across the board to really help them - and be the change agent [within the company] to really tell all the technology capabilities that are there," he told Business Insider.
It may seem trivial at first, but one of the biggest hurdles to adoption of new technology within companies is pushback from managers and other mid-level employees. That can be due to workers not yet understanding the systems - or being fearful of the impact automation and other advanced tools will have on their jobs.
So having an IT team that can not only explain the technology itself and the desired outcome of implementing the service, but that also takes the time to understand the needs of the different business units can help greatly in converting skeptics.
"We need to talk to real people who are consuming our services to build for real people. You cannot sit in a back office to find out and come up with projects and prioritize" if you don't know what the users are consuming, said Kota.
He uses that mentality to oversee all the enterprise applications in use at AutoDesk, a software company that sells design and production programs for industries like engineering, entertainment, and construction.
Kota is working with the chief human resources officer, for example, to figure out how to infuse the "on-demand" experience that many employees have at home into the workplace - think of the ease of use of applications like Uber or AirBnB, but for programs used exclusively within organizations.
One way Kota helps his department know which areas to focus on is by using Amazon's "working backward" approach, where engineers write a press release outlining the benefit of a final product and how the end-customer will use it before beginning work on the project.
The modern-day CIO is not "somebody who's sitting in an office and trying to keep the business running," he said. "The hygiene part is always there, but the CIO's responsibility is beyond that."