Angela Yochem, EVP & Chief Transformation and Digital Officer, Novant Health | CIO Leadership Live
hello good afternoon and welcome to cio leadership live i'm mary fran johnson i'm your host today and a contributing columnist on cio.com where i write about boardroom issues for technology leaders twice a month we produce cio leadership live with the generous support of my colleagues at cio.com and the cio executive council we're streaming live to you right now on linkedin and on twitter and we welcome anyone who's watching and wants to participate in today's conversation to pop in your question and i will run it by my guest today and we'll be watching for that and do our best to respond i'm so pleased today to be joined by angela yoakam who is the executive vice president and chief transformation and digital officer at novant health novant health is based in charlotte north carolina and it's a non-profit high growth health care system with thirty thousand team members serving fifteen hospitals and more than seven hundred clinics and physician centers across five southern states angela joined novan in january of 2018 as its chief digital and technology officer and bringing with her a broad cross-industry technology leadership from a fortune 500 companies such as bdp international astrazeneca dell bank of america and rent-a-center her initial mission was to help this healthcare organization redefine its approach to technology by developing a strategic vision for using digital capabilities that would expand access to health care and also to improve the quality of care with novan's chief medical officer angela also co-leads the institute of innovation and artificial intelligence and last month her digital officer role grew into a broader transformation role that we'll talk about more in a moment but i asked angela to join me here today on cio leadership live to talk not only about her experiences as a digital leader who reports to ceos but also about the many years of experience that she has gathered in governance she has had several roles on the other side of the boardroom table essentially working side by side with the people who are the ceo's bosses last summer angela was appointed to an independent director board seat with the u.s board for zurich american insurance group which is a subsidiary of the swiss insurance giant zurich insurance group for the past decade her governance experience has included several private boards a venture capital back tech startup several non-profit boards and the federal home loan bank of pittsburgh which is an sec registrant and the idea for today's focus of the show came from an interview that i did with angela a few months ago as i was researching one of my own boardroom bound columns for cio.com
the topic then was why cios should not wait until retirement to start building up their board credentials and their own skills in the boardroom on that other side of the boardroom table and it was a wonderful interview it was a great column that i've gotten a lot of response for and it answered that question of exactly how does a highly accomplished incredibly busy committed full-time business technology leader managed to do both be a hundred and ten percent devoted to your technology leadership job and also expand your business chops and your board credentials outside of that so that's what we're here to find out today and thank you very much angela for joining us it's delightful to see you again it's always good to see you all right now before we dive into your board experience and the um and your expanded role at novant health tell me how you and your team are doing i think that whole question about how are you doing today has taken on such greater weight and importance to us all just as human beings how is everything going you know i was i was reflecting on the past year this morning and how proud i am of our remarkable team um first we had to respond to the pandemic uh then we had to recover from the shutdown when we reopened all the clinics and all of our ours and and now we're figuring out how to best vaccinate thousands of people each day outside the normal 25 000 we see as part of normal operations and throughout all of this our team members have experienced all of the challenges that everyone else has children loss loss of a loved one health issues of their own or health issues in the family loss of an income or you know if nothing else disruption of normal routines and comfort levels some of our team members have been giving everything they have to improve the health of our communities sometimes at the expense of their own well-being so you know while i've been tremendously impressed by the team and grateful that they are with us in this fight i worry thank you well sure i i can't think of a more incredibly high stress occupation these days than healthcare frontline workers my own daughter is a an addiction psychiatrist working with with communities in newark new jersey and i worry about her every day as well so i know that this is just it's been an enormously it's been an enormously distracting time for everyone but it's it's also been an incredible time in various other ways especially as we've seen the kind of accomplishments that we the way we've been able to keep going because of digital transformation work that goes on so let's talk about that whole change in your own role you and i have talked many times over the years you've been a cio you've been a chief digital officer but there's something that has changed with this addition of transformation to your role what's what is different in your day-to-day concerns my team and i have a pretty broad remit uh we are responsible of course as we were from the beginning for what would typically be called i.t uh plus digital health um plus a device company plus a tech services sales organization um everything to do with data and cognitive computing and of course we share as you mentioned responsibility for the institute of innovation and ai with our chief medical officer and his team so as we think about adding on to that the transformation part of my role that's all about defining new business models and new revenue streams over and above those that i just mentioned um whether or not they have a technology component although so few things don't um also nurturing smaller lines of business that maybe haven't received a lot of investment historically and just general business transformation activity and by the way there's a lot of that in healthcare and i think that's probably something that might surprise people who don't have say someone in healthcare and their family and and then they may not be hearing about the the incredible like you have product lines that are now part of your responsibilities and it's you don't tend to think of um healthcare companies in that sort of range these days tell us something about you know what counts as a product what sort of you mentioned that it's medical devices as well sure no we we actually sell products like physical devices and we also we also provide technology services to other smaller health care organizations we provide their services internally obviously to novant health so why not to other organizations we we also provide health and wellness services to our corporate community members these services are um a composite set of things that include technology capabilities which are the pieces that i'm responsible for the actual line of business for corporate services lives in one of my peers uh organizations but there are so many things that i guess every company should start thinking about in fact mary fan if you'll indulge me for a minute my my favorite soapbox topic right now is this notion that we have to stop thinking about ourselves as being part of a defined industry because the companies that are dominating multiple industries are those who haven't boxed themselves in artificially with those industry um definitions okay these are we think about foundational capabilities that every company that is succeeding and thriving in a world that requires extreme agility um that you know a world in which consumer appetites continue to shift in a world in which you know the the bounds of industry are getting blurrier and blurrier then don't call yourself a healthcare company and this is defined as a healthcare company is defined as xyz 20 years ago therefore that's exactly what we do we don't do anything more anything less and that's our core business and we're never going to do anything else we may be underserving our communities if we stick to that sort of artificial bounds so we've seen it in fintech with banking we've seen it in services and the hospitality and all of the other industries retail my goodness was the first to be disrupted that's not that let's just abandon this notion of industry boundaries it's a it's a really great point and i remember years ago having a conversation with someone about the innovation opportunities in the adjacencies and the things that are around your business and ways because it's really about leveraging a reputation in your brand with uh with with your customers your patients your suppliers your partners you know it's it's definitely it's a very changing world and i think that the incredibly uh the foundational role of digital capabilities is actually one of the things that has really changed that game so much and let's talk a little bit about that i remember some years ago when chief digital officer role came up it's probably a good ten years old at this point the role and there's always whenever there's a new chief title in an industry that you have the inevitable debates and stories about oh this is replacing the cio and oh what what does the chief marketing officer think of this isn't that her job you know this sort of thing so how has the chief digital officer role evolved in just the past five years that's something you've been very i i think not only deeply engaged with doing the job but also influencing the way the job changes that's such a great observation you know it's almost impossible to think about the chief roles with the possible exception of the ceo and the cfo yeah we can't really look at the role title and make any more than the most general assumptions about what it does these days yeah some chief digital officer roles have evolved into massive roles you know as as we just discussed you know with it responsibilities plus revgen plus other and you know some girls see some chief digital officers are you know three levels down from the cio focused on you know running the consumer surveys or the like you know and i think i think what we have to do is um in just as i just as i'm a proponent of abandoning artificial boundaries related to industry i think i'm probably also a proponent of abandoning um defining roles by traditional titles i think it's much more interesting to talk about how we optimize our organizational structure this how we define appropriate scope of responsibility how we think about the sophistication of the capability set that is defined and managed by a given role and what are the interdependencies you know how do we simplify such that we can optimize for either speed or agility or or resiliency or or whatever our optimization goals are um and then we just call it something that allows us to pay someone market i mean that's really that's really what we we you know we can oversimplify it a bit and probably get to a faster better outcome as opposed to trying to confine ourselves to to maybe what the industry is telling us this role should be doing right and i think that's probably a point that i suspect resonates with a lot of the chief tech people that are in the audience because who among us has not been put in the tech box and told you know what you're going to do the technology implementation we're going to come over here we're going to make all the adult decisions and we'll just tell you what to do now the good news is i joined novant health because not in a million years would novant health do that we are every single member of the executive team at novant health and by the way we come from a variety of different industries everyone has a pretty impressive amount of digital uh fluency as you'd expect with any any um executive role to have these days if you want to be successful you can't you can't walk into an executive role today and say gosh you know this finance stuff it really confounds me i don't really understand it nor would you ever say that about technology anymore you can't walk into it any role and say gosh you know my grandson had to help me with my phone the other day i mean no one's ever gonna say that everyone gets it now and uh and and i i happen to to to have the privilege of being able to help enable those sorts of very interesting capabilities um that all of my peer group are are so interested in and so passionate about as well well and i know that's something that i've um i i soap box a lot about that as well in my boardroom column because cio's just chief anything on the technology side has such a wonderful opportunity to just expand the mindset and the understanding of those board members you know the average board member in in the fortune 500 is 64 years old and he's a white male and he's his background has been finance and business and you know the the ones who are more secure in their selves are willing to say i really don't know very much about the technology stuff it's such a great opening to just step in and say well not so much technology let's talk about digital capabilities in fact we have our first question from our live watching audience and it's about the uh data strategy for novant health and um talk a little bit about how that is formulated how you describe it and i know you'll be very conversant with it even though you have a chief data officer who reports to you how do you answer questions like that because the data-driven nature of companies like yours and organizations like yours is really tantamount that's exactly right and that is an excellent question and that is exactly the question to be asked when you're thinking about any significant effort within a within a complex company particularly those um yes within a traditional industry bound that's under transformation so um one of the first things that i did when i joined three three years ago a little over three years ago was to recruit a world-class chief data officer many of you may know carl hightower he came in he brought on board a tremendous team that is responsible for not just traditional enterprise information management stitch you know capabilities so for example when you think about you know how is your data stored how do we think about our data how do we describe our data how do we move it how would at what point is it transform how is it you know what at what point is it encrypted when is it not you know all the sort of classic and what's master data how do we manage mastery all those sorts of things um that's kind of classic ein so all of that is handled and handled very well and by the way those are not simple questions to answer especially not to answer optimally so um his team has spent a great deal of time and i think done a great job helping us get our arms around the business the language of our business the elements that are most important to making decisions in our business and by the way the things that are most important to help us identify the health condition of our patients so that's when we start getting into some of the more um the newer things that that carl and his team have introduced into our estate so for example um we have a strong cognitive computing team um we have real live data scientists who work in our our team that are doing some pretty remarkable things yeah there are a lot of technology vendors who will sell us capability sets um that look at our clinical data um and and help us identify trends and it may help us do some prediction and what we found is that while um while they're better than nothing and some of them are quite sophisticated but you know generally speaking sometimes if we have something fairly precise we need to know we need to predict um we can get to it pretty fast with our own folks so we we have built that capability out with some some brilliant people who who do some amazing work and have done some industry leading work and as a result we're now able to think about our data which by the way we host in a data lake cloud-based data lake access through a robust api layer um you know so that allows us to operate on our data through a variety of mechanisms and um in the data it's not just our clinical data it's it's it's you know behavioral data it's um data that you know comes from a variety of sources some of it's commercially available other parts of it are not are from other devices that stream in and you know as we look at this as we ask questions of ourselves you know what what do we wish we knew in a clinical setting or an operational setting that we don't that we don't know today that team can get us those answers pretty quickly and it's been so essential and so differentiating for us as we've responded to the the coping crisis in particular well and i was imagining that when you talk to your novant board about the data strategy say you're on boarding a whole new board member and they just you know they run in i was going to say we run into each other in the hallway we don't do that so easily these days but eventually we will um and they say angela give me the top line on what our data strategy is i would imagine it it links right back to the delivery of the quality of care oh a hundred percent so when you think about i think you mentioned it in the opening there's a we think about access to care we want to expand access to care that's when we think a lot about our digital health space and then we want to increase the quality of care my goodness everything about quality of care as well as quality of our operations yeah dependent upon our understanding of of the data that defines everything that we do and so it's yeah it is directly linked yes well we have another question which i think is a good follow-up from our audience and this is an advice question for organizations uh what do they need to address in their foundational capabilities before embarking on digitization efforts i guess it's a cart before the horse kind of question in a way um but you've been in so many different industries and organizations so you've probably seen all different scenarios of that so would you advise organizations to take care of foundational things first and if so how so you know i think you can the first thing to ask yourself because the answer to that question's gonna be different but the process by which you arrive at the answer can be uh you know fairly similar so the first thing that you can do is ask yourself what are the outcomes that my business is trying to achieve short-term median term long-term right and then you start thinking before you even set about defining a strategy for how you're going to achieve that outcome just think to yourself what are the what are the foundational capabilities that i'm likely to need in support of these outcomes and you know you'll find that you start defining your strategy and the required capabilities simultaneously and a lot of the capability sets that you define will end up being it'll become obvious to you it should become obvious to you which have to be more robust in advance of others in advance of the the evolution of the others and uh and i think understanding the interdependency between some of the capabilities that you define um understanding which ones you can achieve and and provide opportunistically uh perhaps over others that may require a little more effort um you know those are the sorts of things you consider when you think about priority um and and what is foundational to you is is likely to be um likely to go beyond just the traditional um infrastructural elements and capability sets that we tend to think about as foundational right excellent good answer thank you now one part of the your new role that we talked about earlier was about the unconventional partnership aspects of the work in terms of building and growing revenue streams how did that start for you years ago i'm going to guess maybe 2009 2010 2011 there was an article in the hbr forgive me for mentioning another publication no problem harvard business review everybody should read it all the time i have lots of lots of friends who have worked there it's actually it's a wonderful business journal i found i found that as well um so it is uh there was an article about a uh one of the large energy companies that had set up an innovation network they had recognized early on that it was no longer reasonable to expect that they all of the great ideas about energy would come from within their four walls and so they they started building out a formal network of third parties with whom they interacted as they tried to create you know new ways of operating new ways of working and i remember being struck by that um and and at the time i was working with astrazeneca i was working at astrazeneca as a chief technology officer and a colleague of mine a brilliant guy named john reinders and i spent a lot of time talking about what that what that um might look like at astrazeneca and we we built we set about building that um certainly within the the the r d organization there was a lot of that same sort of approach going on you know the the research that's happening in pharma was happening a lot of the especially in the life sciences space that um it was happening in these smaller labs and so the partnership so we started thinking about ways we could facilitate formal relationships with smaller labs and so on and it grew and then i started thinking why why not do that inside of a traditional technology organization why would we rely on either what we could develop in our four walls or what we purchased from large vendors which by the way i love large vendors they're wonderful nothing against them but they're not going to provide everything to us that we need and so there's no longer a conversation about buy versus build there's a conversation about do i build do i buy or do i maybe co-create with a third party maybe that third party is a a startup maybe maybe i adopt a software uh excuse me maybe i adopt a solution from a startup that doesn't yet have a commercially available product maybe maybe i help them you know land the plane on their product um and their and therefore get to market with the capability before my before my competition does um you know it all started with this idea and then once you have this idea i guess it was easy to sort of expand it to thinking about ways in which we could go to market together with a variety of other entity types of ways in which we could help lend if not developers maybe we lend subject matter experts in our industry and and we've as a result in my experience across a variety of industries in which i've worked it's it's relatively easy to do and it's something that i think every technology leader needs to needs to have as just part of a way a basic way of working well i've noticed too over time talking with technology leaders like yourself uh and and many others in different industries that when we start talking about vendor management for instance the first point everybody tends to make is that i don't want to work with vendors i want to work with partners and that whole approach and that whole willingness to you know it's what are my suppliers and partners bringing to us that we can use we're happy to help support them and to invest in their products and so forth but do they how much do they understand my business and that sort of thing so i think that that's very it's not so much leading edge with cios anymore as i think that it's in that best practices bucket about it's not about vendors that you buy things for from its partners that you work with and suppliers who are fueling different parts of your business let us now let's say if you're just joining us this is cio leadership live and i am joined today by angela yoakam who is the chief transformation and digital technology officer at novant health and we are going to switch our conversation over now from oh i i want to call it's not exactly typical cdo business because you do a lot of so many different business parts of your role as a technology leader but i want to switch over and talk about the board your board and governance career and let's start by rolling back a decade to the first experience you had in your board career how did that opportunity arise i find that every cio i know every chief digital officer who serves on outside boards everybody's got an origin story where it all started for them so tell us your origin story i think thank you for that question that's a great question uh i think i'd like to answer that in two parts i first you know my first for profit board i'll tell you that story but then i think i also would like to share if i can did how i feel about service in general yes because that's important it's important part of my origin story um it's my first for-profit board outside of those that were affiliated with my executive roles was the federal home loan bank of pittsburgh a dear friend of mine although at the time i didn't know her well um asked me about my interest in serving on a board and we had a couple of long conversations um she suggested i throw my name in the hat as a candidate for an open board position um that you know she she was on that particular board as well and the rest is history so that's that's how that went for me and by the way i've shared a lot of stories um with others who who have also found their first board see through people that they know a personal connection personal connections in your network now as it relates to general board service and community service um that's seen something that's something that i've i've had modeled in my own family for as long as i can remember my parents have always served in and supported groups promoting health and education equity sustainability the arts veterans uh other civic issues and they instilled in me from a very early age um the belief that if you can work and there is work to be done uh then you know what are you waiting for go go get it done and so um things do work sorry find the time create the time to do it find the time you know go get it done so uh with that with that is my example um you know i think i think service in in whatever form it takes is is something for which we can always we can always make the time yes well and i've had many conversations with cios over the years about the whole concept of servant leadership and the idea that you are and it's not necessarily applying to board work but it is the notion that you are in a leadership position because that puts you in a better position to help to help people around you to help the people working for you to help your companies and so forth many cios will their first likely board position will it's very likely 75 percent of the time you find it through a personal connection usually someone in the business community not necessarily another chief information officer so a lot of times non-profit boards will come up as uh your first service example and there's often debate in the board world i think people assume that if you've served on a non-profit board it's some kind of a natural stepping stone to a for-profit or a private board not necessarily the case it comes down to a lot of depends on the industry your own networks and so forth but tell us why you have found you've been on several non-profit boards and i think you're currently serving on a couple of them in your own community in charlotte so we know it doesn't necessarily need to lead to a paid board seat why is it worthwhile to be part of a non-profit board and to seek that yeah three three reasons uh first you have the opportunity to do something meaningful for the community in which you live so that's that's number one right and that's why most people serve secondarily it gives you an opportunity to exercise those muscles that you know are understanding how another complex organization works it might expose you to different problem sets than you're used to seeing perhaps different industries different company types different sorts of problems different sorts of political structures inside of the organization this exposure allows you to to expand your own understanding of organization i think that's important that's something that we all need in our day jobs so so i think you learn something from it outside of just serving the community and the third thing i will say is that how better so if you look at if you look at non-profit boards you look at who's serving on these non-profit boards um oftentimes there are people who are in big big executive roles and so they're learning from you just as you're learning from them and one of the things that they're going to learn is how you operate they're going to learn how you work and so if if you know if you're if you're in it purely for selfish reasons this gives you an opportunity to show what your talents bring to an organization that needs your talents um so you know i would say everyone wins if you join a non-profit it's not going to lead to a for-profit board um that is not a stepping stone in the the executive recruiting community finds meaningful and by the way it often is irrelevant in terms of skill sets but um as you build your own foundational capabilities those muscles you need to do that anyway just as just as part of your personal growth well it's a wonderful way to to build your business network because as as much as and i've worked with cios for well over 20 years now and i'm a huge fan of a strong cio network i mean it's one of it's one of my when people say oh what's your superpower you know i love that question because it's not just about whether you can bake bread or not it's basically my superpower is knowing so many cios and having this wonderful network but that wonderful network of cios will not lead to board success it's your business community friends those ceos and chief financial officers that you meet on the nonprofit board so i think that's a great point now let's think about today's boardroom talent needs just in general for private company boards fortune 500 fortune 1000 boards is there anything especially in light of the global pandemic that we've been going through now is there anything that makes this a better time for full-time senior executives like yourself to think about board service or to reach out why why would a board need your capabilities today talk about that well if you think about think about what we're seeing in the world today everybody's talking about how rapidly the world is changing and businesses of all sorts are thinking about unconventional competitors and they're thinking about changing market opportunities and changing customer appetites and you know everyone acknowledges that the biggest challenge is the rapidity of the change happening around them who what type of executive what type of executive has been best positioned to deal with rapidly changing or advancing capability sets over the last 20 years i would say it's the technology executive the one who's been running the estates that have you know that that you know whose landscape shifts every half year um we're in the middle of it we're very well positioned to help with agility um to help with um that all of the new the new muscles that all of the companies are trying to build and all of these boards need as they as they as they guide their management team as they ask questions of their management team as they pressure test the management team's work so you know i think that that is probably the first reason why it's a great time for technology leaders to to reach out and and and look for opportunities to serve in this capacity and the second is of course that it's impossible to separate any of the advances that are happening in any of the industries again i said i don't like to talk about industries but across the industry spectrum all of those changes are enabled by some sort of technology advance or some sort of unprecedented but now available access to data and that's our world so you know why would we why would we form up a board that doesn't have the perspective of somebody who understands that accelerating force and again can ask the right questions of the management team to make sure that that's being taken into consideration not just from a risk mitigation perspective as it relates to operational risk but also as a as a future state future planning strategic sort of risk mitigation there's a lot being written today too about the changing nature of the board's governance responsibilities i mean it's certainly oversight and the shareholder value and making sure the company is profitable and and guiding it away from you know wrong directions certainly are very core to what board members are needed to do today but there's also stakeholder attention now when the i've read so much of board literature over the last year or so that points out the incredible importance of diversity and inclusion and equality and how those issues i just i have a column being published next week about environmental societal and governance issues the esg which is and one of the tie-ins there for cios is that esg is going to come down to a lot of data that the boards are going to need i mean there's not a lot of regulatory requirements around esg data yet but the big institutional investors are all paying a lot of attention to it and i think and i like when i say diversity that way i actually mean diversity kind of writ large where it's diversity of thought and background and education and capabilities i love the way you always talk about capabilities rather than technology skills because it really does reach across different opportunities that are out there have you found that serving on outside boards has that helped you work more effectively with your own board at novant health at you know rent a center when you were there all the different what five or six companies where you have been involved and during most of that time i think from astrazeneca on you've been involved in boardwork how did you find that it helped you with your own company board i think uh two ways first of course it allowed me to see our engagement through their you know with with wearing the board hat i understand what what the sorts of things they're likely to be looking for i i had a i had a perspective that was similar to theirs and that helped me but i think maybe less obviously but equally if not more important is the type of exercise that serving on a board allows me to to perform that helps me just be a better version of myself so professional athletes i always by the way i should preface this by saying i always get in trouble when i try to do some sort of sports analogy so i'm not going to try to be careful i never try it either because i mix all that stuff up i'm just not about i i can talk about classical music and pianists but i can't really say much about sports i'm going to try so we all know even those of us um i have a dear friend um clint who refers to his favorite sport is sports ball i'm like yes so even if you have sports ball a player um somebody we know football players for example sometimes take you know ballet right or yoga we know that regardless of the nature of the athletics in which you're engaging you have a whole set of conditioning exercises you have to go through right and you know you're in there with your athletic trainers you're in there with your strength coaches you're in there with you know i don't know see this is where my my knowledge peters out but you know you're in there with a whole bunch of people who are who are not running you through football drills if you're a football player right you're you're not only practicing football over and over and over again you're also doing all the flexibility work you're doing all the strength training work you're doing all the other stuff that helps your muscles be more explosive if that's what you're looking for be faster if that's what you're looking for or be more resilient if that's what you're looking for and i think for executives our mental muscles are they need to be exercised not just in doing the actual job that is ours to do on a day-to-day basis and how do we exercise those muscles we read we attend industry events but my goodness what about getting into the weeds of another industry another company understanding someone else's problems that are not the ones that you deal with on a day-to-day basis there is no better conditioning exercise that will make you a better version of who you show up to be at work i'm a strong believer that that ceos should encourage their executive teams to do exactly that yes well and that's that's actually a great segue to my next question that comes up every time i make this argument to my very busy full-time cio friends about you should be looking into board service and they say well i kind of have a job that's 120 of my time mary fran what are you talking about how do you convince a ceo because anyone who's working full-time at a company you are all uh fiscally responsible you're fiduciary officers of your companies how do you convince the ceo that there's a benefit for him or her and the company for you to be involved in another company i of course not a competitor but spending any of your time not thinking about them and and their little world so talk to that a little bit because i'm sure you've had those conversations with ceos i will say that i've been i've been pretty fortunate so i've worked for a number of ceos who who understand that to be a stronger exec um you have to understand how a variety of different businesses work how they operate they they get it um they themselves often serve on boards of very different sorts of companies i mean true that's true you know in understanding you know how governance works increases an executive's impact uh in their own company that's it's almost common sense um and so i've been fortunate in that that the the significant that the ceos for whom i've worked have all all understood that and are 100 behind that mission um i haven't yeah i would say that i probably would not go to work for a ceo who didn't who didn't think that who needed to be convinced otherwise um because i think if you if you believe that everything that one might ever need to learn is contained currently within one's own business as it exists it today i think that's fairly dangerous because your business isn't going to look the same in three years again because of industry disruption that's happening so rampantly every industry is going to look very different three four five years from now than it does today and so focusing on and specializing in only the world of today in which you're in which you're operating um puts you at risk and so i certainly hope that executive teams are not being encouraged to to focus inwardly only right this doesn't seem like a good idea it seems especially not like a good idea right now with everything changing so much what about the time factor i mean when i look at your linkedin profile it's a little daunting when i think about the job you have you get promoted consistently you take on more business responsibilities and yet you've still got a couple uh you serve on two um for-profit you know serious board seats the one for the big insurance company and then i believe another one and you also um work with venture capital based startups in an advisory role where are you finding all the time for this angela that's a really that's a very serious question even though i'm kind of like rolling my eyes about it where do you find the time for this no it's a valid question so um every day does not look like every other day okay so there are some days where i don't think about anything in fact in recent days um you know since the since the new year i've been pretty consistently head down with a couple of things that are happening in the american heart association world um otherwise i'm i'm pretty heads down on what's happening in novant health we're trying to vaccinate an entire you know states of people um and it's you know under some changing frequently changing constraints um so so i've i've been pretty heads down at work um however in normal course of events although i hate to you know i don't want to presume it will ever be fully normal again but i'm i'm i have a couple of things uh a couple of secret weapons so you asked you know you said your superpower is your network um by the way i think that i think that your superpower is your ability to um context very very quickly when you meet people and your ability to keep those details in your head and understand connections between all the people in your network forever i think that's your superpower and the ways in which you influence the industry is is phenomenal but anyway that aside um one of my zebra powers is that i read extraordinarily quickly so i can plow through about 400 pages in an evening so um when it comes to being when it comes to absorbing a lot of material that's very um complex very quickly um it doesn't take me weeks and weeks to do it takes me what i what i like to do is i i try to plow through as much material as i can absorb it and then what i like to do is think about it in my off cycles so when i'm walking my dogs or when i'm you know making dinner or you know doing the dishes or whatever i start thinking about what i've read i started applying it i started expanding upon it that's where the real magic happens for me the consumption sorry that's where the connections happen your different neurons are just firing differently that's right so so i consume very quickly and then i let it you know i let it marinate over time and and that's that's how i learned that's how i operate and that's how i i balance so many different things um if you know it's um as long as i can do that so far as as my parents always said you know if you can work you should work get it done yes that's what that's what i'm doing that's great well and i have uh there are so many there's a couple things i've been recommending to my friend because i like to also listen to podcasts and that sort of thing while i'm doing like you know puttering around in the kitchen or or out in my garden and everything and there's two podcasts that i've been recommending especially if you're interested in board service um it is i i've been calling it the digital twin there's a boardroom bound podcast that is actually it's a um a band named alexander lowry who is a cfo trained he's a college professor in massachusetts and he's been doing this boardroom bound podcast it has nothing to do with my column i just happen to pick the same kind of name he's actually i think got a a patent on his name and he's been allowing me to use boardroombound in my cio.com column every week he interviews someone on this podcast about different issues he's on a mission to help board members become better at what they're doing and now that alexander and i have met i'm on a mission to get more cios interviewed cios and chief digital officers interviewed because he's done over a hundred of these interviews but they're mostly people from the business world and when i looked through the list i only saw one cto on the list so alexander and i have a pact going where i'm going to send him more in fact i'm sure i'll be introducing you to him angela so i recommend listening to alexander's podcast and there's also just a new one that i mentioned to you that brene brown the famous social researcher on human emotion is doing it's called dare to lead and i posted about it on linkedin the other day because i think it's just phenomenal and she's been interviewing all kinds of people about leading to she started this podcast like two months ago so it's right in the midst of the pandemic and it's all kinds of wonderful wonderful interviews with people that are really paying a lot of attention to these elements so let me uh switch gears one more time and say uh talk about the your work on the federal home loan bank board when i was looking through your whole list of all the things that you've served on i look at that and i think oh well you probably have an mba and all this financial expertise behind you so how did how did that experience come about and you served for over two years on that board what did you learn there and how did that all happen well first let me say the only reason i left that wonderful board which was such a strong board is because there's a regulator there's a regulatory requirement that the board members live in the region and when i left when i left the region to move to texas i had to design for the board and it was just heartbreaking because what a wonderful group of people um doing you know doing good work doing the right work um yeah so that board was actually the board that i i mentioned to you having having joined as a result of a conversation with a dear friend who who at the time i didn't know as well um but certainly came to know over time um and so that's how that came about i had the privilege of serving um i think i started serving on the operational risk committee the um operational risk committee and governance uh and public policy committees uh and that was that was fascinating um operational risk is of course right up my alley at the time it was right up my alley still is obviously um the um governance and public policy the governance side of that was more like a nom gov committee and the public policy piece was something new so i had an opportunity to um look at how you know it's a organization that was regulated by an entity um the same entity that regulates uh fannie and freddie or used to regulate fannie and freddie so it's really regular regulators that you don't typically read about in the paper so it was interesting to learn more about that and how that works um and then i moved into being the vice chair of the enterprise governance board and also joined the audit committee ultimately so very um very uh very wonderful my i i do have experience in the banking um so i was i worked for suntrust for a few years in bank of america for a few years i mean i it's not as if i didn't have an understanding of banking federal home loan banks though i wasn't as familiar with they are the banks that provide liquidity to other banks they function more as a co-op which is really interesting so they're an sec registrant but um instead of having shareholders they have members and so you still you still are are are um you're still governing member value just as you govern shareholder value dividends are paid out you know there's there's still it operates very much the same as as shareholders but it's a membership instead it's a co-op but you're still the same sec submissions the same artifacts have to be crafted it's this you know it's a a variety of regulatory considerations as you consider any any number of industries so those are fantastic thank you for asking about that it was a really fantastic experience and uh i treasure my time uh with those those board members well and i think it's a great example also of how much you can not only learn from getting inside another industry on a board that way but also what cios can bring just because of cios and cdos and chief transformation officers what you can bring to the table that is different from everything else around the table um one of the the people i interviewed for um a virtual event i took part in a few months ago she was the former president of princeton university and she was a very well-known shirley tegman and she's a um on the google board she got asked in 2004 to join the google board and she knew eric schmidt had called her up and she knew him because he was a princeton alumni so she was always basically you know compa university presidents basically fundraise right and so eric knew her very well and he called her up one day and said come and be on the board and she said you know silicon valley she lives in princeton new jersey at the time you know and she ended up being one of the few consumer east coast academic type people on that board and we ended up talking about that diversity of thought and knowledge that somebody who's truly an outsider from an industry so i think there may be a um there may be a misconception that you can only be on a board where you bring this incredible expertise it's actually and that's leading me one of my long-winded rambling questions leading me into asking you what cios and people that are technology leaders what they can bring to boards to give them a new way to think about that as you know as the central nervous systems of the way their companies operate why do boards need those kind of talents to come on these days especially um so again i think i'm going to give you an answer in two parts part first part what what cios bring on paper which is also what they bring in reality so first part is number one part of operational risk management which is either part of audit committee it could be part of a separate auto operational or enterprise risk committee um that's where you manage um and pressure test management decisions around cyber risk yes and of course that's also where you pressure test manage management decisions around um major technology investments technology infrastructure infrastructural considerations maybe outside of the cyber space security space um and all of that you know is within the domain of expertise presumably that is held within a cio cto sort of tech leader position um the other piece of that on paper answer is uh that because so many of the business innovations that uh are coming out of a variety of industries are empowered by and in many cases entirely enabled by advanced technologies the people who are the executives who are in charge of those sorts of transformative capabilities are those technology leaders and can bring that same sort of thinking into the discussion with management so that you think about you know are you are you thinking the right way about moving into adjacencies or doing all of these other things that we think about on a daily basis so that's the on paper answer now the other answer this may be a little more subtle is again it's it's not enough to say i'm the outsider so i'm going to bring a different perspective because you're only going to be the outsider for a short period of time because pretty soon you're not going to be an outsider anymore unless something has gone terribly wrong you know so so you know um what we all should be bringing whether it's to our executive roles or to our board roles is is is it a mental agility is it is an understanding that the world around us will shift very very quickly is is the ability to break down into the most basic components what's required to be successful and to thrive and that is going to change regardless of in your same industry for 25 years or if you're in different industries year year year year you're going to have to understand when where those pivot points are occurring recognize them anticipate them uh get ahead of them and and and be positioned to thrive whether you're um you know regardless of industry so that kind of thinker is i think um i think you can find that kind of thinker again in the technology leadership ranks because of how quickly technology has continued to advance over time and how facile we've had to be as you know in the face of that change so that's very much a practice that you've made as you've built out that senior team that you have of all those different chiefs you know chief security officer chief data officer chief technology officer yeah i know also yeah yeah exactly you look for those kind of thoughts i want to quote something back to you that you said during our interview for that boardroom column i mentioned and you were summing up the intrinsic value that you yourself have gotten from serving on different boards and why you along you join me in thinking that it's so important for technology leaders to get out there and serve on boards you said if you believe business innovation will continue at unprecedented rates and that market opportunities will expand and the consumer appetites will keep growing realize that your industry won't be the same in five years right so in terms of exercising that that agility and that muscle that helps us deal with change with all the change around us today it seems it's it's pretty hard to imagine a better way to do that than to get experience on that other side of the boardroom table i'm completely biased on this point so tell me if i'm being a pollyanna about it oh no you are you and i are exactly aligned on this you know that's i think it is our if someone is paying us to come and work and and well virtually or physically or otherwise and and and to do to and to make strategic decisions to put their strategies in play we have an obligation to that entity to expand our perspectives beyond the walls of the company as it exists today that is just an obligation we you know again i'm going to take a chance with the athletics you know you might you know a professional sport here thank you a professional sports team hires a professional athlete at the peak of his or her you know physical athleticism and they expect that person to stay in shape they're not going to be happy if that person comes in eats a bunch of donuts and gates 50 pounds right similarly executives have to come in and continue to be world-class and we have to make ourselves world class by exercising those muscles we exercise those muscles by expanding our perspective and getting deep into the weeds and continuing to learn quickly applying our natural strengths to someone else's problems learn what it's like to sit on the other side of the table um it's part of our growth it's part of our personal growth plan as an executive and it also allows us to to best lead um our companies regardless of industry in this changing world because they're as we've said several times it's it's a changing world changing environment yes and who knows that better than chief information and digital officers and it also reminds me a couple of cios who all like you serve on multiple different boards have pointed out that one of the ways they win that argument with their ceo is they point out that it's basically for the company it's a free executive education that another company gets to provide for you it's an i mean it's enormous personal growth i think for individuals but in terms of what you bring back to the company i think that it's very important so that's much more succinct than what i said and i but you're exactly right well thank you thank you so much for letting me veer off usually on leadership live we talk about kind of the usual lineup of cio topics it's innovation and business strategy and leadership and talent retention and all that but this was just a very i thought that this was a very appropriate change as we are heading into a whole new decade and a new administration in washington and i especially appreciate that you joined me here today instead of watching the inauguration live so thank you for that angela and i hope i will see you again soon and in well it'd be nice to see you in the real world but i especially appreciate you joining us today virtually thanks so much it's my pleasure to be here thank you for having me if you joined us late today please do not uh despair uh you can watch the full episode later today on cio.com or you can also catch us on youtube where we have um the idg tech talk channel has not only this wonderful interview with angela yoakam today but also the 50 60 i think this might have been number 61. we've kept a whole library of all of these cio
conversations there on our idg tech talk channel and i hope you enjoyed today's conversation with angela as much as i did and that you will join us again here in two weeks for the next episode of cio leadership live on wednesday february 3rd i'm going to be joined again at 12 noon eastern by justin kershaw who is the chief information officer at cargill the ag giant the agricultural giant company one of the largest privately held companies in the united states and take a moment before you leave us to check out that idg youtube channel there and you'll be able to find all the previous episodes and thanks so much for joining us today stay well and safe out there and we'll see you back here again in two weeks
2021-01-29 01:56
