Play to Your Workforce’s Strengths

Jim Fister, a lead strategist for Intel Architecture Digital Enterprise

No question, workers in their 20s and 30s can be maddening. They’re anxious to succeed, distracted by Tweets, and constantly networking with friends. But all those things also are their strengths.

Jim Fister, a lead strategist for Intel Architecture Digital Enterprise who joined Intel 20 years ago, was one of the original consumer PC strategists inside of the company in the mid 1990s, helping think through how people were using PCs at home and how Intel could help them.

Today, Fister spends a lot of time with younger people, talking to them about technology, watching the way they use it, and helping figure out how CEOs, CIOs, and other managers can best harness their huge passion for technology. He spoke with MIT Sloan Management Review editor-in-chief Michael S. Hopkins.

You’ve talked about how one of the biggest IT issues is sort of a new variation on the generation gap. Can you explain?

I remember a couple years ago being on the road with one of our IT people talking to a group of CIOs and IT professionals about Twitter, and seeing the utter look of disdain on their faces. These were people about my age, in business for 20, 30, maybe even 40 years.

The thing is this: When people my age joined technology companies, it’s because we were geeks and that’s where the cool technology was. It was there at the office. But today, all the good technology is at home. You’ve got a whole new generation of people who were raised with technology right in their hands. And they see the rejection of the latest-generation technology as an affront to their personal wellbeing.

So if CEOs or CIOs say something like, “Well, we like technology but we really want to slow the pace of how this is getting into our organization,” what these kids out of college and into their early 30s are thinking is, “I thought this would be a fun place to work. It’s much more fun for me to be at home. I should go home and I should innovate.” You end up with people on the ground doing all the hard work, trying to understand how to best manipulate the environment, turning their passion toward going home and being creative there instead of creative for you.

I could imagine thinking, “okay, I have to figure out how not say no all the time to the cool, new stuff that’s happening out there.” Is that your recommendation?

You have to say no in a very gentle way. You can say no in a way that makes a person want to try harder or to find a way to yes. “It’s not that I disagree with you; it’s that you haven’t made your case yet, try harder.” That’s a good no. Or, “I don’t understand how something like Twitter would benefit my IT environment. You need to tell me that.” What you’re doing is encouraging the passion of the people, and I’m big on passion. That’s what everybody wants out of their motivated workforce.

Younger people do have a sort of constancy of contact as well. Do you think that presents another opportunity?

Definitely. It used to be you didn’t share information with your classmates or your friends. The word for it back then was “cheating.”

But I spend a lot of time with high school students, and everything they do is done collaboratively, socially. They’re all working together in groups.

We all talk about teamwork inside of the corporate walls, but for those of us who are older, we are used to being given our individual projects that you kind of roll up into a team task to achieve success. Get a bunch of kids together for a robotics challenge and just watch the really cool things that happen. See the way they operate, how they really accomplish a global task.

That’s the workforce that is coming in and they’re going to go change the way that IT innovates. The way that the younger workforce was educated, the way that they were trained and the way they want to come into the workforce is working in a collaborative fashion. And they’re doing it in ways that those of us who were trained along the individual lines just don’t understand.

It’s not that we need to change their habits. We need to recognize that they’re doing the right thing. We need to change our habits as a result. We’re going to get results much greater, much faster, with a tremendous amount more passion than we would have gotten otherwise.

What other kinds of broad changes in the business environment stick out as things executives need to understand because of how they’ll affect thinking about information?

Let me hit another aspect of the workforce. I’ve mentioned the change in the personality and the social collaboration in the First World workforce. The other piece is the outsourcing of IT to developing nations.

We’ve taken advantage of the fact that many nations are training their employees to really be able to respond in an outsourced fashion. But the arbitrage that we used to see between the salaries is definitely equalizing. A developing world workforce really isn’t the cost savings that many people thought it was — in fact, that was probably a relatively short-sighted approach. We tried to adapt a different culture.

What we’ve missed in all of that is the wonder of multiple cultures. I view the opportunity less as outsourcing of a specific job to a specific culture: I see it more as localizing for cultural excellence. And I really see a localization of competency becoming the new globalization for IT. That’s something that we’re going to need to understand better as we look at the competencies we’ve established by putting teams all over the world in these larger companies.

Can you give a concrete example of how certain kinds of work might be best suited in certain kinds of places?

You know, I don’t want to make too many cultural assumptions one way or the other.

But don’t you have to, though?

Well, it’s more that you want to focus on the level of training. So, if you look at the workforce in India, it’s highly technical. The education they’re getting is far superior in many ways to most of the developing nations in terms of true engineering training, true IT training.

That is a great place, then, to be able to drive strong IT process or process management. If I want to create a workflow of, say, my customer support, I want to make sure that that is as clean as possible, establishing a workflow, all the charts, all the feedback, all the tracking systems.

But if I want to change the way that customer support is done, I’m going to need some cowboy who might not fit in the customer support role, and give them a little freedom to go innovate around that. That work is going to create my next generation of process. And that might be found somewhere else.

I want to switch gears and talk about data. One of the things we hear most often has to do with the data flood. Not only is there more data already inside companies than executives know what to do with, but there’s more coming because of instrumentation’s increasing presence—the proliferation of “smart” technology. What do you say to somebody who says, “I’ve got all this stuff, this data, but I don’t know what to do with it.”

The easiest way to miss the value of water is to be a fish. Okay, let me expound on that. The general value that most IT organizations place on data is that they can effectively store it and recall it when they need it. There’s a lot of focus on enterprise storage and making sure that repository is safe.

But what about the whole mining aspect of it? The value of data is that you can look at it. Companies have data on products and how they’ve been developed and all the methodologies that were used. They’ve got data on all the schedules for successful products, and maybe some of the schedules for the unsuccessful ones, too.

The opportunity is to look at it. Not necessarily to assign someone to look and give us results, because I guarantee you are going to get very predictable results with that route. Instead, with certain protections, make data available. Let people look at it, come to conclusions about it, share their conclusions.

This takes a big habitual change in management. You have to do it in such a way that even when you don’t want to hear a certain conclusion, you still encourage people to look and find answers that could change the way the company operates.

That’s what’s going to create the success. Encouraging people to be passionate about what they want to be passionate about. There are plenty of data hounds in any organization. Information will rise to the top, as long as you’re not standing there with your foot, waiting to kick anybody off.

Is the sheer quantity of data going to create opportunities that we don’t currently have today?

Well, the huge pace of change of technology is going to force us all onto a wave that we’re going to have to surf. Occasionally we’re going to fall in, but the point is not to drown.

There’s got to be some recognition that you’ll never understand all of it, and all the methodologies you put into trying to understand it are probably going to be useless a year or two down the line as you get two to three orders of magnitude of more data to parse.

So it’s crucial not only to being willing to go look at the data and adapt to the data, but to be able to adapt your methodologies for looking at it as well.

So, again, let people look at it. They’ll find that path.