How to Navigate Digital Change: Tech Expert’s Guide to Future Proofing Your Business

Hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Chats with Jason. I am, of course, your host, Jason Esprature, and this is the show that helps you transform the experience to transform your business. Now, today I share with you a conversation I had with Dr. Alex Huberlein. He's currently the president of NETSERT in the US and he joins us with over 30, 30 years of experience in the IT industry. He's worked in senior positions across companies like IBM, HP, Oracle and others. And today he's leading the US division of Netsura, which is a digital transformation consultancy. So during the chat, we really deep dive into some of his key insights on how you can leverage digital technologies, digital disruptions, if you will, to help transform the experience to transform your business. So without further ado, let's jump in to my chat with Alex Huberlein. Today. Our guest comes to us with a wealth of senior leadership experience in the IT industry, helping businesses really prepare themselves to weather any storm that comes their way and continue to grow, no matter the challenges ahead of them. But that's only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to his experience. Alex, thanks for joining us on the show.

Thanks for having me, Jason. This is great.

I really appreciate it. Now, Alex, I alluded to you having over 30 years of experience in the IT industry. Do you want to share with our listeners today some of your background?

Yeah, absolutely. So I've been doing this for close to 35 years now. Started out very much on the technical side, so I wrote software for 20, 25 years. I got a little bit bored doing that though, and then I kind of pivoted over to the business side. So I've worked for a lot of big companies as well as startups and everything in between. So it's been quite a journey. But I kind of made that pivot sort of mid career and said, you know, I'd really love to be able to take this technology and figure out how we can take it into more businesses, how we can use information technology to help our customers become more productive, to increase their level of adaptability. So it's been a great journey over the last couple three decades.

Yeah, working with companies like IBM, hp, Oracle and Red Hat, certainly the who's who of technology. I'm sure given your background, you would have seen significant disruption in the industry and some huge, monumental flops when it comes to technology. And of course, some really great pioneering changes in the industry. Today. Our topic is future proofing your business strategies for resilience. Thinking about that topic, the first thing that comes to mind to me, Alex, is why do you think so many businesses fall behind when it comes from a technology point of view? Because I've found it doesn't matter whether it's a small business with, you know, only a couple of employees, or I can remember walking into one large corporate role that I had, and their IT landscape was, I think Noah's Ark had better technology. Why do companies let it fall behind?

You know, I think there's a couple of reasons for it, right? One is, for companies that have been around for a while, one of the challenges they run into is that they've adopted technology over many, many years. And if you go into some of these bigger companies, they've got one of everything, right? They were like, oh, this is the great new technology. We're going to go implement this. We're going to try it out. And so they've ended up in a situation where many of them have so many different and divergent technologies that it's very, very hard to change those, right? It's very hard to keep pace with those things. And I always tell people, when it comes to things like adaptability and innovation, complexity is your real enemy. If your environment is so complex that it's been around since the Noah's Ark days, and a lot of companies that that's actually the case these days, it's very hard to take that technology and change it as you go forward. It's harder to adopt those things. So I think that's one of the big reasons. There's an old joke about this. You know, some people say that the Lord may have created the heavens and the earth in. In seven days, but he didn't have to deal with legacy systems, right? So when you're doing it from scratch, it's easy. When you're a startup, it's a lot easier. Being a startup has its own set of challenges, but for a lot of organizations, just the amount of complexity they've built up over the years makes it very difficult for them to adapt and change, because these systems were never designed to change. They were never designed to be adaptable. And a lot of companies take shortcuts. They'll look at something and they'll say, we're going to go implement this. And the IT guys will be like, okay, great, this is going to be fantastic. And then they'll say, hey, but here's your budget to do this. And IT guys will come back and say, if they spent a little more, we could make this much more future proof. And the. And the CFO says, no, no, no, no, look, here's all the money you have. And so they kind of dig themselves into a little bit of a hole. If they plan for the future and they design systems to be adaptable and be more flexible, then they've got the opportunity to make those changes at a much, much lower cost and much more rapidly in the future. But a lot of times people look at the bottom line, look, here's the money. We've got to be able to do this. How do we do it at the lowest cost? And they're not thinking about 10 years from now or five years from now, we're going to have to change this technology, we're going to have to change these business processes so they don't design them with a lot of adaptability and flexibility built into them.

I think another trap that I've seen at least, is that a lot of organizations go, well, we just need to start with doing what our old system did and so they don't realize any benefits. And then of course the CFO is going to be saying, well, we just spent all this money to get the same egg at the end of the day, so why should we invest? Talking to leaders out there who are perhaps the decision maker around making that investment, or, you know, as member of the C suite, canvassing the CFO for that investment to be approved, is there any hints or tips that you have for them around how to position the conversation so they don't fall into the trap of underinvesting upfront and do build in that adaptability?

When I have to deal with CFOs, I mean, there's two things they care about, right? They care about return on investment and they care about total cost of ownership. And it's really the latter, Right. A lot of people get very focused on what's my return on investment, what's my payback period of a particular process or system or technology that I'm going to put into place? They get really laser focused on that. And too many times people try to focus on that when they're trying to sell this into the C Suite. They'll talk about roi, they'll talk about, oh, look, the payback period on this is only nine months. What they don't talk a lot about is total cost of ownership. And if you look at most systems and most processes you put in place into a business, it's the long tail economics that get you right. That's where 80, 90% of the cost is. It's not in that upfront implementation. It's in that total cost of ownership. So you've got to speak that language, right? You got to learn that term TCO and really hammer the TCO part just as much as you're going to emphasize the return on investment in the payback period. And I think that's something that not enough people do when they're looking at these investments and understanding how big that long tail is. Because it's hard to see out in the future. It's hard to say, is this system really going to be around 20 years from now. We still have mainframe systems out there, right. That run credit card transactions and run automated teller machines and things like that. So a lot of this technology tends to live on long, long, much longer than people realized it was going to or thought it was going to initially. So looking at that long tail economics is really important.

Yeah, I think we've got really good at working out ways to continue to connect to the mainframe system with new systems as opposed to dealing with the legacy system. Thinking about that hint around total cost of ownership. When I was in procurement, I worked as a director in procurement for a period of time. One thing that I always tried, not always successfully, but always tried to do, was bake in unlimited usage or very high usage caps. So that when you were having those conversations around total cost of ownership, the CFO couldn't turn around and say, well, okay, we put on one extra employee and suddenly the bill's gone from a million to 2 million. So anyone listening? If you're not in the sales side of the software business, they're trying to make sure that you've got yourself a lot of bandwidth when it comes to usage, especially today, that most technologies are sitting obviously as a software, as a service. Now, when it comes to future proofing your business being resilient against the change. I think it's easy for people to say that this is the worst time or the best time to be in business. Right? There's always clear view on either side. But the reality is whatever the time is, it is the time and there's going to be change. Change in leadership, in politics, a change in the economy, change in consumer behavior that's going to impact your business. So we've talked about some of the issues around not preparing for that adaptability. What can an organization to do if they have got a pile of legacy systems or they're locked into a four year contract on a solution that just doesn't suit them anymore? What's the best way to navigate that? Is it just shove it in the corner and buy something new, or how do you think people should navigate those challenges?

I think one of the underlying assumptions there is that procuring technology going forward is about buying systems, or it's about buying these SaaS applications or monolithic applications or what have you. What we're starting to see in the industry is a big change there. We're starting to see people look at this much more from a process standpoint as opposed to a system standpoint. And I think that's absolutely critical because you're right. You'll see a lot of people go in and say, oh, we're going to implement this big ERP system or this CRM system or what have you. They spend a ton of money on it and then they realize, wow, we're actually not getting what we thought we were going to get out of it. So I think there's a couple of things you can do there. One of them is really to make sure you've got a very, very iterative strategy where you're actually trying things out, you're piloting them, you're doing proof of concepts, you're iterating through these things as you're evaluating them and even as you're implementing them. Right. Not go big bang on these things. So I agree with you. Yeah, being able to negotiate really, really high usage caps is great, but it's only great if you know you've made the right decision. Right. Getting to that point where you know you've made the right decision is absolutely critical. So putting these things through their paces and not looking at them as systems, but looking at them as enablers to a larger set of business processes and starting with the processes as opposed to starting with the systems, that's really, really important. So the second thing that I see is that a lot of people will go out and try to implement things and they want to take these systems and adapt them to their processes. And sometimes it's actually easier to make some modifications to your processes, to adapt them to systems way of thinking as well as. So it's a tricky calculus you have to get into there. You want your processes to work in a way that's going to be the most efficient, the most productive for your business and supports your customers and the products you're selling out in the marketplace as well as you possibly can. But sometimes you have to say, you know what? This is actually good enough and we'll be able to save a tremendous amount of money by maybe making some tweaks to our processes as opposed to trying to shoehorn Every system into the process way of thinking. It kind of cuts both ways, but I think that's very, very important. And having this very iterative, very dynamic strategy where you can go in and you can take multiple technologies, put them together to achieve your needs, as opposed to trying to buy a complete platform. I think these sort of monolithic platforms are on their way out. And our ability to develop much more bespoke systems using technologies that are emerging. If you look at what's happening in the artificial intelligence and generative AI world, our ability to create custom applications, custom processes, custom automations for those processes, that the cost of doing that and the difficulty of doing that is being reduced every single day. And we've seen this out in the marketplace. We've seen what's starting to happen with software development. I think that trend is just going to continue and accelerate over the next few years.

Yeah, some really, really good points there. I love the idea of testing and trialing, piloting concepts early because as opposed to the big bang approach, so many organizations think the big bang approach is the way to go. And then the bang happens and you go, oh, that's not quite the bang I was thinking. Yeah. And all of a sudden your 12 months or two years of steerco meetings become nightmare meetings as you're trying to rescue the project. But the other thing that I took out of what you were just saying to us was it's about starting with the end in mind, having a really clear vision around what you are trying to achieve, and then finding the software solution or the technology solution to help you enable that vision. As opposed to. Well, I just. Everyone needs an erp. I'm a big company, I need an erp. Let's go. Let's go and buy an erp.

Buy the best one.

You know, there are some brands out there, I won't mention them, but you know, there are some software innovators out there that have, over the last five or so years, grown significantly through acquisition, and now they have a million different products that they bolt into their cloud. And it's still a cumbersome experience because people are just then going, oh, well, they can do it all. I'll buy it all. But not realizing that there's actually different technologies designed to do different things. And you've got to start with that end in mind. So that's really great. Now it seems like I can't do an episode of this show recently without someone talking about AI and all the different elements of it. So, you know, you are the tech guy. So was Bound to happen. Two questions based on what you said. First question should be fairly simple and I hope that we're aligned on the response. But the first question is, we'll see. Is AI going to just cut my workforce and allow me to automate everything? And the second question, because you might want to answer them together, is AI truly that panacea that's going to transform the efficiency of my business?

I think a lot of people look at it and say it's going to eliminate a lot of jobs, it's going to make people so productive that they're not going to need most of the people that they, they have in their workforce today. And look, I think in some industries that's probably true, but I have a much more optimistic view of it. I don't think that we're going to get to artificial intelligence that can fully replace most knowledge workers anytime soon. But I do think we're on the cusp of having AI technology that can make their lives a lot easier, that can make them much more productive and free them up to actually go do things that only humans can do. So I view AI as something that is really about getting rid of a lot of the process, a lot of the repetitive things that need to happen on a day to day basis, taking those out of the equation. You still need to have some human oversight of it though. These things don't always give you 100% correct answers. In fact, we tell people, we tell our customers, hey, look, don't pick a use case where you need a 100.00% correct answer because you're not going to get one. But if we can come up with solutions that are 90% good enough and that's okay, then that's a great use case for artificial intelligence. So I think part of it is picking the right use cases. And that's not a science at this point. As much as I'd love to go tell prospects and customers, I don't know, it's completely a science. We've got it all worked out. We all know it's not true. Right? It's still a bit of an art form to pick the right use cases for artificial intelligence and then go implement those, the solutions that if it's 90% accurate or 90% good enough, that's fine. I'll have the humans do the other 10%. Guess what? I freed up 90% of that person's time in doing that. So I think a lot of it is about choosing the right use cases. I don't think AI is going to Come in and replace everyone. I don't think it's going to be a panacea, but I do see the massive exponential growth of the capabilities that we're seeing right now in AI. When we talk to prospects and customers alike, there's maybe one in a hundred that get it, that can actually see what's happening in the technology space around AI. Most of them, they're like, yeah, you know, I've used ChatGPT and it's really, really cool. And you know, I can parse through documents and I can ask it questions and things like that. They're only seeing the tip of the iceberg of what's possible. So I'm a big believer in using artificial intelligence to enhance people's capabilities, to free them up, to focus on the things that are uniquely human, to focus them on the creative pursuits. And I don't mean creative just in terms of art or things like that, but being very good at what they do and bringing innovation into their business. That's what you want your people doing, right? You want them servicing your customers, you want them building relationships, you want them innovating, you want them coming up with new ideas for products and services. Not, oh, I've got to go process these 300 invoices and I've got to do it manually. Taking that out of the way frees up people to do what people do best.

Yeah, some great insights there. One of the co founders of Duolingo actually reinforces your message. In an interview recently, he was saying that of course they use AI in their business. They would be crazy not to use AI, just like you mentioned, you know, to take away some of those repetitive tasks that is simple for the machine to get right and with the right checks and balances, even 90% accurate is good enough. But he reinforced that there's tasks that Duolingo uses to be completed by AI, but then they have the final check done by a human because it's so important to their brand and their culture that those elements deserve that additional attention. I also love the comment around improving how people work. Having someone in an accounts team, it's an easy example. Manually inputting invoices to be paid is not an effective use of their time. Having them interrogate those invoices, look for patterns is much more beneficial to the company. Making sure things are paid late or overpaid or underpaid. You know, all those sorts of things are much more beneficial than sitting there keying in paper invoice. So great there. And I think AI really allows us to Spark curiosity, You know, go back five years, someone presents you with a report or a system generates your report. And it was difficult to say what if this scenario had changed, where with using AI tools, you would know better than me. You can give it 50 what if scenarios and, and then run into the problem of information overload. But it's that curiosity that it unlocks that I think is a enabler for businesses. So great take there on AI. Where do you see technology going in the next 24 months when it comes to enabling business success?

A couple of big trends that are happening, and I think AI is actually at the heart of a lot of these trends. So kind of going back to the. The idea of this episode. How do you future proof your company? How do you make your company more adaptable and more resilient? And one of the neat things about AI, when you think about one of the things that makes us uniquely human, is that we're unbelievably adaptable. We are the most adaptable things that we've ever seen in nature. We come across problems we've never seen before, and we can work out how to solve those problems. We can create things completely out of nowhere, just thoughts in our head that we turn into reality. So I think if you think about one of the. One of the characteristics that has propelled us as a species over the last couple hundred thousand years, it's not that we're the biggest, it's not that we're the strongest, it's not that we're the fastest. It's that we were the most adaptable species on Earth, and we continue to be. So I think one of the neat things about artificial intelligence and machine learning is that it brings a lot of that adaptability to the table. Before, if I wanted to implement this business process or I wanted to do this within my business, I had to go hire an army of programmers. They had to work for weeks or months to build this stuff and write all the source code for it. And then six months later, I want to change that thing. Ah, now I've got to go employ that army of people to go change it and test it and so on and so forth. So one of the neat things about generative AI in particular is that it's very adaptable. If I change this one thing, it's much, much better at adapting than any of the technologies that we've seen in the past. So I think having that notion that AI isn't just here to automate things, it isn't just here to do some things for Us, but it actually enables us as a business to become more adaptable and more flexible and more resilient as an organization capitalizing on that and using that. When I can make a change in an hour versus making a change to these systems, that takes me a month to go make the change and then a month to test and then a month to get it out into production. If I can do that in hours now with similar results, well, now I've got something that is very, very difficult for my competitors to emulate. Right. You know, business is all about competition. At the end of the day, you're always looking to get a leg up on your competition. And I'm a firm believer that flexibility and adaptability, it's very hard to implement. It's very hard to do, but it's very hard to copy. It's very, very difficult for your competitors to do the same thing. So if you can move faster than they can, and you can move with more flexibility and adaptability than your competitors, then you've got a sustainable competitive advantage, at least for some period of time. And I think, well, that's what every business is looking for, is how do I get a leg up on my competition.

Yeah, it was just keeping that in mind when you're building out solutions for today's problems. Right. How can I build in that flexibility or that adaptability so that if I do need to pivot, if I do need to move, I can do so quickly? Anyone that's followed my work knows that. I believe strongly that the experience of our customers and our employees is ultimate to long term business growth and success. How do you find technology? What do you think the one thing technology is going to do in 2025 to help improve either the customer or the employee experience?

Well, I think you can improve both. And I think the trick is using it in the right way. We've seen people try to automate customer experiences with technology with artificial intelligence, and a lot of that has not gone particularly well, if we're honest. Right. One of the key things to me is how do I free up time from my people? But to go have those very rich interactions with my customers, Right. How do I free them up from all of the things that they're doing today that aren't high value added activities? How do I free them up to actually have those deeper conversations and build those deeper relationships with my customers? That's what I think customers want to see. At least in most of the industries that I've worked in, they want to know that they have a connection with people, they have a connection with the companies that they're buying products and services from. So I think on one hand, you can use technology and you can actually create a wall between you and your customers if you're not careful. But if you use it right, you can free up people to focus in on. How do I build those deeper customer relationships? How do I work more closely with my customers? How do I get them to view me as a strategic partner, not just a vendor? That's the holy grail. I think for a lot of companies out there. The problem is a lot of them look at this and just say, well, we can just cut a bunch of costs here. And it's like, that's great, but take some of those savings and invest those in working very closely with your customers and building those richer experiences. So I think we can use technology to do both.

Yeah, having technology enable an efficient use of the process, policy adherence, and freeing up the human to be human, be connected with the person in front of them, whether it be in person or virtually, so that they can actually deliver an experience. I think that's a great takeaway. So as we look to wrap up today, I really hope that you, our listener, has got some really great ideas out of today's conversation. But it would be remiss of me to let Alex go without one last question. So, Alex, what is the one thing you think someone who has watched the show today or perhaps is listening to it, should start or stop doing as soon as they've listened to this episode?

I think the one thing that I encourage everyone to do is to take adaptability and flexibility and make that a key initiative within your organization. Not just as an add on, not just as an afterthought, not just as a, oh, you know, yeah, we should probably make this process more adaptable a little bit, or this system, or make that something that's front and center for your business. Because, look, we're going through unprecedented change now. Every generation says that every new technology comes out, oh, it's unprecedented, and we've never seen anything like it. But I think we are in that situation where we are going through an era that over the next three to five years, we're probably going to see more change, not just in technology, but in the way we do business than we've seen in the last 20 or 30 years. And so if you're not designing adaptability into your culture, into your systems, into your processes and your interactions, if you're not making adaptability a key performance indicator and a key initiative within your business, you're probably going to fail because someone else will. One of your competitors will do that. They'll be able to out compete you by moving faster and moving more flexibly. And then in the end of the day, if you don't adapt, you really will perish as an organization. And we will see more companies go out of business in the next five years than we saw go out of business in the last 20 years. So to me, it's not just a nice to have. It's not just something that, oh yeah, we should be a bit more adaptable. It's an existential threat to most organizations. And so you can decide you're going to meet that threat head on by designing adaptability. And again, it starts with your culture. It starts with your people and then that permeates through the rest of your systems and your processes and your interactions with your customers. If you don't make that one of your top priorities as an organization, you probably won't have an organization in five years.

Yeah, great, great. Call out. Embrace adaptability. Encourage your business in every aspect, whether from culture to the way you deploy systems and how you respond to challenges with adaptability. Alex, you've been a fantastic guest on the show. I really appreciate you sharing your insights and your time with us today.

Jason, thank you so much for the time. Really had a good time here.

Thanks so much. Appreciate it.