Corporation Service Company (CSC) is a company in the midst of a transformation. As a worldwide leader for business, legal, and financial services, they’ve helped simplify the way corporations are formed, operated, and maintained compliance. However, to remain a leader in their field, CSC needed to push their organization to innovate and bring new applications to the market faster. Realizing that the current technology platform they used would not allow them to move as fast as they wanted, it was time to make a change.

In this latest “IT Visionaries”, CSC’s John McKenney, Leader of the Solution Strategy Group & Innovation, within the Corporate Legal Services (CLS) division, shares how creativity and technology drive innovation, his secret to working with business stakeholders, and why businesses shouldn’t underestimate the culture change when moving to cloud.

1. What is the most misunderstood or inaccurate perception people have about being an Architect of Solutions?

I think most people think that I’m involved in the very technical design of things here. With my title, it would seem that I’m heavily involved in defining things like data models, but that’s not true. I’m more of an idea guy, a vision guy. I help my stakeholders figure out what the market is looking for and guide them towards innovation. It helps that I was a consultant for most of my professional career. I’m more of an inventor, which is what I don’t think a lot of people realize about the job — that I drive the notion of what our products are going to be and how hands-on I am in that process.

2. How has thinking and working creatively helped you in your role at CSC as an innovator?

It's a perfect fit for me. I'm kind of unique in that aspect — I'm not a techie and not so into technology as much as others. It doesn't really play a large part in my personal life. I don't have a lot of gadgets, and I'm more of creative guy by nature. I'm a published author, I've made a few films, I've sold two screenplays, so tech is not really part of my ingrained self. But I love to create things, so I found myself coming to this company because I spent so much time in technology and contributing to projects, but not really being involved in the future of products. I've always been involved in the product development side of the house in my career, but never had an official opportunity to do it before, so I'm really enjoying this.

3. I imagine that conveying the value of a product or process to your stakeholders and execution teams can be challenging. How do you build trust with them?

Yes, it took some building to gain trust in changes, App Cloud, everything. I formed a team and brought in Service Cloud to help transform the operations of the business, and that earned a lot of credibility. People start believing in you when you can deliver a game-changer like that, and they start having faith in the process, but I had to really push to change the thinking and get around the unfamiliar. I could be difficult on people, pushed back and asked ‘why’, and challenged them to use Salesforce the way that it comes out-of-the-box, rather than customizing it back to something people were used to. So that’s how you get the trust, and how I keep it and leverage the trust to push things forward in my approach to innovation. I feel that it’s innovation that’s blazing the path for all these things we're doing on App Cloud.

I also feel that most people associate with imagery and not words. Because it’s hard to have a common language, I usually whiteboard with my guys here, and we draw out what I’m thinking about and get right to prototyping. So we don’t code, or do anything but use a prototyping tool; essentially, we create a demo experience, but behind the scenes. It’s a bunch of static pictures and text, but it gets people closer to understanding what I’m trying to achieve and that’s how we’re able to get on the same page, build trust, and drive things forward—it’s because everyone can also visualize the project.

4. What’s the secret to working with both developers and business stakeholders?

I think you have to approach it from different perspectives. You can’t bring the same idea, same presentation to one group or another. I can speak more technically with the developers, and give them as much feedback and flexibility as they want so they can influence my design. With stakeholders, I approach it a little differently. It may sound a little strange, but I purposefully put some ‘easter eggs’ in my designs that I know will stick out, grab the stakeholder’s attention, and get them engaged. It activates them and they become a part of the project; I’m not just the technical guy telling them what to do. It's a real seat at the table. You have to have a different strategy for different type of people, but it all comes to the same end. It’s up to me to tie those two tracts together and advocate for the plan.

5. Tell us about how CSC managed business before Salesforce?

CSC is very good at making smart business acquisitions, but when you acquire companies, you have to go through the technical side of the acquisition, consolidate systems, and normalize things. That’s a tough, time-consuming thing for most companies to do. So we have 2-3 of almost everything from ERPs, to customer masters, and more. Systems and processes aren’t streamlined. For instance, our Customer Service Representatives (CSR) required three monitors and relied on 15+ applications to effectively service our clients. These apps spanned messaging systems, terminal emulators for Order Entry, jurisdictional information and so on. These CSRs could really only support customers in a reactive manner. We really needed to transform our technology platform both for our internal applications, and for the software we provide to clients to remain a market leader for corporate legal services.. But it was a struggle to deliver new products to the market fast because we had so many siloed teams working on their own projects and supporting internal applications. If we were going to keep ahead of the competition, we needed to do things differently; we needed to go 10x faster.

6. And did it work? What kind of changes have you seen since adopting our platform and App Cloud?

It definitely enabled us to move faster. We didn’t want to throw more people at the equation to go fast, we wanted a platform that would enable us to incubate ideas and transition to development in rapid succession. So with App Cloud, we were able to keep the same amount of people and overhead, but we’re able to do so much more and really move quickly. Everyone feels that we’ve achieved that. We’re very excited about a recent App Cloud venture. When our Market Manager approached me about innovating on an old market capability of filing to the SEC, we decided to have our Innovation team build a functional prototype to test the speed and viability of building it on the App Cloud. We built a new capability into one of our core SaaS applications which is a hybrid solution that is connected to our very traditional Java stack. It was terrific to be able to break down siloes and form a joint team to work on the project, leveraging a knowledgeable team experienced in building a top product, with agile building tools. In a short time frame, both the App Cloud team and the Java dev teams were able to come together to collaborate during our sprints. It was amazing; like going from nothing, to almost completely built in three weeks. It really drove home that what makes developers great is their ability to solve problems regardless of the toolkit. That team had a year and a half estimation to deliver this project, and with everyone’s help, we delivered it in 3 months, and are very proud of it. From idea to inception, prototype to development, end to end we were able to get this big new feature out to the market in under 5 months. I am proud to say that we launched this in March.

7. Do you have advice for other companies looking to build apps on cloud platform?

Don't underestimate the culture change; the change management aspect of the process. When you start off and say, “we’re going to move to cloud and do all these great things,” don’t underestimate how it will make your developers and technical people feel at first. You have to be sensitive and not just convey a, “suck it up, here’s what we’re doing now,” kind of attitude. Many of your employees are concerned about their viability within their career, and making big changes like that can be very emotional. Companies rarely factor in employees being a roadblock to success, but it happens. It’s worth it to take some time and get your employees to buy into the idea. When you pick a tool, don’t be afraid that you’ve made this investment and you’re not getting an immediate gain. It takes some time to adjust because it’s a complete culture change. It’s the culture of the person, but also the development lifecycle; everything is different. My suggestion would be to have a 4-6 month ramp-up plan included when you develop in the cloud and add that to your value proposition. It’s not so much about training, but the investment in culture change. Bake that into your plan and get comfortable with it.

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