What follows is an excerpt from an interview with Isaac Cheifetz and Jim Wilt on the Chief Architect Forum Podcast. The men were interviewed by Brice Ominski, global chief technology officer at DeepDive World. The full interview can be heard here.
Isaac Cheifetz has over 20 years of experience consulting with advanced technology businesses on executive search, organizational design, and strategy. He is a frequent speaker and writer on topics related to Information Technology, Organizational Change, and Job Creation.
Jim Wilt is a technology executive focused on innovations in aerospace, manufacturing, health, fintech, and retail, just to name a few. More recvently, he focuses his time on generative AI, augmented software, and platform modernization through engineering empowerment on cloud-native platforms leveraging automated code generation.
Question: One of the most important topics I would like to discuss with you is about how we relate to our executive team? What skills do I need as a chief architect to relate to my team? Is it just technical skills, or are there some soft skills I need?
Isaac Cheifetz: Forty to fifty years ago, Peter Drucker, who was essentially the father of management consulting, wrote something that Is relevant to my answer here.
He once said that the trend going forward over the decades with IT would be that slowly the “I” would come to take precedence over the “T” while the first generation or two, the “T” was inextricably more important than the “I”, just because the platforms had not yet become stable and consolidated.
Question: What does that mean for for an aspiring executive that wants a seat at the table, who is coming from a digital background?
Isaac Cheifetz: One thing I’ve observed for a long time now is that pretty much every executive who has come over from the technology side has made a proactive decision to do it and had then filled in the competencies, as well as approached it from a position of deep curiosity. So I think that’s really the beginning platform is that you want to get to that point and that you are curious and not fearful about what you need to add to your competency wheel to get there.
Jim Wilt: On this point, I want to quote something CEO Jim Farley said, too. Asking the question generically is good and we could look at it from the 80s, 90s, 2000s. But today, 2024, we’ve got to look at it completely different as well. While we want us architects to speak the C-Suite language, which is necessary, Jim Farley said something recently that’s making the C-Suite look back at technology.
Basically he said that we’re not a car company anymore. We’re a software company that happens to make cars. I think that’s pretty true today of most any company. They need to be a software company first to compete today and they need to use that as part of whatever their business model is. Now, having said that, a technologist wants to talk about technology and why, “Oh, I’m so good. I want to be a software company, too.” We kind of have to hold back on that. We have to understand that that’s a necessity that we have to have a conversation about with the executives. But we need to take all the technology knapsack knowledge we have and put it behind the curtain and hide it from the executives. And why I say that is we only need to speak enough technology to understand where it fits in the business model and the business sense of things, or we’re going to wrap them around the axle of confusion with all the technological terms, hype, reactiveness and things like that. And so I’m just kind of throwing that out there as a way of looking at when we want to encourage that business sense, we need to encourage the business sense with an urgency of technology that exists today. But that pendulum can swing too far on the technology side.
The full interview can be heard at the following link: https://lnkd.in/dBd6VPMx
