George Trujillo is an independent digital strategist and practitioner who helps organizations with digital initiatives and transformations. He uses a values-based approach to leadership, focusing on building shared vision, data culture, and inspired teams. For the last 12 years, he has architected or led data monetization and digital initiatives. Before that, he was CEO of a professional services and technical training company for 12 years. He is a published author, a contributor to CIO magazine, and an internationally recognized speaker at CIO, CTO, Oracle, VMware, and Gartner conferences.
Host: Richard Lowe | Guest: George Trujillo
Conversation Transcript
Richard: Introduce yourself and tell me about your approach to digital transformation.
George: I’m an independent digital strategist and practitioner. I focus on working with organizations to help them with their digital initiatives and transformations. One of the things I really believe in is using a values-based approach as a leader. It’s important when you’re building a team to have a shared vision and a core common set of values that everybody’s aligned with. That alignment and transparency builds inspired teams. Whenever I look at organizations that have incredible digital transformations, they all seem to be very human-centric and focused on inspiring their teams.
What Values-Based Leadership Looks Like
Richard: What do you mean by values-oriented? Give me a for-instance.
George: Whatever we do in life, a lot of the decisions we make are based on our core values and morals. So when you can have your team aligned on core values, you can empower them to make more decisions because they understand what those values are.
For example, with my directs, they see that I’m invested in their careers and their personal development. All my actions should reflect that. They see that I really am focused on their growth. And I expect them to pass that on to the teams they lead. That’s the core value of caring about your team members.
I spend a lot of time talking to executives, CIOs, and CTOs. You never get very far in a conversation with a C-suite leader when they don’t talk about culture and people. Another executive told me something that stayed with me: your people will always want to know how much you care before they want to know how much you know.
Data Flows Horizontally, Not Vertically
George: From my perspective, the projects I’ve led have been very data and AI focused. How do we modernize our data strategy, what is the data culture you’re building, what does data literacy mean in your organization, how are you achieving data governance and data quality. It doesn’t matter how much data you have if people can’t discover and find the data, and once they find it, can they understand it?
One of the key factors I see impacting companies is that for 12 years or more, whenever there is a very vertical siloed effect, it has massive impacts on the business. The more you work on a horizontal perspective, the more you can create impact across an organization.
Data is not vertical, even though we think of it that way. Data flows from all kinds of sources, moves through ingestion, resides in databases, flows into data marts and warehouses, then gets integrated and aggregated. If you look at data as a value supply chain throughout the entire organization, the more you have strong vertical silos, the more you inhibit the healthy growth of that data ecosystem.
Richard: That’s exactly what a company I worked with found. Their silos were regional, and reporting totals didn’t add up because each region reported differently. Once they centralized through digital transformation, it all matched.
George: What really brought this home for me was working as a global architect and strategist. I’d talk to directors and see green, everything’s great. Talk to VPs and it’s orange. Talk to the C-suite and it’s red. Same organization, three different levels of success. At the project level, they’re looking vertically. The higher you go, the more they’re looking horizontally.
When I spoke to business leaders and asked about their challenges, the more they described their issues, the more it came back to an unhealthy data ecosystem where data was being stopped in different silos. Then I had a role where all data reported to my office, and I saw clearly that it’s how data flows through the ecosystem that determines the speed companies can execute, and the data quality. The healthy ecosystem wins, not just picking a technology or building out a silo.
Strategy Drift
George: Some advice I got years ago stayed with me: an organization cannot move faster than they’re comfortable moving toward. You’ve got to get people’s buy-in, educate them, spend time with them, and let them see the business advantage.
When I see dysfunction, I see strategy drift. You might have a strategic initiative, but downstream teams can change that strategy by saying they don’t have enough resources, they have to pick the old technology, or they’re not ready for the complexity. Little by little, they bank decisions that start impacting the overall strategy. I see that consistently in companies having challenges, and I don’t see it in organizations being successful.
At the VP level, one thing I consistently hear when I ask about main challenges is a lack of shared vision and distributed thinking. Getting away from vertical silos is extremely difficult and requires tremendous effort. But how do you have an organizational business transformation without addressing that successfully?
Culture Before Technology
Richard: It becomes a cultural transformation as well as a business transformation. You have to transform the culture before you can transform the business. Technology actually comes last. You’re more concerned about making your business resilient for the future than about getting a great new system.
George: The more you study digital transformation and look for where there’s been incredible success, you see that really successful leaders who lead massive transformations always talk about building education and culture in waves and phases. You can’t do it all at once. And you have to constantly feed and nurture the culture you’re trying to build. I can’t think of an exception of a really successful digital transformation that didn’t use that approach.
Richard: At Trader Joe’s, we were successful because we focused on very small pieces at once. Supply chain, warehousing, merchandising, one at a time. When we expanded too fast, staff became overwhelmed. But when we focused on just the supply chain or part of it, the transformation became much easier.
George: And going back and measuring whether people are able to work at the speed you’re trying to get them to. If they’re not, how are you filling those gaps? Another successful pattern is finding the balance of bringing in new talent while doing tremendous reskilling of existing resources and getting their buy-in. Sometimes you’ve got the new and the old at conflict. Finding projects that integrate them together and get them rowing in the same boat starts creating impacts. That’s leadership looking for all those dynamics of change within the culture and the values that drive it.
Richard: You have to remember that organizational knowledge. If people leave, you’ve lost it. Someone who’s been there 20 years and knows everything, losing them or having them disengaged makes it very difficult. But integrating them and making them part of the team can be very useful during and after a transformation.
George: Think of the positive impact when long-time employees who understand the business and have the common sense that external technology experts won’t have, when they see that the organization is investing in them and saying they’re an important part of the journey. How does that uplift everybody and create positive momentum?
The AI Opportunity
George: I’ve been tracking digital transformation success rates for the last three years. In 2019, success rates were single digits. By 2023, up to the mid-20s. Everybody seems to be ignoring the difficulties. If only 22% are succeeding, why are we going to be different?
Now we’re in the world of generative AI, and once again everybody’s rushing to the shiny new toy with technology decisions leading the way and the business as bystanders. But I see companies getting really tangible, impactful results from generative AI. I believe it’s real and here to stay.
I wrote a CIO magazine article where I highlighted an example: say you want to build a deck for your backyard. Instead of doing dozens of separate searches, you go to a retailer’s AI application and say, “I want to build a deck, here’s my address, here’s the size, give me a low-cost, medium, and bells-and-whistles solution.” With a vector database and proper context built around their products, generative AI can tell you the materials you need, drying times for finishes, local contractors for cement, and permits required for your location. It completely redefines the customer experience.
People going to ChatGPT and seeing hallucinations aren’t seeing how organizations are building vector databases and intelligence and context into their generative AI capabilities. I’m really looking forward to this upcoming holiday season to see what companies are leading in transforming the customer experience.
Trust and Transparency
George: It’s important to have transparency and honesty. Just say, here’s where we’re at today, here’s where we want to go, and create realistic expectations. I’m fine if you don’t have all the bells and whistles now. Just let me know what you do have and what I can trust.
A lot of generative AI is real-time. When you make real-time decisions, you can’t take them back. Whether you’re deciding to close a manufacturing plant, call an ambulance, or issue a warning, you need to be accurate. If people don’t have trust, and then you make it better later, it’s going to take tremendous effort to get that trust back.
The Case for a Chief Digital Officer
George: I’ve become a key advocate for Chief Digital Officers. They have to come in with a horizontal view and understand the business perspective. That type of view can eliminate so many mistakes of the past where we led with technology first. It doesn’t have to be the Chief Digital Officer specifically, but somebody has to have that horizontal view and not lead with technology first.
One inspiring story: a Chief Digital Officer said that on day one, it was absolutely critical to get alignment and sponsorship with other C-suite leaders. Human resources put together training to help the organization learn the new culture and values. The CIO, the CSO, the CFO, they were all supporting it. Just by the phone call, I could see why it was really successful.
Richard: None of these roles work without support from the CEO and the board. If it’s not built into the goals and objectives, anybody can legitimately say, “I don’t see this in my goals for the year.”
George: When you look at digital transformations, look at it from a business transformation. How is technology going to enable that business transformation? If you could just take that one piece of advice, it will help you stay on the yellow brick road.
Learn more about George Trujillo on LinkedIn.
Find Richard Lowe at TheWritingKing.com.