The Workgrid Podcast | Balancing the Needs of IT and the Business ft. Dante Ragazzo, Tapestry

welcome back to the work grid I'm your host Rob Ryan in today's episode we dive deep into the world of digital workplaces with none other than Dante Razo Dante is a seasoned expert with over 25 years experience deploying and managing digital workplace solutions for Global Brands he spent the last decade leading digital workplace initiatives at tapestry the parent company of the names such as coach Kate Spade and Stuart whitesman whether at home or in the office Dante is prepar perpetually engage in fixing teaching and learning something new today Dante and I will explore that crucial relationship between it and business units and the indispensable need for robust digital workplace strategy as well how emerging Technologies like AI are reshaping our work environments we also tackle the issue of digital friction and discuss practical ways to enhance productivity and collaboration across platforms so grab your notebook and let's get ready to unlock some invaluable insights with Dante Razo right here on the work grid hey Dante welcome to the show um before we jump in and get started uh I think it'd be great for our listeners to get a bit learn a little bit about yourself and kind of some of the work you've been doing over the last few years morning Rob morning Frank great to be here thanks so much I really do appreciate it um so my name is Dante Razo I am uh let's see I'm a husband I'm a father of three I have three kids uh two girls and a boy um my wife and I have been married going on 26 years and uh we are very much looking forward to becoming empd nesters we're not there yet we got a few years to go but uh a man can dream and uh so that's really who I am dayto day um professionally I am the senior director of digital workplace at tapestry um and some of your listeners may not know who tapestry is but they've probably heard of our brand so we're the parent company of Coach Kate Spade and Stuart whitesman Brands so luxury retail is the market that we're in um love those Brands very proud working there and I've been there over 12 years actually awesome excellent yeah could you share a little bit about your journey into the digital workplace realm kind of what inspired you to really focus in on that Junction of Technology strategy communic a etc sure so uh my education is in Communications I am a proud Scarlet KN went to ruter for undergraduate and graduate and I went to their school of communication so I have a master's in communication and information studies um and we studied at that time actually the library school was part of the it was actually the school of communication information and Library studies at that time and so we studied systems before there were you know things like Netflix like before Netflix existed we were toying with Concepts like tagging and like how do you categorize things oh very cool came out and began a career in what I would call traditional Communications you know so I was writing messages and um and after a couple of years you know that wasn't really what I loved doing but it was it seemed to me like it was maybe the path that I had going forward and then I was sitting in a meeting one day and our VP uh had a communication said you know I've heard about this thing called blogging and I'm just curious if uh any of you have heard of that and I was like I raised my hand I was like I I've heard of it I don't know much about it but I'll look into it and that was kind of the beginning I started looking into what blogs were reporting up to her what they were and then very shortly after that we the company I was with at the time said they were deploying a new internet system that they were calling an enterprise portal and they were toying with this concept of Employee Self-Service where we were going to manage our own content and we were like whoa what and so I was sort of the natural fit as the person who should learn about that understand how it worked excuse me and and that's really what happened I began just digging into it and what I'll say is I think very quickly it spoke to me very quickly I thought gosh I am engaged in this I think about this stuff all the time I'm going home and I'm talking to my wife about this or that like it was clearly really speaking to me in some way and um I've more or less kept my career connected to the technology side of the communications team ever since um and for me I'm a natural what I say a natural tinkerer you know so here at home and at work I I see things whether it's a whether it's a physical thing or it's a toy I want to understand how does it work why does it work and that's just sort of a natural fire that I have inside of myself and so it just seems to work well with working with communication professionals whose needs I understand and at the same time almost seeing just this natural gap between them and the technology that they need to that they need to do their jobs and my experience very early was the the communicators I'm working with really struggle to understand what I'm how I'm trying to show them how to do these things and so it became clear to me that there as technology becomes more ubiquitous there's a real opportunity here to be the person on the team who understands communication and how communicators think but also understands the technology and can bridge that Gap and early on in my career it was very often just being in conversations and even today actually that's some of sometimes I'm just in conversations and it's they're literally like Dante I just like you to hear because it is going to tell me things and I may not know what they're talking about or other things that it relates to and you know I'm able to play that sort of translator role very often and so do you find yourself flipping flipping sides and being you know Cals amb bastard over to it yes yes 100% um yes I do in fact I've often compared this to I don't know if this is Politically Incorrect or not but I think about you know stories of when as the frontier of the United States was opening and you had people venturing out into the space that was inhabited by Native Americans and stories of people being ingratiated into Native American tribes mhm and then in some cases becoming diplomats between the two you know and I sort of see myself as playing that role it's like I'm often mistaken for it you know people often think talking me that I might take I'll be completely honest with you Dante the first time I saw you present I thought you were it yeah yeah exactly exactly what do you what do you think the state of the relationship between it and comms is in 2024 I'm asking to put your Diplomat hide on right now yeah I mean I think look I'm seeing a greater um proficiency I'm seeing enhanced proficiency of tools and Technology particularly from new employees as they come on board and they've been maybe their you know dare I say of a younger generation you knowes exactly so technology is part of their lives yeah just what it is right um and so the benefit of it is that they're not afraid of it and so they jump right in and they want to understand how it works um I think we struggle because now we're sort of getting into everything but my experience is that again in my experience it tends to be methodical they want to lay out a plan and they want right up front what is this tool going to look like what is it going to do for me sure so give me all the requirements and the the business teams just do not understand how to give requirements you know they really don't you need somebody on the technology side who can just have a conversation walk me through your day show me what you do oh why are you doing it this way like why are you in what systems do you use and you need someone who can understand why the business operates a certain way and not try to tell them to change how they operate which is very traditional it MH but at the same time on the business side you need somebody who you know can keep things in a way that the person on the technology side can sort of just keep it all together and I mean I'm sure you guys have been in requirement conversations and the business person is just like all over the place yeah and you're like well okay but we're not going to solve every problem for you with this solution you know we can Pro solve these problems well and but it would also if it could do this and you're like okay we're not getting anywhere because we just keep like there's a point for for envisioning but then at a certain point you got to say okay SC creep right you know yeah so I I think that that Communications people today respect it and they they appreciate the value that it brings to them I think Beyond comms I just think the businesses in general people in the business side generally don't know how to talk to it um and you could you could flip that too and you could say it just they don't understand how to hear the business you know it's literally like people who speak different languages you know I mean I I'll give you an example if you ask someone and by the way it also it sounds like I'm beating up it but the fact is I love it and it's just like I I I feel almost like I I need to I feel the need to protect them from themselves sometimes because they're well-meaning they're problem solvers so when you call them if you're an executive and you call and you get somebody at the service desing you have a problem well whoever that gets to if it's somebody within the it space they're going to desperately try and solve that problem for you right now they're not necessarily thinking about what are the longer term implications of this solution for you am I am I giving you a link to something that's going to be only good for like two days am I giving you a link to something that's only good for the two of us am I going to put a link on a thing on the website that's going to be outdated in two weeks and I'm never going to come back and check it right you ask somebody in it how do you improve search and they say oh well what's your doc you want people to find you know whatever it's it's doc one two3 and they'll say oh well why don't you start it with a AA and then the name of the document because in their minds by starting with 3 a you're gonna show up right at the top of the stch the old yellow page strategy for a towing company yeah voting yeah ex think we might have to explain that for the Millennials down in the uh in the show notes later on but yeah what are the yellow pages so you know again like it means well and they're trying to solve problems where they get themselves in trouble is they solve a problem but in the very short term and very often they're not thinking about scalability of a solution you know the global accessibility of a solution or whatever the different dimensions may be um and so having somebody on the business side who can say to the to both to say the person on the business okay look this is a temporary solution and longterm I'm going to write up for you the challenges that are involved in what you're trying to do or why this is not just a this is not a simple fix and the business loves to oversimplify everything right because it's like here I'm beating up on it but the truth of the matter is the business is like I mean it is the ultimate scapegoat they're just like the EAS skapegoat it's a black box I put stuff in it I don't know why we got out garbage you know and then and then when you're trying to figure out well who do we blame it's just so easy to say well they didn't build it right this is a partnership you know blame it blame the technology it's everyone else's fault yeah you hear that's a common pattern it's why most internets get ripped out after about 6 years because we blame the technology and we didn't put enough people strategy governance Etc in place and but all of those things that you're talking about temporary solutions sprawl you know building something that single task purpos I mean honestly that that you know that leads right into digital friction and the um and the sprawl of you know what the the topic of the moment is you know uh that that I think we rob that's what we originally met Dante uh under the opes of right yeah it was about a year ago what we have we had back-to-back presentations I believe and uh you you got up there spoke about digital friction it mirrored basically the the Preamble my presentation we could have we honestly could have collaborated together it was it was it was funny um so so to that you know rise of AI app sprawl Etc in the business like you you bring you bring a good argument in conversation to the table which is you know kind of what what are you seeing out there in inside organizations in your conversations with other digital workplace leaders in apps sprs happening businesses are driving for more spot solutions to try to solve for all those needs that you're saying and it on one side of the fence having to manage all that Tech ACC crewing Tech debt Etc like do you think businesses really appreciate the threat of digital friction is it a threat Etc so I absolutely think it's a threat um and no I don't think that businesses appreciate it I think more data is coming out now that's quantifying what the cost is and I think that's helpful um just within the last couple years Harvard Business Review came out with a study and they said that most employees the average corporate employee spends eight minutes per day toggling between applications they lose eight minutes per day right I did the math and you know at 40 hours a week comes out to about 200 hours a year I mean that's five weeks a time that's significant just all tabbing back and forth ping pong and yeah exactly and you know think about how often you're tabbing and you're like no no that's not the one I want and the break in your concentration I I I don't want to give a number because I can't recall the exact numbers of the study but there's another study it's enormous right right the amount of time it takes you to get back into flow when you've broken your flow easy it is to break your flow okay you guys know yeah it's it's funny I actually had the author on um a few podcasts ago actually it'll probably have dropped by the time uh this one drops but Gloria Mark um of UC Irvine her book's attention span fantastic book um but just like years of research and data points on exactly that of your what happens to your cognition and your attention when it's constantly fragmented and disrupted throughout time and you know I don't think there's a real appreciation of that because we've kind of been that frog or Lobster in The Boiling Pot over with all the technology that we have you know at our disposal but you you know I'm curious Dante let's say you make that case um all true I think even it knows it even the business knows it can you make that case internally because if inevitably it says well we should never contact switch it does eventually lead to this idea that you have a single pane of glass you don't have more than one Tab and it's a single everything app on your desktop MH one I want to know if you've tried to push that and then two how did you do when you tried it because yeah I'm that that all those things are true but has the you know has the horse left the barn and we are now going to be contact switching because stuff isn't going to be in workday and stuff's going to be in SharePoint and stuff's going to be in service now and stuff's going to be in Salesforce and stuff's going to be main Confluence and I can keep naming apps um is is is that is the context which just the reality we're going to deal with to a certain degree I I think it is at least in the short term but I mean maybe I should say the short to medium term having said that you know today the way things move so quickly what feels to me in my old age you know as my in my uh Generation X body is like uh oh this could take you we're looking at 20 years before we get to that it could be much shorter than that with I mean things just go shorter having said that um I I think context switching is going to be part of it until we actually get to the point where we're like talking to Jarvis one of the causes I think for Contex switching and I have no data to back this up this is purely anecdotal and based on my experience okay but what I've seen is this the technology is not the problem the backup data like the the core data is the problem you know cleaning and keeping core data accurate is a hard and unglamorous thing but like the foundation of your home it bleeds up and it will it will scre screw you if you don't take care of it right and what I see and I know in my experience as I'm toggling is why am I toggling from this to that well I start a thought on a thing but then I need to insert a link from another site and I go to that and now I'm in the process of trying to find that link and so I'm looking for the link and how hard it is to find that link and then um or maybe I'm trying to execute a transaction for somebody one of my employees and I get to a point where I go to choose the vendor and the vendor isn't in the drop down list I'm like okay so I'm trying to execute a process I can't because this the choice I have to make isn't here so I do one of two things either I pause and I now I have to go about the process of figuring out how do I add this vendor name to this list or I pick something wrong just to get through going through the process I mean what do you think most managers who are too busy they they just pick something else right I mean that's probably not a great example but at the same time I think it's it's broad enough we can all relate to like that's the type of thing that we' we've done ourselves even in filling out a form we just got I'll get to it in eight weeks later I haven't gotten to it exactly right and so as a result later on somewhere down the line they're running a report on your vendor and all of a sudden your employee isn't showing up in that vendor report and so these things snowball when you have thousands of people all managing core system data I I don't know how you get around that so I think until we can get to a place where AI is facilitating at the most basic level to where you're filling out that form and it says what's wrong and you say there my vendor isn't in this oh hang on I'll do that for you or hang on we need to do this fill out this form to do that but I'll remind you in a day to come back and fill this out correctly like okay okay maybe then people will start doing things the way that they need to so you're saying like offload it to Jarvis who's standing over your shoulder or floating over your shoulder case of Jarvis and I don't see any other way to get out from it I mean we we use teams we have zoom we have Microsoft 365 which is you know a whole bunch of different applications in and of itself and and you know doing everything through one interface might sound great but but then when you get it that's got its own frustrations you know I mean teams is supposed to be that and personally I don't like the fact that it's all everything in one place I'm in the middle of a chat and then a thing comes in and I have to leave the chat to get through and I know can pop out the chat but it's a pain in the ass like I want my chat totally separate from teams at all times personally and somebody else might like it all together in one place my point is simply it's it's going to be a balancing act because everything through one interface I don't think in the end is gonna I don't think that's what you're driving for on a on a day-to-day basis you know when we set aside the8 minutes a day you're spending contact switching do you think you work all day and teams or do you go back and forth between teams and chrome something on your desktop yeah I go back and forth teams and chrome and Outlook yeah and and other Microsoft apps you know I'm in PowerPoint a lot okay so you got a lot of apps yeah yeah yeah and I don't I don't know yet what the solution is to where you know again when you have so many different people I'm not sure other than what we've done which is create a governance committee to basically be a filter for any newcoming apps I don't know how you keep a handle on it keep that sprawl from happening and I think you also need a real strong backbone to push back on people who want to create a who want to install an app for themselves or for their team want to start using an app that is very close to something you've already had but they're losing a little bit of capability and be able to push back on them and simply say it's not worth that capability I'm sorry and that's a hard thing to do and whose job is that exactly the person to say no you yeah right yeah you know difficult exactly it's it's difficult and and so maybe this sort of brings this full circle a little bit Rob to to I think this is part of your origal original question which is you know it's the state of things and do do businesses appreciate the cost of digital friction and I think the answer right now is is the reason I said no is all the things we've talked about yeah and and I also think that one one of the reasons it's not that one of the reasons it's hard is because the people who make the decisions are shielded from the pain of everyday life for most employees and I I mean that with peace and love but I'm talking about Executives of course you know if you're an executive you're very unlikely to be the person executing the transaction in your HR System you're very unlikely to be the person in your procurement system it's the people who report to you and so it's very easy to dismiss the frustration and it's not that you don't hear it and that you don't want to do something about it and I'm not even saying that I'm not even saying that that that I don't understand why hard decisions have to be made I I completely get that but I've never seen action taken on systems as quickly as when you see an executive forced to go through it for themselves and then all of a sudden it's like this is unbelievable how could we be doing this to people this is been for years you know it's like well you've never had to go through it I I mean there's no nice way to say it and and don't get me wrong we have fantastic Executives who are very interested in understanding like what the employees experiences are and St like it's not that that's but I just think as a general rule you have a whole group of people who tend to be treated differently and as a result they're shielded from challenges like this and I'm sure a whole bunch of other challenges across the business so contributes to it yeah right that's human if if you don't actually Walk In Those Shoes you don't walk that path you don't feel what it's like you can appreciate it from afar there's there's air quotes there but you don't really get to see what potential pain people are going through on a daytoday basis and grind yeah exactly exactly that's why Undercover Boss is so popular so what are what are vendors missing then because we touched upon this like 365 tries to be the the end all be all from your day you're just going to stuff everything into 365 and you don't need any other tool and that's not the case like it does not fulfill those needs so what are even spot vendors or you know large collaboration vendors for the digital workplace what are what are they missing that you think they could do a better job in for me I think the thing that we need more than anything is flexibility both in what features you can turn on and not turn on and integrate ability okay and and and the latter portion of that the integratability component to me needs to be much more self-service for the business and less it required the less it is required the easier the business if you have somebody in the right you know in that role the easier the business can do for themselves and it can focus on making sure the lights stay on and all the things that it is really pressed to focus on on a on a day-to-day basis um you know I think that self-service capability the ability to just do things for ourselves would would just go so far you get feedback from users you want to make changes the process of going back when you have to rely on it to make changes process of going back and forth is is exhausting it's exhausting and then of course it also then includes money because when you get it involved they have to explain their time which I understand so the more that vendors could make it so that once you deploy a system somebody on the business can do anything and that would include things like okay let's add a window that integrates a transaction from workday or success factors or something like that you know the more we can get in that direction the the happier I think the business and customers will be um and then I I also skipped over very quickly but flexibility in turning things on and off right one of the challenges we have is every new tool that people want to deploy has chat functionality has a social space has your own profile and it's like you're all trying to outdo one another in the same thing and it's it's like I can't deploy this application because of all the extra garbage it comes with you know how does the how does the extra AI come with affect both the roll out your governance and all that stuff because all those tools are probably having AI sprinkled in AI right now ai wash are you are you are you are you fine in that and how's that how are you dealing with that with you run a pretty tight structure H yeah okay thanks well I mean relatively speaking Yeah Yeah so um we are we're in a space right now where everything AI is under review so we're not deploying anything we haven't deployed anything incl including say co-pilot um I don't think that's a problem to share that U that's just the reality where we are so all the applications that we're talking to right now one of the things that has been like we have to be conscious of is can you turn off your AI component until we can review it and make sure that it's acceptable and so we haven't had any issue so far where somebody can't turn that off which is a good thing um but we are like we have barely dipped our toes in the water in terms of actually deploying AI in any way I expect co-pilot will be the the first Big Splash into that space you're doing it on you're doing it on the external side I'm assuming I'm assuming the CMO and the marketing team are are are are are doing some AI but when you say you haven't deployed any it's probably not coming on the internal side internally you very cautious okay that's right yeah I can only speak internally I can't speak speak to anything they do as far as from a marketing perspective I'm sure you're right so from your Viewpoint AI got to be rolled out internally it's it's going to happen are you operating from the point of view that you want to measure twice cut once and come up with a policy and then this is what we're going to do or are you wor looking at it and going this is dangerous we're not sure how this what how this can affect are you viewing it looking at it and seeing there's opportunity here we should take advantage of it or are you looking at it right now saying there's risk here right now we've got to be we've got to approach approach cautiously I I think it's a bit of both um from our perspective we are very excited like we're not a fear we're not fearful as a comm's team um there is a small sandbox an AI space that that has been made available within the company uh for different teams to basically just to play around with and we got access to that and we've been talking you know my my senior leader is really Forward Thinking and so she's very much like yeah we need to understand how to use these things to do our jobs so she's very very much for it or at least for you know for understanding it and and potentially leveraging it um I think that we tend to just be cautious for one thing our IP is is really we have to be very careful about that so the biggest risk for us is somebody takes something about a design or something and they load it in into some AI program and now it's available you know in the cloud that's yeah I mean that's like the worst case scenario fear and so our security teams want to just vet all these things very thoroughly they want to understand exactly where the data goes and everything related to that which is where which is why we've been slow with co-pilot for example but we're all for once once we have the uh clearance um from security perspective we're going to Jump Right In we want to understand that as a comms team from from a Content creation perspective and from my perspective I'm really interested in it in terms of helping usability and helping us improve I'm sorry not usability well usability too but findability you know I would really love to see what it can do to help so that when employees are looking for a document if they're not looking for it by the right name that the technology will start to figure out or in the right place works yeah exactly but the technology will be able to say oh no are you looking for this because most people when they're asking about that are looking for this and I would hope that the AI could help us do that we're all for it yeah we've seen that we've seen that pattern of organizations that are they're being methodical in their approach to AI standing up governance committees testing trialing doing poc's whatnot um and I think the the caution is good it's good that it's being very much thought in its approach of understanding what our strategy should be and how we should deploy and on the vendor side you do see that AI wash happening where we're going to bolt AI onto it and then hopefully that'll raise our value prop up but if everyone does that well that'll lead to AI friction and then who knows what ends up happening to our information and the the friction we're already seeing day in and day out um one of the questions I I had for you Dante because I had uh I saw naturally some LinkedIn posts about this and I was curious to get into it because it ends up being a conversation we end up having with a lot of folks who happen to be digital workplace leaders which is the question who should own the internet is it the business is it it know there's some friction there that happens there what's your perspective on that because I wasn't able to actually attend and see that presentation but uh very curious um how it went sure um so yeah my presentation is entitled who owns the digital workplace no I'm sorry it does not own the digital workplace Chang my mind um and uh a lot of it is is um you know framed in some of the things we've talked about before in terms of who is it who is the business and this analogy I make between chip and Joanna gains if you've ever seen the show fixer upper um you know chip and Joanna gains chip gains is the he's the husband and he fixes all the stuff around the house and he makes sure everything is working and Joanna is The Decorator she makes sure everything looks beautiful you know and I like that analogy because it is very good at keeping the lights on doing the major construction making sure things function breaking connections when connections are broken things like that but choosing your throw pillows is just not typically something that I would want you know it to do uh metaphorically speaking right um and so the it's sort of tongue and cheek and it's like it's really done with love I have a whole I I heart I teeth you know slide that I show because relating to what I was saying earlier I really do love it and so often I find myself I'm I'm you know on a personal level I build relationships with these people they're not they're such good people they're problem solvers and so often I I can just feel like they it's almost like they can't defend themselves like they don't know how to defend defend themselves I hate phrasing it that way because it shouldn't be a defense you know the chip and Joanna gains analogy works because it's also a marriage it's a partnership and so part of it is understanding you're not against one another your partners um but from my perspective when we talk about ownership there's a couple different elements right and I I believe part of the reason that in the examples where it is owning the digital workplace or feels they should own the digital workplace I'm of the opinion that it's because well we hear the word digital and then we assume that that means it's got to be it but the digital workplace from my view is not a techn like it's not a technological thing it's it's an ecosystem you know it's it's your experience it's actually a very people- centered thing and so you know we go back to what I was saying before about the business loves to blame it we also like to believe our own delusions and so it's like technology is going to be a silver bullet it's going to solve this problem it's like no it isn't and we have to we have to understand that the technology is not going to solve every problem and so I believe it should be the business you know we talk about ownership the business should be setting the vision for how are we going to use these tools what does the environment look like the internet is a Cornerstone to your digital workplace um understanding who you know knowing the application making sure that the application gets all the data that it needs all the Integrations are correct that's all it part so it owns that portion of it but how it should be laid out where you should go for different information how some of that information should be presented to you from my perspective that should be coming from the business now there's always going to be people on the it side of the house who have a knack for that type of thing I would argue that if you really do have an knack for that thing maybe you should be on the business side and you can speak and work very well with it and then I'll I'll I'll I'll I'll at least close this portion with this the push back that I get you know very often is is from well-meaning well-intended wellth thought through people on the it side you know and they're passionate and they hear me saying I want to take their baby away I'm saying it's it's not how I'm how I see it um what I see unfortunately is when times get lean it gets pressed to do exactly what they're tasked with doing and everything experience business analysis all that stuff becomes less important it gets deprioritized and when things are really lean that's where Cuts get made because it it it that to me those are the moments where it is acknowledging themselves this is not our core function it's just like if you do something that's experiential in nature when it is really pressed I can almost guarantee you you're the one going and they look they then that's when they look to the business and if the business needs this function then they should hire somebody to do it and to me that speaks volumes because you know when when you're pressed you see what your priorities are you know and and that's not a knock on it that is what it Priority should be like to me that's correct that's appropriate but the business should be responsible for setting the vision and being able to talk to it and work with it to construct the experience that they want and my feeling is like that's not a that's not a skill that has existed in previous generations it's a relatively new skill so anyway I sort of went around a little bit there Rob I I think I did answer your question and then a little more you did you did actually you you it's it's funny as you started describing it towards the end there I I began to think about it's almost like a ship right through Times Are Good The Umbrellas are out so on the you know the the chairs and whatnot but as times get rough guess what the the engineers got to go down to the boiler room they got to batten down the hatches they got to make sure and all the window dressing and all that well that's that's going to be left yeah it goes right right off the ship right exactly exactly and and that's the stuff that makes all the difference when you're an employee you're trying to get something done you know it's that 20% you know these Solutions give you like 80% of what you need but that 20% Gap is maybe you can get it down to 10 if you're really good maybe you can get it down to five I don't know how good you have I mean Disney does some amazing stuff like when you're a guest there like they they've done some amazing stuff system wise but generally speaking in most corporate settings most budgets if you can get 80% of the way like you've done a lot so I've been advocating for this human layer to fill in the difference and that that sort of was the is the next step in my case around like who should own the digital workplace it's who do we need in place to actually make a digital workplace that is worth bragging about so of digital workplace leaders right yeah which and and what I've seen and this is kind of what spurred that whole presentation is that term is being kind of w't say appropriated but but sort of Taken and applied to things that to me are they exist today it's like I see digital workplace titles on LinkedIn and then you look at the job description and it's like this isn't like this is an application management per this is somebody managing the service desk this is a clear it role and they're just calling it digital workplace I I can't blame them necessarily but to me that's not that's not the same thing yeah that's a good point is that the the name it's self digital workplace leader hasn't matured to the point where it's universally understood as to its perit its role its strategy its point of view and you know let's say if you're a vendor and you're looking for a digital workplace leaders well then you have to kind of go in and understand what what what really do you do oh to your point you manage a service support desk like that no that's not a digital workplace leader that's not someone highing the organization looking across the tech tech tech stack the business requirements the business needs the strategy what are also our business objectives and really being that that Anchor Point and that connective tissue between the two and regrettably so for most organizations is they don't necessarily have a true digital workplace leader who is you know being able to span both sides between the business it lead strategy and have that seat at the table um I'm not sure why it hasn't necessarily caught on because we have been talking about it for for years you see it happen with many organizations where they they start to stand up a strategy and a governance plan that assists the business what advice would you give to organizations that are looking to do such to do better and maybe even you know second question here if someone is a digital workplace leader such as yourself how to begin to raise their profile or build better Bridges between the business and it um so that's a great question I think one of the first things I would do if you're in the role if you've got if you've established that role in some way we could talk about how you do that too but that's a whole yeah it's a whole conversation but um I would start with some form of governance so start to build a committee of some kind and I hate to say build a committee but a small group of people most of whom will be from it um and maybe that's it it might just be you and people from it but getting together on some sort of a regular basis and reviewing from the guy on the lowest level I hate to say like lowest level poll but the guy who's getting the lowest level feedback to be on that call as well and then he can bring oh well this team they want to deploy this application this team asked me if they could have this or that or the other and just begin having the conversations um if you get the right people or a couple of the right people you'll realize after one or two meetings the other right people who need to be in the call M um you'll probably get a little bit of head scratching up front of like what is it we're doing like what is I don't even understand what we're talking about here sure and yet you'll fill every meeting because as soon as you start talking it's well this and and all of a sudden everybody's kind of like I sort of know what we're get what we're doing here but I can't describe it okay um so that to me is something very concrete that you can do where you start to provide immediate some immediate value and also demonstrate and communicate to your colleagues you know what it is that you're trying to do the direction you're trying to take this now from that the challenge may be well who makes the decision I mean let's say we hear about an application we might say we don't think this is a good idea like who says no well you might find that you just by asking that question you're again like you you're forcing up these questions that people then have to provide an answer back to you and the more you can do that and highlight to them like that these are gaps that's how you slowly start to paint the picture that hey this is something that we actually do need to pay some attention to um it's if look if you're looking for Fame and Fortune it's the wrong path for you because it's not uh glamorous you know it's a lot of it's a lot of explaining it's a lot of re-explaining it's a lot of um frankly course correcting you know I mean the amount of things that come through that are attempting to duplicate something we're already doing yeah you know it's but at the same time you know you start to make you start to connect dots and people will start to come to you in advance once they get a couple of those you know they get a couple of those experiences and then you can build some credibility so that to me is a very concrete way of starting um if you have the right contacts and you can get at least an initial conversation going I would I would start there um the other thing I would say and and I don't know that this is really what you asked Rob but I would for me this is evolving now even beyond the digital workplace to be digital employee experience and so you know I'm just I'm just seeing that as sort of being the maybe the next the next iteration of what it is that I do and so if digital workplace gets sort of commandeered from a technology perspective employee experience is not now digital employee experience is sort of something new so how does that all fit together that's a whole new set of conversations but from my perspective I'm trying to broaden things a bit in that way so that it allows me to involve myself in certain conversations that are Beyond just regulating what technology we have in the space it's it's also about that experience that people may come across apps and things like that so um I don't think that that's directly answering your question Rob but feel it just felt related to me so I'm throwing it in so so from your perspective Dante because I I like your take if I let me let me let me recap what I think I just heard um there is a digital workplace leader which is an ambiguous term right now which could mean all the things we've talked about in terms of comms and internets but it could also mean keeping the lights on and what you really where this really go is a digital employee experience leader which is really more about what is the environment I am working in on a day-to-day basis and that's here and that's is that a peer relationship in your view is that a want back and forth these rotating you know is this Harry Met Sally or is this the War of the Worlds it's a great question I I don't know honestly I don't know that I thought it through that far I mean I'm not sure that you if the digital workplace becomes an IT role where you're talking about application management okay if you if you take it out of what we've been talking about well then it becomes more of a peer partnership role that should be an it a role in it if that's how we're defining it in my opinion if it's actually more experiential then I'm not sure it isn't the same thing you know it it may to me just be a better name for the same work in which case you don't necessarily need a digital workplace leader you might have a internet manager and then you might have somebody managing say your collaboration tools or something perhaps what's the metric they're trying to drive up right like so for the uh keep the lights on one it's the lights are on everything's running all my readouts are 5 by five in the world of a digital workplace experience leader MH what there Northstar so in all likelihood it is going to be something like your regular Employee Engagement survey it's going to track Employee Engagement and within that survey you're going to have some level some you're gonna have a few questions related to Communications and so I would say that this person should be correlating to communication goals so do I know what's going on across the company do I feel well informed there's a correlation there whether you can get experiential questions within that survey so much the better so you can ask employees like are you proud to work here is it easy to do your job on a day-to-day basis okay another thing that might be worth doing and we've we did this last year and actually I think we're going to do another one would be a communication survey and now you're asking very specific pointed questions do you know what tools we have here are they is it easy to work with them are you overwhelmed by applications like questions that can very directly ask for feedback from employees but I think that's only part of it I also think that now I'm sorry Frank I'll just finish this point then I'll um there's also technologies that can allow you to see the real behavior of employees and that to me is the other side of this that you want to know so what are you saying how do you feel there's that portion and that's kind of in place and exists today what I'm starting to see now is technologies that are able to spit back for you for example what percentage of um of posts in teams include an at mention right and you can set a target for that you can say okay we know that the more people at mention the more likely they are to draw engagement so maybe we set a Target if 10 if it's 10% now maybe we say we want to figure out ways to educate people on how to use these tools one of our goals and then at the end of the year we can I mean over the course of the year we can continue to track are we seeing at mentions go up are we seeing use of question marks go up in chats are we seeing an increase in chats are we seeing a decrease in emails for example if that is one of your goals so metrics that can check real Behavior are becoming better and better and so I think that's actually going to make it easier for us to do our jobs than it's ever been because it's so hard to quantify the value that we can be adding but if you can demonstrate more uh knowledgeable usage of Technologies to me that's a really valuable metric and I've seen some texts that do that some some tools that do that now I'm sorry I cut you off no no no no no no I'm glad you went there because what you're really saying is you're looking for proof that it's actually a great and easy place to work with and that the tools are there so where I was going to go was do you believe that you know this experienced leader should ultimately roll up to or be tracking retention and I am guessing that retention sits there but honestly if the tools are easy to work with it's kind of their job like that the tools are there you know how to use them they're engaging and they're easy at that point becomes a company's larger role to retain or do view retention as part of that overall mission I mean I think it's part of it um I think it's but but I don't think it's a big part of it you know I mean being frustrated by your tools at work sure that can be frustrating it might make it just a little easier e to leave yeah um knowing that you won have to deal with this headache but I don't think I don't think anything has taken um overtaken having a poor manager or just not liking the company is the reason people leave I heard this I heard this said in Dallas a couple weeks ago you know your your your your digital experience is your manager your manager is your digital experience If your manager is great your digital experience will be you know if your manager is awful it doesn't matter what your digital experience is right right yeah yeah yeah yeah so yeah man yeah I mean I I would love to see experience as part of you know again it's this is what makes these soft things relatively soft things so hard to measure because sentiment and how people feel about a given thing is all you can do is take them at how they say it other than and you can track their behaviors but um things like retention things like recruitment you know if you have a great place to work so for example one of the things a lot of these tools now do is they allow for employee advocacy so you can take an article from your internal internet and you can share it to your personal social media Network and say hey check out how awesome the place I work at it's some article that talks about you know whatever program you're doing that is really cool you know seeing from people and being able to facilitate that from an internal platform when I saw that capability I was like wow okay so now we have there sort of a ret it wouldn't be the retention but what attraction right the recruitment component what can we do to like can we see for example an increase in our subscriptions in glass door in subscriptions in LinkedIn and in our um well I mean our our Instagram presences for our brands are massive so I'm not going to expect to move the needle on those but you can see my point like um there's just opportunity there to move the needle in in new and creative ways too which I just think is awesome and and that's a data point of Engagement as well because if you're an organization that is engaged I'm more likely to share that content to my social network as opposed to if I'm a disengaged employee you can pretty much guarantee that isn't going to happen they're not going to be going out there promoting and being a strong Advocate and Champion for the brand and the product they're probably spending their time thinking about ways of getting out as opposed to promotion and that can be a nice measure in accordance to emps that I'm sure there's some correlation between the two that's a great point I had even thought about that that's a great Point you're absolutely right I used to sell a social advocacy product a few years back so yeah no that's great yeah yeah absolutely yeah one of those data points you know looking ahead um Dante into the future right we talked a bit about AI but what what emerging Technologies Trends do you see that you know should be top of- mind for digital workplace leaders we talked a bit around metrics we talked a bit around governance strategy AI but what do you think around the corner or even potentially some some threats to the digital workplace that perhaps we haven't discussed I I mean I think the technologies that are really focused on like I said before simplifying simplifying Administration to enable more self-service from the from the business owners and less from it I think is huge um more and more applications I'm seeing I love the house analogy for the internet right the internet is a house and more and more require less and less of the it teams to come into the house more and more of it is they just they connect your electrical they connect your plumbing and everything internal to the house you're you're able to manage yourself as the administrator so I think I think that that's those are steps in the right direction um because it teams are pressed there's all sorts of reasons that we already talked about why it's hard for them if you have to engage it to make changes to your platform it's just makes every change a big lift um and then the other thing I think is being able to reach employees you know regardless of the application that they're looking at I mean when we first talked and I was I saw work grid and I saw how work grid works I was like okay these guys are on something like you're just in the browser and it doesn't matter what internet I have it doesn't matter what HR System I have and I know this is going to sound like the portion you paid me to plug but it just it really isn't like this is this is really what we are going to send you some socks at some point [Laughter] soon um but the fact that you're just you're in my browser and so now if I have a task from any application out there I don't need to figure out a way to create a page on my internet create a link that sends you there or like it's just going to meet me where I am every day and the more that the technology can do that the better um I I have to assume that someone is out there building what amounts to like a desktop app that functions in that way and if they're not that would be an interesting idea because even opening my browser you know at this point is one more thing that I've got to do as opposed to Simply having an interface that's on my desktop at all times that's like oh you still need to do this this this and these tasks are all coming from different applications and I don't have to fix all those applications in order to bring it all to me in one place it's interesting Dante you're you are now dating yourself because you are that uh that desktop user you know your your kids are your your kids are probably uh I don't understand why I have to use a device that won't fit in one hand and uh and someplace in between there the people who just uh open up the computer and just use it to fire up a browser and have don't really know what the operating system underneath it does fair enough guilty is charged yeah we appreciate the shout out and um we've got it we we definitely are well we're working on some stuff we'll leave good that's good but you bring up a you bring up a really good point which is the the ubiquitous nature of what would be a Humane technology right that's always been our point of view and I'm not trying to you know use use this to to sell our services or or or products or or whatnot but it's the it's a Humane approach to the employee right where I think most products are focused on this is 99% of SAS vendors which is look the utilization of and the consumption of our particular product Dalal whatever they're measuring that as that instantiates their value how many eyes can I get per day upon our particular product how much consumption of our servers can we drive so that we could sh show that to our customers and say look how much you're using our product yeah but back to the digital friction story they're peppered across you know hundreds of applications potentially for large organizations um I think that's where technology needs to move it needs to move in the fact that you know people's work isn't going to be focused on one particular application one particular vendor it's going to be ubiquitous it's going to be you know spread out and then how can we at least create technology that is focused on the employees Journey as opposed to what the technology offers I don't know maybe that's too much you know dogs and cats living together in peace and Harmony and whatnot but yeah no I mean I think you're on I think you're on to it that's that's really the thing and and from an Enterprise perspective one of the biggest one of the biggest obstacles to improving your experience is ocean boiling you know it's just the the the underlying work to make so many of these platforms work the way that they're sold is boiling the ocean for many companies you talk about major data changes like completely changing like Fields adding Fields changing what we're tracking in certain Fields um and those are you know those are massive undertakings in in an Enterprise of you know tens of thousands of people and and that that is a reason why you go okay well I guess we can't use that feature okay how about the next awesome feature that we said was going to be so amazing and was going to over you know completely change the way people did well we can't really use that either or we can use it but for two-thirds of the people they're going to have to go to this other website first and approve and you're just like oh my gosh you know that is the challenge so anything that allows you to bring to your point if you can bring to the employee the stuff that they need to do and from an administrative perspective not require us to fix every application before we link to it now we're on to something you know that that to me has been this challenge over and over again oh why can't we pull in data from this system because because that system and this system they're just like totally speaking different languages not and I don't even mean integration wise I just mean it just the way that you're looking at the data points totally look different than the way they're looking at the data points and there's no way to make them talk to one another um that's that's really really a big obstacle well hopefully hopefully we start moving in that direction and who knows AI is either going to be the uh the assistant to that or it's going to be it's going to be more sky yeah yeah well I mean the it's funny because one of the things about AI that I guess concerns me and it might just speak to my ignorance of how it works is AI can solve a problem for you much the same way I was describing before where someone can solve a problem for you with no thought as to the long-term implications or the scalability of that solution and so you could very quickly if you say deployed like couldn't you potentially have ai designing processes and and flows for people all the time that effectively are all doing the same thing but it's never going to recognize yeah that it's doing the same thing and how do I build this at an Enterprise level like I don't know how it would ever do that you you'd have something would be the war of the Bots uh where where everybody has built one yeah yeah AI sprawl um it's interesting they they were even doing um um kind of some studies on regenerative AI building code for example and uh some of it works some of it does Works kind of well none of it was documented none of it was properly code reviewed all of it was Bo a little yeah yeah exactly exactly right but now you make that available to the business you'll have people just like building mini apps all over the place you know and yeah again I don't mean to sound Doom and Gloom about it it's just something I don't quite understand and so I don't know if it's I don't know how that's going to land when we start when we start making AI available through all these different tools it's coming it's coming oh it's coming for sure for sure no doubt about that deploying the John Connor bot to go back in time and unwind all the code Rob I think you could pretty much B you could you could trademark that because I can almost guarantee you it's only matter time until someone creates the John we should we should we should I should have re you know the the question where I asked you about uh the future of AI I should have asked it to you like do you view it as Skynet internally or is Jarvis that would been that would have been the deep cut that would have been the way to do it sorry G have to cut all of that crap now no worries no worries good Dante really appreciate you coming on the show today where can folks learn a bit more about tapestry yourself if you have socials out there connect with yourself sure yeah for me I'm on LinkedIn so it's just Dante Razo just I I don't I think I'm one in one of a kind um are and then and then um you know tapestry is tapestry.com you can read all about the company there follow us we do have tapestry um um social media presence so we're on Instagram we're on glasso we're on LinkedIn as well if you could follow us there and of course all Our Brands coach Kate Spade Stuart whitesman give them all the follow as well thank you so much guys it's it's been a pleasure I've really enjoyed our conversation as you know like we could talk about this probably for hours and hours so I hope people weren't too bored with it but I appreciate you having me on thank you very much this was great thanks thanks guys thanks

Channel: Workgrid Software

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Length: 63min 26sec (3806 seconds)

Published: Wed May 29 2024