BriefingsDirect Transcripts

Thursday, June 13, 2019

How Enterprises Like McKesson Digitize Procurement and Automate Spend Management to Slash Waste

Transcript of a discussion on how leading enterprises are digitizing procurement and automating spend management to reduce inefficiencies, cut manual tasks, and streamline the entire source-to-pay process.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: SAP Ariba.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect. Our next intelligent enterprise innovations discussion explores new ways that leading enterprises like McKesson Corp. are digitizing procurement and automating spend management.

Gardner

We'll now examine how new intelligence technologies and automation methods help global companies reduce inefficiencies, cut manual tasks, and streamline the entire source-to-pay process.

To learn more about the role and impact of automation in business-to-business (B2B) finance, I’m pleased welcome Michael Tokarz, Senior Director of Source to Pay Processes and Systems at McKesson, based in Alpharetta, Georgia.

Tokarz: Thank you.

Gardner: There’s never been a better time to bring efficiency and intelligence to end-to-end, source-to-pay processes. What is it about the latest technologies and processes that provides a step-change improvement?

Tokarz: Our internal customers are asking us to move faster and engage deeper in our supplier conversations. By procuring intelligently, we are able to shift where resources are allocated so that we can better support our internal costumers.

Gardner: Is there a sense of urgency here? If you don't do this, and others do, is there a competitive disadvantage?

Tokarz: There's a strategic advantage to first-movers. It allows you to set the standard within an industry and provide greater feedback and value to your internal customers.

Gardner: There are some major trends driving this. As far as new automation and the use of artificial intelligence (AI), why are they so important?

The AI advantage

Tokarz

Tokarz: AI is important for a couple of reasons. Number one, we want to process transactions as cost-effectively as we possibly can. Leveraging a “bot” to do that, versus a human, is strategically advantageous to us. It allows us to write protocols that process automatically without any human touch, which, in turn is extremely valuable to the organization.

AI also allows workers to change their value-quotient within the organization. You can go from someone doing manual processes to working at a much higher level for the organization. They now work on things that are change-driven and that bring much more value, which is really important to the organization.

Gardner: What do you mean by bots? Is that the same as robotic process automation (RPA), or they overlapping? What’s the relationship?

Tokarz: I consider them the same technology, RPA and bots. It’s essentially a computer algorithm that’s written to help process transactions that meet a certain set of circumstances.

Gardner: E-sourcing technology is also a big trend and an enabler these days. Why is it important to you, particularly across your supplier base?

Tokarz: E-sourcing helps us drive conversations internally in the organization. It forces the businesses to pause. Everyone's always in a hurry, and when they're in a hurry they want to get something published for the organization and out on the street. Having the e-sourcing tool forces people to think about what they really need from the marketplace and to structure it in a format so that they can actually go faster.

E-Sourcing, while you have to do a little bit of work on the front end, you enable the speed of the transaction on the back end because you have everything aligned from all of the suppliers in one central place, so that you can easily compare and make solid business decisions.

Gardner: Another important thing for large organizations like McKesson is the ability to extend and scale globally. Rather than region-by-region there is standardization. Why is that important?

Tokarz: First and foremost, getting to one technology across the board allows us to have a global standard. And what does a global standard mean? It doesn't mean that we're going to do the same things the same way in every country. But it gives us a common platform to build our processes on.

It gives us a way to unify our organization so that we can have more informed conversations within the organization. It becomes really important when you begin managing global relationships with large suppliers.

Gardner: Tell us about McKesson and your role within vendor operations and management.

Tokarz: McKesson is a global provider of healthcare solutions -- from pharmaceuticals to medical supplies to services. We’re mainly in the United States, Canada, and Europe.

I’m responsible for indirect sourcing here in the United States, but I also oversee the global implementations of solutions in Ireland, Europe, and Canada in the near future. Currently in the United States, we process about $1.6 billion in direct transactions. That’s more than 60,000 transactions on our SAP Ariba system. We also leverage other vendor management solutions to help us process our services transactions.

Gardner: A lot of people like you are interested in becoming touchless – of leveraging automation, streamlining processes, and using data to apply analytics and create virtuous adoption cycles. How might others benefit from your example of using bots and why that works well for you?

Bots increase business

Tokarz: The first thing we did was leverage SAP Ariba Guided Buying. We also then reformatted our internal website to put Guided Buying forefront for all of our end users. We actually tag it for novice users because Guided Buying works similar to a tablet interface. It gives you smart icons that you can tap to begin and make decisions for your organization. It now drives purchasing behavior.

The next thing we did is push as much buying through catalogs and indirect spend that we possibly could. We've implemented enough catalogs in the United States that we now have 80 percent of our transactions fully automated through catalogs. It provides people really nice visual cues and point-and-click accessibility. Some of my end users tell me they can find what they need within three minutes, and then they can go about their day, which is really powerful. Instead of focusing on buying or purchasing, it allows them to do their jobs, their specialty, which brings more value to the organization.

We use the RPA and bot technology to take the entire organization to the next level. We're always striving to get to 90 touchless transactions. If we are at 80 percent, that means an additional 50 percent reduction in the touch transactions that we're currently processing, which is very significant.

The last thing we've done is taken it to the next level. We use the RPA and bot technology to take the entire organization to the next level. We’re always striving to get to 90 percent touchless transactions. If we are at 80 percent, that means an additional 50 percent reduction in the touch transactions that we’re currently processing, which is very significant.

That has allowed me to refocus some of my efforts with my business process outsourcing (BPO) providers where they’re not having to touch the transactions. I can have them instead focus on acquisitions, integrations, and doing different work that might have been at a cost increase. This all saves me money from an operations standpoint.

Gardner: And we all know how important user experience is -- and also adoption. Sometimes you can bring a horse to water and they don’t necessarily drink.

So it seems to me that there is a double-benefit here. If you have a good interface like Guided Buying, using that as a front end, that can improve user satisfaction and therefore adoption. But by also using bots and automation, you are taking away the rote, manual processes and thereby making life more exciting. Tell us about any cultural and human capital management benefits.

Smarts, speed, and singular focus

Tokarz: It allows my procurement team to focus differently. Before they were focused on the transactions in the queue and how fast to get them processed, all to keep the internal customers happy. Now I have a bot that processes that three times a day, it looks at the queue, and so we don’t have to worry about those any more. The team is only watching the bot to make sure it isn’t kicking out any errors.

From an acquisition integration standpoint, when I need to add suppliers to the network I don’t have to go for a change request to my management team and request more money. I can operate within the original budget with my BPO providers. If there's another 300 suppliers that I need added to the network, for example, I can process them more effectively and efficiently.

Gardner: What have been some challenges with establishing the e-sourcing technology? What have you had to overcome to make e-sourcing more prevalent and to get as digital as possible?

Tokarz: Anytime I begin working on a project, I focus not only on the technology component, but also the process, organization, and policy components. I try to focus on all of them.

So first, we hired someone to manage the e-sourcing via an e-sourcing administrator role. It becomes really important. We have a single point of contact. Everyone knows where to go within the organization to make things happen as people learn the technology, and what the technology is actually capable of. Instead of having to train 50 people, I have one expert that can help guide them through the process.

From a policy standpoint, we've also taken the policies and dictated that. People are supposed to be leveraging the technology. We all know that not all policies are adhered to, but it sets the right framework for discussion internally. We can now go to a category manager and access the right technology to do the jobs better, faster, cheaper.

As a result, you have a more intriguing job versus doing administrative work, which ultimately leads to more value to the organization. They're acting more as a business consultant to our internal customers to drive value -- not just about price but on how to create value using innovations, new technology, and new solutions in the marketplace.

To me, it’s not just about the technology -- it’s about developing the ecosystem of the organization.

Gardner: Is there anything about Guided Buying and the added intelligence that helps with e-sourcing – of getting the right information to the right person in the right format at the right time?

Seamless satisfaction for employee

Tokarz: The beautiful thing about Guided Buying is it’s seamless. People don't know how the application works and that they are using SAP Ariba. It’s interesting. They see Guided Buying and they don't realize it's basically a looking glass into the architecture that is SAP Ariba behind the scenes.

That helps with transparency for them to understand what they are buying and get to it as quickly as possible. It allows them to process a transaction via a really nice, simple checkout screen. Everyone knows what it costs, and it just routes seamlessly across the organization.

Gardner: So what do you get when you do e-sourcing right? Are there any metrics or impacts that you can point to such as savings, efficiencies, employee satisfaction?

The biggest impact is employee satisfaction. Instead of having a category manager working in Microsoft Outlook, sending e-mails to 30 different suppliers on a particular event, they have a simple dashboard where they can combine all of the answers and push all of that information out seamlessly across all the participants.

Tokarz: The biggest impact is employee satisfaction. Instead of having a category manager working in Microsoft Outlook, sending e-mails to 30 different suppliers on a particular event, they have a simple dashboard where they can combine all of the answers, or questions, and develop all of the answers and push all of that information out seamlessly across all the participants. Instead of working administratively, they’re working strategically with internal customers. They are asking the hard questions about how to solve business problems at hand and creating value for the organization.

Gardner: Let's dig deeper into the need for extensibility for globalization. To me this includes seeking a balance between the best of centralized and the best of distributed. You can take advantage of regional particulars, but also leverage and exploit the repeatability and standard methods of centralization.

What have you been doing in procurement using SAP Ariba that helps get to that balance?

Global insights grow success

Tokarz: We’re in the process of rolling out SAP Ariba globally. We have different regions, and they all have different requirements. What we've learned is that our EMEA region wants to do some things differently than we were doing them. It forces us to answer the question, “Why were we doing things the way we were doing them, and should we be changing? Are their insights valuable?”

We learned that their insights are valuable, whether it be the partners that they are working with, from an integration standpoint, or the people on the ground. They have valuable insights. We’re beginning to work with our Canadian colleagues as well, and they've done a tremendous amount of work around change management. We want to capitalize on that, and we want to leverage it. We want to learn so that we can be better here in the United States at how we implement our systems.

Gardner: Let’s look to the future. What would you like to see improved, not only in terms of the technology but the way the procurement is going? Do you see more AI, ML, and bots progressing in terms of their contribution to your success?

Tokarz: The bots’ technology is really interesting, and I think it's going to change pretty dramatically the way we work. It’s going to take a lot of the manual work that we do in processing transactions and it's going to alleviate that.

And it’s not just about the transactions. You can leverage the bot technology or RPA technology to do manual work and then just have people do the audit. You're eliminating three to five hours’ worth of work so that the workers can go focus their time on higher value-add.

For my organization, I’d like us to extend the utilization of the solutions that we currently own. I think we can do a better job of rolling out the technology broadly across the organization and leverage key features to make our business more powerful.

Gardner: We have been hearing quite a bit from SAP Ariba and SAP at-large about integrating more business applications and data sets to find process efficiencies across different types of spend and getting a better view of total spend. Does that fit into your future vision?

Tokarz: Yes, it does. Data is really important. It's a huge initiative at McKesson. We have teams that are specifically focused on data and integrating the data so that we can have meaningful information to make more broad decisions. They can be made not by, “Hey, I think I have the right knowledge.” Instead insights are based on the concrete details that guide you to making smart business decisions.

Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. You have been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect discussion on new ways that companies gain improved visibility, analytics, and predictive responses across their supply-chain activities.

And we have learned how new tools and methods are coming together to help organizations be more intelligent by using such new technology as bots to improve not only the outcome from procurement activities -- but the satisfaction of those doing the procurement.

So a big thank you to our guest, Michael Tokarz, Senior Director of Source to Pay Processes and Systems at McKesson in Alpharetta, Georgia. Thank you so much, Michael.

Tokarz: Thank you.

Gardner: And a big thank you to our audience for joining this BriefingsDirect intelligent enterprise innovation discussion. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout the series of SAP Ariba-sponsored BriefingsDirect interviews. Thanks again for listening -- and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: SAP Ariba.

Transcript of a discussion on how leading enterprises are digitizing procurement and automating spend management to reduce inefficiencies, cut manual tasks, and streamline the entire source-to-pay process. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2019. All rights reserved.

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Monday, June 10, 2019

CEO Henshall on Citrix’s 30-Year Journey to Make Workers Productive, IT Stronger, and Partners More Capable

Transcript of a discussion on how Citrix is charting a new future of work that abstracts productivity above apps, platforms, data, and clouds to empower, energize, and enlighten workers while simplifying and securing anywhere work across any deployment model.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Citrix.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect. Our next intelligent workspaces discussion explores how for 30 years Citrix has pioneered ways to make workers more productive, IT operators stronger, and a vast partner ecosystem more capable.

Gardner

We will now hear how Citrix is by no means resting on its laurels by charting a new future of work that abstracts productivity above apps, platforms, data, and even clouds. The goal: To empower, energize, and enlighten disaffected workers while simplifying and securing anywhere work across any deployment model.

To hear more about Citrix’s evolution and ambitious next innovations, I’m very pleased to welcome David Henshall, President and CEO of Citrix.

David Henshall: Thank you for having me.

Gardner: To me Citrix is unique in that for 30 years it has been consistently disruptive, driven by vision, and willing to take on both technology and culture -- which are truly difficult things to do. And you have done it over and over again.

As Citrix was enabling multiuser remote access -- or cloud before there was even a word for it -- you knew that changing technology for delivering apps necessitated change in how users do their jobs. What’s different now, 30 years later? How has your vision of work further changed from delivery of apps?

Do your best work

Henshall: I think you said it well. For 30 years, we have focused on connecting people and information on-demand. That has allowed us to let people be productive on their terms. The fundamental challenge of people is to have access to the tools and resources necessary to get their jobs done -- or as we describe it, to do their best work.

Henshall

We look at that as an absolute necessity. It’s one of the things that makes people feel empowered, feel accomplished, and it allows them to drive better productivity and output. It allows engagement at the highest levels possible. All of these have been great contributing factors.

What’s changed? The technology landscape continues to evolve as applications have evolved over the years – and so have we. You referred to the fact that we’ve reinvented ourselves many times in the last three decades. All great companies go through the same regeneration against a common idea, over-and-over again. We are now in what I would describe as the cloud-mobile era, which has created unprecedented flexibility from the way people used to manage IT. Everything from new software-as-a-service (SaaS) services are being consumed with much less effort, all the way to distributed edge services that allow us to compute in new ways that we’ve never imagined.

And then, of course, on the device side, the choices are frankly nearly infinite. Being able to support the device of your choice is a critical part of what we do -- and we believe that matters.

Gardner: I was fortunate enough to attend a press conference back in 1995 when Citrix WinFrame, as it was called at that time, was delivered. The late Citrix cofounder Ed Iacobucci was leading the press conference. And to me, looking back, that set the stage for things like desktop as a service (DaaS), virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), multi-tenancy, and later SaaS. We all think of these as major mainstream technologies.

Do you feel that what you’re announcing about the future of work, and of inserting intelligence in context to what people do at work, will similarly set off a new era in technology? Are we repeating the past in terms of the scale and magnitude of what you are biting off?

Future productivity goes beyond products

Henshall: The interesting thing about the future is that it keeps changing. Against that backdrop we are rethinking the way people work. It’s the same general idea about just giving people the tools to be productive on their terms.

A few years back that was about location, of being able to work outside of a traditional office. Today more than half the people do not work in a typical corporate headquarters environment. People are more distributed than ever before.

The challenge we are now trying to solve takes it another step forward. We think about it from a productivity standpoint and an engagement template. The downside of technology is that it does make everything possible. So therefore the level of complexity has gone up dramatically. The level of interruptions -- and what we call context shifting -- has gone up dramatically. And so, we are looking for ways to help simplify, automate common workflows, and modernize the way people engage with applications. All of these point toward the same common outcome of, “How do we make people more productive on their terms?”

Gardner: To solve that problem of location flexibility years ago, Citrix had to deal with the network, servers, performance and capacity, and latency -- all of which were invisible. End users didn’t know that it was Citrix behind-the-scenes.

Will people know the Citrix name and associate it with workspaces now that you are elevating your value above IT?

Henshall: We are solving broader challenges. We have moved gradually over the years from being a behind-the-scenes infrastructure technology. People have actually used the company’s name as a verb. “I have Citrixed into my environment,” for example. That will slowly evolve into still leveraging Citrix as a verb, but meaning something like, “I Citrixed to get my job done.” That takes on an even broader definition around productivity and simplification, and it allows us more degrees of freedom.

We are working with ecosystem partners across the infrastructure landscape, all types of application vendors. We therefore are a bridge between all of those. It doesn’t mean we necessarily have to have our name front and center, but Citrix is still a verb for most people in the way they think about getting their jobs done.

Gardner: I commend you for that because a lot of companies can’t resist making their name part-and-parcel of a solution. Perhaps that’s why you’ve been such a good partner over the years. You’ve been supplying a lot of the workhorses to get jobs done, but without necessarily having to strut your stuff.

Let’s get back to the issues around worker talent, productivity, and worker user experience. It seems to me we have lot of the bits and parts for this. We have great apps, great technology, and cloud distribution. We are seeing interactivity via chatbots, and robotic programming automation (RPA).

Why do you think being at the middle is the right place to pull this all together? How can Citrix uniquely help, whereas none of the other individual parts can?

Empower the people, manage the tech

Henshall: It’s a problem they are all focused on solving. So take a SaaS application, for example. You have applications that are incredibly powerful, best of breed, and they allow for infinite flexibility. Therein lies part of the challenge. The vast majority of people are not power users. They are not looking for every single bell and whistle across a workflow. They are looking for the opportunity to get something done, and it’s usually something fairly simple.

We are designing an interface to help abstract away a lot of complexity from the end user so they can focus on the task more than the technology itself. It’s an interesting challenge because so much technology is focused on the tech and how great and powerful and inflexible it is, and they lose sight of what people are trying to accomplish.

We start by working backward. We start with the end user, understand what they need to be productive, empowered, and engaged. We let that be a guiding principle behind our roadmap. That gives us flexibility to empathize, to understand more about customers.

Gardner: For younger workers who have grown up all-digital all the time, they are more culturally attuned to being proactive. They want to go out and do things with choice. So culturally, time is on your side.

On the other hand, getting people to change their behaviors can be very challenging. They don’t know that it could be any better, so they can be resistant. This is more than working with an IT department on infrastructure. We are talking about changing people’s thinking and how they relate to technology.

How do you propose to do that? Do you see yourself working in an ecosystem in such a way that this is not just, “If we build it, they will come,” affair, but evangelizing to the point where cognitive patterns can be changed?

Henshall: A lot of our relationships and conversations have been evolving over the last few years. We’ve been moving further up what I would call “the IT hierarchy.” We’re having conversations with CIOs now about broad infrastructure, ways that we can help address the use cases of all their employees, not just those that historically needing all the power of virtualization.

But as we move forward, there is a large transformation going on. Whether we use terms like digital transformation and others, those are less technology conversations and more about business outcomes – more than any time in my 30-year-career.

Because of that, you’re not only engaging the CIO, you may have the same conversation with a line of business executive, a chief people officer, the chief financial officer (CFO), or someone in another functional organizations. And this is because they’re all trying to accomplish a specific outcome more than focusing on the technology itself.

And that allows us to elevate the discussion in a way that is much more interesting. It allows us to think about the human and business outcomes more so than ever before. And again, it’s just one more extension of how we are getting out of the “technology for technology’s sake” view and much more into the, “What is it that we are actually trying to accomplish” view.

Gardner: David, as we tackle these issues, elevate the experience, and let people work the way they want, it seems we are also opening up the floodgates for addition of more intelligence.

Whether you call it artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), or augmented intelligence, the fact is that we are able to deal with more data, derive analytics from it, learn patterns, reapply those learning lessons, and repeat. So injecting that into work, and how people get their jobs done, is the big question these days. People are trying to tackle it from a variety of different directions.

You have said an advantage Citrix has, is in access to data. What kind of data are we talking about, and why is that going to put Citrix in a leadership position?

Soup to nuts supervision of workflow

Henshall: We have a portfolio that spans everything from the client device through the application, files, and the network. We are able to instrument many different parts of the entire workflow. We can capture information about how people are using technologies, what their usage patterns look like, where they are coming in from, and how the files are being used.

In most cases, we take that and apply it into contextual outcomes. For example, in the case of security, we have an analytics platform and we use those security analytics. We can create a risk score that’s very similar to your credit score for an individual user’s behavior if something anomalous happens. For example, you’re here with me and you’re in front of your computer, but you also tried to log on from another part of the globe at the same time.

Things like that can be flagged almost instantaneously and allows the organization to identify and -- in many cases -- automatically address those types of scenarios. In that case, it may immediately ask for two-factor authentication.

We are not capturing personally identifiable information (PII) and other types of broader data that fall under a privacy umbrella. We access a lot of anonymized things that provide the insights.

Citrix operates in about 100 countries around the world. We are already very familiar with local compliance and data privacy regulations. We are making sure that we can operate within those and give our customers in those markets the tools to make sure they are operating within those constraints as well.

Every company has [had privacy discussions] and will continue to evolve over time as technology evolves because the underlying platforms are becoming very powerful. Citrix operates in about 100 countries around the world. We are already very familiar with local compliance and data privacy regulations. We are making sure that we can operate within those and certainly give our customers in those markets the tools to make sure that they are operating effectively within the constraints as well.

Gardner: The many resources people rely on to do their jobs come from different places -- public clouds, private clouds, a hybrid between them, different SaaS providers, and different legacy systems of record.

You are in a unique position in the middle of that. You can learn from it and begin to suggest how people can improve. Those patterns can be really powerful. It’s not something we’ve been able to do before.

What do we call that? Is it AI? Or a valet or digital assistant to help in your work while protective of privacy and adhering to all the laws along the way? And where do you see that going in terms of having an impact on the economy and on companies?

AI, ML to assist and automate tasks

Henshall: Two very broad questions. From the future standpoint, AI and ML capabilities are helping turn all the data we have into more useful or actionable information. And in our case, you mentioned virtual assistance. We will be using intelligent assistance to help you automate simple tasks.

And many of those could be tasked between applications. For example, you could ask your assistant to move a meeting to next Thursday or any time your other meeting participants happen to be available. The bots will go out, search for that optimal time, and take those actions. Those are the types of things that we envision more for the virtual assistants going forward, and I think those will be interesting.

Beyond that, it becomes a learning mechanism whereby we can identify that your bot came back and told you you’ve had the same conflict two meetings in a row. Do you want to change all future meetings so that this doesn’t happen again? It can become much more predictive.

And so, this journey that Citrix has been on for many years started with helping to simplify IT so that it became easier to deliver the infrastructure. The second part of that journey was making it easier for people to consume those resources across the complexities we have talked about.

Now, the products we announced at our May 2019 Citrix Synergy Conference are more about guiding work to help simplify the workflows. We will be doing more in this last space on how to anticipate what you will need so that we can automate it ahead of time. And that’s an interesting journey. It will take a few years to get there, but it’s going to be pretty powerful when we do.

Gardner: As you’re conducting product development, I assume you’re reflecting these capabilities back to your own workforce, the Citrix global talent pool. Do you drink your own champagne? What are you finding? Does it give you a sense as the CEO that your workforce has an advantage by employing these technologies? Do we have any proof points that the productivity is in fact enhanced?

Henshall: It’s still early days. A lot of these are brand-new technologies that don’t have enough of a base of learning yet.

But some of the early learnings can identify areas where you’re multitasking too much, or are in an inefficient process, or in my case, I tend to look at automating opportunities for how much I am multitasking inside of a meeting. That helps me understand whether I should be in that meeting in the first place, whether I am a 100 percent focused and committed -- or have I been distracted by other elements.

Those are interesting learnings that are more about personal productivity and how we can optimize from that respect.

More broadly speaking, our workforce is globally distributed. We absolutely drink our own champagne when it comes to engaging a global team. We have teams now in about 40 countries around the world and we are very, very virtual. In fact, among my leadership team, I am the only member that lives full-time in [Citrix’s headquarters] in South Florida. We make that work because we embrace all of our own technology, stay on top of common projects, communicate across all the various mediums, and collaborate where need be.

That allows us to tap into nontraditional workforce populations, to differentiate, and enable folks who need different types of flexibility for their own lifestyles. You miss great talent if you are far too rigid. Personally, I believe the days are gone when everybody is expected to work inside a corporate headquarters. It’s just not practical anymore.

Gardner: For those businesses that recognize there is tremendous change afoot, are using new models like cloud, and don’t want complexity to outstrip productivity – what advice do you have for them as they start digital transformation efforts? What should they be putting in place now to take advantage of what companies like Citrix will be providing them in a few years?

Business-first supports global collaboration

Henshall: The number one thing on any digital transformation project is to be currently clear about what the outcome is you are trying to achieve. Start with the outcome and work backward. You can leverage platforms like Citrix, for example, to look across multiple technologies, focus on those business outcomes, and leave the technology decision in many cases to last. It shouldn’t be the other way around because if you do, you will self-limit what those outcomes should be.

Make sure you have buy-in across all stakeholders. As I talked about earlier, have a conversation with the CFO, head of marketing, head of human resources, and many others. Look for breadth of outcomes, because you don’t want to solve problems for one small team, you want to solve problems across the enterprise. That’s where you get the best leverage. It allows you the best opportunity to simplify the complexity that has built up over the last 30 to 40 years. This will help people get out from under that problem.

Gardner: Lastly, for IT departments specifically, the people who have been most aware of Citrix as a brand, how should IT be thinking about entering this new era of focusing on work and productivity? What should IT be thinking about to transform themselves to be in the best position to attain these better business outcomes?

Henshall: I have already seen the transformation happening. Most IT administrators want to focus on larger business problems, more than just maintaining the existing infrastructure. Unfortunately, the budgets have been relatively limited for innovation because of all the complexity we have talked about.

But my advice for everyone is, take a step back, understand how to be the champion of the business, to be the hero by providing great outcomes, great experiences, and higher productivity. That’s not a technology conversation first and foremost. Obviously it has a technology element but understand and be empathetic of the needs of the business. Then work backward, and Citrix will help you get there.

Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. You have been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect discussion on how Citrix has pioneered ways to make workers more productive, IT operators stronger, and a vast partner ecosystem more capable. And we have learned how Citrix is charting a new future of work that abstracts productivity above apps and clouds to empower, energize, and enlighten workers anywhere.

Please join me in thanking our guest, David Henshall, President and CEO of Citrix. Thank you, sir.

Henshall: Thank you very much.

Gardner: And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining this BriefingsDirect intelligent workspaces interview. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of Citrix-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions. Thanks again for listening, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Citrix.