Becky Blalock
Senior Vice President and CIO, Southern Company, Atlanta

Becky Blalock is Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Atlanta-based Southern Company, where she directs the electric service provider’s IT strategy and operations across nine subsidiaries and 120,000 square miles. She leads more than 1,100 employees in a company that has been consistently recognized as one of the 100 Most Innovative Companies by CIO magazine and one of the 100 Best Places to Work in IT by Computerworld.

Since beginning her career at Georgia Power in 1978, Ms. Blalock has provided broad leadership in many positions, including accounting, finance, marketing, corporate communication, external affairs, the office of the CEO, and customer service. She serves on the CIO advisory board for Sierra Ventures, as well as the Customer Advisory Boards of Oracle and AT&T. She is listed among the Who’s Who in Science and Engineering, and in 2006, she was inducted as one of Computerworld’s Premier 100 IT leaders.

Ed Yourdon: One of the things that I find that people are very interested in is to get a sense of how you got started and particularly whether there were any mentors or guiding lights that pointed the way when you were just getting started in the field.

Becky Blalock: I believe my background growing up influenced where I ended up. I’m an Air Force brat. When I was growing up, we moved a lot. I went to four high schools, three junior high schools, and eight elementary schools. I don’t think I realized it then, but one of the things that all the moving around taught me was to be very adaptable and unafraid to go into new environments. A lot of people fear change and going into new environments because they grew up in the same town, went to the same schools, know the same people. I came into the corporate world and wasn’t afraid to do things that I really had no background in because I’d been doing new things all my life.

Yourdon: That’s very interesting. I mean, it hits close to home. I’m not an Air Force brat per se, but my dad worked for a defense contractor and we were stationed just outside Air Force bases, so I went to 17 different schools, but only one high school as it turned out, but every year we moved to a new town, and my parents said, you know, “The school is down the street. Go check yourself in,” and so I can relate to what you’re saying. [laughter]

Blalock: You’re the only person I’ve ever talked to that’s been to more schools than me, ’cause I went to 15.

Yourdon: Well, I was lucky that I ended up in just one high school, but I understand what you’re saying. To be able to adapt to completely unexpected circumstances must be a very valuable skill?

Blalock: When you go into a new environment, it’s all about how you adapt and how you fit in with people. I think my background taught me a lot of adaptability. I don’t think I put all those pieces together until later, because I hated moving around in middle school and high school. Loved it when I was young because you’re the new kid in the class, but when you get to high school and middle school, it’s tough.

Yourdon: Oh yeah. Absolutely.

Blalock: And I got my undergraduate degree in marketing and then moved into finance inside the company. I went back to school at night to get an MBA in finance later in my career. I ended up in IT was through my stint as assistant to our then-CEO at Georgia Power. He had me working on an initiative to get better information and better metrics for how we could manage the business. He wanted an executive information dashboard and he was having a really difficult time trying to get that data out of our financial organization. At that time, our systems weren’t designed to pull information in those formats, but we did make some progress when I reported to him.

At that same time, IT was going through a big reorganization. They were pulling IT out of our operating companies and centralizing it. They created regional CIO jobs, and the Georgia Power Management Council decided I would be good in this role. So the CEO walked into my office and said, “You know, we’re creating these regional CIO jobs, and I want you to go do that.” And I said, “You’ve got to be kidding me!”

You know, I had no background in IT other than the fact that I did some systems development work early in my career, but I really didn’t even know any of the people in the organization.

My CEO said to me, and I have really carried this with me throughout my tenure in IT, “It’s a job about information … You know that I am struggling because I do not have the information and the metrics I need to run this business.” And he said, “Help me get the information that I need to more effectively run this business.”

You know, when the CEO asks you to do something, you don’t really have a choice about it!

Yourdon: Yeah. True.

Blalock: As a regional CIO, I had responsibility for Georgia Power, for our telecommunications company, and then system-wide, across Southern Company, I had responsibility for marketing and customer service. It was a fabulous time to be there because we were going through a major transformation. We had to downsize, which was tough, as I’d never been through anything like that.

And the mindset that I took into IT is the mindset that I got from Allen Franklin, who was [the] CEO at the time. He said, “Let’s not be so enamored with the technology. Let’s think about how we use the information to more effectively run our business.”

I was in the regional CIO job for nine months when the job of running corporate communication at Georgia Power opened up. The company decided we were going to be an Olympic sponsor, so what a great opportunity to run PR for a company that’s going to be an Olympic sponsor. So I left IT after those nine months and ran our corporate communication group and then had an opportunity to run our business and economic development group. I was named the Vice President for Community and Economic Development and had been out of IT about six years when the CIO job opened up again.

It was the third time it had opened up. There had been a lot of churn, a lot of turnover in the position, and there was not a good, clear, strong candidate for the job. And I was fortunate that I had some brief experience there. I had a lot of success on the business side and did many things in the business and then got the opportunity to come here and lead this group for the past nine years.

Yourdon: Wow. Well, would you consider the CEO who got you started on this path to be a mentor in the traditional sense? Any others?

Blalock: Absolutely. He was not a mentor in the sense that he knew a lot about IT, but he was a great mentor in terms of staying focused on what really drives business success. One of the things he said to me, and I share this a lot when I mentor others, is, “Normally, when somebody comes into a role like this, I tell them to think about the three most important things you want to leave as your legacy when you walk away from the job. Normally, I’ll write those three things down for people and tell them what they are.” And he said, “I don’t know what to tell you when they are in IT.”

He said, “I want you to think about what those three things should be, then come back and let’s meet again.” So I did. I went off and I interviewed employees. I interviewed the people we support inside the company. I interviewed our vendors and took all that information into consideration.

And I told him, “I think I figured out what my three things need to be. Number one, you’ve got some of the smartest people in the company working in IT. But they grow up and they stay in IT. They really don’t get the opportunity to go out into the business and take that knowledge. There’s a huge opportunity to grow future leaders for Southern Company and this needs to be a big part of my focus, grooming and growing that workforce. Also IT changes so much that it’s important for the people we have to stay very current on what’s happening.”

The second focus should be the opportunity to brand Southern Company as an innovative company, through the way we were using technology. We were doing incredible things. We were way ahead of anybody in the industry, but we weren’t telling that story. We needed to be more proactive in making people aware of how Southern Company was a leader in the way we applied technology.

And then the third focus would be to look back—at the end of my career—and show that we rolled out incredible technology, which delivered significant business value and drove our business to be a leader. I didn’t know what these technologies would be, but that to me, I’d like to look back and know we did some things that were significant in terms of the way we applied technology.

And he said, “Okay, I think those are the right three things. Now, write those down on a sheet of paper and every Friday, you pull that sheet of paper out and say, ‘Is this where I spent my time?’”

He said, “With these jobs, these very senior-level jobs, there’s all kinds of minutiae that people are going to want to pull you off to do and distract you from this focus. It’s very important that you always keep these three things in front of you because it will keep you focused on the most important things you need to do for Southern Company. If you can look back each week and say, ‘This is where I spent my time,’ you know your time was well spent.”

And really, I have used that as a guiding principle to keep me focused and to say no to things that did not fit this focus.

Yourdon: Well, it’s a good one. It’s kind of the first-things-first maxims that you hear in a lot of other places and it leads into the next area of questions that I had for you, which is basically what you’re doing and what you have been doing as a CIO to make your company more successful? And it sounds like those three things you just mentioned, I would assume, continue to be at the top of your list today.

Blalock: Well, they are. We have focused a lot on our workforce. IT was—I think it was a demoralized organization. We were viewed only as a cost center. I think we’ve turned the corner now. Some of the feedback I got from the executives we support is, “I don’t need a bunch of order-takers. I want people to show me what’s possible.”

Yourdon: Aha.

Blalock: We’ve turned the corner in a couple of ways. First, we focused on making sure our people got recognized for things. We had no intellectual property patents nine years ago, so we started an intellectual property program and made sure that our people got financially and otherwise recognized for their creative ideas. Today we have 56 items that have cleared the hurdle to go in the pipeline for patents. We only have eight that have actually cleared because it takes a while to get there, but we actually got our first three last year.

Yourdon: Hmm.

Blalock: An employee who received one of these patents asked me to come to his office. He said, “I’ve been in the company 34 years, and I want you to know this is the thing I’m most proud of in my career.” And we had given him a plaque and $1,500, and I thought, “A 34-year employee and this is the most important thing,” and it was really so little of an effort on our part.

Second, we started winning awards. We started getting picked by CIO magazine as one of the most innovative companies for IT. We started being on the InformationWeek’s 500 list of the most creative. A number of people on our senior team have been picked as one of the 100 top leaders in IT by Computerworld. In fact, this year, Dave Coker, our VP of Computer and Networking Services, got that recognition. Aline Ward and Marie Mouchet, who are regional CIOs, have gotten that recognition in the past, and I’ve gotten that recognition in the past. But it’s not just us. We have people across our organization who are getting recognition for phenomenal achievements. In fact, one of our employees was named Engineer of the Year by Georgia Power last year.

Yourdon: Wow.

Blalock: We try to make sure our successes get highlighted and celebrated. Computerworld magazine has a survey of the 100 best places to work in IT in America.

Yourdon: Right. They do that every year.

Blalock: And we have been honored for the last five consecutive years with that recognition. This year we received our best ranking—#18! I take a lot of pride in this ranking because it is based on a survey our employees complete.

Yourdon: Ahh.

Blalock: It’s not just the programs you have. It’s not just what you say about yourself. They are surveying our own employees. Morale has improved dramatically in the organization, and we have a lot of folks in our organization who get opportunities to go into other parts of the business now. In fact, our new CEO was the CIO when I was regional CIO. It’s the first time we’ve had a CEO who used to be a CIO.

Yourdon: Interesting. Yeah, I don’t think I’ve run into that in the various other interviews I’ve done. That is very interesting.

Blalock: Yes, so we are very excited about that.

Yourdon: You know, I can’t resist the temptation to ask a question that normally comes up more toward the end of this conversation, having to do with the new generation—the digital natives—the young kids who are coming out of college right now. How do you view them in the context of what you’ve just been talking about, as potential leaders and so on? Are you optimistic, pessimistic? Do you see them as being any different than the generation that came out 10 or 20 years ago?

Blalock: I think they’re going to make life very exciting for us. In the past, IT was trying to push technology out, trying to get people to embrace it and use it. These people are coming out of college and they’re pushing us.

Yourdon: Right.

Blalock: IT needs to embrace them. Gone are the days when corporations are going to be deciding what PCs employees use. I think you’re going to come to work and bring your own PC, just like you do with your phone. We’re a ways away from that yet, but we’re headed in that direction. If you don’t embrace technology and really allow people to use the tools they’re comfortable with, they’re going to go work somewhere else where things are more open and flexible.

Yourdon: Well, that’s one area where I’ve gotten a pretty consistent response from everybody, very much the way you’ve just said it. And I’m sure if I had asked that question five years ago, I would have gotten a very different answer, because people were still pushing technology down the throats of all the new employees.

Blalock: Well, in knowledge today, it’s not so much about what you know, but what you know about where to get the knowledge. And I’ll give you an example, it was just this weekend. I was at the lake with a bunch of my relatives and my niece was there. And she said, “I need to call my brother.” I said, “What’s his number?” She said, “Well, I don’t know what his number is. I have to go get my cell phone to tell you that.” You know, they don’t even know phone numbers anymore, but they know where to go get them.

Yourdon: Yep.

Blalock: So much of what it’s going to take in the future to be successful is knowing where to find information. No one person can know it all, and they have the Internet at their fingertips. Young people know how to really leverage these tools, and they’ve grown up with them.

Yourdon: Well, you’re certainly right about people—and it’s not only that they know where to get the information; they don’t even have a conscious pause. It’s just wired in, whereas in my case, it requires a conscious recognition that, “Oh, I can go to Google and get that information.” Or “Oh, that phone number is already on my speed dial list.” So the younger generation has got a split-second jump on me usually in terms of getting that, but I think that phenomenon is true everywhere. On the other hand, does it give you any concern that the younger generation can afford to operate in a more superficial fashion, for lack of a better phrase, because the stuff is right at their fingertips? They don’t have to do any deep thinking.

Blalock: No. I still think you’ve got to be smart enough to know what you need to look for. I still think you’ve got to have some thought leadership. The research might be easier. It might be easier to find the information, but you’ve still got to be researching the right things.

Yourdon: And you’ve got to know what you can trust and what you can’t trust.

Blalock: Right, and also, I think it’s 24/7. Work is. You used to have to be in your office between 8 and 5 and wait for the phone to ring. People can work from anywhere now and they work all the time.

Yourdon: Well, you know, another thing I’ve heard from almost every CIO, and I assume it’s going to be true for you as well, is the notion that even if their business is ostensibly a local business, everybody’s business these days is global, so that you’re going to get a phone call at 3 in the morning saying, “There’s a revolution in Egypt. What are we doing about it?” And, I’d be curious to know how that plays itself out for the Southern Company. For example, when there was the earthquake in Japan, did your phone start ringing?

Blalock: Our phone did ring because we are building the first new nuclear unit in 30 years in this country. I can assure you that it was a very busy time for us.

It was a very busy time for us now because there are a lot of tornadoes touching down, and they don’t touch down just in the middle of the day. They touch down in the middle of the night. Our systems have to be working, so that our crews know where those outages have occurred and know where to go and restore power. We are definitely a 24/7 business and IT, of course, is 24/7, too. And there are events around the world that impact us.

Yourdon: Well, I think that’s the thing for everybody. It doesn’t matter what kind of business you have these days, IT is central to everything. And as a result, we are not only 24/7, but global, no matter what we think we might be doing with our business, and so that’s a good confirmation. I’m glad to hear that.

I’ve gotten a lot of feedback that the next generation of workers do not have the same passion for work or the work ethic of our generation. What do you think?

Blalock: I think we’re going to be just fine with the next generation. They embrace change. They are not nearly as bureaucratic as my generation. We’re going to need them to be flexible and adaptable because there’s going to be fewer of them having to do a whole lot more work. Their innovation and their creativity are going to be very, very badly needed. That’s really what sets the U.S. apart, but they’re going to be competing against all the people around the world.

Yourdon: I hadn’t thought of it that way.

Blalock: And these kids are bright. You know, they adapt so much better than my generation did. They’re so much more open to new things, and I think so much about success is being willing to take some risks. If there’s one thing that we’ve got to be cautious about, it is that they’re too open to risk. Some things that they may think are okay to do, like downloading copyrighted movies—you can’t do that in the corporate world.

Yourdon: Well, you’re even more straightforward; they may think it’s okay to run an app that they got on their iPad in a safety-critical part of your business that you just can’t afford to do. So, I hear what you’re saying.

Blalock: Communication and education will be essential, because it is a little different in the corporate world than it is in working for an entrepreneur or when you’re in college.

Yourdon: That’s true. I want to ask you about another area that you mentioned on this list of the top three priorities that you have. One of them was—I think it was the third one—was rolling out technology to enhance the business now.

Blalock: Yeah.

Yourdon: Speaking of people, how does a CIO create a successful team?

Blalock: As CIOs, our success is most directly tied to who we surround ourselves with. You cannot be successful as a CIO if you don’t have a good team of people around you, and those people need to be very different. You may need to have someone who knows a lot about finance if you don’t know a lot about finance. Or you may need to have someone who knows a lot about marketing because no one person can know it all, and the beauty of IT is that you get to see the whole company. It touches everything, but that’s also the challenge in it.

Yourdon: What are the key criteria or characteristics you look for on the part of the people that are your team, the direct reports? And your point about having a wide variety of skills is interesting. The two other more interesting responses I’ve got are a deep sense of integrity. That everybody’s got everybody else’s back.

Blalock: Absolutely. When I got this job, one of the things I heard was that it was not a team and that people didn’t like each other; they didn’t support each other, and that the first thing I had to do was fix the team. It’s like the book, Good to Great¹, but you’ve got to get the right people on the bus. The first thing we did was focus on building a much stronger team. Today, I think the IT team at Southern Company is probably one of the stronger senior teams anywhere in the company.

My senior team—there are 14 people on the senior leadership team—we actually complete a teamwork survey twice a year. We rate how effective we think we’re working together as a team. And the first time we did that, I think we rated ourselves a 5.4 on a 10-[point] scale. The last time we did it, everybody gave us a 9. We have some people who are never going to rate everybody a 10, but we rated ourselves a 9 as a team. As part of the survey they also rate each other individually, to remind the team that no one of us can do what we need to for this company. We have to do it together.

This survey keeps the focus on teamwork. We don’t really need to continue doing the survey, but we do it because it’s affirmation that we need to continue to look out for each other. You are really under such scrutiny from the business that you support. The survey pulls you together cohesively as a team in IT, and it’s only together that we can be successful in doing what you need to for this company. We have each other’s back. I can’t reiterate that enough, how important it is to have a team that pulls together. Generally it doesn’t take more than one person to mess up a team. You have to just nip that in the bud if it’s going on.

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Yourdon: Well, that’s a good reinforcement of what I’ve heard from others. I want to ask you about another area that you mentioned on this list of the top three priorities that you have. One of them was—I think it was the third one—was rolling out technology to enhance the business now. To some extent that’s something every CIO would say he feels responsible for doing, helping the business become more competitive or more successful. In your case, are you and your IT people expected to come up with completely new things that the business has not even thought of doing, but have become possible with new technology—or just enhancing the efficiency of what’s already going on?

Blalock: I said earlier that when I got this job and interviewed people in the business, they said, “We don’t need a bunch of order-takers. You’re here inside our business. You understand our business, and you should be helping us figure out what’s the next great thing that’s coming in, in the way of technology.” We have embraced that, and we have two processes in place at Southern Company that I think have really helped us with that. We have teams that are made up of people from IT and people from the business called Technology Leadership Teams (TLTs). There are 14 of those teams. Some of them meet once a quarter, some meet every month.

For example, one of the TLTs is in the distribution organization, the wire side of our business, the folks that actually distribute electricity to the homes. They’re one of the most active teams that we have. They meet every month, people from the business and people from IT. IT will discuss some emerging technologies that are becoming available in the market. We will work with the distribution team members to determine if we can pull together a business case to evaluate doing this in our business.

Sometimes, people in the business will go to a conference and talk to a vendor, and they’ll bring back an idea to IT and say, “Here is what a vendor says they can do.” And then IT will get involved and we’ll say, “Well, that’s vaporware.”

Or we’ll say, “Hey, that’s a really good idea.” And then we work together to prioritize the money that’s in the budget and make the decisions about how we proceed. IT has absolutely got to be aligned with the business. IT should never push technology that doesn’t drive value to the business. And these TLTs work very well for us. Engaging the business in the decisions that we make helps them take more ownership and helps them not to see us as a cost center but as a partner who’s truly driving value and success to the company. This process has helped us deliver tremendous value from the projects that we roll out, which is critical because we have about 100 active projects under way at any point in time in IT.

The second thing that we did is develop a technology lab where vendors would give us the beta version of a product and we would test it, because you need to have these products ahead of time so that you can then build the infrastructure to support them. We have since evolved that lab into a showcase where we can bring our employees in and show them what’s coming in the way of technology. We also use it as a place where we can brainstorm about how we should apply some of these technologies to move the business forward.

And it has been a huge success. Incredible ideas have surfaced in that center.

Yourdon: I’m sure you have.

Blalock: We live in a world where the consumer market leads the business world. Look at what’s going on with sensor technology. That really came about in the consumer market, and there are huge opportunities to take that technology and develop a business case for saving money and applying it inside the corporate world. But sometimes it’s very hard for people to visualize that unless you get into a brainstorming session with them.

Yourdon: Ahh, interesting.

Blalock: And this facility, actually, it was showcased in our 2008 annual report. It talked about how we’re bringing in lots of innovative ideas in terms of how we drive this business forward. We really empower our employees to use technology to be more efficient. We’re doing things that help the company apply technology, because most of the customer-touch in our company today is not through people, it’s through technology.

Most of the people who call the Customer Care Center talk to the voice-response unit, our unit that’s computerized, or they go online and do self-help, and never talk to a person. You think about the banking industry: most people go to the ATM when they want to get cash.

Yourdon: Sure, yeah.

Blalock: They don’t communicate. And so how do we in IT play a role in enhancing that experience? That is an important question, because one of the most important strategic things we focus on as a company is making sure we provide world-class customer service to the people we serve. And we want to make sure we are looking at the technologies that are out there and utilizing them in the most efficient way and in the way that our customers will embrace in terms of how we serve them. It also saves us money when we use technology. On average, it costs $3 per call to have a customer service representative handle a request. And to the extent we can apply technology, we not only enhance the customer’s experience, we also save money.

Yourdon: Well, that leads me into the next obvious question—which is what interesting technologies do you see coming down the road in the next few years that you expect you’ll be able to take advantage of?

Blalock: Mobility is exploding everywhere. As a company, we have to think about is how do we better serve our customers on mobile devices. Not everybody’s going to have them, so you’ve got to have some traditional ways of reaching people, but there’s a new generation of people coming and they want their information in a different fashion. So I think how we provide mobile solutions to our customers and how we put mobility out there in the way of dashboards, so that our employees always know what the state is of the things that are going on inside the company.

One example I’ll give you is when there’s an outage. To be able to give every employee in the company information about how many customers are out and where they’re out is helpful. When the power goes out in my neighborhood, who do you think people call wanting to know when it’s coming back on?

You can imagine, as an employee, if I have that information at my fingertips, I’m a lot better equipped to answer those questions. One of the things we’ve started doing is tweeting what the status is on our outages. And a certain portion of our customer base really likes getting information that way, so I think there’s a great opportunity in that mobility space, especially to engage our customers in more two-way communication.

The second area where there’s a huge opportunity for us is on data analytics. Business intelligence is going to be huge because we have so many sensors out on our network now that we can better predict when an outage will occur. We’ll never be able to predict them all because you don’t know where lightning’s going to hit. You don’t know when somebody’s going to run into a pole in their car. But there are sensors that allow us to look at our equipment and better tell if you’ve got a transformer that’s getting ready to blow. Predict it, so that you replace the transformer before that happens, and the customer’s power is never out. Also, analytics allow us to perform better service. when somebody does hit a pole, instead of it taking down electricity to 200 homes, there’s enough intelligence in the network that it only takes down power to, say, five homes.

Yourdon: Wow. Okay.

Blalock: In many cases, the system is self-healing and can automatically switch the flow of power to keep some customers from going out. Instead of 200, like I said, it would only take a few homes down until you can get a truck to the location. And the trucks are equipped with analytics, as well. They receive information about the exact location of the outage to save time. In addition, the analytics can be shared with out call center. The customers don’t even have to call us. We can call them and say, “A pole in your area has been damaged. Crews are on site and repair should be complete soon.”

All of that is coming in the very near future. And the other thing is that in the future there will be a lot more distributed generation. For example, there may be customers that are generating their own power through solar panels. We’re putting smart meters on everyone’s home so we can tell them—in the future—how much electricity they’re using at different times of the day. If customers want to be more efficient, these smart meters have the intelligence to tell them when they’re using a lot and determine what it is that’s driving usage up.

Yourdon: I assume that’s just one small part of the overall buzzword of the “smart grid” that you folks in your industry are looking forward to over the next 10 or 20 years?

Blalock: Absolutely. There is lots of transformation coming in that area, and we will be leaders in helping move in that direction. I could talk forever about the things that we see coming, but I do think mobility and business analytics are going to be huge. I think the smart meters and the electric vehicles are two technologies, not necessarily in IT that are going to revolutionize our business in the way people are going to use electricity.

Yourdon: It certainly makes a lot of sense. You know, there’s one kind of mundane answer that I was expecting everybody to give me that I haven’t really heard, and that is the response from people who say, “We’re depending on Moore’s Law to continue for another decade”—you know, the fundamental law that says computing power doubles in price performance every 18 months. I’ve been around since that started, and there were all these predictions it was going to stop after ten years, that we were going to run out of ideas for continuing to improve technology. And the latest I’ve heard from Intel is that it’s going to keep going ‘til at least the year 2026, beyond which I won’t really care, but that’s very reassuring.

Blalock: And I don’t see any of this slowing down. If anything, we’re going to continue to reinvent.

Nobody really even thought about virtualization—that was a buzzword five years ago, and now it’s commonplace. Cloud computing—most large enterprise groups were saying, “Not in my lifetime.” Well, guess what? We’re figuring out how to do cloud computing. Maybe not everything, but we’re taking higher chunks of it to the cloud, so it’s coming.

Yourdon: I would certainly agree with that.

Blalock: And these leapfrog innovations that will continue to surface because the amount of data is … it’s mind-boggling how much data we’re going to have. We think we’ve been growing at about 35 percent a year at Southern Company, which is I think pretty much on par with what we’ve seen traditionally in the world. It’s already starting to double every year. We haven’t seen that yet, but we’re bracing ourselves for the fact that we’re going to have a lot more data in the future.

Yourdon: Yeah. I’ve heard one or two people, CIOs that I’ve interviewed focus on the same thing, the importance of the data analytics in this new world, but I don’t think there’s quite enough appreciation for it yet. You know, there’s one last thing I’d be curious about in terms of futures to see if you think it’s important.

There’s a buzzword that was introduced by a futurist named Clay Shirky called “cognitive surplus.” He argues that we are at a point now in society, for the first time, where we have enough spare time supported by technology that mankind can contribute its surplus cognitive energy, and do things that have never been done before—the classic example of which is Wikipedia. You know, we now have a society that can give back in thousands of different ways. And I’m curious whether that’s something that’s meaningful to a utility company.

Blalock: Absolutely. This can actually go back to the history of mankind because mankind used to have to spend all their time growing food, just to survive. Then, farming technology progressed enough, so that today, you don’t worry about food. You go to the grocery store and there is a ton of anything you want. In the developed world, we’re even growing stuff out in the middle of the desert now. And genetics has allowed food to get even more progressive.

I do believe more cognitive time has been freed up, but I also think there’s a lot of stuff consuming our time.

Yourdon: Okay.

Blalock: The Internet has changed the way we live and think. And it has turned us into a global society, more so than anything ever has, and I think we’re continuing on that evolution. And that you’re going to continue to see big changes in medicine. And you’ll see big changes in energy and the way energy gets produced and consumed, and it’s all because of all this knowledge-sharing that’s going on. I don’t think it’s so much that you’ve got free time. It’s the collaboration and the fact that we’re bringing all of this brainpower together so that you can problem-solve in ways that we couldn’t have done.

You wouldn’t have had somebody from China and someone from the U.S. collaborating 20 years ago, solving a problem.

Yourdon: Yep, yep. That’s true.

Blalock: The power of that combined thinking is what I think is driving innovation. It’s not that people have more free time. They have more time and better tools to collaborate.

Yourdon: That makes sense. I want to make sure that I have some time to ask you about the other side of this—the dark side of the force. What are the things that give you nightmares and keep you awake at night, if there is anything?

Blalock: People ask me that question a lot, and it’s really not that much to do with IT. I think the single most challenging thing you deal with as a CIO is personnel. Anytime you have a challenging personnel issue, to me, that’s difficult, because it’s not black and white. IT is pretty black and white. You solve the problem and you move on. Human beings are not, so those are the things that keep me up at night. I also worry about cybersecurity.

Yourdon: Mm-hmm.

Blalock: I’m not inordinately worried about it because I think that Southern Company has some of the best thought leadership in the country. We do a wonderful job managing threats, but will always have to stay on top of it. There are people who are always trying to move the company to become more and more dependent on this technology. As we become more dependent on technology, there are also people who would love to be disruptive in that world. And so I think it’s a challenge to stay on top of that.

I love a challenge and I like learning new things and doing things in different ways. So I think that’s one of the most exciting things about IT. The systems are getting more and more reliable. I can remember when I came to work for the company: We had a mainframe system and I was out in the field, and if this microwave tower went out, you were out of business.

Yourdon: Yeah.

Blalock: And it used to happen on a regular basis. You kept microfiche by your desk. And I knock on wood, but we rarely ever have anything go down now. And it’s because we have such great intelligence and redundancy in the system, and it’s only going to continue to improve. But the people aspect of it is crucial. As CIOs, we are responsible for leading all this technology, but you can’t do it alone. What I do not see enough of sometimes is the leadership around the people dimension. And that’s really what is so important, because you’ve got these really smart people who you have to keep motivated, and you’ve got to bring them along with you, if you want to be successful.

Yourdon: And I would imagine you’ve got to focus a lot also on getting the knowledge out of their heads and into some sharable form, so that when they do eventually retire, you don’t lose it entirely.

Blalock: Absolutely. We’ve focused a lot on cross-training and IT is a key part of the solution to all that. We did a focus group meeting in one of our district offices. And we talked to some of the senior linemen and asked, “Would it be helpful to you if we took a lot of the maps and stuff that you have here and we put them on a computer and you could take them to the field with you?” And they said, “I don’t need that. I built this system. I’ve got it all right up here in my brain.”

Then we talked to some of the young engineers who were fresh out of college and asked them, and they said, “Could you do that for us?” They said, “That would be so helpful if I had those maps at my fingertips instead of having to go back to the district office and pull them out and look at them and try to reengineer the system. If I had all that knowledge right here at my fingertips, I could be so much more productive.” So I think IT is the solution to all of that.

Yourdon: Interesting. Well, that’s encouraging to hear. Let me wrap this up with the final question that I’ve asked every CIO—and that is, where do you go from here? What is life after a CIO, if there is such a thing?

Blalock: Life after a CIO? Umm, I think CIOs can go anywhere they want, because you’ve gotten such great knowledge about the business. I think the real challenge is when I talk to a lot of my peers, they really don’t want to go anywhere else. They really love running and working in IT. Nothing else really quite compares to doing this, and the fact that you’ve always got to be one step ahead, in thinking about how you apply this technology and how you embrace it.

Yourdon: Well, certainly, if your company continues to grow and take on more challenges, that keeps your job from being boring.

Blalock: And like I said, our current CEO was the CIO. We’re very proud of him.

Yourdon: That was very unusual.

Blalock: But it is becoming more of a trend. CIOs today have such broad knowledge of all business processes across the enterprise. The technology they provide is touching the customer in a powerful way. This knowledge is a strong foundation for the CEO of the future.

Yourdon: Hmm. Well, maybe it will continue to do so. All right, so your idea is that a lot of CIOs would probably be perfectly happy continuing to be a CIO, maybe, of a bigger and even more challenging company as time went on.

Blalock: Yeah, a lot of CIOs do move around, and they go up to bigger companies.

Yourdon: Yeah, I certainly have seen that as, you know, I’ve been tracking these people down everywhere. And I’ve also run into a lot of CIOs who are at the end of their career and who have said, “It’s been a great run, but now I’m going to go out and be a university professor or do stuff in the community.” But, you made the point that if one wants to, one could go on to be a CEO or any other position in the company.

Blalock: You’ve got to know the business to apply technology. It’s interesting because I have talked to two former CIOs recently. What they have elected to do is sit on boards for small technology startup companies. And they love it. They are having fun, and they are bringing incredible knowledge to make these companies successful.

Yourdon: Yeah, I have heard that from a couple of them. Yeah, you’re right.

Blalock: There are many young companies who are just starving to know how to get in, and how to sell to CIOs.

Lately, I have had some headhunters contact me about board positions. Companies are beginning to think about the fact they need somebody with IT expertise, somebody who can counsel them regarding cybersecurity, disaster recovery, and how the company should be embracing and applying technology. CIOs are certainly great at this.

Yourdon: Well, that certainly makes sense. I’ve been on a few boards, and there’s been a huge vacuum in that area for some of them because the people they bring in have got very strong finance backgrounds or marketing or whatever, but not that IT component, so I think you’re right.

I very much want to thank you for your time. We could talk all afternoon about any one of these topics, I’m sure—but hopefully, this will at least get people thinking about some new ideas and directions.

Thank you, Becky. I very much appreciate it.