Ken Bohlen
Vice President and CIO, Arizona Public Service Company (APS)

Ken Bohlen is Vice President and Chief Information Officer for Arizona Public Service Company (APS), Arizona’s largest electric company. Based in Phoenix, APS serves more than 1.1 million customers and is one of the fastest-growing investor-owned electric utilities in the United States. Bohlen heads APS’s Information Technology department where he oversees the company’s vital electronic infrastructure and manages the digital challenges faced by a major electric utility. Bohlen also leads the Lean Six Sigma improvement process for APS.

Before joining APS, Bohlen spent 10 years at Textron, Inc. where he served as Executive Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer. Prior to joining Textron, he served 25 years as an information/supply chain executive at both AlliedSignal Inc. and John Deere. Bohlen is a member of the American Production Inventory Control Society and a senior member of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers, Computer and Automated Systems Association. He was recognized with the 2005 Stevie Award for “Best MIS and Systems Executive,” and is a member of IBM’s board of advisors. Bohlen also was recognized by his peers as one of Computerworld’s Premier 100 Leaders for 2006.

Ed Yourdon: I find that a lot of people in the IT industry—especially young aspiring IT professionals who think some day they’re going to be a CIO—are curious how executives like you get to where you are. Is this your first CIO position, or did you move up through the ranks to get to where you are?

Ken Bohlen: It’s kind of an interesting story. I knew early on in my life, in high school, that these things emerging as computers or intelligent work environments were growing, so I looked into what they had at my high school, which was a co-op program with local companies.

Yourdon: That’s common in college, but not in high school. That’s interesting.

Bohlen: Yeah, I did it in high school, I wanted to find something different. My school advisor gave me the opportunity that if I could find something I liked, she’d sponsor it. So I worked for a small company that had computer processing and they made cardboard boxes.

The company was Doerfer Engineering. I worked with the old punch-card routines and the slot machines, and the wires around for sorting. I realized that, “This thing is something. I don’t know where it’s going to take me, but I like it.” So when I went to college—I went to Iowa State—I majored in computer science. But I wasn’t a geeky techie guy, so I took several minors, industrial relations, psychology, sociology. I knew that I wanted to focus my energy with computers, but I felt I needed to know how to use them in social settings as well. So I kind of visualized a plan early on. I didn’t realize where it was going to take me or that I would land in manufacturing, but I’ve just retired out of the manufacturing industry after thirty-five years. Now I’ve jumped into the utility or energy industry. Completely different worlds.

Yourdon: Wow. That is interesting.

Bohlen: And it’s been kind of fun, exciting. I look back at your historical basis. I was a part of PDP minicomputers, with DECnet and some of the communication activities from the CIM, the old computer integrated manufacturing.

Yourdon: Oh, right. Yeah.

Bohlen: So it was a lot of diverse backgrounds, trainings, opportunities. In my last job, I was actually the CIO with the “I” being “innovation.”

Yourdon: Oh, really? Hah!

Bohlen: And Michael Tracy—I don’t know if you know Mike or Clay Christensen.

Yourdon: Oh, yeah, Christensen I do know. Yeah.

Bohlen: Well, Michael Tracy wrote some of the original books on innovation. He said, “You know, Ken, you’ve got to be one of the first in the Fortune 100 companies with the title of Executive VP/Chief Innovation Officer.” At that time I managed all of engineering, IT supply chain, worldwide ops in India, so it was an interesting way of growing, but it’s because of the very beginning, diversity, branching out, knowing the computer’s going to be prevalent in many areas. So my counsel to young people is never say no to an opportunity to learn something outside of your bailiwick, particularly if you’re in an industry field outside of technology.

Yourdon: Well, I was going to ask a similar kind of question because I’ve heard this from other CIOs that a broad education is far more valuable than you might think it is, as opposed to a very narrow, geeky computer science education.

Bohlen: Well, I think it kind of depends. If you want to stay in the Internet, gaming, social media development area, then you are okay! I think that provides you an awareness in areas that are still unknown territory. I think huge riches remain to be made there. But I think that’s a very small group of very talented people. If they’ve got that calling and that desire, God bless them, let them go.

Yourdon: [laughter] Okay, one other related question. Did you have any particularly important mentors or role models along the way?

Bohlen: You know, I’ve had several. There were a few at John Deere, one in particular, Jay Harmon, who was head of production control. I had to step inside of that while I managed the worldwide billing materials and inter-factory buying and selling for John Deere Waterloo operations. Jay would spend time talking with me after hours and actually even come over to my home. We would talk about people, progress, and relationships. John Deere was a very family-oriented company, but we had some tough times in the ’80s, and Jay spent a lot of time mentoring me on the soft skills, if you will.

Yourdon: Interesting.

Bohlen: And, again, this was outside of the IT arena, which I find reflective of the fact that many of my peers in IT at the time were growing and bumbling through the process of turning it into a legitimate profession.

Yourdon: Yeah, I think you’re certainly right on that. And what you’re saying here is similar to what I’ve heard from other people that the mentoring is far more likely to be outside of technology per se. I don’t know about you, but when I went to college, I never took any courses on management or … you did take a broader range of things than I did, but I knew nothing about interacting with the human race [laughter] until I started getting management positions. One last question in this area: as you rose up through the ranks, did you go back to school or get any special training? Did you get an MBA or anything of that sort?

Bohlen: Yes, I did. I went back and got an MBA in my early 40s. I had no intent of ever leaving John Deere. They were really good to me, and my family, everybody was there in Iowa—but after getting the MBA, I ran into a person by the name of Jerry Stead. Jerry was part of the AT&T environment. Anyway, he was a traveling executive. And Jerry and I developed quite a relationship. At the conclusion of the MBA program, where we did a lot of case studies with Allied Signal, I told Jerry, “If I ever had a chance, I’d probably go to work for Allied Signal and leave Deere.”

Yourdon: [laughter] Interesting.

Bohlen: Well, guess what? I got hired at Allied Signal after my MBA graduation, as the director of supply chain. So I essentially got two MBAs, a legitimate academic MBA and then an experiential learning MBA from Larry Bossidy.

Yourdon: Interesting. There have been a few people I’ve spoken to who have gone back to get an advanced degree, but it’s been less common than I might have thought. Well, I think we get a sense of what brought you to this point. In terms of where you are now, the central thing I’m interested in finding out is how you view IT as making a significant contribution to the organization’s strategic success in the future.

Bohlen: Well, we look at the future and the prevalence and the ambiguity going on in hardware platforms. IT, if not prevalent in the industry group, will have to be in the future. As I look at manufacturing, IT had a tremendous impact on processing speeds, billing cycles, cash cycles, customer relationship opportunities. All of those kinds of things, I think, were really good. We’re seeing that in the financial industry. Just the beginning. In the energy industry, I have been a little surprised at IT’s lack of credibility in many of these organizations, as a platform from which to operate.

Yourdon: Hmm.

Bohlen: So I have a little hypothesis—and then there’s what I see. In the manufacturing arena, it’s not uncommon to find the CIO—the super CIO, if you will—in some of the annual reports and proxies. In the utility business, it’s difficult to find any CIO in the proxies of their companies. Now, that’s just one indicator, Ed, but it’s an indicator that I see the IT profession losing ground. I see many IT executives are now becoming subservient to CFOs. Some in the utility space are reporting to HR generalists.

Yourdon: Really?

Bohlen: Yes. When I first came to the utility business, I met with 19 CIOs. I told them I was underwhelmed at how many organizations and the industry looked at IT. Much to my surprise, they came back and said, “You’re right.” I understand you’re talking with Becky Blalock [of Southern Company, interviewed in Chapter 10]. She was one that said, “You’re absolutely right, Ken.” I said, “You know, I don’t know how to change it, but it’s my opinion that, if anything, the power, the grid, the energy environment that we’re operating in is just one huge infrastructure.”

Yourdon: Right.

Bohlen: Who better to run that than people that have grown up managing the growth of this tremendous infrastructure called the Web in our company infrastructure? So, it’s a mental note that I’ve made to myself. That’s why APS is a new, exciting challenge for me. I have been helping improve ways to manage infrastructure, including security. I jumped back in as a way to “give back.” I also find myself speaking more at conferences trying to energize potential future CIOs to get out of the techie world in the business environment, grab hold of ERM, grab hold of disaster recovery, business continuity because that’s what we grew up with.

Yourdon: Interesting. So, how will you use IT to make APS more successful in the future? And it sounds like you’re saying that IT has to take more responsibility for things involving the grid and the infrastructure.

Bohlen: I think that’s one of the components. The other is technology. Too often in my career I’ve noticed these problems are loosely understood, but the solution is clear. I got to know Jim Womack really well in my last job. He has influenced me to focus first on making clear the problem we’re trying to solve. And if we can’t articulate it, I’m not throwing dollars at technology. Inside this arena, what I’m finding is that people really don’t know what problem they’re trying to solve. So you get a lot of little pilots. I’ve seen these pilots have different technology directions, some of which are counterproductive to each other. Overall technology direction always needs to be very clear.

Yourdon: Ahh, interesting.

Bohlen: Then, the third thing is business value. I sometimes find we already have technology that would indeed answer a problem. But you know how it goes, people see something new at a latest gizmo/whiz-bang show and suddenly the organization finds itself trying to incorporate new technologies. So one of the values that I’ve added is that we are not doing projects unless we understand the business value.

Yourdon: Okay. Well, that certainly makes sense.

Bohlen: You know, it’s the kind of thing we all talk about. This is one of the first times I’ve experienced it. IT really didn’t drive that before. It was the old—I call it the 1970s’ management style—they would yell and scream until IT felt that they needed to come to the requestor. And I just don’t do that.

Yourdon: [laughter] Now, as CIO, I assume you are also in charge of the thousands of desktops and servers with which all APS employees get their job done every day. So how big a job is that, just keeping the lights on, so to speak, for the internal IT operation?

Bohlen: If you look at my budget, over 60 percent of my budget is keeping the lights on. Which is very high from the industry group I came from, but what I’m beginning to learn is that that’s not uncommon in a lot of utility spaces.

Yourdon: Hmm, interesting.

Bohlen: So, part of the reason for that is the previous discussion. “We don’t know the problem we’re trying to solve, but I think this nice tool will help me.” So over a period of time, the organization had accumulated hundreds of different applications products.

Yourdon: Wow.

Bohlen: Well, that’s an opportunity for improvement. I always like to operate from a base of facts. I hired a benchmarking company. I used them at John Deere, Allied Signal, and Textron, and now I brought them in to help us at APS. They performed a benchmark for IT, finance, and HR. And that gave me a baseline to begin directing my efforts. Otherwise, standing on a platform without data, I’d sound like a wolf crying at the bottom of a hill.

Yourdon: Right.

Bohlen: I was able to point out that we were extraordinarily high on the applications compared to peer groups of our size; however, compared to other world-class companies, we were fourth quartile. Directionally, this gave me the areas that we needed to go attack. It provided a third-party source of data our organization could refer to as we promoted the necessary changes, that it wasn’t just my personal opinion or a pet project. As business people, it also showed that we’ve got a lot of opportunity.

Yourdon: Hmm. Fascinating.

Bohlen: So yes, we’ve got to support desktops, but what was really adding to the overall support cost was all these other apps. What we did was unique and different for me. IT has always been in the role of saying, “No, you can’t do that. No, you can’t do this.” When we had green screens and then Apple came out and the Intel machines, we said, “No, we’ve got to test them.” Then we went to distributed computing, we first said, “No,” and then it took off. So what I’ve developed here is a program called “Just Say Yes.”

Yourdon: Ahh, fascinating.

Bohlen: What we’re doing is transitioning from the company buying personal-asset laptops, the iPads, the iPhones, to the employees buying them themselves. We don’t care what kind of smartphone you get as long as it’s within a certain family. We’re using products like Citrix and GoodLink, so we have a secured venue into the device. What the person does with it outside of that controlled environment, that’s their legal responsibility. What we’re trying to do is get outside of the security/privacy issues in the workplace. All of that we’re trying to eliminate in giving people freedom.

Yourdon: Well, I’m certainly hearing conversations of that sort from just about everybody I’ve spoken to, and it’s fascinating to see how everyone is grappling with this, because it is an unstoppable tidal wave in many cases.

Bohlen: Yes, we’ve had the program in place for about four months and it’s been positively accepted. We did the traditional return on investment and looked at what we needed to invest, so we are providing incentives for people to say, “You mean, you’ll give me x dollars a month and I just put the package on my own home computer, and I don’t have to use this other stuff?” That’s exactly right. It’s been very successful. We are doing it in phases so we don’t tax the team as we do it, but it’s been really good.

Yourdon: And it’s interesting to see how this correlates with the industry that’s providing the devices and apps. So I spoke to the CIO of Google, who said, “You know, in the old days we used to build things for the enterprise and hope that it would trickle down to the employees.”

Bohlen: Yes, you’re right.

Yourdon: Because it was very expensive and very scarce, and therefore it had to be controlled. And he said, “Now at Google and Microsoft and all these other places, like Apple, they’re building things for the consumer marketplace first and foremost, and if it trickles up into the enterprise, that’s wonderful—but we start with the consumer.” And, of course, you’re experiencing that from the other side because all these people walk in your door holding something in their hand that they bought at home and that they’re bloody well determined to use, regardless of whether you say no or not, so.

Bohlen: I love it. You know, I didn’t put the two together, but that’s a significant paradigm shift.

Yourdon: Yeah, I think it is, and that really is the next whole area I wanted to get into is. “Paradigm shift” is a term that’s overused a bit, but you’ve obviously been in the industry a long time, and we’ve all seen enormous things happening over the last 30 or 40 years. But I’m curious to let you speculate on what kinds of paradigm shifts or major things we should look forward to in the future, over the next few years?

Bohlen: That’s a tough one. What we’re seeing more and more in this cloud computing environment is an opportunity to have storage of our company data in diverse locations. I think we’re going to see a huge move—now this could be “what you are now” is “where you were back when.” So being an older person, seeing some cycles, I’m beginning to wonder about what is going to happen. For instance, is all it’s going to take is one security breach of a significant magnitude that’s going to spin companies into a tailspin and they’re going to bring their data back to a resident location?

Yourdon: Ahh, interesting. Okay.

Bohlen: It’s more an issue in the hard-line manufacturing/R&D companies, but also in the energy/utility spaces—but all it takes is one, and you’re going to have legislation. So one of my desires is to try to understand what’s happening with government legislation. And that can change so rapidly and change everything that’s going on. Some of the ITAR¹ relationships that we have in the DoD² world are cumbersome, but very important and critical. And I think those are the kinds of things that I think three, four years out, that could be a concern. Another is analytics. I think that we have a huge opportunity because there’s so much data that needs to be turned into information, and I think the tools that are associated with analytics can help present patterns and paths and directions that can allow for more informed decision making.

Yourdon: Hmm.

__________

Bohlen: The third one I see is the generational issue inside of the companies, including IT. Being a professionally educated IT person doesn’t necessarily mean you’re the best equipped, because they’re graduating accounting majors who have computing tools they use on the side. So everybody is kind of an IT wizard—I won’t say “professional,” but they’ve got an opinion because they’ve used it.

Yourdon: Yeah.

Bohlen: I think that may create a tough leadership role in the future, even tougher than what we’ve got today. I watch my grandkids: 13, 14 years old. They’re growing up with this thing that is significantly different. This is an interesting dialogue because historically, and as all the case studies suggest, you never take true advantage of the technology until you get rid of the traditional management over the top of it and usher in a new one. So how do we usher in the new leaders?

Yourdon: Well, in some cases they’re starting at a much younger age than they were before. You and I are of the same generation, but when I talked to the CIO of Google—it’s staggering to see. And Google as a company is … well, the average age must be 25, I think. So it’s a whole different set of assumptions and expectations and experiences. Well, back to this issue of paradigm shifts. So I gather you think this move into cloud computing is one example where there are going to continue to be a lot more changes and things. Any other major things you’d add to that? Oh, and you said analytics. I’m sorry. That was the second one.

Bohlen: I think analytics is going to have a place in it. Another I’m beginning to sense is just the huge opportunity that exists for what I’d call “home computing.”

Yourdon: Hmm. Yeah.

Bohlen: One of the things that we see at the utility is that that customers are going to consume more and more energy, but we’ve got coal that we don’t necessarily want to promote and provide, for various reasons, and yet we know that renewables like solar and wind, probably only can make up 15 percent of our consumption by 2025. We are also seeing the true emergence of these home entertainment or smart home concepts. Honeywell’s got some, GE’s got one, Control4’s got one, where you can begin to marry your thermostat to energy consumption models, so that during peak load times, you can cycle air conditioning and appliances differently. I think there’s a revolution about to happen in that arena.

Yourdon: Ahh, interesting, ’cause we’ve been talking about it for 40 years, but maybe we’re being driven by economic forces to really start getting serious about it.

Bohlen: I think we are. You know, you’ve got the boomers that dabble with technology, so they’re kind of open. If you can put the thermostat readings on their TV so they can actually program and control it, I think they would actually do that. And the economics, to your point, you can now put … home systems in play for under a thousand bucks.

Yourdon: Yeah.

Bohlen: So all of a sudden, there’s a market that I think the Googles or a different marketing franchise unit is going to come in and people are going to knock themselves on the head and say, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Yourdon: Interesting. Well, that will be interesting to watch if it develops. I haven’t heard that one from anyone before. When you mentioned Google, by the way, you reminded me of one other suggestion that I heard from Google in this area of paradigm shifts, and that was the notion that for the first time in history, with the technology that we have and everything else, we have what one futurist, a guy by the name of Clay Shirky, calls a “cognitive surplus”—that is, an opportunity to take advantage of free brainpower and extra time to contribute to society things like Wikipedia or Linux. For that matter, the entire open software thing is one example. But this idea of contributing knowledge into some form that can be accessed by humanity is arguably what Google is all about, and several other organizations, too, and that just didn’t exist a generation ago.

Bohlen: I agree with that. One of the things I’ve pondered recently here is: are there unintended consequences to free knowledge and growing knowledge? And my reference point is as I looked worldwide—I’ve managed engineering centers in India, too—and I began looking at what parents and grandparents were struggling with, with their children and grandchildren. And it led me to the thought that there is pervasive information before they’re willing to have the maturity, the intellectual capability to interpret things. So as an example, you and I growing up, we didn’t learn stuff because they were secret from you and me—because our parents said, “Well, they’re not old enough. We’re going to wait.” In today’s day and age, in this environment, I think that’s a social environment that we haven’t really thought through.

Yourdon: Ahh, I see what you’re saying.

Bohlen: Because the information is so pervasive that the parents are no longer, or the grandparents or the nuclear family, may no longer be the source of information, and I think we’re seeing that more and more as the new generation comes up. So I’m looking at humanity as an experiment and saying, “well, what’s going to happen here?” because we’ve changed the very knowledge transfer of nuclear families.

Yourdon: There’s a set of terms, vocabulary from an anthropologist, Margaret Mead, about a postfigurative, cofigureative, and prefigurative culture. Her point was that a couple of generations ago, it was just taken for granted that children would learn from their parents, much as you just said. And then there was a shift where the older and younger generations have to learn at the same time. It happens particularly with immigrant communities.

Bohlen: Yeah.

Yourdon: They both show up here in the United States, and they’ve all got to learn the language and customs and so on. And she argues that we’re now in a new area—the prefigurative culture—where the parents have to learn from the children because the technology is changing so rapidly that the kids pick it up first. They learn how to operate the TV remote controls before their parents, which we’ve been joking about for 10 or 20 years. And the parents are struggling because they have to abandon old habits and assumptions, which is more difficult for them to do. So it’s a huge transformation in that sense, and of course, IT is right in the middle of that also. Now, does any of that directly affect your industry?

Bohlen: I think it will and it does, but it gets back to that point we have all this data. We are all just learning how to interpret it.

Yourdon: Ahh. Okay.

Bohlen: For example, there’s a feeling that the younger people are more energy-conscious. Well, some of the data doesn’t show that. They may be even less energy-conscious as long as they get what they want in terms of data, information, so they don’t care when they get it if it’s cheaper. So there’s some interesting debates that need to occur after we synthesize the data.

Yourdon: You know, there’s a trivial example of that. I grew up in the ’50s, and we were smacked on the hand if necessary to remind us that when you leave a room, you turn out the lights—because electricity was expensive. Today, of course, my kids wander from room to room and the entire house looks like a Christmas tree. Because it’s always there and they have no idea what the bill is—so I think you’re certainly right about that and you’re probably right that we just don’t know what data could be telling us because we haven’t analyzed it properly. Very interesting.

Bohlen: You know, unfortunately, in the American culture particularly, we tend to operate best when we have a burning platform, and that platform’s not quite there yet.

Yourdon: Yeah, I think you’re right. Let me switch gears to the opposite side of this discussion we’ve been having, to the dark side of the force. What are the problems and things that keep you awake at night in terms of IT?

Bohlen: I think the Johari Window—are you familiar with that?

Yourdon: No, I’m not.

Bohlen: Basically, the things I know and you know are public. The things I know and you don’t know, that’s my private world. The things I don’t know and you know are things that I try to discover. And then there are things you don’t know and I don’t know. That’s what worries me.

Yourdon: Okay, that’s what Donald Rumsfeld called the “unknown unknowns.”

Bohlen: Yes.

Yourdon: We used to have a lot of conversations about that sort of thing when we were planning for Y2K ten years ago. There are the known knowns and the known unknowns and so on. Okay, so you’re concerned about the things we’re not even aware that we should be worrying about.

Bohlen: It primarily comes from my work in the Department of Defense days, and you’re familiar with the war games. But there are some people out there trying to destroy our way of life. And the more I know, the more I can make sure I protect myself or protect our society. So as an example, what’s the potential of terrorists blowing up a microwave hub channel that would cut out power? I just don’t know what I don’t know. And that’s bothersome to me because I think frequently the little things we should be doing—should I be worrying about it, you know? But those do from time to time cause me to sit up and shoot off a quick e-mail saying, “Guys, what are we doing on these channels or these distribution hubs or these remote locations?” When you think about the value or the criticality of them, they’re huge.

Yourdon: You know, there’s a related point that I heard from Google once again. The CIO there said it was humbling to realize just how much power could be brought to bear against you by an entire country. He said, “It’s one thing to deal with hackers, or the kid in Moscow who’s trying to break into your system. You deal with that, and you still have to worry about that at night. But when you’ve got a whole bloody country focusing its attention on you, that’s terrifying.” Especially if you’re very visible.

Bohlen: You’re right.

Yourdon: I interviewed the CIO of the New York Stock Exchange, and he said, “You know, clearly, we’re a very visible target, as is Google, as is Microsoft, as are, you know, various other organizations.” And I guess to some extent, energy companies in general are because of the attractive consequences that a terrorist might contemplate. You know, “If I can make all of Arizona go dark, wouldn’t that be cool?”

Bohlen: Right.

Yourdon: Yeah, okay, so it’s security on kind of a grand scale that still worries you.

Bohlen: The other one that I think I’ve always been vigilant on is not becoming complacent with where we are today. Keeping people on edge—because I think if you don’t, it’s too easy to make assumptions. And in some ways, I think if you ask by having somebody coming from outside the industry like myself, it allows you to ask the “dumb” questions. “Why do we do that? Why is that important? Why did we do it way back when? Do we still need to do it today?”

Yourdon: Right. That’s a very good point. The other answer I heard in that area, which I’m pretty sure you would agree with, is listening more carefully to the younger people coming into the organization.

Bohlen: I’ve got several focus groups, they call them “skip levels,” and my “Just Say Yes” program, as a matter of fact, came out of the young group. I’ve got them sponsored and I keep giving them the opportunity to keep telling me what I don’t know so that we can provide leadership for the company, so I give them all the kudos.

Yourdon: Well, the other aspect of that that I would think would be very, very much of concern to CIOs in almost any industry is the risk of losing touch with existing parts of your marketplace, but also new parts of your marketplace.

Bohlen: And you’ve got to be quick. You know, I’m accustomed to planning for things nine months, ten months, a year out. We do it. But we’ve seen this massive switch. Blogs were a big thing for a long period of time. Now it’s Twitter. They don’t even go to blogs.

Yourdon: Right.

Bohlen: And you’ve got to be extremely sharp on the latest things that are coming out. Finding restaurants now, you go to Yelp—it’s bizarre to me. But you’re right. You’ve got to have the input of that generation because it is different.

We’re going through discussions now inside the company. Should we be able to tweet high-power days out to our customer base so they can go and turn some of their lights or appliances off? So we’ve had those kinds of discussions and dialogs. Do we send out national alerts to our people on those high-energy days? So that’s what we’ve been talking through. We’re trying to gain some experience from the rest of the organization and other utilities. We’re not a large utility so to speak. We’ve got 1.1 million customers. So we want to be mindful of how we do that, and I keep asking, “So if you send it, what do you want the recipient to do?”

Yourdon: Yeah.

Bohlen: We look at what specifically we can do beforehand, so that we don’t annoy our audiences. Because that’s another thing you learn. The young kids in particular don’t like spam. They like stuff coming from people they know or it’s actionable and meaningful to them. So you can’t get on these wild goose chases where you’ve got to tweet everything. Well, why are we going to do that? Have we really looked at it? So there’s a lot of old generational thinking and new value creation thinking that needs to occur, and I don’t think we’ve got a good model yet.

Yourdon: Yeah, there certainly are examples of that kind of situation that I’ve seen. For example, the San Diego Fire Department used Twitter as a mechanism for allowing citizens to report in brush fires and these terrible fires that they have in the fall with everything getting very dry. And that’s actionable and it conveys information back to the organization that they would otherwise not have known. Is there anything of that nature that might be relevant for you?

Bohlen: I think that is something that is available, because if you think about it today, we typically learn first about outages through telephone services. That’s beginning to change with the smart meters. That’s a whole new revolution beginning to occur, where you get instantaneous data. Our challenge is to figure out, “Do we want it every 15 minutes? Do we want it every 30 minutes?” Then the question is, “If we get that data every 15 minutes from 1.1 million customers, what do we do with it? What do we want them to do with it? How long do we keep it?” That’s where analytics will really come into play.

Yourdon: Exactly. That is a good point. Let’s see. I want to shift back to a topic we’ve talked about a little bit already and from a couple of different perspectives: this whole thing about the new generation, the younger generation coming in. Do you have any concerns about how they use technology or how they think about technology?

Bohlen: Not necessarily concerns. I think I have learned from that. I find it very intriguing. Some of my first meetings when I was at my previous company with the new-generation people is that they would ask questions that cause you to think: “Well, why do you send out meeting notices and expect all of us to attend the meeting? Don’t you think that’s a lot of wasted time, energy, and effort? Well, what are you guys talking about? Why do you have these meetings to discuss security issues?” is an example.

So I said, “Okay, then what should I do?”

“Well, why don’t you send it out as an e-mail message to everybody, kind of an alert, let us all respond and dialogue,”—and at that time we were using a blog—“And we can respond from there. That way you’ll get people feeding off of each other and you’ll get ideas, and you don’t have to waste all of our time in meetings. We can do it as a matter of course in our workday.”

I’ll tell you, that really shook me, because all of a sudden, I’m seeing their social media initiatives brought into the work environment that had the potential for changing the way we do work.

Yourdon: Ahh, interesting.

Bohlen: The other thing I found is that they’re a whole lot more concerned and interested in teams. In one case, I had eight engineers, young ones, I wanted to keep two of them, so we told the two that we wanted to keep… “The other six, we’re going to probably have to let go.” They said, “Well, then, we’re not staying. … We hired on together. We’ve bonded. We’re all in this together.”

Yourdon: Well, I’m glad you mentioned that. It’s the first confirmation I’ve gotten. I’ve asked several other people and I’ve gotten a blank stare. I heard first from the CIO of Marriott Hotels that teams are being hired together. It’s very much—

Bohlen: Yeah, you talked to Carl?

Yourdon: Yeah, oh yeah, Carl Wilson.

Bohlen: He and I have shared similar examples that it just blows you away.

Yourdon: Yeah. I had not heard that before. I certainly have heard of teams demanding to stay together, which—when they finish one project and want to go on to another—which runs afoul of the HR policies in a lot of organizations.

Bohlen: Yeah, it does. The other one I ran into was when we started working through the teams of people and trying to figure out who should get what compensation. They wanted to have a say in that which, again, you would hold that close to your vest in the traditional management style.

Yourdon: Yes, I certainly agree with that. Interestingly, some of these kinds of issues in the IT field in particular have been discussed and debated for some 20 years now. I don’t know if you’ve seen a book written by two friends of mine, Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister, called Peopleware³.

Bohlen: Yes.

Yourdon: All of those topics are still relevant today because there are still a lot of organizations that insist on doing things in a very traditional way. But I think your point is that this new, younger generation is more and more resistant to just sort of buckling under and doing things the old way.

Bohlen: Exactly.

Yourdon: Do you have any concerns about how they work or what their loyalties or energies or anything else might be?

Bohlen: Well, I think that I’ve worked my way through it. They don’t have any loyalty, but why should they? We’ve taught them not to.

Yourdon: [laughter] Yeah, that’s been true for 20 years also, unfortunately.

Bohlen: I do think that they are a whole lot more mobile, but I’ve also found, particularly the educated group of people we’re addressing—many of them are family-bound or root-bound. Or they saw what happened in their families. I had some experience with this in Wichita, Kansas, and Fort Worth, Texas—huge operations we had there. We were recruiting from the local colleges because the kids didn’t want to leave those areas, the environment where they grew up. They wanted to stay close to their moms and dads.

Yourdon: Ahh, interesting.

Bohlen: I think the coasts were different. When I was in Rhode Island, I didn’t find that as prevalent. However, in Providence, it did go on because, again, that community is very family-oriented. So they’d hire from Brown and Bryant.

__________

So the shift is significantly different for me. I made offers to kids to go to Fort Worth or to go to Wichita. I know why they didn’t want to go to Wichita, but that was another issue, but they wouldn’t go. “No, I don’t want to leave.” And maybe that’s a Midwest as opposed to coast issue. I don’t know.

Yourdon: Would that still be true in today’s economy?

Bohlen: I find it in Phoenix with ASU [Arizona State University] students. They want to stay in the valley.

Yourdon: Interesting. Even if it involves a lower-paying job than might be available in Silicon Valley?

Bohlen: Yes, and, you know, there are those highly motivated people I think will go wherever the jobs are and they’ll grow through it. I was just back in the Midwest at John Deere in Iowa again, chatting with a bunch of young people, entrepreneurial startup people. I said, “What are you doing in Iowa?” These are geeky kinds of companies, and they’re working through some analytics and open-source modules and what have you. And I said, “Do you want to go where the action is?”

“No, we’re staying right here.”

I said, “Well, you know, you’re missing out on the huge opportunity of capital, because Iowa is a great place to be from, but you’re not going to run into millionaires just willing to invest capital in startups.” But they have no interest.

Yourdon: Well, in addition to that, one of the things we’ve begun to see with the Web 2.0 industry is that they don’t need millions of dollars to get started.

Bohlen: Well, that’s true, too.

Yourdon: A generation ago, you did. You had to go to Silicon Valley and find some rich person to give you a million dollars and then you did an IPO—but I could give you a long list of these Web 2.0 companies that have been started up on somebody’s credit card with a spare computer that they had in the garage. And that means you can do it in Iowa, or for that matter, Bangalore or any other number of places around the world, so.…

Bohlen: You’re right and I agree with the context—they communicate on a worldwide basis. So maybe there’s a little prejudice from my “what you are now is where you were when” perspective.

Yourdon: [laughter] The only negative thing that I have heard and the reason I kept asking about this actually comes from a man named Paul Strassmann [interviewed in Chapter 16], who was the CIO of the Defense Department and the CIO of Xerox and NASA and a few other places. He’s very concerned about what he regards as kind of a superficial intellectual level of today’s generation. They expect to get everything instantaneously from Google, their attention span is five minutes, and they may not be interested or perhaps even capable of deep intellectual concentration. Is that something you see at all?

Bohlen: I’ve seen a correlation to that. Math and science, depth in knowledge and skills, particularly in North American universities, is significantly less than other worldwide training programs. The reason I’d go to India is because I couldn’t find enough skilled aerospace labor here in the United States.

Yourdon: Ahh, but …

Bohlen: But the depth of that knowledge was very light. So math and sciences, which is in support of that, are skills and avenues that require deep thought. So I do think that we’re seeing Geraldo’s “dumbing down of America.” And I think the kinds of attention spans also are adding to that, so these are one of those social unknowns I was talking about before. And by the way, we’re unconsciously doing it.

Yourdon: Well, consciously and unconsciously. It’s something I began to hear about a while ago with something as innocent as Sesame Street, which are tiny little vignettes that are 30 seconds or a minute long because that’s all a 5-year-old kid feels like concentrating on—and it stays with them all the way through their education these days.

So, we’ve got just a couple of minutes left, and I wanted to wrap things up with what I hope will be an appropriate final question and that is: where do you see yourself going from here?

Bohlen: Carl Wilson [the recently retired CIO of Marriott International] and I chatted about this about a month ago, and I think part of what we’re doing is giving back to the profession.

Yourdon: Ahh, okay.

Bohlen: So, trying to do some public speaking. I speak frequently at Gartner events. I’ve been trying to get IT professionals to think about business in the terms of business. All the stuff we talked about, the desktop, yes, we’ve got to do that. But that’s what we do in our private world. And I’m very concerned that today’s IT people don’t understand the value that they can bring to their organizations, nor do they understand the value and the worth that their organizations are to the companies. And many companies are being led and directed by traditionalists or boomers that don’t really understand the technology movement and therefore aren’t rewarding the IT people appropriately or rightly.

Yourdon: Hmm.

Bohlen: So I’m really on a campaign to push that message. That’s one of the things I’ve been doing. Carl Wilson and I chatted about that. Can we work with groups like Concourse or Strive to get young leaders aware of the business language. So that’s one of the things. Am I interested in another CIO? No, not at all.

Yourdon: [laughter]

Bohlen: While I miss the global environment, I’m into teaching the next generation. I get a ton of opportunities for this at APS and to speak nationally. I don’t know if I want to travel anymore. I’ve done enough of that. So, being in Scottsdale, Arizona, is kind of nice because people come out here frequently.

Yourdon: That’s true. It’s a nice place to visit.

Bohlen: The dialogue my wife and I are having is like, “Okay, when will you be ready to go on to other stuff, like retirement and grandkids?” So, it’s interesting.

Yourdon: Well, that’ll be interesting to see how it plays out for you and for Carl—and there’s another gentleman, the University of Miami CIO, who has just retired also and is going through similar kinds of questions for himself, so I’ll be watching to see where all of you end up.

Bohlen: [laughter] You know, I took a step. I told Carl, I said, “You know, I’m a life learner. Being a chief innovation officer, you’ve got to re-create yourself.” So I’ve decided to go back to school again. So I’m now taking seminary classes, Greek and Hebrew, because I thought I want to expand my mind.

Yourdon: That’s interesting.

Bohlen: So that’s been a very interesting dialogue, a complete change of agendas and learning, so that’s one that I’m intrigued with right now.

Yourdon: Well, that certainly is unique. Nobody else has told me a story along those lines. And with that, I think I will wrap this up. I certainly appreciate your taking the time.

Bohlen: Thanks, Ed.

Yourdon: Thanks again. I really appreciate it.