Mittu Sridhara
CIO, Ladbrokes plc

Mittu Sridhara is Group CIO at Ladbrokes PLC. A leader in the global betting and gaming market, Ladbrokes transacts more than £16 billion each year—making it a pure, cross-channel digital business on a global scale. Customer experience at Ladbrokes is delivered by a combination of trading, banking, streaming-content, and gaming platforms personalized by channel. Ladbrokes’ innovative KickOff app won the Future Mobile Award for Mobile Gambling 2011.

An international visionary, Mr. Sridhara has an outstanding track record of building high-performance teams, products, and industry-leading customer experiences. He is recognized for his customer-centric approach and passion. Mr. Sridhara’s career has encompassed Senior Leadership Technology and Product Marketing at Sabre; CIO at Versapoint NV, a broadband telecommunications company; and Group CIO at Avis Rent A Car System, LLC.

Ed Yourdon: I usually start off the same way. I don’t need to ask where you grew up or where you went to university, but people were not born into the position of CIO, so I’m curious to know how you got to where you are now. Were you a CIO somewhere before?

Mittu Sridhara: Yes, I was. I actually tell people about who I am, because how you do your job, especially on a global scale in a global organization does, I think, add flavor to it.

Yourdon: It does, and it’s something I had not anticipated. And I hope for your sake that it’s very different for you, but some of the organizations I’ve spoken with have said, whenever there’s a crisis anywhere in the world—of which there are many today—“We get a phone call at three in the morning because our organization is global.” Now I hope you don’t have global crises, but I can imagine you have a global scale, so that it makes things different than a lot of people would expect.

Sridhara: I think probably most CIOs at scale have operations to run 24/7. I mean globally. So, something can go wrong at any point in time along the way. But also how you implement and influence, culturally and across geography, is also relevant to the context. Because, who you are and how you perceive and how you message are quite fundamental in how successful you are in getting things done. And you get things done through people, not through technology. You also get to customers through solutions that have elements of technology that is derived through an understanding of what the customer wants. I believe the global aspect has been a significant part of the job and I’ve operated globally for pretty much most of my career. I’ve been in business now for 22-odd years. So I consider myself a “young body with high miles.”

I started with American Airlines in what was the decisions group, which then became Sabre Technology.

Yourdon: Separate business. Yes, I remember that story. That was one of the, I think, the first big case studies of information being more valuable than the parent company that spawned it.

Sridhara: We built an ERP system for what was the travel business as a whole, and earned my stripes going from being one of the ‘coders’ to leading the project because the lead got stuck in a previous project at Southwest. And by default, I assumed leadership and delivered an ERP for travel agencies. I’m going back a decent period of time, but that product is still there on the marketplace. It was built in a very agile manner, with customers in the same room. Locked into helping drive deliverables, literally cutting a version of the product every day. In about nine months, we built a product that was the ERP for the travel agencies business process, the ability to take your reservation, process it on the GDS in the back end. And then provide you with all the services you required.

I came into the business process side at American and very quickly was noticed as somebody who understood technology but also understood business process.

I was starting to manage teams as a whole, but more importantly, I understood what the customer wanted. And we were able to translate that into the requirements, or the user stories, as you call them today, in agile terms, for what needed to be built. So, yes, there was not a traditional technology part then, but I ended up then using technology to enable solutions for business.

Yourdon: One of the questions I’ve asked in this early stage of just about everyone is whether they received any formal education along the way. Did you go to CIO school or get an MBA, once you got on this track that was about to lead you where you are now?

Sridhara: From an educational point of view, I’ve been a CIO for, at a group level, for about ten years now, so it’s been a school in and of itself. But in terms of building up to it, it was a progression of different roles and responsibilities—jobs and different career spans and spans of control, I should say, that gave me the experience to help execute as a CIO.

Yourdon: Well, it’s interesting how few people have said, “Well, yes, at a certain point I had to go get my MBA” or “They sent me off to learn about finance and accounting and so forth.” There has been a lot of emphasis on broad education at an early stage, but after that, it seems to be very much on-the-job training, as you rise up through the ranks.

Sridhara: Mark Zuckerberg didn’t go to school to learn how to build Facebook. So the answer to this is, I think for all of us, especially for me, learning is big every day. I come in to work every day to keep learning. So it’s a daily and a career aspiration. To learn literally every day and every year, to take on responsibilities that help you learn, grow, refine. And you also learn through building other people and building businesses. So you’re constantly learning.

Learning is such an important thing to me, I went and signed up with London Business School and got some of the finance and marketing sides. I was kind of completing my portfolio of tools that I use every day. But I do believe in applying them practically.

The magic sauce to me is not just in the theory of what you need to do, but it’s also in understanding how you do it. And how you refine it as you do it to get the job done, and these are three very separate things.

You can be a consultant up front, and a very good consultant at seeing what it is that needs to get done, but understanding true context, and then starting to deliver it, and then refining the plan as you deliver it to be the right result—you could think of it as agile, it’s strategic agile, but in organizational delivery terms.

Not just the technology, because often CIOs, I think, are enabling businesses to do more, or they differentiate at a lower cost overall. I should probably talk to you about strategy.

Any simple strategy boils down to three things: differentiate and grow top-line revenue and differentiate and drive more value; drop costs and do more for less, while you currently run the business that is in play.

Yourdon: Very quickly. One last question in this sort of “getting started” area. And that is the question of whether you had any significant mentors or role models that helped shape who you are today?

Sridhara: I’ve been very fortunate, very, very fortunate, because in many of my jobs, I’ve had people that I’ve worked with where several people stand out. What’s interesting to me when I reflect on your question is not only were they mentors back then; they continue to be friends/mentors/role models to this day.

Because I look back at them when they were young managers, and I still look at some of them today and look at how they’ve chosen the basic life decisions they’ve made, and not just career decisions. And you learn from them, and continue to learn because these relationships last a lifetime. There are several people that come to mind.

I’ve always looked at mentoring not just in a business context but mentors as role models.

Yourdon: Now you mentioned a moment ago, the next major area I want to get into, which is how you see IT here at Ladbrokes. For example, achieving the objectives you mentioned of competitive differentiation and driving value and just keeping the lights on. And everybody has had a slightly different story to tell me there. Why don’t we start with the first part, about differentiation? How do you see IT achieving that, or how are you using IT to achieve that?

Sridhara: Fundamentally, I think, differentiation. It’s probably worth taking a moment to describe the business, so that you understand the context. Ladbrokes has more retail outlets than Tescos in the UK. The market capitalization is £1bn ($2,000m). It’s not our true turnover. If I reported like Tesco’s, I would be reporting 15 to 16 billion in stakes yearly. So when it comes to the solutions in IT, we service every single penny of our £16 billion.

My can of beans is electronic, my shelves are electronic, my prices are also going to go electronic. And I was out at Gartner now ten-odd years ago, probably nine years, talking about real-time systems. Nowhere else in my entire career have I been somewhere where real time is truly, truly real time. In this business, if there’s an example on the betting side of our business, if a horse leaves the gate, and you place a bet two seconds later, we might have a problem. So two seconds can make a huge difference.

You could be viewing it on-screen on what is effectively streaming media on the wall in a shop, and you could place a bet on a handwritten slip. If we capture that bet incorrectly at the wrong price, we could be out millions of pounds.

So that ability to digitize what is manual, in subseconds, but to get the right price, to match up with the video feed, with the right product is critical. Across channels we are a customer experience and entertainment company and delivering a rich entertainment experience to you, the customer, if you’d like to bet or game. And we’ve got to bring all those together in real time, and the technology underpinnings is what does it for this business.

By real time we’re talking about 20 milliseconds of latency making a big difference. So it’s about ensuring the price to be right, but also ensuring the pinning enablement is all correct. It’s also about operational processes being automated because you’re doing this for fun, the sooner we actually give you something back, the sooner you have a choice. You have a choice to put it back in or take it and walk away.

The whole industry is in the process of understanding the customer, and what the customer wants is key. I know you come to this question a little later in your series of questions around what are the big differences and emerging trends.

The smart mobile device for us, not just the mobile device, but the smart mobile device, is an interesting opportunity, because suddenly it’s immersive. Before it wasn’t, you know, your flat text message. Yes, you can engage, because we’re in the space of providing a rich piece of entertainment to you, which includes content, it includes price, it requires streaming video or stats around a game, a price, around you. A smart device now suddenly starts to make that possible.

So that’s where you have really rapid convergence coming our way. And we are at the forefront of most industries, because others have to deal with it as well. Convergence is coming to us much quicker than it is to anybody else because the only physical thing in our business is cash, and even that is going digital.

Because the iPhone 5 is expected to have a digital wallet, thus new battleground for the Googles and everybody else around payments. The reason it is a new battleground is because of convergence.

How do I then ensure that everything is consistent and engages around regulation as well, which is another key element for us. We are strictly regulated, more so than the FSA¹ on what you can and cannot do and what we’re required to do as well. We cannot always do what another retailer can do.

So it’s just a fascinating space, because we are in the Web 3.0 business in that our customers are already watching media, socially interacting in-store, and buying product. It’s now about how do you make the technology—the technology’s come alive for the segment—how do you then apply it effectively to the business processes you already have?

Yourdon: One of the things that you just said intrigued me, in terms of being aware of a customer profile. Obviously, there’s a real-time aspect to that too—but how fast would my profile change and to what extent can you anticipate my future profile and perhaps offer me opportunities or games or transactions that I might not have thought about on my own?

Sridhara: That’s what I call “more ‘e’ than Amazon,” as a tagline. Why more ‘e’ than Amazon? It’s more than just product. It’s a product where the price is varying by the second. A large range of products, where the product has to be delivered through a web channel but also has to be delivered in-store, also has to be delivered on the smartphone, and all of those things have to be cohesive and coherent, rather. To deliver a seamless customer experience while you’re performing trading.

As a bank, because we are, we have traders. We have people aggregating and disseminating content around understanding you, the customer. We’ve always looked at our platforms, and we’ve grown up in the silos of retail and a web-emerging web channel, but we’ve never really looked at our business and said, “Oh, look, this is just one business really.”

It’s a betting business and a gaming business in its core constituent parts. They’re all technology enabled, and you don’t need to do them separately and differently. Yes, you need to deliver them differently around who, you, the customer is and what you want, but in the past we’ve done it very differently, and we’ve grown up very differently.

What we’re in the process of doing is automating the underpinning business processes, but also, building the platforms around you the customer, to where, as we understand you better, we deliver the personalization.

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The average customer is looking for an experience. It’s our ability to give you what you need and when you need it, the way you need it. And that’s what we’re in the process of building right now. And building it in a cross-channel manner, so wherever it touches, it looks and feels consistent to you.

On the other hand, if you do not wish to be known, then we will not only respect that, but we will ensure that this is the case, and we will interact with you as such across channels. So we’re going from this ‘push it all out and some of you will take’ to this ‘push-pull engaged,’ but again, it’s engaging in real time.

Yourdon: That’s really fascinating. The third basic part of the overall objective that you mentioned a moment ago is something that I characterize as keeping the lights on, just running stuff. And from everything you’ve just said, you obviously have to do so in a very high-performance fashion, where every nanosecond counts. And I assume also reliability and availability and all those sorts of traditional parameters are almost as important as they would be for a nuclear reactor or an air traffic control system. Umm, is there anything special you all do in that area, other than just redundancy and huge numbers of servers all over the place?

Sridhara: We can’t afford huge numbers of servers. This is a bank without the cash to do it all.

[both laughing]

Sridhara: We have the same challenges without the same budgets or investments. We’re not capable of making the same investments in these areas. So we have to be very innovative in how we underpin all this technology and how we build. We’re in the process of building a trading platform, which is actually a banking platform effectively, but some of the systems integrators refuse to bid at the prices I was asking for.

However, we are delivering those platforms on industry-standard technologies at a fraction of the prices that most banks would pay. To deliver exactly the same thing.

I’ve got the economies of scale, and as a result I’m able to build a good level of redundancy into how we deliver it. And that’s the good thing about technology; it’s getting cheaper as well.

There are other, new technologies that are coming down the road. Computing power, as a whole. The buzzword is always cloud, but, you know, being able to do it securely is key.

We are very “spiky”—we’ll go from 600 bets a minute to 6,000 bets a minute just before an event. Now, a bet in our business is about the same as Visa or MasterCard transactions. It’s not only the payment, it’s not only taking the cash out of your wallet and putting it back in; it’s also about getting the right prices, getting combinations, managing liability behind it. So it’s not just a sale, it’s a sale which then has to be transacted, monitored, and re-computed for how much you may win to manage liability.

So one transaction typically means six different things that have to happen. So we are pretty “peaky” in how we have to transact. And so how affordable computing is, and the high end of computing, is key and also the virtualization of that capacity.

Computing power will get cheaper, faster, and smaller and for Ladbrokes, in simple terms, it’s about coming back to strategy, differentiation, and value.

Yourdon: Okay. But there seem to be quantum jumps, where a 10 percent decrease in price or a 10 percent increase in CPU cycles isn’t going to make a whole lot of difference. But there’s some point where things that were simply not possible before suddenly become possible. And I assume that’s going to happen in your case, although I’m not sure what form it will take.

Sridhara: But it’s about you as a customer and your experience. So with a smart device, you’re starting to expect that you have live streaming, as an example, and you have come to expect that it is as good as, if not better than, what you may be receiving sitting and watching television. But you’re also expecting to transact on it and look up other things in additional windows while you’re watching the video. Now, that requires a certain amount of computing power on the front end.

It’s compressed, it’s streaming, and it needs to compute. But on the back end, you’ve got to then be able to deliver all of that at scale, so you will never know how many people are going to be engaging with you on mobile devices, and that will continue to increase pretty dramatically.

Which is why the back-end ability to process all of it is key. So in our business in particular, our ability to continue to deliver the experience that the customers are looking for in an affordable way is absolutely key.

Yourdon: There is one aspect of what you’ve just said, this whole idea of mobile computing becoming more widely dispersed. In many areas it’s gotten to the point where computing activity is essentially free. It may be supported by advertising or something like that, but whether it’s free or almost free, it has suddenly opened up entirely new markets. Whole continents [that] could not afford computing at all before now can—and therefore, I assume, have become potential customers for you. That might not have been the case before. I don’t know how much more there is to go on in that direction, although I suppose it will go on for another five or ten years. Not everybody in Africa has a cell phone yet, by any means at all. Let alone China or India. Do you see that multiplying by another factor of 10 or a factor of 100?

Sridhara: Well, it’s certainly a factor of 10x. But also in our market, it’s about regulated markets, so not every market is available. When the markets do become available, you will have phenomenal steps in growth.

Yourdon: Interesting. One of the points that has been mentioned to me by some of the other CIOs is that as the overall cost of computing has dropped and, we now have a phenomenon that one of the American authors refers to as a “cognitive surplus,” an example of which is Wikipedia. We now have the computing power available, and people have enough spare time and good thoughts in their hearts that they’re willing to contribute some of their surplus cognitive power to, to do things like open-source computing or Wikipedia or any number of other examples. Is there any aspect of that that’s relevant in your world?

Sridhara: It’s relevant, once we can open up what we do, to saying, “Hey, look, if you’re a games developer,” as an example. “And you like building games, I’ll provide you a development toolkit to build games. Yes, you can go ahead and build it. You don’t need to have the horsepower to run it.”

“We will run it for you, and then you can become part of an app store.” Games are an example, and we do run different versions of games, different versions of games take in marketplaces, customers like different games, they like variety. It will happen at a much bigger scale as time goes by.

Yourdon: What about the whole area of data visualization? I would imagine that some, if not all, of the things that you’re dealing with involve the possibility of presenting enormous quantities of data to a trader or a player. Where it would be wonderful if there were some way of boiling it down to, a more understandable digest, so to speak.

Sridhara: Very much so. We’re in the process of automating our entire trading floor. And they’re actually in test runs going live right now for some markets and then we’ll continue gradually adding all markets. But there’s a lot of visualization and can have 20,000 different things possibly coming into setting up an event.

So that gets visualized for the trader. They can make decisions based on that, but also, if you go to our current website, you will see stats for how a horse performed or how a footballer performed at a previous match or what their history was. That’s already there and making it more visual is clearly going to be a turning point.

On the gaming machines, we are in the process of testing a game in China. And the Asians more so than us and some of our customers here and other geographies, like to see and understand the patterns, understand what’s happening. So visualization is a key element of the experience—for certain customer types.

Again, being able to provide that and then in some of the platforms, we’re looking to roll out. I won’t say more than saying they’re going to engage you visually.

Yourdon: And, of course, a lot of those areas are, just by their very nature, going to require vast amounts of additional computing power to be able to do the back-end computation and presentation to the user. That is going to be interesting.

Sridhara: But it’s also about the tolerance as you talked about earlier. I got a mobile device, not just a server, which is a foot next to the other. So it has to have a price update at the same time. And all able to fit on a small screen, too. So it’s about getting it right for who you are and what you want.

Yourdon: Well, let me change from all the wonderful futures and opportunities to the dark side of the force—the problems and the risks. What is it that keeps you awake at night, if anything?

Sridhara: You never have a problem, you always have an opportunity. It’s a question of how you address the problems. So when something is an opportunity, you go about it differently because you go about it and say, “Okay, is this an opportunity to address something now in a different way, so that it does not become an ongoing problem?”

Sridhara: So it’s often an opportunity to go in and fix, but the way you fix it is as important as what you fix. You’ve got to look at what the customer wants, what broke, and how do you ensure that it doesn’t break again? Or if it does break, is it okay for it to break, because it may not be that the customer sees that as the most relevant thing to your experience. You may do it in such a way that it’s safe-fail as opposed to fail-safe.

Yourdon: Usually when I ask that question, the answer I get almost immediately revolves around security. And I would imagine in your case, the mismatch between dealing with the technology of security threats while also being constrained by all of the regulatory things that you have to live under, which usually moves a lot more slowly than the technology. How do you balance those two things?

Sridhara: Frankly, I’m coming from regulation, which is something you’ve got to comply with. It’s not optional. And everything is designed to be secure and compliant, PCI-compliant or the gambling acts and everything else, so it’s always designed with compliance right from the start.

That’s one. Second, security is always a threat to anybody right now in operating in any electronic form. We’ve got things like DDoS² protection, we’ve got 24/7 monitoring alerts that go out should patterns change, automatic blocking that goes in place.

But DDoS attacks and security, or the way people come at you can continue to change and become more sophisticated, so it’s something you’re constantly looking for, constantly reviewing where you are, how you’re doing it.

It’s certainly something that I constantly re-evaluate, saying, “That’s how we were choosing to address the problem yesterday. What has changed? Can we address it differently today?”

Yourdon: The way you just raised this a moment ago took me back to a comment made by the CIO of one of our universities, who said that, in terms of re-evaluation, he looks to his students because he said, “I don’t know everything, my peers don’t know everything, and we’re not always able to keep up with everything. But we have this constant influx of new students who are smarter than us and more inquisitive than us, and we look to them in a way, as people on the edge of the frontier.” Is there anything equivalent in your case? I can imagine it could be some of your customers, for example.

Sridhara: Our customers, absolutely. Our customers are looking for different types of services. It’s industry peers. It’s some of our partners as well. Because of our geographic spread, often an idea in one geography for regulation purposes cannot be applied in the other, but you have lessons learned that can be applied. So we have innovation or ideas coming out at us in so many different ways, and we also foster innovation and an open culture here to where every idea is a good idea. It’s a simple thing: fail, fail fast, but succeed faster.

Yourdon: And get data about it, yes. I agree. One last thing that has always struck me, because I’ve been in the field for 45 years. Forty-five years ago, much of what we dealt with in technology was very expensive and very scarce and therefore controlled very diligently. But now, of course, so much technology has become cheap to the point of almost being free, and pervasive to the point where our employees—not just in the IT department, but employees everywhere, or customers in your case—may well have better technology at home than what they’re going to find in the office. And yet the control structure that I’ve seen in a lot of IT organizations, led by the CIO, still seems to be this top-down hierarchal kind of mechanism that’s just completely out of place.

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And I’m just curious as to your thoughts about, you know, how to deal with that.

Sridhara: And that has to do with what worried me earlier. You’ve got to look at everything as a service, starting with the customer. Bringing them services that matter. And then, as you progress, so if you’re a trader, those trader apps and perhaps you’re trading as a trader where you do it, is completely secure today and will always [be] in the future. So you draw rings, concentric rings, if you will. You’ve got to hammer security and apply it in layers.

So the average user is just coming in and doing Word documents and e-mail. As long as they’re not extracting customer data, we’ll have a different amount of security and it will be a different boundary than deep down here, where there’s lots of customer data. And trading information, as an example.

If you’re a trader, yes, I will choose to provide you with a laptop and anything else you need and have it completely encrypted and wipeable remotely.

It’s also about business process—which is why solutioning is an important thing, x role in y, the organization is now looking for something greater than what they should be looking for. They need levels of authorization for customer data. So if you look at it again from the “what data matters?” [standpoint], you can address some of these opportunities differently.

Yourdon: That’s a very good point. What I have found with all of the CIOs I’ve spoken to is that they’re focusing on all these technology issues that we’ve been talking about—but, of course, they’re also interacting with their business peers, heads of business departments or product departments, who are very smart people and very competent people and often have very strong opinions that have helped them succeed.

And they not only think they know how to run their business better than you do; sometimes they think they know how to run your business better than you do. How do you go about achieving the kind of influence you need to avoid risks and to take advantage of opportunities that hopefully you do know more about because of your expertise?

Sridhara: Excellent question. I think you probably know the answer and where I was going to come at it from. In every business I’ve been in, I’ve been very, very lucky. I seldom had many challenges in working with my colleagues to get the job done. And I think part of it is, if you look at it from a customer view, fundamentally, and you understand the end customer, then they’re all partners, they’re all partnered together. I’m incentivized as much as they are to deliver business results and shareholder value by driving customer growth. So if I’m addressing the same problem they’re trying to address, we’re on the same side. Now, we may have different views of how we think we may address it, but we’re fundamentally trying to solve the same issue, and it often is the ground of convergence, as a result, because you’re comparing notes on how best to solve it and often find, “Yes, they’ve got great ideas. Let me combine these with the ideas my team can bring,” and together you come up with solutions that no one person would have come up with. So that bringing the sum of the parts together—you know, what I used to call “2 + 2 = 5,” but I increasingly think “2 + 2 = 22.”

And that’s very, very important. In a fast-moving world, no one area can see it all. So it’s about people combining and collaborating now even more so than before.

Yourdon: I certainly agree with that. Now I think one of the reasons it’s been a problem in some of the other situations I’ve seen is that the CIO has sometimes only been in his or her position for a short period of time, so there’s this element of trust that has to be built up—because even though your business peers may think you’re all trying to achieve the same objectives, they might not necessarily agree with your particular perspective or your solution or your priorities.

Sridhara: I’m not sure there is a quick way to win trust. I think you can get going quickly, but trust is something that is earned both ways. Over time, by doing what you say and saying what you do. About being trustworthy, about having integrity, competence—clearly, if you’re incompetent, they may trust you, but they may not trust you’ll get the job done. So it goes without saying that competence underpins all of that, and all those only can be established with some time. Now the key thing is to ensure results—because this is where agile comes in, because if you focus around the customer in agile, you can deliver to your end customer, to your mutual customer, and do so quickly and you build trust, because you’re doing that in dialogue.

Yourdon: Exactly. And that’s the common answer I end up with. You know, when I first got started in the field, you often didn’t have anything to deliver for seven years. And you can only rely on trust during that period because you had no intermediate results or prototypes or daily builds.

Well, let me switch gears to the two last areas. I’m very curious about everyone’s opinion about the “new generation,” whether you call them digital natives or whatever. And, of course, they’re arriving everywhere in the organization, not just in the IT department, but everywhere. Armed with their smart mobiles and their different attitudes. They’ve grown up in a world of Google and multimedia. Is that something that you see a lot of around here? Is this something that you think it’s good or bad or irrelevant?

Sridhara: I think it’s good. We increasingly see a lot more of it coming into our workplace. Overall it’s good in that it always challenges how you keep your own employees engaged, but with them they bring, because of the space we’re in, our customers are in the same space. It’s a good representation of what I’ve got to solve anyway and solve for externally, and having that on the inside just brings good ideas—right inside our building.

So they’re a part of the team and this is part of encouraging innovation right through the workforce, but also improving how we drive what we do. And it’s an exciting place given the challenges we have. It tends to really lend itself to new ideas, looking at things differently, and driving solutions that work, by default, work for the person who’s come in but also result in driving the right customer experience.

Yourdon: Well, that is a very good point. I’ve been even hearing about that in banks, where their traditional IT people simply don’t know how to reach a generation of college students that the bank wants to get as bank customers, but they’ve got young programmers who are on Facebook who can reach out and effectively communicate. That is a very good point. Any negatives? Any concerns about the new generation of digital natives or digital whatever you want to call them?

Sridhara: No, not really. I think they’re all different. Again, they come in different flavors. Yes, you can do a pattern and say, “This is what they all want.” They are looking for places that have values and core ethics. That’s important to the new generation as it is to everybody else, I suggest. They place different emphasis. They want to understand more about what they are doing and how they do it. The question of work-life balance is a bigger question for them than it was for some other generations.

Yourdon: One of the people I interviewed was the former CIO of the American Defense Department. He’s very concerned with what he regards as the superficiality of the younger generation, their inability to spend a lot of time really focusing and concentrating on, on some intellectual question for long periods of time because they’ve grown up in a world where they can find something on Wikipedia right away, they can Google something right away, and they don’t ever have to spend more than ten minutes thinking about anything. Is that something you see at all?

Sridhara: I think they adapt to the workplace with time—if you provide them with good mentoring and structure. Yes, that’s a good thing. They can find an answer to at least 80 percent of the questions you ask them very, very quickly, which is great. All of them aren’t going to fit into a mold. Some of them will take to program management; some of them will take to customer experience.

They will take to different roles as you start understanding their strengths. And I think they bring a valuable perspective, you know, contribution and energy and also make every manager and the world think differently as well.

Yourdon: One last question, and then I‘ll let you go. It’s the obvious final question: where do you see yourself going from here? After life as a CIO, is there a future life?

Sridhara: Is there a future life? I think there is. Well, first of all, let’s answer the latter one. There is a future life, and I think it will continue to evolve because I think increasingly technology enables the business and the running of the business are fusing even closer. When we’re in roles like the ones I’ve held and I’ve had the luxury of holding, they’re always closely associated with the front end, customer end, and the solutioning of the services.

So every role I’ve had has been technology-intense with the customer at the core. Delivering product platform and solutions to enable enterprise value, shareholder value and customer experience. Effectively, I’ve been on both sides of the fence as being a pure “CIO” and running technology and product marketing for a B2B and B2C. So, increasingly, I think, roles will fuse and will evolve. I think the people who want to grow and evolve will continue to have fascinating roles, especially when you come at it from a solution view and you get technology, and you get the customer. I certainly expect to have a lot of fun over the next 15 or 20 years.

Yourdon: Okay. Well, can’t do better than that. All right. And with that, I think I will turn this off. I very much appreciate your time.