Taking the Friction Out of Remote Work

John Stecher, CTO of Blackstone, and Anisha Vaswani, the CIO of Toast and previous CIO of Box discuss everything from what it takes to be a good CIO or CTO, to which details really, really matter when you’re working remotely.

The two C-level standouts dive into what drives innovation within the enterprise and how eliminating the points of friction in our everyday work is so crucial to unlocking that innovation.

Key Takeaways 

• Your team doesn’t have the time or patience to hunt for the resources they need to do their work. CTOs and CIOs have tremendous power to build more robust, essential knowledge hubs to help their teams find the information they’re looking for, or document a newly minted process. 
• Prioritizing projects is an art. CIOs have to learn how to weigh one project’s impact against another’s while juggling the work they have in-flight. Agile workflows help teams prioritize and move swiftly, as opposed to burning time and money on a years-long project.
• Teams might be working outside of the office, but their expectations haven’t changed. Someone working remotely still expects the speed of the office WiFi, the VPN capacity, and more. CIOs have to fine tune their infrastructure to help teams work together from afar. 

Key Quotes

• “Surprising and delighting people is just making technology more transparent in their lives. I focus a lot on those types of things as well as removing friction.” – John
• “To be a good CIO,  I think you have to have genuine passion and interest in understanding the business and what it’s trying to accomplish. The technology comes later. It’s really about understanding the business.” – Anisha
• “Innovation comes from really listening to what people need and hearing what they’re actually saying.” – John
• “Gone are the days of the five year IT project and boiling the ocean. It’s about building flexible, iterative, agile delivery models and having the ability to respond to shifting demand as it appears. ” – Anisha

Links

• Anisha Vaswani LinkedIn
• John Stecher LinkedIn
• Blackstone
• Toast

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