Althea: Good day and good greetings from Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates. Today we are going to be conducting an interview with Lalitha Krishnamoorthy, and we will be going through a series of questions to get some insights and some valuable tips from her on her experience, working at IBM and what she believes the future is going to bring in the data space and the information economy.

So, without further ado, I would like to do a quick round. Lalitha, would you like to just go in and introduce yourself?

Lalitha: Thanks for having me. I’m super excited to share with the team here today. I’m with IBM. I just celebrated my 20th anniversary. I’m the director for digital commerce and digital data platforms. 

Althea: Thank you so much for that introduction. And we’ll just do a very short introduction on the two of us as moderators. So, you’re getting two of us from Abu Dhabi. Rasheed, please go ahead and introduce yourself.

Rashed: My name is Rashed Alsuwaidi. I’m the CEO and founder of Turnkey Technologies, a chief data officer-led data management consultancy —a one-of-a-kind in the world.

Althea: Thank you very much, Rashed. And I’m Rashed’s partner in crime, co-founder of Turnkey Technologies. I’m the managing partner and I’m also a serial chief data officer, worked for many years for financial institutions. So, let’s get started. Give us a brief summary of your career and give us a sense of the scope of your organization and your role at IBM. What does it entail? 

Lalitha: My career journey, when I think about it, is not very unique, and I’ll be the first to admit it. I have an undergraduate degree in electronics engineering. I came to the U.S. for graduate school and got my master’s in computer science. I have a double major. I majored in neural networks and fuzzy logic, and relational database. And believe it or not, when I graduated, nobody was hiring for AI. So, I actually took a job as a database developer because AI was not as hot as it is today.  So, I started as a database developer, working on Db2, which is IBM’s flagship database product, then went on to work on super cool research, including a project involving federated technology. I worked on that research project for a couple of years. Then I moved on to IMS replication, which is another product suite.

From there, I went to IBM’s information server, which is called Data Stage. As you can see, I was able to go to various products and build out product knowledge across the board, from databases to integration technology to middleware to backend strong systems and bring revenue to the table. 

And then I had the opportunity to lead client advocacy for our entire analytics platform. This was my cool opportunity to have direct-facing clients and work with our signature accounts. These are our very heavy clients, bringing most of our revenue. That opportunity really helped me build the client side of the muscle.

How do you work with clients directly, and not in a capacity of sales, but when you have product knowledge? That’s when clients come to you because they want to know what’s right for their environment. What is the right investment? It was a real good eye-opener for me, it helped me build that right. And then I was at that point in my career where I was like, well, I’m on my mid-level, what am I going to do next? What do I want to be?

I’m sharing this because I know there’s a lot of people out there who are also thinking that after you reach a certain point in your career, you’re saying, “I’m a technologist, maybe it’s time for me to go to business school and get an MBA.” So, I was thinking maybe that’s what I wanted to do, go and get a business degree. But one of my mentors said, you know, the best way to learn how to swim is you get in the water. And I actually did a two-year assignment in business development just within IBM. I took up a hardcore biz dev role and M&A for two years. Believe it or not, it was a cool risk because a hardcore technology person typically stays away from that land because you don’t know that thing.

I think it was the best experience that I could have ever had. Now I can speak to both sides of the coin. I’m not just a technologist who can only speak to the tech stack. I can speak from an ecosystem perspective, from a strategy perspective, and alignment as well.

When I finished that role, I came back. So, about five years ago when IBM was just starting its digital transformation journey, I was asked to come in as an executive and lead the digital transformation and be part of that effort. That’s basically what brought me into digital. I tell my team that we do two things and we do them really well. One is, we build out the best digital data platform that can possibly be built. This allows us to maintain data quality, make governance standards and democratize that data so that AI models can go and leverage this data to provide real-time insights on our clients, business partners, to our marketing teams, sales teams, etc.

And the other thing we do really well is lead up our digital commerce or marketplace platform. That handles almost every transaction that goes through IBM, from a marketplace perspective and e-commerce platforms. And then in the center, I also own the dev ops mission for digital. The space where, instead of every team building their own infrastructure and services, we try to standardize the platforms so we all speak one language, if we can, as much as we can.

Althea: That’s highly, highly exciting. What you explained, where you started, what was not cool at the time that’s really hot now, and how you went from the technologist side and took a leap of faith to go over to the business side. And not just the business side, we’re talking about the complex business side of M&A. Even businesspeople don’t want to go into M&A. So, there’s a lot of business moving parts, and when the technologist comes over, I can imagine your learning curve was really steep. What kept you in there?

Lalitha: I think it’s two things. One is, I’ve always had this attitude of risk it all. I’ve never been risk averse in my life in general. It’s good and bad because you win some, you lose some. The biggest lesson I learned is that I truly wanted to test myself to see if I had an AI model in my head which is capable of training itself and learning. This machine could learn a brand new vertical, a brand-new domain. It was personally a way for me to test myself to see I still had it in me to go and learn a completely new domain and take that risk.

And two, know that as you go into executive roles, you truly understand the business side of the equation. Very important skillset that you do need to build. Whether you build it early on in your career or later in your career, it doesn’t matter. But for you to have that conversation with the C-suite clients and get in front of them, they absolutely understand because I can negotiate both sides of the house. I’m not looking to take my gang with me or a bunch of team members with me to that room to have that conversation.

Rashed: How do you talk about the business development area and the challenges you face while facing the C-suite on what decision-making you’re going to have. I’ve been hearing on some of their videos about “digital tsunami” as they call it. I want to ask you, to what extent were your existing strategy plans and roadmaps in the data space able to cope up with the turmoil of 2020?

Lalitha: The truth is, when I talk about digital transformation, a lot of people think of it as a restaurant. It’s more like a gym, in my opinion. You can’t just go and look at a menu and order a bunch of platforms and teams and standards and say, this is what I want, like in a restaurant. It’s actually like a gym where you have specialized programs, you have specific trainers, you need to build the team around it. And then, the most important thing is, you need to do the work to gain the benefit of the investment you’ve made. So, the mindset that digital transformation is a restaurant needs to change. This journey is not like dining out. This is really about investing yourself in a gym, and the KPI that you get, the business outcome you derive from working out in the gym based on those programs and specialized platforms, is actually the improvement that you see. 

This example has always stuck with me, and I use this a lot with every team. The point is that if you think about it from that perspective, when IBM started our digital transformation journey five years ago, we actually started even before the turmoil started.

So being ahead of the game, thinking ahead of where your competition is thinking, and keeping that flame of innovation going is super critical for you to be relevant and to keep growing in this market. We had to do a very thorough 360 view of “What does this digital platform look like?”, create multiple blueprints, and have a very iterative approach to what outcomes we’re going to derive, which can be more intentional, rather than trying to boil the ocean because we have to keep the company going on their journey and really benefit from the investment.

So, the way we constructed our data platform and the digital commerce platform, keeping in mind the digital needs of our clients and focusing the customer experience. Let’s try to onboard those products that meet those customer experiences and meet those more. It’s like buying one song on iTunes that I like versus being forced to buy the entire CD like we used to do a bunch of years ago.

Our clients are saying the same thing: “Look, I’m not going to buy everything you have digitally. What can you offer me so that I can just take what I need and get moving with my business because I don’t have surplus revenue to pay you?”