Eric Tan (LinkedIn,) has been on both sides of the IT coin – as a consultant, and now in an operations role as the VP of Business Services and IT at Coupa.
On an episode of IT Visionaries, Eric discusses how he grew up destined to be in IT (despite a segue as a CPA), what it means to join and lead a company that has doubled in size, and the excitement that comes when innovation happens in every part of the organization.
Some of the most important lessons he shared were about what it means to be an IT leader, and how he manages his team at Coupe. Here are some of the things we took away from the conversation.
Creating a culture of innovation:
Eric explains that it is important to get input for every single person in your organization, and to keep yourself open to ideas that come from places you may not expect.
“Every employee at Coupa is, in fact, an IT person,” Eric says. “We still encourage innovation across our 1,300 employees. Innovation should come from your team.”
He went on to discuss how Coupa just recently hosted its fourth “hack-a-thon” to promote problem-solving and innovation throughout the company. During the hack-a-thon, a twenty-year-old with no coding experience used Apex to create thirty-six lines of code that has helped the company reduce over one hundred customer service tickets per year.
Recently, Eric wrote an article about becoming an IT leader, and it’s anchored in the fact that fifty percent of IT projects are not about IT. When you are working in IT, leading the team is all about change-management and navigating people to rally toward a specific mission and adoption.
It’s helpful to have a community of IT leaders to lean on and learn from who will help you through some of the challenges. In fact, Eric explains that, in Silicon Valley, there is a network of young CIOs who rally around and help one another. This is helpful because when Eric wants to implement a new technology or idea at Coupa, the number one question he gets from the CEO or CFO is, “Where has it been done before?” Having a network of IT leaders to tap into and learn from helps him answer that question.
What to expect from machine learning and A.I.:
Eric believes that both technologies are still in their infancy, and part of the reason why is because what while there is an abundance of data, there is no real understanding of what to do with it. There are ways machine learning and A.I. can help, but those use cases are still being worked out.
“Over the last ten years, data has evolved so much,” Eric says. “We have such a wealth of data that deploying technologies such as A.I. and machine learning makes predictive capabilities so much more powerful.”
Ultimately, Eric believes that all the data being collected can be used to tell stories about how – and why – people are buying, and make the experience better.
Listen to the full interview here.
