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All good things must come to an end and on this episode of IT Visionaries,  after more than 200 episodes, countless conversations and numerous trips to the top of the Apple charts,  Ian Faison is stepping down as host of the show and passing the baton to Albert Chou. Albert joins Ian to give some background on who he is and his background in tech and entrepreneurship, and then the two chat about the evolution of the show during its first two years, and the trends in the IT industry that are setting the stage for the future. 

Key Takeaways

• Your Host For The Evening Is: After more than 220 episodes, Ian Faison is stepping down as host of IT Visionaries. In his place, Albert Chou will assume the role of host. 
• Accelerating the Digital Agenda: Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations were forced to accelerate their digital agendas. With more employees working remotely, along with more C-level executives feeling those same pains, employee experience has been put at the forefront of company needs. Digital transformations have moved from being a wish-list item to being a priority.

• Owning It: The employee experience takeover has quickly risen as a hot-button issue among the C-suite. But who should be taking ownership of a digital employee renaissance and what role does the CTO and CIO play in managing it?

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For a more in-depth look at this episode, check out the article below.

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After a two-year run, numerous rankings atop the technology podcasts charts, 220 episodes and more than 820,000 downloads later, Ian Faison is stepping down as host of IT Visionaries. In his place, Albert Chou has assumed the mantle of host. On this episode of IT Visionaries, Chou joined Faison for a conversation about their learnings in the technology and IT sector, the employee experience takeover, the rapid acceleration of the digital transformations amid the COVID-19 pandemic and legacy tech’s growing concerns.

A life-long learner, entrepreneur and overall tech connoisseur, Chou currently serves as the Vice President of Operations for Mission.org, where he handles the company’s day-to-day business ventures and helps guide the overall direction of the company. Chou joined Mission during the summer of 2019, and has served in a behind the scenes capacity since, but now is afforded the opportunity to share stories of his past learnings while hearing from some of the best minds in the industry.

“What’s interesting about meeting other people in the tech space is they’re constantly bombarded by new ideas,” he said. “I’ve been around tech enough to know that not everything works as it’s promised to do. So when I think about some of the people that have been on the show, some of the things that they’ve been exposed to, some of the things they’ve tried for themselves, they probably have a huge list of things that actually don’t work as promised.”

Chou elaborated that while he’s excited to take over behind the mic and dive deeper into the inner workings of the IT space, one of the things that intrigues him about the future of the industry is how current CIOs, CTOs and tech leaders are operating and their pathways toward success. Chou’s hope is to bring those learning to the airwaves, making them accessible to the listener.

“One of the things I hope to bring to the show is that there are a lot of empty promises made in tech,” Chou said. “[I want to] get people closer to understanding how companies operate towards success. How are they going to move toward success? What are the technologies that they are investing in to get toward success?”

Some of the factors that contribute to success are how organizations are managing their digital employee experience, the technology afforded to them, the ease of how employees use technology, and what member of the C-Suite owns the decision.

What has also been important, especially lately, is the acceleration of the digital agenda. From the beginning of IT Visionaries, most technology leaders have been focused on accelerating their digital agenda and dealing with the myriad of technologies that their business partners would present to them, but that philosophy has seen a dramatic timeline shift over the last half of 2020.

“What happened with COVID was the senior leadership team, the board, the CEO all now have an acute awareness of the pains that go into the employee experience because now every one of them feels like an employee in the middle of work-from-home orders,” Faison said. “So they acutely feel all of the pains that a normal employee who was working from home would have felt, and what that means is it was this jumpstart to a digital transformation. It was a jumpstart to accelerate the digital agenda that had been necessary for a long time.”

According to Faison, what the latter half of 2020 proved to organizations is that digital transformations, and the need to have working and functional technologies for your employees, went from being a wish list item to a non-negotiable. Chou concurred.

“Companies are going to start seeing how slow or how fast they can get back to customers,” Chou said. “So the employee experience is the customer experience. If you take care of employees, they take care of your customers. So it’s going to be in reverse. If there’s a problem in your workflow that you can’t do something fast and efficiently, for a company that cares and doesn’t have a monopoly, they’re going to care very much to solve that.”

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To hear the entire discussion, tune into IT Visionaries here.