CIO Classified: How to scale quickly and securely

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With technological innovation accelerating faster than ever—and the pandemic entering a new phase—CIOs have never faced more uncertainty and complexity. That’s why we’ve partnered with Caspian Studios to launch Season 3 of the CIO Classified podcast. 

CIO Classified is a podcast for CIOs, decision-makers, and technology leaders that want to push their business forward and stay on the cutting edge. Each episode features candid conversations with leading CIOs discussing their most pressing challenges and how they solve them. 

Listen to the latest episode for insights and actionable strategies that you can bring back to your own organization today.

Episode summary

In this episode, seven-time CIO and author Mark Settle is joined by 6sense’s CTO and Co-founder Viral Bajaria as they discuss:

• The importance of a customer-centric mindset and pitfalls to watch out for in today’s instant gratification economy
• The scaling problem in bigger organizations and the role of change management
• The IT and business relationship and tips for improving it

Episode soundbites

“Nobody says, ‘I don’t want to be customer centric.’ The problem is, are you ready to be customer centric? Are you really committed to it?” — Viral Bajaria, CTO & Co-Founder at 6sense

“Change management at large organizations can be overwhelming. The problem is not so much discovering, evaluating, and prioritizing technology opportunities. The problem is really getting business partners to help identify the business benefits that would be obtained through implementing the technology.” — Mark Settle, 7-time CIO and author

“We went through the painful process of documenting the last eight years of tools that the business purchased and now require teams to justify the business need for new tools. We presented to the whole company and told them why we are doing this and actually showed them the number of tools we have. That’s when everyone had an AHA moment. That’s one thing I learned: Tell everyone why you’re doing things—and sometimes go deeper than you usually would—because they will start empathizing with you.” — Viral Bajaria, CTO & Co-Founder at 6sense

“At an executive level in a company, you can’t rest on your laurels because the criteria used to measure your success changes over time. The conditions of the business change all the time, along with the perceptions of your fellow executives and board members.” — Mark Settle, 7-time CIO and author

Episode guests

Mark Settle, 7-time CIO and Author

Mark Settle is a seven-time CIO and author of “Truth from the Valley: A Practical Primer on IT Management for the Next Decade.” He has over 20 years of IT leadership experience across industries, formerly serving as CIO of Okta, Visa, Oxy, BMC Software, Arrow Electronics, Corporate Express, and IHS. 

Settle pioneered the adoption of service management and cloud computing technologies within several large enterprises and currently sits on the advisory boards of several Silicon Valley venture capital firms. He received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from MIT and a PhD from Brown University and is a former Air Force officer and NASA Program Scientist.

Viral Bajaria, CTO & Co-Founder, 6sense

Viral Bajaria is the Co-Founder and CTO of 6sense, an account engagement platform creating the next generation of B2B sales and marketing technology. He leads the development of 6sense’s innovative analytics and predictive platform. Everyday Viral wakes up to realize his passion of leveling the playing field by using open-source data technology for companies of all sizes. Prior to 6sense, Viral built the big data platform at Hulu that processed over 2.5 billion events per day.

He was an early adopter of Hadoop (late 2008), and built and managed a cluster that stored and processed over a PB of data. Viral was instrumental in building the infrastructure that powered reporting, financial and recommendations systems across web and mobile devices. In his spare time Viral enjoys contributing to open-source projects.

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