娇色导航

How automation forges a sense of community and purpose at 6sense

Interview
Mar 19, 20256 mins
CIOCloud ManagementData Quality

Bryan Wise, 娇色导航of San Francisco-based software company 6sense, sat with CIO.com鈥檚 Lee Rennick at the 娇色导航100 Symposium and Awards to discuss the motivation behind the company鈥檚 award winning Automation Domination project to deliver process improvements and efficiencies.

Bryan Wise, 6sense
Credit: CIO.com

The world is becoming digitally native and tech companies are leading the charge. There are exceptions depending on the industry, says 6sense 娇色导航Bryan Wise, but situations will arise where if a company gets large enough, the cost benefit becomes a key concern, and going back on prem to an extent might be the right option.

鈥淲e鈥檙e a long ways from that but because of the complexity of data residency of some larger fortune 500 companies, and they鈥檙e definitely thinking about true costs in the cloud and more control,鈥 he says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a really dynamic topic that I think is going to evolve over time as we all push to the cloud, and, potentially in some cases, push back from the cloud. So I think you鈥檙e getting at this hybrid approach.鈥

But even if most skill sets have shifted to cloud first, there鈥檚 a need to address cloud flow and ebb. Wise, however, doesn鈥檛 have to worry about this for a long time, but there鈥檚 a need for a common plane of how to manage it all going forward. It鈥檚 all part of what makes being a 娇色导航right now very exciting.

鈥淢y experience being a 娇色导航today has never been more powerful and energizing,鈥 he says. 鈥淐IOs have really wanted to be taken more seriously and have a larger presence in the boardroom, and with the shift that鈥檚 going on in the commoditization of a lot of technology, it鈥檚 allowing CIOs more freedom to influence the company more than ever.鈥

And because of this increasingly commoditized technology, there are greater ways to partner more effectively with the business.

鈥淭he fact we can lower the technical barrier for a lot of services and enable the business to do more of the heavy lifting because they know their processes best, it just accelerates everything and changes the whole engagement. It鈥檚 an awesome time to be a 娇色导航now and be part of the strategy to help the bottom line. Those sorts of conversations have increased exponentially.鈥

Wise also discussed data quality, and the cultural shift to deliver and continuously improve on technology excellence. Watch the full video below for more insights.

On achieving efficiencies: When you come into a pre-IPO environment, there鈥檚 a lot of fast growth. And there鈥檚 a lot of situations where your business processes aren鈥檛 really as mature as they should be. And because of speed, maybe you鈥檙e doing things that are manual but you have to start maturing because end-to-end processes have to be as efficient as possible. So Automation Domination is a program we put in place to change the way the company thinks about efficient automation of processes and not accepting the status quo. We made it a top level company objective and the key result was to save 67,000 manual people hours. The way we came up with that was we took our employee base, about 1,200 employees, and asked, what if we could save one hour per week per employee for the entire year? So that鈥檚 the rough math of why 67,000 hours became the goal. The real deliverable, though, was to change the culture and the way people think about what they鈥檙e doing. It was also to create an environment where people also thought about what they do and how it affects other groups.

On outcomes: Automation Domination breaks down silos and becomes ingrained into our environment. Then for me as a CIO, I know there鈥檚 going to be process improvement, efficiencies, and speed that ultimately help our customers. So we focused a lot on the sales and marketing. It was a great experience and it was so successful that we鈥檙e doing it again and our next goal is to save 100,000 hours. It鈥檚 a pretty awesome experience and now it鈥檚 changed the entire culture so I don鈥檛 have to cheerlead anymore. You just hear team members and employees talking about it all the time.

On data and cloud: It鈥檚 interesting to think about what the cloud is going forward. When you think about on prem physically, those would be data centers. And the world has changed a little bit so that your data center is your cloud provider, and you can control that. So it鈥檚 an interesting change in landscape. We鈥檙e a digitally native company, so our company never had anything on prem; it鈥檚 always been in the cloud. I do think it makes it faster because you can deploy products much quicker, and you don鈥檛 have all capital and intensive infrastructure you need to buy. But it does require a certain mindset of controlling costs because you can get carried away with the ease of use into computational resources. It also brings up interesting questions around where my data is exactly. So there鈥檚 data sovereignty, where鈥檚 it going, and so while it鈥檚 simple to go to the cloud, it adds other complexity you have to consider.

On enterprise innovation: 6sense is a big AI engine, so one of the things we do is provide B2B intelligence for marketers and sellers to understand where their existing customer base or future accounts are in the buying journey. And the way we do that is an AI engine. But on the generative AI side where things are going, it used to be a situation where you didn鈥檛 have enough data, and now we have tons. Managing those data sets, getting a lot of utility and insights out of them, the quality of that data is going to be paramount, especially in this generative AI space where LLMs are the new paradigm shift. There are many other ways to take this, but you need to understand your data in a real, actionable way because quality is only going to be exacerbated. And we鈥檝e got to figure out a way to talk about hallucinations and situations where you might get reports back from data that鈥檚 not correct, but can look very real. So there has to be a mindset to make sure data is high fidelity.

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