娇色导航

Welcome to 娇色导航Leadership Live Canada.

I'm Lee Rennick, editor of CIO.com.

I'm very pleased and excited to welcome Charles Lewis, Vice

President, Information Technology Canada Life.

Charles, thanks so much for joining us today.

Could you please introduce yourself

and tell us a little bit about your current role?

Thanks very much, Lee, and thanks very much for having me this afternoon.

It's great to see you.

I am currently the Vice President of Technology

for Canada Life with a particular focus on our IT operations arm

as it relates to data center and a lot of the traditional disciplines

that that comes with around compute storage databases, the service

Canada Life Command Center, as well as network network operations,

the strategy also moving into my portfolio over

the next little while will be our cloud operations piece

as we continue our journey to move to public hyperscalers.

So a very large portfolio.

Thank you so much for sharing that

and I really appreciate you joining us here, Charles.

We've created this series to support CIOs and senior

technology leaders in their leadership and business journey.

So the first question I ask, and I always ask everyone

this question, can you tell me a little bit about your own career path

and provide some insights or tips on that road path?

Are there any lessons learned that you could share? Absolutely.

You know, the sort of keep it brief, I came up through the technology

ranks in a pretty traditional manner many years.

Well, decades ago now. Began life as a software

developer and software engineer working with in the telecommunications

area and was primarily on the software track through the traditional path

of developer, senior developer into leadership in that vein.

I started to broaden out into some of the affiliated disciplines,

such as software release management and environment management.

As I began to take on larger portfolios and got introduced

in a great way to the infrastructure world

as well, in about 2016, at that time I was with Telus Health

and have had infrastructure as part of my portfolio. Ever since then.

The journey has been fantastic.

I've had great opportunity to learn so many different things from product

development to infrastructure management, architecture, user centered design.

I've been able to work with so many great teams in that regard.

Have been very lucky to be part of planning and execution of migration

from on premise into public cloud, which is a journey a lot of large

organizations have gone through or are going through will go through.

In the end, being able to really delve into my passion

for using technology to be able to help others and

and make the world, if you will, a better place to be in some small regard.

As far as lessons learned along the way, I think there's always a couple of things.

As you grow older, you start to realize those lessons a little bit more.

What sticks with me primarily that I learned

and have been able to leverage over the years is the way things have been done

before are not necessarily the ways they're going to work in the future.

And like anyone probably past a certain level of age,

I've had many experiences where

I've made mistakes by assuming that.

Approaches that have been successful for me in

the past would be successful in a new situation.

Sometimes you can implement those without enough forethought, without enough

planning, and there can be some negative connotations and ramifications to that.

So that's one lesson that has been has always stuck with me.

The other is open mind all the time.

Great solutions and great ideas can come from anywhere.

And one thing that I'm always keen on that I've found

has helped me along the way, although it took a long time

to develop, is to be quite clear and quite transparent.

As you move forward and as you engage others in things you're thinking

about, to seek their opinions to make it better as well. Hmm.

Well, some great advice and some great lessons learned along the way.

I totally hear that

you know, you've undertaken continuous learning throughout your career.

You've understood and identified, obviously, that certain things

always work out the way they have in the past.

So moving through that and then the opportunity to network

with individuals, I mean, certainly we're hearing that from so many leaders

in the tech sector just that networking piece is so important.

So I really appreciate you sharing that very much with us.

And you just referred to something that we had our first discussion

gave me a little bit of goose bumps when we first talked, and I was so happy

that you said you would do this interview, because what you said to me

was that you're really passionate about using technology

to enable outcomes that will lead, leave the world in a better place.

So could you talk a little bit about that, please? Yeah, absolutely.

It's something I'm quite passionate about and I think for everyone

they approach technology or technology implementation and a different vein.

And even how people interpret doing things for good

can be looked at in a myriad of different ways.

But for me, the real and continued opportunity is always to use

software and other technology stacks and approaches

to be able to realize the true value of interpretive human beings

and to remove some of the, you know, I hesitate to use the term like the

the grunt work or the that the items that that weigh you down.

But to try to address some of those friction points

to allow us as humans to be able to really

use our brains on problems, start working on the interpretive things.

You know you can see

how this conversation leads down the road of heavy automation, for example.

But more than that, especially with burgeoning data strategies

and the amount of data that's out there, is a real opportunity

for any industry to be able to improve

the user experience of their end users.

And that can again come in many fashions.

I've been fortunate enough, both in my previous role and in this current role,

to work with companies who are dedicated to improving the wellness, be it health

or financial of Canadians. And to be able to contribute to that,

to be able to build technology and support technology

that is meant to improve health of Canadian users,

to improve the financial well-being and general wellness

of Canadians users, particularly here at Canada

Life as well as in my previous role at Telus Health,

is just a fantastic opportunity. And those are the sorts of things

that I'm really passionate about, which is being able to take technology,

build technology and see an end result

where people are leading healthier, happier lives.

That is really inspiring.

And thank you for sharing that.

And, you know, definitely I see that.

Yeah, with the multiple of data we have and the way we use it

and the way you work as an IT leader to ensure that we can create benefits for, as you say,

Canadians.

That impacts on our overall, you know, health of our country, right?

Because if we're helping people have better, more secure lives,

more healthy lives, being able to use that data for good, then

that that impacts on our overall structure of our country and and what

we have to use from a tax perspective to keep the country going and healthy.

So I really appreciate you sharing that.

And it gave me just some inspiration to talk a little bit about doing that.

Because when you're doing that, you're working with a

huge amount of teams in your organizations and you're leading those teams.

So I wanted to ask you a little bit about leadership and leadership roles

and really ensuring we're hearing now that a lot of employees and especially generations

want to have purpose.

So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you lead

to ensure you're understanding, your teams, you know, in around things

like generational mix of employees, wellness and overall team planning,

Are there any tips you have there or information you could share?

I can certainly share my own approaches.

I don't know if they're well thought out enough to be considered

tips for others to use. But you've hit the nail on the head.

Generally speaking, long gone are the days where people will simply work

in a role or in a job that they don't feel passionate about.

We all spend a great deal of time and emotion

invested in our work. So we want to feel

that there is a tangible, measurable, good outcome to that.

That goes far beyond

just the notion of traditional compensation.

Companies like Canada Life, for example, are dedicated

to serving our customer base, but not just serving them

by providing services, but providing insights, by being able to help them

on their wellness journey, be it health or financial to make their lives better.

And to do so, we need and have the engagement

of a huge number of employees across a breadth of products and services.

Canada Life is a massive company that touches people in a myriad of ways.

And one of the great things about that is

you can start to form a cohesive picture

of, you know, Canadians as a whole or your users as a whole

and understand how you can support them between products,

between the pieces that traditionally were isolated.

Now, the teams who do that run the gamut from

new graduates who have joined us and co up students all the way to team members

and practitioners that have been with us for beyond 30 years.

One of the things that has always struck me here at Canada, Life

well, always, I've only been here about eight months

is the willingness to come together, to look at things holistically

and do the right things, to arrive at the right solution

for our customers and for our stakeholders.

Leading in an environment like that that spans a multitude of generations,

if you will, and different approaches.

What's really key there is listening and more than just listening, but hearing

what people are saying and what's important to them,

and giving them a forum to be able to voice what is important to them.

And that's why I always harp and we may talk about it later as well.

Harp So much on the concept of transparency.

We as technology leaders should be able to form up a technology strategy

that directly ties to a publicly known business strategy,

and our team members should be able to measure us against

measure our decisions against that strategy.

When everyone is on board and pulling

in the same direction, you can accomplish all sorts of amazing things.

Well, it's very interesting.

Just before we hopped on this call, you said, How's your day going?

I said, we just had a presentation from our President about our business objectives and goals.

And it was really, really engaging and amazing just to be able to learn that.

So when you talk about transparency that certainly, you know,

I can relate to that as an employee of an organization.

But I'm also hearing from you from a leadership standpoint,

like you're talking about all all of the work that you do for Canadians

to help with health and financial stability and support.

And, you know, when I think of your employees

and your teams that are building it,

there are almost building it for themselves as well, too.

So you've got this very interesting product mix where you're supporting Canadians,

but I'm sure many of your employers are building building initiatives

from a technology standpoint that are also helping them, you know?

Well, that's one of the amazing things about working for an organization

like this and other organizations like this is,

you know, the common expression is eating your own dog food.

But our team members and practitioners, as well as our leadership teams,

we do use the very products and services that we build for Canadians.

We're able to weigh in on whether they meet our needs,

whether they're intuitive enough, whether they have the right user

experience, whether they have the right results.

So we know as we build,

as we promote them, as we move them out into the wild,

we know that we've done our utmost to ensure

that they're meeting the needs of our customers and stakeholders. Amazing.

I want to have a whole other conversation about those.

I find it very interesting.

We we didn't actually plan to have that conversation

within these these questions, but it's it's very interesting.

I'd love to talk further about that.

But now I wanted to talk about an ask a question around technology innovation.

Well, and specifically AI talking to a lot of individuals

and tech leaders about this.

So could you just maybe talk a little bit about this, Share your views on

how AI and the future of AI will impact business?

I'd be happy to, and this is another one that could be a full conversation

in and of itself could involve hundreds of people

because it's another one where there is a wide swath

of differing opinions and more than just differing opinions.

The notion of AI is one of those concepts

that tends to fracture people towards one extreme or the other.

Often, you know, at one camp, you often see folks that are validly

raising concerns about the impact a AI implement without proper planning

and proper foresight may have on things like the labor market

may have on things like information privacy may have on things like, you know,

what happens if if a self-driving car directed by AI

drives into someone, how do you prevent that?

What are the quality controls?

And then, of course, there's another you know, the other extreme of the camp is

we've got to push forward with AI. The

you know, the sky's the limit on what can be accomplished

and we can push our innovations through the roof to the next level.

I typically tend to feel that the answer lies in the middle ground.

I am in the camp of people that strongly believes

in the continued development of AI, but in an ethical and safe manner.

I believe in planning what it is you want to do.

Understanding the use cases.

You're trying to drive and implement those through an AI approach

that is both ethical and safe, and those have to be sort

of your primary concerns with the design phase. I do believe

AI has a great capability applied across a swath of industries

to be able to help humanity

in everything from diagnostic help for physicians

to insights on health and financial wellness for customers of companies like Canada, Life.

I don't think it should always be looked at

people tend to look at it as a replacement for humans and or human thought patterns.

Whereas I tend to look at it as an extremely strong complement

to human thought patterns and human decision making.

It's another tool that we could use in our toolbox

to help us form the proper decisions for the best outcomes. Yeah.

I appreciate that, those insights.

And yeah, definitely I've been, you know, having a few chats around the bringing

the design teams together that are building the AI applications

that you're going to use, really testing, those are getting some great engineers in

and like you said, making sure that all the checks and balances are in there

when you're going to implement it into any of your programs

and products or services. So I appreciate that. All right.

So now

we're getting to the very last question, which is very interesting for me.

It's kind of I call it my lightning round question, but you get one answer.

And that question is what is the future of IT?

That's a great question and I wish I had

i wish I had thought about that beforehand.

The future of IT to me is really about

what I'll call the frictionless response,

so it's hard to quantify exactly what the future of IT is.

The future of it is now the future of i.t was five years ago.

The future of ip is five years from now.

It's a constantly shifting discipline

that is driving towards specific business outcomes.

And that's that's really the key.

As we move the IT landscape forward, we often make the mistake of implementing

different IT approaches for the sake of different approaches.

And we really need to tie those to specific business outcomes

that we're looking to achieve and tie it deeply to business strategy

for whatever organization it is you happen to be part of.

There are of course some overarching technology advances.

I think everyone understands the value in moving from on premise data centers

to public cloud in sort of specific industries and environments.

Those are well understood.

There will always be changes like that.

There will always be a rapid pace of change.

In fact, the pace of change in technology is increasing daily.

We used to be able to identify

a standard stack you could use for ten years, 15 years.

You'd be lucky to identify a standard stack that would remain

the market leader for for more than a couple of years at this point.

So you have to be willing to shift.

But overall, to me, the future of IT,

I believe the way

this will start to develop itself is we will in many cases

start to abs attract what we consider the lowest level of IT to be today.

So just in the same way as we've gone through a journey of having people sort of

physically racking and cabling servers or spending,

spending a lot of time writing,

you know, writing COBOL, for example, you've seen programing languages

continue to develop into more abstract and abstract concepts that allow you

to get more done with sort of full features of libraries.

IT as a whole will continue to move in that direction

from my viewpoint, which will again allow the focus of the individuals

working in those environments to not concern themselves

so much with the very time consuming baseline here,

but focus on higher value items for their organization. That is fantastic.

That's a whole other session as well to.

Thank you so much for joining us today, Charles.

I really appreciate it very much.

If you're interested in viewing this video or others to support the senior tech

leader in their journey will include this interview and a link at cio.com/ca Thanks again, Charles.