For decades, CIOs have been challenging their organizations to shed one of the most persistent labels in our profession: order taker. Instead of waiting for the business to tell them what they want, technology leaders need to understand what the business is trying to accomplish, get invited into the first meeting, and earn the right to become a strategic partner. But in a fast-moving environment, is being a trusted advisor enough?
To reach the next level, top CIOs are increasingly transforming their IT organizations into what I call “innovative anticipators”: These IT orgs understand the business, customer, and possibilities so deeply that they can see around corners, anticipate what’s needed next, and create value before someone asks for it.
Janet Robertson, global CIO of RS Group, believes building that anticipation muscle isn’t simply about moving the IT organization to a higher level of maturity. Increasingly, it’s a business imperative.
For a recent episode of the Tech Whisperers podcast, Robertson and I explored the deeply human side of leadership: how trust goes both ways, how great leaders serve as a lighthouse when others are navigating through the fog, and how we prepare the next generation to lead in a world none of us has led in before. But hiding inside that conversation was another fascinating story to unpack.
RS Group is a global product and service solutions provider for industrial customers operating in 33 markets. Its journey has been remarkably similar to the one our IT profession has been making — from taking orders, to advising customers, to anticipating what they might need next. As Robertson evolves IT at RS into an innovative anticipator, the company as a whole is doing the same.
Two journeys, similar challenges. And as Robertson explains in the following conversation, strategic partnership may no longer be the destination for today’s CIO. It may be the starting point for what comes next.
Dan Roberts: You’ve said something that sounds simple but has enormous implications: There isn’t a technology strategy and a business strategy. There’s one business strategy. What changes in the way a technology organization operates when people genuinely believe that?
Janet Robertson: When the technology group is focused on an outcome, they’re looking at solving a business problem more than implementing a technical solution. That’s a nuance, but it’s really the most direct route to a solution, because they’re trying to solve a business problem and get a business outcome more than implementing a technology solution or a technology transformation. It’s a different mindset.
In practical terms, you end up with increased adoption because you’ve got buy-in from the business on the direct answer to the problem. You also end up with fewer bells and whistles — a solution that’s not gold-plated and that doesn’t have things you won’t need, which is more efficient, considering how fast things are moving today. Everything could be different.
In fact, we’re doing product development now as more of a continuous evolution using new, innovative tools that are available to us at each space. The days of planning a three- or four-year program are over. By the time you’re going live, the technology’s out of date, or the processes have changed, or the world’s changed around it. You’ve got to create solutions fast with the most direct available technology to support the business outcomes.
You can’t anticipate a business you only understand through dashboards. How do you get your technology leaders close enough to the work, the customers, and the people to see what they otherwise might miss?
I encourage my leaders to spend time in the everyday working life of the recipients of our solutions. Sit with some of our biggest customers and watch them place an order through our website. Sit with our middle- and back-office team and watch their process of paying an invoice, receiving an order, entering an order, processing an order. Go to the distribution center. Spend time with the people who are using your solution.
Our customer experience officer has been riding around with salespeople, experiencing what they are going through in a day-to-day environment. I’m going out to Milan, Italy, next week to open our new our automated warehouse there. I’m almost more excited about launching it and seeing what we’ve implemented in use than I was planning the program. I want to see the ship sail in clear waters.
When technology leaders spend the time doing this, they start to see the connection directly between what they’re putting out there and what actually has to take place. You get very different perspectives from different sides of the fence when you get hands-on. It’s less about KPIs and dashboards and the results out of the other end of it. It’s more about understanding who’s consuming what you’re producing and how you’re providing value to them. Because sometimes, their biggest pain point is something you put down as a priority 5, and it’s in the lowest level of the backlog, but would completely change their perspective, improve their experience, and drive value.
What have the best consumer experiences taught you about orchestrating a B2B customer experience that will continue to differentiate RS Group?
Our catalog is massive, and we’ve got so much to navigate. As a consumer, with the new developments you can go on to an Amazon experience and find anything you want using even cryptic keywords. Or you can go on to Google and find 20 different buying options. That is absolutely transformative for us, because a lot of our customers buy that way. They’re searching for something that’s maybe very specialized, so they expect the same kind of Amazon-type experience when they’re looking for a specialized manufacturing-line repair part.
For us in the technology space, it means we’ve got to make sure that our data and our foundations are prepared to enable those large language models for the AI and generative search for agentic purchasing. What’s a little bit different from the B2C space is that many of our customers are starting to implement agents to do a lot of their procurement. So we’ve got to be prepared on the receiving end of those agents to be able to place those digital orders. It’s not really an e-commerce, add-to-cart channel anymore. Now it’s a direct agentic experience in purchasing for our bigger customers that use agentic purchasing.
To lead the way on that is a huge differentiator, and we are aware of it, and we’re keeping an eye on it. We have to be able to move fast and pivot quickly. Who would have thought two years ago that we were going to be talking to agentic procurement?
For years, we’ve challenged IT organizations to do a better job demonstrating their value to the business and to become trusted advisors. How has your organization made that pivot, and what does the next evolution of that journey look like?
When I first joined RS, my department was seen as less of a technical advisor or an expert in new technologies and new ways of getting things done. We were seen more as order takers and a cost center, basically a necessary evil. The pivot we’ve gone through has happened by listening and engaging with the business to understand and help them articulate what problems they’re truly trying to solve. I say, “Please tell me the what, and let me and my experts provide you the how.”
It’s taken some time, honestly. That evolution from an order taker to a trusted advisor is a journey, because you’ve got to prove that you know what you’re talking about, that you’re up on the latest technology, you understand the latest tools, and you are thinking outside of the box — truly providing the vision and the art of the possible to a problem they don’t know how to articulate. The biggest driver for me is connecting my leaders and my team to the business in general. They’re out looking for tools to solve those business problems.
Now we’re starting to partner with our business partners to show them the art of the possible with some of the new trends that are coming, like agentic procurement and large language model search. SEO is gone; now it’s GEO, generative engine optimization. So instead of “Tell me your business problem,” it’s moving to “Let me tell you how to solve a problem you might not know you have yet. This is a way to anticipate what is probably coming down the pipeline, and it’s going to be a problem soon.”
Because we’re leading the way in talking to our business about where the future’s going in technology and customer search and customer analytics and data science, we’re being brought in to discuss these developing trends.
That level of anticipation requires intelligence, or what you’ve described as “intelligent automation.” What’s involved in building that kind of anticipation engine?
Just like you can’t expect a 300-year-old house to be a smart house overnight, you can’t turn a 100-year-old business into an efficient, highly data-connected enterprise overnight. We know that we’ve got some legacy plumbing that we need to repair, and we are well into that journey now. We know that the data we have is incredibly valuable, but we need to understand how to use it, how to interrogate it, and how to get the right answers out of it. Without a structured format, and without all the speed and the pipes and efficient use, we can’t take advantage of that.
Bad data and a bad foundation only accentuate bad decision-making from the data. If you put a lot of intelligence over the top of an unstructured or bad format and foundation, you get really bad data to make decisions from, and it just makes it that much worse. So sometimes you have to build a little bit of a foundation before you’re able to just run with it.
For years, the goal for technology organizations was to become the trusted advisor who gets invited to the first meeting, not just be handed requirements after the important decisions have been made. Robertson’s experience suggests that today’s CIOs need to challenge their organizations to go further, from “Tell me what you’re trying to accomplish” to “Let me show you what’s coming.” That requires getting close enough to your business colleagues and customers to see what they may not see yet. It’s the difference between being invited to the first meeting and being the reason the meeting gets called.
For more from Janet Robertson’s leadership playbook, tune in to the Tech Whisperers.
See also: