Tom Soderstrom serves as the IT Chief Technology Officer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where his mission is to identify and infuse new IT technologies into JPL's environment. Infusing new technologies means creating ways both IT and the business can work together to innovate for the business. As an experienced leader, Soderstrom shares his recipe.
Watch the video or read the transcript below.
"I would say, the most important thing is IT as enablers, as visionaries, needs to know something about IT, needs to know where it's going. So I would recommend to create the next IT decade for your business, as it applies. So, that's fairly straightforward to do. You study, you talk and you look especially at startups. Every startup is life and death petri-experiments in technology, so you can learn from them and then you talk to other similar minded CTOs and you read all the great publications.
So now you get your arms around, what does the next IT decade look like? An IT decade is three years. Now what do you do? You take it and you prototype around those, so what we do, is we hold an innovation seminar where we get all of the people who are interested in that topic, and we get them there. Schedule the conference room an extra half hour. Measure and look at who comes up and asks questions after, and that's your leaders for the initiative moving forward. And they typically, and often are not from IT, but it's a mixture of IT and business.
So create the next IT decade, visibly. Create energy, create a pull, absolutely not a push, a push does not work, so you need to create this pull and imagine innovating together, that's an easy way to create the pull.
Look for return on attention — not return on investment. You won't get the investment, unless you get the customer's attention. You create that pull and everybody comes.
Then, the last piece I would say is envision it by looking at those IT trends:
- Prototype it by trying it together with the end-users.
- Report on it, and failure is a good thing. Fast-failures should be celebrated because a prototype is something you are for to learn something. It doesn't have to be successful. If it's successful, then pilot it, and now you are looking for success.
- And adopt it, one size does not have to fit all. The most interested users can adopt it.
- And you now need to figure out how to operate that, and DevOps is something to be looking at.
- Finally, abandon it! Don't be afraid to give up on IT. If it didn't work, or it has it's lifetime, look for the next one and bring it on."
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Tom Soderstrom is IT Chief Technology Officer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Los Angeles, CA . JPL is the lead U.S. center for robotic exploration of the solar system and conducts major programs in space-based Earth sciences. JPL currently has several dozen aircraft and instruments conducting active missions in and outside of our solar system.
