Podcast #227 Clear, Ready and Aligned

 TRANSCRIPT

Ken: Good day, and welcome to the Momenta Digital Thread podcast series. Today, I'm pleased to host Kimberly Eubank, Chief Digital Information Officer of Big Ass Fans. Named one of Global Telecom Business' 50 Women to Watch, Kimberly is a strategic and operational executive experienced in tackling big initiatives and delivering results. She's an expert at breaking down complexity and moving the business forward in a more integrated, seamless manner. Her background includes established Fortune 150 companies and startup and turnaround environments. In these roles, she served both business and consumer segments with a proven ability to build consensus and overcome obstacles to successfully drive high-profile, multi-million-dollar initiatives. Kimberly's achievements include spearheading day one readiness for the AT&T and Cingular merger, impacting over 46 million customers, driving the transformation of Cingular's B2B infrastructure, and overseeing the migration to a unified identity and access management framework for over 100 million customers. She joined Big Ass Fans in early 2023 to help drive the digital transformation, assessing, preparing, and executing transformative change, ensuring they are clear, ready, and aligned. Kimberly holds a Bachelor of Science in Communications from the University of Tennessee Knoxville and an MBA from Kennesaw State University. Kimberly, welcome to our Digital Thread podcast.

[00:02:08]

Kimberly: Thank you, Ken. I'm so excited to be here and discuss all things digital with you.

[00:02:13]

Ken: Excellent; I appreciate you taking the time to be part of this and coming- especially from your interesting background. Hopefully, we'll weave all of that into our discussion today. We call this the Digital Thread podcast, so I always like to start with a very open-ended question: what do you consider your digital thread?

[00:02:34]

Kimberly: There are several things. I think in my career, clearly, large-scale project management, which in and of itself isn't digital, but as my career evolved, digital evolved along the same timeline and the same path, the ability to manage large-scale programs that had a lot of different pieces and bringing them together into one. The other thread in my career has been fixing complicated issues. I'm the person they bring in to say, "We have a Gordian knot that needs to be unraveled." Or "We have some big thing that we have to hit by this date, and the date is immovable; figure out how to get us there." Tackling those complicated issues and being fortunate enough to succeed at that to some degree has been a thread. I think the last one is owning efforts with a large change component. Whether that's a merger integration activity like I did for day one readiness with the AT&T-Cingular merger or a more straight-up digital transformation, we're doing things the 1980s way; we need to do it the post-2000 way. No matter what it is, it's owning something that will change the organization. Those are the three pillars that are common throughout my career.

[00:04:00]

Ken: I had to appreciate your more straight-out digital transformation. Is there such a thing? I have yet to see patterns of why.

[00:04:09]

Kimberly: Yes, everyone is different. I think that's why I like it; it's not cookie-cutter. If you try to make it cookie-cutter, you'll probably not be successful.

[00:04:17]

Ken: Agreed, fully agreed. At least, that's what we've seen so far. Let's go back to your time with AT&T, even before the famed merger with Cingular. I noted you were the Director of Product Development for Emerging Devices, now IoT- in 2009. The telcos were among the first to drive machine-to-machine or M2M and IoT initiatives. What were some of the key technologies and use cases you were exploring at the time?

[00:04:44]

Kimberly: I like to say that I was IoT before IoT was IoT, right? We didn't even call it IoT back then; it was so early. At that point, we knew that it revolved around machine-to-machine communication. We talked about M2M a lot, but we didn't know which use cases would stick, which ones wouldn't, which ones would be profitable for us to pursue, and which ones wouldn't. We tried connecting things like dog collars and photo frames, but the big breakthrough in M2M, the first one that I recall, was utility meters. We started getting in with utility companies so they could take readings remotely and know where things were. Kindle was one of our first M2M projects, enabling features like whisper sync. Ultimately, after I left, the organization found a sweet spot in automobiles. They began working with car manufacturers to connect vehicles for diagnostics and other purposes. I think that became one of the carriers' major lines of business. We've seen everything from dog collars to Teslas.

[00:05:56]

Ken: Well, and certainly some of those have really- in fact, they've all stuck, but clearly the automobile one and remote telemetry. Tesla has been the one to exercise the greatest in terms of capabilities. It's interesting to think of your automobile downloading a new firmware set to allow for new features like semi-autonomous driving, right? Who would have thought in the day?

[00:06:18]

Kimberly: Yes, it's interesting. I have a fairly new Volvo, and I literally have to set aside time to upgrade my software and not go anywhere, just like you have to do on your computer. Sometimes, they keep changing.

[00:06:33]

Ken: Yes, they do, and God forbid that, at least. Hopefully, you have a choice when and how it decides to update because sometimes my Mac decides on Apple's behalf to update now.

[00:06:44]

Kimberly: Yes, before you tell it, "Okay, I'm gonna be around for two hours, so you can update now. I'm not going anywhere."

[00:06:50]

Ken: There you go.

[00:06:51]

Kimberly: Let's hope you didn't have an emergency.

[00:06:52]

Ken: Let's hit the famed AT&T and Cingular merger, affecting 46 million customers. What was your role, and how did your time there prepare you to be a digital business leader?

[00:07:05]

Kimberly: Yes, I think this was the beginning of me taking on transformational roles. My job was that when you're in a merger when you're merging with a competitor for FCC and Justice reasons and for trade reasons, you have to ensure that you're still continuing to act like competitors. You're limited in what information you can see from the other side, so it's very much planning in the dark. My job was to lead the efforts to figure out how we were going to be ready within 30 days of the merger closing to come out to our combined 46 million customers looking and feeling like one company, even though behind the scenes, we still had two billing systems, two networks, two websites, and two everything - but to the customers, it needed to look and feel like, "Oh, the merger's done. We're one company." I think we went further on that than I've seen other companies do. Other companies that merge, I've seen them take a couple of years to change the brands in their stores. We did it overnight to ensure every store had the new logo when you woke up. My job was to figure out how we could fake it until we made it and make sure that we thought about all the different customer transactions they would want to do: pay a bill, buy a phone, upgrade a device, do a return, and make sure that we know how to handle that across all of our touch points, digital, company-owned retail stores, and agent stores.

But also, there's a difference between handling that in a prior Cingular store versus handling that in a prior AT&T mobility store. We had to deploy the Cingular systems into the AT&T stores during that 30-day window. It was a lot of moving parts, but very rewarding. One of the things I look back on so fondly about that is when you have your entire company striving for the same goal, and they understand - this is probably the most important - they understand why they're striving for that goal and what achieving that goal means, there's just a synergy and a kind of an electric buzz in the workforce while that's going on. In hindsight, it was a very engaging and rewarding time we all look back on fondly. That really started my path of working on transformational-type things. Once I'd worked on that, which was really focused on B2C, it went so well that they said, "Hey, why don't you go over and help the B2B side of the house figure that out?" Because it took a little longer to do the B2B side, I worked on that for a couple of years. Subsequently, I just kept getting those kinds of projects over and over again until, ultimately, I left the company. Every role that I've had post-AT&T has been to lead some sort of transformation in another company in another industry. It just became my sweet spot as a result.

[00:10:19]

Ken: Clearly, those lessons taught had good cross-industry applicability because, as you mentioned, when you left AT&T, you went to SunTrust. It was interesting: SVP of Digital Efficiency back in 2017. How did you define digital efficiency? What was your remit? What are you most proud of?

[00:10:42]

Kimberly: With the SunTrust role, that was really about owning the authenticated digital experience, so the remit was essentially what most digital teams' remits are, which is trying to deflect contacts from the human branches or the contact center and putting the ability for the customer on their device or computer to actually take care of transactions themselves without having to talk to a human being. What we were really trying to achieve was efficiency. Could customers accomplish the tasks they came for in a self-service manner? In that role, there were a lot of incremental changes. It wasn't like we threw away the old app and started completely over, although some people wanted to do that. But it was solid; it just needed a lot of bells and whistles added. We spent a lot of time looking at what other competitor apps, considered best in class, do. What are the transactions that customers are still calling customer service for or walking into a branch for, and then really tackling those in priority order as far as this is where we can help the customer not have to go somewhere or do something; they can just take care of it on their phone. One of the things at the time was paperless billing. By that time, most people were all in on paperless billing. This particular company wasn't at that point, so it seemed simple and not such a big thing, but just making paperless billing more of an opt-out versus an opt-in, and then also making sure that we had - I think it was up to seven years of billing history or three years of billing history on the digital platform so that they didn't have to call in and request old bill copies and things like that. They were simple things; it wasn't huge, but it was the amalgamation of the whole. Once you start tackling those little issues that cause friction in your customer experience, you start smoothing the friction. That's what it was about; it was trying to remove friction points and make customers more self-sufficient and able to complete things in a more self-service manner.

[00:13:05]

Ken: You brought that customer experience focus to Cooper Lighting Solutions in 2020, so you oversaw their digital transformation efforts across their customer touch points. That was synonymous with what you did at SunTrust but much more focused on the electrical and appliance space. How did you organize your team and approach? What were some of the results?

[00:13:27]

Kimberly: At Cooper, it's interesting that you chose to ask about an organization with this role because that's probably the most extensively defined organizational structure of all of my roles. There, we took the customer journey and its phases. For each of those phases of the customer journey, and I believe there were seven or eight, we created a scrum team for each phase. The product manager, product owner, and the scrum team focused on "How can I make my part of the customer journey better for the customer, and then how can I hand off to the next phase of the journey as cleanly and as efficiently as I can?" so that once you get through all of the phase improvements, you've strung together a cohesive end-to-end journey that again, is much more seamless and frictionless for the customer. That was one where we could have dedicated resources specific to the transformation, which was very helpful for focus. One of the challenges we had during that time was working in agile. But, like many companies, not everybody's fully agile. In fact, I think most people, if you're a company of any tenure or any longevity, you have legacy systems that are not agile and may never truly convert to an agile working process, and so, the challenges that we had there were how do you work in an agile way, but also have to respect the fact that some things are waterfall still in your business and how do you merge those two. In most businesses, when I come in, you have to end up hybridizing between Agile and waterfall and teams working in Agile, but then there are whole organizations that still work as a waterfall module. Then, how do you marry those two? This is why I say textbook agile is great in theory, just like textbook digital transformation is great in theory. It's all very specific to the company you're in and the environment in which you have to get the work done. You're going to have to bend, or you will break.

[00:15:59]

Ken: Yeah, yeah. Specific and, I'd say, very much relevant. We often talk about digital transformation, put the focus on digital, and sometimes forget that digital is only the catalyst; transformation is really the goal. With that in mind, it's got to be relevant, and you've got to talk about how you move an organization from point A to point B. That is why I called out the organization side of this, because obviously, the work you had done in various industries, now you're hitting an industry where- especially when you think about IoT and the angle there, where technology is the business in that sense, and so you don't just stop at the customer touch point to the system. You have to think about digitalizing sales, the product itself, and moving to advanced models like as-a-service, right? All of those things come into play or at least into consideration during a digital transformation. Now, in what seems like a natural move, now that we've visited some of your past successes there, especially around both B2B and B2C, you joined Big Ass Fans as Chief Digital Information Officer. Tell us about the company, your role, and your impact.

[00:17:07]

Kimberly: Big Ass Fans is a premium provider of comfort solutions. They're known for really big ass fans that are comfort solutions. The tagline right now is 'Comfort Without Compromise.' They're based in Lexington, Kentucky, and they're about a $350 million company that's on the march to become a billion-dollar company. That's why they brought me in to evaluate where we are from a process, technical stack, and customer experience perspective. Where are we? What do we need to do to gracefully scale to a billion? After coming in, I interviewed 58 people across different business areas and put some recommendations together. What's great about Big Ass Fans is the employees are very engaged and believe in the product and believe in their customers, but they were working with what I'll call outdated or 'more manual than they needed to be' processes. They didn't have a good integration layer where all the systems talked to each other and showed data at the points of need. In addition, they hadn't automated a lot of things that- coming from a larger organization, you would be like, "Well, why are you still doing that manually? That could have been automated." Looking at those opportunities- so that in order to scale to a billion dollars, you don't have to add headcount to do that, you can actually keep quasi the same amount of headcount, but you can get the efficiencies from automating things that human beings are doing that aren't value add for the human being to be doing.

We've really focused on going around and finding those things, and what we found is we needed to bring in some more platforms, or we needed to upgrade platforms that we had, so we're in the process right now of- we were using EDI, but it's what I call 'faux EDI.' It wasn't 100% fully automated, so we're focusing on fully automating EDI, which will pull off some manual things that people had to do on the ordering and invoicing sides. We're bringing in a new transportation management system, and we're halfway through that. We had a homegrown integration bus, but it had been coded on top of and coded on top of and coded on top of. There wasn't a lot of documentation from its time, so it was very difficult to efficiently fix anything if it broke or make changes to it. We've replaced that with MuleSoft. We had Salesforce Service Cloud, but we're revamping that, ensuring that we have a few more required fields that automate tasks to have better data integrity. Again, when you start integrating the systems, you have better data integrity. You're better at automating things more efficiently. Lots of different balls in the air, but all with the goal that we want to get more efficient in an automated fashion so that we can scale gracefully to a billion dollars.

[00:20:19]

Ken: "Scale gracefully," that's a notable quotable. Given your IoT starting point, let's close the loop. To what degree do you see IoT technologies catalyzing changes in traditional electrical appliance companies like Big Ass Fans?

[00:20:35]

Kimberly: I think that in the industrial space, comfort for your workforce definitely equals productivity. We have some statistics that I don't have memorized, but the hotter you are, the slower you work. The cooler you are, the more efficiently you work. Not only is it a productivity enhancer to make sure that you’re heating and cooling solutions are effective for your workforce, but it also is a morale, human resources, and retention strategy as well because nobody wants to go to work in 110-degree weather when it's 130 degrees in the factory. That becomes miserable really quickly, and morale will tank as a result.

Interestingly, from a human resource- not just a productivity perspective, having the proper climate control is important. I think that when you get into having the infrastructure to do that and having multiple fans or multiple coolers or even heat if you're in the winter, having that connected and being able to monitor that and monitor it across all of your facilities if you're located in multiple different buildings in one city or even in different cities. One area is just having that building facilities overview to say, "Hey, all of my fans are working efficiently and effectively." I think there's also preventative maintenance at play, where you can monitor it to make sure it's performing well. If it's not, then you know that you need to come in and have it serviced. All of those types of things that we've seen in other industries- I mean, I come from telecom. Our network operations center constantly monitored our switches and towers to ensure that calls were happening, and things weren't failing. It's that same concept but then brought into the appliance scenario. You even have somewhere in your home, like your refrigerators and things like that, where you can see the refrigerator's efficiency, and the same goes for heating and cooling. I think there are plays; it's gonna be a degree of turning that corner on how serious people want to get about managing that infrastructure in their business and home. But I don't think anybody 20 years ago thought that we'd be looking at our fitness watches and monitoring our steps every single day, our heartbeat, and all the other things they monitor. The time is here, and it'll be an evolution for it to get to full scale.

[00:23:23]

Ken: Every business will eventually become a digital business, and even those traditional, if you will, utility or appliance, electrical businesses, smart homes, smart factories, smart buildings, all of these things come into play for all components. Let me go back. You mentioned the organizational side. Knowing your background and how you came in, and knowing what I call the holistic extent of the digital transformation work you're undertaking now, and you have in the past- how do you organize for such a widespread digital transformation involving all core functions, from engineering and manufacturing to sales, marketing, and service?

[00:24:03]

Kimberly: Yes, it is different every single time because it depends on the company and the company’s culture and structure and who's chomping at the bit for improvement and who's a little bit more resistant because there's always those different groups in every organization. But the key to it is that you have to have a centralized lead. You must have one person who's on point and holistically knows the entire plan. That person has to have- I've seen it most effective when that person's on the business side because IT cannot drive change by itself. In my role, I actually sit in IT. But because I have an extensive business background, I'm not your average IT person. I'm not coming at things specifically from boxes and interfaces. I come at things from business processes and experience improvements. I think you have to have somebody who can amalgamate a large amount of information and look at it through the lens of the employee and the lens of the customer, and that's another thing that I truly believe you cannot do a customer experience transformation and not do an employee experience transformation. Because the employee experience is the customer experience, if it sucks, your customer it's going to show to your customers. Many people think it's okay to have their employees scurrying around manually on hamster wheels doing things, but then having a slick app for their customers doesn't work like that because garbage in, garbage out. You really have to tackle the customer experience and the employee experience simultaneously.

Once you have that kind of lead, having a list of problems that you're going to go tackle- I have found in every single role that when you start writing stuff down and making a list, and I don't care how you make a list, whether you write it in Excel or you put it in Jira; however, you make your list, having that list and being able to communicate that list and then start knocking off some of the low-hanging fruit of that list, that starts to make people go, "Oh my gosh, they're serious this time. We've heard it 27 other times, but we didn't have a list before." "Oh my gosh, something on the list got done. Okay, let's see if something else gets done." Eventually, you start getting momentum on that. My job is to solve problems, whether it's a customer, business, or employee process problem, I'm there to solve them. What I like to do is when we need to tackle- how does it work today, and how do you want it to work tomorrow? I get cross-functional people in a room, and we whiteboard through it and debate the options. It's a more efficient way to get requirements because it'll take a while if you're trying to do them over the phone, which I do for some smaller things. It'll take a while, right? But getting people in the room, locking them down in a day or two to just in-depth discuss the art of the possible and what tomorrow should look like, that's how I typically tend to engage a lot of different people from different departments but around a singular topic that they all have some skin in the game on.

[00:27:30]

Ken: I understand that you packaged your real-world experience and launched a new company to inspire and help organizations better assess, prepare, and execute transformational change. Can you share how you help clients and who your ideal clients would be?

[00:27:46]

Kimberly: Yes, I have. As we alluded to earlier, I've had a lot of varied experience with transformations in different companies of different sizes and industries. I recently came off of a role and was like, "Why do some of these transformations go off the rails and some of them don't?" I started thinking about the elements that make a transformation successful. 80% of companies say they need to undertake a digital transformation or are planning to undertake a digital transformation, but 70% report that they don't succeed. Only 30% succeeds. How can you make sure that your company is in that 30% that succeeds?

I started thinking about what I've seen across my vast experience in this as the things that differentiate the winners from the losers. I've put that together in the clear, ready, and aligned framework, and underneath each of those pillars, there are 13 different competencies, which I won't go through here, but they are on my website if anybody wants to go take a look, which is kimberlyeubank.com. It's 13 competencies that you need to think about ahead of time before you start doing work and before you start spending money. Then, I typically use a framework for when I come into a client I want to interview. I want to hear from people. I'll talk to senior leadership about what they think is going on, but often, what senior leaders think is going on and what's really going on are shades different. I want to talk to the people actually doing the work. I do extensive interviews with the people on the ground and compare and contrast that to what senior leadership has told me they believe the issues are. Then, I put together a recommendation and assessment that says, "Look, this is what your issues are. These are probably the things you need to tackle. Here's what I recommend you tackle." I can do that in a priority order. I've even gotten down to where some clients- I'll help them- you need a new X system; I can help you evaluate X systems or put you in contact with X systems.

Companies that probably need that help are people who have been in maintenance mode for a long time, and it could be that you chose to invest in products. It could be that you're the big gorilla and you've just been successful by momentum, but your competitors have been investing in experience improvements and digitization where you haven't been. Suddenly, you wake up, and your experience is lagging, and your customers are telling you that your experience is lagging. That's one-use case. Scaling for growth, right? I'm a $250 million company that aspires of being a billion-dollar company, but we're still working like we're a $100 million company. How do I evolve that so that we start working like a billion-dollar company because you don't want to wait until you get there to break? We all saw with- I think it was Southwest a couple of Christmases ago, where they had not invested in their systems even though they knew they needed to. They had been told they needed to but chose to put their money elsewhere. Then, they got so much load that the systems they had been relying on that they hadn't invested in cracked under the load. You don't want to wait for the load to hit you; you want to get ahead of the load. If you're moving into new markets or new channels, that might be the time when you might want to assess how you get things done or to better efficiently define how you're going to go to market in that new channel. Those are potential use cases where you might want somebody independent to come in and assess your readiness for change.

[00:31:43]

Ken: It sounds like a very compelling, timely, and relevant offering that you have. I'm sure, given all the conversations we've had across all of our podcasts around digital transformation, it's one that I think will be in great demand, so perhaps you've got to figure out how to take kimberlyeubank.com and go for minibox because that's about what it's going to take given the scale, I'm sure. As we wrap up, I'm always curious to know how you maintain your edge as a leader, particularly in digital transformation. Do you have any recommendations you'd like to highlight for our listeners?

[00:32:15]

Kimberly: It is hard because your head's down when doing a digital transformation. If you're doing it right, your head's down, and you're busy every minute of the day, so staying ahead of trends and knowing what's going on in the industry- what I found that works for me is I've actually set up a Google alert with the word transformation in it. Every day, I get a Google alert where people have mentioned transformation. Sometimes, I get body transformations because the word is used not just for digital transformation, but I scan through those articles. If one interests me, then I'll open it up and take a quick read of it. That seems to be something where some days I don't read anything, some days I'll read just something short and quick- and they tend to be shorter, so it's not like you have to invest an hour to get through something meaty and in-depth.

I'll tell you from a book perspective: someone recently gave me the book "Smart Brevity." That book is about how you communicate in the digital age and how it's about getting to the point and how you should formulate your communications to employees, to whomever- to make sure that you're hitting the salient points, the important points without a lot of fluff, but making sure that you get your full message across. In a world where we've all got full inboxes, the ones that are short, sweet, and to the point, I appreciate those. If you struggle with being short, direct, and to the point, that book is a helper, and it's "Smart Brevity." There are a couple of old books that really hit me when I read them years ago and stuck with me. I'm not even sure if they're in print anymore, but one is called "Work to Live" by Joe Robinson. That book was all about how the American work culture is work, work, work, work, work, but that doesn't necessarily make us more efficient and how other companies that have great GDPs and productivity take a little bit more time to rest and relax and rejuvenate. It was an eye-opener for me. It was like, you know what? I should really take my vacation.

There was a point in my late 20s when if work called, I answered, and I really didn't take the necessary time to unplug. I will check my email on vacation, but I'm much better at unplugging now. I think "Work to Live" was helpful because you can't keep going at the speed you need to go in a transformation indefinitely. You will hit a wall at some point. Then another one from a female leadership perspective is "It's Not a Glass Ceiling, It's a Sticky Floor" by Rebecca Shambaugh. That's a book about how women do certain things. We may actually be our own enemy because of the way we approach or handle a situation, and so we might be inadvertently sabotaging career success by doing those things. I read that again, probably in my early 30s, and that was one that when I cleaned out my library during COVID- those three books stayed.

[00:35:43]

Ken: Great recommendations, and I love the title of the third one. That's very compelling. Kimberly, thank you for sharing this time and these wonderful insights with us today.

[00:35:52]

Kimberly: Well, thank you so much for asking. I appreciate it, and I appreciate your thoughts on IoT and the digital transformation space. I enjoyed it.

[00:36:01]

Ken: Thank you very much and thank you for contributing to the podcast. This has been Kimberly Eubank, Chief Digital Information Officer at Big Ass Fans. For more information on her new offering and service, it's kimberlyeubank.com, and we should have a link in the podcast release when we go out with it. Thank you for listening, and please join us for the next episode of our Digital Thread podcast series. We wish you an impactful day. You've been listening to the Momenta Digital Thread podcast series. We hope you've enjoyed the discussion, and as always, we welcome your comments and suggestions. Please check our website at momenta.one for archived versions of podcasts, as well as resources to help with your digital industry journey. Thank you for listening.

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