Messaging and Careers

I work in EMC's Office of the CTO. As part of this team I have visibility into the technology vision of the Corporate CTO (John Roese). Last year I wrote a series of articles that represented his vision publicly. It was a vision that extended from the application bits running on mobile devices right down to the storage bits that live in a data lake. For an overview of last year's vision posts I recommend reviewing the bulleted items found within the Pivotal building block post from last April. 

What's the purpose of putting together this messaging and circulating it publicly? There are two primary reasons:

1. Customers and partners that are evaluating EMC or investing in EMC technology want to know what EMC's long term vision is. The landscape of data center design is shifting dramatically and this transition typically requires compatibility with existing data center infrastructures. Customers and partners want to know (a) where EMC is headed, and (b) how the entire federated portfolio of EMC companies (EMC, VMware, Pivotal, RSA, VCE) is marching towards that vision.
2. Technologists responsible for generating the federated portfolio of EMC products need to know where the eventual destination lies. This influences the implementation of the products and services currently under design.

It is obvious then that the CTO has a leadership role to play in regards to messaging. This can be implemented in a number of ways. At EMC the decision was made to create a small, dedicated team that continually works on the generation of technology vision as well as a messaging framework to distribute that vision both outside and inside the company.  The team is called VISION-X, where the "X" stands for "across" (i.e. what is the technology vision "across" the entire portfolio). Whenever a presentation, email, or any other communication contains the logo displayed on the left it means that the content therein represents the CTO's point of view on the future of the industry.

One of the key issues facing the VISION-X initiative is global scale. Customer, partners, and employees all over the world have a vested interest in hearing (and responding to) this vision, but the team itself is too small and not generally available in all time zones. For this reason the VISION-X team launched the EMC CTO Ambassador program (based on a similar program run at VMware). The EMC program, however, has a set of well-defined roles:

• Presenters: technologists with strong communication skills that are capable of delivering an advanced technology vision.
• Messengers: evangelists with a focus on delivering the vision via social media
• Scribes/Analysts: attend meetings with customers/partners and record detailed feedback on the vision; the feedback is then summarized monthly and presented at an executive level.

In 2014 we recruited the initial class of CTO Ambassadors.

And then something interesting happened: their careers began to change. This happened in a couple of ways:

1. CTO Ambassadors become responsible for understanding the vision of the company. This helps them gain new insight into their individual role, and how it (does or doesn't) pertain to the corporate vision.
2. CTO Ambassadors find themselves in the middle of high-level, strategic dialogues with customers and partners in a brand new way, and learn things that they never would have learned during more tactical discussions.
3. CTO Ambassadors become go-to resources for their peers inside the company, because their co-workers are hungry for vision.

The overlap between vision messaging and individual growth is a fascinating topic that I have witnessed in my own career. I plan on relating my own experience in an upcoming blog post.

Steve

http://stevetodd.typepad.com

Twitter: @SteveTodd

EMC Fellow