Lynne Ellyn
Senior Vice President and CIO, DTE Energy
Lynne Ellyn is the Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at DTE Energy, a Detroit-based diversified energy company involved in the development and management of energy-related businesses and services nationwide. Ellyn leads an organization of approximately 700 people who provide information technology strategy, development, and computer operations for all of the DTE Energy companies.
In 2002, Crain’s Detroit Business named Ms. Ellyn as one of the 100 Most Influential Women Business Leaders in the metropolitan Detroit area. In 2003, the Association for Women in Computing named her as one of the Top Michigan Women in Computing. In August 2004, CORP! Magazine named her as one of Michigan’s Top Business Women. She is a member of IBM’s Board of Advisors and the DTE Energy Foundation Board of Directors, as well as an appointee to the Smart Grid Advisory Committee of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and a fellow of the Cutter Business Technology Council.
Lynne Ellyn: Hello.
Ed Yourdon: Hi, Lynne.
Ellyn: I’m sitting outside in Ocala, Florida.
Yourdon: Aha. So you’re not in Detroit. I very much appreciate your taking the time. I can start you at the beginning in terms of how you got to where you are today. Were there any early heroes or role models or mentors that shaped your career path and future?
Ellyn: Well, not formal mentors. I think particularly for women who got into the IT field when I did, there weren’t very many mentors. And that may also be true for men, but I think it was particularly true for women. So no really formal mentors, but fairly early in my career, I worked at Henry Ford Hospital, and I worked for a gentleman by the name of Jim Shipley. I was too young at the time to appreciate how extraordinary he was, but as I encountered other people that I worked for, time and time again, I came back to what an outstanding boss he was, what a visionary thinker as well as a person who was just so effective with the larger system, the people system, and the organizational work. And he was just an imminently good human being. Not to say that I worked for a lot of bad human beings, but the point of all this is: I found myself over the years wanting to be the kind of boss that I felt Jim was.
Yourdon: Ahh, interesting. And your comment about mentors is something that I need to keep in mind because I’m trying to pin down the woman who’s the CIO for General Electric at the moment, Charlene Begley. And I’ve got another one, Joan Miller, the woman who’s the CIO of the entire UK Parliament. I’ve pinned that one down. So, I’ll be curious to see whether you know, whether your experience is a common one or unique. It certainly makes sense from what you’ve said.
Ellyn: Well, I’m often asked to speak to women’s groups. Even in China I got these questions: What’s it like to be the only woman in the room? And the other is: Who were your mentors? And I have a smart-ass answer for both of them. I had four brothers, so being the only woman in the room started really early.
Yourdon: Aha.
Ellyn: And I had no sisters. And the smart-ass answer to the mentors is, and you’ll chuckle about it. When I was growing up, all the grown-up women around me were mothers: my mother, my grandmother, my aunts, the neighbors. The closest thing I had as a model of a working woman was Marlo Thomas in That Girl.
Yourdon: Ah, interesting.
Ellyn: And people crack up because, of course, she was a comedienne. She was always in some kind of ridiculous situation. Umm, they never really let you know what kind of work she did, but she was independent in the sense that she had her own apartment in New York City and, you know, she seemed to be having a lot of fun and she was really cute. So, it’s a joke, but the truth is, not only were there not any women in IT, I mean, I heard early about Grace Hopper, but I never met her, and there were no professional women, certainly not somebody with a title like a senior vice president that I ever met. And for probably the first two thirds of my career, umm, I didn’t know very many women executives, and if I did, they were at a very large distance, so there was no model.
Yourdon: Now that is very interesting. Now you spent an early part of your career out in Silicon Valley, didn’t you?
Ellyn: I did, I did.
Yourdon: And there were no women out there?
Ellyn: Just to recap, the first five years were in hospitals, and I did a lot of medical computing.
Yourdon: Right.
Ellyn: The next ten were at Chrysler Corporation.
Yourdon: Oh right.
Ellyn: Where I was in advanced technology software planning and managed the artificial intelligence group. Then I went to Xerox and from Xerox went to Netscape.
Yourdon: Ahh, okay. What about out in Silicon Valley? Was there also an absence of female, you know, really strong IT managers?
Ellyn: Absolutely. There were . . . like at Netscape, the chief counsel was a woman, the head of HR, which isn’t too uncommon, was a woman. There were a couple, umm, more senior-ish product development managers who were women at Netscape, but only a few compared to the number of men and certainly at Xerox there were women. As a matter of fact, Anne Mulcahey was the head of HR when I was there and Ursula Burns—I didn’t know her, but I had met Anne a number of times—but Ursula Burns I think was in a product division, but certainly was not an executive. The CIO at Xerox was Pat Wallington, so she was, but Xerox was the first place where I encountered women with the senior kind of titles. To this day it remains the organization I worked for where there were the most executive women.
Yourdon: Well, that’s a nice segue into my next question area, which is basically, how you got your current CIO position? I mean, without going through your whole career, how did you begin moving into more and more senior executive positions that led to a CIO title?
Ellyn: The opportunities always came to me. I can’t say that it was my intention to be a CIO. It was always my intention to do really good, really energizing, interesting work. And whatever I was doing, that’s what I was focused on, and the next opportunity just sort of showed up. I will say that lots of opportunities showed up that I said no to because they weren’t interesting. They weren’t going to be motivating. They looked like a grind.
And I let them pass. So this idea that, you know, every opportunity that comes along, you better jump on it or it’s never coming back, I think it’s totally wrong.
Yourdon: Did you get any kind of specific training along the way to be a CIO? Did you go back to school to get an MBA or anything like that?
Ellyn: Yes, Chrysler sent me to an executive MBA program with Michigan State when I was managing the advanced technology group.
Yourdon: Okay. So that was just part of a general training provided to people, executive people once you got to a certain level?
Ellyn: No, no, no. They only sent a few people a year and you had to be recommended. Obviously, you had to be admitted to the program.
Yourdon: Right.
Ellyn: And they had to have a good reason to do that. You had to have a pretty strong advocate. And I was nominated twice before I was accepted. The senior executive review selected me. So the year that I went, which was when Chrysler was doing pretty well, in the ’90s, they sent five people from the company.
Yourdon: Oh, okay. Well, that leads into the next general area of questions, which is basically what you’re doing now. You know, if you had to divide your day or your general kind of work activity into three or four categories, what would they be? I assume one is just sort of keeping an eye out for the operational area. You must have tens of thousands of servers and all that stuff. Are there major kinds of clumps of responsibilities that you have?
Ellyn: Yes, but let’s talk about the directly IT responsibilities. You know, it’s the usual. I have three large data centers, I support all of the DTE family, which is two large utilities and a number of non-regulated businesses, which operate all over the United States, including two energy trading floors, one in Ann Arbor and one in Houston. We have rail and transportation activities, power and industrial. So what I have is a diverse portfolio of companies, and they are very different in character. Energy trading is like a typical trading floor, and then I have highly regulated utilities. So my day is spent switching hats from a mentality around startup and growth to a mentality that’s conservative and careful.
And I actually like that about the company, because I’m probably prone to boredom if you ask me to do something repetitive, and then I’ll go cause mischief, I suppose. So the diversity of that and the operational requirements are a complicated puzzle because, obviously, if you’re in trading, it’s right now, it’s “whatever I want; don’t bother me, we’re making money here” and if you are operating the status system that controls the flow of power and gas, the margin for error is zero. So, you know, those are very, very different things. See, the other responsibility that I take most seriously and is my fingerprint, is the way I manage, it is around the coaching and optimizing of the people system, finding the exact right place for a specific person so that they are not only highly productive and contributing; they are really, really glad to show up. Because I believe that you can pay people to walk in the door, but they either volunteer the best of themselves or don’t. And as they say, people join companies but quit bosses.
Yourdon: Yeah.
Ellyn: So the people system, I would say, is the most important thing and unfortunate at this time, taken a while to build it; I had the best, the strongest director team I had ever known anywhere, and so now I really am a coach, working on refinement, not working on basics. They are so super-confident that they’re amazing, so it’s a little bit like the symphony conductor. Sometimes I think that I need to be careful that I don’t mess it up.
Yourdon: [laughter] By waving your baton.
Ellyn: By stepping in when they don’t need it and whatever, so that’s kind of a refinement. And the last thing—and this is probably different than all the other CIOs that you’re going to encounter, because of the nature of the utility industry and the moment in time where we find ourselves with all the smart grid and smart grid money and expansion of the grid and the cyber security threats—I spend a significant amount of my time actually talking to the Department of Energy, the Utilities Telecom Council, lobbyists, [and] political people, working with the other CIOs in our industry about what positions we’re going to take. [I] also have a technical Congressional appointment, … I’m on the Smart Grid Advisory Committee for the next three years, so I’m spending a lot of my time on large industry issues with a lot of political overtones, and God knows, nobody would have ever accused me of being a politician.
Yourdon: [laughter] That’s, fascinating. There are a couple of aspects of that that I’d like to pursue, but first I want to make sure that I understand kind of the main thrust that you’re talking about. In terms of coaching people, I mean, you must have, I don’t know, 1,000 or 10,000 people, you know, in your IT empire. How far down the hierarchy do you go in terms of practicing your coaching work or carrying it out?
Ellyn: Well, pretty far down, because I’m open to taking on anyone who wants coaching, so I do end up coaching some people. In addition to that, I’m actually pursuing certification through the International Coaching Federation, so I’m building my coaching hours.
Yourdon: Ahh, okay.
Ellyn: Which is something else that I’m working on, so I’m actually coaching some women in the company who aren’t in IT. They’re in other departments and I’ve been asked to coach them through our mentoring program. So I do a fair amount of coaching, but directly in my organization what I’m trying to build into my directors, my managers, and my supervisors is their ability to coach others.
Yourdon: Right, right, right. Now, the directors or whoever they might be who essentially report right to you: I’ve heard several of the CIOs talking about that, that whole area, you know, their team, the team that really on a day-to-day basis helps them get their job done. In order for people to get onto that part of your team, what skills or characteristics were you really looking for?
Ellyn: Well, obviously, they have to be technically competent. That goes without saying.
Yourdon: Sure.
Ellyn: That’s … part of the issue. And for me, technical competence comes from actually having practiced in our industry, so I’m a little at odds with the idea that you take the guy who was great with the spreadsheets and has great business relationships and then you put him in charge of some type of IT. So, personally, I don’t subscribe to that. Maybe that’s my background.
You know, I actually programmed, designed databases, programmed in a ton of different languages, so it could be a bias, but for me, you got to be the real deal. But you can’t just be the real deal. You also have to have great people skills, strong character, and the ability to live in the gray zone, with a ton of paradoxes, and find a good answer when you’re in the middle of competing priorities and seeming conflicts of interest.
Being in IT, you’re the crossroads for everything and getting over-identified with your business constituents, or over-identified with the IT interests, or over-identified with technology. Any of those are deadly, and one of the things I just love about my director team, and I think makes for a really strong organization of any kind, is not one of my directors would ever allow one of their peers to fail at anything.
Yourdon: Ahh, okay.
Ellyn: If someone was in trouble, they would—and we call it “swarming”—they would swarm the problem and pull their peer out of issues because they understand that any problem anywhere in IT is everyone in IT’s problem.
Yourdon: Hmm, okay.
Ellyn: And that orientation, I think, is unusual because competition, showing up the guy next to you, has for a long time been the way that people have got promoted.
Yourdon: That certainly is true. Yeah, you know, there’s another theme I’ve heard from several of the CIOs I’ve talked to about this area of your team. And several of them have said, clearly technical competence, the competence from being a practitioner and some of these other things are obviously important, but they also want to have a team of people that can get along with each other because, in this kind of economy and business environment we’ve got today, a lot of them are putting in 12-hour days and you don’t want to have to spend 12 hours a day working with people you fundamentally don’t like. Has that been a big issue for, for your team?
Ellyn: It has not, but I’d go a step further. Of course, they have to get along, but I think it’s more than being able to get along. It’s again back to the idea that we are IT. And helping, assisting, even doing the job for your peer that’s necessary in order to keep the group together, to keep it performing, that’s what you’re going to do. Not that that should ever happen or happen frequently, but the idea that you and your peers are so interdependent, and your identity with them is bound to help everyone’s success. I think it’s a level of sophistication you don’t see in many organizations, and the organizations, whether they’re IT or otherwise, that are going to really perform are able to move to that level of sophisticated community and deep identity with the success of the group.
Yourdon: Interesting. Now, you said another thing in this area of discussion that I want to pursue a little bit. When you said that you and your directors are very much at the crossroads because these days everything goes through IT, so clearly you and your team find yourselves interacting with a lot of other peer-level people in the various business areas with whom I have to assume you occasionally have some conflicts or disagreements, and you find yourselves dealing with very strong, successful leaders, who have risen up to where they are right now at least partly through the strength of their personality and convictions, and so forth, and who feel that they really know how to do their job or they probably think they know how to do your job better than you do. How do you and your team manage to get your point across or, you know, pursue the kinds of policies and strategies you think are crucial from an IT perspective?
Ellyn: Well, you’re exactly right. Everybody who has ever used the Internet or done a spreadsheet knows exactly how easy this should be.
Yourdon: [laughter] Yeah, right!
Ellyn: It’s as though everybody who ever drove a car would believe that they could engineer, design, build the factory, and produce cars better than the car manufacturers. It’s an interesting thing that the complexity in systems is so poorly understood and yet, and you probably know this, complexity scientists say the most complex products on earth are software.
Yourdon: Right.
Ellyn: And so we have a situation where that completely eludes people. The idea that software could be more complex than the vehicle they drive or the most complex part of it is the software, you know, people don’t get that. And certainly, trying to get that across to your peers is difficult. So back to how do we influence and work with them, again, back to the sense of community. When your directors, your managers, your supervisors, and the people in IT all understand that if they go native, if you will, and kind of veer outside in order to please somebody, then the whole all falls apart—that the consequences are bad. That we have to be clear in our communication, consistent in our communication, we have to always remind people that we’re balancing competing priorities, and we have to continuously be educating, explaining, demonstrating, and, by the way, benchmarking with other companies and presenting the facts of how you stack up against the performance they would get elsewhere is the only survival technique I know to work. And that’s a survival technique, ’cause this battle never ends.
Yourdon: Well, particularly these days, when a lot of the technology is cheap and widely available. You know, it’s been true for 25 years, ever since the PC came out. You mentioned your energy traders as kind of an example of people that I would imagine are somewhat rogue technicians. You know, if they don’t like the answer they’re given by you, they’ll go down to Radio Shack or whatever the equivalent is today, or download an app for their iPhone and say, “Screw you. We don’t need you. We’ll do it ourselves,” until it gets out of hand and then they come begging for help.
Ellyn: Actually, I don’t have that problem with them.
Yourdon: Oh, really?
Ellyn: Because they are also subject to daily scrutiny around what they’ve done, you know, when the trades are over at the end of the day, there has to be an audit trail, so it turns out they’re very impatient and they want what they want, but they don’t color outside the lines. It’s actually more likely in other…in engineering areas.
Yourdon: Ah, okay.
Ellyn: And the like.
Yourdon: Yeah, yeah.
Ellyn: But to be truthful, we monitor and police our network and we manage the desktops to such a degree, it’s really hard to do that.
Yourdon: Well, one of the other things you mentioned is very consistent with what I’ve heard from other CIOs, and in fact, one, I forget which one it was now, said that he’s beginning to think of his job as being the chief media officer in terms of the effort he puts into communicating and educating and spreading the word about not only what they’re doing, but as you just said, benchmarking against what … the competitors [are] doing, what the peers in our industry doing—I think that is going to become increasingly important.
Ellyn: Oh, absolutely. That is a big part of my job today and the work my staff does. Last year, we belonged to UNITE, which has 17 of the largest electric utilities. We spent a thousand hours collecting the data for our benchmark with them.
Yourdon: Wow. That’s amazing. One other thing you also mentioned that kind of fits into this whole thing, that is kind of a no-brainer, and that is the importance of staying in touch with other CIOs both in your industry and really all industries, uhh, to keep track of what other people are worrying about and thinking about and planning for, and so on. How much of your time do you spend doing that sort of thing?
Ellyn: Well, I’m guessing it’s like five, seven percent, which isn’t such a big part of my time. But, it’s a really critical part. It’s absolutely essential, to get a handle on the sort of the lobbying efforts or industry positions.
Yourdon: Ahh, good point.
Ellyn: That’s been hugely important. Becky Blalock from Southern Company and I collaborated to do some policy discussions with the lawyers at the Department of Energy. I have another one coming up and we strategized around those things.
Yourdon: Let me switch gears to another question area that I imagine you would enjoy talking about. What are some of the new trends that you see coming down the line that you think are going to influence the IT industry in your world of utilities in the next few years?
Ellyn: Well, the big one, of course, is the “smart grid.” The problem with that title is that it implies that there is a stupid grid.
Yourdon: [laughter]
Ellyn: The grid is highly automated now. This is a re-automation of the grid. For example, at one time (this predates me) Detroit Edison had 140 engineers that just operated it. Today it’s done with just a dozen or fewer. As we go into more grid automation and smart meters and we can debate how smart they are, but meters to the extent that homeowners adopt a lot of home automation, and that remains to be seen, but there are a lot of people who are juiced about it. And we start to bring on a fair amount of electrical cars; electric vehicles; and the automation, billing, and management that is going to be in here. It’s a big deal for our industry, a big deal. Great opportunities. I don’t believe the opportunities are where the popular press or Silicon Valley want them to be, but there are great opportunities to improve the manageability of the electrical distribution grid. At the same time, we have been railroaded into doing that as an IT-based network.
Yourdon: Hmm.
Ellyn: So if you go back to 1995 and ’96, ’97, and ’98, when I was out in Silicon Valley and we were IP-ing everything, none of us, none of us anticipated the volume of security issues that we would face in the future and how that volume would ever be increasing in diversity and sophistication.
And so back in those days, we had a few security tools. You know, every company is now running, what, 20 different security tools, spending 5 to 10 percent of their IT budget on security issues, just managing the IT networks we know well. So now we’re getting to IP electrical grids. So, in one column are all of these amazing possible things that we will be able to do, some of which benefit the consumer by reducing the cost, improving the reliability, allowing for better management, some of which may help the consumer if you believe all of the venture capitalists (VCs) who are funding all of this stuff out in Silicon Valley, in giving them iPod applications and smart phone applications that allow them to turn their lights off and on and cycle their pool filters and whatever if we believe that, if we believe that’s what people are going to do.
And by the way, I don’t believe that that’s going to be anytime soon, because every experiment with that has shown that people play with it for a couple of months and then they’ve got better things to do, but we’ll see if over time… So we have this, you know, bright, shiny future that we are in this process of creating. And we always have as an asterisk attached to it: “Oh, by the way, it ought to be secure.”
Yourdon: Mm-hmm. Right.
Ellyn: Well, what do we know about IT now? They are not secure. We, we get a new security tool, a new security patch constantly. We have a “patch Tuesday” to fix problems that have already been exploited.
Yourdon: Right.
Ellyn: So logic tells me that the future for these IT networks can’t be hugely different. So I see great and exciting things. I see deeply worrying and troubling things. And trying to enable without overly enabling potential problems is [like] walking a tightrope right now. And the IT industry is being hugely out-lobbied in Washington by the tech industry, because this is a lot of money for them.
Yourdon: I want to get to the problems and gists and so forth in a second, but let me just finish off this area we’ve been talking about. How much of an impact on your world do some of the other hot buzz words have that we’re all seeing in the press these days, just like cloud computing and virtualization and so forth? Are those just sort of things that you use, or are they going to fundamentally change the way that you guys do business?
Ellyn: Well, about seven years ago, I was faced with huge capital investments to knock the walls out and make the data centers bigger. I said, “You know, we can’t do this. We’ve got to find a better way.” So it’s pretty early in the virtualization game.
Yourdon: Oh, okay. Really, I thought so.
Ellyn: But we moved very strongly to virtualize our data centers. And today, I have so much white space in all three data centers, it’s not even funny. So, we moved very strongly ahead of the game on virtualization. We got rid of the mainframe after we implemented a new enterprise business system based on SAP and some other technology. And we’ve moved along the virtualization path very strongly. So the few times we’ve looked at “cloud computing”—if I could set aside my concerns about security, which I absolutely cannot, you know, I’m so highly virtualized—there’s not much money in it for them.
Yourdon: Ahh, okay, interesting.
Ellyn: So my point of view on virtualization is very similar to the outsourcing discussion 10 to 15 years ago: Get your house in order before you ask somebody else to do it. Because otherwise all you’re going to get is your mess for less.
Yourdon: And your mess is farther away that you can’t even see.
Ellyn: And the point of view
Yourdon: Yeah, right, I agree.
Ellyn: So . . . and then, you know, depending on your industry, and again, if you’re a fast startup, you don’t have any data centers. You’re more at risk of running out of cash than you are if somebody is stealing your secrets, well, of course you’d go to a cloud. But when you’re a 150-year-old utility company, you are the target of terrorists, criminals, and mischief makers, you’ve got a different set of considerations.
Yourdon: Interesting.
Ellyn: So, you know, if I was in another company, I’d view it differently.
Yourdon: Sure.
Ellyn: But for us, virtualization—absolutely three stars, four stars. Cloud computing—a big question mark. And if I was going to do any cloud computing, I sure wouldn’t do it with the likes of Amazon or Google. So for us, that’s probably not a big deal, but of course, we watch it. All of the consumer device stuff, the edge devices, big deal. We’re in the process of moving to a point of view where we’re going to enable a bunch of these, but we’re going to view them as consumer devices; we’re not going to provision them.
Yourdon: Ahh, okay.
Ellyn: So, you know, everybody’s budget is cut. This year iPads were hot. Five years ago BlackBerries were hot. Three years from now it will be something else. I think our role is to keep up with the technology where we can deliver the corporate connection to you, the corporate mail to you, possibly some of the corporate applications. But it’s your choice what you want to bring to work.
Yourdon: Hmm, okay. Well, that leads into, I guess, the final part of my questions in this area, and that has to do with the social media, which may or may not be brought to work by whomever. Twitter, Facebook, and related things, do you see those having a significant impact on the world that you live in, in the next few years?
Ellyn: Well, we have two points of view about that. We’re on Facebook, we’re on Twitter, but that’s really only for corporate communications and the service part of our business, customer interface. We are not enabling our workforce to be spending time on these things because, frankly, we view it as a productivity hit.
At the same time, we are rolling out and deploying social media tools inside the firewall, so that we can have our own Wikipedia-like locations, we can have collaboration going on, we can have chat rooms about problems, you know, two people working on a problem in different power plants being able to use internal social media to show each other what’s going on, what part is failing, and draw on other people.
I think [it] is a real win and a real enabler. Expanding that across the firewall boundary, we haven’t seen a business reason for us to do that. The most important thing we do is keep the lights and power on. If I were a marketing company or a consumer products company, I’d probably view this differently. So my context is the company I’m currently in.
Yourdon: Sure, well, what about, you had mentioned consumer service? What about using things like Twitter so that citizens out there on the streets of Detroit can communicate back to you guys about the problems they’re seeing or questions they have?
Ellyn: We do have that.
Ellyn: But, again, it’s only open in the business context to those people who would be responding to that corporate communications customer service.
Yourdon: Right, right.
Ellyn: Not, not open to power plant personnel, IT personnel, whatever, because we’re not responding to that.
Yourdon: Sure. That makes sense. Now, in the whole area of problems and concerns you certainly mentioned security, and that’s something that I hear from everybody as being if not the central ingredient, certainly one of the biggest problems of all to worry about. Are there any other big risks and problems and so on that you’re worried about over the next few years?
Ellyn: A moderate concern for my company, but a big concern across our industry, is under-investment in IT infrastructure, tools and technology, training, [and] recruiting. You know, most IT budgets have been viciously constrained, that we’re not building the farm club for the future and we aren’t across the industry making the kind of investments. And part of this I lay at the feet of the vendor community because the durability of their products over time is an issue. You know, I have an enterprise business systems policy that includes SAP, Maximo, Advantac, a bunch of other products, sitting on IBM hardware with a million tentacles into other systems. Well, you know how this is. There’s a new release of the operating system as soon as you are up and you have to go to it, because otherwise you lose support. As soon as you make that change, then you have to upgrade another product. And if you upgrade that product, then you have to upgrade a third product.
Yourdon: Right.
Ellyn: We spend such a significant part of our budget just in life support for these large systems that doing the new thing becomes very, very difficult from a budget perspective. And that’s problematic. That is very problematic. You know, back when we all embraced the idea of component-based architecture, object-oriented programming and whatever, and the idea that Java was going to be multi-platform-portable, we thought we were going to get to a point where there was enough level of abstraction between components and enough granularity that you wouldn’t have to change everything in order to change one thing. We have not gotten there. And this is a serious problem for expansion, growth, agility, flexibility, and responsiveness.
Yourdon: That’s a good point, and I don’t see that changing in the next few years either.
Ellyn: Not until somebody says, “Enough is enough. I’m going to fund a very different kind of company that is not going to be dependent on support revenues to keep my focus and product market.” You know, in the utility industry, we have an 11 percent limit by law. That’s the best we can do. We have to deal with the likes of Oracle and Cisco, with huge profit margins. So they can out-lobby us, they can demand that level of increase in order to just keep running what we already paid for.
Yourdon: Right.
Ellyn: We have to maybe tax it. It’s a problem and it requires radical change. You know, I wish I were young and had less to risk. I’d want to take this problem on, but I hope somebody . . . but I think you might have to be old to see the problem. [laughter]
Yourdon: That’s true.
Ellyn: But I’m hoping one day it will change.
Yourdon: I have two relatively small question areas left for you. One is the whole generational issue. Do you see significant differences in the behaviors and attitudes of the new generation of workers that you’re hiring out of university today as compared to, I don’t know, five or ten years ago?
Ellyn: Yes. However, because I’ve always been at the edge of advanced technologies and the new, new things, even back in my Chrysler days, I had the fresh-out-of-the-university rotational. Everybody wanted to be in the advanced technology group for at least one rotation.
Yourdon: Right.
Ellyn: When I was in Silicon Valley, the two times I was there, obviously, I was doing the adult supervision thing. I think, there are some characteristics about being young, not being jaded, having your whole life in front of you that are kind of durable. Whether that was your state of being in 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, or 2010, and then the whole context around you kind of colors in that outline. So yes, there are differences. I keep hearing about all of this conflict in the workplace based on those differences. Maybe we just don’t have enough difference for me to have experienced that. But my observation is, there is a norming sort of pressure whenever you work in an industry or company that over time you are going to be more like them or you are going to leave. And so, I’m just optimistic. With young people comes a lot of energy, a lot of naiveté, a lot of “just do it,” and you’d like to preserve some of that. At the same time, you’d like them to start building judgment. And I think it’s a great process, I like it, so I don’t know. I’m not concerned about it.
Yourdon: What about the fact that they now bring with them a whole lifetime, literally since birth, of familiarity and maybe some degree of competence with, I hate to say IT, but the computerized toys and gadgets that they’ve had access to?
Ellyn: Well, when I get people who think that because they drive a car they know everything about designing and engineering them…
Yourdon: [laughter] Yeah, yeah, okay.
Ellyn: I usually try to give them a tour of the data centers.
Ellyn: The systems operations center where we’re managing the flow of power. Get them on the energy trading floor. Get them a visit to a nuclear plant.
Yourdon: Ahh, okay.
Ellyn: And knock some of the stardust right out of their eyes, and they start to realize that an edge device doesn’t tell you much about what goes on in the center and smart people get it. I mean, they get it.
Yourdon: Oh, okay. That’s very interesting. Well, one last question in that area which kind of goes back to the very beginning of your comments. What about differences, generational differences in terms of female IT people? You know, the young women coming out of engineering schools, are there more of them or fewer of them? Are they smarter or whatever than they were, you know, when you first came out of university?
Ellyn: Well, there are fewer of them. You know that statistically.
Yourdon: Sure.
Ellyn: That women signing up for engineering and science programs and IT are fewer and fewer. One, they believe all the jobs did go somewhere else. Two, there are now much wider opportunities to choose from, so they have opportunities that I would have never even thought of. Three, I think there are some, and my daughter would be an example of this. She always said, “Mommy, you work too hard.”
Yourdon: [laughter]
Ellyn: She’s a very talented designer. She’s done museum design and whatever, and she kind of balances between periods of working and periods of raising her kids, so she was able to make a choice that I can’t think of any opportunity I had like that. And I don’t know what I would have done. But they have choices we didn’t have. So having said that, though, the young women who are in IT today and I meet a lot of them, I’m an advisor to the Michigan Council of Women in Technology. They have over 600 members. They are far more ambitious, aggressive, technically educated and savvy in so many ways, so the ones I do meet are pretty awesome, and I hope we can attract more to the field like that. Now, instead of being systems analysts, we have women who are computer architects. You know, we didn’t have that back then.
Yourdon: Hmm, yeah, yeah. That’s encouraging. Well, one last question, I guess it’s kind of appropriate for the end of a discussion like this, and that is, what’s next for you? You know, do you hope to be a CIO for the rest of your life? Where do you go from here?
Ellyn: Well, remember I told you all the opportunities always showed up?
Yourdon: [laughter] Oh, okay.
Ellyn: Rather than me finding them. So I have faith there is something else. It’s going to show up. Now, having said that, I think it’s likely that I will finish out as a CIO, but I’m expanding right now in two directions. One is this coaching thing, because I’d like to help other CIOs, would-be CIOs in organizations work on how do you get appropriate synergy between computer systems and technical systems and the big human system? I think that’s where all the opportunities are. The second thing I’m doing I start next month. I’m pursuing a postgraduate certificate in the neuroscience leadership from Middlesex University in London, and this kind of harkens back to my science and roots. I’m very interested in cognitive science.
Yourdon: Hmm.
Ellyn: How we apply that to . . . we now know so much more about the role the brain plays, the structure, the chemistry of the brain, and how successful you are, how you relate to people, how deficits in one area of the brain do . . . I’m passionate about how that relates to building really effective organizations, but also in how that relates to building really effective systems. So I don’t know where it’s going other than I’m going to spend ten months studying my brains out.
Yourdon: [laughter]
Ellyn: But, you know, something will happen from here.
Yourdon: Sure.
Ellyn: I’ve been tracking challenges on our remote access capacity because of the number of people who are out, so…
Yourdon: I can imagine.
Ellyn: You should be glad you’re where you’re at and I’m certainly glad I was able to get out of Dodge.
Yourdon: [laughter] I’m sure. All right, well, we’ll, I’m sure we’ll schedule for sometime later in the spring, and I look forward to seeing you in person then. So, thanks again.
Ellyn: Great. You take care.
Yourdon: Thanks a lot, Lynne. Bye-bye now.
Ellyn: Okay, bye.