CIO Spotlight: Eric Johnson, Talend

As Talend’s first CIO, Eric Johnson is responsible for setting the strategic vision and growth of the company’s global IT organization and the use of its systems and platforms. With more than two decades of global information technology leadership experience, Johnson brings deep expertise scaling IT infrastructure, leading digital transformations and supporting strategic sales. Prior to joining Talend, he served as the CIO of DocuSign and the CIO of Informatica. Here, he shares his career path and offers advice for aspiring CIOs. 

What was your first job? I was a business/systems consultant at Deloitte Consulting.

Did you always want to work in IT? No, I thought I was going into the family business – manufacturing.

Tell us about your career path. When I graduated from California Polytechnic, I started at Deloitte, where I was able to work with industries in Australia, New Zealand and North America. After Deloitte, I decided to take six months off to travel Southeast Asia, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. This was a great opportunity to get perspective on new and different cultures, including seeing a new perspective on how the simple things are often times best and how the global economy is changing every culture – one example of this being KFC in Vietnam!

Upon returning, I started working at Informatica as an early IT employee. I was part of the leadership team that built the company from $200M to $1B in revenue, and eventually went on to lead the global IT organization as CIO. Next, I served as the first CIO at DocuSign, where I built the IT team from the ground up to 100 global IT staff in a hyper-growth environment.

Now, I am serving as Talend’s first CIO, during an exciting time, as Talend is a key part of the data revolution, and the value of data is now more critical than ever.

What business or technology initiatives will be most significant in driving IT investments in your organization in the coming year? Security as a service: As the security landscape grows more sophisticated and critical to business growth, it is important to leverage cloud services due to the challenge of staffing/driving innovation alone.

Advanced analytics and machine learning: Getting access to the data is simply the first step in the journey. Delivering insightful analytics is next, and the goal of predicting the future and leveraging machine learning to do this in a more complex data world is where we are headed.

IT/DevOps: IT organizations are continuing to deepen and broaden their knowledge of cloud infrastructure and services due to the accelerated pace of moving enterprise services to the cloud. This cloud knowledge, along with a strong operational and process-oriented mindset, can be highly valuable in driving scale and standardization and a cloud centric architecture for DevOps.

What are the CEOs top priorities for you in the coming year? Talend CEO Mike Tuchen’s top priorities are to drive secure scale for Talend’s fast growing global business with a cloud-first priority and become an innovative global external reference of our own Talend platform.

How do you plan to support the business with IT? I am focusing on three main areas: 1) delivering advanced analytics for better and faster business decisions; 2) providing secure global cloud IT services (IPaaS) for improved speed to market/customer experience; and 3) streamlining business processes through innovation, leveraging our SaaS investments for improved productivity and efficiency of business operations.

Does the conventional CIO role include responsibilities it should not hold? Should the role have additional responsibilities it does not currently include? I believe the CIO should own enterprise business operations due to the cross-enterprise process, data and systems expertise many CIO functions have. The CIO in many organizations has the best visibility to cross enterprise operations and opportunities. Much like enterprise operations, digital transformation can be found in both internal processes (e.g. onboarding employees) to external processes (e.g. engaging/selling to a customer). The CIO has a unique cross functional perspective of these processes and opportunities. Finally, in some organizations, the DevOps function – DevOps is evolving to being driven by process automation, solution standardization and cloud scale — all strengths of many IT organizations.

Are you leading a digital transformation? If so, does it emphasize customer experience and revenue growth or operational efficiency? If both, how do you balance the two? Yes, the customer experience, revenue growth and operational efficiency are all being emphasized in our digital transformation plan. Driving a frictionless experience for our customers will be important to driving global growth and being able to quickly scale critical business processes. Moving from manual to digital will provide the operational efficiencies.

Describe the maturity of your digital business. For example, do you have KPIs to quantify the value of IT? We are working to better understand and track the customer journey and experience, along with a more seamless experience when interacting with Talend. We do this by monitoring our customer interactions through the various touchpoints (Talend Cloud service, Talend Support, Talend communities, Talend Sales). This provides us the data and metrics we need to see if the digital transformation is being delivered. The IT KPI’s are related to sales cycle efficiency, customer NPS and employee onboarding experience.

What does good culture fit look like in your organization? How do you cultivate it? At Talend and within my own team, our culture is defined by being very transparent, over communicating, ensuring teams are aligned on the IT plan, holding each other accountable and leading by example.

What roles or skills are you finding (or anticipate to be) the most difficult to fill? The area of security is becoming highly sophisticated and mission critical for most enterprise companies, especially in hyper-growth mode. Finding top security talent is competitive and expensive; you need to be creative in selling the culture and growth of the company and the chance to broaden and enhance your skills.

What’s the best career advice you ever received? It is not just the result but how you get the results.

Do you have a succession plan? If so, discuss the importance of and challenges with training up high-performing staff. I recently started working with Talend, so my focus now is on building the team.

What advice would you give to aspiring IT leaders? Remember what’s most important on driving a successful IT organization: the people and the culture. If that is not there, no amount of technology or planning will make you successful.

What has been your greatest career achievement? Building great teams and mentoring/coaching the next generation of IT leaders.

Looking back with 20:20 hindsight, what would you have done differently? I have no regrets from my career. Sure, I’ve made plenty of mistakes, but every single one of those mistakes produced a good learning experience and helped shape my career.

This interview is part of CIO’s regular Spotlight series, which focuses on the career paths of IT leaders. If you know someone (or are someone) with a story worth telling, please contact kate_hoy@idg.com.