What does one chief information officer have to say about the changing landscape of information technology? A lot! Cathy Southwick (pictured) spent over 21 years of her career at telecommunications giant AT&T Inc. in a variety of roles — from IT operations, to infrastructure, to project management, to technology innovation. She most recently became CIO of storage solutions company Pure Storage Inc., where she witnessed firsthand how rapidly the demands of IT workloads have shifted over the past few years and gained insight into what customers and vendors alike are asking of technology.

“All of us in the industry are really faced with the challenges of not just trying to transform … but then also enable technology that’s going to bridge us from ‘What do we have to deal with today, and where do we think we’re going to go?'” Southwick said. “We’re all in that same boat of saying, ‘How do you make sure I have technology that’s going to live longer than a year or three years, and then how do I have a workforce that can continue to grow and develop?'”

Southwick spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California. They discussed the IT workload challenges that modern companies face and advice from from a CIO’s perspective (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Economics, flexibility and partnership within IT

As technology has shifted into a digital transformation, the economics of time to value have changed, according to Southwick. Long workload projects that took months and months, even years, have now shortened so that cycles are down to days. But this fast-paced turnaround can leave CIOs shortsighted if they aren’t careful, she warned.

“Economics are … always in the forefront of every company,” Southwick stated. “But I think the more important part of it is just trying to make sure that you can make decisions that can outlive … a shorter economic window than maybe you would have done in the past. So I think that’s where all of us in the space of CIO roles are trying to really evaluate. How do you do that? How do make sure that you can make those transitions and not have economics be your only foundation?”

As companies figure out how to evolve successfully, workloads and applications look very different — with everything hyperfocused around the user experience of both employee and end customer, according to Southwick. This is something on every CIOs mind.

“When you talk about workloads, it’s not just applications that are business functions,” Southwick noted. “They’re also about, ‘How do you make sure that our employees are having a great experience?’ Because you want to have that so that they can help to grow us as well and be productive in their roles.”

The major challenge is figuring out how to evolve effectively with IT workloads but not get locked in — and this is true from both a customer and vendor perspective, according to Southwick. The vendor relationship has changed in IT from static to fluid and flexible — for example, being able to use multiple clouds vendors for different objectives.

“The vendor community has also recognized … they really want to be a partner. So now it’s about figuring out what I consider enablement,” Southwick said. “That’s the exciting part for IT — I think we’ve transitioned or are in … that time period where  instead of just being a pure enablement for the business, it’s really turning into how do you become a strategic partner.”

As this strategic partnership between customers and vendors emerge, there are two things on every CIO’s mind, according to Southwick: modularization of applications so data is separate and navigating both on-prem and off-prem.

“It’s that flexibility. When you start talking about your digital strategy, none of that works when you start wanting to get into AI and ML until you have some of things done and you’ve put that data strategy in place. So you then have that ability to have the thread across your whole ecosystem, and I think that’s what our challenge is,” Southwick concluded.

Watch the video interview with Southwick below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Pure Storage Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Pure Storage nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE