As Eric Johnson, the CIO of PagerDuty, points out, five-time CIOs don’t come around very often. Before joining the cloud computing firm in September 2023, the San Francisco-based industry veteran served as CIO of SurveyMonkey, Talend, DocuSign and Informatica, capping more than 20 years in IT leadership roles.
His responsibilities throughout that time have been far from static. As he tells Tech Monitor, the CIO role has transformed significantly since he started out – and not just because of the ways that technology itself has evolved over the past two decades. Nowadays, the CIO is expected to lead from the board rather than the trenches of the server room, positioning the business to excel by adopting the most exciting technological innovations without succumbing to hype. In the following interview, edited for clarity and length, Johnson explains why it’s time for CIOs to step into the spotlight.
Tech Monitor: PagerDuty provides enterprise technology for businesses – including half of the firms listed on the Fortune 500. Can you give some background to your vision as a company and the services you offer?
Eric Johnson: PagerDuty began as an incident response company – it was known for waking you up in the middle of the night to let you know there was a problem and helping you get the right people assembled to manage it. Since then, the company’s evolved into something much different, which gets into the world of incident management end-to-end.
Companies are starting to understand how important it is to be able to react when there’s a situation. Even in the last few months, there have been several major outages around just a few technology platforms that impacted pretty large swaths of the globe.
Our focus today is how we continue to help companies build the right level of resiliency. If there is a problem – or rather, when there is a problem – how can we help them go from identifying the problem to triaging the problem to fixing the problem and then getting the post-mortems and action plan together so the problem doesn’t happen again?
Like many companies out there, we’re trying to find ways to support our customers with generative AI. There are a bunch of things that companies are monitoring every day, and there’s a lot of noise in that information. We’ve always been really good about helping you correlate that noise and understand what’s going on. But now we’re starting to leverage generative AI to not only correlate that but also help you ascertain the source of the problem, and even kick off automation. Every minute counts when you have an outage, so the advantage of shortening that cycle is that there are dollars to be saved.
Now more than ever, CIOs are expected to play a strategic role in organisations, going beyond tinkering with technology and shaping the very direction of the business. What is your overall perception of how the CIO role is evolving?
That’s a question I get asked quite a bit. I started out as a CIO in a very different world. Even five or seven years ago, the CIO was primarily a back-office function – It was about trying to keep systems up and running and dealing with infrastructure behind the scenes. Since then, technology has become a focus in every company, regardless of your industry and geography. How people leverage technology has become a competitive advantage.
So, I think the CIO’s role has become much more of a customer-facing function in many companies. The CIO also has an amazing opportunity to step forward and start to tackle some of the actual business problems. CIOs are often asked to sit with the executive team and solve their business challenges and technology just happens to be one of the many tools that can be used.
At the same time, more and more CIOs are getting out in front of customers, especially if you’re selling technology. I find myself talking to PRs and news outlets a lot more, speaking at events, and sometimes even closing deals with customers.
The was an article that was out many years ago in the Harvard Business Review called ‘Are CIOs obsolete?’ Nowadays, though, there’s no question that the CIO is critical to companies’ success.
What are some of the key points of focus for a CIO who is looking to play that kind of strategic role? Where should they be directing their energies?
There are three that come to mind. One that never goes away is cybersecurity. You just can’t be a successful company if you don’t worry about security. No matter what, as a CIO, you are always thinking about what you are doing to keep the company, your customers’ data, and your employees’ data, safe.
The second is this world of data. If you think about generative AI, the core of that is data. It’s all about how you manage data, how you access data, and what data you train against. So Gen AI is now one of the tools we use to drive a real business impact with data.
And then the third one is automation. As companies scale, one of the big questions becomes, are we just going to keep adding people to the company? Many times, you can’t – it just doesn’t make financial sense. That doesn’t mean you don’t hire people, it’s just that you’re more strategic and surgical around how you hire people. At the same time, the world of automation has exploded. There’s so much interesting technology and innovation in this space.
When implementing a new technological initiative, how important is it for CIOs to get buy-in from other leaders across the organisation? How can a CIO successfully engage with all the different business functions to ensure that everyone’s on the same page?
I think the first thing to ask is whether the problem you’re trying to solve is actually important. Start there. Historically, CIOs would sometimes take off on these wild adventures where they wanted to implement something but the rationale or business impact wasn’t very well understood. That’s where CIOs would find they couldn’t get alignment.
And so I think the way that CIOs can succeed is to take a step back and say, “Well, what are the priorities that we have as a company and what kind of impact are we going to be making?” If you can agree on that, then you have your buy-in at the beginning versus at the end.
Now, no one ever signs up for more security and more rigour around how they access data, because sometimes it does create some barriers. But if there’s a clear business goal, and the IT project is directly related to that, then I should be able to drive alignment with those teams.
A lot of the time, you need to think about the standard stuff around good communication, making sure people are informed and aware of what the impacts can be. That’s all change management 101. But for the CIO community, my first question is, do you start projects by looking at the business impact you want to make? If your projects aren’t related to that, it creates misalignment right out of the gate.
GenAI is on CIOs’ radar as it never has been before. What kind of questions should CIOs be asking to help them sort the reality from hype?
I was just at a meeting with a VC in San Francisco, and there was a group of probably 15 CIOs around the room. One of the consistent themes in the conversation was this hype curve that we’re in with GenAI. No one is questioning whether there’s value there. What everyone is questioning is, what is the value? How do you identify the value? How do you measure the value?
You know, if you’re saving someone two or three minutes by putting something in the GenAI prompt, that’s a valuable thing; there’s a productivity gain. But CIOs are trying to figure out, how do we drive more high-impact business results? And often that’s about making money, saving money or driving some sort of strategic imperative. If you can’t put it into one of those buckets, why are you working on this?
GenAI is an expensive technology. So I think the missing piece right now is having GenAI be able to drive more revenue or save you significant dollars.
What keeps you up at night now, compared to 10 years ago?
Ten years ago, I was worried about things like servers being up and all the infrastructure running. A big part of what we did was running all the back-end physical infrastructure: the networks, the phones. It consumed 75% of our capacity to do anything.
What’s happened now is we don’t think about those things. I don’t think about phone systems. I don’t think about the network. I don’t think about data centres. I don’t have a data centre. Everything now has been virtualised, and thrown into the cloud and we get to rely on cloud providers that are experts in doing that at scale.
That means I get to spend a lot more of my time understanding our business problems and opportunities and thinking about how I can help move the needle with the technology and data that we have. Ten years ago, it was hard to spend time on that because I was fighting the server being down, or the cooling going sideways, and you just don’t have those types of problems anymore. The CIO has become more of a business executive than an infrastructure executive. That’s what’s really changed.
Read more: As AI transforms cybersecurity, Cisco’s Martin Lee has only one piece of advice for IT managers: expect the unexpected
