Boomi highlights business thought leaders, the trends they see, and the cool things their organizations are doing. We also get their hot takes on pizza integrations.
While growing up in the New York City metro area, Sean Wechter didn’t play basketball. So, he wasn’t familiar with John Wooden, the late UCLA coach who oversaw a collegiate dynasty decades ago and continues to be remembered for his folksy wisdom. But when Wechter watched an ESPN documentary about him, he recognized how Wooden’s philosophy about winning sports teams could apply to technology teams.
Wechter devoured books about Wooden and began applying his leadership principles – such as paying attention to fundamentals – to his own business career.
“My kids will tell you that I’m a John Wooden zealot,” said Wechter, the Chief Information Officer at Boomi. “He’s been my North Star. His “Pyramid of Success” and ideas of developing character, hard work, and enthusiasm are universal.”
And, most importantly, teamwork.
“I’m a big believer that you play like you practice,” he added. “What makes IT teams really good is they’re disciplined at the fundamentals of technology management. They’re solid in QA and change control. They build well-architected solutions. When you have problems, it’s rarely the technology. It’s a lack of teamwork and discipline. That’s how things break.”
Wechter, a three-time CIO, has more than 20 years of expertise in radically simplifying IT complexity in his work across a variety of functions, including support of engineering, security initiatives, network/IT infrastructure, and applications. His experience includes executive positions at media companies, which explains why he’s the rare tech leader to have been on multiple teams at multiple companies to win television Emmys. He also holds a U.S. patent for a fraud detection system.
He took some time to discuss the changing role of the modern CIO, the growing need for system and data integration in the age of AI, and why he places so much emphasis on running a strong IT help desk. Some portions of our conversation were lightly edited for length and clarity.
How do you explain to people what you do?
Sean Wechter: The most common way I describe the CIO job is that a technology company has the product we sell to customers, and then there’s everything else. The head of product or Chief Technology Officer handles what’s in the product. A CIO like me handles the everything-else bucket within the enterprise. The laptops, the systems like ERP and CRM, the network, and, of course, security. Today, security is the most important part because you can’t allow your systems or customers to be compromised in any way.
How has the CIO role changed?
Sean Wechter: The biggest is AI. That’s the game changer. We can all see it coming. It reminds me of the other big waves like the cloud, mobile, and the Internet. In my book, this is as big or bigger than those. But it hasn’t really changed the job yet, other than trying to get the organizational conditioning in place so that people have an open posture to rapidly adopt these tools. My opinion is you’ll need them to compete in the future. Let’s say you and a competitor each have 10 developers. One team uses generative AI tools, and the other team doesn’t. The team using those tools is going to be 10 times faster. So, to remain competitive, we have to adopt them. But a lot goes with it. You have compliance, ethics, and security. Our objective is to have a big impact as AI enablers for different parts of the organization.
How do integration and automation empower AI?
Sean Wechter: When I’m having dinner with other CIOs, it always comes up that you can’t unlock actions with AI. You can go into ChatGPT, ask a question, and get back a lot of text. But it’s not about your company. I tell them you can unlock an action using AI with Boomi. Integration and automation make AI smarter because it can access your enterprise systems. Something like ChatGPT is trained on a corpus of the world’s knowledge, which is a bell curve that will give you average answers. You’ll get better answers when you augment that with your enterprise data. But more importantly, because a platform like Boomi touches everything, AI could automatically route information like a ticket and then have somebody or even an AI agent do the necessary work. Boomi puts the action with the intelligence, which gets pretty exciting.
We have to talk about the Emmys.
Sean Wechter: I want to be careful here and go back to something that John Wooden always said. Nobody wins by themselves. Teams win. The Emmys are trying to expand into technology. I’ve been fortunate to work on projects with exceptional teams across different companies that have won. Two came from Xfinity: one for user experience and one for the voice remote. The other was awarded to NBC KING 5 in Seattle when we did a redesign for all the Gannett news stations. These accomplishments are a testament to the power of teamwork in achieving excellence.
So, no statuettes on your home mantel?
Sean Wechter: They go in a company trophy case. But I did get to hold them. What lights me up more than stuff like that is when you can make people’s lives better with technology. You know you’re helping people’s experience when they’re watching TV and using technologies we created. Or when you’re part of an IT team helping people when their company was bought by your company. I’ve done seven M&As in the past six years. It’s very rewarding when people who are uncertain about their futures come to a new company, and you make that a good journey and experience for them. The bonus for me now is that Boomi helps with those acquisitions because the platform accelerates how we connect disparate systems a lot more easily.
That goes beyond thinking of IT as the help desk.
Sean Wechter: Actually, the help desk is a great example because you can reduce the stress level and real pain people feel when you resolve their problems quickly. The help desk is the face of IT. That’s a lesson I learned as a consultant helping the country’s leading hospital for stroke treatment. They had under-invested in technology, and their entire IT strategy needed work. As we were explaining this, this amazing chairman of the board kept asking about the lunch system. Finally, I said, “Forgive me, but you don’t understand. You’ve got real problems here.” And I’ll never forget what she told me. She said, “No, you don’t understand. People can never understand all of the science and medicine we bring to bear. But if they order Jello and we give them pudding and we can’t even get that right, they’ll never trust us. That’s how they judge a hospital. We have to earn the right to do all the sophisticated stuff.” That was a wake-up call for me. The parallel to IT is if you fail at the help desk, you have not earned the right to do all the sophisticated, fancy technology projects. So, I pay a lot of attention to making sure we get an “A” in the help desk. You get judged by what people see.
Can you talk more about building successful teams?
Sean Wechter: When you’re involved in big projects, the battle is won way before it starts. Fortune favors the prepared. You have the right team and the right people working on the right things. Teams that know what they’re doing are squared away and have contingencies throughout. They’re varsity players. In technology land, you’ll have teams that I’ll call cowboys that can hack something together that works. But those aren’t the teams with the judgment that will win in the long run.
We saved a fun question for last. Do you have a favorite pizza integration?
Sean Wechter: I’m a New York City pizza kid, so I just like it plain. It’s pure joy the way it is. When I graduated from school, I lived above a pizzeria with five of my buddies. New York City-style pizza is thin with normal cheese. You just fold over the triangle and eat it that way. My mouth is watering just thinking about it.
Putting that in terms of technology, it’s all about simplicity.
Sean Wechter: Exactly. Simple and elegant. Nothing complex.
Up Close With Sean Wechter
Home: Philadelphia suburbs
Family: Wife Jill, two teenage children
Education: B.S. from Clarkson University and MBA from Bentley University
Career: His more than two decades of experience includes CIO roles at Benefitfocus and Qlik, as well as senior executive roles at Gannett, Comcast, Dell, and PwC
Integration and automation are fundamental to getting the most from AI. Learn more how Boomi is helping organizations transform their businesses.