Oracle’s Jason Rutherford On How To Use Digital Transformation To Take Your Company To The Next Level

As part of our series about “How To Use Digital Transformation To Take Your Company To The Next Level”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Jason Rutherford. Jason Rutherford is Senior Vice President and General manager of Oracle Communications, Applications business. Previously, Rutherford worked as Executive Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer for KORE Telematics. His focus is on Oracle’s Digital Experience for Communications (DX4C) and B/OSS portfolio.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

While studying at Virginia Tech as a finance major, I was exposed to a couple of computer science classes and found them interesting, especially when I saw how quickly they were impacting businesses. This eventually led to me interviewing with Anderson Consulting (now Accenture). I started my career with them, and that is what brought me to the crossroads of the telecommunications industry and information technology. I have always enjoyed the industry, what it delivers for society, and how technology is the enabler of a lot of it. Over 25 years later I am still working in this space.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take aways’ you learned from that?

Early in my career, as a young Consultant I was always asking for bigger roles and increased responsibilities. Doesn’t every recent college grad think they are ready for the c-suite? Reflecting back, I definitely wasn’t ready for anything more than I was doing at the time. I worked for a great manager at the time, and she outsmarted me by asking if I was ready to take on a new, “very important” opportunity. Of course, she knew I would immediately say “yes” without asking any questions — which is exactly what I did. Much to my chagrin, I spent the next several weeks working on system testing on the midnight shift, often alone in an empty office building.

Lesson learned!!! I quickly figured out that I needed to qualify every opportunity and demonstrate a little more patience with my career progression.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

I have been very fortunate throughout my career to have numerous people who encouraged me, mentored me, or saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself. To name just one would be unfair. However, I can say without a doubt that the biggest opportunities in my career always came when someone trusted me enough to put me in a role that I probably wasn’t quite ready for, but they saw some potential in me and took a chance. Knowing that was the case, always caused me to work a little harder to prove them right and go the extra mile not to disappoint. Case in point, in 2013 Oracle acquired Acme Packet and shortly after needed some help integrating the sales force. I was asked to lead this team — not only was it a new product to me, but it was also my first global role and came with a unique set of challenges. I took the role, and spent the next few months travelling to all the regions listening to both our customers and our employees to understand where the issues were and what was required to solve them. In the end, I learned a lot and grew as a leader. It’s really amazing what you can do when someone believes in you and gives you an opportunity to thrive.

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers had a big impact on my way of thinking, particularly around being patient — do you see a trend here? There is an idea in the book that claims it takes 10,000 hours of practice to really master something. This principle certainly resonated with me for a couple of reasons. First, I think our society is too heavily focused on instant gratification or fulfillment and you see it almost everywhere you look. In the business world for example, I see this manifesting itself in resumes all the time. So many people are staying in jobs for 12 months or so, and then they try to jump to the next thing. I am not saying that everyone needs to stay in single role for 5 years, but it’s impossible that they are staying long enough to get really good at something, let alone master it before they take that experience and parlay it into their next role. It also struck me as a leader when you are coming in and trying to change a situation. You have to have to play the long game. It takes patience to develop a new product, deliver a complex project or turnaround an ailing business. I think that a little bit of a longer-term view of things would benefit many of us. I know that I have been in this business for a long time, and I am still growing professionally every day.

Extensive research suggests that “purpose driven businesses” are more successful in many areas. When your company started, what was its vision, what was its purpose?

Larry Ellison founded Oracle more than 40 years ago with the purpose of helping organization to organize and use data. That may not sound like the world’s most aspirational purpose but anyone who has worked in corporate, government or non-profit organizations realizes that the smart use of data is essential for serving customers, providing a good employee experience, and generating stakeholder value. Four decades later, Oracle’s mission is to help people see data in new ways, discover insights, and unlock endless possibilities. This purpose is what helps our customers succeed in their digital transformation.

Are you working on any new, exciting projects now? How do you think that might help people?

We are working on a number of interesting projects right now, but the most interesting is a project called Digital Experience for Communications (DX4C). DX4C is Oracle’s complete communications solution that enables Communication Service Provider’s (CSPs) to Innovate, Engage and Transform for the experience economy. It leverages data and AI to transform the customer experience — from launching offers, acquiring and retaining customers, omnichannel commerce and care to fulfilling and monetizing services. It’s really the future of where (CSPs) need to go especially if they want to quickly roll out and profit from the new services that 5G will enable. 5G will have a significant impact on the way we live going forward from how we receive medical care, to how we travel and how we consume entertainment.

Thank you for all that. Let’s now turn to the main focus of our discussion about Digital Transformation. For the benefit of our readers, can you help explain what exactly Digital Transformation means? On a practical level what does it look like to engage in a Digital Transformation?

To me digital transformation is the ongoing process of putting systems in place to attract and retain customers, use data to everyone’s advantage, reduce operating costs, and create more agile cultures. On a more practical level, we are working closely with Swisscom on their digital transformation, and they summarize their overall objective as “being easy to do business with.” I think that’s a no-nonsense way to describe it.

Which companies can most benefit from a Digital Transformation?

The quick answer is any company that wants to better serve their customers and increase profits, and those aren’t mutually exclusive. Now let me expand on that answer. Digital Transformation allows companies to quickly roll out new products and services, orchestrate how they work together and monetize them. It also changes customer engagement and allows customers to interact with companies on their terms. We have seen the demand for this type of engagement increase exponentially during the Covid-19 pandemic and I don’t think it’s going to abate when the pandemic subsides. When you combine these things, the benefits include but are not limited to increased customer satisfaction, lower costs to serve, and increased profits.

We’d love to hear about your experiences helping others with Digital Transformation. In your experience, how has Digital Transformation helped improve operations, processes and customer experiences? We’d love to hear some stories if possible. Has integrating Digital Transformation been a challenging process for some companies? What are the challenges? How do you help resolve them?

I’ve worked in technology my whole career and it’s easy to get excited about all the technical and business impacts of digital transformation, but let’s remember that it’s the people and the culture that really need to evolve in order to take it to the next level. I recently spoke with our customer Telefónica México about the twin roles of technology and people and I loved how they summarized the human factor: “How can a company transform itself amidst all these sweeping changes, even if resource constrained? One of the ways is rethink how it works. Companies and their partners must learn new technologies and ways to work as a multidisciplinary team. Hierarchies must be eliminated, and they must start working on agile initiatives. They must also accept that making mistakes will be part of the learning process, and delivering good, yet small results must be part of their everyday lives.”

I see this topic of breaking down hierarchies and building agility as critical. For example, many of our customers’ IT organizations are moving from more siloed development and operations teams to what’s now called DevOps, and the idea is that organizational walls are broken down to encourage collaboration and joint KPIs, particularly as companies adopt cloud. Our consulting organization works closely with customers on these new ways of working. We don’t just implement cloud native software; we help them on their journey of adopting new organizational best practices that underpin digital transformation.

I also agree that this type of transformation needs to take a step-by-step approach and avoid the big bang project failures that we have suffered through as an industry in the past. However, taking this incremental approach is only part of the solution; we have to get employee buy in and make them part of the process.

Ok. Thank you. Here is the primary question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are “Five Ways a Company Can Use Digital Transformation To Take It To The Next Level”? Please share a story or an example for each.

Here are a few ways our customers are taking it to the next level:

New product introduction. Reducing time to market is critical in the hyper-competitive comms industry and is a longtime pain point for many service providers. Rethinking new product introduction relies on smart use of data to understand emerging areas of customer demand, along with streamlined systems designed for business users and aligned with industry standards. Speed to market will be increasingly important with 5G; nobody knows yet what the killer use cases will be so CSPs need to experiment and quickly launch new offers and scale what works. We have one customer in the US who grew though acquisition and had many platforms that slowed down their ability to launch new products. They rationalized and consolidated with Oracle and were able to reduce product launch time from four weeks to two days.

Omni-channel commerce and care. We have so many channels available to us today and we want complete fluidity between them. I might start an interaction on an app, walk away, pick it up later on a website, “talk” to a digital assistant, then maybe eventually go into a retail store to complete my purchase or get help. To me if you are going to be truly omni-channel, you must have the underlying systems in place to remember the customer and what they needed and carry that context to wherever they wish to go next. This is much easier said than done and requires true digital transformation of underlying data to provide the common catalogs and persistent shopping carts to enable omni-channel and the blending commerce and care.

Real-time charging. Customers today expect everything to happen in real-time. For example, cloud gaming is on the rise and communications service providers are using real-time charging and notification systems like Oracle’s to let gamers know they are running low on prepaid gaming minutes or can pay a little more to turbo-charge and reduce lag during critical game time periods. Adopting real-time charging platforms is a key element to providing a modern digital experience and maximizing revenue opportunities.

Guided selling. Successful selling today requires offers that are personalized to reflect a customer’s likely preferences, and a process that is completely free of friction. The CEO of a customer of ours in Austria recently said it best, “In digital business you have to focus on the customer more than ever and need the processes need to be easy so people will buy. Systems must be fully integrated and that requires cloud.” This customer is using data and insights to create what they call a “virtuous cycle” for B2B and B2C customers.

Triple As: AI, analytics, and automation. I recently spoke to another customer who said, “We are drowning in data but thirsty for insights.” Service providers generate massive amounts of data in the network and IT systems and need the tools to rationalize and cleanse that data and apply AI and ML to derive true intelligence, which in turn is needed to enable all the personalized, connected, “easy” experiences we’ve just discussed. And particularly as we enter the complexity of 5G with new networks, slicing, and services, automation is essential to reduce costs and ensure speed and accuracy in everything from flow-through provisioning to network inventory management.

In your opinion, how can companies best create a “culture of innovation” in order to create new competitive advantages?

I think it’s imperative for leaders to focus on employee engagement. I spend a lot of time listening to my employees. They are the ones that are spending all day, every day either working directly with our products or directly with our customers. This means they are the ones seeing the issues or challenges firsthand and are coming up with the innovative ideas for solutions. If companies and especially leaders aren’t engaging directly with their employees or driving a culture of open communication, then those great ideas are simply staying trapped in people’s minds and aren’t making their way into the consideration set.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“To whom much is given, much is required”. I have always viewed this as both a personal and professional duty to manage your responsibilities and do your best work. Early in my career it was really around completing assignments to the best of my ability or making sure that I was properly handling the responsibilities I was given. As I progressed in my career and my responsibilities grew, it meant not only doing my best work, but also taking care of the people I worked with. As I gained experience, it became increasingly important to me as a leader to take care of my people, but I also noticed that when I did that, it resulted in a great culture and ultimately increased performance.

How can our readers further follow your work?

Feel free to reach me on LinkedIn if you would like to directly connect. You can also see Oracle’s work in this space by checking out the Oracle Communications blog or following Oracle Communications on Twitter, LinkedIn and/or Facebook.

Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!