Guest Speaker Discusses Tech Culture and Customer Obsessions

In March, Rahul Jalali, senior vice president and chief information officer, Union Pacific Railroad, Omaha, Nebraska, spent time with the chapter discussing his role at Union Pacific (UP). Jalali began by exclaiming that his life has been "R & R," where he has gone from "retail" to "railroad."

In addition to the mission, he was drawn to UP's purpose of building America. One guiding principle he learned early is that if a company does not have technology as its organization's headlight, it will cease to exist. He added that 53% of companies had gone away for not following this guideline. Jalali discussed the challenge of integrating technology but doing it in a modern way. A company needs to establish a tech culture of innovation. Jalali elaborated that to make some changes, he had to become completely obsessed with what the customer wanted. What is the customer's obsession? Jalali also talked about taking full advantage of the cloud and implementing an architecture accommodating a password-less environment.

Jalali suggested that people are not the issue, but it's typically legacy processes. It is possible to change and create a new culture. Change the culture from "It's IT's problem to it's the customer's problem." Create an air of shared responsibility. Jalali concluded by pointing out the utility of moving to a culture of accurately predicting what may occur in the future.

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