Planning to disrupt

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Debbie Forster MBE:
Hello and welcome to XTech Podcast by Fox Agency. I’m your host, Debbie Forster MBE. I’m a tech portfolio consultant and an advocate and campaigner for diversity, inclusion and innovation in the tech industry. So today I am so pleased to be joined by Dave Hodsdon. He’s VP Transformation at Liberty Blume, a Liberty Global company. Welcome Dave.

Dave Hodsdon:
Thanks, Debbie. I’m absolutely thrilled to be here.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Super. Okay, so Dave, the audience always like to get to know you as a human before we understand you as a techie. And the first way in that we try to do that is to understand how you got into tech. Was it a surprise, an inevitability? How did this happen for you?

Dave Hodsdon:
Look, I thought you might ask me that Debbie and I spent a few minutes deep in thought about where did this interest come from. And I guess there’s probably three quick points to make. I am only just a millennial and so I’ve had a lifelong interest, born into this age of computers with Apple and with Microsoft, the launch of the internet, and so it’s really been a part of my DNA growing up. And I think entering the workplace as a lawyer when I did maybe 20 years ago now, 15, 20 years ago, the largest blocker that I saw to my colleagues being able to do their jobs was often the technology that they were using. And I have to say, the limitation, their understanding of the technology that they were using. And so that really fostered that desire to be part of the change.

And then I think my role today, working as part of a service provider to others, I’m trying to provide great service at a fair price. And so technology is really the catalyst to being able to spend the time that we need to with the people we need to, and providing that kind of digital framework for taking care of everything else.

Debbie Forster MBE:
I think it’s interesting, and I’m going to comment as not a millennial, as one of our older X’s thinking about it, I think it’s something interesting, there was a time when we had that really cliched referring to all of you as millennials and younger as digital native. And I think that’s rubbish because different news, but I do find if we look at millennials onward, you’re tech pragmatists. It’s not the allure, it’s does it work or does it not? And I think for the audience to think about that, because gone are the days where people roll their eyes at millennials. When we look at millennials, you are largely now middle to senior management. You’re proper grownups, running shows. And if we think about the Gen Z’s coming through, millennials and Z’s are now 40% of our audiences, our users and our workforce. And I think for the rest of us, we need to really wake up to that, to the potential and to cut through the noise really.

Because like you said, you want to make it work. It’s about it’s just another tool. There’s none of the pzazz or the wonder or the fear. You guys just want to get on with it. Is that fair?

Dave Hodsdon:
It’s right. Yeah, it’s right. It’s definitely substance over style I think. And I think I spend a lot of my time talking with others, prospective customers, those in our industry, about use cases for technology. And you hear a lot of the buzzwords, I guess, that are coming from the hyperscalers and the large providers in our industry and actually being able to cut through some of that, say, “Well actually bring it alive for me, make it real.” The accounting professionals in this world, the CFOs of this world, want to see this technology add material value, usually monetary value, to a business. The lawyers want to be able to process more quickly, do their legal research more quickly. And so it’s all been about these, “Bring it to life for me. How will this help me? So what?”

Debbie Forster MBE:
And it’s overcoming that “So what?” But I think that’s healthy for tech and those of us in tech just need to accept. Because that’s the blessing and the curse. We were all talking about digital is eating the world, et cetera. Well, it’s eaten and now we have to figure out what happens next. So tell me a little bit, there may be some people in the audience who haven’t heard of Liberty Blume. What does it do? What’s your role entail?

Dave Hodsdon:
Yeah, sure. Look, I imagine the majority of people haven’t heard of Liberty Bloom.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Not yet.

Dave Hodsdon:
We’re in the middle of a rebrand, so you will. Liberty Global, our parent company, has a federation of telecommunications and media businesses dominantly in Europe with a small presence in the North America’s market. And Liberty Shared Services as it was, was the captive, the Shared Service centre dealing with support services such as finance, HR, legal, operations and construction support services to that telecommunications and media industry. We’ve now grown out of the Liberty Global group and still make up a huge part of our customer base, and we’re providing these business solutions to industry, both telco, utilities and then banking, finance and others.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Lovely. Well, and I understand it’s not just a rebrand that’s being focused on. I think there’s a lot that’s taking up time on your desk. What are your plans with what’s happening?

Dave Hodsdon:
It’s a great question. Look, my role as VP of Transformation is all about managing large scale change. And large scale change is exactly what’s happening to our industry today. So thinking about this from a BPO, so a business process outsourcing angle, we are providing business solutions and we’re in the same space as other large BPO business process outsourcing providers. And we’re seeing a real shift in that industry. The industry over the last 20, 25 years has all been about low cost locations, outsourcing, dare I say a little bit of disillusionment where work has been moved to a very low cost location and then hey, you either get lower quality service, an unexpected consequence, or you get the fact that your business has moved on over a five or ten year contract cycle and yet your services are still being provided in the same way they were when you sent them away.

And so I think there’s a real shift now in, and I think it’s this confluence between a rise in accessible technology to solve business problems and particularly to replace the need for human interactions in relatively straightforward transactional activities. I think that’s happening on one side. Then I think this kind of disillusionment of, well, I sent it away and I’m actually really disheartened with the service that I was receiving. And we’re seeing that there’s a trend, growing trend now, of businesses bringing this stuff back. The large businesses will bring it back and they’ll set up their own captives. They’ll do it themselves nearshore or onshore, so on time zone, culturally aligned, so they’re kind of getting that customer service piece. And then they’ll invest very heavily in technology-based solutions to be able to manage the labour arbitrage, so still get that kind of cost benefit that they were seeing from work being undertaken at a lower cost location.

Debbie Forster MBE:
So does that feel like I need to use, dare I say, the word disruption? Does that mean you’re planning for some disruption, Dave?

Dave Hodsdon:
So that is Liberty Bloom. We see ourselves as disruptors to this industry. Being really candid with you, there are a lot of industry providers, many of them household brands in the industries that we work in.

Debbie Forster MBE:
It’s a crowded space.

Dave Hodsdon:
And it is a crowded space. And what we’re not going to do is go toe-to-toe with these providers and try and play the same game that they’ve played very successfully over the last 25 years. We’re planning for the customer of the future and we’ll be a business solutions provider of the future. And the way that we will do that is by delivering tech-led services to our customers.

Tech is ingrained in all of the services that we provide to our customers today. We’re building tech products, working with some of the brightest and the best, a combination of hyperscalers and small startups and disruptors who we think sometimes have a really niche focus in that space. And I guess the one thing that I’m really interested in and really the trend that I’m really seeing in this tech space is you’ve got, in finance particularly, in HR too, you’ve got these very large resource platforms, platforms like Oracle and SAP, and they’ve effectively, for all the right reasons, become the nerve centre for a lot of the businesses that we provide services to. But when you scratch beneath the surface, there’s then 40 to 60 very small point solutions that hang off the outside of these ERPs, numbers of different third party technologies. And they’re all performing specific roles. And what we say is that all of that kind of infrastructure on the outside is ripe for disruption here. Building very practical end-to-end solutions for enterprise businesses to be able to deal with very common activities like finance processing, like HR onboarding, to make it much, much easier to both plug and play, but also to get the job done. Back to the original point there, Debbie, this isn’t about tech for tech’s sake, this is about practical business solutions using technology.

Debbie Forster MBE:
You took the words out of my mouth because I think we’ve seen this happen in so many areas of tech. Initially, disruption is newcomers in the space. Then as the hype trip takes off, it’s those that are exploiting those niche. But where the real insight comes, and I love that your lead into this was user dissatisfaction. That’s got to be the driver in the first instance of really understanding that. Understanding not just the crowded landscape, but where’s the dissatisfaction to work. And then I think, this is early days as you said, but we’ve seen the great innovations, the great disruption, that next wave is the aggregators, isn’t it? And I think for anyone, whatever vertical you’re working in within tech, et cetera, it always goes back to not tech for tech’s sake, it’s listening, knowing your user and listening and using satisfaction to build more of or dissatisfaction to disrupt, to change in that.

Dave Hodsdon:
Look, I couldn’t agree more, and a very wise man once said to me, “The customer isn’t always right, but the customer gets to choose where they spend their money.”

Debbie Forster MBE:
I think that’s our tagline for the piece actually, for us to remember that. Because it’s so easy sometimes in tech for us to do that tech knows best. If the customer is not happy, they just don’t understand it. And that may be true, but let’s remember they’re the customer and we have to build that bridge and going forward. Okay, so you have your reason, your vision that’s going forward. What have been the key steps of moving this forward without giving your trade secrets, of course, but I think for anyone listening in this, if I’m looking and I can see in my company there is this opportunity, there is this disruption, what do you think are some key building blocks to start moving that forward?

Dave Hodsdon:
Yeah, it’s a great question. Whenever I’m asked this, the first thing I say is the word “transformation” and I think the word is overused, so let me start with a definition. An effective transformation function is the execution arm of your strategy team sitting adjacent to your chief strategy officer, your strategy team in any company, who are thinking big, who are creating the vision for the next 3, 5, 7 years of your company is your execution team. And that is where transformation should sit. They should be engaging broadly all of your decision makers from the person who is running your budget, so your CFO and team, to the people who are performing the activities that your company performs today. And they should be the glue that’s bringing everyone together. And I think with a well-structured transformation programme, we’ve been able to both articulate the journey that we’re heading on, what our vision is, and making everybody feel a real sense of purpose aligned to that vision and a real responsibility for delivering that vision.
But also making everybody feel included. I understand the role that I am playing and whether I’m cleaning the floors or whether I’m running the company, I understand the role that I’m playing in achieving this outcome. And I think when everybody is playing for the same team, you’re going to secure the best outcomes. When everybody feels valued, you’re going to get the best performance. And so we’ve spent a huge amount of time investing in our people to help them to understand how these technologies are evolving. We give access to the latest tools and allow people to play in a sandbox environment. You can’t break anything, see how it works for you. And I think with that level of education then comes right, okay, now think about how you’d apply that to the work that you’re doing today. What could you do differently? How might you get a different different outcome? And that’s the way we’re kind of bringing that disruption.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Okay, so let me grab some of that because I think you threw out a lot of great nuggets of insights. So if I’m standing back and listening, what I really love that you were implying of transformation is the verb, is the doing part of the team. Strategy comes out and that’s the noun, that’s what we’re going to do. You’re about the action piece. But what I love as well is too often, I think, transformation people or when we think we’re working with a transformation team, that happens over there. It’s a lot of people staring at screens or whiteboards, et cetera, and it’s all about the tech. But this is a golden thread, I think, through all the podcasts, is reminding ourselves tech is first, last and in between, people.

And so it’s that emotional intelligence, it’s that engagement. And I really liked what you’re talking about, when you’re winning people to the why, it’s also letting them play with the how? And I think that’s the piece as well, because too often transformation is something that’s launched from on high and lands on people and they just have to sort of scrape themselves off and figure out through that playing and that sandbox. And that takes time and investment, doesn’t it? And training of people to get that forward. Are you learning any to do’s or not to do’s while you’re doing that?

Dave Hodsdon:
I mean, we’ve learned so much. So I actually, I read a lot and I put down a couple of months ago Walter Isaacson’s book on Elon Musk. I’m sure a lot of your listeners would’ve read it. And the one thing that I really took away was in all of Musk’s ventures, one of the key components of building his successful technology companies was sitting your engineering teams with your operational teams. And that proximity of if you build it and it causes pain to the people that use it, your engineers see the pain and feel the pain. And that enables you to get back into that kind of fail fast, fail forward, move on. And we’ve adopted that.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And feel the pain, feel the pain of those fails. And I love that because it is, again, transformation or bringing your engineers are little. We come in here as, how’s it going? Super. We’re back over playing ping pong in the corner there. It’s got to be amongst that and hearing what happens Thursday at four o’clock, not just Monday at nine when you launch something, isn’t it?

Dave Hodsdon:
That’s exactly right. Yeah.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Is there anything to avoid, is there anything else that you’d say, “Oh God, don’t do that. We’ve learned from that.”

Dave Hodsdon:
We’ve learned so many lessons.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Pick the most painful that jumps to your mind when you think of it.

Dave Hodsdon:
Pick the most painful. It is definitely over time, over budget, under delivered outcomes, we’ve all been there. That is the pitfall that everybody looks to avoid whenever you’re taking on a large project. We’re constantly quoted that seven out of ten large projects fail. When you really dig beneath the surface, we find proper planning is often condensed and swapped for just get on with it and then this extended period of delivery. So this kind of plan quickly, execute slowly and it’s never worked. It’s never worked, whatever the project has never worked. Now we’re in this…

Debbie Forster MBE:
Well, it’s never worked in big projects. And is that, can I just ask because we’ve had in a past episode, someone talking very much about “agile” and talking about how much “agile” has been misunderstood, misappropriated. And that still sometimes proves the justification for those of, oh, you just need to get in, make a mess, fail fast, move on. And you can’t do that on big projects. You can’t do that with enterprise can you?

Dave Hodsdon:
You can’t. You absolutely can’t, but also I think we’re in a world where the last six months feels like a lifetime ago. You go back 18 months and it’s barely recognisable. And so taking your time to execute a project and iterating it as you go, is an expensive way to do business. And so really when I talk about plan slowly and execute quickly, I’m not advocating for not getting on with it. But what I am saying is make sure everybody’s aligned, make sure everyone’s on board, make sure we’re very clear about the outcome we’re trying to achieve. How will we know when we get there? What could go wrong? Taking time to work through that means that when you do come across something during execution, you’re ready for it and you know how to solve for it. And you don’t have to put the whole project on pause whilst data privacy comes in and says, “You haven’t thought about this, we need an audit.” Well there’s six weeks gone in your delivery timetable.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And it’s absolutely, and I think that’s the thing because the planning is everything that you said. It’s not somebody sitting off in a box somewhere. The planning is about the people and getting them on board because that’s where you build the agility. The agility is not in the plan and God help you if it is because it ain’t agile. It’s building the agility in people where there’s the trust, the buy-in. Because if you’ve just dragged people into it, they’re going to sit there arms folded waiting for it to fail and say, “Hey, told you so.” Whereas if everybody’s invested, everybody does it, they flag those warning signals early and work with you on the solution. I think agile is not dead, but that is a million years ago and it needs to have evolved. And I think more and more, the agility is in the people and the planning is getting people positioned to have that agility. It’s not inherent and it’s not done by a few stand-ups and some retros. This is much bigger and deeper in that.

You and I could talk to you about this forever. I’m really excited. And we may have you back when you’re more on the other side of it. Is there any other things, if you were listening to this, is there anything else you wish someone would’ve told you if you were setting out on a disruptive transformation like this?

Dave Hodsdon:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, A couple more points just to make. So I spend a lot of time talking to people that are starting their transformation journey or feeling like they’re being left behind by this tidal wave of technical innovation. Don’t know where to start. They’ve been told, get your data right first, focus on good data inputs. And it’s paralysing, particularly for medium to large enterprise. The concept of get your data in a good place before you start is it could be five years worth of effort because it’s 25 years worth of data build-up for these enterprise businesses.

I wish we’d just started. We started really what we could call our automation journey that became a digital journey that involved AI. We started that journey back in 2018 as many companies did with robotics, and we learned so much when we started to think about how process works when you are digitising it, how to bring technology to workflows. We learned so much about what was important, what was not important. It helped us plan better, it helped us execute more effectively. And I think the same goes for whatever technology project you’re planning. We do a lot of work with conversational AI, with virtual agents. And again, I hear the same, “Look, I just don’t know why people contact me. I know that I’ve got 30 people working emails, telephones, whatever it is, ticketing systems. I just don’t know where to start.” And I say the same to them every time. Put your virtual agent in, get your friendly user interface, encourage people just to ask questions and make it really clear to your audience that they’re not going to get the five-star response that they might expect on day one because the platform needs time to digest the data. But the amount of information you’ll gather, you’ll get 12 months experience in the first six weeks. And that allows you then to build the solutions that work for your business. So I guess in a nutshell, just get on with it.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And small bite-sized chunks. It is find where is it? What’s the analogy? How do you eat an elephant? Something. Very large animal. It’s one bite at a time. You’ve just got to start somewhere in that piece.

Okay. Look, Dave, we may have to have you back another time because so much we could unpack here. I often ask guests to sit back then, apart from just the day job, is there anything on the horizon of tech that is exciting you, annoying you, worrying you, that you’d share here?

Dave Hodsdon:
Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely. Look, I am a self-confessed futurist. I’m incredibly optimistic about the future. We live in the most wonderful time as a species that we ever have occupied the earth. And the next five to ten years will be dramatically different. So it’s an incredibly exciting time. I think making it practical and bringing it back to business, we’re starting to see the generative AI hype fade. I think you earlier mentioned the hype cycle and I think we’re in that trough of disillusionment for gen AI.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And this one’s really steep, isn’t it? This hype cycle really, the AI hype cycle is Mount Everest.

Dave Hodsdon:
No, it really is. And I think a lot of that’s driven by, there was a tendency, certainly with organisations that I’d been connected with, just to put gen AI in the title. I spoke to one guy who I won’t name, he knows who he is, “When I’m building products,” he said, “if I put gen AI in the title, I get X number more call-backs than I would if I was just touting the same software that I was a year before.” And I thought that was really interesting because I think a lot of large tech companies haven’t helped themselves with, okay, we’ve built something, it is that kind of analogy again of, we’ve built another hammer, now where’s all the nails?

Debbie Forster MBE:
And it looks like a piece of wood, but I’m sure if I look at it in the right light, you got a nail-ish bit of it.

Dave Hodsdon:
You’re 100% Debbie. And that for us was gen AI. There absolutely is some really strong use cases for it in the industries that we work in. It’s fantastic in terms of making it easier for users, employees, customers, to engage with you using the everyday language that they would usually speak in and for that language to be able to be interpreted and played back to them in a way that feels more emotional, perhaps more persuasive. So there’s a huge amount of value in that. There’s lots of other use cases that we’re watching closely in the gen AI space in terms of actually crafting responses. And what I’m thinking about quite specifically, just for everybody that listens to the show, being able to write things like audit finding reports. That’s a process that goes through somewhere between 12 and 15 iterations for auditors. Being able to get a good final draught, maybe to get you to version 9 or 10 without a human having to do that, I think is hugely time-saving. Very beneficial. Absolutely possible with gen AI.

I think the same is true with legal documents. So particularly true of things like contract negotiations where clauses need to be written to appease both sides. I think gen AI can do a phenomenal job there as well, take out a lot of the heavy lifting. And then I think the third area that I’m quite excited about is accounting policy memos. Never thought I’d say that, but our technical accounting…

Debbie Forster MBE:
Always a riveting topic. Many’s the time I watch those on television, I can just binge-watch those.

Dave Hodsdon:
But this is the point Debbie. They’re almost not, even for the people who have built their careers around these very interesting and technical topics, being able to save somewhere between 6 to 12 hours worth of just drafting, I think is phenomenal. So I think we’re about to see, we’re about to come out of the trough disillusionment. We’re about to get into a place where this technology becomes usable and practical. And I think we’re also starting to see this rise of agentic AI is back in vogue. Those who are thinking about it, 2025 might be a little bit too early, but I think 2026 is probably the year that we’ll start to see that happen in earnest. And that’s really exciting for the industries that I work in because a lot of the activities are repeatable, transactional in nature. And whilst that doesn’t mean that they’re simple, they’re complex transactions that require specialist intervention, accountants, lawyers, HR professionals, et cetera, but agentic AI provides us with an opportunity to queue up decision-making with minimal human interventions. That’s really quite exciting.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And the key is, again, as we’ve had to do in tech with any new hype, it’s getting people to put the hammer down for a second. We’re going to use the hammer, but we’re going to take a moment to find the nails and the little nails and play round instead of just going round and testing if that’s a nail. People get hurt. My father used to take the hammer away from me if I got too enthusiastic. So it’s finding the nail first, then picking up the hammer and like you said, creating those safe ways to begin playing with it and iterate it and find the way moving forward in that way.

Dave Hodsdon:
Right, and I don’t know if we’ll ever get past this Debbie, if I’m honest, and call me a disasterist if you will, but you’ve kind of got these conflicting priorities where big tech obviously wants to show that they’re innovating, they need to show that they’re innovating, their investors are expecting it once a quarter, what’s the next big thing? And so here’s the newest topic, here’s a pre-recorded demo of this working in an abstract way. That’s then the thing that creates value for big tech. And then that’s going to push down to just being honest kind of CXO level in industry. And then, well, I want one. You know, the CXO is how can I bring that into my business? And you have…

Debbie Forster MBE:
He has a hammer and it’s a really cool hammer.

Dave Hodsdon:
It’s cool.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Where’s my damn hammer?

Dave Hodsdon:
It’s cool, right? And so there’s definitely that. How do we as a community change the narrative to say, these are all very interesting. This is absolutely, we should be looking at what’s happening in the future, but we should really think about how that applies to the strategy that we’re on, the journey that we’re on, and how we make best use of this, rather than just bringing it in at any cost.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Super, brilliant. Okay, we’re in violent agreement on that too, David, it’s been a good call. Last but not least, we go back to you as a human. You’ve already alluded before, you’re a big reader, but you can talk about any of it. Is there anything that at the moment you’ve been reading, watching, listening to, that is giving you that buzz that we should all look into?

Dave Hodsdon:
Yeah, look, a couple of book recommendations. Transformation, I’ve been reading How Big Things Get Done. Wonderful book, talks about both tech and infrastructure investments and the kind of common themes that go through execution of large projects. So a must read for anybody who’s thinking about going on a change journey. Particularly look, really relevant I think, to me, when it comes to how to execute large change projects is communication. And it’s as much about who isn’t in the room as who is. So Caroline Criado-Perez, phenomenal author, Invisible Women.

Debbie Forster MBE:
You’re talking about someone I have a deep girl crush on, Caroline Criado-Perez.

Dave Hodsdon:
I mean incredible, an incredible writer, a must-read – Invisible Women, and effectively talks about…

Debbie Forster MBE:
Oh Dave, you’ve gone up, you’ve got three gold stars now for me as a man techie, talking about Caroline Criado-Perez. People, if you’ve not read the book, where are you? Get Invisible Women. And you said there was a third one.

Dave Hodsdon:
Yeah, look, the third one for me is I really like Diamandis and Kotler. I think they’ve written a series of books now. They wrote Bold a few years ago, Abundance, and a couple of years ago they wrote The Future is Faster Than You Think. And for all of those would-be futurists, for anybody that thinks they’ve missed the boat on this kind of technological change, for anybody starting to think about practical applications of technology with purposeful outputs, read The Future is Faster Than You Think. For me, as a transformation expert, it helps me to think about seven to ten years from now. It helps me to think about other industries. Whenever we say it’s not the right time to bring this technology in or speaking to either lawyers or finance professionals or HR professionals and you hear, “We’re not sure about going on this change journey just yet.” And you look at the medical industry and the phenomenal disruption that’s happening with advanced technologies today. You look at the transport industry. We are going to have flying cars in Dubai and LA from as soon as next year.

We’re now able to undertake drugs testing a 100,000 to a million times faster than we could just five years ago. This is a phenomenal time for innovation. And books like that really help you to think big.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And if you wait until you’re absolutely sure you’ve missed the boat. It’s getting comfortable with being uncomfortable with some of the decisions we have to take.

Dave, listen, this has been a treasure trove and such a pleasure talking to you. I really appreciate you joining us here today. And thank you to all of you for joining me on this episode of XTech. We’d love to receive your comments and thoughts on what you’ve heard and you can share them with us.

Thank you for listening. If you’re a tech innovator and would like to appear as a guest on the show, email us now at [email protected]. And finally, thank you to the team of experts at Fox Agency who make this podcast happen. I’m Debbie Forster and you’ve been listening to the XTech podcast.

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