In this eighth episode of ASUG Talks: Candid Career Conversations, season 2, we talk with Mark Richardson, Chief Technology Officer at Rich Analytics.
A full transcript follows:
Laurel Nelson-Rowe:
Today, I am joined by Mark Richardson, who is Chief Technology Officer at Rich Analytics. Welcome, Mark, to ASUG Talks.
Mark Richardson:
Thanks a lot.
Nelson-Rowe:
We're glad to have you with us today. And we're going to start this Candid Career Conversation with a little bit of background on you. So where did you grow up and did it have any effect on who you have become as a professional? And if so, how?
Richardson:
I have an interesting story. I grew up half in the UK and half in Canada. So, I was born in the UK but in the mid-1970s. My dad got a job with a Canadian oil company and we picked up and we moved to Canada when I was seven or eight years old. And it was really a pivotal change because you get picked up from one community, one area, and dropped into a totally fish out of water landscape. And I think that really has affected how my career has proceeded. After that nothing surprises me anymore and you can throw just about anything at me and we'll figure out a way to make it work. So I think that was a really important life lesson that I learned early on. And now as I move through different projects, different phases of my career, that ability to adapt and change on the fly has really helped me in my career.
Nelson-Rowe:
So you've been able to be flexible and adaptable and a no-surprise man.
Richardson:
Exactly.
Nelson-Rowe:
What are the other values and principles from your childhood that have contributed to your career and the professional success that you've achieved?
Richardson:
I think watching both of my parents get up and go out the door every morning. We were in Northern Alberta in Canada, minus-40 was not an unusual temperature. So when you see your parents getting up in the morning, going out the door to work in that kind of extreme temperature, it sets you up to really understand that you've got to work through things, conditions won't always be their best. And that has really helped me as I've worked through my career.
Nelson-Rowe:
A little bit of persistence lessons.
Richardson:
Persistence and always being prepared for that kind of weather. Being prepared for the unexpected storm.
Nelson-Rowe:
Whether in the house or in technology. Now we'll go into a little bit of your career. What was the first job related to IT and to SAP solutions that you had in your experience? When did it occur? Where did it occur? What was it about?
Richardson:
In the mid-1990s, I started working for a company that did admissions systems for theaters, museums, arenas, theme parks, water parks, zoos. And at that time there were a lot of reporting requirements out of those various systems. And my company is called Rich Analytics and I come from the analytics side of the SAP landscape. And one of the very first tools that we had to use for creating reports for museums and theme parks and arenas and stuff was Crystal Reports. And Crystal Reports was at that time a Canadian-owned company. Over the years, Crystal was purchased by Business Objects and then Business Objects was purchased by SAP. But those foundational analytics tools have stayed the same. And in fact, most of the SAP analytics cloud development that is being done today is being done in the Vancouver office where the Crystal Report software was being written 30 years ago. So it's interesting to see how things have changed, but also how things have stayed the same over the years.
Nelson-Rowe:
And have you seen an increased value and prioritization on analytics?
Richardson:
Oh, 100%. The kind of stuff we were doing, this is all pre-Y2K work. When we were doing some of the very early reporting work, it was all very transactional, operational, sales reports, customer-arrival reports, those kinds of things, day-to-day transactions of the business. There was really no trends, there was no forecasting, there was certainly no artificial intelligence or machine learning that you could build into your analytics like there is today. But the foundations of having the right data, presenting it correctly and being able to make your business better by using that data appropriately, that's foundational. And that hasn't really changed since I started in the industry. We've just found more interesting ways to do it and ways to do it with much larger data sets than we were looking at in 1997.
Nelson-Rowe:
Absolutely. If you were to characterize yourself, would you say that you're an active career path planner, a responsive career opportunist, something in the middle, a hybrid?
Richardson:
I think I'm more of a responsive career opportunist, and that's basically because of the area of technology that I'm in. You have to respond to the direction of where business is going, where the tools are going. There are tools today and technologies today that didn't exist five years ago, didn't exist 10 years ago. You couldn't really plan your career path in analytics. You have to respond to how the industry is changing. And there's a Canadian phrase in hockey that talks about skating where the puck is going. You need to slightly understand the direction something's moving in and put yourself in a position to be there when it gets there. And I'd say from a career point of view, that's certainly what I've done, learn where the technology is going. But put yourself in a position so that when that technology is available and is being adopted, you have the skillsets, you have the understanding of how it applies to business so that you can be somebody to help facilitate good outcomes for your clients.
Nelson-Rowe:
Okay. What so far has been your most challenging role or responsibility or project to date and why was it so challenging?
Richardson:
I would say probably the most challenging thing I've done in the last few years was I helped the very first government of Canada Federal Agency go live on S/4HANA in April of 2021. And it was a huge challenge because we were doing it in the middle of COVID. So it was the first time we were putting SAP landscapes for a federal entity into the Microsoft Azure Cloud. It was the first time any federal government department in Canada was doing S4/HANA. And everybody for the very first time, everybody from the business to the IT workers, were all fully remote because the offices were all closed for in person. And if anybody has any experience of working in government, that was a huge change. There was almost zero remote work in the federal civil service in Canada until March of 2020. And then over the course of three weeks, there were hundreds of thousands of people who were suddenly working remote. So it was a big challenge, but I actually found it was more effective than the old way we've been doing things.
Nelson-Rowe:
How so?
Richardson:
Well meetings for example, there were a lot of times where projects would be scattered around different buildings in Ottawa. So during the course of a regular business day, you might waste three hours going back and forth between different meetings, getting past security desks, getting into meeting rooms, waiting for people to arrive, all of the physical logistics of moving around like a corporate campus. Whereas in a world where we were 100% Microsoft Teams, you could have meetings back-to-back, you could have troubleshooting sessions, you could pull everybody into a session. and it wasn't like you were having to go all around a campus or all around your building trying to pull people together. And the ability to work slightly shifted hours. So if something needed to happen at seven in the morning, well it was much easier to do that if somebody was working from home than if somebody was going to have to physically get themselves into the office for 6 AM or 7 AM to run a particular process.
So there was a flattening of the hierarchies, and it became a really solution-oriented program for delivering the S4. Prior to COVID we had a lot of progress-oriented programs where it was more, we had the Tuesday meeting because it's Tuesday versus we're having this particular meeting to solve this particular problem. That was the way the project moved because of COVID. And I think it's going to be hard for us to go back to the old ways of doing things. I hope it's going to be hard to go back because I think this is a much more efficient way to deliver solutions than the way we've been doing things in the past.
Nelson-Rowe:
It sounded very much like efficiency themes, effectiveness, themes, and collaboration were much more present.
Back to the career arc, what's been your best career decision to date and why was that a great decision, the decision-making process?
Richardson:
The best decision that I've made for my career is to almost never work full-time for a single client, even when a client wants you to work full-time for them. And it's a two-factor reason. One is that you become dependent upon that client and that client becomes dependent on you. And my happiest moment is when we've delivered a solution to a client, and we are done, and the client is self-sustainable and can walk away without us.
And on the other side, you don't want to be dependent on a single client. We had people in our industry who were very involved when Target moved into Canada, Target opened stores all across Canada. They hired lots of people, they hired lots of IT people. And the move into Canada didn't go well for Target and they closed all those stores. And there were a lot of people who'd put all of their eggs into this, their five-year corporate plan was to be a primary IT provider to Target. If you put all your eggs in one customer's basket, one customer's business, you're tying yourself to decisions that are sometimes totally outside of your control and it isn't good for you and it isn't good for the customer.
So the best career decision has been to always have multiple customers, always have multiple projects, usually in the same area and sometimes even in aligned industries. But we are a consulting organization. We are not a body shop contracting organization where you're using us as virtual employees. You're using us instead as experts for hire to help you with specific problems.
Nelson-Rowe:
And do you also have different projects at different project points? Yes. Along the maturity curve.
Richardson:
Yeah. We would never have three organizations all doing their S4 go-live on the same weekend. But because we have multiple things going on it also allows us to experiment with things that we can then take back to some of our other clients. So we're starting to have some conversations about RISE on SAP, which obviously wasn't a conversation we were having in April of 2021 when we went live with the first S4/HANA implementation of the federal government in Canada. That is now a conversation we might start to have in 2023 because we're starting to look at that offering. By having things at different points in time it allows us to adapt as we go and see how products are changing as we go.
Nelson-Rowe:
Right. What education, training, resources, professional development have been essential to your career development and to your success of yourself and your business?
Richardson:
This is going to sound like a plug, but I'm going to say ASUG is a huge one. I came to ASUG from the CDUGNA, which was the Crystal Decisions User Group North America, which then went into the Business Objects User Group, which then with the acquisition of Business Objects by SAP, we got pulled into the ASUG organization. So I've been an ASUG member and an ASUG volunteer for 12 years or so now. And the opportunities to present, to go to conferences, to attend webinars, to be on think tanks, take part in usability testing and customer engagement opportunities.
Nelson-Rowe:
To be on a podcast.
Richardson:
To be on a podcast, all these opportunities exist. And it's back to that idea of skating where the puck is going. By embracing the opportunities that are there within the ASUG ecosystem, you can learn things be slightly on, you want to be on the leading edge and not on the bleeding edge of things. And ASUG helps you figure out what is leading edge and what is bleeding edge. And if someone is on the bleeding edge, you can learn from their experiences because they're part of the ASUG community and they're talking at conferences or they're on a podcast or a webcast or a webinar.
Nelson-Rowe:
Speaking of your career again, has there been a mentor that has given you a great piece of advice? And if so, what was that piece of advice?
Richardson:
‘Can you explain it to your grandma?’ So there was somebody I worked with quite early in my career, and I'm a technical guy, I come from a technical analytics background. And you do not, even when you're trying to explain something that is very technical, you should be able to take it apart and explain it to your grandma. Don't get lost in the techno-speak. Don't get lost in the corporate buzzwords because you don't know what the other people in the room, what their level of background information, their level of comprehension is about some of these things. So always start with first principles, understand, try and find out what the other people in the room already know. And then you work from there when you're describing a problem, describing a solution, describing a technology. Make it understandable.
And I would say that anybody who's been to things will often complain about this presentation was like buzzword bingo. You don't want to be the buzzword bingo caller. You want to be the person who's bringing actual value to the conversation. And if you know the technology, you should be able to explain it relatively simply to people.
Nelson-Rowe:
Great piece of advice so far from a mentor. Now, what are the three things that you've learned from being in the fields that you are in that people should know?
Richardson:
Everybody has garbage data. That's the first thing. Almost everybody has garbage data. I've never seen a perfectly pristine data source. And the argument has been, well, we'll automate more things or we'll use IOT sensors and that will mean fewer hands and keyboards and that will result in better data quality. It only takes a minor mistake in programming and IOT sensor to create lots of garbage data or a broken GPS unit in something that you're tracking to create lots of garbage data. Your first thing you should always be thinking about is data quality.
Nelson-Rowe:
Okay.
Richardson:
And it's not very sexy, but it is the plumbing of anything you want to do in the analytics world. Because you can put fancy dashboards on top of garbage data and they'll look right, but the numbers will be wrong or the indicators will be wrong. So you want to avoid that definitely.
The other thing that I would say that I've learned in this field is that the technology is always changing and some things that look incredibly promising will die on the vine. So we've seen whole industries come and go. People were talking about Bitcoin like crazy, right? Crypto, crypto, crypto, crypto, at this year's Super Bowl, where all the ads and now chickens are coming home to roost.
So just be aware that the technology will not always pan out the way you expected it to. I was around for the first dot-com boom. I was around for the Pets.com and the Tickets.coms. And so I've learned that lesson.
And I think the last one is never be afraid to ask a dumb question. No matter who you are, you're a CIO, if you're a CTO, you should be humble enough to be able to ask a question if there's something you don't understand. And that's always stood me in very good stead. And it also earns you some respect from the technological people who you're working with. If you're just asking that same explain it to your grandma question, I just happened to be your grandma this time.
Nelson-Rowe:
That last piece of wisdom can probably apply to so many professions actually. What's most difficult about what you do on a day-to-day basis?
Richardson:
Coordination. We deal with a lot of stakeholders. I'm working on one project right now where I have 26 or 27 separate federal government departments and entities and agencies that we're having to coordinate with. And that means a lot of emails, a lot of virtual meetings because not everybody's at the same level. Not everybody understands the technology in the same way, but we need to get them all to the same place on the same schedule. So the most difficult thing is that kind of air traffic control aspect to managing projects like that, that everybody's got to get safely to their destination.
Nelson-Rowe:
Okay. What are you most proud of in your professional life so far and why?
Richardson:
I think the stuff I'm actually most proud of is some of the stuff that we don't get paid for. My company does a fair amount of pro bono work around open data, open government, and transparency. And for the last four years we've been doing a project around affordable housing development in the city of Toronto. We have, like most big cities, we have a lot of challenges with homelessness and shelter and even housing for workers now, housing for nurses, housing for teachers. There's a big challenge in achieving that. And for many years the City of Toronto had been setting affordable housing targets for creating units, creating new buildings, setting aside city lands, and was never getting anywhere close to its own targets. Its targets were kind of New Year's resolutions, I want to lose weight, but I don't want to go to the gym and I don't want to eat better.
So we started a project in mid- to late-2018. And it just tracks the city's affordable housing development sites. And because we were doing it for free and because we were doing it in a way that was totally public and online and on your phone, you had exactly the same information that the mayor had using our tools. And it changed the conversation. We do a lot of media stuff on that now. We're being asked by other cities, could we repeat this lesson? And it's that idea of data for good and tech for good. Your skills are valuable and applying your skills to what they call wicked problems is a very powerful way to actually help people make better decisions about those wicked problems in your cities.
Nelson-Rowe:
How much of your time is spent in that regard?
Richardson:
We probably spend about 10% of our month working on that. But at the same time, it's turned into a really good vehicle for our paid services to other branches of government and other industries because we now get asked into media interviews, we do TV and radio spots, and we are considered a trusted voice on affordable housing data in the City of Toronto. So if you're a trusted voice on affordable housing data, well could you help us with this data problem that we have in our organization? That's a call we get now after doing media about our not-for-profit work.
Nelson-Rowe:
Creating the awareness and demand pull. If you could change one thing about IT and SAP products and solutions, what would that be?
Richardson:
I would change the aggressive marketing that is done for some of these solutions, particularly in the SAP world. The latest product is sometimes sold that it will paint your house, mow your lawn, make sure your kids get good grades and straighten their teeth.
Nelson-Rowe:
Sounds great.
Richardson:
Yeah, it sounds great. Sounds perfect. And I think that we need to be more honest about, yes, these are things this technology could do. It could fix this problem within your organization, but it will not happen without organizational change. It will not happen without organizational commitment to doing it. And it will not happen without a very clear definition of what it is you want to solve. I can't tell you the number of times we've been asked to come in and report on something or create analytics on some piece of data only to find out that they really don't capture that data in their business process.
Nelson-Rowe:
So I'm going to wrap up with, again, trying to draw some pearls of wisdom from you based on your career, your experience, your customer experiences, what are the three best pieces of advice you'd give to someone who's interested in a career in IT using SAP technologies or pivoting into a career for IT and SAP technologies?
Richardson:
First piece of advice is, you don't know what you don't know. So therefore you need to get into an organization, be it ASUG or another of the global user groups and really understand not what these products say in the books and in the manuals, what they actually do within organizations. So I've spoken at ASUG events, at the UK and Ireland user group, and learn how this stuff works in the real world, not how it works in a sales pitch.
The next thing I would say is that idea of skating where the puck is going. So try to be on the leading edge of at least some part of the technology and listen and look for examples from people who are on the bleeding edge because they will save you a lot of pain in the future.
Nelson-Rowe:
Of the technology as well as the business?
Richardson:
Yes, 100%. And then the last one is to make sure that your direction is aligned with your principles. There's often good money in working for companies that may have lines of industry that you may not want to be associated with. So we've made some very clear choices that we don't engage with businesses that deal in weapons manufacturer, for example. And there are other folks who I know who won't work in medical fields and that's purely because if they made a mistake, they don't want to be responsible for somebody else's death, if they wrote analytics incorrectly around drug safety or pacemaker safety or something like that. So there's a lot of opportunity in the IT world and the SAP world. So find a place within that that aligns with your principles and what you want to do to try and make sure that your career aligns with what you would like to see improving the world around you.
Nelson-Rowe:
Great. Anything else you want to share with the ASUG community?
Richardson:
No, other than I'm hoping to see people in person in 2023 after a lot of Zoom, a lot of Microsoft Teams, a lot of virtual conferences. I'm very much looking forward to seeing people in the real world.
Nelson-Rowe:
Very good. I think we can make that happen.
Richardson:
I hope so.
Nelson-Rowe:
I thank you for joining ASUG Talks. Appreciate your time and your effort and we'll talk again soon. Have a great day.
Richardson:
You, too. Thank you.