When Paolo Juvara joined Pure Storage in 2021, he knew he had a vastly different role to fulfill. After being the CIO of one of the largest cloud companies in the world (Google Cloud), Paolo’s role at Pure Storage as the Chief Digital Transformation was to be quite an unusual venture.
A software developer at heart, his diverse background in both business and technology domains has helped him ace the role.
In this exclusive interview with CIO Dimension, Paolo shares his unique experiences as the chief digital transformation officer who drives Pure’s ambitious digital agenda to meet the company’s innovation and growth goals.
Watch the full video here:
People should be at the center of every digital transformation project
DX is all about leveraging technology. But you really cannot succeed if you are not focusing on people and process, says Paolo. He believes that digital leaders must be empathetic towards the needs of diverse set of users.
“If you do not involve humans to begin with, by understanding their needs and challenges, then you are not going to find the right bottlenecks – whether your goal is to improve process efficiencies or drive innovation,” he adds. One of the ways he implements this strategy is through the formation of a product management team within the DX organization.
For a company that transformed storage into an innovation technology, all of Pure’s technology and business advances are complemented by digital transformation – to greatly amplify the outcomes. The starting point of a successful transformation project, says Paolo, is often the back office. “I would say back office is the foundation of everything else in digital transformation. If operational complexities are not addressed, they start becoming a huge bottleneck for the scalability and growth of the company. My number one priority has been to focus on the back-office operations so that we can remove all the internal friction.”
In this interview, Paolo also highlights how the traditional ways of measuring the success of DX projects are changing, the importance of employee and customers experience in such initiatives and why organizations must clearly define the business outcomes at the very outset.
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