Qualcomm’s Cisco Sanchez on structuring IT for business growth

All of it matters. And the reason why I’m so excited about being in the role is I’m getting to see an industry that’s starting to change forms into something else, which allows for key technology enablers to be stood up and available to help drive change for the company. Again, that’s why the IT teams, CIOs, and CTOs are so important to help make the pivot into a different industry than they were before.

In the 18 months you’ve been at Qualcomm, the company has grown from a $30 billion to a $44 billion company. Your CEO recently made the proclamation during investor day that Qualcomm would become $100 billion company. Can you talk about those ambitions and IT’s role in them?

It’s happening, and I think there’s going to be an acceleration on all avenues. Handset is our bread and butter. It is what we do really well and it will continue to grow, particularly with this AI change factor that’s happening. I wouldn’t call it a hype cycle. It’s real. The AI on edge is going to be important to a lot of consumers that will help drive change in their cycle of how often they purchase a phone. With the phone handset business, we got really spoiled with great camera and battery life and apps. The next wave is this ecosystem around AI that’s going to generate more creativity and interaction for the end user.

As an example, let’s say I’m texting you and I tell you I’m going to be in town and we should grab coffee at a Starbucks near your house. You say that sounds great, and without me having to prompt anything, my AI engine pops up and tells me there’s a Starbucks near this spot and here are the directions, and I can send it to you. So the first one is this acceleration that’s going to happen with the mobile devices.

The second is in the automobile industry, where cars are becoming computers on wheels. Everything on the car has to be quick and allow for fast movement, understanding, and a capable, aware platform to ensure that you are interacting with updates and keeping everything fresh, from mapping to games to interaction. And that’s our sweet spot. If you add more stuff for your car, you need a Bluetooth interaction, which we do on the phone, and WiFi, which we do on the phone. And now you create this whole stitching of fabric of displays and content. It also has to continue to evolve and not get stale. Pushing of new updates into the vehicle is going to be super important, which we’re good at. So I think that’s a second way we’re seeing the acceleration.

The third is in this IoT growth area where the TAM [total available market] is something like $400 billion of just growth because of all of the key capabilities that are going to be driving efficiencies — from sensors on windmills so you can know when they need to be repaired to shop labeling in stores so you can update pricing very quickly versus having to change labels, or interacting with drones. This whole capability we’re good at, and I think you’re going to see continued acceleration because everything’s almost in motion right now.

The last is AI everywhere. And again, I think we’re pretty good at it. All that to say, the growth, even though it’s significant, is achievable. In IT, our requirements and responsibilities will include ensuring that you do that very profitably as you’re growing to these areas — that you have less duplicity, streamlined core capabilities, foundational components, and that you’re leveraging resilient applications frameworks to ensure that none of this ever goes down. That you have it secure, reliable, and also heavily supportable as you build these common components out. That’s how you get speed.

We know scale and speed matter, but it’s not easy in the face of so much complexity. What are some of the things IT is doing to enable the company to go faster?

Remember the big red easy button? What we’re trying to do is create easy buttons for a lot of capabilities. Another way you could say it is we’re creating reusable components or guardrails to allow for speed and agility to show up. Typically, when people think of guardrails, they think we’re restricting you from access to other parts. The way we’re thinking about it is, if we can get out in front of you, we allow you to go as fast as you want without falling off the road and getting into an accident. We allow you to identify where the curves and turns will be, where the slopes might happen, to allow for our business counterparts to go as fast as they want.

What that means, though, is we have to identify the methodologies, the capabilities, or frameworks that will help build resilient patterns, and the reusable items that can be leveraged quickly so you can start making the turn.

In terms of the methodology, we’re leading into an agile framework because we want to know in two weeks if the capability is right or we need to readjust. We can get speed and agility out of being able to go back faster. With the reusable components, we’re looking at the full stack, from hardware, networking, storage, all the way up to the stack of the UX design and saying, ‘How do we build the stack to ensure that we understand patterns really well?’ We’re building a stack that’s generic enough so that when the business starts throwing other items or capabilities that they need, we can focus on how this stack lines up so you have good architecture discipline.

Our enterprise architecture community is wrapped around these areas to say frameworks matter, how we do things matter, and here’s how we should build so we can be a reusable component versus having to rip something out and start all over. There’s a lot of standardization in the architecture that we’re putting in place and in the UX on how things are getting created.

Once you start to establish that architecture, bench, frameworks, capabilities, and methodology, you’re going to get speed; it’s just inherent. Because the next person that takes advantage of that component can use it and get it for a fraction of the cost. We built it for auto but IoT can use it, and I know it’s secure, it’s supportive, it’s resilient, it’s monitored, it’s alerted — they can pick it up and use it.

What we’re trying to show is that this can be done over and over again if we can identify the business model and understand where the business is heading and why it’s heading that way and start leaning in and creating capabilities.

If you had to boil it down to its essence, what’s most essential for driving the kind of change that’s necessary in a fast-growth environment?

Frameworks are important; culture will drive change. Even in the midst of issues, when you have a good strong culture, you can pick up and move and almost navigate around discomfort. But you need both. It’s not just that framework and capabilities and technology, you need the culture to drive the change.

This stuff is hard! When I came to Qualcomm, people asked me if it’s different than the last place, and the answer is, not really. We use the same tools, we have the same problems, the things we’re being asked to do are similar. The hardest part is people. Technology doesn’t have bias on how we do things. People do. And the people are all rooted in the culture of the organization. We have to drive change there so that the technology part is easier.

For more from Sanchez, tune in to the Tech Whisperers podcast for his CIO 100 Leadership Masterclass on “Unlocking Business Value — Digital Transformation that Goes Beyond Technology.”