Sharon Mandell's full-time role is chief information officer at Juniper Networks. But she says the hardest job she's ever had is her side hustle: teaching.
For the past three years, Mandell has taught a graduate class in information systems at the University of San Francisco, for people who work as individual contributors in IT departments but aspire to management roles, including CIO.
“They’re used to building things and solving problems,” says Mandell. “Well, that’s one part of running this function.”
To be sure, managing the day-to-day operations of an IT department and staying on top of new technology innovations, like generative artificial intelligence, are some of the core responsibilities of any tech leader.
But Mandell teaches students that successful tech leaders must also think strategically. Key questions they need to ask themselves and navigate include: How can an IT leader work with business partners to develop technology? What’s needed from a budgeting perspective? What kind of projects get approved? And once approved, in what order should the various elements of the work be done?
“You don’t create projects on your own in IT,” explains Mandell. “They’re always in service of some business outcome.”
Mandell applies that same thinking to her leadership role at Juniper Networks, which makes networking devices like switches and routers. She regularly explains to Juniper's engineers that their work isn’t just going down a checklist of technology problems that need solving, but rather to make things smoother for their colleagues and customers.
The CIO is a “very contextual role,” says Mandell, varying greatly at each company depending on its size, the industry, whether public or private, and its growth targets. A big reason Mandell joined Juniper Networks in 2020 was because she wanted to work at a larger public company than her prior employer, private-equity backed Tibco Software.
Throughout her career, Mandell has served as CIO or chief technology officer at several companies, including enterprise software maker Tibco, telecommunications company Harmonic, and newspaper publisher Tribune. “I really love technology,” she says. “But the reality is, I spent most of my time trying to understand what our business is trying to accomplish and translating that down to my leaders so we ask the technologists to do the right things.”
Juniper Networks was also alluring because of its 2019 acquisition of Mist Systems for around $400 million. Now known as Mist AI, the platform uses artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science techniques to optimize user and operator experiences, as well as improve both the network's reliability and security.
That bet on AI helped make Juniper attractive to Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which in January agreed to buy it for $14 billion in an all-cash deal that is expected to close by early 2025, pending regulatory approvals. Buying Juniper would double HPE’s networking revenue though some investors questioned the lack of overlap between the companies’ product offerings and the risks of an increased debt load to HPE.
While Mandell has been telling her students that C-suite technology roles require more than just a clear understanding of rapidly advancing technologies, paradoxically, she admits to spending more time in recent years explaining generative AI to Juniper’s leadership and clients.
What technologists are still sorting out, she says, are the sometimes mistaken or incomplete outputs of generative AI and a flurried pace of change that's unlike any other technology advancement.
“Nobody wants to be the one who's left behind,” says Mandell. “It's a challenging problem for all of us. And it's not really a technology problem; it's a human problem.”
John Kell
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