Dunkin Brands CIO Dan Sheehan says the presence of four distinct generations in IT makes it the most interesting time ever for change management.

Dan Sheehan has a full plate, leading all corporate IT for Dunkin Brands, the parent company of Dunkin' Donuts and Baskin-Robbins, as well as their 6,600-plus franchisees in North America. And like many IT leaders, he's grappling with constant change--not only in IT itself, but in the composition of the IT workforce.

In fact, Sheehan believes that the presence of four distinct generations in the IT workforce is having a bigger impact on change management than anything else. Sheehan, a IT leadership veteran who has held top spots at ADVO, Coca-Cola, Georgia-Pacific and others, spoke recently with Workforce News Editor Brian P. Watson.

WORKFORCE NEWS: What’s your approach to leading the IT function today?

SHEEHAN: I try to be a business-technologist as opposed to a true technologist.  Everywhere I’ve gone it’s been about understanding the business first, and then enabling the technology to support it.

I’ve learned over time that you don’t have to worry about the technology. That’s the easy part. It’s about change management and enabling people to think differently. If one can negotiate and lead through that, it can really create positive change.

We have more than 6,600 Dunkin’ Donuts stores in North America, and most are owned and operated by franchisees who are small business owners. That means I work with many individual “CEOs” on some level. They each have their own opinions on how to manage IT systems, and I take pride in helping them to understand our retail technology capabilities and show how and where we are adding value to their businesses.

Where/when did you develop this approach?

I was with Georgia-Pacific between 1993 and 1997 and we were doing SAP, which back then was different than the ERP giant it is today. At that time, the reengineering movement began, and I really bought into its efficiencies and getting more horizontal rather than vertical with your applications.

With SAP being a platform, it was exciting at Georgia-Pacific to look at all these divisions and the amount of money they were spending to do the same things. There was a huge opportunity to make significant changes.

At that time, no one wanted to give up their verticality. The executives who led these divisions (paper, pulp, drywall, etc.) were held accountable for making their numbers. They were very successful and made good money, and all of a sudden we’re saying to them, “We’d like you to move to this technology, and you’re going to procure with your fellow divisions and share that data.” That became a big issue.

It had nothing to do with technology—it had everything to do with the politics of change. That’s when it hit me hard. The amount of energy we spent convincing upper management that they’re not giving up their territory. People get into a comfort zone and it’s hard to change them. I realized it is more about getting the end user to absorb it, become more efficient, and reduce spend and total cost of ownership so that we can add value to the business.

The light bulb that went off for me is that it’s all about change management.  We can make the software do whatever we want it to do, but ultimately it’s about getting people to use it and use it in the way it’s intended.

Change management has been a big, scary term for most executives through the years. All CIOs grapple with it, to some extent. There are a ton of change management issues that take place in IT, but you nailed perhaps the biggest one: Helping the business understand what’s possible, and helping them understand how to get bigger gains by doing things differently, and wrenching them out of their comfort zones.

A lot of this reengineering is just what so many CIOs are trying to do in explaining things like cloud computing or Web 2.0. I’ve heard so many IT leaders tell stories about a business executive coming to them after reading an article about cloud computing. The business leader says, “We should be in the cloud. Where’s our cloud?” The CIO ends up saying, “Hold on a second. How quickly did you read this, and what do you think it means? Do you really understand what it is?” It’s an ongoing challenge that, frankly, too many CIOs haven’t gotten their arms around.

It’s getting everyone to understand the technology available to us and then act on it. It’s not about the vendor’s technology du jour. We have to forget about the technology and focus on what we want, how we want the business to perform, where we want to save money, and how we can become more agile and efficient… and ultimately how can we make our franchisees and our business more profitable. That’s it in a nutshell.

I believe the four generations in the workplace today are having a tremendous effect on technology and change management, more than anything else in the last 30 years. The mix of pre-World War II generation, Baby Boomers, Generation X, and now Generation Y. There is an expectation that the technology will work for everyone across generations, and that’s good! When I look at my kids and what they play with and use, compared with five years ago, it’s just scary.

It seems pretty evident that IT is truly becoming consumerized, and these younger generations will only push that forward. Sometimes, as a CIO, you just have to let your guard down—these people want to use what they want to use, and they might even circumvent whatever barriers you put in place for them to do so.

I totally agree.

What’s your take on Generation Y? What are they doing to bring change?

The plusses are that they ask “why?” a lot. They question why we do things the traditional way. They’re a bit brash in that sense—they have passion. I like that. They want to figure out how to do things better and simpler.

Some people do the same thing at a company for 15 straight years, day after day after day. Someone in Generation Y looks at that and says, “Time out. I don’t want to do the same things. I want to fix it—make it so that it flows better, moves quicker or takes less time.” They want change, and they’re more receptive to change. All of these technological advancements, along with Generation Y, will continue to push change across industries. I’m so interested in it because I’m seeing it first-hand.

What about Generation Y’s downsides?

If you don’t change, or if the technological capabilities aren’t there, you’ll have a lot of these people jumping ship. They’ll go and find a more dynamic, innovative company to work for. The companies that do the same things will fall behind.

We talked about Generation Y, but going back to the four different generations, what are they doing collectively to affect change management?

Each generation becomes more adaptive. The older generations tend to adjust more slowly to change. But with the current state of the economy, if a company can’t change and be agile, it better move over because it will be passed by another company willing to pick up the slack.

In my son’s job, he’s totally connected. If someone contacts him, he gets right back to them. He doesn’t have that concept of only emailing from nine to five. That’s the nature of the beast: People are connected. If the CEO asks him a question on Friday night, he’s not waiting until Sunday night to get back to him.

It’s all about speed. Now we all have BlackBerries and texting, so the expectation is that we are always available.  Older generations have to adjust to that pace – because it has definitely picked up. I’m 48-years-old, and I know that for sure!

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