PNNL’s Brian Abrahamson on delivering UX excellence

As chief digital officer, Brian Abrahamson is leading a digital transformation journey to cement Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)’s reputation as a globally recognized research institution. His diverse team of professionals that spans computing, IT, UX design, program management, cybersecurity, HPC, and systems engineering is an essential asset in making this possible.

On a recent episode of the Tech Whisperers podcast, Abrahamson discussed what differentiates a business-savvy digital leader. Afterwards, we spent some more time talking about how he’s building, measuring, and sustaining a culture of service excellence and how CIOs can benefit from strong peer networks as the role becomes more pivotal and pressure filled. What follows is that conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Dan Roberts: Jerry Cochran, PNNL’s division director for cybersecurity and digital operations, has remarked on your passion for consumer-driven computing and continually improving the user experience. Where does that passion come from and why is it such an important part of your role?

Brian Abrahamson: The consumerization of IT has had a dramatic impact on people’s expectations in the workplace. In our personal lives, we have access to intuitive technologies and information on a just-in-time basis. People coming into the workforce today have had a smartphone in their hand since the age of six. These consumer experiences fundamentally change what staff expect in the workplace. I used to describe rising expectations in the workplace as subconscious. Today, it’s unmistakably conscious.

For years as technology organizations, we’ve had lots of screen real estate coupled with the precision of a mouse, and we’ve filled those screens up with every feature imaginable. But with the smartphone or tablet, it’s smaller real estate and the precision of a finger. That has driven a different design paradigm and a need for simplicity. Nobody downloads an instruction manual for an app anymore. Yet our workplace tools often demand detailed guides and extensive training. This goes against the grain of consumer-driven expectations in our workplaces.

A pivotal moment for me was a class I attended over 20 years ago at Accenture. They gave us two business cases, and you had 60 seconds to go through two 20-page briefs before pushing a button on your desk to vote for the one you’d invest in. In 60 seconds, you don’t have time to do anything, so you would expect a completely random distribution of votes. What was stunning is that the vast majority vote for the same business case, every time.

Then they unpacked it for us. Both business cases were selling essentially the same product, the same price points. What was different was the layout, the fit and finish of the proposal, the font, the clarity and positioning of the images, even the ink quality — all of which the brain apprehends subconsciously in a way that has a significant impact on your perception of the proposal.

So when I think about the consumer experience of IT, it’s not one big thing; it’s those 100 details that must be thought of, because, collectively, they have a significant impact, whether people realize it or not. It’s about recognizing that every small interaction matters and contributes to the overall experience. In the end, excellence in IT isn’t about overwhelming complexity or a myriad of features; it’s about seamless, intuitive simplicity that meets expectations born from our everyday consumer experiences. That’s the real game-changer.

During the podcast, you talked about how measuring the right stuff matters. How do you measure the consumer and client stakeholder experience?

A couple of years ago, I put together a Maslow’s hierarchy for digital. The base layer represents things like a reliable network and WiFi, computers that work, applications that don’t crash, collaboration technology, etc. If you don’t have those nailed, nothing else matters. The upper levels represent more strategic ways we can transform a business. We have an obsessive focus maintaining our performance at the base levels through real-time monitoring, instrumentation, alerting. When something at the lower levels of the hierarchy falter, we want to know immediately and act on it. We don’t just ticket; we pivot.

For example, we have thousands of meetings scheduled each day in hybrid-ready conference rooms, and many of those meetings are critical to advancing our mission. They might have been scheduled months in advance with top scientific minds from around the world. When a console fails in a conference room or a microphone malfunctions, we know in real-time, and it is escalated to our teams for remediation immediately, because those meetings are important, that room is down, and it’s not something we fix tomorrow or next week. When you push the red button in those conference rooms, within 60 seconds a live agent drops into your virtual meeting with full telemetry and control to troubleshoot. That kind of attention to the lower level of our Maslow’s hierarchy is incredibly important.

Moving up the hierarchy, we focus on things like simplifying and digitizing operational processes at the lab. This is where ‘moments of truth’ and RATER [responsiveness, assurance, tangibles, empathy, reliability] help us understand those things through the lens of the user. This is the single biggest challenge IT organizations have. As technologists, we’re technically resilient and technically curious, so we intuitively understand certain things in a way our users don’t. But you have to step out of yourself to really look at your end-to-end process from the customer point of view. What is the scientist’s perspective on the process to refill or order chemicals for a lab? Tools like RATER and ‘moments of truth’ are absolutely pivotal in helping to retrain the eye of a technology professional.

One thing that stands out to me is how you make these principles and strategies around service excellence part of your organization’s DNA. What drives your commitment to staying the course for the long haul?

Strategies and principles need staying power. What matters are people’s behaviors and the beliefs that guide their actions and thoughts and approaches — that’s where the magic happens. If the principles are shifting out from under somebody every few years, those principles never have a chance to become a behavior and to become contagious within an organization. The same goes strategies: Articulating a vision and a path and staying the course long enough to achieve it is essential.

Organizations also need to become resilient to leadership change, because often it’s leadership change that erodes the staying power of principles and strategies. We’ve had the good fortune of a lot of staying power with leadership at PNNL. But we’ve also thought a lot about, in the event we didn’t have that leadership continuity: How do we make sure the strategies and principles become a legacy that outlasts leaders? When you get something really embedded into an organization’s culture, it has that staying power, absent any one person.

You have a number of CIO colleagues at federally funded R&D centers you meet with regularly who share your passion for building a consumer-driven IT culture and workforce — folks like Michael Misumi at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, Bob Solis at MIT Lincoln Lab, Deb Youmans at MITRE, and Beth Apillanes, who has led this work at the Rand Corporation and now NASA Jet Propulsion Lab. Can you talk about the value of that group to you as a technology leader?

We actually just wrapped hosting that meeting at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, so we had the whole crew here, and it really is a special time. We all prioritize these meetings because, even though our institutions have different missions, we share similar challenges and opportunities. There’s a lot of value when we come together to learn from each other.

One aspect of these meetings is the opportunity to showcase successes and priorities, like a show and tell. In our recent meeting, for example, we focused on artificial intelligence, sharing demonstrations from various organizations on their approaches and implementations.

Equally important is the safe space to discuss our failures and challenges. It’s a closed-room environment, allowing us to learn from each other candidly. We support each other with ideas on overcoming issues, sharing insights into the internal dynamics within our own organizations that we might be struggling with, and comparing notes on how others have solved it.

That human connection is so important, because these jobs are hard, and there’s always a lot going on, a lot of expectations. The role of technology leaders has become particularly pivotal within organizations, and there’s a lot riding on our success. Being able to come together and have a safe space to celebrate, coach, and counsel each other is essential.

This reminds me of a quote by Henry Ford: ‘Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.’ These kinds of gatherings epitomize this journey of coming together. It’s about building a community where we not only share knowledge and strategies but also inspire each other to push the boundaries of what’s possible in technology and innovation.

For more on Abrahamson’s consumer-driven approach to computing, as well as additional insights from his leadership success formula, tune in to the Tech Whisperers podcast.