Navigating the Evolving Intersection of Technology and Trust with Ashwin Rangan

Tim Crawford: 0:05

Companies are looking for new ways to transform their business to remain relevant and differentiated within their industry. Technology now plays a central role in this transformation. Hello and welcome to the CIO in the Know podcast, where I take a provocative but pragmatic look at the intersection of business and technology. I'm your host, tim Crawford, a CIO and strategic advisor at AVOA. This week I'm joined by Ashwin Rangan, the SVP of Engineering and Chief Information Officer at ICANN. In our conversation, ashwin takes a philosophical view of technology that has changed over the course of the pandemic. He shares his perspective on the impact technology has had on people, cultures and business. Ashwin thinks a lot about the internet and outlines its impact today and going forward. Ashwin, welcome to the program. Thank you, it's great to have you here. Ashwin Rangan, senior Vice President of Engineering and Chief Information Officer at ICANN. We've had a number of conversations over the years, but to get us started, why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are and your role there at ICANN and CIO?

Ashwin Rangan: 1:19

Who am I? It's rather a philosophical question, right, but I can tell you a little bit about myself and perhaps that'll fill some of the gaps there. I serve as the head of engineering and information technology for ICANN. Icann itself is short for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. We're sort of an apex body for things to do with policies of the internet and the very heart of the internet itself how the internet works and how it behaves. So the works part of it is the technical part and the behaves part of it is the policy part, if you will.

Ashwin Rangan: 2:01

I landed in this position about seven and a half years ago after a journeyman career is the way I look at it, where I don't come from a specific industry.

Ashwin Rangan: 2:14

I've served as CIO just prior to this in a life sciences company Edwards Life Sciences and prior to that I did a startup a group of friends in cloud-based analytics. Before that I served as the head of technology and CIO for Walmartcom and created Walmartcom, and prior to that I was CIO with the Rockwell International Group of Companies. So, as you can tell, it's been airspace and defense, followed by high tech semiconductors, followed by e-commerce, then analytics and cloud-based computing, life sciences and finally, icann. One interesting thing that I just want to interject here with is that journeyman career perhaps was the most interesting and important aspect of landing up where I now am, because the internet is underpinning so much today that having that breadth of perspective and the depth that it gave me by virtue of having served in those different industry verticals, so to speak, has been enormously helpful in trying to understand what people are struggling with when they think about the internet.

Tim Crawford: 3:28

That's really important and incredibly germane to our conversation today. You know, maybe we could kind of get a little provocative to start off our conversation. You know, in past conversations you've made the statement that technology is less interesting, and for someone who's kind of lived in technology throughout your career, I find that to be an interesting statement. Maybe you could elaborate on what you mean by that.

Ashwin Rangan: 3:54

What do I mean when I say technology is less interesting? It's not that technology is less important. Technology is vitally important for what we do, and I think increasingly it's getting woven into the day-to-day fabric of our lives in ways that we least expect, but in ways that it makes it impossible to lead a predictable life without the technology. So I mean I'll use an example here I wouldn't think of driving to work. My work is 50 miles away from where I live in Blyovist. I wouldn't imagine starting up to go to work without first looking at ways. So it's vitally important to give me that predictability so that I can inform others and plan my day based on when I'm likely to arrive at the workplace for physical one-on-one meetings or face-to-face meetings. But the underpinnings of ways are truly not particularly interesting to me.

Tim Crawford: 5:00

So it's more about the outcomes and how you use technology, as opposed to the underpinnings of how the technology actually works.

Ashwin Rangan: 5:10

Exactly. It's the utilitarian value of it, as opposed to the marvels of under-the-hood technologies.

Tim Crawford: 5:17

There was a time when the underpinnings were of great interest to many.

Ashwin Rangan: 5:21

Indeed, even to me when I served the semiconductor company, the specifics of how the semiconductors actually behaved were really very interesting. But that was at the literally dawn of the Internet. We were creating modems and trying to figure out how to make people on board and get onto the ramp and get onto the Internet. So the way I mean, was it a pulse that was creating the on-ramp or could it become ADSL or some other DSL, or would it be cable modems, set-top boxes, all of those were technology discussions that were vitally interesting. But over time they've sort of become subsumed, kind of like electric power and the plug point in the wall. You say, okay, it's there. How is it there? Really, it's kind of interesting if you're an electrical engineering working for Southern California. Otherwise it's like it's there, just use it.

Tim Crawford: 6:19

Yeah, it's funny, some of the technologies you mentioned, like DSL and ADSL, I can see Some of our readers or listeners are probably searching what is that? To look that up. But as I'll throw ISDN in the mix, so, as you kind of think about how you use technology, we would be remiss if we didn't bring up the pandemic. The pandemic has changed life for all of us, both personally and professionally. When you think about that before and after and how you've gone through that change and how you've gone through the change over the years, how has the pandemic changed that for you in terms of that before and after?

Ashwin Rangan: 7:04

I think that's a very layered question, and I say this because there are so many levels at which we can talk about what the pandemic has done. Let's start at a philosophical level. If you philosophically think about what's going on in so much of the world, still we are singularly blessed as a nation because we've had access to the vaccine in past numbers, sooner than most other countries in the world have, despite our size, perhaps because of our economy and our innovations. But regardless, when you think about it, I think over the last 12 to 15 months we have learned the value of life itself. We have learned the important things in life. We have learned that what we want far exceeds what we need. I think those are philosophical comments about what the pandemic has done, but the one thing that became clear through the pandemic lockdown periods is that staying connected with people, people that care for us and we care about was one of the few things that made you wake up with hope in your heart and looking at the light and saying that's not a train at the end of the tunnel and that connectivity was possible only because of this wonderful innovation that we call the internet. In some ways, I also think of it as war, and how people have come through wars where they've set a beacon of hope outside of themselves and in the future and focused on that to get through the travails of war itself. So that beacon becomes a centering mechanism to focus their hopes. And I think we've been able to successfully do that in many parts of the world, if not most parts of the world, that have the internet tone, so to speak. But I think, in looking back and certainly looking ahead, we have gone through seminal shifts and we will recognize them for what they are, but only in the rear view mirror. We'll be able to connect the dots.

Ashwin Rangan: 9:04

Look back on this period and see several things. We went into lockdown in different parts of the world at different speeds, but if I think about the US in large measure, between the 1st of March 2020 and the 20th of March 2020, in that three-week period, this nation with practically every kind of worker, whether it were government or a startup or somewhere in between in the spectrum we went into lockdown mode with technologies that enabled us to suddenly separate ourselves from a physical location and yet not let the work rhythms fall apart or sort of lay somewhere along the ground as we go forward. Instead, it all became cohesive. We continue to make this great nation and the economy work well and operate, and in fact we innovated and accelerated many things, using the pandemic lockdown as though it were an accelerant all by itself. So the necessary conditions were all there, but for some reason there was no forcing function, and the pandemic has proven to be a forcing function to accelerate this move towards embracing things electronic and digital and becoming more virtual. So I think that has been a good part of what happened here from a technical perspective. But there is a different aspect which is not as positive for me, and that is because of so much that went on concurrently, outside of merely getting connected with technology and staying abreast of what's going on.

Ashwin Rangan: 10:53

The amount of information and the seeming differences between bits of information, literally on the heels of a day or two days or a week, contradicting what was previously said has led to an erosion of trust in institutions, so it's hard to look at something and say, yeah, that's right and move ahead. Instead, there is now a tendency to check and verify before accepting what is coming our way, and it has also permeated a lot of other layers of society because, you know, I think of, for instance, inviting friends over now that I'm vaccinated. But the first thought that comes to my mind is will I be a threat to them if they're not vaccinated? Am I an asymptomatic carrier? So should I ask them are they vaccinated? But in the asking of that question, will there be a breach of trust?

Ashwin Rangan: 11:51

So trust is something that has gotten fractured in unexpected ways as a result of the pandemic, and I think we had certain trust anchors prior, from a society perspective, that now need to get reestablished. So in many ways, I think the pandemic, while it's accelerated certain things forward Remarkably, perhaps between five and ten years of acceleration occurred within a ten, twelve month period. Here, in other ways, we have to go through a healing period where we rediscover how to reestablish those trust anchors that we took for granted previously and start to use them as the pillars on which we can build our lives back fuel.

Tim Crawford: 12:35

It seems like we could spend a whole episode just talking about that, just talking about building that trust back in how technology comes, infuses, its way Through that process. But you talk about this acceleration. You talk about how things are accelerating coming out of the pandemic. Maybe you could take it a step further. What are some examples of things that you're thinking about? It's things that you're seeing as an acceleration are being accelerated coming out of the pandemic.

Ashwin Rangan: 13:06

Let me start at the top, in terms of the internet itself and the user base of the internet. Give or take. We went into the pandemic march of last year with about four point four to four point five billion people Using the internet and, because of the need to stay connected that I spoke about, in many regions of the world, people who previously had no access to technology were prioritizing access to technology. Lower down Made the effort to actually get access to technology and hop onto the internet In larger numbers than I would have expected, given the prevalent conditions, over the last twelve to fifteen months, the net of which is that over the last twelve to fifteen months depending on how you measure it, the time period and the number of people somewhere between three hundred and fifty and five hundred million people got on to the internet, so that we're now approaching five billion people on the internet. From a user base perspective, that to me is a remarkable leap forward in spite of the prevalent conditions. So that's one layer at which I think about it. The second is when I think of essential services and essential information. It is rare for us now to have a conversation over the wall with a neighbor to figure out what's going on, and instead it's quite common in all parts of the world to jump on the internet and source information from a couple, three different locations. Read for ourselves and inform ourselves about what's going on, while watching news, of course, on the TV. Those are the two primary means through which we're consuming information, arriving at conclusions, if you will.

Ashwin Rangan: 14:47

A third that I think about is the pandemic forced us to stay indoors for our own safety and security, and therefore it increased the interaction with e-commerce provisioning sources, whether it were for day to day groceries or shopping online for a pair of shoes or whatever the case may be, so that we became much more comfortable dealing with e-commerce and, in turn, those e-commerce suppliers became less friction, if you will, so that those interactions became more fluid.

Ashwin Rangan: 15:23

It's now easy to swipe a card. Have the card be remembered, so that the next interaction you have with an e-commerce source if it's a regular source you don't go through the setup mechanism, you don't go through the mechanism of paying for it. It's all already there and all you're doing is interacting with the catalog and asking for what you want, and the rest of it magically happens in the background. So those are just examples of how things have changed quite remarkably over the last 15 months, and I do believe that these are irreversible trends in that, post the pandemic, regardless of which region of the world you're talking about, people will continue to use these as methods of convenience, even though they may have alternatives.

Tim Crawford: 16:07

I find that that I'm already changing my behavior. One of those changes is I don't carry cash in my wallet, and haven't for a year. I haven't had the need for it. I wear an Apple Watch and I actually use Apple Pay on my Apple Watch to pay for most things, and that's something that maybe I would do here and there in the past. But Now it would feel very weird to use cash. But, as when you talk about something that I want to kind of delve a little further into, you talk about how the internet has become accessible to folks, but at the same time, the pandemic has shown us that there are a lot of folks that don't have access to the internet still. How do you see that changing and evolving?

Ashwin Rangan: 16:55

There are a few vectors that I'd like to talk about here. It's not a singular thing. You know, while there is pride in us as a human race looking at 5 billion people, we also have to look in the mirror and say there are 3 billion people who today do not have access to the internet for a variety of reasons. So what are those reasons? The first of them is there is a basic layer of power that is required for any of these things to happen. So do they live in a place where there is power and there is innovation around the world on how to get power? You know, I often cite the example of Malawi, where it's one of the poorest regions in eastern Africa, where people have innovated with bicycles. They've created a paddling system with the back wheel of a bicycle, so when you put it on a stand that elevates the back wheel, there is sufficient wind and breeze power that it generates power enough to charge cell phone. So, using that, they're seeking the internet signal, so to speak. Well, there is an infrastructure issue, because there isn't that ubiquity of bandwidth in Malawi. So there are enterprising entrepreneurs who are launching fleets of low-Earth orbit satellites, so that by this time in 2025, the expectation is that there will be 25,000 such very small low-Earth orbit satellites which, across that constellation, will provide coverage to 95% of the Earth's landmass. So now, if you have power, you have the quote-unquote internet tone and the local providers of telephony are providing smartphones, then you have access to the internet. Which then leaves a last challenge where we do play a role from an ICANN perspective, and that is do the people know the language of the internet in the scripted form? So, if you think about it, the internet began with Latin scripted characters because it was sort of innovated in English, so to speak. So the Latin scripted characters were natural to the internet when it started. But over the last many years we have taught the internet. Icann has been very instrumental in this, in teaching the internet other scripts. So today, for instance, you could resolve a URL at the top bar with a right-to-left scan of the Arabic or Chinese characters or Japanese and Korean characters.

Ashwin Rangan: 19:44

And now we are working with many regions in India which have different scripts. There are a dozen to 20 different scripts in India. So Gurmukhi is a script that is used in the Punjab. Devanagari is the native script of both Nepal and Northern India for writing Hindi. Tamil is a completely different script in the southern part of India, but each of these pockets is representative of a population which is educated but not English literate. So they're educated and literate in their local scripted language, but not necessarily in English.

Ashwin Rangan: 20:20

But each time one of these languages sunrises, you have a mass that comes onto the internet. So if I speak of the state from which I hail my ancestry is from a state called Karnataka, in the southern part of India there are 25 million people, give or take, who are very literate in a language called Kannada, whose script is unique unto itself. But the moment we make Kannada a script available on the internet, 25 million people have access to the internet, which they previously didn't, because they didn't know the English language. Even though they had a smartphone and they could speak on it, they didn't have the ability to jump onto the internet. So those, to me, are new things that are happening which are quite remarkable.

Tim Crawford: 21:04

And you're talking about more than just translation here, oh, absolutely.

Ashwin Rangan: 21:08

This is the ability to enter a URL itself in a different scripted language with which you are familiar and have that resolve on the back end to a website to provide you content in the language of your choice.

Tim Crawford: 21:23

That seems like an incredible opportunity to open up the world to these people. I mean 25 million people, which is a lot of people to begin with, but 25 million people kind of live in somewhat of their own microcosm and now you've just opened up the world to them.

Ashwin Rangan: 21:40

That's right, and if you think about that in the context of 40 languages, you've got a billion people who now can access the internet, and that number of five billion gets pushed to six billion and we're closer to the goal of everybody having an internet.

Tim Crawford: 21:52

So if we kind of bring it down to a slightly smaller population, and that being of the CIO themselves, you know, when you think about the talent pipeline of the CIO of the future, what comes to mind for you?

Ashwin Rangan: 22:08

You know, multiple dimensions come strikingly fast and through. For me, one is the need for more emphasis on STEM education at the lower reaches of the educational system. First, so that the enthusiasm for the discipline of getting into stem is Infused early on the curiosity, the critical thinking needs, so that that pipeline starts to get filled out. There is also the need to bridge the gap, so to speak, between the tech speak and the true English language. What do you mean by that? You know, when you think about Conversations that you have with technology people, it seems like inside baseball at times, because there is their language which is unique unto itself, as though it were in fact a scripted, grammatically correct language and quite different from the English language. So oftentimes you need this technology whisperer in between who can speak both languages and convey it in terms that the other Person can understand. I think that is an art form which, as a very senior executive yourself, you will understand, because there are those that seem to have the ability to speak both languages and be fluent in both and have the ability to convey the most important points quickly, so that their case is made, so to speak, whether it's a business case for the technologist to make with the business people or it's a technology case For the business folks to make.

Ashwin Rangan: 23:48

From a requirements perspective, I think that art form is something that we're not seeing as much supply of, so that technology Executive that you're seeking becomes harder to find.

Ashwin Rangan: 24:00

So, at the bottom end, is the pure technologists and the shortage and supply and at the top end, it's that technologist who has the ability to speak the Bridge language and be the whisperer between the divorced worlds, if you will, and bring them together so that there is that commonality and that common ground for a dialogue. So I think those are important and will become critical as we move forward, because, on the one hand, you've got Business is getting excited about the potential for technology and, on the other hand, you've got technologists becoming even more narrowly focused. Where you've got the AI expert, who's different from the machine language expert? Who's different from the robotics expert, who's different from the robotic process automation expert, and so on and so forth. So these narrow, micro focuss Experts they speak their languages, whereas the business folk are interested in how can you make this work for me, what can I get out of it and how can it improve my productivity and my efficiency?

Tim Crawford: 25:06

You know, bringing it full circle, ashwin. It kind of goes back to what you were saying about ways right Before you get in the car to go to work. You're not thinking about all the underlying technologies that go together to make the product work.

Ashwin Rangan: 25:21

You're thinking about how you can use it in a meaningful way, exactly all I'm interested in is and exactly what time Am I likely to get to work and with what probability? How did you make it happen? Did you mesh network it? Did you get real-time feedback along the way? Was that a duck? I don't know and I don't care.

Tim Crawford: 25:39

But you know, I have to say, you live in Los Angeles, so you know all bets are off to begin with when it comes to traffic. Indeed, indeed. One last thing you know, as we kind of wrap on this episode, you know who are those CIOs of the future. Then, from your perspective, I mean, it seems like a tall order to bridge that gap, to bring those divorced languages, as you said, together. Who are those CIOs of the future and how do we kind of bridge that gap?

Ashwin Rangan: 26:08

You know, if I think back to Greco-Roman periods, there was the Socratic School and the Platonic School, where it was dialogues and discussions that led to the education of people. You had Socratic conversations and the Platonic conversations were very much about questions and answers. If you will, I think there is a strong need for that as we move forward. Where, deliberately, executives, particularly those that are in the technology business, make the time engage with youngsters in universities so that the bottom end of the funnel, if you will, is being fed well, so that it starts to get, you know, sort of to the top end of the funnel too. Where senior executives are also having similar conversations amongst themselves, particularly in the technology domain, but talking about the context in which they operate, not the content that they bring forth, but the context in which they operate, the big picture, bringing that big picture constantly back into focus, so that it's not technology discussions that are occurring when it's a business discussion with technology in the background, fueling, perhaps enabling, certainly, what's being done in the context of business. Continually having that mindfulness to have those kind of conversations starts to infuse the sense that this is the way it ought to be, as opposed to the other, where the other is a natural saying.

Ashwin Rangan: 27:49

This is how I was schooled. Let me continue to go down the same pathway, because this was what I was taught. But when you think back about what I was taught, you know, if I were to graduate from an electrical engineering and computer science background, my professor spoke electrical engineering and computer science. They did not speak business. So somehow we have to create this, because this is that new domain that we're looking for. This is the new domain that will be, and therefore we have to ask of ourselves as executives how do we bring the next generation forward so that they fill the void that we will likely leave behind, where they are fluent in the language of both worlds and are expressive and communicative in terms that are understood in both worlds?

Tim Crawford: 28:35

Love it. Ashwin, we're going to have to leave it right there. Thank you for taking part in today's episode. Thank you so much. This was such a pleasure Thank you For more information on the CIO in the know podcast. Visit us online at CIO in the knowcom. You can also find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Please subscribe and thank you for listening.