Building an IT foundation to support rapid business growth

Veteran CIO helps IT scale up to meet the needs of a growing business

When it comes to customer success, the sale of a product is just the first step in a proactive journey to ensure that customers derive value from the product and achieve the outcomes they expected. The end goal is long-term customer retention and loyalty. As a pioneer in the market, Gainsight wrote the book on customer success, with a platform that helps businesses ensure their customers achieve results with the products they buy.

When Karl Mosgofian became Gainsight’s first CIO in 2018, he faced the challenge of leveling up a small IT operation to support an organization that was more than doubling in size due to the popularity of the customer success concept. “I joined Gainsight pretty early. We weren’t tiny, but there definitely was not an IT department. It was really fun to be creating something new,” recalled Mosgofian.

Keeping a light hold on the IT reins

As he took the first steps to building up the IT function, Mosgofian was met with a typical start-up environment where each department was managing its own technology needs. Mosgofian knew this would be difficult to scale as the organization grew, but his 30 years of IT experience told him to take a careful approach to corralling all these independent applications.

Mosgofian explained his pragmatic leadership approach: “I’d much rather have a collaborative, constructive relationship with people than come in and say that I have to own everything. I think you can have a federated IT environment and still have things work.” He added, “When you start getting into turf wars and politics and saying, ‘No, I should own this,’ it doesn’t lead anywhere good.”

Building up the team with Info-Tech support

Another critical element in Mosgofian’s approach to formalizing and standardizing the young IT organization was Info-Tech Research Group's IT research and advisory services. “As we’ve gone from a 500-person company to a 1,300-person company, we’ve had to get more organized, create processes and policies, and move up the classic maturity curve. Info-Tech has been a great partner in that,” he explained.

In particular, Mosgofian leaned on Info-Tech resources to build up his team: “Info-Tech has this huge library of resources, which has tremendous value to someone who is new to their role. They’ll use the full breadth of everything Info-Tech brings to the table. It’s been a critical piece to growing the team.”

“Info-Tech has this huge library of resources, which has tremendous value to someone who is new to their role. They’ll use the full breadth of everything Info-Tech brings to the table. It’s been a critical piece to growing the team.”
- Karl Mosgofian, CIO, Gainsight

Guiding strategy with concrete data

As Mosgofian developed his IT strategy, he began using Info-Tech’s CIO Business Vision diagnostic program. The internal survey-based tool measures and analyzes the company’s satisfaction with IT, identifying strengths and weaknesses and guiding strategic focus. The first year’s scores provided a benchmark that Mosgofian has used in subsequent surveys to measure the IT department’s progress over time.

“What I love the most is that the survey summary gives you a heatmap of what the most important things are to your executives and how well you do them. This helps us put IT resources in the right place because, at the end of the day, we’re here to serve the business. To me, the CIO Business Vision diagnostic survey is absolutely invaluable,” said Mosgofian.

Doubling down on collaboration

The Info-Tech survey supports Mosgofian’s leadership philosophy of a culture built on trust and collaboration. Soliciting feedback from the organization and acting upon the results has helped align IT with the business in a strategic way. “That’s part of the trust equation. It strengthens the relationship because we create a feedback loop between our team and the business. And that’s super valuable,” explained Mosgofian.

Looking ahead, Mosgofian believes a collaborative approach will serve IT well as departments across the organization eagerly seek to leverage emerging technologies like generative AI: “CIOs are going to have to live with a more federated world where even less technology is within their direct control. We will need to be coordinators rather than owners of technology at our companies – we need to embrace that.”

“CIOs are going to have to live with a more federated world where even less technology is within their direct control. We will need to be coordinators rather than owners of technology at our companies – we need to embrace that.”
- Karl Mosgofian, CIO, Gainsight

The future is exponential

Viewing AI and other emerging technologies through his pragmatic lens, Mosgofian knows it’s important to get past the hype to find the real value: “As technology leaders, we have to keep a level head. AI is not going to be the right tool for every job. We’ve got to do the hard work of rolling up our sleeves and figuring out where it fits, where it adds the most value, and where the investments make sense.”

Mosgofian notes that Info-Tech’s Exponential IT research framework, which outlines principles for extracting value from emerging technology, offers a useful approach to managing the rapid pace of innovation: “The Exponential IT framework is excellent. It gives my team a rallying cry and a way to think about the disparate things that we’re doing, how they connect together, and how they support this rapidly growing technology environment in a rapidly growing company.”

Summing it up, Mosgofian concluded, “We’ve got to be light on our feet, agile, and ready to react quickly to changes so that we can help our businesses thrive and take full advantage of all these great technologies that are coming.”

“The [Info-Tech] Exponential IT framework is excellent. It gives my team a rallying cry and a way to think about the disparate things that we’re doing, how they connect together, and how they support this rapidly growing technology environment in a rapidly growing company.”
- Karl Mosgofian, CIO, Gainsight