11/26/2018
By Peter High. Published on Forbes
Reinsurance Group of America (RGA) is a $13 billion dollar global life and health reinsurance entity based in St Louis, Missouri. A few years ago, the company developed a subsidiary called RGAX that is part innovation lab and part venture arm, focused on transformative initiatives. On its own site, RGAX is noted as “embracing the talent, resources, and more than 40 years of insight and innovation experience. RGAX partners with carriers and entrepreneurs to fuse industry expertise and outside capabilities.”
Two years ago, when RGA sought a leader of this function, they elected to elevate the chief information officer of the company, Mark Showers. He led RGA’s IT team for more than seven years, and, as such, knew the business inside and out. As RGAX would require defining areas ripe for transformation and build an ecosystem in the start-up and venture world to help deliver that. In this interview, he shares insights from his current role, how his time as CIO helped provide him the wherewithal to take it on, and as well as a variety of other topics.
(This is the 41st article in the “Beyond CIO” series. To read through past interviews with executives from companies like Waste Management, Biogen, Allstate, Aetna, Marsh & McLennan, and BMO Financial Group, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please follow me on Twitter @PeterAHigh.)
Peter High: You work for a group called RGAX, a wholly owned subsidiary and a transformation engine of Reinsurance Group of America. Could you describe the mission of RGAX?
Mark Showers: RGAX was established roughly three and a half years ago. At a core business level, the fundamental driver was to create a new and diversified set of earning streams for RGA. Specifically, it was designed to create earning streams within the health and life sectors that are outside of our core reinsurance business. We see ourselves as a mission-driven organization, and the mission we established at RGAX is to help people live longer, healthier, and more financially secure lives. While this broadens our base beyond the typical business of RGA, it is still targeted at the areas of life and health.
High: How do you think about the topic of innovation, and how do you direct the team to focus on the various areas in which it is involved?
Showers: RGA is built on innovation so we want to make it clear that RGAX is not the only place where innovation occurs. Because of this, we use the term ‘transformation’ to describe the work of RGAX. There are four pillars or lines of business where we focus our efforts: data analytics, digital distribution of life insurance, consumer engagement, and insurance services. We pursue each of these in three different ways:
To read the full article, please visit Forbes.
By Peter High. Published on Forbes.
Next month, Sasan Goodarzi will become the Chief Executive Officer of Intuit. He once made his ambition to rise to the CEO role clear to his superiors, and as they cottoned to the idea and more officially put in him the succession path for CEO, he was exposed to each business unit of the company. He notes in my interview with him that, though it was important for him to make his hopes clear, he also gained even more mightily when he focused on more on enjoying the jobs he took on for the opportunity and learning that each offered.
His three most recent roles have been Executive Vice President of Small Business, Executive Vice President and General Manager of TurboTax, and Chief Information Officer. Interestingly, he counts the CIO role as his most exciting. The reasons include the expansive view of the business that the CIO role offers, but also ability to influence the next generation of technology change that will position the company for growth.
Among the special attributes that Goodarzi holds dear, and will remain areas of emphasis in his administration will be the company’s culture and its focus on customers. He believes strongly that a fulfilling work environment yields better results for customers.
In this interview, we cover his preparations for the CEO role, how he sees the company growing in his tenure, the role that artificial intelligence will play, and a variety of other topics.
(To listen to an unabridged podcast version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 40th article in the “Beyond CIO” series. To read through past interviews with executives from companies like Waste Management, Biogen, Allstate, Aetna, Marsh & McLennan, and BMO Financial Group, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please follow me on Twitter @PeterAHigh.)
Peter High: In early 2019, you will ascend to the Chief Executive Officer role of Intuit. Congratulations. Can you talk about the point at which you found out about this news?
Sasan Goodarzi: I found out about the news several days before it went public. Intuit is an incredible company, and to have the opportunity to move into [outgoing CEO] Brad Smith’s role is truly an honor. Over the past eleven years, Brad has done a remarkable job of positioning the company for an incredible next chapter, so he deserves a great deal of credit for his leadership. Building leadership capabilities and mobility are core competencies for Intuit. Although this announcement is a visible one, we are extremely deliberate about ensuring that we have successors for key roles across the company. In his eighth year, Brad notified the board that he would be stepping down at some point in the future. The board and Brad agreed to the rigorous process of hiring an outside firm to look at external leaders, assess leaders within the company, and determine what the company needed in its next chapter. While that was taking place, Brad chose to do what we do across the company. Several leaders, including myself, switched businesses a few years ago. I have had the privilege of being in all of the company’s businesses, including the CIO role. The point of this switch was to ensure that we had strong internal candidates who could take over when Brad was ready to step down.
If you’re not thinking like a software company, you’re already behind.
Software companies focus on codifying and then scaling everything they do. To do that, business subject-matter expertise and technical expertise must become one in the same, converging once siloed disciplines.
In a recent interview with Metis Strategy, Cathy Bessant, Bank of America’s Chief Operations & Technology Officer, explained that convergence must apply to all companies, saying, “Technology has completely changed the notion of business integration. You cannot say the business is technology or technology enables the business—they are one and the same.”
Your company will not be able to compete at scale and speed if delivery teams have not gone beyond typical IT-business hand offs to true convergence. This convergence extends beyond obvious points of technology dependence, such as an eCommerce website or managing internal productivity tools; it is happening everywhere.
“Metis Strategy helped us make big decisions on a number of key initiatives. Their real-world experience coupled with their ability to perform deep analysis gave our organization confidence in our new direction.” – Gary Reiner
Still, many companies struggle with where to start on this transformation. Business function leaders often communicate high-level goals that are difficult for technology leaders to translate into concrete actions, and technology leaders often approach a problem by addressing the technology first, and the business outcome second. They end up six months into a “digital transformation” effort with a disparate collection of projects, but no cohesive sense of prioritization or interdependence to create a more tech-driven future. The solution to bridge this gap between strategy and execution is for IT leaders to be better collaborators and communicators, and to understand the business and customer needs as well as their business partners do. But that is easier said than done. Start by rooting your IT plans in a well-defined business capabilities map, and then transform the way that IT goes to market by driving cross-functional operating model convergence in the long term.
Business capabilities are an integrated set of processes, technologies, and deep expertise that are manifested as a functional capacity to capture or deliver value to the organization. They outline “what” a business does, as opposed to “how” a business does it. They are the definition of your organizational skills, best represented in a landscape map that allows you to evaluate the full spectrum of capabilities against each other. Business capability maps are not just about technology; these tools are designed to improve an organization’s holistic ability to improve a business outcome, and in many cases, it is not the technology that is the constraint, but rather a process, skill, or policy issue. Consider the process for onboarding a new employee. Strong onboarding capabilities make the experience seamless for the new hire. From the second an employee steps into the office, they might:
• Be welcomed at his/her desk by a hiring manager, who provides a building access card and computer • Be given orientation training videos on the company’s mission, security protocols, etc. • Be added to email distribution lists, Slack channels, file access on shared drives, and to recurring meetings related to his/her role • Be coached through benefits enrollment for 401(k), health-savings accounts, and vacation accrual
Business capability maps are designed to improve an organization’s holistic ability to improve a business outcome.
There are various people, process and technology components behind each of the steps in the employee’s journey. However, the employee does not—and should not—feel the transition between, in this case, HR, facilities, and IT. If the desired outcome for this capability is to provide a seamless employee experience where the employee is productive in less than three days, the different functional areas should integrate their strategic plans to meet that objective. This is often challenging in an organization that thinks and acts in functional silos, but a capability-driven approach will bridge that gap.
Many organizations have never formally documented their business architecture and therefore struggle to understand business priorities. To bridge that gap, IT will generally dispatch enterprise architects or business relationship managers to form bonds with functional leaders, understand their current processes, and identify the pain points. As a result, they map the business capabilities. This exercise elevates technology leaders and their business partners to common ground, on which both can add value to the conversation: one around business process improvement, and the other around technology enablement. We generally suggest no more than four levels of cascading capabilities, with the fourth level most resembling the associated process. Keep in mind that business capability maps are not organizational charts. By definition, they are anchored by the business outcome, with many functional areas converging to realize that outcome.
Once you define your capabilities, prioritize them to help provide strategic direction to the organization. Not all capabilities are of equal importance to your ability to compete, so you need to ensure you are not boiling the ocean. While there is more nuance in practice, for simplicity, capabilities fall on a scale of achieving competitive parity through sustaining competitive advantage, and it is important to evaluate which are the most important to your business’ success. This segmentation will not change tremendously year by year, unless there are major shifts in the competitive forces at play.
• Competitive advantage: Capabilities that—currently, or in the future—are critical to creating or sustaining your market position in a fundamentally unique way. Customers will hire you because of these capabilities, your employees will love you for them, and your investors will celebrate the cost effectiveness that they bring. For example, you may be able to segment customers and tailor offerings in a way that economizes your marketing spend far better than a competitor. Or, if your competitor competes on price, you may compete on amazing customer service. Thus, you might prioritize your capability on managing customer cases. To be clear, further segmentation is needed within the “Competitive Advantage” bucket; remember: not everything is created equal.
• Parity: Capabilities that maintain customer expectations and operational needs. You don’t lose (but also probably don’t gain) fans because of these capabilities. For example, your “process payroll” capability probably needs to stay at current levels, but it does not need to be the target of heavy investment and prioritization. This doesn’t mean you don’t invest in these areas. For example, Uber uses Stripe to instantly pay drivers, giving them cash in hand each day, but Lyft also offers this capability. Uber needs to continue to invest in this area to stay at parity, in the case that, say, Lyft started predicting revenue for drivers and giving them advances. Still, if the offerings are similar, they may not be a deciding factor for whether a driver goes with Uber or Lyft.
Once you segment and prioritize your capabilities, you should evaluate the current state maturity for each capability, as well as the target future state. Evaluating maturity levels is as much art as it is science. As a result, the defining of maturity levels cannot be done independently, and often the conversation around why something is or is not mature is as valuable as whatever score you give yourself. We recommend undertaking this exercise with cross-functional groups that have an understanding of the capability from different perspectives. We often evaluate capability maturity as a function of process definition, degree of automation, organizational reach, and the measurement of the business outcome. This evaluation will influence the prioritization of near-term investments and will not always coincide 1:1 with the segmentation mentioned above. For example, if you have low maturity in a “parity” capability, you would still want to invest in that capability to get it up to par.
Enhancing a capability may require investments in people, processes, or technology. Therefore, a converged team of business function experts and technology leaders should jointly identify improvement activities. IT should lead in aligning the technology services (if your organization uses an ITSM approach) and technical architecture needed to enable these capabilities—but all in the context of how the business process may change. Once you have aligned your technical architecture, IT can identify gaps and redundancies. For example, if you have multiple applications supporting your “expense management” capability, you might opt to undertake a cost-benefit analysis of maintaining all of the applications. Conversely, you might discover you have a prioritized business capability of sales forecasting without a technology architecture supporting or enabling that capability. You might identify this an area where a new technology services is needed to provide data analytics to the sales operations team. Once developed, capability maps can bridge the gap between strategy and execution by driving organizational alignment around where investments are needed. For example, we recently helped a growing technology company through this journey. The IT organization had been viewed as an order-taker, and it often struggled to get budget consideration for more strategic projects that would add value to the business, but the CIO was intent on evolving the organization into a more strategic partner. The CIO knew that the convergence of business process improvement and technology enablement was key, so the team worked closely with business function leaders to develop prioritized capability maps across the organization. Then they leveraged the capability maps to identify areas in greatest need of investment, and in turn forced trade-off decisions that resulted in a meaningful prioritization of focus areas that galvanized the team. The converged business and technology teams, oriented around shared business outcomes, had threaded the needle from strategy to execution. In the end, one of the business partners said, “We have tried to do this many times over the past six years, and this is by far the best it has ever gone.” That is how IT goes to market differently, and wins.
11/19/2018
By Peter High. Published in Forbes.
Shaleen Devgun is a remarkable innovator in the chief information officer community. For the past three years, he has been the CIO of $4 billion Schneider National, a trucking and logistics company based in Green Bay, Wisconsin. You might suspect that running IT for a trucking company based in Green Bay might be an enormous challenge. His burden is a shade lighter inasmuch as two other members of the executive committee at Schneider National are former CIOs, including the company’s CEO Chris Lofgren. (In the past, I interviewed Lofgren about his rise from CIO to CEO.)
Moreover, he has taken a creative approach toward recruiting to his his humble city: he and his team work on tough problems. The logistics business has endless opportunities for greater efficiency and for revenue gains. Devgun’s Forbes CIO Innovation award was based upon his team’s work on a multivendor transportation marketplace with consumer grade tablets, Internet-of-Things devices, and apps. This is just one of several examples of the ideas that have led Devgun and others in the company to think of Schneider National as a technology company masquerading as a trucking company.
(To listen to an unabridged podcast version of this interview, please click this link. To read future articles like this one, please follow me on Twitter @PeterAHigh.)
Peter High: Please describe Schneider National’s business and your role as their Chief Information Officer.
Shaleen Devgun: Schneider National is one of the nation’s largest truckload carriers, and we are a leader in the transportation and logistics space. The breadth of our business is large as we serve our customers through a diverse set of offerings, from over-the-road [OTR] to intermodal, and we also have a healthy logistics business. I have been with the company for around a decade, and I am three years into the CIO role. As part of the executive team, I report to our President and CEO. In addition to my traditional CIO responsibilities, I have accountability for the business transformation, our logistics engineering efforts, and the corporate venturing around our technology.
11/13/2018
Dinu Parel has been named the new Chief Information Officer of Parker Hannifin Corporation, a Mayfield Heights, Ohio-based maker of motion and control technology products. Parel succeeds William Eline, who had been with the company for 40 years.
Prior to this role, Parel was CIO of Downers Grove, Illinois-based Dover Corporation, where he was the industrial conglomerate’s first ever CIO. I interviewed Parel earlier this year, in which he spoke about transforming IT from a traditional, back-office support function to an advisory function that helps drive business growth and innovative technologies such as Blockchain.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
11/12/2018
Ralph Loura joined Lumentum on October 22 as the company’s new chief information officer. Lumentum is a $1 billion revenue manufacturer of optical and photonic products enabling optical networking and commercial laser customers worldwide. Until recently he was the Chief Technology Officer of Rodan + Fields.
“Ralph brings unparalleled information technology experience from premier companies to Lumentum,” said Alan Lowe, President and CEO, Lumentum. “He has a true passion for problem solving and innovation and is an industry-recognized IT leader. I’m sure he will be a great fit at Lumentum, and I am pleased to have him join our leadership team.”
Seth Goldman was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, and throughout his life, he dreamed of ideas to pursue. That tendency was enhanced when he crossed paths with Yale School of Management Professor Barry Nalebuff while pursuing his graduate degree in business administration. The student impressed the professor with his insights, and his willingness to productively debate ideas in class. A couple of years after business school, Goldman went for a run in New York City, entered a convenience store, and despite his thirst, was not impressed by the usual suspect beverages on offer. He viewed this as an idea to explore. As it happened, Nalebuff was returning from India, where he had participated in a tea auction. The process had led him to think of how best to brand tea. The name Honest Tea came to him.
These dual epiphanies proved fortuitous, and eventually they went into business together. In this interview, Goldman tells his side of the story, including a bottling issue that brought the company to the brink of failure, the value the company derived out of using game theory when engaging with investors in the business, and how they maintained so much creative control even after Coca-Cola purchased the business.
Peter High: Can you talk about your relationship with Honest Tea co-founder Barry Nalebuff, who was your professor at the Yale School of Management? How did your relationship move from student-professor to start-up co-founders?
Seth Goldman: Because both my parents are professors, my family had rigorous academic discussions at the table when I was growing up. To many students, Barry was an intimidating presence, and there were stories of students who were brought to tears in his classroom. I was fortunate that the first course I took with Barry was on political and economic marketing, and having previously worked on presidential campaigns, that was in my wheelhouse. My first interactions with Barry came from a position of strength, and I had strong insights that gave him a positive impression. The next course I took with Barry was on competitive strategy, and similar to the first class, I had some creative ideas. In this course, I put together a business plan for something related to urinary tract infections [UTIs], which is obviously substantially different than my idea for Honest Tea. Barry thought my idea showed bright and creative thinking, and he appreciated the fact that I was not a pushover in the classroom. I believe having that strong presence and pushing back in the right way can make a strong impression, which it did for Barry.
11/06/2018
Seemantini Godbole has been named the next Chief Information Officer of Lowe’s Home Improvement. She will begin on November 12. She joins Lowe’s from Target Corporation, where she has worked for nearly nine years.
A press release from Lowe’s noted, “Godbole helped lead Target’s digital technology transformation, including the re-architecture of the company’s digital platforms, implementation of agile product management, and the introduction of technology for new customer experiences including mobile applications, buy online and pick up in-store programs, digital wallet, localized pricing, and customer loyalty and engagement offerings. Seemantini has led development of long-term technology roadmaps, portfolio planning and engineering, operational support functions and ecommerce platforms. She is passionate about enabling great customer service and developing top-notch technology teams.”
Marvin Ellison, Lowe’s president and CEO said, “Seemantini is a tremendous addition to the Lowe’s executive leadership team. She is a proven retail executive and brings to Lowe’s extensive expertise in transforming digital platforms to drive outstanding results by focusing on the technology needed to improve the customer and associate experience. I am confident Seemantini is the right leader to advance Lowe’s technology efforts for the future.”
11/05/2018
On October 28, IBM announced its intent to acquire Red Hat for $34 billion. This marked the largest software acquisition ever. Prior to announcement, I caught up with Red Hat Chief Information Officer Mike Kelly, who offered thoughts on the steps his team had undertaken to continue to improve Red Hat’s product (using a Red Hat-on-Red Hat program), to advise technology executives at various stages of leveraging open source technology, and in improving the overall operation. Clearly these are the sorts of improvements that helped make the company attractive to IBM.
Peter High: Could you describe your purview as the Chief Information Officer of Red Hat?
Mike Kelly: I am part of our executive team, and I have a variety of responsibilities relating to IT at Red Hat. The responsibilities are as follows:
10/29/2018
A few weeks ago, I co-hosted a meeting with Gamiel Gran of the venture capital firm, Mayfield Fund. It was held in Santa Monica, California, and it included a dozen leading CIOs from Greater Los Angeles. The CIOs offered thoughts on areas that have them excited and others that keep them up at night. Ultimately, there were five topics that rose to the top of the minds of the gathered CIOs:
Managing Through the Threat of Amazon
The breadth of Amazon’s reach and the threat that it will inevitably become broader still was of concern with the gathered executives. Retailers feel this most acutely, as one retail IT executive expressed, “If Amazon points their radar at us, we are in trouble.” But it is important to note that B2B companies such as industrials and OEMs are also concerned. One of the areas highlighted was B2B distribution. As their logistics and shipping capabilities grow, this could be a natural extension of their offering.
There is a general consensus that there is no way to “Amazon proof” one’s business but that it is important to continue to innovate and to develop an ecosystem of partners that will help bolster one’s self against the threat of Amazon or other digital native organizations for that matter.
