10/29/2018
By Peter High. Published on Forbes.
Arthur Hu joined Lenovo nine years ago after more than eight years as a consultant at McKinsey & Company. Hu ascended the ranks to become Chief Information Officer a bit more than two years ago while still in his 30s. In that role, leads the information technology function and business transformation activities for a Chinese company with major operations in the US and in a variety of other countries. As a Chinese-American who speaks fluent Mandarin, he leads a diverse team, and spends roughly half of his time in Beijing, and half of his time either in the United States or at other strategic locations for the company.
Hu pushes his IT leadership team to have a strong grasp of Lenovo’s strategy, what is happening in the broader industry, as well as to remain abreast of crucial technology trends in order to drive transformation. He also strives to be the company’s first and best customer, leveraging its technology, and providing feedback on its strengths and where it might improve.
Hu represents the CIO of the future, in many ways. His ability to work seamlessly across the two biggest economies, his ability to impact the company’s transformation and products, and his ability to master both strategy and tactics set him apart. He describes his journey and his methods herein.
(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: Could you describe your role as the Chief Information Officer of Lenovo?
Art Hu: As the CIO and business transformation leader at Lenovo, I have a dual role. I am responsible for keeping the business running and creating a strong employee experience, which involves our workspace and our private and public cloud. The second element of my position targets Lenovo’s business transformation. In this role, I focus on defining and evolving our business processes and models, which ultimately helps us serve our customers better and improve Lenovo’s competitiveness.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes.
10/23/2018
By Peter High. Published on Fobres.
Schneider National’s CEO Chris Lofgren describes the company’s relationship with innovation in the following way: “Innovation and technology are in our DNA. Our success and long-term success are dependent on aligning the flow of information through technology and making it available to people so they understand the implications of the decisions they make. That’s at the heart of operational excellence and who we really are.” Lofgren is a former chief information officer of the company. The current member of the team with that title is Shaleen Devgun. He and his team focus not only on ways to drive efficiency through the operation, but, importantly, they also focus on revenue-driving innovation, as well.
Case in point is the company’s In-Cab Telematics toolset. This is an area that has been core, largely driven through a partnership with Qualcomm that goes back multiple decades. Dependence on a single vendor was deemed too risky to be a sustainable model. Devgun and his team got to work on a a multivendor transportation marketplace with consumer grade tablets, Internet-of-Things devices, and apps. The results are noted below, and they are the basis for Devgun to be named a Forbes CIO Innovation Award winner.
Peter High: Please describe the innovative idea that you and your team in IT pursued. Please be specific, including the steps you undertook to implement the idea(s).
Shaleen Devgun: Schneider is a pioneer in telematics innovation, beginning in 1989, with its partnership with Qualcomm to create the first in-cab two-way satellite communication system. This innovation was a strategic differentiator for Schneider, but it eventually led to a critical operational risk: Dependence on one vendor. This monolithic, single purpose-built system was installed in tens of thousands of tractors and trailers, any transition would be difficult.
Schneider’s TECH team stepped in and mitigated this risk and simultaneously created a multivendor transportation marketplace. We replaced the purpose-built system with consumer grade tablets, Internet-of-Things devices and apps. Our transportation marketplace is filled with custom Schneider apps and apps from third-party providers.
10/22/2018
By Peter High. Published in Forbes.
Gartner Symposium was last week, and as they do each year at the event, the company has identified a top ten strategic technology trends for the year ahead. Gartner defines “strategic” as those technologies that will have significant disruptive potential over the next five years.” Here is a summary of the trends:
Nike’s Global CIO Jim Scholefield is leaving the company to join Merck as Chief Information and Digital Officer, effective Oct. 29.
Scholefield will be responsible for leading all aspects of information technology and digital strategy, including developing and implementing new and emerging technologies and capabilities to drive efficiencies, strengthen the security of the company’s infrastructure and support the company’s growth. He also will lead the development and innovation of digital strategy across the company to foster innovation.
Scholefield noted, “I’m honored and excited to have the opportunity to join Merck, a company that has made – and continues to make – a significant difference in the world. I look forward to contributing to the Executive Committee and to helping the company further succeed by driving industry-leading technology and digital capabilities across all aspects of the business.”
Shafiq Khan was remarkable digital leader at Marriott International. First as the Senior Vice President of eCommerce and then as the Senior Vice President of Channel Strategy and Distribution, he helped grow the company’s digital sales from $150 million to $15 billion. Under Khan’s watch, the company became one of the top-ten companies in digital sales in the United States.
A native of Pakistan, Khan would return frequently, and the state of the country’s education system for the poorest members of society were stark. Khan began to connect the dots between the work he did at Marriott and a way to help solve global literacy. Teach the World Foundation was born.
The company has developed digital tools to help teach those children who cannot afford basic education Pakistan, and the program has expended to Bangladesh, as well. Later this year, Malawi will be added as the third country. Khan makes the point that global literacy is not only a worthy undertaking to help the most vulnerable of the world’s citizens, but it should also have much broader economic and societal benefits. He describes his journey herein.
(To listen to a podcast version of this interview, please click this link. To read future articles like this one, please follow me on Twitter @PeterAHigh.)
Peter High: You are the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Teach the World Foundation. Could you describe the foundation and its mission?
Shafiq Khan: In a macro sense, our vision is to enhance human potential by furthering knowledge and learning, specifically by increasing literacy. Two out of seven people worldwide are not functionally literate, which is a huge cost for the world. To help minimize this issue, we decided to use our digital background to make a social impact on the world by enhancing human potential. Digital technology has clearly made a massive impact on every domain, and our world has changed as a result. However, this change has not translated effectively into the education space. Because education is a non-profit and non-competitive space, we have not seen digital technology leveraged there. Our mission is to establish and deploy models of literacy and learning effectively and with scale through the power of digital technology. We want to prove that we have a new way of learning that will address two massive issues that the world has.
To read the full article, please visit Fobres.
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.
10/15/2018
By Peter High. Published in Forbes
Kai-Fu Lee is a true citizen of the world. Born in Taiwan, he emigrated to and was educated in the United States (including earning a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon). He worked for four legendary technology companies: Apple, Silicon Graphics, Microsoft, and Google. At multiple of these companies, he worked in China, including leading Google’s efforts into China.
His time leading Google China was notable as it was a rare exception of an American company succeeding for a time, growing market share from nine to 24 percent between 2005 and 2009. He believes that if Google had remained steadfast in their pursuit of the Chinese market, the company would have been able to have its own piece in the overall Chinese puzzle. He left the company to found his venture capital firm Sinovation Ventures in September of 2009, and a few months later, Google closed shop in mainland China.
Lee has written a new book AI Superpowers. China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order, in which he describes China’s entrepreneurial rise, the parallel tracks that the US and China are on, and the difficulties companies from one country have in penetrating the other, the opportunity and the issues that artificial intelligence will lead to, and much more. Sinovation Ventures is a $2 billion fund, and a full third of that investment is in artificial intelligence. In this interview, he discusses themes from his book, his perspectives earned from having been a leader both in the US and in China, his investment philosophy, and especially artificial intelligence.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 28th interview in the IT Influencers series. To listen to past interviews with the likes of former Mexican President Vicente Fox, Sal Khan, Sebastian Thrun, Steve Case, Craig Newmark, Stewart Butterfield, and Meg Whitman, please visit this link.)
Peter High: In many ways, you personify what I and many others believe to be one of the key ingredients of America’s entrepreneurial spirit: the immigrant’s experience, which is fundamentally entrepreneurial. As a native of Taiwan, you were an immigrant to this country. You went to undergraduate and graduate school in the United States, and you worked for a number of iconic technology companies, such as Apple, Silicon Graphics, Microsoft, and Google. There was a time when people believed China lacked an entrepreneurial spirit to fully compete with the United States and Silicon Valley. That seems to have changed in recent years. As somebody who has spent time in both countries, could you talk about what has led to this dramatic growth of China’s entrepreneurial class?
Kai-Fu Lee: I believe a combination of factors has driven up the entrepreneurial spirit in China over the past twenty years. These factors are as follows:
There is a rapidly growing market with many business opportunities arising. The government has jumpstarted programs, such as the mass entrepreneurism and innovation plan, that are designed to reverse the traditional conservative mentality. Chinese entrepreneurs now have role models to look up to, such as Jack Ma, who was not a super genius with a Ph.D. from MIT, but instead, he was the boy next door who went to an ordinary school and could not get a job at Kentucky Fried Chicken. Jack went on to build the largest e-commerce empire in China based on inspiration.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
By Peter High. Published on Forbes
If you have sat on a flight or a train recently, and a neighbor pulled out their mobile phone to play a game, often the game of choice is Candy Crush, it seems. At its peak, the game boasted roughly 100 million users. Though the company has had other successes with new games, last week, it introduced Candy Crush Friends Saga as an enhanced version of the mega-hit.
The company behind Candy Crush is King. I recently caught up with King’ s CEO Riccardo Zacconi to discuss the new launch.
(To read future articles like this one, please follow me on Twitter @PeterAHigh.)
Peter High: Congratulations on the launch of the new Candy Crush Friends Saga. What is different in this version of the game from prior versions?
Riccardo Zacconi: We have made the game more beautiful with incredible 3D graphics. We have taken the best parts of the Candy Crush franchise games and brought them to the next level with Candy Crush Friends Saga. For the first time in the Candy Crush franchise, we brought the characters to life, giving them personality and background stories, that users will grow to know and love. The characters help you in the game by strategically throwing boosters into the game board to help beat blockers and allow you to level‐up more quickly, creating an authentic connection to the player.
Players can also unlock and collect new characters and use them as they advance in the game while also customizing their outfits. For the first time ever, the game taps into cultural moments with seasonal game updates. For example, a Dracula costume for one of the lead characters, Tiffi, is currently available for Halloween. A more rewarding game experience than ever, Candy Crush Friends Saga is filled with joy and constant sweet surprises.
10/08/2018
Kimberly Johnson joined Fannie Mae in 2006. As such, she was with the company when it went through its most trying time in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis. She was part of the team that led the company back from the brink in roles of increasing responsibility from Vice President of Capital Markets to Senior Vice President of the company’s Multifamily business unit to Chief Credit Officer to Chief Risk Officer.
In March of this year, she ascended to the role of Chief Operating Officer of Fannie Mae in March of this year. In that role, she is responsible for leading technology, data, enterprise models, operations, the enterprise program management office, and resiliency. Her varied and diverse experiences have aided her rise, and now that she has such a broad set of responsibilities, she has a broad ability to impact innovation within the company. She describes her journey and the path to innovation in this interview.
Peter High: Could you talk about your role as the Chief Operating Officer of Fannie Mae and the responsibilities the position entails?
Kimberly Johnson: The COO role that Tim Mayopoulos put together for me includes an interesting combination of responsibilities, such as overseeing Fannie Mae’s technology, operations, innovation, data, and strategic execution. This mix serves as a nice way to string together the full array of the functionality that we need to enable the business.
High: Was there a predecessor with this same job description, or were these a set of responsibilities that was brought together for the first time in the role created for you?
10/02/2018
BNY Mellon has named Sabet Elias as the company’s new Chief Technology Officer. He will report to the company’s chief information officer Bridget Engle, and he will serve on the firm’s Technology Executive Committee. Elias will be based in New York.
Engle noted, “Sabet is a talented technologist and brings to the bank a solid track record of building platforms. As we continue to shape our global technology agenda and improve resiliency, we need to add leadership talent with deep experience in technology to take us to the next level. Sabet has years of experience in financial services, plus deep management and technical expertise to help us navigate the future.”
