7/23/2018
By Peter High. Published on Forbes
General Electric has been in the news quite a bit in recent weeks for the many changes afoot there. A centerpiece of the change in recent years has been the move toward digitizing the business. Bill Ruh leads that transformation as CEO of GE Digital and as the Chief Digital Officer of General Electric. He has been one of the primary architects of a major cultural change that is afoot at the 126 year old company.
Ruh notes that digital transformations often fail due to a lack of focus on “soft” elements such as culture, leadership, and talent. He notes that it is essential to blend talent by bringing new people into the company who have digital experience while also retraining existing employees.
Ruh has developed three layers to the approach: GE for GE, GE for installed base customers, and GE for the industrial world. This ensures that GE is its own first customer of digital offerings, and then can take those offerings to existing companies and beyond. He highlights all of the above and more in this interview.
Peter High: Executing a digital transformation is certainly a challenge, and it is almost always a multi-year journey. Could you talk about the digital transformation that you lead at General Electric? Specifically, could you elaborate on where you have been, where you are, and where you are going on that journey?
Bill Ruh: When we started seven years ago, GE was an early mover into the digital space. We dove into it because we could see that our customers were starting to use the data off the machines that GE had. There was a recognition that going forward, you had to be the best at understanding this data, because you do not want your competition to be better. We are entering a world where selling the machine is one element, but anybody can take the information off the machine and provide insight. Because of this, you want to give the best insight to your customers. It was a simple thought process in the beginning, but it turned out to be relatively profound.
Throughout this journey, we have learned a couple of things. One is that from an outside perspective, we have come to believe that the business world is a series of dominoes. Every industry and sector will eventually be transformed by digital. Digital will be the critical cornerstone to providing value. We have seen that in retail, entertainment, telecommunications, among other industries. Specifically, we are now seeing it in the industrial sector. One of the first ones we believe is going to fall in a big way is the automotive industry. Specifically, software for autonomous driving is going to foundationally remake who buys cars, who sells cars, and what the business model is. As I mentioned, I believe this goes beyond automotive and that it is true of every industry that we serve. We believe digital and autonomous systems are going to be the center point of it whether that be for cars, power plants, rail yards, factories, and so on. We are entering a ten year period where the industrial sector is likely going to be the most interesting sector for digital. We were the first in the sector to make this move. We incubated it and we feel incredibly well positioned to be able to win both in the industries we serve as well as in this emerging world as a whole.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes.
7/16/2018
Article by Mary Pratt. Published on CIO.com.
This customer focus helps her and her technology team spot unmet customer needs that they then can work to fulfill. That’s how they came up with CBRE 360, and how they decided to acquire in 2017 two software companies providing software-as-a-service solutions that CBRE now offers to its own employees and its customers.
Peter High, president of the business and IT strategy firm Metis Strategy and author of Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation, says CIOs who are able to identify money-making opportunities put themselves in their customers’ positions.
“They need to be awake to the opportunities to use information and technology in ways that will have positive implications for existing and potential customers,” he adds.
To read the full article, please visit CIO.com.
By Peter High. Published on Forbes.
Jason Lish was recently promoted to Chief Information Officer of $2.3 billion Alight Solutions. As CIO, he is responsible for Alight’s overall digital, technology, enterprise risk and security strategy, and execution. Lish also leads the team charged with designing and developing Alight’s latest human-centric designs and advancements at the Alight Innovation Lab.
Lish’s career path is an unusual one, as he has spent most of his career in security, most recently as Chief Security Officer of Alight Solutions, a role he took on in July of 2017. In that role, he directed physical and cyber security initiatives including developing and enforcing security policies and strategies, establishing security standards and programs across the company, and focusing on increasing protections around digital and physical assets. Lish also oversaw client investigations and was responsible for monitoring information security risks overall. There are a number of reasons why CSOs (sometimes referred to as CISOs – chief information security officers) are not regularly called upon to take on CIO responsibilities, but chief among them is that CSOs, understandably, develop a risk mitigation and risk management orientation to such a strong degree, that they are believed to be ill-suited to the CIO role, which often has an innovation mandate, as is the case in Lish’s current role. By definition, innovation requires risk-taking. Alight Solutions’ assessment that he can successfully make the leap from CSO to CIO suggests that he is equipped to balance risk-taking and risk management appropriately.
One factor that has helped Lish’s growth in developing a broader perspective than the average CSO has been involved in advising other technology firms. He is an advisory board of member of Tigera, Inc., a provider of secure application connectivity for the cloud-native world; SecureCircle, which provides unstructured data security for cloud-first enterprises; and Privora, a mobile protection company. Though all three are in the security space, his role in each case is as an advisor to help each company grow and innovate.
When Gary Reiner was the chief information officer of General Electric for parts of two decades, ending in 2010, he had an unusual purview in that role even for today. He led mergers & acquisitions, sourcing, IT, operations, and quality teams for the company. Armed with an MBA from Harvard University, and having spent time as a partner at the consultancy, Boston Consulting Group, he brought an unusual degree of business savvy to the role of CIO.
Since then, Reiner has made the unusual leap from CIO to venture capital, joining the growth equity firm, General Atlantic immediately after his tenure at General Electric. In that role, he has joined the boards of a number high growth companies (Box, Mu Sigma, Appirio, SnapAv), while also joining the boards of mature companies such as Citigroup and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Thus he has a deep well of knowledge of what the buyers of enterprise technology (CIOs) want in the technology they seek, and he also can advise mature companies on how to borrow some of the magic of start-ups while counseling start-ups on how to mature as they grow.
Reiner also sees the CIO role maturing, as well. He believes it will become more strategic as software continues to eat the world, and in fact, he believes that the rapid production of software at scale will become increasingly important among CIOs, as well. In this interview, he offers a wealth of recommendations for CIOs, offered from the various experiences he has had in the world of technology.
To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link.
Peter High: You are an Operating Partner at General Atlantic [GA] and part of their Resources Group. Could you talk about your purview in that role?
Gary Reiner: My responsibility is to look at technology companies where technology is the strategy and to become an advocate internally to partner with them. In many cases, if we do partner with them, I stay involved by joining the board to try to help them grow. We are a growth-oriented private equity firm, that is our mantra, and therefore what I try to do is centered around helping them grow faster than they otherwise would.
7/09/2018
Tom Keiser has been the CIO of two multi-billion dollar corporations: L Brands for five and a half years, and Gap, Inc. for four years. After his second CIO post, he was promoted to Executive Vice President of Global Product Operations for Gap where he was responsible for building a seamless inventory operating model and technology platform to deploy in each global brand of the company. The objective of seamless inventory was to significantly reduce stranded inventory and improve margin for each of the company’s global brands by leveraging advanced analytics to better plan, buy, allocate, replenish, and price product across all markets and channels.
Following this experience, he decided to try a familiar role in a very different setting: in May of 2016, he became CIO of Zendesk, the roughly half a billion dollar revenue provider of a customer service and engagement platform. After a bit more than two years in that role, he was promoted to chief operating officer of the company while retaining his IT strategy. Now he is responsible for IT, security and compliance, enterprise data and analytics, product technology operations, and go-to-market, among other items. He describes his current post, his career journey, and the trends that particularly excite him as he looks to the future in this expansive interview.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link).
Peter High: You are the Chief Operating Officer of Zendesk. Could you provide a brief overview of Zendesk’s business?
Tom Keiser: Zendesk is a dedicated customer service and engagement platform that is focused on customers and how customers want to interact with the businesses that they do business with. We were founded nearly eleven years ago and started off as a company primarily focused on digital, e-commerce, and [small and medium sized] businesses. We have grown into what is now a $500 million company and we are rapidly expanding into larger enterprises
High: Can you talk about your role as Chief Operating Officer? What is within your purview?
Keiser: I stepped into this role this past August after serving as the CIO for approximately a year and a half. Overall, my role is a combination of operations, go-to-market, and customer-facing functions. I still maintain many of my CIO responsibilities including the [overall] IT function, security and compliance analytics, all the business analytics we run the business on, as well as our tech-ops organization, which is the underpinnings of all our products. Additionally, as I moved into the COO role, I took over our go-to-market functions, which is our sales operation, as well as our customer experience organization.
High: Zendesk went public a few years back, after having grown dramatically over the years prior. Could you talk about the significant changes that have occurred since you joined the company a little over two years ago?
Keiser: As companies move out of the startup mode, go through the IPO, and then go public, building out their capabilities in the process, you go through evolutions just like everything does as you grow up. My time at Zendesk has been about putting down a foundation for us to be able to grow unimpeded. This involves making sure that we have the right processes, technologies, and organizational constructs to be able to evolve and grow.
The world of customer service that we are in changes dramatically every year. People’s expectations continuously advance in terms of what they expect from the businesses that they interact with. While you can have a nice left to right roadmap, the reality is you have got to keep adjusting. When you are growing as quickly as we are, and you are in a space that is growing and changing, you must have a solid and agile foundation to be able to adjust to that.
My time here has been focused on ensuring that we have that foundation through the technologies that our employees are operating on and making sure that they are as productive as possible. This applies whether you are in design, engineering, one of the sales functions, or one of the support functions. Additionally, I am focused on ensuring that our external and customer-facing components are evolving appropriately along with the product.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
7/02/18
Cathie Kozik is the Chief Information Officer of PSAV, which is an 81 year old events management company that helps bring to life roughly one million events per year. She was a CIO of Tellabs in the 1990s into the last decade, and went on to become an IT executive at Motorola, as well. In 2001, she became one of the earliest board-level CIOs when she joined the board of an individual hospital that would grow through acquisition to become $5 billion Northwestern Memorial Health. She did not set out to be a trailblazer, but now that she has been for 17 years, she has a variety of lessons to share with other CIOs who’d wish to follow in her footsteps.
Her breadth of experience as a CIO and as a board member have helped her with the current transformation she has led at PSAV for the past three and a half years. She has pushed IT to go from roadblock to strategic enabler for the business. She now leads a digital transformation, which is focused on the technician experience and business insight through data analytics. Her vast experience has earned her a spot in CIO.com’s prestigious CIO Hall of Fame.
Peter High: You are the Chief Information Officer and Senior Vice President at PSAV. Could you provide a background as to PSAV’s business and your role in it?
Cathie Kozik: PSAV is the world’s largest event experiences company. We see our role as connecting with and inspiring our customers, so they can connect with and inspire their audiences. We help our customers around the globe put together different event experiences, then enable them to reach out to their audiences in new and different ways. It is a great and exciting business to be in as we are always doing something different. We put on about 1,500 different shows per day and more than a million over the course of a year.
As CIO, my role has been to help bring the organization into the next generation and prepare us for growth. We have been on a great trajectory as we have acquired a substantial number of companies over the past five to ten years. Despite this, between the acquisitions and organic growth, the business system had not kept up with what the business was trying to accomplish. Therefore, when I joined the company three years ago, my core focus was about stabilizing the environment and then bringing new technology to bear. It has been about bringing the company into the information age where technology is an enabler as opposed to something that was preventing the business from getting its job done. As we continue to grow, digital transformation is impacting us just as it is impacting every other company in the industries that we serve. Because of this, we have to make sure that we are keeping pace and are thinking about new technologies that can not only improve our operational efficiency and our interactions with our customers, but also improve the event experiences that have been part of the innovation cycle that we have been on. For example, we have focused on mobility as approximately 95 percent of our employees are out in the field. We need to make sure that we are communicating with these employees. They need to know what to expect for the day, what customers are coming in, and what these customers past experiences have been with us. We need to communicate with these employees so that we can ensure that today’s experience with PSAV is just as great or even greater than the last experience. Additionally, if something goes wrong, it is important that we know about it. We have to talk to the customer as we know them and support them in the ways they are expecting. For example, we need to ensure that a customer who is expecting a high-resolution projector, gets that high-resolution projector. We need to make certain that they get the right experience that they need for their customers.
6/25/18
Lenovo’s Kim Stevenson Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Data Center Solutions division has had a variety of roles in information technology. At technology behemoths such as IBM, EDS, and HPE, she worked on internal operations, but also gained her first exposure to customers who were technology executives. At Intel, she went from General Manager of IT Operations and Services to Chief Information Officer.
As CIO, she had an strong external customer orientation based on her experience prior to that. As a result, she quickly gained invitations to join boards. (She has served on the boards of Cloudera, Riverbed Technology, and she currently serves on the board of the wealth management and private banking company, Boston Private.) During her time as CIO, she was in the first class of Forbes CIO Innovation Award winners based on her team’s contribution of more than $1 billion in value to the company based on analytics. She would eventually rise to Chief Operating Officer, Client, IoT and System Architecture Group at Intel.
When she joined Lenovo in March of 2017, she did so with a remarkably rich set of experiences across the technology sector. As a result, she is an unusually well connected and highly regarded in the IT community. Now that she serves CIOs as clients again, she sees three things that CEOs and boards expect of CIOs: re imagining customer experience, driving productivity inside the enterprise, and delivering new products and services. She and her team are poised to help CIOs deliver all three, as she notes (among other themes) herein.
To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link.
Peter High: You are now the Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Data Center Solutions division of Lenovo. Could you describe your role and your responsibilities?
Kim Stevenson: At Lenovo, we aligned our Data Center Solutions division with our important customer segments, which is how we run our business. Each of those customer segments then report up into my organization.
The telco market is at a fundamental inflection point. We want to help drive a new, efficient infrastructure into the telco space. This plays into IoT, which will be all endpoints that are going to be connected in the world. And of course, there are data center implications for having multiple, new types of endpoints connecting into the network.
High: You were a former buyer of technology as the CIO of Intel. You rose beyond that role and became the Chief Operating Officer of the Client, IoT, and Systems Architecture Group. Now you are on the other side of the table as someone delivering to CIOs among others. How do you engage the customer set, and what was the transition like from one side of the table to the other?
Stevenson: Even before I joined Intel, I was with EDS and HP Enterprise Services running IT for customers and selling IT services to the CIO organization. When I moved to Intel to run internal IT, I felt like I was becoming my customer. Having that 360-degree view served me extraordinarily well. There were days when I thought to myself, “Why would anyone try to sell you this? It is just not practical.” There were also days that I felt I could understand more of what was possible from an innovation vector because I had seen many different types of accounts.
This is the next chapter, which is coming back to the business side. Now more than ever, the voice of the CIO in every company is becoming more strategic and more critical to the raw execution of the company. There is no business process in any company today that executes without some form of IT at its core. When I look at the role of the CIO today, I see three things that the board of directors and the CEO expect.
At Lenovo, I focus on helping the IT organization deliver on those three fundamental strategic priorities that exist in every company.
High: Can you expand on the translation of those general ideas to the way in which you are doing that in concert with the business?
6/18/2018
Randy Mott is used to big challenges. Prior to joining General Motors as Senior Vice President of Global Information Technology and Chief Information Officer of General Motors in 2012, he served as CIO of Walmart, Dell, and HP. One might argue that the current transformation is the largest of his career, however. When he joined GM, 90 percent of the IT staff were outsourced. He elected to bring those jobs back into GM, insourcing 10,000 new roles in the company and hiring 3,000 recent college graduates.
You might think that hiring into a Fortune 10 company in an industry that has been replete with bankruptcies across the decades would be a challenge. Mott makes the point that great IT staff want big challenges, and the scale of the opportunities he looks to seize are remarkable.
He set up innovation centers at the company’s headquarters, in downtown Detroit, in Austin, outside of Atlanta, and just outside of Phoenix. As Mott notes, this means that these centers are “within hiring distance of about 75 percent of the talent in the United States from an IT standpoint based on the locations of those centers and the geographic radiuses that they represent.”
Now, that team is focused on everything from helping facilitate self-driving car technology to better data analytics for and from the vehicles, to identifying ways to better tapping partners as sources of inspiration and innovation.
Not so surprisingly, Mott has joined the ranks of board-level CIOs, as he has been on the board of Dun & Bradstreet since 2015. He reflects on his career, his current post, and advice for others who would wish to follow in his footstep in this far reaching interview.
(To read an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link.
6/11/18 By Peter High, Published on Forbes
Mickey Boodaei has been a leading entrepreneur in the security space for years. He co-founded Imperva, which went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011, and he co-founded Trusteer, which was sold to IBM for $1 billion in 2013. Soon after the latter acquisition, he founded Transmit Security.
Interestingly, Boodaei did so without seeking venture capital. He indicated that by putting his own money (and that of co-founder Rakesh Loonkar) into the start-up, it felt more like when he founded his first firms, but in this case, there was no one else to answer to.
Transmit Security provides, “a cross-channel identity platform that is designed to simplify, accelerate, and reduce the cost of identity-related projects,” as Boodaei explains. He also notes that “security and customer experience are the two most important goals of any organization today. We bundle these together and address them as a single challenge.” In this interview, he explains his personal journey as a CEO, the importance of a strong co-founder, and his opinions on the evolving threat landscape.
Peter High: You are the Chief Executive Officer of Transmit Security. Can you provide an overview of the company?
Mickey Boodaei: We founded [the company] four and a half years ago with the goal of building a cross-channel identity platform that is designed to simplify, accelerate, and reduce the cost of identity-related projects. These include projects such as authentication, authorization, fraud prevention, account opening, among others. Our R&D Center is in Tel Aviv, Israel, and the rest of our technical teams are physically close to our customers in the US and Europe.
As a company, we focus on large enterprises with millions of end-user customers. Most of our customers to date have been banks, insurance companies, telcos, and retailers. We have two global financial customers with over 20 million users each, and about 20 customers with more than five million users each. Our customers typically use our platform to consolidate and accelerate multiple initiatives in the identity space. For example; multi-factor authentication in biometrics, behavioral analytics, and advanced fraud detection, attributes-based access control, new data protection regulations, using the mobile device as an authenticator for call centers, branch and web, authorization and authentication around open API’s, and more.
High: Yours is an organization that is experiencing extraordinary growth, and you have been able to do so without venture funding. Could you talk about the way in which you have grown, as well as the advantages of having done so without taking on venture funding in your early stages?
Boodaei: Our goal was to build a big company that is focused on what we enjoy doing around cybersecurity, which is working with large enterprises. We wanted absolutely zero external pressure as to the direction of the company or the speed in which we are growing. Therefore, my co-founder Rakesh Loonkar and I decided to invest our own money in the company.
We have been relatively successful in the past, so we could afford the risk of losing many millions if we failed. Today, Transmit is a profitable company, so the investment paid off. Not taking money from venture capitalists is not something everyone can do, so we consider ourselves lucky to be able to fund ourselves. Personally, I find it uncomfortable taking someone else’s money when I can do this with my own.
I also believe that it made us more focused and got us to work harder. If you look at first-time entrepreneurs, they are eager to secure their future. For us, by using a considerable amount of our own fortune, we created a strong motivation for ourselves to succeed that is not dissimilar from first-time entrepreneurs. This is the idea behind the self-funding concept of our company.
6/4/18
By Peter High. Published in Forbes
Last September, Tesla and SpaceX Chief Elon Musk provided $15 million to the Global Learning XPRIZE. The goal is to develop methods to teach the 250 million children who do not have access to primary or secondary education the means to teach themselves to read, write, and do math within 15 months. While programs exist to build schools and train teachers, they cannot scale fast enough to meet demand.
Illiteracy has long precluded individuals from joining local economies, but as our world increasingly becomes hyperconnected, this preclusion is greater than ever before. Consider an illiterate child in the developing world. A decade ago, illiteracy may have prevented them from running a farm in their local community. Today, ubiquitous connectivity, digital commerce platforms, and innovations such as Estonia’s e-Residency program means that an illiterate child will instead be locked out of opportunities at a global scale.
A Radical Solution
While technological progress may have made the problem of illiteracy more acute, it may also hold the solution. “The genius to solve these problems resides in the crowd,” says Matt Keller, Senior Director of the Global Learning XPRIZE. “And technology enables XPRIZE to reach the crowd.”
Founded by Peter Diamandis, XPRIZE is an nonprofit “innovation engine” that uses gamification, crowdsourcing, and incentive prize theory to provide incentives for competition and bring about radical breakthroughs that solve global grand challenges. After a number of successful competitions – most famously the $10 million Ansari XPRIZE that catalyzed the private space race.
The Global Learning XPRIZE challenges teams from around the world to develop open source and scalable software that enables children ages seven to ten in developing countries to learn basic reading, writing, and arithmetic without adult assistance within the aforementioned time constraint of 15 months. Hundreds of teams from over 40 countries registered to compete, and last year, five finalists were selected.
