6/4/18 By Peter High. Published on Forbes
7-Eleven is a big retailer. It operates 65,000 stores in 18 countries, has 55 million customers in stores on a daily basis, and conducts 20 billion transactions annually. Like most retailers, it is in need of transformation. Enter Gurmeet Singh. With a Ph.D. in Engineering from Rice, and stints with leading companies like FedEx, Intuit, and Capital One, Singh joined 7-Eleven in August of 2016 as chief digital officer. He would add the chief information officer title in November of 2017.
Singh joined the company with a mandate from 7-Eleven CEO Joseph DePinto to make the company a digital leader. Singh embarked on a multi-year journey to become a digitally-enabled organization, including a “full stack transformation” approach which encompasses consumer-facing technology, back-end technology, infrastructure, and the organizational stack. He also expanded the company’s loyalty program from its initial focus on beverages to a full-fledged loyalty offering that is available on mobile, web, digital loyalty card, and even through chatbots.
Singh notes that “the closest store to a customer today is in the palm of [his or her] hand,” and he wanted to go beyond pushing customers from mobile into stores, and allowing customers to interact with 7-Eleven on their terms, through the interface of their choice. To foster this, Singh’s team helps the rest of the organization understand the art of the possible through constant experimentation with new technology. He describes his path to innovation in great detail herein.
Peter High: You are the Chief Digital and Chief Information Officer of 7-Eleven. Could you describe your role?
Gurmeet Singh: I started at 7-Eleven as the Chief Digital Officer, with my primary responsibility being driving digital transformation. This company founded convenience at a global scale, with 65,000 stores in 18 countries, 55 million customers visiting the stores every day, and 20 billion transactions on an annual basis. You take that, and you overlay the consumer trends and the new technology trends like big data and digital payments, and you have the perfect formula for redefining convenience.
Technology is a key element of a digital transformation and it is also key to becoming a digitally-enabled company. Initially, we started off with what most companies have been doing and what most consulting companies have been citing as a strategic approach, which is building a two-tier architectural model. A two-tier architectural model means you have digital technology capabilities that are being developed at a higher speed, and then decoupled from that, you have your legacy enterprise systems which have longer release cycles at slower speeds. Additionally, enterprise and legacy work was being managed in long cycle processes as projects, not as products.
Old models in any company are always changing, and they should be changing. They are a function of maturity of the company, the need of the hour, and the market factor. As we evaluated the speed of our transformation, we felt that we were not getting to the speed we needed. To get there, we needed what I call a full stack transformation. When I say full stack transformation, I am talking all the way from the consumer-facing technology to back-end technologies, all the way to infrastructure and cloud. It even goes beyond that to encompass the organizational stack.
To bring more efficiency and effectiveness to our decisions, our prioritization, while driving the productization of IT, we decided to combine the CDO role and the CIO role. This allows us to drive vertical product slices while working on horizontal capabilities. If you are doing one after the other, you are taking too much time to get the business transformed. If you do not do a vertical slice, you do not know what customer problem you are trying to solve. Combining the functions gets us there faster. It is harder, but you end up driving more synergies. We drive higher team engagement. You speed up your transformation journey, and you end up creating a stronger pool of talent as one team. What we did was then combine digital and IT, which we call DIGIT, which is very much digital.
High: You are clearly thinking multiple years out. The changes require hard work to be done in the near term to make the organization nimbler for the long term. How difficult was the process of selling this internally? Was it difficult in having your peers among the executive leadership understand the rationale behind all the hard work to be done in the near term for a better outcome for the long term?
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
6/4/18
By Peter High. Published on Forbes
Most of the tests of self-driving cars have taken place in cities. These are places where 3D mapping of streets, lanes, curbs, signs, and the like is undertaken with precision. One of the biggest challenges for self-driving cars is to navigate the roads less traveled.
“The cars use these maps to know where they are and what to do in the presence of new obstacles like pedestrians and other cars,” says Daniela Rus, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). “The need for dense 3-D maps limits the places where self-driving cars can operate.” Rus and colleagues at CSAIL have developed MapLite, a framework that allows self-driving cars to drive on roads they’ve never been on before without 3-D maps. I caught up with her recently to find out more about this innovative idea.
Peter High: Please describe how MapLite is different from other self-driving technology?
Daniela Rus: Most self-driving car companies only test their fleets in major cities where they’ve developed detailed 3D maps that are meticulously labeled with the exact positions of things like lanes, curbs and stop signs. These maps include environmental features detected by the sensors of the vehicle. The maps are created using 3D LIDAR systems that rely on light to scan the local space, accumulating millions of data points and extracting the features defining each place.
If we want self-driving cars to be a viable global technology, this reliance on detailed prior maps is a problem. Today’s autonomous vehicles are not able to drive in rural environments where we do not have maps — in other words, on the millions of miles of roads that are unpaved, unlit or unreliably marked.
MapLite is a first step for enabling self-driving cars to navigate on roads that they’ve never been on before using only GPS and sensors.
Our system combines GPS data – like the kind you’d find on Google Maps – with data taken from LIDAR sensors. Together, these two elements allow us to autonomously drive a car on multiple unpaved country roads and reliably detect the road more than 100 feet in advance.
MapLite is a first step toward creating safe and capable autonomous cars that can support drivers in new road situations. Imagine if cars could learn how we drive and how to never be responsible for a collision? What if they could become our trusted partners to help us navigate tricky roads, watch our backs when we’re tired, and even make our time in the car fun?
In the future, autonomous cars won’t just be able to sense the state of the road; they’ll be able to recognize the state of the driver. Imagine if your car could tell you were having a bad day and turn on your favorite album. Or imagine if it could talk to your fridge, figure out that you’re out of milk, and suggest where to stop on your way home. Imagine if your car knew that you forgot to call your parents yesterday and could issue a gentle reminder and suggest a safe stretch of highway where you could make the call. These are just a few of the possibilities when we bring together cars, computer science and artificial intelligence.
5/29/18
Dan Olley was recently named to the prestigious CIO Hall of Fame by CIOMagazine. In many ways, however, Olley has not been a traditional chief information officer. For one, he has largely held chief technology officer roles. Moreover, he has also had customer-facing, product-centric roles. In his current role as Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Product Development of Elsevier, his purview is quite broad.
Elsevier is a subsidiary of RELX Group, focusing on academic and clinical research. In his role, Olley helps develop solutions to help academics and clinicians train, while enhancing their ability to help patients at the bedside.
Olley’s focus in recent years has been in machine learning. In fact, he has been immersed in the subject long enough that this insights into its use, the value derived from it, the implications on teams, and the like are unusually deep. We cover all of the above in great depth in this interview.
Peter High: Could you provide an overview of Elsevier and the business you are in?
Dan Olley: Our parent company, RELX Group, is among the largest technology companies no one has heard of. We are an information analytics company, and we predominantly work across four fields: the legal field, the academic and health research fields, the risk business and financial fields, and our large exhibitions business. I am the CTO of Elsevier, which specifically focuses on the academic research and clinical research spaces.
We help clinicians and clinical professionals save lives. We are trying to build solutions that help them do their jobs better, from coming into the profession and training to the patient’s bedside. We also help academic and corporate researchers by providing materials in their field.
We run the peer review process for many academic journals. It is about helping them make breakthroughs. How do we give them solutions that make their research more effective? That is at the core of who we are and what we do.
High: If you gather 10 CTOs together, you have 10 different job descriptions. The CTO can mean everything from the co-founder of a startup in Silicon Valley and the number two person behind the CEO, to the person who owns the plumbing and reports to the chief information officer. I know you also run product development and have customer facing responsibilities in addition to focusing on the technology as it relates to both the efficiency as well as revenue generation. Can you provide an overview of your sets of responsibilities as CTO?
Olley: My background is software product development. I have been doing that for longer than I care to remember. I have had both product management and software engineering responsibilities in my career, but both at technology companies where technology was making a fundamental shift that drove commercial differentiation. At Elsevier, I am responsible for the more traditional IT part that falls under my remit, but over 70% of my responsibility is about building the electronic products and services that we sell. Think of it more like Google and Amazon or a Facebook building that technology solution than a more traditional company.
High: In the world of technology, you have reason to think a lot about how trends are evolving. I know from our prior conversations that you have a passion for contemplating how trends are coming together in some significant ways. Could you talk about the period we are in from a technology perspective and how the confluence of those trends is impacting the way in which all of us are going to be operating between the digital and analog worlds?
To read the full interview, please visit Forbes
The Pittsburgh renaissance has been covered in many places, including in this column. (See my interview with Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto and my interview with Carnegie Mellon University’s Dean of the Computer Science department Andrew Moore.) One area of the tech boom in Pittsburgh that I had not covered is the investor community.
Pittsburgh-based Innovation Works is one of the country’s top seed investors, and CB Insights ranks it as America’s most active investor in robotics. The company’s mission is “to introduce, connect, support and expand the startup & entrepreneurial ecosystem within Southwestern Pennsylvania, making our region a center for innovative startups and tech investors from around the country.” Innovation Works’ portfolio includes companies in the robotics, artificial intelligence, medical devices, retail technologies, and enterprise software fields, among others.
I recently caught up with the Chief Executive Officer of Innovation Works Rich Lunak to discuss the current state of technology in Pittsburgh, his firm’s focus on robotics, trends that excite him, and other topics.
Peter High: Please describe Innovation Works’ purview.
Rich Lunak: Innovation Works is the most active seed-stage investor in the Southwestern Pennsylvania region, and one of the most active in the country. We are dedicated to serving high-growth tech entrepreneurs throughout the Pittsburgh region in order to create jobs and wealth, and to help our startup community thrive.
By Peter High, Published on Forbes
National Grid is one of the world’s largest investor-owned utilities, focused on transmission activities in electricity and gas. The United Kingdom-based behemoth has the vision to “exceed the expectations of our customers, shareholders and communities today and make possible the energy systems of tomorrow.”
One of the key executives to bring that vision to life is the company’s Chief Information and Digital Officer Andi Karaboutis. She has been the CIO of Dell, and she held a number of roles above that of the CIO at Biogen prior to joining National Grid in 2017. She is currently on the board of directors of Perrigo Company and Advance Auto Parts.
From her perch as CIO/CDO, she leads the company’s NGDigital Labs, which is tasked to develop innovative solutions leveraging “distributed generation management, peer-to-peer energy trading using Blockchain, AI and big data solutions to better understand our customers, to virtual reality projects to improve field force efficiency,” as she notes herein. These efforts have led to increased value to National Grid, and enhanced customer engagement and satisfaction. For her work, she has been recognized as a Forbes CIO Innovation Award winner.
Peter High: Please describe your purview at National Grid.
Andi Karaboutis: National Grid is one of the largest publicly-traded utilities in the world, focused on electric and gas transmission and distribution activities in the UK and the northeastern US. We play a vital role in connecting millions of people to the energy they use, safely, reliably, and efficiently.
5/21/18 By Peter High. Published on Forbes
Stephen Gillett has had a remarkable career for someone as young as he is. At 42, he has been the CIO and General Manager of Digital Ventures at Starbucks, the President of Digital, Marketing, and Operations at Best Buy, and the Chief Operating Officer of Symantec. In 2015, after Symentec was split into two companies, Gillett exited. Soon thereafter, he joined Google Ventures (now known as GV) as an Executive-in-Residence. He would eventually join Alphabet’s “Moonshot Factory” X (formerly Google X), and it was during his time there that the idea for Chronicle arose.
Chronicle is still largely in stealth mode, but Gillett took time to speak with me about his vision for the company, its progress in garnering customers, the process of graduating from X, and the advantages of growing a business within Alphabet as opposed to seeking funding from more traditional venture capital.
Peter High: When we last spoke, you were transitioning from your role as Chief Operating Officer of Symantec to Executive-in-Residence at GV [formerly Google Ventures]. You transitioned to X [formerly Google X], and in recent months, an idea that you have been pursuing, called Chronicle, was graduated from X. Can you talk about the genesis of Chronicle?
Stephen Gillett: First, let me provide some background. While at GV, as I met with entrepreneurs and talked to various categories that GV was making investments in, my goal was eventually to go to a startup having spent the last few years at bigger companies.
In 2015, while I was learning and understanding everything that Google was working on, Alphabet, the parent company, was taking shape. It gave me an opportunity to meet and talk to several of the now Alphabet leaders, at Google, Google X, and Google Ventures to understand what their future paths were.
In that tour of the new Alphabet, I learned about what X’s mission was, their concept of moonshot thinking, and how the “moonshot factory” worked. Rather than joining a startup that Google Ventures was funding, I pivoted and started to work within the X structure to figure out if there was a startup or a moonshot category that I felt compelled to work on. I realized that X was a great platform to achieve my goals, and I could get the support and the access to the resources I needed. That is how I landed at X.
High: Can you talk about the process as you were searching for that category? What was the process of elimination or inclusion? I would also be interested in the inner workings of X, such as how people work together across the organization.
Gillett: I knew one of the categories would be enterprise security, but I was not sure that this was the right place or the platform. X had been experimenting and looking at cybersecurity as a category before my arrival. When I got here, the question X was asking was, “Is this a problem worthy of the mission of X?” Which is to build moonshots, to create radical new solutions, and to touch a billion lives around the world. That is X’s broad framework.
X is not here to create widgets or a new point product. They are tasked with thinking about big problems facing humanity at large. I have spent over 20 years in IT, starting off on the help desk and working my way up to be CIO. Every year, security became a bigger and more important part of what I was doing in technology. Having spent a few years with Symantec – at the time, the world’s largest cybersecurity company – and dealing with the customer needs globally that they were facing, it quickly became apparent that cybersecurity was worthy of moonshot thinking.
X and Alphabet was a great place for us to focus on that because of the resources, thinking, and capabilities you need are not conducive to a quarterly earnings call or having to raise a round of funding. You can focus on long-term problems and assemble the best teams and the best technology to go after that by getting the permission to be curious and think about it at a huge scale. I do not believe there was a better place to start this than at X.
5/21/18
Starting in the fall of 2018, Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science (SCS) will offer a new undergraduate degree in artificial intelligence, providing students with “in-depth knowledge of how to transform large amounts of data into actionable decisions,” according to a statement put out by the University.
“Specialists in artificial intelligence have never been more important, in shorter supply or in greater demand by employers,” said Andrew Moore, dean of the School of Computer Science. “Carnegie Mellon has an unmatched depth of expertise in AI, making us uniquely qualified to address this need for graduates who understand how the power of AI can be leveraged to help people.”hghhhhhh
Reid Simmons is a research professor in the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute, and is the new director of the AI program. His research has focused on developing reliable, highly autonomous systems – especially mobile robots – that operate in rich, uncertain environments and on developing robots that can interact socially with humans. I had a chance to catch up with him last week to discuss the new program in greater depth.
Peter High: What was the genesis of this idea?
Reid Simmons: The AI degree had been under consideration for about four years, but efforts to put the program together began in earnest last fall. The main impetus was that students wanted to come to CMU to study AI, because of CMU’s centrality in that discipline, but were struggling to obtain the combination of math, statistics, algorithms, sensing, planning, and action needed to develop the appropriate expertise in AI. By combining the strengths of a number of the departments of the School of Computer Science, we were able to put together a comprehensive curriculum that teaches the basic concepts, as well as in-depth understanding, of AI and Machine Learning.
High: Can you provide some examples of the curriculum?
5/14/18
By Peter High. Published on Fobes
Puneet Bhasin joined Unum in March 2018 as chief information and digital officer — a new position that recognizes technology’s central role in achieving operational excellence and the company’s long-term business objectives.
Unum is an $11 billion revenue provider of employee benefit solutions, including disability, life, accident, critical illness, cancer, hospitalization, dental, and vision insurance, as well as benefits education, enrollment support, leave management, and claims service. The company has four businesses — Unum US, Unum UK, Colonial Life and Starmount.
“This is an exciting time to join Unum’s team,” Bhasin noted. “The company is undertaking a digital transformation that will help it take strong strides toward delivering the best customer service experience in the industry. Our information technology team will play a leading role in this process.”
Bhasin reports to Unum Group President and CEO Rick McKenney, and oversees the continued execution of a comprehensive, long-term information technology strategy to support Unum’s vision. He will also lead a multi-year digital transformation journey and work with the executive team to translate the strategic business plan into a technology, product and services roadmap.
5/14/18 By Peter High, published on Forbes
Of all the CIO-plus roles that exist, that of chief information officer and chief technology officer may seem to be the one that is least expansive. Each are technology roles after all, right? Pawan Verma’s purview offers an interesting counter-point. In his case, his responsibilities include traditional information technology, but it also includes data and digital marketing, supply chain, and customer experience, among other areas. As such, he has remarkable influence over Foot Locker’s customer journey’s no matter the channel they choose to engage with the company.
In this interview, he offers thoughts on his breadth of responsibilities, innovations he is driving, his thoughts on the customer experience of the future, and much more.
Peter High: You are the Global Chief Information Officer and Technology Officer at Foot Locker. Could you give an overview of Foot Locker’s business?
Pawan Verma: We are a global brand. We do business in North America as well as in Europe, parts of Australia, and New Zealand. All in, we have approximately 3000+ physical stores and sizable engagement from our consumers. We are primarily focused on the athletic footwear and apparel business. However, I would say that we are in the engagement and experiences business.
The youth that we connect with and are engaging with either digitally or physically are interested to know about the new sneakers that are coming. The sneakers are not only for them to wear, but they are a status symbol or currency. The products that we sell are not only used on the basketball court, but there are a lot of products that we sell that are used as a lifestyle products.
We have a diverse portfolio of products and have about $7.8 billion in revenue. Consumers engage with us in different ways. We do not focus on what channel the customer is using. Instead, we believe in listening to them more than selling to them. We are here to create that emotional engagement experience in what I call a “phygital” world. By that I mean we want to be part of the customer’s journey whether it is in the store, on their mobile device, on the web, or anywhere else. We want to add value to that customer journey in whichever way we can to help them in that consumer journey.
The kids that we are servicing happen to have high mobile penetration. Somewhere between 85 percent to 90 percent connect with us on mobile. They connect with us for our launch experiences, and it is a high energy culture around social, digital, and physical. That is why I use the term “phygital,” which commands all those experiences. It is at the center of that engagement, and it caters to that energy that they are creating.
High: You have a diverse role yourself. Your title is Executive Vice President and Global Chief Information and Technology Officer. As we peel back the onion, I was amazed by the number of responsibilities you have. Can you give a brief overview of all that your role encompasses?
Verma: There are four primary functions, but they are all intertwined. The first big function for my team is the global technology piece. They are focused on the core, the POS systems, the dotcom systems, the infrastructure, and the mobile piece. This is the typical CTO responsibilities.
The second big part of my function is creating the customer experience across all the different touch points in the form of data and digital marketing. All the digital marketing functions include performance marketing, mobile marketing, how we activate, how we create demand, SEO, and so on. The reason that mining the marketing data is one of my functions is because I believe that we need to create this platform wherein our consumer can engage with us, and that engagement can only be encouraged if you are activating a given marketing method based on what the customer is looking for. To do that, you must listen to those signals and connect them back.
5/8/18 By Peter High, published on Forbes
In March of this year, Kimberly Johnson was promoted from Chief Risk Officer to Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Fannie Mae. In that role, she is responsible for leading technology, data, enterprise models, operations, the enterprise program management office, and resiliency. These shared services are a key component of Fannie Mae’s unified business strategy.
Johnson is a member of Fannie Mae’s leadership team known as the Management Committee. As COO, she is charged with continuing the innovation work already underway throughout the company. Johnson partners closely with business units and the enterprise innovation team to focus resources on innovations that have the potential to enhance the company’s business model, support the execution of strategy, and evolve the housing finance system for the better.
When asked about her new role, Johnson noted, “I am excited to serve as Fannie Mae’s Chief Operating Officer. This is an opportunity to accelerate our digital transformation by integrating our innovation efforts and our technology platform. I am focused on aligning our long-term capabilities with our business strategy to ensure that the company’s business model evolves to better serve the housing finance system.”
