5/7/18 By Peter High, published on Forbes
Prior to joining $6 billion revenue Magellan Health as Chief Information Officer and Chief Technology Officer two and a half years ago, Srini Koushik was a consultant with IBM, a CIO and CTO at Nationwide Insurance, a general manager of a business at Hewlett Packard, and an entrepreneur, having founded NTT Innovation Institute. This diverse array of experienced gave him a deeper understanding of the value he could drive as a CIO and CTO of Magellan Health.
That said, the nature of the role of CIO and CTO changed significantly in the five years since he last held the titles. Moreover, this was his first foray into healthcare. Since then, he has seen the profound impact that technology can have in impacting customer experience on both sides of Magellan’s business: healthcare and pharmacy benefit management. Moreover, by adopting a cloud-first approach, he could more easily help the company continue to scale up. He does this all in the service of driving what he refers to as the company’s Massive Transformative Purpose.
Peter High: You are the Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer and Chief Technology Officer of Magellan Health. Could you give an overview of Magellan Health’s business, as well as your purview?
Srini Koushik: We are a Scottsdale, Arizona-based company. However, we cover all 50 states, and we have counselors in seven or eight different countries across the globe. Magellan Health is in this business because we have a desire to help lead humanity to healthy, vibrant lives. Within Magellan, we call it our Massive Transformative Purpose [MTP]. This mission motivates us to do what we do.
When we talk about leading humanity to healthy, vibrant lives, we focus on the population that needs it the most. These are people with behavioral health and mental health conditions. These are folks that have been diagnosed across the entire spectrum of mental and behavioral health, from depression, anxiety, and addiction all the way to paranoia, schizophrenia, or PTSD.
We say people need it the most primarily because we are in 2018 and mental health issues still have a stigma associated with them. You tend to see these patients not for the primary diagnosis such as depression, but in a high-cost channel on the other end. It is as if they show up at the emergency room for a secondary condition, but that could have been avoided if you treated the primary condition.
While costs are important, we try to look at things from a member outcome standpoint. That is where we start and work from. That is how this company has had a history of 40 years of expertise in the behavioral health space. In the last two or three years, we have evolved that to a point where we are not only dealing with the behavioral health aspects of it but the total health of that individual.
Magellan Health has two big platforms for growth. One is the healthcare and the other one is in pharmacy benefits management (PBM). On the healthcare side, we have turned the tables. The traditional model for behavioral health has been that you have your healthcare provided by a certain provider. They carve out the behavioral health piece, and they allow companies like Magellan to do the utilization management and care management components of it. Magellan Complete Care, which we introduced in Florida a couple of years ago, turns the tables. This takes the individual and manages their entire health. Not just behavioral health or physical health, but other conditions as well. We introduced the nation’s first benefit plan aimed at the seriously mentally ill in Florida. When people ask me, I say, “We are actually a startup. We are 40 years old, but we are also a three-year-old startup,” because that was a first-of-its-kind plan. That was one where we entered into the market because it was absolutely the right thing to do and fit with our Massive Transformative Purpose.
You must work through that because the population we are talking about accounts for about 5 percent of the population, but about 40 to 45 percent of the costs in the system are driven by this population. As you can imagine, if you took the traditional cost view of it, this would be the last piece you would want to touch. However, we thought there was a different way for us to be able to address it. Magellan Healthcare has pivoted and started to focus on the population that needs the help the most.
Our second platform is the pharmacy benefits management platform. Our competitors are much larger, but our differentiation and our approach has been key. There are two primary drivers that drive our pharmacy benefits management business. One is the growth in the number of specialty medications. The FDA approved more than 60 specialty medications last year. The difference in specialty medications is that they are not broad-spectrum drugs that apply to a large segment of the population. These are drugs such as Harvoni, the hep C treatment. A regimen of Harvoni is about $80,000. It is a much smaller population that needs it, and it is a much more expensive treatment. We have the ability to manage the care for this specialty medication with a strict regimen. If you missed the regimen, you must go back and start the regimen again. By providing those capabilities to manage specialty drugs, we have been able to grow along with that trend.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
5/1/18 By Peter High, published on Forbes
Last year, I featured the founder and executive director of Lowe’s Innovation Labs Kyle Nel in this column. We covered the remarkable innovations his team developed, and the creative methods used to drum them up. For his efforts, Lowe’s received numerous accolades, including being named number one on Fast Company’s 2018 Most Innovative Companies, for augmented and virtual reality, as well as being named number one for innovation among specialty retailers on Fortune’s 2018 World’s Most Admired Companies.
Nel recently left Lowe’s to develop his own firm, Uncommon Partners. His goal in so doing is to bring the magic of what his team undertook at Lowe’s to a broader audience. Nel noted that “We are a consulting and training firm that helps organizations transcend intrinsic human barriers – fear, habits and routine, and our struggle to make long, visionary leaps – to create breakthrough change. We use new tools, and re-designed tools, to help organizations dream bigger, break decision bottlenecks, and create measures that can guide anyone navigating new territory.”
The mission of the firm is to help organizations with behavioral transformation; to enable them to do the things they say they want to do: change nimbly, innovate meaningfully, and move faster than the competition to change customer behavior. In a world marked by uncertainty, organizations must adapt and change in order to get better at solving intractable problems. We all need to shift from a mindset of risk mitigation to that of racing to seize the opportunity.
New York Life is an enormous company with a storied history. Like other companies of comparable size and age, they can be caught flat-footed by the disruption forced upon them by newer, more nimble companies. New York Life has elected to be the source of disruption through the development of New York Life Ventures, which was founded in 2012.
Peter High: When New York Life Ventures was founded in 2012, what was the rationale for its creation?
Joel Albarella: New York Life Ventures was founded to accelerate the pace of innovation at New York Life. This has included developing a trusted, ever-expanding network of participants within the start-up community to better understand their efforts and provide support. We also seek opportunities to tie their innovative work back to New York Life’s value chain and business strategy. The objective is to deliver a return while also driving value to the business.
Back in 2012, we decided to take a closer look at how the digital environment was evolving. Society was largely embracing exciting new trends related to e-commerce, mobility, the Internet of Things [IoT], among others. The time was right for New York Life to launch the group to better understand the evolution of technology and how it could be used to improve and digitally transform our businesses.
No one – and especially not a large, Fortune 100 company – can wake up one day and decide to suddenly be more innovative. True innovation is an ongoing process that involves commitment and deliberately making non-traditional decisions that pay off over the long term. That’s what our leadership understood and embraced.
New York Life was ahead of the curve as being one of the first life insurance companies to launch a corporate venture capital arm. Six years later, New York Life Ventures has performed approximately 150 proof of concepts [POCs] with emerging technologies and invested in more than $200 million in 30 venture capital investments. We are a key innovation driver at New York Life and within the industry.
High: How does the mission of New York Life Ventures marry with the mission of New York Life more generally?
Albarella: The mission of New York Life is to empower people to achieve financial security throughout their entire lives. New York Life Ventures plays its part in this by connecting the financial strength of New York Life with the speed and agility of the start-up community. Through a strategic testing and investing approach and an on-site research and development lab, we can accelerate the pace of innovation across the enterprise while fostering a powerful external network rooted in trust. All of this is ultimately focused on enhancing customer experiences and better serving New York Life’s policy owners and clients now and well into the future.
4.30.18
By Peter High, published on Forbes
When Anil Cheriyan joined SunTrust as Chief Information Officer six years ago, he inherited a siloed technology group. He got to work breaking down those silos, implementing a new operating model to drive alignment, cost transparency, and strategic investment decisions. He addressed SunTrust’s fragmented approach to digital by hiring business segment Chief Technology Officers, a Chief Data Officer, and an enterprise-level Chief Digital Officer, all of which reported to him as CIO. Cheriyan also oversaw SunTrust’s transition from an innovation strategy of ad hoc hackathons and collaborative office hours to a comprehensive framework that leveraged an agile way of working, a DevOps mindset, and new technologies like the cloud and AI.
His plans in retirement befit someone of his impressive background. Cheriyan will continue to advise start ups and fellow CIOs. This comes naturally to him as someone who spent more than two decades as a consultant with IBM and PWC.
Peter High: You recently retired as Chief Information Officer of SunTrust after a successful 6-year journey. What are you planning to do in retirement?
Anil Cheriyan: I do not have a detailed plan. I intend to take some time off and travel a little bit. I am on a few advisory boards of some smaller late stage growth startups. I also intend to pursue some public board opportunities. I do a little bit of consulting and advisory work through relationships that I have built in the past. I am not seeking a CIO type of job. I recently heard about the term portfolio career, and that is what I intend to do.
High: You mentioned you are doing some advising on the boards of some venture-backed organizations. Can you talk a bit about that experience? How have you gotten involved? Also, what value do these organizations derive from having a CIO advising them?
Cheriyan: During my career, I have built several relationships with Fintech venture capital funds, as well as general venture capital funds that are involved with late-stage startups. These are startups that are about $40 million to $50 million a year in revenue and growing. Their focus is typically to grow their revenue to $100 million plus. It is exciting and fun being part of these boards.
The career that I have had in consulting, as well as in driving IT for a financial services firm, enables me to help a lot of these startups in their revenue opportunities. What is the right messaging? Providing them with a CIO perspective. Helping them think through how best to attract and build the right talent, and so on. It has been fun, and it helps me network with influential people who are in similar positions as myself.
To read the full interview, please visit Forbes
Halsey Minor was one of the digital media pioneers, having CNET, the first comprehensive consumer-facing technology content publisher, in 1993. The company grew, and, remarkably for the time, grew profitably. He would run the company for eight years, and it would eventually be sold to CBS in 2008 for $1.8 billion.
Halsey would go on to be one of the original investors in Salesforce, and he would be an active advisor to the company in its early days.
He continues to have his hand in a number of companies, including crypto currency company Bitreserve, and Live Planet, an end-to-end virtual reality video system that captures and distributes live and recorded stereoscopic VR and 360 degree video. We discuss all of the above in this interview.
Peter High: Please provide an overview of Bitreserve, and of why you are so excited about crypto currency.
Halsey Minor: Bitreserve was one of the first companies in the crypto space. I realized that bitcoin created a new monetary system, and the problem Bitreserve is looking to solve is getting money from the old monetary system into this new one.
The company was difficult to start because banks would not open bank accounts for companies with “bit” in the name. It was very prejudicial. We bought part of a New Jersey bank and after about two and a half years, we were in the same situation as Coinbase. Coinbase’s success is predicated on their access to US and European banking. Bitreserve is thriving and profitable, but the regulatory aspect was a headache. I thought there were others who were better suited to running the company, so I left and started Live Planet.
High: Could you provide an overview of Live Planet? What are the problems it is trying to solve, and how does this differ than existing solutions?
Lety Nettles has joined Novant Health as Chief Information Officer. Novant Health is a leading healthcare provider with 15 hospitals & more than 350 physician practices offering advanced medical treatments in NC, SC and VA. In her role as CIO, Nettles is responsible for providing world-class IT capabilities so that Novant Health can deliver upon its promise of “remarkable patient experience, in every dimension, every time.” She will report to Novant Health’s Chief Digital and Technology Officer Angela Yochem.
Nettle was most recently Vice President of Digital Technology Strategy & Portfolio at Baker Hughes. She has also held technology leadership positions at Walmart and at Dell, among other companies.
When asked about Nettles, Yochem noted, “Novant Health is a leader in patient care and digital engagement. With Lety’s deep experience in consumer technology and transformation, I am confident she will contribute to Novant Health’s innovative culture, and she will play a key role in enhancing digital experience for our patients and team members.”
4/23/18
From an early age as an Estonian refugee in the United States, Toomas Hendrik Ilves understood the transformative power of technology. He learned to code in BASIC in the 1970s. He would go on to study psychology at Columbia University and at the University of Pennsylvania, but as Estonia gained independence after the Soviet Union collapsed, Ilves returned to serve his country. Some of the earliest reforms that he ushered in involved the use of technology in schools. He also understood that the blank slate that the country had at its independence was a rare opportunity to rethink how a government interacted with its citizens.
Through many waves of innovation, the country not only made tremendous digital advances, but it also future proofed its technology. Ilves would become president of Estonia in 2006, serving for two terms through 2016. Along the way, he defended his country during the first cyber war with Russia, and ushered a number of radical digital ideas. He describes all of the above in this interview.
Peter High: You have an international background. You were born in Stockholm, Sweden to Estonian parents. You spent much of your upbringing in the United States in Leonia, New Jersey where you graduated from high school. You have degrees from Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. I am curious what you drew from the international experience in the development of your thought process?
President Toomas Hendrik Ilves: To begin with, growing up bilingual often has an impact on people’s thinking and their ability to see things from different perspectives. I am also the child of refugees, so I was far more tuned to foreign policy issues than normal kids my age. I remember beginning to read the New York Times when I was nine because of the Soviet Union and how that was connected to my parent’s country being occupied.
A second major influence is that I learned to program when I was in ninth grade. I had a math teacher who was doing her Ph.D. in Math Education and decided to teach a small group of us how to program. At the age of 14, I was programming in Basic. This was a unique experience, and it had a huge influence on me. It was the inspiration for the first digitization program in my country. Finally, I am fundamentally interested in democracy, and that was fueled by the enormous course load that is required for a Political Philosophy degree at Columbia. These were all influences when I was in the United States.
Later, when I went back to Europe, I worked as what you might call a cold-warrior. I was an analyst for Radio Free Europe, and, later, I headed the Estonian Service. Through this, I met a lot of authors who were part of the underground dissent decades before Estonian independence. Eventually, we would lead the independence movement. That was also formative.
High: It was in the early to mid-1980s that you returned to Europe through Germany at Radio Free Europe. In 1996, you became the Estonian Minister of Foreign Affairs. It was during that period in the early to mid-1990s that this radical transformation of the country began.
Estonia emerged from the Soviet Bloc after the fall of the Soviet Union. It is remarkable how the leaders of the country had the foresight to recognize this tabula rasa and not waste the opportunity to do something special. I am curious, why Estonia? What was it about that environment?
President Ilves: There are a number of reasons. I was the first Estonian Ambassador before I became a Foreign Minister to the United States after the occupation. That is how I became Foreign Minister. In many ways, we had a number of alternative paths before us in the early ‘90s. If you look at the history of post-communist countries, they seemed to have chosen every possible variant from harsh authoritarianism to the very open, liberal approach that we took. Our government focused on economic reforms, privatization, and liberalization of the economy. We created a currency board system that allowed convertibility of our currency at the time.
Much of the digital push was largely my input into the government. I looked at the situation and it seemed so backward. As a point of reference, in 1938, the last full year before World War II, Finland and Estonia had the same GDP per capita. When we emerged in 1991 from the Soviet period, Finland had a GDP per capita 13 times that the GDP per capita of Estonia. Then, we had this direct contrast between them. One of the things associated with that was the enormous success of tech in Finland, such as Nokia.
4/16/18
Vince Campisi joined United Technologies (UTC) as the Senior Vice President of Digital and Chief Information Officer in mid 2016 after most of two decades with General Electric. He spent the last year as the Chief Operating Officer of GE Digital, so he was quite familiar with the ideas behind digital transformation of a large, multi-operating company industrial business.
At United Technologies, he found an environment ripe for change. Digital transformation had begun in pockets in the four operating companies: Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Engines, Otis Elevators, Climate Controls & Security [CCS], and UTC Aerospace Systems. That change had not been coordinated globally in a way that Campisi was used to. He embarked on a journey to foster more collaboration across the operating companies and one of the keys to this has been the development of the United Technologies Digital Accelerator in Brooklyn. The Accelerator is less than a year old, but UTC and Campisi have found a great group of digital leaders to drive change. The vision is for this to have multiple hundreds of people in the office in the DUMBO section of Brooklyn in the next year. Campisi describes the work of this team, the digital transformation more generally, and the need for digital leaders to play offense, defense, and special teams in order to win in the marketplace.
Peter High: You are the Chief Information Officer and Senior Vice President of Digital at United Technologies. Can you talk about your purview as it relates to those two aspects of your role?
Vince Campisi: There is a lot of discussion around digital. Sometimes, that conversation happens concurrently with IT. For us, we wanted to make a conscious decision that those two things work hand in glove and not two different facets of the organization. Instead, they need to be driven in a way that takes advantage of what classic IT offers a company like us, as well as the aspirations of digital as it relates to how people think about it in the market today.
We see it on two dimensions. One is reinventing IT. For us, that is about how you would streamline critical business processes, improve sales processes, and improve manufacturing processes to improve inventory. It is also about infrastructure services, and how you enable computing at scale and make sure the employees have the resources they need to be productive. The second part is when we think about reinventing IT more effectively around cybersecurity. I would classify those as defensive capabilities. How do you protect the bottom line, drive productivity, and efficiency?
The second dimension which often gets classified as digital is how do you accelerate business growth? That is where Internet of Things for industry comes up, which goes hand in glove with data and analytics, and how you use those insights and software applications to grow value with your customers and help customers achieve new levels of value. That is the offensive dimension of how we use IT and digital to differentiate the company.
High: United Technologies is itself a diverse business. Could you talk about how IT is organized across the various companies of the organization and ultimately, how it reports up to you?
Campisi: We have four iconic franchises: Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Engines, Otis Elevators, our Climate Controls & Security [CCS] business, and our UTC aerospace systems business, which recently announced a partnership with Rockwell Collins. Those are the four major business units. Within them, they have a variety of P&L’s and other facets because they are Fortune 200 companies in and of themselves. The way we think about it is they need to be in a position to differentiate and compete in their respective markets.
They each have a digital and an IT strategy that enables them to connect with their customers in a new way and differentiate themselves in the market. We then look for places where there is horizontal scale and horizontal leverage. From a technology architecture perspective, this could mean cloud computing. When we think about talent and the breadth of what the company has to offer, it creates a lot of opportunities for people to find new challenges and new ways of working across industries without having to change pay or benefits.
The third part is things like cybersecurity. The business units might decide on the appropriate platform for them or how they are going to develop a smart factory. We will have a reference architecture, but they will select the MES system that is best for what they need to do. There are places where we might have a stronger point of view for horizontal leverage around network, or email, or security tools. That is the balance between what we do centrally versus de-centrally.
When Boeing CIO Ted Colbert added the title of SVP of Information and Analytics to his role, there was good reason for the promotion. Ted is a champion of data analytics within the company and is the driving force behind Boeing Commercial Airplanes’ (BCA) Digital Flight Deck. While the use of analytic models is common within the airplane business, the Digital Flight Deck is a model of models. More specifically, the Digital Flight Deck stitches together a cluster of digital and analytics tools to create an end-to-end digital twin of the business, enabling BCA leadership to simulate higher-level business scenarios. The Digital Flight Deck is actively assisting the BCA leadership with rate increase decisions for the 737 and 787, where a rate increase of 10-15% would result in $6-9 billion in revenue. Further, because it is completely digital, the Digital Flight Deck saves approximately one hundred-person months’ of manual data collection and chart creation every month.
When asked about Ted’s contribution and the Digital Flight Deck, Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg noted, “Boeing has more innovation and development underway than at any time in our history—including in how we apply information and data capabilities to the aerospace market. The BCA Digital Flight Deck is a great example of how we’re bringing data into every part of our decision-making process to increase productivity and value.”
Peter High: Please describe the innovative idea that you and your team in IT pursued.
Ted Colbert: The Boeing Commercial Airplanes’ (BCA) Digital Flight Deck was conceptualized as a cluster of real-time digital models coming together to form a digital thread that runs end-to-end through BCA – starting with Sales & Marketing all the way to Production and Delivery.
Today, I am happy to introduce our latest class of Forbes CIO Innovation Award winners. They will each join me on stage today at the at our Forbes CIO Summit in Half Moon Bay, California. These CIOs are pushing the boundaries of their role and are harnessing innovation to drive significant revenue growth at their organizations. Since its commencement, this award has focused on CIO-led, revenue augmenting innovation, which I believe to be one of the biggest differentiators between the best CIOs and others. The 2018 Half Moon Bay Summit winners are:
