Blue Shield of California is an 83-year-old nonprofit health system that earns roughly $20 billion in annual revenue, but it caps its net income at 2% of revenue. As a result, the company has returned more than $650 million to customers and communities through its history. With 4.5 million customers across the state of California, the company has a mission to create a healthcare system that is worthy of employees’ family and friends while being sustainably affordable. The pandemic has transformed the way in which the company interacts with customers. There has been a digital relationship with customers that has deepened since March of 2020. Blue Shield of California has focused on being holistic and personalized while being high-tech and high-touch.
The leader who has catalyzed much of this change is the company’s chief information officer Lisa Davis. In her role, she runs information technology as well as the company’s data and analytics organization, while setting Blue Shield of California’s technology strategy.
Davis draws upon an unusually deep reserve of experience as a technology leader, having spent 26 years at the United States Department of Defense, rising to the post of CIO at multiple divisions of DOD. She was also a CIO at Georgetown University for nearly three and a half years. After that, she joined Intel, first as a technology leader, and then ran a $9 billion business for the company. All of this was prior to joining Blue Shield of California in February of 2020.
Davis has seen the past 16 months of the pandemic as a remarkable driver of innovation and change. By way of example, she referenced telehealth, which has been an area of focus for Davis, and an area of tremendous growth for the company during the pandemic. “Prior to the pandemic, there was a lot of consternation and a belief that telehealth wasn’t wanted by consumers and wouldn’t be leveraged or used by our members,” said Davis. “In fact, the pandemic showed just the opposite. Telehealth has soared almost 500%. We are seeing better health outcomes, and [in many cases] our members prefer telehealth appointments to having to go into the office.”
Davis also notes that an area that the healthcare system in the United States has lacked historically has been a holistic approach to personal health. The pandemic has underscored the need for the healthcare ecosystem to work more closely together to serve patients. Davis referenced Blue Shield of California’s Health Reimagined program as an example. “Imagine an experience where providers, members and payers have access to the same data; that we’re making decisions that are best for the member or the patient because they have all of the providers sharing information from a single electronic health record,” said Davis. “[We aim to make] decisions based on [information that is] holistic and personalized to that member.”
Davis believes that the best way to serve providers, members and payers is to re-orient the IT function to be more tied to the rest of the organization. She and her team have spent the last year developing a new operating model for the information technology function centered around portfolios and products. “We spent the last year changing our operating model to align against and support the key lines of business and key horizontal functions within the company,” noted Davis. “We have created seven different portfolios: three to support lines of business, four to create horizontal functions such as Medi-Cal, commercial business, senior markets, customer care, and marketing. Corporate services [is] a horizontal function and a large complex horizontal function [is] our Health and Growth Solutions organization, which has a big need around data and analytics capability.”
The portfolio teams have a variety of roles associated with each burgeoning partnership across the organization, including a portfolio leader, a solution delivery lead, solution architects, business architects, security personnel and data and analytics team members. Davis believes that this mix and the stronger partnership increases IT’s business acumen. “[This model creates a] basis of trust and a foundation with our business partners to improve collaboration, understand the opportunities that [they are] trying to solve, the capabilities that we’re trying to bring to market, so that those teams are connected hip-to-hip, working together to ultimately accelerate capabilities and services that we want to bring to market for our members,” said Davis. “That has laid a foundation [toward] being a cloud and data company that is required to support this new digital experience and vision of Health Reimagined that we want for our members.”
Davis joined Blue Shield of California only a couple of weeks before the company went into quarantine. As such, she became a test case for onboarding virtually, and she drew several lessons about how best to lead a team without the benefit of getting to know them in person. She has added more than 150 people to the IT team since the beginning of the pandemic, infusing the team with new talent at a time of great transformation, giving her ample opportunity to test those lessons. The first lesson in leading during these most unusual circumstances is to lead authentically. Davis indicated that it is necessary to “listen more, to understand where our employees are [personally and professionally], to understand the capacity for change that they can handle, to be connected to what all of our employees are dealing with.”
Second, she recognized the sanctity of communications. “I’m a firm believer that you can never communicate enough,” said Davis. “That engagement and trying to stay connected, keep the video on [on video conference calls], trying to find that connection with the employees has been extremely important in navigating this change.”
Third, she models perseverance with the team. These are uncertain times, and it is difficult to predict what opportunities or threats might be around the corner but being steadfast in moving the organization in the right direction remains paramount.
Davis draws strength that helps her persevere through her diverse set of experiences, and she understands that there is more that is common across those experiences than is different. “One of the beautiful things about being a technology leader is no matter what sector that you’re in, our challenges are all pretty much the same,” she noted. “We all address those technology opportunities at a different place, at a different maturity level. Our stakeholders are clearly different, but the technology opportunities and how we leverage technology to support mission or business outcomes doesn’t change.”
Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. He has written two bestselling books, and his third, Getting to Nimble, was recently released. He also moderates the Technovation podcast series and speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @PeterAHigh.
Barbara Lavernos has had a storied 30-year career at L’Oreal. She has had multiple promotions in recent months going from Chief Technology and Operations Officer of the company to President of Research, Innovation, and Technology in February 2021 to Deputy Chief Executive Officer in charge of Research, Innovation and Technology in May 2021. She indicated that her background and passion for tech-enabled innovation aligns with the company’s focus on science and innovation, which she noted: “have been at the foundation of our pioneering spirit and the success with our consumers as the L’Oréal DNA.”
Lavernos’ has driven a remarkable digital transformation at the company at the intersection of science and technology to create a powerful platform to develop advanced, personalized, innovative beauty products, services, and devices. “The science; agronomy and biotechnology allow us to renew completely our portfolio of raw materials,” noted Lavernos. “Green sciences are at the heart of the exploration of our innovation when it comes to product. Then with the exponential advance of tech, we think we are unlocking new breakthrough algorithm-based services and products. That is the idea of combining research and innovation—our roots, our DNA—with this revolution of technology. We look forward to developing innovation that pushes the boundaries of science and reinvents beauty rituals thanks to technology.”
Lavernos is passionate about what she refers to as BeautyTech. She defined the term as, “exponentially augmenting L’Oréal’s science that we have rooted [in] cutting-edge technology at scale.” She added that the company has the advantage of 112 years of knowledge and data about beauty rituals related to skin and hair. One of the biggest changes in recent years has been the focus on personalization. “In the past, most of the companies provided global products that [were believed to] suit everyone,” Lavernos said. “Today, we [have the capacity to know consumers] in real-time, to know their expectations, to know their environment, to know their skin because with virtual reality, with virtual try-on, we can have this dialogue with our consumers.”
By way of example, Lavernos highlighted an offering that was introduced at CES 2021 with the company’s Yves Saint Laurent brand. It is called Rouge Sur Measure, and it is a smart at-home method for consumers to create their own personalized lipstick, choosing from thousands of shades with one single touch. It is done through an app that can be installed on a smartphone or on a tablet. The app leverages artificial intelligence to allow the consumer to explore and try the color or the looks they want. Also, a consumer can take a picture of a pair of shoes or a handbag and match a lipstick color to them.
A second example that Lavernos offered is Lancôme Custom Made Foundation, which offers Le Teint Particulier, meaning a unique tint. It is a patented technology that creates a foundation that matches the skin tone of each individual. “The experience starts with taking a scan of the consumer’s skin, and it is done at the point-of-sale with three different places to have the perfect skin tone,” Lavernos explained. “Then this data is interpreted by the highly sophisticated algorithm, which predicts the ideal color using those three measurements taken from your skin. The algorithm goes on to determine the correct amount of each ingredient required. Then you have the mix of those ingredients. 20 minutes after, you have the perfect foundation you are dreaming of!”
Lavernos also highlighted that consumers today are much more interested that in the past about the ingredients in the products they use but also where they come from and how they are sourced and manufactured. L’Oreal now provides QR codes that provide product origin, production, manufacturing conditions, sourcing, supplier details, and the like.
Customers are also more interested in the environmental impact of the products they use. L’Oreal has established a partnership with Gjosa, a Swiss innovation and environmental company that integrates technology into everyday products to make them more environmentally friendly. The partnership has developed a multi-channel showerhead that integrates Gjosa patented In-Flow technology, that will make it possible for beauty salons to use 80% less water when washing customers’ hair. Lavernos indicated that a version for consumers to use at home is in the offing, as well.
The pandemic has pushed some consumers who had little or no experience with virtual try-ons for make-up, for example, to use the latest technology to do so. Many have enjoyed the experience so much that Lavernos believes many will continue to interact with the company virtually for try-ons even when the health crisis subsides. In 2020, more than 25% of L’Oreal’s revenue was derived via digitally via e-commerce. That represented an increase of 70% over the prior year. “Here again, there will be no way back,” said Lavernos. “Not to say that people will not come back to physical shops, but they will go to physical shops for other experiences [than in the past]. Here again, technology will play a key role for entertainment, for precision advice, for our professionals taking care of them [personally].” She believes that e-commerce sales will eventually behalf of the company’s overall sales.
Lavernos believes that her ascent to the Deputy Chief Executive Officer role at L’Oreal was aided by her background in technology. “Technology is business today,” she underscored. “My appointment in this position is really only the translation of this belief…. [technology] became fully, completely strategic, let’s say, eight years ago when we transformed into Industry 4.0, when we entered this digital shift and more and more IT came into everything. When you speak about advertising…it is tech-based today. When it comes to innovation…it is about technology. When it comes to supply chain e-commerce, it is about technology. Finance? If you are not real-time, at scale, capable [of leveraging] AI, how can you properly manage your Finance [function]?”
Therefore, Lavernos believes that her journey will be replicated many times over, as technology and digital leaders increasingly are seen as ideal candidates for the top ranks within companies. She provides a remarkable case-in-point for others to ponder and emulate.
It may seem strange to think of a technology or digital leader being responsible for aligning strategy across the enterprise. Since the inception of the CIO role, strategies were often created and then brought to them. They were not engaged in the strategic planning processes of the rest of the organization. Instead, they had to bring to life the outcomes of those strategies.
If you think about it, though, aside from the chief executive officer, only the chief financial officer and chief human resources officer has the breadth of purview comparable to a CIO or chief digital officer, and the technology and digital executives are increasingly involved in customer-facing activities in a way that the CFO and CHRO roles have not historically been.
Technology and digital leaders must recognize that they engage with the rest of the enterprise and the company’s customers, and that is rare if not unique. As such, they must leverage this advantage to a greater extent in fostering strategic alignment.
Strategic alignment means ensuring there is alignment from enterprise strategy to divisional, business unit, or functional strategy. This alignment is often misunderstood or lacking in companies, and that disconnect means wasted effort and money for the enterprise.
Further, a lack of well-articulated plans at the divisional level means the path to bringing those plans to life will be murky at best. For reasons of self-preservation and value-creation, technology and digital leaders must push for better.
Translating IT strategy from the enterprise level to the divisional level is important because it is at the divisional level where the work is done. Enterprise strategy typically calls out objectives related to revenue growth, cost efficiency, customer satisfaction, geographic expansion, product innovation and the like. It is the divisions of the company that determine how each of those will happen.
Let’s take revenue growth as an example. Growing revenue is vital to the health of a company, but each function — from sales and marketing to specific product or service areas — contributes in different yet important ways. The specifics of what each function will do needs to be formulated clearly to have teams go and find the new revenue through the various mechanisms available across the company.
Engage teams to conduct an analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT). Such analyses are typically simple, easy to understand, and ensure that leaders can gather information quickly, easily and at the right level of granularity:
As you gather feedback from these SWOTs, it is important to categorize the feedback into topics like people, processes, product, brand, geography or market, finance, customers, organization or culture, competition, technology, vendors or partners, and the like. These form the vestigial versions of objectives for the enterprise or division.
Optimally, you should gather that feedback into a common framework of objectives, goals, tactics and measures.
Each objective should have a goal associated with it. This is a success metric that helps chart the path to success.
Using the same rather generic enterprise strategies, the goals might be defined as revenue growth (grow revenue by 15% in the next year), cost efficiency (grow costs at a rate 5% under revenue growth in the next year), customer satisfaction (improve customer satisfaction with our products from 70% satisfied to 80% satisfied in two years), geographic expansion (open 10 new offices in the coming year) or product innovation (introduce two, $50 million revenue products in the next year).
Try to limit the number of goals to two, as if you go for more than that, the strategy is less of a filter and is permeable to too many ideas.
Next, the digital and technology leader can brainstorm tactics with members of the enterprise or divisional team who are experts in the area noted by a given objective. As noted above, these are the various actions available to the company (or division) that help it reach the goal(s) articulated.
It is important to note that tactics should never include the name of a particular solution. The extent to which a project name or a vendor product is noted in a strategic plan renders it more important than it is. The action is one thing; the means of delivering the action are another.
You may believe that Salesforce is the solution you wish to use for customer relationship management, but better to articulate the need for CRM than to note the solution. The solution should be debated.
The tactics can be more plentiful, and during the brainstorming phase, definitely err on the side of more rather than fewer tactics. After the list is finalized, the tactics should be prioritized. The prioritization should be undertaken based on the perception of which ones are being pursued today, which ones are likely to be pursued in the near term, which will be undertaken in the medium term, which will be undertaken later, and which ones may or may not be undertaken.
Finally, a measure or measures should be defined for each tactic. For the same reason noted for the goals, try to limit them to two. For the goals and measures, remember the acronym SMART.
Our current moment has provided an opportunity for CIOs and other technology leaders to be the catalyst for their firms’ strategic evolution. These executives should take advantage of driving digital change. Otherwise, they risk digital driving them.
Peter A. High is the author of GETTING TO NIMBLE: How to Transform Your Company into a Digital Leader and President of Metis Strategy, a management and strategy consulting firm focused on the intersection of business and technology.
With all the ways digital innovation has enabled companies to remain productive during the pandemic, one of the most positive outcomes is improved collaboration across traditional business silos. In my new book, Getting to Nimble: How to Transform Your Company into a Digital Leader, I discuss how enterprises have made these silos more permeable, creating greater partnerships along the way.
Consider the following five examples and how they could apply to your digital transformation efforts.
Talented technologists are in high demand at most organizations, tasked with helping teams in other divisions figure out the digital implications of their ideas and strategize accordingly. In many cases, these ideas come from the technologists themselves. Companies that provide such “T-shaped” career paths offer an enormous advantage, developing leaders with great breadth and depth of experience. When they ascend to “chief” roles, they do so with a much clearer understanding about how value is created within the enterprise.
Agile methodology has been a boon for collaboration across the enterprise.
The traditional “waterfall” method of development involves someone from the business side (outside of IT) placing an order with the IT department. The IT team then develops this order, with little input from the business side until the project is completed months later.
In contrast, agile development includes the intended audience or user of the project in development from ideation through completion. With each iteration, the user validates value, and features are amplified or turned off accordingly. In some cases, the entire project may even be scrapped as a result of what the team learns.
DevOps blends two traditionally siloed parts of the technology and digital domain: development and operations. In a traditional project development model, developers take a project from ideation through completion, and the operations team then moves it forward. There is often a moment in the lifecycle when the project is “thrown over the wall” from development to operations (even this phrase highlights the distance and disconnects between the activities of the two groups).
DevOps instead makes delivery teams responsible for production issues and fixes, whether legacy or new, drawing them into the lifecycle earlier. Greater levels of involvement and accountability make for better work products.
The migration from a project to a product orientation is another area that benefits from greater collaboration. Internal “products” are also good examples of this – think order-to-cash, onboarding new hires, or creating a mobile customer experience.
These products potentially involve great value, and the product teams are typically cross-divisional or cross-discipline: They might include tech and digital, marketing, sales, operations, and any other division to which the product is relevant. A product leader should lead the cross-functional team, and that team should be prepared to remain intact for a longer period of time than the typical project.
An early example of this type of project orientation comes from Atticus Tysen, Chief Information and Security Officer at Intuit. When Tysen became CIO, he brought with him a product orientation, defining products for IT to drive. By developing in long-term teams, each team member was able to develop a higher level of expertise in the product area than they would have in a more traditional project structure.
Data strategy has also driven more cross-functional thinking. Done well, all strategy should invite greater collaboration across traditional silos since value is truly driven at the intersection of the disciplines. Data strategy should apply everywhere data is gathered, secured, synthesized, and analyzed – across the entire company.
Many companies have found it useful to have a leader who drives data strategy on the company’s behalf. To do this effectively, that leader (whether the CIO, the chief data officer, or another IT role) should engage leaders in other parts of the company to ensure that the data strategy is as comprehensive and useful as possible.
These are just a few areas where stronger collaboration is happening across industries and geographies. Companies that fail to take advantage of these trends risk falling behind more nimble players in their industry.
Peter A. High is the author of GETTING TO NIMBLE: How to Transform Your Company into a Digital Leader (Kogan Page, Spring 2021) and President of Metis Strategy, a management and strategy consulting firm focused on the intersection of business and technology. He has advised and interviewed many of the world’s top CIOs and leaders at multi-billion-dollar corporations like Gap, Bank of America, Adobe, Time Warner Inc., Intuit, and more.
Yasir Anwar is the Chief Technology Officer and Chief Digital Officer of Williams-Sonoma. He refers to the company as a house of brands, which include Williams-Sonoma, Williams-Sonoma Home, West Elm, Pottery Barn, Pottery Barn Teen, Pottery Barn Kids, Mark & Graham, and Rejuvenation. Technology and digital are the central nervous system of the company, Anwar notes. “We are the world’s largest digital-first, design-led and sustainable home retailer. For that, you have to bring the whole world together to serve the customer needs.”
Anwar sees the evolution of the head of technology role as key in this transformation. He notes that “traditional” CIOs have an internal operational focus. The merging of technology and digital in his title and responsibilities implies a focus on technology projects but also on outcomes. What value is being driven? “It always has to start with the customer experience,” Anwar says. “This is the merger of the technology strength, powered and coupled by customer experience, digital experiences, and the power of digital that has been unleashing in the world as we speak.”
The results speak for themselves. Williams-Sonoma has a 70% e-commerce revenue penetration, Anwar said, up from 58% prior to the pandemic. Achieving that from a technical perspective begins with a global multi-tenant platform and a modern e-commerce platform. “We are building on top of not just microservices, but micro front-end, which would allow us to have more nimble, small, modular services,” noted Anwar. This allows the company to go to market much more rapidly. The platform is used across all of the company’s brands, which gives the company an edge when it comes to innovation. The platform allows the company to test a new idea or feature on a single brand, gather data, and quickly roll it out to others if it is successful.
As with many other companies, the pandemic accelerated digital innovation. For example, Williams-Sonoma associates use a tool called Room Planner to help advise clients on what furniture fits best in which rooms. The pandemic pushed for a faster release of a customer-facing version of the tool, which enables a customer to use the measurements of a room in their house, and then fill the space with furniture from across Williams-Sonoma’s brands. This proved to be a game changer at a time when so many people focused on updating and upgrading their homes to make them more conducive to both work and personal life. The tool also provides a connection to a professional when a customer wishes to get advice or ask questions.
When asked for Williams-Sonoma’s points of differentiation, Anwar believes one of the biggest examples is the company’s in-house design. “Many other marketplaces…sell home furnishing items,” he said. “They [typically procure] those items. They’re sourcing those items from different vendors across the world, but they do not own the design of those products.” By contrast, each of the Williams-Sonoma brands have high-performing, passionate and inspirational designers. “We own and we design everything and then we work with our in-house manufacturing locations, which we have here in the U.S.,” said Anwar, “We make in America, and then we also go to our partners, wherever we need to get the quality and diversity of design manufacturing…. I don’t think there is a company that could claim that they have such a deep ownership of the design, freshness of the design, and then the quality of the design.”
Anwar and his team have focused on two key cultural pillars in their transformation. First was moving a culture of “managers managing managers” to “experts leading experts.” This entails upskilling the team dramatically to greater levels of depth of knowledge. The second was going from a focus on output to a focus on outcomes. The result has been a transformation from a traditional retailer to a true hybrid between traditional retail and retail tech. “Our business is completely running on the rails of technology,” Anwar said. “Our goal in the next few years is to [reach a point where] tech front-loads the business propulsion and growth.”
The “house of brands” approach works for Williams-Sonoma because each brand serves different phases of an individual or a family’s life. The stores, themselves, reflect those nuances. A Pottery Barn Kids will have a different look and feel from Williams-Sonoma. That said, there are many commonalities and best practices that the unified Stores team can apply across the brands. Technology reflects a similar strategy. “If you have brands which are running on different platforms, different versions, there is a ton of costs,” he said. “If you have tested something great in one brand, you cannot go live [with] another brand because there are so many nuances.” Anwar noted that at least 85% of the company’s technology stack is common for all the brands.
Each of these trends served Williams-Sonoma well, and the stock price of the company bears this out, as it has risen more than 450% since March 20, 2020, from roughly $36 per share to the current price north of $164 per share.
Anwar is proud of the degree to which the tech and digital team fostered nimbleness in the company. “The teams were ready, the infrastructure was ready, the websites were ready, the supply chain fulfillment operational teams were ready,” noted Anwar. “It is a unique situation for all [retailers]. As they say, everybody is going through the same storm, but on different types of ships.” Anwar and his team have helped Williams-Sonoma build a ship to withstand the storm, steering more readily toward opportunity and away from danger.
LoanDepot has named George Brady Chief Digital Officer, effective July 6. LoanDepot has funded more than $300 billion in loans since its founding in 2010 and currently ranks as the second-largest retail nonbank lender and one of the leading retail mortgage lenders in the United States. LoanDepot is an approved seller and servicer for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae.
Brady will oversee all of loanDepot’s technology capabilities, including the leading proprietary platform, mello, with a specific focus on spearheading loanDepot’s technological innovation. Brady will report directly to loanDepot Founder and CEO Anthony Hsieh. LoanDepot’s technology team, led by Chief Information Officer Sudhir Nair, will report to Brady.
“Pushing the technology envelope is in loanDepot’s DNA,” said loanDepot founder and chief executive officer Anthony Hsiea. “Since our launch in 2010, our technology-powered products and services have changed the game for both customers and originators by providing an exceptional experience they can’t get anywhere else.”
In describing Brady’s hire, Hsiea went on to note, “George is a world-class talent whose unmatched knowledge, skills and leadership adds incredible horsepower to an already exceptional team. Under George’s leadership, I’m confident we’ll drive our world-class platform, mello, to new heights and continue to cultivate a culture of innovation and technical excellence. We have a tremendous opportunity to not only continue our innovation path as a category leader, but to shape and change the entire industry.”
“LoanDepot has a deep understanding of how technology can push the boundaries to enable both consumers and originators to seamlessly and successfully navigate the lending process,” noted Brady. “Between its remarkable track record of digital innovation, the talent and passion of its outstanding team, and the commitment of a visionary CEO to stay on the cutting edge, loanDepot is in a unique market position. The time is right to set the new standard for technological excellence and expand our capacity to meet the changing expectations of our customers.”
Brady has spent most of his career in financial services at companies like Goldman Sachs, Fidelity Investments, and Deutsche Bank. He was most recently the Chief Technology Officer at Capital One.
The company now known as Cox Enterprises was founded nearly 120 years ago by James Cox, a man who would become the Governor of Ohio. It began with his first media property, the Dayton Daily News, and developed into a media conglomerate covering many cities. It is now a $20 billion private, family-owned company with 55,000 employees. Cox Enterprises operates across three business categories: Communications, which includes Cox Cable; Automotive, which includes Manheim Auctions, Kelley Blue Book, and Autotrader; and media, which dates back to the company’s founding. Much of the media business was divested in 2020, though the company still owns the Dayton Daily News and a few other properties. Much of that part of the company was divested in 2020, though the company still owns the Dayton Daily News along with a few other properties.
The company’s chief information officer is Richard Cox (no relation to the founder). He joined the company in 2013 as part of the Autotrader.com team and took on the CIO role in October 2019. However in 2018, he took a break from his ascent in Cox Enterprises to join the City of Atlanta as Chief Operations Officer, which proved to be a seminal experience for him. The current mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, was early in her administration and called upon Cox to help her set things up. “We went to high school together,” recalled Cox. “I hadn’t talked to her in 30 years, so it was just this really interesting opportunity. Cox [Enterprises] allowed me to go help her at the City of Atlanta for about a year and a half. I was an executive on loan.”
During his first week in that role, Atlanta experienced the largest ransomware attack in its history. This was a few months before Atlanta was to host the Super Bowl, making the situation all the more impactful and stressful. In retrospect, Cox sees it as a blessing in disguise. “I am absolutely convinced if we had not gone through that, that Super Bowl would have been [all the more] challenging,” remembered Cox. “We were on high alert during the Super Bowl. We were being scammed on a regular basis, but because we were really prepared [due to the earlier cybersecurity attack] it was seamless. We didn’t have any security issues at all, and the city now is in a good posture.”
Cox says his time in government accelerated his progress as a leader. “During those times, you can’t pretend to be a leader, you have to prove it,” he noted. He brought back much of what he learned in taking on the CIO role at his old employer. Cox encouraged open dialogue across the team to understand how the company could improve. That led to a group called Action Speak, which increased Cox Enterprise’s focus on diversity and inclusion. “Now we have paid time off for people to vote,” Cox said by way of example. “Regardless of what your political views may be, you will be supported to vote. We’re being more intentional in terms of making sure that we look across all levels in how people of color are represented across not just our front lines, but (also) middle management and the executive ranks.”
Cox has also focused his team’s attention on reducing the complexity of the company’s diverse set of businesses. “We have worked on making sure we take a step back and build a strategy that is holistic,” he said. “In the past, we just had this tendency to work in silos.”. An early way in which he accomplished this was by conducting numerous interviews and surveys to understand how customers viewed technology. By doing more together, Cox reasoned, the customer’s experience would improve.
This approach extended to the technology that the customer might not immediately notice. For example, Cox focused on creating a comprehensive cloud strategy and incorporating better data and analytics capabilities. These priorities have improved reliability and resiliency and helped Cox identify new ways to improve customer experience.
These priorities were part of a three- to five-year plan that accelerated dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic. For Cox, the pandemic was a chance to improve. “In these times of crisis, you can take a step back and regret what you didn’t do along the way, or you can look at it as an opportunity,” he said. “We have looked at this as an opportunity for sure.”
Communication is the essential element to pursue during these times of great change, Cox said. “What’s non-negotiable: you have to communicate. You have to be proactive, and you have to communicate relentlessly.” There are several formats that have worked best. With groups of 10 to 15 at a time, he met with every member of his team to communicate plans and listen, noting their concerns, hopes, and the like. Additionally, town hall meetings and more impromptu “ask leadership” sessions have added to the frequent opportunity for conversations and learning.
With each challenge and crisis he has faced, Cox has gained lessons and confidence for the next one. Though he hopes he won’t be tested again, Cox knows he and his team have what it takes to guide Cox Enterprises through turbulent times.
Johnson Controls has appointed Vijay Sankaran as vice president and chief technology officer, a new role aimed at accelerating product software engineering development and expanding customer solutions. This will expand upon the company’s OpenBlue digital platform, which allows the company to connect all building systems and to optimize interior environments by learning from the data the systems share. Johnson Controles is a global leader for smart, healthy and sustainable buildings. Sankaran was most recently chief information officer and head of innovation at TD Ameritrade, with responsibility for digital strategy, customer platforms, software engineering, technology operations, cybersecurity, data management and analytics, and enterprise innovation.
“Vijay brings a wealth of strategic software experience to Johnson Controls and is ideally positioned to strengthen our solutions and market competitiveness through world class software engineering,” said Johnson Controls chairman and chief executive officer George Oliver to whom Sankaran reports. “In this new, enterprise-wide chief technology officer role, Vijay and the software engineering team will accelerate our innovation, solve for unique customer outcomes and deliver for our customers on the key secular trends of sustainability, energy efficiency, and healthy, safe and connected smart buildings.”
Sankaran’s is a newly created organization, with software engineering team members from across Johnson Controls global portfolio reporting into it. His team will accelerate and unify the product software engineering development efforts creating common software architecture to further drive the enterprise software technology strategy.
“Vijay’s role as CTO will be pivotal in driving continued growth and expansion for our OpenBlue digital platform as all of the elements of a building’s operational technology become connected,” said Johnson Controls Chief Customer and Digital Officer Mike Ellis. “Through OpenBlue, that connectivity enables us to leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence, as well as edge computing technologies, to predict patterns and trends, and provide positive customer outcomes for sustainability, energy efficiency, security and healthy building environments.”
“I couldn’t be more excited to have this opportunity to lead customer facing engineering as no other company has the breadth of capabilities to provide healthy, smart, sustainable building environments,” said Sankaran upon reflecting on this new opportunity. “The Johnson Controls team already successfully developed and rolled out an outstanding platform, OpenBlue.”
Sankaran’s role is to integrate software engineering across the company in a holistic way so that we can further expand the capabilities of OpenBlue and leverage the breadth of the company’s building systems portfolio. When asked about the technologies that will be most important to this journey, he noted, artificial intelligence, machine learning, data analytics and connectivity, each of which he referred to as “game changers” to help customers meet their goals on sustainability, energy efficiency and healthy, smart buildings.
Prior to working at TD Ameritrade, Sankaran held executive roles at Ford Motor Company from 2001 to 2013, including IT Chief Technology Officer, Director of Application Development, as well as leadership roles in architecture, emerging technologies, data and analytics, and enterprise transformation programs.
Sankaan has a B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an M.B.A. at Duke University Fuqua School of Business.
The $8.4 billion revenue network infrastructure provider CommScope has promoted its vice president of digital transformation, Praveen Jonnala, to the chief information officer role, effective immediately. Jonnala has been with the company for more than a dozen years.
In his prior post, Jonnala led all aspects of strategy, development, and delivery of the company’s digital transformation efforts partnering with sales, marketing, supply chain, manufacturing, finance, HR, and quality.
CommScope is focused on developing its next-generation wireless networking and communications infrastructure businesses. In recent years, CommScope grown tremendously through acquisition, requiring simplification of business processes and enterprise systems. This has included steps like consolidating to a single, global ERP to improving operational efficiency and improving customer experience digitally. Areas that Jonnala and his team will focus on in the near-term include enhancing the company’s product catalog and better tracking of product orders. The business teams will have access to more artificial intelligence capabilities to build better revenue projection models and predict and manage global supply chain risks.
“Working for a leading edge technology company in the networking equipment space, CommScope’s CIO plays a critical role in not only optimizing our own operations, but also serving as a test bed for cutting-edge technologies and new customer solutions,” said Alex Pease, chief financial officer. “Through advanced analytics, automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence, Praveen will help us optimize our business operations as well as serve customers better. With his depth of experience and broad knowledge in advanced technologies, Praveen is uniquely positioned to drive value both within CommScope and externally.”
“Establishing the role of IT as a business and innovation partner is critical given the rate of change in our business and customer expectations,” noted Jonnala. “I believe we have a great opportunity to add value through technology across CommScope—by providing an exceptional digital customer experience, partnering with product teams to drive more software capabilities into our products, and transforming our factories and supply chain for improved quality and reduced costs. I am excited about Artificial Intelligence and its transformational potential, particularly in our product development, manufacturing and customer service operations. Building hybrid AI teams made up of both IT and business partners will unlock new opportunities for CommScope and our customers.”
CommScope has Global IT capability centers in the U.S., India and China. Having global IT centers enables the company to tap into the best talent across the globe.
Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. He has written two bestselling books, and his third, Getting to Nimble, will be released in March 2021. He also moderates the Technovation podcast series and speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @PeterAHigh.
Saul Van Beurden is the Head of Technology for Wells Fargo, a role he has had for nearly two years, after having spent time as the Chief Information Officer of Consumer and Community Banking at JPMorgan Chase. He commands a budget of roughly $9 billion and has a team of 40,000 technologists reporting to him. His purview includes all software developments, IT operations, infrastructure and cloud enablement and cybersecurity. His is a role of tremendous consequence in the bank to say the least.
The top technologists at major companies are most often referred to as chief information officers. They are sometimes referred to as chief technology officers or as chief digital officers. The “head of technology” title is an unusual one. When asked how the company and he arrived at it, he noted that the reason was that when he joined, there was already a chief information officer and a chief technology officer, both of whom would report to him. “For me, it’s not important the title of a role,” noted Van Beurden. “It’s how you act on that role and the responsibility that you have [that is more important].”
Upon joining the company, Van Beurden elected to develop a plan to play both “offense and defense,” as he put it, comparing it to coaching an American football team. “The first role is what you could call the defensive role and is the first operator role,” he said. “This is all about making sure that the plan runs, that the things go. The second role is an offensive role. This is what we call the business enabler role, where it’s more about how do you decrease risk for the bank? How do you maximize revenue? How do you get better return on investments?”
To bring this to life, early in his tenure, Van Beurden and his team defined what he refers to as a “6S Strategy.” They are:
Relative to skills, he highlights that it is critical to build a team that has the skills of today and grows the skills of tomorrow, suggesting a level of learning agility necessary to accomplish the company’s mission. This is the path to being a “trusted operator,” as he put it. “This is all about upscaling and reskilling your workforce,” he said.
Needless to say, security is an important skillset for any enterprise, but especially so for a major financial services company that has so much sensitive data flowing through it. “You could say the only thing that a bank sells is trust: the fact that it’s safe to have your [money and data] with the bank,” said Van Beurden. “Security comes down to cybersecurity, to controls that you need to have in place, and so forth.”
With 90% of all transactions taking place digitally across Wells Fargo, stability is sine qua non. “When the digital app or the online desktop version is down, the bank is down,” Van Beurden underscored. “You need to have a stable shop. That stability is created by more and better resiliency. It’s all about automating the processes on the IT operation side, and with rationalization of your applications.” He noted that these first three “S”s make up the defensive play.
The offensive play begins with scalability. Van Beurden highlighted that this requires on-demand service, so that as transaction volumes increase, the technology seamlessly scales up and then can scale back as necessary.
Next is the focus on speed. As a long-time financial services executive, Van Beurden noted that banks are slow, with the behemoths like Wells Fargo often taking more than a year to deliver programs. He has driven his team to halve or even to cut the time to a third of that. He painted the picture of the typical way of doing things, and then offered the improvement. He highlighted the typical process with many handoffs along the way. “First product requirements, and then the prioritization with finance teams, and then it goes to a PMO, and then it gets to a project leader, and then IT intake, and IT intake to design, to technical design, to developers, to test, to production,” Van Beurden said. “You already near 60 weeks’ worth of work right there.” The improvement comes through multifunctional teams that do not require inefficient handoffs. “The analyst with the product idea sits down with the engineer who is supposed to build a feature, who is also the one who can directly put it in production because he or she is using DevOps tools like we have today. You take away that whole notion of handoff, handoff, handoff.” Next, he noted that process automation is critical. He highlighted that speed is the key differentiator to maximize revenues and to gain advantage over the rest of the market through better return on investment.
The final “S” is satisfaction. “You can do all the other things, but if the end customer is still not happy with and app [for example], and the uptime of the app [are not appropriate], we have failed,” Van Beurden said. “Satisfaction is, for us, the cornerstone of the strategy.”
Van Beuren hoped to simplify things from a strategy perspective to validate progress relative to each of the six “S” categories. By maturing and driving value in each area, the goal is to deliver better capabilities for innovation. The technology team has re-infused the company with the art of the possible. That innovation is based is also structured, in this case into three pillars.
The first pillar is an innovation unit that reports to a peer of Van Beurden’s, Ather Williams III, who is the Senior Executive Vice President, Head of Corporate Strategy, Digital Platforms and Innovation at Wells Fargo. “[Williams’] team constantly looks for what is the next best experience for our customer,” said Van Beurden. “What is the next best feature that we need to develop? They also look a little bit further ahead, like three years, four years into the future, and start to see what is coming and looking around the corner and making sure it is getting adopted.” That team works in an integrated fashion with software engineers on Van Beurden’s team, ensuring there is alignment and a strong collaboration between the teams.
The second pillar is research and development on the technology side. This team is often tasked with the most deeply technical or complicated innovation topics. The team has assembled an ecosystem to stimulate the thinking necessary to tackle big topics, partnering with institutions such as MIT and Stanford. Van Beurden indicated that the R&D team focuses on what he calls “the magical cocktail of artificial intelligence and machine learning, data and compute.” He believes that the future of the bank will be defined at the intersection of these technology disciplines.
Van Beurden offered examples of how Wells Fargo is leveraging each. “We need to explain the outcomes of AI models. If we get a lending request of a customer, and we say yes or no, we need to be able to say why we said yes or why we said no. We cannot say, ‘There was the model and it ran it and we do not know [why the decision was made].’ We need to be able to explain it.” The team has been able to monitor and explain the outcomes of the models while fine tuning them where necessary. With MIT, they have developed a mechanism for AI to explain AI. “This is how we solve the problem of non-explainable AI by putting AI on top of it by which it becomes explainable,” said Van Beurden.
Though many companies think of big data as an operating principle, Van Beurden thinks about small data. “Small data is really finding that smallest significant set of data that will bring you to [the right] outcome, [which may leverage] synthetic data, instead of all the production data that we use for this,” explained Van Beurden. “Can we do synthetic data to come to the same outcome?” In concert with the research institutes, his team is hard at work on this.
The final pillar is related to compute; more specifically, the fast advancements Van Beurden’s team is making on compute power. “That speed that is coming with quantum compute cannot [be expressed] in factors like 10, or hundreds or millions,” he noted. “It’s [beyond] what we think is possible to be done. It doesn’t matter when it’s ready. We do not want to be the one that has regrets that we didn’t do it from the start, and that we weren’t there if it becomes successful and production ready.” There are two areas of focus as his team drives this journey: trading algorithms and cryptographic keys. The former will aid the bank in fostering faster trading. The latter will protect the bank from the time when all possible passwords can be determined at lightning speed by bad actors due to dramatic advances in compute speed.
Though Wells Fargo has taken its lumps in recent years, Van Beurden and his team have positioned the company to gain advantages once again as an innovator.
