8/7/2018
By Peter High. Published on Forbes
Greg Meyers has joined $13 billion revenue Syngenta, as chief information officer (CIO) in Basel, Switzerland. Greg will now focus on leading information technology for a global agricultural innovator that is helping improve worldwide food security by enabling millions of farmers to make better use of available resources. The company aims to “to transform how crops are grown. We are committed to rescuing land from degradation, enhancing biodiversity and revitalizing rural communities.” Syngenta has over 28,000 employees in over 90 countries.
Meyers also led a digital transformation that reshaped how the company works with direct customers and channel partners to drive growth via eCommerce, enable customer-self-service, and enable the future of our smart public safety software and services portfolio.
“I’m thrilled to be joining Syngenta,” said Meyers, “Agriculture innovation and farm productivity is increasingly enabled by IT systems and the ability to manage Big Data. In fact, IT has been transforming both farm operations and companies, like Syngenta, that support them. I look forward to contributing in this exciting environment that is ultimately helping feed people around the world and making our planet more sustainable.”
Mark Patrick, CFO of Syngenta said, “We are in the midst of a new era of innovation in agriculture – in breeding seeds, developing crop protection products and delivering digital solutions – for farmers around the world. Harnessing the power of IT is important to our success and we are looking to Greg to lead us into the future of IT. Greg has a strong IT track record in multiple industries – both technically and as a leader; he will help us better manage our business and serve our customers.”
Previously, Meyers served as CIO of Motorola Solutions for the past four years. In that role, he successfully led the largest technology transformation in Motorola’s history (and the largest ERP project in the world in years 2015-2017) by consolidating seven ERP instances and more than 600 supporting applications to one ERP instance and less than 250 applications across Finance, Supply Chain and the go-to-market functions.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
8/6/2018
Bask Iyer has always had a different orientation as a chief information officer. As a divisional CIO at GlaxoSmithKline, then as the Group CIO at Honeywell, and as the Group Senior Vice President of Business Operations and the Chief Information Officer of Juniper Networks, he developed a close relationship with the businesses that he was a part of. He believes that is one of the key factors in his rise at Dell and VMare.
Iyer has the rare distinction of being both the CIO and chief digital officer of both companies in addition to being the Executive Vice President of Dell Digital. As such, he has leadership roles in two publicly traded companies. (Dell has a majority ownership stake in VMware.) He began his tenure with the companies as the CIO of VMware alone, when Michael Dell asked him to take over the same responsibilities at Dell. To Iyer’s surprise, he was not asked to relinquish responsibilities at VMware.
As such, he has led dramatic digital transformations of two very different companies: a Silicon Valley software company and a much larger and more traditional technology company. Iyer notes that the key to his success has been focusing on people and process before technology. He highlights the changes he has ushered in and the methods he has used in this interview.
Peter High: You are the Executive Vice President of Dell Digital as well as the CIO and CDO of both Dell and VMware. Could you unwind all that you do and describe what it entails?
Bask Iyer: I was the CIO of VMware for a long time and had additional digital responsibilities. Nearly two years ago, the Dell-EMC merger happened and Michael Dell and the executives in the Dell-EMC family asked me to help with the integration. They were bringing two cultures together, two different CIOs together, and two IT teams together. Little did I know that my role helping out would turn into a job.
I have a challenging and interesting job. VMware is an independent company and therefore Dell owns only 80 percent of VMware. Additionally, Dell is big partners with a great deal of their competition, and because of this, VMware has to have that independence. It is an independent company with its own audit committee among other independent entities. Because of this, I have to think of it as two separate jobs. As the CIO for VMware, the audit committee asks me questions to ensure that my job for VMware is not being compromised. Moreover, the Dell audit committee and management ask me the same questions.
At Dell, part of the role is the traditional CIO, which covers all infrastructure, all IT, all end-user applications, the program management office, and security, among other areas. Additionally, I am part of the executive team on both sides, so I can understand the strategy and translate it. An interesting part of the digital side of the job, which is a little unusual for IT, is that Dell’s E-Commerce team is supported and run by my team. All the product developer people for e-commerce, who are not necessarily IT employees but instead are product development employees, are a part of it. It is a robust e-commerce platform, it is growing, and we want to put more products for our customers on the Dell e-commerce services. That part of the job is certainly interesting and creative. Similarly, with VMware, we are going to a digital subscription model. My team at VMware works closely with [research and development] to ensure that the products and subscription models we develop can be built and have visibility to end customers. Additionally, the subscription model is a product that IT develops to go in part and parcel with the offering that VMware has. Overall, it is both digital, and it is traditional IT that people understand, but it is two separate jobs. That being said, it is a family of companies and therefore it is a friendly environment. While both executive teams always make fun of me as both believe I am not with them, they have always been supportive. I could not have done it without the support of the two CEOs, presidents, and executive teams.
7/30/2018
Mayank Prakash was a chief information officer multiple times over at private sector companies such as Avaya, Sage UK, and iSOFT. He also was a Managing Director at Morgan Stanley where he was responsible for Global Wealth and Investment Management Technology.
Four years ago, he pivoted dramatically, taking on the role of Chief Information and Digital Officer of the United Kingdom’s Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), which is the largest public sector organization in the country. He has found a motivated workforce up for the challenge of digital transformation in order to enhance the services that the DWP offers. Moreover, he has seen great advantages to being a more mature company inasmuch as there is ample data to run diverse, mature analytics on data sets that span several decades. He has also found that the significant challenges and opportunities that he and his team have been tasked with tackling have been a magnet for talent that is up to the challenge. He indicates that the greatest joy he has taken from this experience has been the opportunity to impact 22 million British citizens’ lives.
Peter High: Could you describe the United Kingdom’s Department for Work and Pensions?
Mayank Prakash: The Department for Work and Pensions is one of the largest organizations in Western Europe, and it is the largest public-sector organization in the United Kingdom. The best way for me to describe the DWP is from the perspective of the 22 million people who drive the change. Everybody in the UK has come across our services in their lives as we touch all citizens. We support children when their parents are separating to ensure that they have a better quality of life. We look after employed people who are of working age to make sure that they have fulfilling lives and that they are working. We look after disabled people to allow them to explore their potential. We look after retired people, who are typically living longer lives. We do all of this in an effort to produce better outcomes for them and for society.
High: Given the diverse array of people sho you deal with, ranging from millennials to older citizens of the United Kingdom, how do you think about the different personas or different experiences in which your citizenry wishes to interact with the DWP?
Prakash: We work with diversity on every dimension, ranging from age and gender to geographical footprint and social background. Like any large organization with a diverse footprint, we do not employ a one size fits all strategy, but instead, we use active segmentation of our customers to make sure we target our services to get the best impact. Additionally, we do not look at these customers as the cohorts. Instead, we ask ourselves what is the problem that we are trying to solve. The purpose is to work with people of working age to ensure that they are, in fact, working. That purpose leads to the need to get more people into work, which leads us to why some people may not be working. This leads to active segmentation and better delivery of targeted services.
7/23/2018
General Electric has been in the news quite a bit in recent weeks for the many changes afoot there. A centerpiece of the change in recent years has been the move toward digitizing the business. Bill Ruh leads that transformation as CEO of GE Digital and as the Chief Digital Officer of General Electric. He has been one of the primary architects of a major cultural change that is afoot at the 126 year old company.
Ruh notes that digital transformations often fail due to a lack of focus on “soft” elements such as culture, leadership, and talent. He notes that it is essential to blend talent by bringing new people into the company who have digital experience while also retraining existing employees.
Ruh has developed three layers to the approach: GE for GE, GE for installed base customers, and GE for the industrial world. This ensures that GE is its own first customer of digital offerings, and then can take those offerings to existing companies and beyond. He highlights all of the above and more in this interview.
Peter High: Executing a digital transformation is certainly a challenge, and it is almost always a multi-year journey. Could you talk about the digital transformation that you lead at General Electric? Specifically, could you elaborate on where you have been, where you are, and where you are going on that journey?
Bill Ruh: When we started seven years ago, GE was an early mover into the digital space. We dove into it because we could see that our customers were starting to use the data off the machines that GE had. There was a recognition that going forward, you had to be the best at understanding this data, because you do not want your competition to be better. We are entering a world where selling the machine is one element, but anybody can take the information off the machine and provide insight. Because of this, you want to give the best insight to your customers. It was a simple thought process in the beginning, but it turned out to be relatively profound.
Throughout this journey, we have learned a couple of things. One is that from an outside perspective, we have come to believe that the business world is a series of dominoes. Every industry and sector will eventually be transformed by digital. Digital will be the critical cornerstone to providing value. We have seen that in retail, entertainment, telecommunications, among other industries. Specifically, we are now seeing it in the industrial sector. One of the first ones we believe is going to fall in a big way is the automotive industry. Specifically, software for autonomous driving is going to foundationally remake who buys cars, who sells cars, and what the business model is. As I mentioned, I believe this goes beyond automotive and that it is true of every industry that we serve. We believe digital and autonomous systems are going to be the center point of it whether that be for cars, power plants, rail yards, factories, and so on. We are entering a ten year period where the industrial sector is likely going to be the most interesting sector for digital. We were the first in the sector to make this move. We incubated it and we feel incredibly well positioned to be able to win both in the industries we serve as well as in this emerging world as a whole.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes.
7/16/2018
Article by Mary Pratt. Published on CIO.com.
This customer focus helps her and her technology team spot unmet customer needs that they then can work to fulfill. That’s how they came up with CBRE 360, and how they decided to acquire in 2017 two software companies providing software-as-a-service solutions that CBRE now offers to its own employees and its customers.
Peter High, president of the business and IT strategy firm Metis Strategy and author of Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation, says CIOs who are able to identify money-making opportunities put themselves in their customers’ positions.
“They need to be awake to the opportunities to use information and technology in ways that will have positive implications for existing and potential customers,” he adds.
To read the full article, please visit CIO.com.
By Peter High. Published on Forbes.
Jason Lish was recently promoted to Chief Information Officer of $2.3 billion Alight Solutions. As CIO, he is responsible for Alight’s overall digital, technology, enterprise risk and security strategy, and execution. Lish also leads the team charged with designing and developing Alight’s latest human-centric designs and advancements at the Alight Innovation Lab.
Lish’s career path is an unusual one, as he has spent most of his career in security, most recently as Chief Security Officer of Alight Solutions, a role he took on in July of 2017. In that role, he directed physical and cyber security initiatives including developing and enforcing security policies and strategies, establishing security standards and programs across the company, and focusing on increasing protections around digital and physical assets. Lish also oversaw client investigations and was responsible for monitoring information security risks overall. There are a number of reasons why CSOs (sometimes referred to as CISOs – chief information security officers) are not regularly called upon to take on CIO responsibilities, but chief among them is that CSOs, understandably, develop a risk mitigation and risk management orientation to such a strong degree, that they are believed to be ill-suited to the CIO role, which often has an innovation mandate, as is the case in Lish’s current role. By definition, innovation requires risk-taking. Alight Solutions’ assessment that he can successfully make the leap from CSO to CIO suggests that he is equipped to balance risk-taking and risk management appropriately.
One factor that has helped Lish’s growth in developing a broader perspective than the average CSO has been involved in advising other technology firms. He is an advisory board of member of Tigera, Inc., a provider of secure application connectivity for the cloud-native world; SecureCircle, which provides unstructured data security for cloud-first enterprises; and Privora, a mobile protection company. Though all three are in the security space, his role in each case is as an advisor to help each company grow and innovate.
When Gary Reiner was the chief information officer of General Electric for parts of two decades, ending in 2010, he had an unusual purview in that role even for today. He led mergers & acquisitions, sourcing, IT, operations, and quality teams for the company. Armed with an MBA from Harvard University, and having spent time as a partner at the consultancy, Boston Consulting Group, he brought an unusual degree of business savvy to the role of CIO.
Since then, Reiner has made the unusual leap from CIO to venture capital, joining the growth equity firm, General Atlantic immediately after his tenure at General Electric. In that role, he has joined the boards of a number high growth companies (Box, Mu Sigma, Appirio, SnapAv), while also joining the boards of mature companies such as Citigroup and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Thus he has a deep well of knowledge of what the buyers of enterprise technology (CIOs) want in the technology they seek, and he also can advise mature companies on how to borrow some of the magic of start-ups while counseling start-ups on how to mature as they grow.
Reiner also sees the CIO role maturing, as well. He believes it will become more strategic as software continues to eat the world, and in fact, he believes that the rapid production of software at scale will become increasingly important among CIOs, as well. In this interview, he offers a wealth of recommendations for CIOs, offered from the various experiences he has had in the world of technology.
To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link.
Peter High: You are an Operating Partner at General Atlantic [GA] and part of their Resources Group. Could you talk about your purview in that role?
Gary Reiner: My responsibility is to look at technology companies where technology is the strategy and to become an advocate internally to partner with them. In many cases, if we do partner with them, I stay involved by joining the board to try to help them grow. We are a growth-oriented private equity firm, that is our mantra, and therefore what I try to do is centered around helping them grow faster than they otherwise would.
7/09/2018
Tom Keiser has been the CIO of two multi-billion dollar corporations: L Brands for five and a half years, and Gap, Inc. for four years. After his second CIO post, he was promoted to Executive Vice President of Global Product Operations for Gap where he was responsible for building a seamless inventory operating model and technology platform to deploy in each global brand of the company. The objective of seamless inventory was to significantly reduce stranded inventory and improve margin for each of the company’s global brands by leveraging advanced analytics to better plan, buy, allocate, replenish, and price product across all markets and channels.
Following this experience, he decided to try a familiar role in a very different setting: in May of 2016, he became CIO of Zendesk, the roughly half a billion dollar revenue provider of a customer service and engagement platform. After a bit more than two years in that role, he was promoted to chief operating officer of the company while retaining his IT strategy. Now he is responsible for IT, security and compliance, enterprise data and analytics, product technology operations, and go-to-market, among other items. He describes his current post, his career journey, and the trends that particularly excite him as he looks to the future in this expansive interview.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link).
Peter High: You are the Chief Operating Officer of Zendesk. Could you provide a brief overview of Zendesk’s business?
Tom Keiser: Zendesk is a dedicated customer service and engagement platform that is focused on customers and how customers want to interact with the businesses that they do business with. We were founded nearly eleven years ago and started off as a company primarily focused on digital, e-commerce, and [small and medium sized] businesses. We have grown into what is now a $500 million company and we are rapidly expanding into larger enterprises
High: Can you talk about your role as Chief Operating Officer? What is within your purview?
Keiser: I stepped into this role this past August after serving as the CIO for approximately a year and a half. Overall, my role is a combination of operations, go-to-market, and customer-facing functions. I still maintain many of my CIO responsibilities including the [overall] IT function, security and compliance analytics, all the business analytics we run the business on, as well as our tech-ops organization, which is the underpinnings of all our products. Additionally, as I moved into the COO role, I took over our go-to-market functions, which is our sales operation, as well as our customer experience organization.
High: Zendesk went public a few years back, after having grown dramatically over the years prior. Could you talk about the significant changes that have occurred since you joined the company a little over two years ago?
Keiser: As companies move out of the startup mode, go through the IPO, and then go public, building out their capabilities in the process, you go through evolutions just like everything does as you grow up. My time at Zendesk has been about putting down a foundation for us to be able to grow unimpeded. This involves making sure that we have the right processes, technologies, and organizational constructs to be able to evolve and grow.
The world of customer service that we are in changes dramatically every year. People’s expectations continuously advance in terms of what they expect from the businesses that they interact with. While you can have a nice left to right roadmap, the reality is you have got to keep adjusting. When you are growing as quickly as we are, and you are in a space that is growing and changing, you must have a solid and agile foundation to be able to adjust to that.
My time here has been focused on ensuring that we have that foundation through the technologies that our employees are operating on and making sure that they are as productive as possible. This applies whether you are in design, engineering, one of the sales functions, or one of the support functions. Additionally, I am focused on ensuring that our external and customer-facing components are evolving appropriately along with the product.
7/02/18
Cathie Kozik is the Chief Information Officer of PSAV, which is an 81 year old events management company that helps bring to life roughly one million events per year. She was a CIO of Tellabs in the 1990s into the last decade, and went on to become an IT executive at Motorola, as well. In 2001, she became one of the earliest board-level CIOs when she joined the board of an individual hospital that would grow through acquisition to become $5 billion Northwestern Memorial Health. She did not set out to be a trailblazer, but now that she has been for 17 years, she has a variety of lessons to share with other CIOs who’d wish to follow in her footsteps.
Her breadth of experience as a CIO and as a board member have helped her with the current transformation she has led at PSAV for the past three and a half years. She has pushed IT to go from roadblock to strategic enabler for the business. She now leads a digital transformation, which is focused on the technician experience and business insight through data analytics. Her vast experience has earned her a spot in CIO.com’s prestigious CIO Hall of Fame.
Peter High: You are the Chief Information Officer and Senior Vice President at PSAV. Could you provide a background as to PSAV’s business and your role in it?
Cathie Kozik: PSAV is the world’s largest event experiences company. We see our role as connecting with and inspiring our customers, so they can connect with and inspire their audiences. We help our customers around the globe put together different event experiences, then enable them to reach out to their audiences in new and different ways. It is a great and exciting business to be in as we are always doing something different. We put on about 1,500 different shows per day and more than a million over the course of a year.
As CIO, my role has been to help bring the organization into the next generation and prepare us for growth. We have been on a great trajectory as we have acquired a substantial number of companies over the past five to ten years. Despite this, between the acquisitions and organic growth, the business system had not kept up with what the business was trying to accomplish. Therefore, when I joined the company three years ago, my core focus was about stabilizing the environment and then bringing new technology to bear. It has been about bringing the company into the information age where technology is an enabler as opposed to something that was preventing the business from getting its job done. As we continue to grow, digital transformation is impacting us just as it is impacting every other company in the industries that we serve. Because of this, we have to make sure that we are keeping pace and are thinking about new technologies that can not only improve our operational efficiency and our interactions with our customers, but also improve the event experiences that have been part of the innovation cycle that we have been on. For example, we have focused on mobility as approximately 95 percent of our employees are out in the field. We need to make sure that we are communicating with these employees. They need to know what to expect for the day, what customers are coming in, and what these customers past experiences have been with us. We need to communicate with these employees so that we can ensure that today’s experience with PSAV is just as great or even greater than the last experience. Additionally, if something goes wrong, it is important that we know about it. We have to talk to the customer as we know them and support them in the ways they are expecting. For example, we need to ensure that a customer who is expecting a high-resolution projector, gets that high-resolution projector. We need to make certain that they get the right experience that they need for their customers.
6/25/18
Lenovo’s Kim Stevenson Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Data Center Solutions division has had a variety of roles in information technology. At technology behemoths such as IBM, EDS, and HPE, she worked on internal operations, but also gained her first exposure to customers who were technology executives. At Intel, she went from General Manager of IT Operations and Services to Chief Information Officer.
As CIO, she had an strong external customer orientation based on her experience prior to that. As a result, she quickly gained invitations to join boards. (She has served on the boards of Cloudera, Riverbed Technology, and she currently serves on the board of the wealth management and private banking company, Boston Private.) During her time as CIO, she was in the first class of Forbes CIO Innovation Award winners based on her team’s contribution of more than $1 billion in value to the company based on analytics. She would eventually rise to Chief Operating Officer, Client, IoT and System Architecture Group at Intel.
When she joined Lenovo in March of 2017, she did so with a remarkably rich set of experiences across the technology sector. As a result, she is an unusually well connected and highly regarded in the IT community. Now that she serves CIOs as clients again, she sees three things that CEOs and boards expect of CIOs: re imagining customer experience, driving productivity inside the enterprise, and delivering new products and services. She and her team are poised to help CIOs deliver all three, as she notes (among other themes) herein.
To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link.
Peter High: You are now the Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Data Center Solutions division of Lenovo. Could you describe your role and your responsibilities?
Kim Stevenson: At Lenovo, we aligned our Data Center Solutions division with our important customer segments, which is how we run our business. Each of those customer segments then report up into my organization.
The telco market is at a fundamental inflection point. We want to help drive a new, efficient infrastructure into the telco space. This plays into IoT, which will be all endpoints that are going to be connected in the world. And of course, there are data center implications for having multiple, new types of endpoints connecting into the network.
High: You were a former buyer of technology as the CIO of Intel. You rose beyond that role and became the Chief Operating Officer of the Client, IoT, and Systems Architecture Group. Now you are on the other side of the table as someone delivering to CIOs among others. How do you engage the customer set, and what was the transition like from one side of the table to the other?
Stevenson: Even before I joined Intel, I was with EDS and HP Enterprise Services running IT for customers and selling IT services to the CIO organization. When I moved to Intel to run internal IT, I felt like I was becoming my customer. Having that 360-degree view served me extraordinarily well. There were days when I thought to myself, “Why would anyone try to sell you this? It is just not practical.” There were also days that I felt I could understand more of what was possible from an innovation vector because I had seen many different types of accounts.
This is the next chapter, which is coming back to the business side. Now more than ever, the voice of the CIO in every company is becoming more strategic and more critical to the raw execution of the company. There is no business process in any company today that executes without some form of IT at its core. When I look at the role of the CIO today, I see three things that the board of directors and the CEO expect.
At Lenovo, I focus on helping the IT organization deliver on those three fundamental strategic priorities that exist in every company.
High: Can you expand on the translation of those general ideas to the way in which you are doing that in concert with the business?