6/18/2018
By Peter High. Published on Forbes
Randy Mott is used to big challenges. Prior to joining General Motors as Senior Vice President of Global Information Technology and Chief Information Officer of General Motors in 2012, he served as CIO of Walmart, Dell, and HP. One might argue that the current transformation is the largest of his career, however. When he joined GM, 90 percent of the IT staff were outsourced. He elected to bring those jobs back into GM, insourcing 10,000 new roles in the company and hiring 3,000 recent college graduates.
You might think that hiring into a Fortune 10 company in an industry that has been replete with bankruptcies across the decades would be a challenge. Mott makes the point that great IT staff want big challenges, and the scale of the opportunities he looks to seize are remarkable.
He set up innovation centers at the company’s headquarters, in downtown Detroit, in Austin, outside of Atlanta, and just outside of Phoenix. As Mott notes, this means that these centers are “within hiring distance of about 75 percent of the talent in the United States from an IT standpoint based on the locations of those centers and the geographic radiuses that they represent.”
Now, that team is focused on everything from helping facilitate self-driving car technology to better data analytics for and from the vehicles, to identifying ways to better tapping partners as sources of inspiration and innovation.
Not so surprisingly, Mott has joined the ranks of board-level CIOs, as he has been on the board of Dun & Bradstreet since 2015. He reflects on his career, his current post, and advice for others who would wish to follow in his footstep in this far reaching interview.
(To read an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link.
6/11/18 By Peter High, Published on Forbes
Mickey Boodaei has been a leading entrepreneur in the security space for years. He co-founded Imperva, which went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011, and he co-founded Trusteer, which was sold to IBM for $1 billion in 2013. Soon after the latter acquisition, he founded Transmit Security.
Interestingly, Boodaei did so without seeking venture capital. He indicated that by putting his own money (and that of co-founder Rakesh Loonkar) into the start-up, it felt more like when he founded his first firms, but in this case, there was no one else to answer to.
Transmit Security provides, “a cross-channel identity platform that is designed to simplify, accelerate, and reduce the cost of identity-related projects,” as Boodaei explains. He also notes that “security and customer experience are the two most important goals of any organization today. We bundle these together and address them as a single challenge.” In this interview, he explains his personal journey as a CEO, the importance of a strong co-founder, and his opinions on the evolving threat landscape.
Peter High: You are the Chief Executive Officer of Transmit Security. Can you provide an overview of the company?
Mickey Boodaei: We founded [the company] four and a half years ago with the goal of building a cross-channel identity platform that is designed to simplify, accelerate, and reduce the cost of identity-related projects. These include projects such as authentication, authorization, fraud prevention, account opening, among others. Our R&D Center is in Tel Aviv, Israel, and the rest of our technical teams are physically close to our customers in the US and Europe.
As a company, we focus on large enterprises with millions of end-user customers. Most of our customers to date have been banks, insurance companies, telcos, and retailers. We have two global financial customers with over 20 million users each, and about 20 customers with more than five million users each. Our customers typically use our platform to consolidate and accelerate multiple initiatives in the identity space. For example; multi-factor authentication in biometrics, behavioral analytics, and advanced fraud detection, attributes-based access control, new data protection regulations, using the mobile device as an authenticator for call centers, branch and web, authorization and authentication around open API’s, and more.
High: Yours is an organization that is experiencing extraordinary growth, and you have been able to do so without venture funding. Could you talk about the way in which you have grown, as well as the advantages of having done so without taking on venture funding in your early stages?
Boodaei: Our goal was to build a big company that is focused on what we enjoy doing around cybersecurity, which is working with large enterprises. We wanted absolutely zero external pressure as to the direction of the company or the speed in which we are growing. Therefore, my co-founder Rakesh Loonkar and I decided to invest our own money in the company.
We have been relatively successful in the past, so we could afford the risk of losing many millions if we failed. Today, Transmit is a profitable company, so the investment paid off. Not taking money from venture capitalists is not something everyone can do, so we consider ourselves lucky to be able to fund ourselves. Personally, I find it uncomfortable taking someone else’s money when I can do this with my own.
I also believe that it made us more focused and got us to work harder. If you look at first-time entrepreneurs, they are eager to secure their future. For us, by using a considerable amount of our own fortune, we created a strong motivation for ourselves to succeed that is not dissimilar from first-time entrepreneurs. This is the idea behind the self-funding concept of our company.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
6/4/18
By Peter High. Published in Forbes
Last September, Tesla and SpaceX Chief Elon Musk provided $15 million to the Global Learning XPRIZE. The goal is to develop methods to teach the 250 million children who do not have access to primary or secondary education the means to teach themselves to read, write, and do math within 15 months. While programs exist to build schools and train teachers, they cannot scale fast enough to meet demand.
Illiteracy has long precluded individuals from joining local economies, but as our world increasingly becomes hyperconnected, this preclusion is greater than ever before. Consider an illiterate child in the developing world. A decade ago, illiteracy may have prevented them from running a farm in their local community. Today, ubiquitous connectivity, digital commerce platforms, and innovations such as Estonia’s e-Residency program means that an illiterate child will instead be locked out of opportunities at a global scale.
A Radical Solution
While technological progress may have made the problem of illiteracy more acute, it may also hold the solution. “The genius to solve these problems resides in the crowd,” says Matt Keller, Senior Director of the Global Learning XPRIZE. “And technology enables XPRIZE to reach the crowd.”
Founded by Peter Diamandis, XPRIZE is an nonprofit “innovation engine” that uses gamification, crowdsourcing, and incentive prize theory to provide incentives for competition and bring about radical breakthroughs that solve global grand challenges. After a number of successful competitions – most famously the $10 million Ansari XPRIZE that catalyzed the private space race.
The Global Learning XPRIZE challenges teams from around the world to develop open source and scalable software that enables children ages seven to ten in developing countries to learn basic reading, writing, and arithmetic without adult assistance within the aforementioned time constraint of 15 months. Hundreds of teams from over 40 countries registered to compete, and last year, five finalists were selected.
6/4/18 By Peter High. Published on Forbes
7-Eleven is a big retailer. It operates 65,000 stores in 18 countries, has 55 million customers in stores on a daily basis, and conducts 20 billion transactions annually. Like most retailers, it is in need of transformation. Enter Gurmeet Singh. With a Ph.D. in Engineering from Rice, and stints with leading companies like FedEx, Intuit, and Capital One, Singh joined 7-Eleven in August of 2016 as chief digital officer. He would add the chief information officer title in November of 2017.
Singh joined the company with a mandate from 7-Eleven CEO Joseph DePinto to make the company a digital leader. Singh embarked on a multi-year journey to become a digitally-enabled organization, including a “full stack transformation” approach which encompasses consumer-facing technology, back-end technology, infrastructure, and the organizational stack. He also expanded the company’s loyalty program from its initial focus on beverages to a full-fledged loyalty offering that is available on mobile, web, digital loyalty card, and even through chatbots.
Singh notes that “the closest store to a customer today is in the palm of [his or her] hand,” and he wanted to go beyond pushing customers from mobile into stores, and allowing customers to interact with 7-Eleven on their terms, through the interface of their choice. To foster this, Singh’s team helps the rest of the organization understand the art of the possible through constant experimentation with new technology. He describes his path to innovation in great detail herein.
Peter High: You are the Chief Digital and Chief Information Officer of 7-Eleven. Could you describe your role?
Gurmeet Singh: I started at 7-Eleven as the Chief Digital Officer, with my primary responsibility being driving digital transformation. This company founded convenience at a global scale, with 65,000 stores in 18 countries, 55 million customers visiting the stores every day, and 20 billion transactions on an annual basis. You take that, and you overlay the consumer trends and the new technology trends like big data and digital payments, and you have the perfect formula for redefining convenience.
Technology is a key element of a digital transformation and it is also key to becoming a digitally-enabled company. Initially, we started off with what most companies have been doing and what most consulting companies have been citing as a strategic approach, which is building a two-tier architectural model. A two-tier architectural model means you have digital technology capabilities that are being developed at a higher speed, and then decoupled from that, you have your legacy enterprise systems which have longer release cycles at slower speeds. Additionally, enterprise and legacy work was being managed in long cycle processes as projects, not as products.
Old models in any company are always changing, and they should be changing. They are a function of maturity of the company, the need of the hour, and the market factor. As we evaluated the speed of our transformation, we felt that we were not getting to the speed we needed. To get there, we needed what I call a full stack transformation. When I say full stack transformation, I am talking all the way from the consumer-facing technology to back-end technologies, all the way to infrastructure and cloud. It even goes beyond that to encompass the organizational stack.
To bring more efficiency and effectiveness to our decisions, our prioritization, while driving the productization of IT, we decided to combine the CDO role and the CIO role. This allows us to drive vertical product slices while working on horizontal capabilities. If you are doing one after the other, you are taking too much time to get the business transformed. If you do not do a vertical slice, you do not know what customer problem you are trying to solve. Combining the functions gets us there faster. It is harder, but you end up driving more synergies. We drive higher team engagement. You speed up your transformation journey, and you end up creating a stronger pool of talent as one team. What we did was then combine digital and IT, which we call DIGIT, which is very much digital.
High: You are clearly thinking multiple years out. The changes require hard work to be done in the near term to make the organization nimbler for the long term. How difficult was the process of selling this internally? Was it difficult in having your peers among the executive leadership understand the rationale behind all the hard work to be done in the near term for a better outcome for the long term?
Most of the tests of self-driving cars have taken place in cities. These are places where 3D mapping of streets, lanes, curbs, signs, and the like is undertaken with precision. One of the biggest challenges for self-driving cars is to navigate the roads less traveled.
“The cars use these maps to know where they are and what to do in the presence of new obstacles like pedestrians and other cars,” says Daniela Rus, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). “The need for dense 3-D maps limits the places where self-driving cars can operate.” Rus and colleagues at CSAIL have developed MapLite, a framework that allows self-driving cars to drive on roads they’ve never been on before without 3-D maps. I caught up with her recently to find out more about this innovative idea.
Peter High: Please describe how MapLite is different from other self-driving technology?
Daniela Rus: Most self-driving car companies only test their fleets in major cities where they’ve developed detailed 3D maps that are meticulously labeled with the exact positions of things like lanes, curbs and stop signs. These maps include environmental features detected by the sensors of the vehicle. The maps are created using 3D LIDAR systems that rely on light to scan the local space, accumulating millions of data points and extracting the features defining each place.
If we want self-driving cars to be a viable global technology, this reliance on detailed prior maps is a problem. Today’s autonomous vehicles are not able to drive in rural environments where we do not have maps — in other words, on the millions of miles of roads that are unpaved, unlit or unreliably marked.
MapLite is a first step for enabling self-driving cars to navigate on roads that they’ve never been on before using only GPS and sensors.
Our system combines GPS data – like the kind you’d find on Google Maps – with data taken from LIDAR sensors. Together, these two elements allow us to autonomously drive a car on multiple unpaved country roads and reliably detect the road more than 100 feet in advance.
MapLite is a first step toward creating safe and capable autonomous cars that can support drivers in new road situations. Imagine if cars could learn how we drive and how to never be responsible for a collision? What if they could become our trusted partners to help us navigate tricky roads, watch our backs when we’re tired, and even make our time in the car fun?
In the future, autonomous cars won’t just be able to sense the state of the road; they’ll be able to recognize the state of the driver. Imagine if your car could tell you were having a bad day and turn on your favorite album. Or imagine if it could talk to your fridge, figure out that you’re out of milk, and suggest where to stop on your way home. Imagine if your car knew that you forgot to call your parents yesterday and could issue a gentle reminder and suggest a safe stretch of highway where you could make the call. These are just a few of the possibilities when we bring together cars, computer science and artificial intelligence.
5/29/18
Dan Olley was recently named to the prestigious CIO Hall of Fame by CIOMagazine. In many ways, however, Olley has not been a traditional chief information officer. For one, he has largely held chief technology officer roles. Moreover, he has also had customer-facing, product-centric roles. In his current role as Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Product Development of Elsevier, his purview is quite broad.
Elsevier is a subsidiary of RELX Group, focusing on academic and clinical research. In his role, Olley helps develop solutions to help academics and clinicians train, while enhancing their ability to help patients at the bedside.
Olley’s focus in recent years has been in machine learning. In fact, he has been immersed in the subject long enough that this insights into its use, the value derived from it, the implications on teams, and the like are unusually deep. We cover all of the above in great depth in this interview.
Peter High: Could you provide an overview of Elsevier and the business you are in?
Dan Olley: Our parent company, RELX Group, is among the largest technology companies no one has heard of. We are an information analytics company, and we predominantly work across four fields: the legal field, the academic and health research fields, the risk business and financial fields, and our large exhibitions business. I am the CTO of Elsevier, which specifically focuses on the academic research and clinical research spaces.
We help clinicians and clinical professionals save lives. We are trying to build solutions that help them do their jobs better, from coming into the profession and training to the patient’s bedside. We also help academic and corporate researchers by providing materials in their field.
We run the peer review process for many academic journals. It is about helping them make breakthroughs. How do we give them solutions that make their research more effective? That is at the core of who we are and what we do.
High: If you gather 10 CTOs together, you have 10 different job descriptions. The CTO can mean everything from the co-founder of a startup in Silicon Valley and the number two person behind the CEO, to the person who owns the plumbing and reports to the chief information officer. I know you also run product development and have customer facing responsibilities in addition to focusing on the technology as it relates to both the efficiency as well as revenue generation. Can you provide an overview of your sets of responsibilities as CTO?
Olley: My background is software product development. I have been doing that for longer than I care to remember. I have had both product management and software engineering responsibilities in my career, but both at technology companies where technology was making a fundamental shift that drove commercial differentiation. At Elsevier, I am responsible for the more traditional IT part that falls under my remit, but over 70% of my responsibility is about building the electronic products and services that we sell. Think of it more like Google and Amazon or a Facebook building that technology solution than a more traditional company.
High: In the world of technology, you have reason to think a lot about how trends are evolving. I know from our prior conversations that you have a passion for contemplating how trends are coming together in some significant ways. Could you talk about the period we are in from a technology perspective and how the confluence of those trends is impacting the way in which all of us are going to be operating between the digital and analog worlds?
To read the full interview, please visit Forbes
The Pittsburgh renaissance has been covered in many places, including in this column. (See my interview with Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto and my interview with Carnegie Mellon University’s Dean of the Computer Science department Andrew Moore.) One area of the tech boom in Pittsburgh that I had not covered is the investor community.
Pittsburgh-based Innovation Works is one of the country’s top seed investors, and CB Insights ranks it as America’s most active investor in robotics. The company’s mission is “to introduce, connect, support and expand the startup & entrepreneurial ecosystem within Southwestern Pennsylvania, making our region a center for innovative startups and tech investors from around the country.” Innovation Works’ portfolio includes companies in the robotics, artificial intelligence, medical devices, retail technologies, and enterprise software fields, among others.
I recently caught up with the Chief Executive Officer of Innovation Works Rich Lunak to discuss the current state of technology in Pittsburgh, his firm’s focus on robotics, trends that excite him, and other topics.
Peter High: Please describe Innovation Works’ purview.
Rich Lunak: Innovation Works is the most active seed-stage investor in the Southwestern Pennsylvania region, and one of the most active in the country. We are dedicated to serving high-growth tech entrepreneurs throughout the Pittsburgh region in order to create jobs and wealth, and to help our startup community thrive.
By Peter High, Published on Forbes
National Grid is one of the world’s largest investor-owned utilities, focused on transmission activities in electricity and gas. The United Kingdom-based behemoth has the vision to “exceed the expectations of our customers, shareholders and communities today and make possible the energy systems of tomorrow.”
One of the key executives to bring that vision to life is the company’s Chief Information and Digital Officer Andi Karaboutis. She has been the CIO of Dell, and she held a number of roles above that of the CIO at Biogen prior to joining National Grid in 2017. She is currently on the board of directors of Perrigo Company and Advance Auto Parts.
From her perch as CIO/CDO, she leads the company’s NGDigital Labs, which is tasked to develop innovative solutions leveraging “distributed generation management, peer-to-peer energy trading using Blockchain, AI and big data solutions to better understand our customers, to virtual reality projects to improve field force efficiency,” as she notes herein. These efforts have led to increased value to National Grid, and enhanced customer engagement and satisfaction. For her work, she has been recognized as a Forbes CIO Innovation Award winner.
Peter High: Please describe your purview at National Grid.
Andi Karaboutis: National Grid is one of the largest publicly-traded utilities in the world, focused on electric and gas transmission and distribution activities in the UK and the northeastern US. We play a vital role in connecting millions of people to the energy they use, safely, reliably, and efficiently.
5/21/18 By Peter High. Published on Forbes
Stephen Gillett has had a remarkable career for someone as young as he is. At 42, he has been the CIO and General Manager of Digital Ventures at Starbucks, the President of Digital, Marketing, and Operations at Best Buy, and the Chief Operating Officer of Symantec. In 2015, after Symentec was split into two companies, Gillett exited. Soon thereafter, he joined Google Ventures (now known as GV) as an Executive-in-Residence. He would eventually join Alphabet’s “Moonshot Factory” X (formerly Google X), and it was during his time there that the idea for Chronicle arose.
Chronicle is still largely in stealth mode, but Gillett took time to speak with me about his vision for the company, its progress in garnering customers, the process of graduating from X, and the advantages of growing a business within Alphabet as opposed to seeking funding from more traditional venture capital.
Peter High: When we last spoke, you were transitioning from your role as Chief Operating Officer of Symantec to Executive-in-Residence at GV [formerly Google Ventures]. You transitioned to X [formerly Google X], and in recent months, an idea that you have been pursuing, called Chronicle, was graduated from X. Can you talk about the genesis of Chronicle?
Stephen Gillett: First, let me provide some background. While at GV, as I met with entrepreneurs and talked to various categories that GV was making investments in, my goal was eventually to go to a startup having spent the last few years at bigger companies.
In 2015, while I was learning and understanding everything that Google was working on, Alphabet, the parent company, was taking shape. It gave me an opportunity to meet and talk to several of the now Alphabet leaders, at Google, Google X, and Google Ventures to understand what their future paths were.
In that tour of the new Alphabet, I learned about what X’s mission was, their concept of moonshot thinking, and how the “moonshot factory” worked. Rather than joining a startup that Google Ventures was funding, I pivoted and started to work within the X structure to figure out if there was a startup or a moonshot category that I felt compelled to work on. I realized that X was a great platform to achieve my goals, and I could get the support and the access to the resources I needed. That is how I landed at X.
High: Can you talk about the process as you were searching for that category? What was the process of elimination or inclusion? I would also be interested in the inner workings of X, such as how people work together across the organization.
Gillett: I knew one of the categories would be enterprise security, but I was not sure that this was the right place or the platform. X had been experimenting and looking at cybersecurity as a category before my arrival. When I got here, the question X was asking was, “Is this a problem worthy of the mission of X?” Which is to build moonshots, to create radical new solutions, and to touch a billion lives around the world. That is X’s broad framework.
X is not here to create widgets or a new point product. They are tasked with thinking about big problems facing humanity at large. I have spent over 20 years in IT, starting off on the help desk and working my way up to be CIO. Every year, security became a bigger and more important part of what I was doing in technology. Having spent a few years with Symantec – at the time, the world’s largest cybersecurity company – and dealing with the customer needs globally that they were facing, it quickly became apparent that cybersecurity was worthy of moonshot thinking.
X and Alphabet was a great place for us to focus on that because of the resources, thinking, and capabilities you need are not conducive to a quarterly earnings call or having to raise a round of funding. You can focus on long-term problems and assemble the best teams and the best technology to go after that by getting the permission to be curious and think about it at a huge scale. I do not believe there was a better place to start this than at X.
5/21/18
Starting in the fall of 2018, Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science (SCS) will offer a new undergraduate degree in artificial intelligence, providing students with “in-depth knowledge of how to transform large amounts of data into actionable decisions,” according to a statement put out by the University.
“Specialists in artificial intelligence have never been more important, in shorter supply or in greater demand by employers,” said Andrew Moore, dean of the School of Computer Science. “Carnegie Mellon has an unmatched depth of expertise in AI, making us uniquely qualified to address this need for graduates who understand how the power of AI can be leveraged to help people.”hghhhhhh
Reid Simmons is a research professor in the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute, and is the new director of the AI program. His research has focused on developing reliable, highly autonomous systems – especially mobile robots – that operate in rich, uncertain environments and on developing robots that can interact socially with humans. I had a chance to catch up with him last week to discuss the new program in greater depth.
Peter High: What was the genesis of this idea?
Reid Simmons: The AI degree had been under consideration for about four years, but efforts to put the program together began in earnest last fall. The main impetus was that students wanted to come to CMU to study AI, because of CMU’s centrality in that discipline, but were struggling to obtain the combination of math, statistics, algorithms, sensing, planning, and action needed to develop the appropriate expertise in AI. By combining the strengths of a number of the departments of the School of Computer Science, we were able to put together a comprehensive curriculum that teaches the basic concepts, as well as in-depth understanding, of AI and Machine Learning.
High: Can you provide some examples of the curriculum?
