2/26/18
By Peter High, published on Forbes
Gill Haus is the Senior Vice President, Retail and Direct Bank Chief Information Officer at Capital One. In that role, he has overseen many of the changes that have made the Bank synonymous with digital innovation. He believes in having his team regularly experiment with the latest technology to judge applicability to the Bank and its objectives. He has overseen the development of innovation labs that further this mission.
Haus is familiar with the difficult work that companies that are larger and that have been in business for a generation or more must undertake in order to become digital ready. These include cultural changes, process changes, and technology changes. Haus has played a critical role in all three. In this interview, he highlights his excitement for artificial intelligence and blockchain, discusses the value that Capital One has gotten out of developing innovation labs, and more.
Peter High: Yours is a bank that is synonymous with innovation and the move towards digital technologies. Could you provide a bird’s eye view of the transformation that you have helped lead?
Gill Haus: It is like the common saying which is, “Technology changes everything.” If you think about Capital One and who we are, for us to be competitive and provide the services we want to our customers, we must keep up with emerging technologies.
Technologies like the cloud and machine learning are more commonly available than they have ever been in the past. The cost of entry for someone to compete with us is small and our competitive moat only helps to a certain point.
Our focus has been on systematically modernizing everything we do. That means we upgrade our legacy systems and go to the cloud. We have approached this in a few ways. One is making sure that we have the right talent on the ground and making sure that the talent has the tools and systems that they need and want to use.
It is one thing for us to say, “Come work at the bank,” which is already not that appetizing to a technologist.” It is another to say, “Come work in the bank, and you will be able to make your own projects if you have an idea.” “Come work in a bank. You will be the first to move the bank’s platform on to the cloud.” “Come to the bank. You will be able to explore different ways of using data, machine learning, etc.”
To read the full interview, please visit Forbes
Denis Robitaille has does not consider himself a technologist despite being the Global Chief Information Officer of the World Bank Group. He came to IT after a career in Operations at the Bank. When he ascended to his current role, first as acting CIO in November 2016 and then as the permanent CIO in June of 2017, he had profound understanding of how the World Bank operated.
He sees a profound connection between technology and the Bank’s mission to end extreme poverty by 2030 and boost prosperity for the bottom 40 percent of populations in every country. He also believes that Blockchain and artificial intelligence will have enormous impacts on the people who the World Bank serves. We cover all of the above and much more in this conversation.
Peter High: You are the second ever Global CIO of the World Bank. While you are not a technologist, you have tremendous operational experience and have done the “actual work” of the World Bank. The Bank’s mission is to end extreme poverty by 2030 and boost prosperity for the bottom 40 percent of populations in every country. What role does technology play in accomplishing these big goals?
Denis Robitaille: Technology is part of our daily life, and I think we are at the beginning of a big transformation in IT. The role of emerging technologies for development is important. There is a big movement at the World Bank Group to explore how disruptive emerging technologies can help development.
We are looking at how we can use technology in a positive way. The entire organization is mobilized behind this goal. For us in ITS, our focus is to support internal clients and operations and to partner with different parts of the World Bank Group to make sure that we can leverage emerging technology.
High: Yours is an organization that has also been going through a cloud transformation. Can you talk about the work going into building a more sustainable technology stack to support the work of the World Bank?
Robitaille: We are a little bit behind, but our objectives are the same. We have a large scale of legacy applications. Last year, we prepared a new three-year strategy. Part of this strategy is to bring some agility and move to the cloud.
We used to be a traditional IT shop of waterfall, and now I am introducing agile and DevOps combined. We want to enable our lines of business and deliver faster for our clients. When we look at our strategies and solutions for the business, we want to triage faster and deliver more flexibly.
2/19/18
Larry Sanger founded Wikipedia with Jimmy Wales in January 2001. He set many of the early policies of Wikipedia. He ended up leaving the organization the following year, and has been a critic of it for, among other reasons, its narrow definitions of credible sources, and the fact that so few people ultimately are responsible for the creation and editing of content on Wikipedia.
In the years since, Sanger has been involved in a number of encyclopedia projects, including Citizendium, which he founded in 2006.
Roughly two years ago, Sanger began to informally advise a new startup called Everipedia, a for-profit wiki-based encyclopedia. Theodor Forselius is a co-founder of the company and its chief executive officer. The core of its content is that of Wikipedia, but it has built more content on top of that base, making it the largest English language encyclopedia. Sanger officially joined the company as chief information officer in December of 2017, lured in part due to the company’s commitment to blockchain technology, which was announced on December 6. They indicated it would convert to using blockchain and a cryptocurrency token called IQ to encourage content creation. The IQ tokens are intended to be exchangeable for Bitcoin. Forselius believes this model will create incentives for broader content creation while also fostering access in countries that currently block Wikipedia such as Iran and Turkey.
I recently spoke with Forselius and Sanger about all of the above and more.
Peter High: Theodor, could you talk about the genesis of Everipedia as well as an overview of the business model and the company’s mission?
Theodor Forselius: Everipedia started a little over two years ago as a project between my co-founder Sam Kazemian and myself while he was still studying at UCLA. Originally, we wanted to build a more modern and inclusive version of Wikipedia because we were both editors and huge fans of Wikipedia. However, we felt like there was a lot that was outdated and that we could do better.
For example, their editing interface, talk pages for discussions, citations, their community guidelines and policies were all things that we liked but that we wanted to improve. That is why we started Everipedia.
We decided to implement blockchain technology because we are a for-profit startup, not a non-profit like Wikipedia, so we had to find ways to monetize. Originally, we partnered with companies and we started running adds on the site. However, it didn’t feel right saying that we were better than Wikipedia while we were running ads, so we started looking at other monetization models. Wikipedia’s model of running massive donation banners did not feel like an innovative solution either. We started looking at other venues of monetization and my co-founder Sam came up with the idea of tokenizing the entire knowledge base and decentralizing it. That way, there is no central entity that needs to run ads to be able to monetize because the whole system will be completely peer-to-peer.
High: Larry, in 2001 you co-founded Wikipedia. As of a few months ago, you joined Everipedia as the Chief Information Officer. Could you share your thoughts about the differences between the two businesses?
Larry Sanger: The co-founders of the company contacted me and told me that Everipedia was moving to blockchain, which is a major difference in its own right. This shift to the blockchain got me interested because the blockchain enables something that I have been wanting to do for a long time.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
2/12/18
To say that Dow CIO Melanie Kalmar has a lot on her plate is an understatement. She has helped integrate two major acquisitions (Dow Corning and Dupont), is in the process of planning their divestiture, leads digital initiatives across the enterprise, runs Corporate Facilities, helped establish and runs Dow Services Business, all on top of running cybersecurity and infrastructure. Hers is a role that has all traditional aspects of IT, but also encompasses revenue-generating business and helps drive both customer and employee experience, as well. She covers this vast purview, the implications of the acquisitions and divestitures, the role that technologies like artificial intelligence and blockchain will play at Dow, among many other topics.
Peter High: Can you provide a brief overview of your purview at Dow?
Melanie Kalmer: I am Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Dow Chemical, and my role is a great example of how the responsibilities of a CIO continue to evolve. I have responsibilities for both global IT as well as for our Corporate Facilities and Dow Services Business. In terms of traditional IT accountability, I have responsibilities on a global scale including delivering the typical broad set of IT services. The fun part of that is the unique services that our business units need. I also have other corporate infrastructure responsibilities focused on our end-to-end processes and other stuff we do with our business units.
I also have accountability for cybersecurity and analytics, and I have a fun role in leading the digital transformation for the company. Even though I lead that, I want to be clear it is a collaborative effort that engages all facets of the company. That is how I like to operate, by engaging with the other executives and being extremely transparent about what we are doing. We hit the mark and we can deliver the expected business outcomes.
The other half is Corporate Facilities. What I focus on there is the offices and labs around the globe and creating modern capabilities. We want the spaces where people work to be vibrant and allow for greater collaboration. We are building new facilities and remodeling others to bring in more technology and create more opportunities for people to collide. The buzz word in the industry is collision space.
We just opened a new headquarters late last summer, and it is a beautiful building. There is a lot of buzz around the building about how it is driving more collaboration and a better flow of information. People can hear what others are talking about. We have open environments across most of our buildings.
As we embark on the huge set of activities that are coming out of our big M&A around Dow Corning and DuPont, we are working on what we call our rooftop strategy. This involves us deciding what facilities will go with which company, and how we get better space utilization in the buildings that we do occupy.
Under Corporate Facilities, we also manage real estate, which will help drive financial assessments on the real estate and sell assets. Much of this, be it land or buildings, we have acquired through many acquisitions over the years.
Finally, I run Dow Services Business [DSP]. The business was formed to support our joint ventures and our divestiture activities. The team that I lead manages contracts to provide services such as IT services, procurement services, and site services, to name a few examples. Those services are provided to our joint venture partners or to buyers of businesses that we divest.
The team focuses on ensuring we have those contracts in place but also acts as a liaison between those DSP customers and the groups within Dow that are providing the services. That has allowed us to leverage Dow’s capabilities on both a transitional basis and on a long-term basis and allows the joint ventures or the buyers of a divested business from Dow to focus on meeting their business objectives instead of having to figure out how to run the day-to-day business. We can provide those services for them while they are starting up.
Those are the three key areas I focus on. Additionally, I sit on the board for a reinsurance company [Dorinco Reinsurance Company] and participate in a lot of external activities such as around STEM. This is my role in a nutshell.
High: You spoke about the digital responsibilities that you have. Can you share how you define digital, as well as the ways in which you lead that from a transformation perspective?
1/25/18
The following article is an abridged version of the Metis Strategy whitepaper on business capabilities. Click here to view the full whitepaper.
By Chris Davis and Leila Chouai for CIO.com
If you’re not thinking like a software company, you’re already behind.
Software companies focus on codifying and then scaling everything they do. To do that, business subject-matter expertise and technical expertise must become one in the same, converging once siloed disciplines.
In a recent interview with Metis Strategy, Cathy Bessant, Bank of America’s Chief Operations & Technology Officer, explained that convergence must apply to all companies, saying, “Technology has completely changed the notion of business integration. You cannot say the business is technology or technology enables the business—they are one and the same.”
Your company will not be able to compete at scale and speed if delivery teams have not gone beyond typical IT-business hand offs to true convergence. This convergence extends beyond obvious points of technology dependence, such as an eCommerce website or managing internal productivity tools; it is happening everywhere.
Still, many companies struggle with where to start on this transformation. Business function leaders often communicate high-level goals that are difficult for technology leaders to translate into concrete actions, and technology leaders often approach a problem by addressing the technology first, and the business outcome second. They end up six months into a “digital transformation” effort with a disparate collection of projects, but no cohesive sense of prioritization or interdependence to create a more tech-driven future.
The solution to bridge this gap between strategy and execution is for IT leaders to be better collaborators and communicators, and to understand the business and customer needs as well as their business partners do. But that is easier said than done.
Start by rooting your IT plans in a well-defined business capabilities map, and then transform the way that IT goes to market by driving cross-functional operating model convergence in the long term.
Business capabilities are an integrated set of processes, technologies, and deep expertise that are manifested as a functional capacity to capture or deliver value to the organization. They outline “what” a business does, as opposed to “how” a business does it. They are the definition of your organizational skills, best represented in a landscape map that allows you to evaluate the full spectrum of capabilities against each other.
Business capability maps are not just about technology; these tools are designed to improve an organization’s holistic ability to improve a business outcome, and in many cases, it is not the technology that is the constraint, but rather a process, skill, or policy issue.
Consider the process for onboarding a new employee. Strong onboarding capabilities make the experience seamless for the new hire. From the second an employee steps into the office, they might:
If the desired outcome for this capability is to provide a seamless employee experience where the employee is productive in less than three days, the different functional areas should integrate their strategic plans to meet that objective. This is often challenging in an organization that thinks and acts in functional silos, but a capability-driven approach will bridge that gap.
Many organizations have never formally documented their business architecture and therefore struggle to understand business priorities. To bridge that gap, IT will generally dispatch enterprise architects or business relationship managers to form bonds with functional leaders, understand their current processes, and identify the pain points. As a result, they map the business capabilities. This exercise elevates technology leaders and their business partners to common ground, on which both can add value to the conversation: one around business process improvement, and the other around technology enablement.
We generally suggest no more than four levels of cascading capabilities, with the fourth level most resembling the associated process. Keep in mind that business capability maps are not organizational charts. By definition, they are anchored by the business outcome, with many functional areas converging to realize that outcome.
Once you define your capabilities, prioritize them to help provide strategic direction to the organization. Not all capabilities are of equal importance to your ability to compete, so you need to ensure you are not boiling the ocean. While there is more nuance in practice, for simplicity, capabilities fall on a scale of achieving competitive parity through sustaining competitive advantage, and it is important to evaluate which are the most important to your business’ success. This segmentation will not change tremendously year by year, unless there are major shifts in the competitive forces at play.
Once you segment and prioritize your capabilities, you should evaluate the current state maturity for each capability, as well as the target future state. Evaluating maturity levels is as much art as it is science. As a result, the defining of maturity levels cannot be done independently, and often the conversation around why something is or is not mature is as valuable as whatever score you give yourself.
We recommend undertaking this exercise with cross-functional groups that have an understanding of the capability from different perspectives. We often evaluate capability maturity as a function of process definition, degree of automation, organizational reach, and the measurement of the business outcome. This evaluation will influence the prioritization of near-term investments and will not always coincide 1:1 with the segmentation mentioned above. For example, if you have low maturity in a “parity” capability, you would still want to invest in that capability to get it up to par.
Enhancing a capability may require investments in people, processes, or technology. Therefore, a converged team of business function experts and technology leaders should jointly identify improvement activities. IT should lead in aligning the technology services (if your organization uses an ITSM approach) and technical architecture needed to enable these capabilities—but all in the context of how the business process may change. Once you have aligned your technical architecture, IT can identify gaps and redundancies. For example, if you have multiple applications supporting your “expense management” capability, you might opt to undertake a cost-benefit analysis of maintaining all of the applications. Conversely, you might discover you have a prioritized business capability of sales forecasting without a technology architecture supporting or enabling that capability. You might identify this an area where a new technology services is needed to provide data analytics to the sales operations team.
Once developed, capability maps can bridge the gap between strategy and execution by driving organizational alignment around where investments are needed.
For example, we recently helped a growing technology company through this journey. The IT organization had been viewed as an order-taker, and it often struggled to get budget consideration for more strategic projects that would add value to the business, but the CIO was intent on evolving the organization into a more strategic partner.
The CIO knew that the convergence of business process improvement and technology enablement was key, so the team worked closely with business function leaders to develop prioritized capability maps across the organization. Then they leveraged the capability maps to identify areas in greatest need of investment, and in turn forced trade-off decisions that resulted in a meaningful prioritization of focus areas that galvanized the team. The converged business and technology teams, oriented around shared business outcomes, had threaded the needle from strategy to execution.
In the end, one of the business partners said, “We have tried to do this many times over the past six years, and this is by far the best it has ever gone.” That is how IT goes to market differently, and wins.
2/5/18
Dover Corporation is a diverse $7 billion revenue company, with businesses in Energy, Engineered Systems, Fluids, and Refrigeration, and Food Equipment. Given this diversity, across the company’s 60 years, it had never had an enterprise chief information officer. That changed roughly two years ago when Dinu Parel was named to that post. In the time since, he has provided strategy, governance, and shared services to the traditionally decentralized IT function.
In this interview, Parel notes that his vision continues to be to allow the business units to have some latitude in selecting strategic technology, but two areas of focus on standardization have been security and infrastructure. He is currently focused on transforming IT from a traditional, back-office support function to an advisory function that helps drive business growth and innovative technologies such as Blockchain.
Peter High: You are the CIO of Dover Corporation, a diversified company with $7 billion in revenue. Could you provide an overview of the operations?
Dinu Parel: We are a diversified global manufacturer that provides product innovation. We are headquartered right outside of Chicago and have 29,000 employees around the world. We have a customer-focused business model. We are currently structured and organized into four segments.
Each of these segments has multiple operating companies that roll up under them and work directly with our end customers.Making decisions close to the customer while working on thousands of products enables and empowers an ownership mindset in the operating companies.
High: Dover Corporation is a very diverse set of businesses. How is IT organized?
Parel: Each operating company has an IT team that is responsible for providing the end-to-end IT function for the business. Each of the four segments has an IT leader, and a few key roles are consolidated at the segment level. Since I joined the company as the CIO, we have been on a transformation journey of establishing the enterprise organization from the ground up. For the enterprise organization, the vision is working with the operating companies and working with each of the segments to drive the enterprise strategy for IT, the governance, and providing centralized services.
It has been exciting for all of us who have been involved in this transformation because it is changing the historically decentralized IT operating model.
High: You were the first ever CIO at Dover Corporation. When you rose to the role two years ago, the organization had not had one in its 60 plus years of operation. What was the genesis of the role? How did the company conclude that time was right for a CIO?
1/29/18
The integration of a major acquisition is the bane of the existence of many executives. Chief information officers have special challenges during such scenarios, since, after all, they must think about the people, processes, and technologies that must be integrated. This is an enormous amount of change to usher in.
When Steve Phillpott became CIO of $19 billion revenue developer, manufacturer and provider of data storage devices and solutions, Western Digital less than two and a half years ago, the company was nearly a third of its current size. With the acquisition of HGST in 2015 and the acquisition of SanDisk in 2016, there was no avoiding the fact that this would be a heavy lift for Phillpott and his colleagues. This was all announced in his first months on the job.
Phillpott noted that across the technology stacks of the three companies, in most areas, two-thirds of employees would be impacted, as the “winning” solution would be named. Phillpott recognized this as an opportunity to choose best-in-breed solutions across the technology portfolio. The mandate for change that any integration brings about would be a boon.
This would lead to the integration of more than 3,000 applications and would test the company’s change management practices, but Phillpott and his team have made enormous progress, as he notes herein.
Peter High: You are the Chief Information Officer of Western Digital. In its current generation, Western Digital is the combination of three multi-billion dollar organizations: Western Digital itself, the 2012 acquisition of HGST, and the acquisition in 2016 of SanDisk. I know you took an interesting approach to integrating these companies. Please explain.
Steve Phillpott: We integrated three large multi-billion dollar, Fortune 500 companies into one future Fortune 150-ish company. You are looking at integrating systems, integrating processes, and integrating technologies. As we started on this journey, this integration became a great opportunity to transform the company. By transforming the company I mean looking at those applications systems and processes that we have today, thinking where we want to be in a couple years, and starting to lay the foundation for that journey.
Consider ERP as an example. Across the three legacy sub-companies, we had three different ERP systems. Going forward, we could have picked any one of the three. In a typical acquisition where you have two companies; one large company, one small, it may default to the larger company’s ERP. Two like-sized companies integrating together, you may flip a coin, or you pick the best one and go forward. With three, it provides an interesting dynamic because, at a minimum, two-thirds of the company are going to have to go through change.
Our thinking was if two-thirds of the company are going to have to go through that massive amount of change, why should we not look at a newer, best-in-breed solution and have the entire company go through that change. What that does is it allows us to transform a foundational application that will support us as we grow to $20 billion, $25 billion, and beyond. It became a great opportunity to go through and rebuild processes and applications that we knew would not scale. We were able to revisit chart of accounts, revisit cost centers, and revisit the reconciliation process with an eye to the future and a focus on ensuring those processes would support us as we grow past a $20 billion company.
High: You have had to rationalize around 3,000 applications. Could you share how far you have come in that process, as well as what learnings you have had?
Phillpott: We had roughly 3,000-plus applications across the three major companies, and then we added a couple more acquisitions after that, which added more applications to the mix. I would say we are still early in the journey, but we have completed some major activities and 2017 was a very productive year for us. We focused on getting a lot of the collaboration and communication tools correct. Communication tools allow for the flattening of the organization, which is increasingly important as you are trying to go through these integration activities.
The speed at which companies can effectively collaborate is essential in helping move these integrations forward and trying to harmonize the processes in the system. The other interesting thing about focusing on those collaboration and communication tools is it also sets us up well for future M&As. Once we get those in as we move forward and have more acquisitions, we can bring them into the mix much quicker. We determined best-of-breed technologies across a variety of communication and collaboration tools.
Globally, we have everybody on the same email, the same file sharing around Box, the same intranet, Jive, WebEx, Jabber – those core collaboration and communication tools. If you look beyond those initial communication and collaboration activities, we have started to migrate many of the legacy applications. Now we are on a global Human Capital Management system which we consolidated with our CRM. We consolidated on a global ServiceNow instance which was interesting because that is another area where we try to get everybody’s information into one area, but it is diverse in terms of what activity we need to help the end users with.
1/22/18
By Peter High, Published on Forbes
Diane Schwarz has the killer combination of skills and experiences to be a chief information officer. She was an engineer as an undergraduate, and therefore learned important technical skills. She has an MBA from the University of Chicago and learned key business disciplines. She was a consultant, gaining experience solving problems across many different companies who were her clients. By the time she joined IT departments, she had depth and breadth to her experiences, and quickly rose to become a CIO.
For nearly five years, Schwarz has been the Enterprise CIO of Textron, the $14 billion revenue multi-industry conglomerate in aircraft, defense, industrial and finance businesses. With such diverse businesses in the company’s portfolio, it can be tricky to get the balance right between standardizing processes and technologies, and allowing the business units of the company to have autonomy. She has simplified things by operating with four key strategies that she describes in more depth in this interview:
Peter High: You are the enterprise level Chief Information Officer of Textron, but I know there is also IT leadership within the business units themselves. Could you talk about the structure of IT at an organization as complex as yours?
Diane Schwarz: We have a CIO in each of our business units and major product lines, and they have their own IT organizations that report to them. Those CIOs have dual reporting to the business unit leadership as well as to me. The business units do what I call the fun stuff. They support the stakeholder applications, whether it is ERP or CRM or PLM tools.
With that much disparity in the organization, we communicate often and at great lengths to make sure that we know what is going on in our different locations. I have only 50 percent of the staff in the United States. I have many folks in India, who roll up independently to each of their business units, but who also happen to sit in a common office building. It may seem complex to an outsider, but we know how our puzzle pieces fit together.
High: In an organization as diverse as yours, how do you think about what should be common versus what should be unique as it applies to that diverse range of businesses?
Schwarz: That is a question our CEO answers. He has said our business units are empowered to make decisions on what is going to be best for them to meet their strategic objectives. Of course, profitability is part of that. Let’s say a business unit wanted to host its own email system. We do not have any rules that say they cannot, but it is going to cost more for them.
Profitability objectives help keep people in line without deviating too much from the standards. This enables employees to be able to interact across our locations. Our CEO also recognizes that when it comes to, for instance, ERP systems, what serves a business unit in aerospace is different than what serves somebody in automotive. If you make people share too much, you sub-optimize what is going to support their business. We look at what is going to best serve their business needs.
High: Could you talk about your strategy? What has risen to the top of your strategic plan?
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1/15/17
Estonia is, perhaps, the most digitally advanced society in the world. This Baltic region country with less than 1.5 million citizens has been occupied frequently through its history, including by the Soviet Union between 1944 and 1991. In the aftermath of independence, particularly progressive leaders decided to leverage advanced technology as a means of simplifying the lives of citizens. As early as the mid-1990s, the government made radical moves to eliminate paper in its interactions with citizens, forming the basis of what would become an almost entirely digital society.
Taavi Kotka was an Estonian CEO of one of the largest software companies in the Baltic States, Nortal. He left the company in late 2012, and he was under a non-compete agreement for two years. He used the time to join the government, and in the process, helped usher in some more remarkable change. The changes he and others enacted would have profound impacts on the efficiency of and value derived from healthcare, banking, education, voting, law enforcement, among other areas. He also spearheaded the Estonian e-Residency program, which has allowed Estonians abroad and non-Estonians, especially so-called digital nomads, to take advantage of these superior services. As Kotka explains, the degree to which Estonia has become digitized actually enhances its security. He describes all of this and more in this far-ranging interview.
Peter High: Estonia is perhaps the most digitally advanced, technically competent country in the world, and for the past four years, you have led much of that work. I wanted to start with the genesis story. Why Estonia? What are the secret ingredients, either in the combination between the government and the citizenry, or other structural advantages that were there that made this change and transformation possible?
Taavi Kotka: That is a good question, but it was not me. It was set up almost 20 years ago after we broke apart from the Soviet Union. It was clear, especially for the private sector, that Estonia is a huge country geographically – we are bigger than the Netherlands, or Switzerland, or Denmark – but there are only 1.3 million people living here. For the private sector, it was clear that it is impossible to physically serve all the people living in Estonia. It is not economically feasible to have a bank office in every small town, for example.
High: And roughly when was that taking place? How long ago?
Kotka: The internet was born in the 1990s, so the push started 1995 or 1996.
High: Remarkably early.
