1/10/18
By Peter High, on CIO Insight
As the CIO of Blue Cross, Bill Fandrich oversees all technology-related services that support business operations and security. He is also responsible for providing critical IT operations, strategic technology leadership, and enhancing the connection between business strategy and technology. In this interview with CIO Insight contributor, Peter High, Fandrich discusses his current strategy, the way in which he collaborates with the CIOs of other Blue Cross Blue Shield organizations, the resilience of Detroit, and a variety of other topics.
Peter High: You are charged with designing IT plans to help drive business imperatives. What are examples of current strategic priorities in your business together with initiatives your team is undertaking to drive them forward?
Bill Fandrich: As a company, we support a variety of business units through customized strategies. One of our current priorities is our informatics and analytics department, which supports Blue Cross’ businesses.
Another area of focus is the modernization of our capabilities to service both our members and our customers by improving engagement and providing affordable, high-quality care. A key value of our company and health care IT is to work toward bringing new products and offerings to the marketplace that support collaborative relationships with our providers and make health care resources as effective and accessible as possible.
High: How do you work with the CIOs of other Blues Cross Blue Shield organizations?
Fandrich: Although BCBSM is our focus here in Michigan, we are part of a broader organization that is governed by the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. As I mentioned previously, we also have more than four million members within our network, some of which are out of state. As part of that BCBS system, our responsibility is to ensure that our members are obtaining services and products that are consistent with the services offered in Michigan. Our various work groups make sure these services translate seamlessly to members across the country.
In addition to our various works groups, BCBSM along with five other BCBS plans are co-owners of a company called NASCO, which provides services and support around technology for members out of state.
The BCBS CIOs also meet twice a year to discuss collaborative tactics. A key part of BCBSM’s strategy is collaborating with other Blue systems to make sure we are bringing the right offerings to the markets in which we serve our customers.
High: You are now the largest IT employer in Michigan. As such, you have been a part of Detroit’s renaissance. What is your assessment of Detroit as an emerging IT hub?
Fandrich: The size of our IT workforce is gauged on a couple of things. Our IT employee base is made up of over 1,000 people. In addition, we work with local service companies who provide staffing services to support our IT capabilities. Combined, our IT workforce exceeds 1,400.
I grew up in the Midwest and lived in Michigan and Detroit during the 1980s. I’m just now returning to Michigan after having lived in the Boston area for more than 20 years. I’ve noticed that there is an incredible foundation here in the Midwest, and Michigan in particular, for technology companies. The academic institutions here continue to develop impressive technology and engineering talent. Detroit offers affordability, a resilient culture and an incredible amount of social and economic benefits for those in IT. There are also a lot of new developments taking place throughout the city, which makes it a very attractive place for companies and the technology population to plant roots and participate in the innovative environment.
High: What trends particularly excite you as you look out, say, two or three years?
Fandrich: What’s great about IT is there is no other industry like it. Information technology is one of the only industries continually reinventing itself and evolving its capabilities, which has led to new opportunities and innovative strategies that have supported our company throughout the years.
I’m excited to see more evolution around cloud space as well as analytics and informatics. I’m interested to see how those areas will expand and leverage robotics and cognitive learning. I’m also looking forward to seeing more advanced techniques that will allow us to leverage information, apply it in different ways, and deliver a new type of experience to our customers that we may not have been able to accomplish before.
This article was originally published on CIO Insight
1/9/18
By Mary K. Pratt, published on CIO.com
As one of the original fintech companies, TD Ameritrade has leveraged technology to do business differently.
CIO Vijay Sankaran says he’s well aware of that tradition.
“This ability for technology to innovate is probably one of the most important things for us,” he says. “The cornerstone of that is how technology facilitates speed and how it helps with the prototyping and adopting of new paradigms.”
Innovation is often portrayed as the mind spontaneously lighting up. But Sankaran and other innovation leaders say innovation happens in organizations that structure their people, processes and technology the right way.
“As businesses mature, what ends up happening is a more execution and operation mindset can creep in. So you have to be very deliberate around how you get new juices and ideas flowing,” Sankaran says.
Digital companies born into the cloud and agile world have an advantage: They’re not burdened by legacy systems. “They’re able to be faster and more flexible and can focus more of their spend on creating value vs. keeping the lights on,” says Rudy Puryear, a partner and director in Bain & Co.’s Chicago office and leader of the consulting firm’s IT practice.
That doesn’t mean CIOs at older companies are always left in the dust. Puryear says those CIOs who have modernized their infrastructure can deliver fast, flexible, value-creating, and differentiating projects just as well as their digital company colleagues.
But CIOs with mostly legacy systems? Not so much, he says.
Puryear says Bain research shows that some organizations spend up to 80 percent of their resources on maintaining legacy environments — “and trying to keep it from breaking” — vs. forward-looking, innovative projects.
“If the company is spending $1 billion on IT and only 20 percent is invested in the future and that has to interface back into the legacy environment, that has a productivity or legacy tax behind it. So the business isn’t getting anywhere close to $1 billion out of that investment,” he explains.
Puryear says CIOs focused on innovation have committed to modernizing their environments; they’re not just delivering stand-alone innovative projects on the edges, as those aren’t enough to truly transform any organization.
“The reality is that traditional IT isn’t really ready for digital. Leading CIOs understand that. They embrace new adaptive architectures so that everything they build and buy going forward is more modular, microservices and plug-and-play. They have a cloud-first mindset and they embrace far more agile, product-centric operating models,” he says.
To drive innovation, Sankaran says he and his 1,500-member technology team has adopted new technologies and work processes.
That includes moving from a shared services model to a product-first agile culture over the past 18 months, a move that has helped IT nearly triple its output. It also includes adopting increased automation and a DevOps environment to support technologists as they work to deliver game-changing applications quickly.
Sankaran says he’s also taking additional steps to ensure TD Ameritrade can continue to foster innovation. He’s testing integrated collaboration platforms to support cooperation and communication across the organization. “It’s really around how you share ideas in a more natural way and how you create communities of communication,” he says.
Sankaran started an Advanced Technology Group tasked with evaluating emerging technologies, identifying prototype opportunities and bringing them to market. And he’s implemented programs, such as an incubation process and hackathons, to spur and develop innovative ideas wherever they come from.
Management experts say they see progressive CIOs making similar moves as they adopt agile, DevOps, automation and innovation labs to speed delivery of new ideas. But, they note, those CIOs represent only a fraction of the IT leaders. Consider, for instance, Deloitte’s 2017 Global CIO Survey found that 74 percent of CIOs surveyed “are investing less than they should in emerging technologies that could contribute to innovation and growth.”
Seth Robinson, senior director of technology analysis with the nonprofit tech trade organization CompTIA, says companies must have processes for people to explore technologies that have potential to drive innovations and test how those technologies could transform the organization’s processes and workflows.
“IT has been focused on lowering costs and investing in pieces that are strategic, but in terms of being collaborative and IT understanding business goals and then being able to take those back into the tech department to come up with innovations, that’s not something we see as the standard course of business. Only leading CIOs are doing that,” Robinson says.
Technology drives innovation today, no doubt about that. But successful CIOs remember that technology itself is only part of the equation, says Michael Gretczko, a principal at Deloitte Consulting.
“It’s fundamentally about changing how people work,” Gretczko says. “And to truly innovate, CIOs have to change how people work. They’ve got to be considering the people component and partnering with their HR counterparts. We see that the most progressive CIO understanding that.”
Gretczko says he sees innovative CIOs, in collaboration with other executives, ask how jobs will change and how customer interactions with the organization will be different. Moreover, they’re articulating how and why those changes will benefit the business to ensure they’re not adopting new technologies simply for technology’s sake.
“CIOs have to drive that process of envisioning the future. And if they’re not thinking about this last mile, they run the risk of technology enabling and not technology innovation,” Gretczko adds.
For Peter A. High, president of consulting firm Metis Strategy LLC, what separates CIOs capable of delivering innovation from the others is their attitude.
“There are very few other executives who have a reason to get into every strategic meeting, but great CIOs recognize they have strategic insight across the organization that few other executives have and [they leverage] that strategic perch that they have,” he says.
Here’s how High sees it: Most companies have an enterprise strategy that lists goals like reduce costs, grow revenue, enter new markets and develop new products. The strategic plan often doesn’t get into explicit details about how the various roles — marketing, operations, sales, and so on — will drive those.
“But a CIO who recognizes those gaps and fills them in with the other chiefs, that’s really an essential step for innovation,” he explains. “This is where the CIO can add value. [The CIO] can understand more than anyone else where there are common needs and divergent needs across the organization and then on the back of that develop IT’s own plans.”
He says leading CIOs do that and as a result have officially incorporated that strategic focus into their roles. He points to the 2015 decision at Dunkin Donuts to promote the existing CIO, Jack Clare, to the newly created position of chief information and strategy officer, as one of several examples.
High also notes that CIOs who leverage their unique position within organizations also don’t refer to the business units (or the business unit employees) as customers, as if IT is second to them. “They refer to them as their colleagues,” High says.
Furthermore, he says these CIOs see the organization’s end customers as IT’s customers and, thus, have a focus on how IT can drive new products and services that impact top-line growth.
Yes, technology and processes must be part of any innovation initiative today. But CIOs need people who understand those pieces and have the vision to leverage them in new ways. Moreover, the company’s culture must support and reward innovation through training programs that develop the technical and business knowledge needed for now, such as collaboration and DevOps skills.
“You can’t innovate if you don’t have that talent and culture,” says Larry Wolff, president and COO of Ouellette & Associates (O&A) Consulting.
Wolff points to a 2016 CIO survey from tech research firm Gartner that found talent and culture were top obstacles to CIOs achieving their objectives. “Most people fall short of looking at, ‘Do I have the organizational structure, the people and the skills to execute these operational changes?”
Indeed, Gartner says in its Building the Digital Platform: Insights From the 2016 Gartner CIO Agenda Report that “Talent has now been recognized globally as the single biggest issue standing in the way of CIOs achieving their objectives.” It cites the biggest talent gaps are around big data, analytics and information management, followed by business knowledge/acumen. Gartner adds: “Talent management practices are not keeping up with the ever-increasing and changing needs of the digital world.”
Wolff says he sees innovative CIOs take very deliberate action on this front.
“They have a very focused and deliberate workforce and talent strategy, and they create a disciplined spirit of continuous improvement,” he says, explaining that they have strong project management skills on staff, they’re good at collaborating and negotiating with the business to determine priorities, and they say no to the business peers when they’re requesting work that deviates from the strategic vision.
O&A and Babson College developed the IT Maturity Curve following a year-long research study about IT leadership. This maturity curve puts CIOs into four groups, with the least mature identified as IT supplier and the most mature labeled as innovative anticipator.
Wolff says one element that all innovative anticipator CIOs have in common is credibility with their business-side peers. He explains that the other chief executives, along with their direct reports and in turn their staffers, know that IT operates efficiently and effectively and thus they can trust IT to deliver on the high-stakes items.
He cites his own past experience to illustrate his point. He joined a $400 million company as CIO, tasked with turning around an IT shop that struggled with basic operations. He improved governance, project management and IT training, all of which allowed his team to better keep up with daily demands. That in turn gave them the bandwidth to move into strategic projects. Those wins won their business colleagues’ confidence to tackle innovative initiatives — including one using predictive analytics to identify which sales leads would become customers, a project that saved $50 million in annual costs.
Building credibility isn’t a revolutionary idea; CIOs have long been advised to do this by delivering exceptional operational services. But it still applies today, Wolff says.
“I would be hard-pressed to find an IT organization that doesn’t have pockets of innovative brilliance. But that doesn’t matter if it the organization doesn’t respect IT. Business will not accept innovation from a low-performing IT organization,” he says.
This article was originally published on CIO.com
1/2/18
By Peter High, published on Forbes Jody Davids has been the chief information officer of four major companies: Cardinal Health, Best Buy, Agrium, and, since April of 2016, of PepsiCo. She had set the goal to be the CIO of a Fortune 200 company, and now she has done so multiple times over. She also set a goal of becoming a board-level CIO, and she accomplished that in January 2015, when she joined the board of the North Carolina-based healthcare company, Premier, Inc.
All of this is particularly remarkable given the fact that she started her career as an executive assistant at General Electric. It was during her time there when her ambition was awakened. She had an assignment that gave her exposure to the paygrades across the company, and she realized how much more she could pay if she joined the IT department. She would go on to do so, and enjoy stops at Apple and at Nike before accomplishing her goal of becoming a chief information officer. She describes her journey, key points along the way, the advice she has for fellow CIOs who wish to join boards, and much more in this conversation.
Peter High:You have been a CIO multiple times. You are currently at PepsiCo but were previously CIO at Agrium, at Best Buy, and at Cardinal Health. While you have been extraordinarily successful, your origins in IT are rather unconventional, as you began your career as an executive assistant. Could you dive into the details of some of those experiences, as well as your pathway into IT?
Jody Davids: My first office job was working as an executive admin for a group of IT people at General Electric’s nuclear energy business group. I was young at the time and was going to college at night as a music major. One of the tasks my boss assigned me revolved around looking at a page full of salaries and reconciling it with some other piece of paper. In that process, I noticed that all the people on the page were making significantly more money than I was. I began to get curious about what the people around me in IT were doing.
At the time, GE had a phenomenal after-hours training program for its employees. I took a class in Fortran which was taught by the one woman in this group of programmers. Apparently, I did okay, and they hired me for their next entry level Fortran programming position.
I was working in GE’s nuclear energy business group around the time of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident [which took place on March 28, 1979]. Three Mile Island was not our reactor, but you can imagine that the whole industry was sent into a tailspin, and eventually, I was laid off at GE. This turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me because I emerged at Apple Computers as a programmer.
High: Can you talk a bit about Apple in its early days and your experience there?
Davids: I was there for fifteen years, from 1982 to 1997. I started as a programmer working on a product called the Apple III, which was later recalled from the market. I was then placed into an IT group that was supporting Finance and HR systems. It was a wild time to be there.
For me, that period was equivalent to working at three different companies. The early days, the first Steve Jobs days before he left, were the Wild West. We were running all our IT systems on a PDP-11/70, and he did not understand why we could not do it all on a Macintosh. There were no networks ready or anything around it yet. Those were interesting conversations in those early days.
That was the first stage of being there. I was growing in my craft as a programmer and then as a project manager, and then as a young manager. Jobs left in 1985, and we had John Sculley take over. Sculley was a ‘professional’ executive who helped us mature as an organization, get focused on process and on cost management, and generally focus on the things that large companies need to be more focused on.
By Peter High, published on Forbes
Clay Johnson has worked at a number of iconic brands, from FedEx to Boeing to General Electric. Roughly a year ago, he joined yet another icon in Walmart. In so doing, he joined a company with 2.3 million associates, 5,000 stores in the U.S. alone, and a complex mix of technology. His priorities in the early days were to meet as many people as possible, to learn the business, and to understand the projects that were ongoing.
He has begun to enact a cultural change within the IT department, and he indicates that the four steps he has followed have been to be transparent, to foster open debates, to push everyone to speak up, and to incorporate a fail-fast approach to work.
Now that he has a year under his belt, he sees his big priorities for the year ahead as developing a product model for IT to facilitate end-to-end ownership of different product areas created, as well as process automation, facilitated at least in part through artificial intelligence. He discusses all of the above and more in this far-ranging interview.
Peter High: Can you please describe your purview as Walmart’s Chief Information Officer and Executive Vice President of Global Business Services?
Clay Johnson: When I joined earlier this year, we consolidated the Internal Technology and the Shared Services teams. Technology encompasses anything that runs internally for the company, from server security and corporate systems to machine learning [ML], analytics, and artificial intelligence [AI]. We split out e-commerce and customer-facing staff to Jeremy King, who is our CTO. Everything else that runs inside the company falls under me. A lot of that is supplier facing rather than customer facing.
Combining these two teams has been incredibly powerful because it enables us to drive end-to-end ownership and use technology all the way through a process. I predict you are going to see a trend of more companies doing this.
High: I know part of the intention was to have a unified view of the associate experience. Could you describe how that is enhanced through digital technologies?
Johnson: The key is a relentless focus on the customer, and my customers are the internal associates of the company. Walmart has over two million associates, which is a huge number. At that scale, any time you can help productivity numbers or improve interactions with the different tools and services that we have, that will result in a massive productivity improvement.
If you look back ten years ago, business technology was better than consumer technology. However, that has now flipped. A lot of the technology that employees use in their personal lives is better than what they have at work. People now expect that when they come to work, the technology will be intuitive like social media and smartphones. They want everything on mobile and at the tip of their fingers. The goal of the Internal Technology and Shared Services team is to provide everything associates need when and how they need it, from tools to analytics.
High: Given this mandate, how much have you had to change in terms of the skill mix of your team? To what degree are you adding new employees, retraining existing employees, or creatively using external parties?
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
Linda Jojo joined United Airlines as Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer in November 2014. Between then and mid-2017, a primary area of focus was improving the company’s mobile tools and apps for customers and employees. As the value she contributed increasingly was customer-facing, the justification of expanding her responsibilities was made. In the middle of 2017, she was promoted to EVP of Technology and Chief Digital Officer.
In addition to her responsibility for United’s technology platforms and analytics, Jojo took over strategy, development and deployment of United’s e-commerce, mobile app and commercial web platforms. With these expanded responsibilities, she and her team have profoundly impacted both top and bottom line of the airline.
Jojo has also joined the small but growing club of CIOs who have joined public boards, having joined the board of $31 billion revenue utility services holding company Exelon in September of 2015. She is a member of the Compensation & Leadership Development Committee and Finance & Risk Committee. She covers all of the above and more in this interview.
Peter High: Since June of 2017, you have been the Executive Vice President of Technology and Chief Digital Officer of United Airlines. This follows your more than two and a half years as the Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer of United. How do these new titles change your purview?
Linda Jojo: I am responsible for technology as I had been as CIO. Additionally, I am also responsible for our digital strategy and ownership of our digital channels such as our website, our apps, and our digital distribution.
High: What are some aspects of your digital strategy?
Jojo: As in every industry, digital is pervasive throughout the organization and throughout the airline. A big component is arming and empowering our own employees with real-time information about the customer so that we can serve them better. It is about harnessing the massive amount of operational data we have to improve the reliability of our airline, to get more involved and more predictive in our maintenance activities, and to get more sophisticated in our revenue management process.
12/18/17
Thaddeus Arroyo has a remarkable journey in technology. He began his career in telecommunications, eventually became an IT executive at Sabre, and then returned to telecommunications as the Chief Information Officer of Cingular Wireless. Via acquisition, he would later join AT&T and become the company’s global CIO.
As he describes it, Arroyo was fortunate to be exposed to growth-oriented, innovative, and transformative opportunities. This included time as the President of Technology Development at AT&T. In that role, Arroyo was responsible for the development of AT&T’s products and services, digital experiences for customers, and systems supporting the operations across AT&T business segments, networks, and services. He notes that, “These experiences equipped me with a broad perspective across many technology and business operation disciplines, and this set me on the path to acquiring the skills required for any successful business leader.”
Opportunity called in Mexico when AT&T acquired multiple businesses in that market, and Arroyo would become the CEO of AT&T Mexico for a two year period in 2015 through 2016. Earlier this year, he became the CEO of AT&T Business.
Arroyo believes that this rapid rise beyond the CIO role will be accessible to many others. He believes that great IT leaders who understand business processes as well as anyone, and who use their unique visibility across all business units to contribute and help drive the business strategy will follow in his footsteps.
Peter High: You have gone from chief information officer of multiple companies to Chief Executive Officer of AT&T Business. Can you describe your career path in brief?
Thaddeus Arroyo: Over the course of my career, I have moved across industries and roles serving businesses and enabling capabilities. Most of my career has been spent in the technology and telecommunication space. Having worked across multiple industries, I have been appointed to positions that have led to technology transformation and integration, and I have focused on enabling business strategies that create business velocity and drive product innovation.
I have looked for roles that position me to broaden my skills through new experiences. That was true at the beginning of my career when I started in the IT department of Southwestern Bell, which was the nucleus of what today is AT&T. While working there, I served in the US Army Reserve as a Signal Corps Officer. That part-time experience was a large element of how I developed my core management and leadership foundation.
After beginning my career in the telecommunication space, I left and changed industries. I went to work for the IT department of American Airlines with Sabre Corporation. There, I had an opportunity to work on expanding their international data networks, then work on application development, and finally on product marketing. My time with Sabre allowed me to move across disciplines and get experience around not just the application of technology, but around operating the business too. That experience was instrumental in positioning me for what I do today.
My experience with Sabre led to my first CIO role, which was at Cingular Wireless. Cingular Wireless was the result of the consolidation of several regional wireless players, including BellSouth and SBC, which evolved from Southwestern Bell Telephone. At Cingular, I had an opportunity to direct the scaling of our operations and the integration of our systems during a period when the wireless industry was consolidating. During that scaling, Cingular purchased AT&T Wireless. When AT&T acquired BellSouth in 2007, I had an opportunity to become the Global CIO for all of AT&T.
High: How and when did you pivot from CIO to CEO?
12/11/17
Historically, the chief information officer’s primary reporting relationship has been to the chief financial officer of the enterprise. The initial rationale for this included the fact that much of the initial value from IT was in helping save costs by automating financial processes, and likewise the historical perspective that IT departments are primarily cost centers to be driven down. Ironically, though this has historically been the predominant hierarchy, few CIOs have replaced their bosses and become CFOs.
Cynthia Earhart has been one of the few to successfully walk that path. Among the many roles that she has played at Norfolk Southern since joining the company in 1985 has been that of executive vice president and chief information officer of the company. Earhart has a CPA, and had joined the company in the Accounting department. On her path through the CIO role, she continued to ensure that her teams had appropriate financial acumen while continuing to sharpen her own. As such, due to the value she contributed both to the top and bottom lines of the company, this unusual career path became relevant. What is the likelihood of others following in her footsteps? Earhart offers thoughts on her remarkable journey.
Peter High: You recently were promoted at Norfolk Southern from Chief Information Officer to Chief Financial Officer. This is an unusual pathway, and it might be helpful to understand your background prior to IT.
Cynthia Earhart: I graduated from college with a degree in Accounting before going on to get my CPA and working a few years in public accounting. When I came to work for Norfolk Southern, I came into the Accounting department, and I spent the first third of my career there before moving to IT. When I moved from Accounting to IT, I did not anticipate a pathway back to Finance. The CFO job was not on my radar.
12/4/17
Fletcher Previn is the youngest chief information officer in the history of IBM. He rose to the role in May after having spent 11 years at the company. He sees his role as helping to make his colleagues productive, to attract top talent, to be the digital front-end of the cultural transformation that IBM is ushering in, and to do all of this in a secure manner.
It is a fifth area that may be the source of highest value, however. Previn notes that his department has a role to play in ushering in the cognitive enterprise. This dovetails with the company’s focus on artificial intelligence through its Watson unit, but Previn notes that his team is working on artificial intelligence and machine learning initiatives independently, as well.
Peter High: You have been the Chief Information Officer of IBM since May of this year. How did you find out that you were going to be selected as the CIO of IBM? Likewise, what sort of preparations did you go through before taking on the role?
Fletcher Previn: I had worked in the IT Department at IBM for some time and had supported two previous CIOs in various capacities. One was a kind of Chief of Staff role, and the other was an executive capacity running the workplace and service and back-office functions. I had a pretty good sense of what the job would entail. That allowed me to hit the ground running and have less lead time in terms of getting up to speed and being able to execute our strategy.
High: Once you took the role, to what extent was it a case of continuing with the strategy versus refashioning it in various ways?
11/20/17
Paula Tolliver joined Intel a little more than a year ago as chief information officer. She had spent more than two decades at the Dow Chemical Company. She had been CIO there, as well, but she also ran procurement for a time, and had profit and loss accountability for Dow’s $1 billion services business. Therefore, she came to Intel with an orientation toward driving revenue growth from her post.
Tolliver immediately got to work doing just that. She has helped lead a major push toward deepening the company’s investment in analytics and artificial intelligence, in addition to other new technologies, and has helped drive $350 million in revenue growth in the sales and marketing channels alone, as she notes herein.
Tolliver has also improved IT’s orientation toward being “customer zero” for Intel’s own technologies. As such, she has woven her team into the product development process, and served as an important proxy for CIO and other IT executive customers of the company.
Peter High: You recently celebrated your first year anniversary with Intel. Prior to coming to Intel, you spent a couple of decades at Dow Chemical. What drew you to the CIO role at Intel?
Paula Tolliver: I have been in the profession for close to 30 years. My move to Intel was the result of my beginning to reflect on my career and wanting to be more deeply involved in this exciting time for IT. As I looked around and started to understand the potential of new technologies and how quickly they are advancing, I wanted to be a part of that in a more meaningful way. I saw joining the technology industry as a way to jump in with both feet. Fortunately, for me, Intel was looking for a CIO. What drew me to Intel was that they are a substantial contributor to the advancements happening in the IT industry. The technology that Intel has developed over its long history have driven many significant technology advancements, opened up many of possibilities that we see today, and powered the digital transformation. The privilege and honor of joining the Intel team and being a part of the ecosystem of technology was too exciting for me to pass up. I jumped on board and have enjoyed every minute.
High: Intel has been going through a transformation. Can you describe the changes and the role that IT plays?
11/13/17
The Chief Information Officer of $100 billion revenue Express Scripts Neal Sample has had unusual breadth and depth of experience for someone who is still in his mid-40s. He has a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford, which allows him to dig into the weeds of the technology his team develops with the best of them. He also spent time professionally as a consultant, giving him an orientation and a toolkit to solve a diverse array of problems. He spent time with legendary digital native companies like Yahoo! (where he was Chief Architect) and eBay (where he was CTO of X.Commerce, eBay’s venture to bring together a comprehensive set of commerce products and capabilities to help merchants and businesses compete in the world of social, local, mobile, and digital-driven commerce). At American Express, he grew from CIO of the Enterprise Growth unit to become president of the unit.
Sample took his current role for the St. Louis-based pharmacy benefits management behemoth nearly two years ago. As he notes in this interview, information is the coin of the realm for Express Scripts, and he has helped tune his team to drive better insights through better gathering and synthesis of information. His team helps lead the innovation agenda for the company, and he has grown leaps and bounds.
Peter High: In the 20 or so months that you have been the CIO of Express Scripts, you have been in the throes of a transformation. What was the state of IT and technology when you joined Express Scripts and what changes have you made?
Neal Sample: For 20 years, Express Scripts had primarily grown inorganically through acquisitions. The enterprise’s growth pattern was fairly consistent, they would purchase another pharmacy benefit management company or a related business, integrate it, capture the synergies from the integration, and then leverage those synergies to acquire the next business. From a technology perspective, this meant that they often did not end up with the systems they would have designed or chosen if they had started with a blank sheet of paper. It was not one plus one equals three, it was more like one plus one equals one. There was a lot of technology debt. There were many systems that would have been upgraded if the focus had been on infrastructure, instead of integrating the next company. There were also a plethora of systems. We had 31 development languages. Any technology stack you could imagine was present. Midrange, mainframe, on premise cloud, off premise cloud, it was all there. We had the opportunity to do some clean up, to enhance our reliability, and to become more agile. From a business process perspective, development had been primarily waterfall, which meant that not only were the cycle times long and fairly expensive, but the processes were rigid in their ability to respond to the market.
We had our work cut out for us. We had to decide to start with people, process, or technology. We picked all three. We began a tech debt retirement program and a move from waterfall to agile. We also focused on attracting and hiring in-house talent. Years of outsourcing had left us a little light for the transformation. In summary, I came into an environment that was target rich in people, processes, and technology, and began chipping away.
High: Part of your purview as CIO is innovation. As you have taken care of the efficiency part of the equation, trying to get to that one plus one equals three equation, what innovative ideas have you pursued?
