By Peter High, published on Forbes
ADP has been referred to as one of the original cloud companies, as it has long run other companies’ payroll off-premises as a service. Now, the $12 billion human capital management company has become colossus in the industry. It does not lack for competition, however, both among traditional players like Paychex, and among digital native companies like Workday and Zenefits. ADP still enjoys the advantages of scale, producing one in every six paychecks for all non-governmental employees in the United States.
Stuart Sackman has spent the past 25 years at ADP, running various businesses within the company. He has spent nearly two and a half years running Global Product and Technology for the company. In that role, he has enormous influence over the company’s products, but also the methods of delivering them to an increasingly technology savvy customer base.
Sackman also leads an innovation lab that has been branded Lifion. The lab was founded in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, 15 miles east of the company’s Roseland, New Jersey headquarters. Sackman explains the rationale behind the branding of the division, the advantages of its geography, its path forward, and a variety of other topics in this interview.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
08/14/2017
As a gifted athlete who was also six feet and five inches tall, all Fortinet founder and CEO Ken Xie wanted to do was to become a professional volleyball player in his native China when he grew up. His parents who were academics at Tsinghua University had other plans for him: to get a PhD at Stanford University and then to return to China to become an academic like them. Xie’s life was transformed at Stanford, as he met fellow students who aspired to start businesses. He notes that the entrepreneurial culture was not something he had ever experienced growing up in China.
He started a company while he was a student to help small companies get online and do so securely. That company would become SIS. He founded a second company, NetScreen, which he would eventually sell to Juniper for $4 billion.
As Xie defines it, these two companies represented the first generation of network security. In 2000, he founded Fortinet to offer the next generation security platform. As the company has grown, it has evolved along with the threat landscape. Fortinet now boasts revenue in excess of $1 billion. In this interview, Xie describes his entrepreneurial path, the culture of innovation that he has fostered at Fortinet, the advantages of having started businesses with his brother Michael Xie, and a variety of other topics.
Peter High: Please describe Fortinet’s business.
Ken Xie: Fortinet was founded in 2000 with the goal of making an impactful change in the network security space. Fortinet is our third company in the same space. Our previous two companies, NetScreen and SIS, dealt with the first generation of network security. However, starting in 2000, this was no longer good enough. It is like air travel, where with the first generation, all you needed was a ticket to get on the airplane, but today, they x-ray your luggage. It is the same thing with the second generation of network security, we need to look inside the connection because most malware comes from permitted connections, whether it comes from the user, the partner, the customer, or from inside. That is how Fortinet started. Seventeen years later, we are nearly 5,000 people strong with over $1 billion in revenue, and growing quickly.
High: You work in a field where you must think proactively, but also where an element of reactiveness is necessary because you need to adapt as the threat landscape evolves. How do you and the company remain current?
08/07/2017
Julia Davis began her career in information technology at the Air Force. She had attended college on a ROTC scholarship, and worked as a software engineer, rising to the rank of captain in the process. For the past 16 years, Davis has been a chief information officer beginning as a divisional CIO at General Electric and eventually becoming CIO of American Safety Insurance a decade ago. For the past four years, she has been the CIO of AFLAC. That depth and diversity of experience has served her well as she has helped transform that $22 billion supplemental health and life insurance company.
AFLAC is based in Columbus, Georgia, a location that can be challenging for hiring millennials. Recognizing that Atlanta is in driving distance, and a more attractive spot for recent college graduates to join, she has developed a robust intern program while also developing an innovation lab of sorts in the company’s Atlanta satellite office. She has also used the opportunity of rethinking that office in creating an “office of the future” concept there. She describes all of the above and more in this interview.
Peter High: Julia, you have been the Chief Information Officer of Aflac for four years. Before that, you were with American Safety Insurance for almost six years. Based on your decade of experience, what role does technology play in the insurance market, particularly from a customer experience perspective and what are some of the strategic ways your IT team brings value to Aflac?
Julia Davis: Insurance was one of the last holdouts to recognize the need to approach the customer in a different way. Historically, we relied heavily on our agent channels and direct customer interaction, which was either face-to-face or phone-to-phone. However, customers began to want to interact with us differently. Property & casualty was the first company in the insurance sector to embrace automation and to leverage technology to expand the opportunities for the customer. Currently, the health and life space is exploring how technology can improve the customer experience. We recognize that folks expect an Amazon-like experience; they want an easy way to do business with us. For Aflac, this means our customers expect their claims to be paid quickly, and want it to happen with limited direct interaction with a person. This is the basis of our One Day Pay initiative. Finding the best way to deliver claim money quickly to our clients drives our technology investment strategy.
High: From our past conversations, I know you put a lot of thought into developing your team. Please describe the apprenticeship program you developed at Aflac and the benefits it has provided the organization.
7/31/2017
A retired four-star general, Stanley McChrystal is the former commander of US and International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) Afghanistan and the former commander of the nation’s premier military counter-terrorism force, Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). He is best known for developing and implementing a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, and for creating a cohesive counter-terrorism organization that revolutionized the interagency operating culture. He will be the first to admit that his retirement did not transpire as planned, but the impact that he has had as a private citizen has also been profound.
In 2001, McChrystal founded the McChrystal Group, a consultancy that provides “innovative leadership solutions to American businesses in order to help them transform and succeed in challenging, dynamic environments,” as his site notes. In that role, he has spent considerable time with CEOs across the private sector, helping them understand that the changes he enacted in the military are quite similar to the changes necessary in the business world: silos need to be eliminated, information must flow more freely across the enterprise, ecosystems must be curated carefully and cared for, and companies must strive to innovate while remaining cognizant of an ever expanding threat landscape.
In 2013, McChrystal published his memoir, My Share of the Task, detailing his years in the military, and in 2015, he published Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, describing how the lessons of his military experience apply more broadly. Both books were New York Times bestsellers. He has also joined the boards of JetBlue and Navistar International.
McChrystal describes all of the above and more in this far ranging interview.
7/24/2017
Kumud Kalia has been a CIO multiple times over, at Direct Energy, at Qwest Communications, and at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein. For nearly six years, he has been the CIO of Akamai Technologies a $2.3 billion global content delivery network services firm. Kalia is responsible for leading the strategy, development, and operation of the applications and infrastructure that support the company’s business operations. As a CIO leading IT at a technology company, in some cases, his team provides guidance of CIO needs and validate the value of the products the company has in development. Moreover, he and his colleagues in IT have developed internal solutions that can be adopted by the end- customer.
Among other areas, Kalia attributes his success to developing a culture that embraces expansive thinking and that is agile in its mentality and its approach. Both have been essential as the company has grown tremendously during his tenure, and its needs and demands for IT’s services are different and far greater than they were six years ago. We cover all of the above and more in this interview.
Peter High: Kumud, you have been the Chief Information Officer at Akamai Technologies for five and a half years. Please describe Akamai’s business and your role as chief information officer.
Kumud Kalia: Akamai has been at the heart of the internet for the past 20 years. Companies that do a lot of internet-based, commercial business use our services to distribute content over the internet. For example, media and e-commerce companies depend on Akamai to run and scale their businesses. We store our customers’ content on our global network of servers that we position geographically close to their end-users. The online experience that the end-user has is the fastest and richest possible because our servers remove latency caused by distance and congestion on the internet. In effect, we speed up the internet by overcoming its natural limitations.
As the CIO of a technology company with many technology-savvy employees, I work with a tough crowd. There are at least 2,000 people in the company who think they can do my job better than I can. There are advantages, of course. Being technologically-aware makes my colleagues more willing to experiment. They also provide critical feedback on technology that we are considering and are adept at debugging my solutions. However, even technology people can be reluctant to embrace new solutions. Engineers tend to consume products that have been built by themselves or by someone they know, and then develop a tribal allegiance to that solution. This challenge is similar to what many enterprise CIOs find with their end-users. I have much in common with CIOs of other enterprises, but I have some natural advantages that come from being in a tech-savvy user community.
High: In our previous conversations, you have said that a CIO and his or her team should foster business agility. IT should not gum up the operation, but rather, as the organization identifies new opportunities to seize, IT should be an accelerator. When you joined Akamai, it was roughly half the size it is now. Presumably, it has plans to continue to grow. How do you think about agility in a fast-growing company?
7/17/2017
Chris Corrado has been an IT leader at many esteemed financial services companies such as Morgan Stanley, UBS, Merrill Lynch, and Deutsche Bank. He has also held CIO and CTO roles at technology companies such as eBay, AT&T Wireless, and Asurion. Along the way, his purview has grown from traditional CIO responsibilities to non-traditional ones, such as product development. Currently, he serves as the Chief Information Officer and Chief Operations Officer at the London Stock Exchange Group, a $2.2 billion British-based stock exchange and financial information company. It is headquartered in London.
He notes that CIOs need to be much more cognizant of the “I” In their title. Information is the key to garnering better insights on behalf of the company and its customers. Those CIOs who harness information effectively will take on greater and more strategic responsibilities. Corrado is optimistic that more CIOs will follow in his footsteps to become COOs.
Peter High: Chris, you are the Chief Information Officer and the Chief Operating Officer of the London Stock Exchange Group. Please provide a brief overview of the organization and explain your purview.
Chris Corrado: The London Stock Exchange Group is a collection of complementary businesses. We have a core strategy called Open Access, which reflects our philosophy of transparency and choice. The Group directly runs the London Stock Exchange and the Borsa Italiana. We provide the infrastructure, operations, and technology for the Oslo Stock Exchange. We also run clearinghouses and information businesses that produce indexes and analytics. The firm has experienced remarkable growth since Xavier Role became CEO, in 2009. The existing businesses have grown significantly and we have made 22 acquisitions. Today, the Group is comprised of diversified and complimentary businesses that provide a robust value chain that enables our clients to manage their investment processes. To achieve this goal, we maximize cost effectiveness, time to market and the quality of information. Technology is the fulcrum of this.
There are some unique aspects of the firm that, in turn, make my role as the CIO unique. For example, we sell hosting services because our customers want their technology in our datacenters because this makes our services more robust and less latent. The hosting services fall under me. When Xavier took over, he realized that technology is critical to what we do. However, he was not satisfied with the performance of our technology, which was being outsourced pretty significantly. Since his focus is on time-to-market, we bought technology companies. The companies have maintained their existing clients and have grown their client base as commercial enterprises. We have scaled and stabilized them internally. These fall under me as well. As we continue, I will touch on some other aspects of my position. As an overview, my role is running the company day-to-day operationally, and helping to determine the best client experience for our customers, by leveraging our capabilities.
High: It seems like the best CIOs are thinking about their job more along the lines of being a chief operating officer of technology, as opposed to the traditional order-taking, back office type of role it once was. Do you see this as a natural evolution for a strong CIO?
07/10/17
Eight years ago, Dave Evans asked Bill Burnett to lunch. Dave was a management consultant and lecturer at the University of California Berkeley, and a co-founder of Electronic Arts. Bill was and continues to be the Executive Director of the Design Program at Stanford University. Evans had been teaching a class at Cal on vocation, and based on that experience, he thought that Burnett and he might be able to address a need in combination for the students in the Design Program. He thought that the fact that students in that program had a multi-disciplinary degree that they may have difficulty finding their first jobs. Evans notes, “I thought this was going to be a multi-part discussion and that I’d have to have a couple of meetings to sell Bill on this idea. Within 15 minutes, I had the deal done!”
Since then, Evans and Burnett have taught an open enrollment class at Stanford together, which has become one of the most popular electives at the university. The method has been the subject of two PhD theses and had demonstrated significant results in helping people design the life they want. The method is centered on the principles taught in the Product Design Program and the d.school at Stanford called “design thinking.” As the ideas grew in popularity, Evans and Burnett elected to memorialize many of the key insights and exercises in a book, Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life, which has been a bestseller since its release in September of last year. They discuss many of the key themes herein.
Peter High: Bill, as the Executive Director of the Design Program at Stanford, the Co-Director of the Stanford Life Design Lab, and the co-author of the book we are discussing, please provide an overview of the Design Program at Stanford, which is foundational to the work that the two of you have been doing.
Bill Burnett: Most people, when they hear the word design, think of graphic design or industrial design. That is commonly the way design is taught, but Stanford took a different tact. We have been teaching design as a human-centered practice, since 1957. A couple of big thinkers, John Arnold and Bob McKim put together what we call human-centered design, which is Engineering, plus Psychology and a little Anthropology to try to understand people well; and then leaning hard into the concepts of creativity and ideation. This is what we now call “design thinking,” which is an innovation methodology that relies on multiple sets of tools and focuses on human needs. It is a way of innovating in anything: a product, a service, or experiences. What we primarily do at Stanford is teach undergraduates and graduates how to be design thinkers. Then they go out into the world and work at all the big companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and IBM. Most of my work is around teaching our Engineering students how to be innovators, the Designing Your Life class popped up as a little side project. It has kind of gotten out of control.
High: Dave, I understand the genesis of the Designing Your Life class was about eight years ago and began with you taking Bill to lunch. That then led to the recently released book, Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived Joyful Life. What was the problem you hoped to solve or the opportunity that you recognized that led you to collaborate with Bill?
07/03/17
Ann Kono wears a lot of hats at Ares Management, the $1.2 billion alternative asset manager. She is a Partner and Chief Information and Risk Officer of the company, and she is a member of the Management Committee of Ares Management. She also serves as Vice President of Ares Dynamic Credit Allocation Fund, Inc. and CION Ares Diversified Credit Fund. She additionally serves as a member of the Ares Operations Management Group and the Ares Enterprise Risk Committee.
Kono’s ability to push to other areas beyond IT can be traced to her roots in Finance (she has a BA and an MBA both with Finance as the areas of focus), and in consulting, where she became passionate about solving difficult and varied problems for clients. Her financial acumen and customer focus have served her well in building an IT team that adds to both the top and bottom lines of the company. By having responsibility for innovation activities while also serving as the company’s first ever risk officer, she helps ensure the company balances both perspectives well.
During her more than ten years with Ares, she has helped usher in remarkable growth, moving the company an order of magnitude forward from a revenue perspective, and ensuring that technology remains modern, reliable, and flexible. She shares her perspectives on her journey, the many hats she wears, and more in this interview.
Peter High: Ann, you are a Partner, the Chief Information Officer, and the Chief Risk Officer at Ares Management. Please describe your responsibilities.
Ann Kono: My responsibilities have evolved over my last ten years at Ares. I started off managing technology and then quickly took over the investment operations functions. My risk responsibilities began about seven or eight years ago, when we developed an enterprise risk function during the financial crisis. We started with operational risk to create the business resilience that was needed for a large-scale multinational firm. Then, we added information risk, which encapsulates information security and cybersecurity. Finally, we added investment risk, which is core to our offering.
In the last three years, I have also taken on responsibility for what we call the “middle office,” which is the bridge between our investment professionals and our operations professionals. Within our industry, the role of the middle office is to enable the transition of assets between the two parties that are buying and selling transactions and assets within the marketplace.
My most recent set of responsibilities resulted from us brainstorming how to optimize high scale, high volume, operational processes. We developed a group called Global Shared Services. The first function within that is Accounts Payable. As we begin to talk, you will see how technology enables all the functions within this group and how we leverage technology to make these functions more efficient.
High: What is the rationale of having IT and risk together?
06/28/17
Brian Lillie set his sights on the becoming a chief information officer early in his career, and he carefully planned the moves necessary to get there. He determined he would lead each of the functions that make up a traditional IT department. Through his beginnings in technology at the Air Force, to time spent at Silicon Graphics, and then at Verisign, he gathered the necessary experiences. Then he took a left turn and spent a year getting a master’s degree in Management from Stanford Graduate School of Business. When he came back to Verisign, it was as Vice President of Global Sales Operations. Through this experience, he gained invaluable customer-centric experience and insights.
When Lillie joined Equinix in 2008, he finally realized his dream, becoming CIO, but he made this role a much more customer-centric one than is typical. As a $3.6 billion leader in the global colocation datacenter space, the company’s customers are often CIOs and their IT teams. As such, he was able to serve as a empathetic peer to his company’s customers, while also making the case for the use of Equinix’s offering. He also established an Equinix-on-Equinix program, ensuring that his team was the first and best customer of the company, making his team’s insights sharper when working with customers.
In September 2016, Lillie was promoted to chief customer officer and executive vice president of Technology Services. In that role, he leads the Global Customer Success Organization, which includes Global Customer Care, Global Customer Experience, Global Customer Process, and Global Technology Services, including IT and Interconnection Product Engineering. In many ways, this role was simply a continuation of what he had already been doing.
Now he has a CIO reporting to him, and as such he has had a chance to reflect further on the nature of the role and what separates those who succeed in it versus those who do not. He has defined “Four Pillars of Excellence,” which he believes to be the four cornerstones for building a career as a CIO. He believes CIOs must be operational, transformational, innovational, and organizational. He covers all of the above and more in depth in this interview, and more.
Peter High: Brian, you are the Chief Customer Officer and Executive Vice President of Technology Services at Equinix. Your current role is interesting, as is the path that led you to it. Can you share a few highlights from the journey you took, how you managed your career, and the goals that led you to where you are today?
Brian Lillie:I started my career in the Air Force. I was an officer for almost a decade. My last two jobs in the Air Force, as a commander of a communications squadron and as a captain in a mission control center operating satellites, prepared me well for IT. My first civilian job was as the network manager at Silicon Graphics (SGI). In this position, I gained both communications infrastructure and international experience because after a while with the company I moved to Switzerland and ran IT infrastructure for Europe for two years. At this point in my career, a mentor told me that a strong CIO should have experience in every box on the org chart. I have used this advice to guide my career.
When I came back to the U.S. with SGI, I transitioned into apps. When I joined Verisign as VP of IT, I picked up apps and infrastructure, and worked on integrating acquisitions. During this time, I thought I wanted to become a CEO, so I took a year off and attended the Stanford Graduate School of Business where I earned a master’s degree in management. After I earned my degree and came back to Verisign, I knew that I wanted to get in on the business side. The CEO was reorganizing the company and asked me to organize the sales force, along with a colleague. Ultimately, this led to me running Global Sales Operations.
When I knew it was time for a change, I took six months off, drove around the country with my family, and ultimately landed at Equinix as CIO. They were rapidly growing and needed a CIO to scale the company’s systems with the business. Equinix is a phenomenally good place to work.I want it to be my last place. Once I got the CIO role under control and had a solid team, I started adding to my remit. I picked up product engineering, that is the technology part of my job. Last fall, I took on the chief customer role to get in front of and roll up our new Global Customer Organization.
High: You started on a standard CIO path, which is to say you sat in all the different chairs in IT, presumably on the past to becoming a CIO. Instead, you rounded out your experience in a way that few CIOs have by pursuing a graduate degree to increase your business acumen, as well as by spending a period in Sales, which gave you deeper customer-centric experience. How did those experiences color your thinking about what could be achieved in the role of CIO?
By Saeed Elnaj, published on Inside NGO
06-19-17
Peter High, president of Metis Strategy and author of the book “World Class IT,” will be speaking at InsideNGO’s Annual Conference on Thursday, July 20. In his session, “Technovation: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation,” High will address how to align business goals and technology for greater synergy and impact, the role of the IT leader, and how to harness the power of the IT team as a platform for innovation. In this blog, Saeed Elnaj, vice president of Global ICT at Project Concern International, reviews “World Class IT.”
It is rare that strategic IT advice comes in a recipe wrapped with a framework and a methodology, but this is exactly what Peter High has done in his well-written and insightful book World Class IT. In this seminal and timeless book, High offers a framework with five principles and a detailed methodology that is easy to follow and to execute. Each of the principles is covered in its own chapter with a set of performance indicators, step-by-step processes, and flowcharts that end up molding these five principles into a well-developed methodology. This makes the book unique, valuable, and a must-read reference for IT leaders, managers, and practitioners.
The five principles are well articulated and presented in such a simple way that they seem familiar and obvious. High’s framework is the IT equivalent of Michael Porter’s revolutionary and well-known five competitive forces framework. In my opinion, understanding both of these frameworks is essential to any IT leader to practice excellence and produce tangible business results from IT investments.
Click here to read the full article on Inside NGO
