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By Peter High, published on Forbes 04/03/17
Rick King has had an unusual path to the CIO role of Thomson Reuters. He began his professional career as a high school teacher and as a coach. In his mind, continues to play both roles. He has taken great pride in building great and loyal teams. Moreover, he has pushed Thomson Reuters to have a remarkably diverse mix of women in information technology, though he is first to note that he wants to push the envelope further on that front.
King has joined the elite but growing club of CIOs who have joined the boards of publicly traded companies, as he is on the board of the bank holding company, TCF Financial. In this interview, he offer insights on how others might follow his lead toward board membership, how best to leverage external partners, how to build world class teams, along with a variety of other topics.
Peter High:I thought we would begin with your role as Chief Information Officer at Thomson Reuters. Your organization is information based — data is the key ingredient. How do you, as CIO, and your IT team add value in ways that are different than your peer CIOs that are at organizations that produce physical products, for example?
Rick King: It is significant because you are not the creator of a lot of technologies. However, you use many leading technologies to do things with your data that are unique and that your customers find value in. IT’s responsibility is to ensure that the infrastructure and innovation aspects are in place so that our product people are free to create a product that can go after data sets and harvest unique insights from them. That requires having the data and being able to manipulate it. We deal with different data sets worldwide; abiding by restrictions, like permissions and entitlements; and then allowing the analytics to go after the key insight that somebody is looking for. IT is right in the middle of the value proposition at Thomson Reuters. We are not selling the technology but rather the delivery of the content. The insights and the information that are our product come from having a strong, creative, innovative, and execution oriented technology team.
High: I know that you have always taken great pride in building strong teams, in both recruiting and retaining strong people. This dates to your first job as a teacher and coach before joining corporate America and eventually IT in organizations like Josten’s Learning, Ceridian, and since 2000, Thomson Reuters. Today, top technology talent is increasingly sought after as different divisions, beyond just IT organizations, are looking for people who are technology savvy and technology experienced. What insights can you share about building and retaining strong teams?
King: There is nothing like a strong team to attract strong players. As of the first hire you have to build a team that is strong at technology and strong at delivery. Then, every hire must raise that capability, not diminish it. To do that I involve the team in the hiring situation, they bring in the players that up their game. I think people stay at a place if they work with smart people, they have good tools to use, and the infrastructure works for them.
The career path is as important as anything else. What is my opportunity here? Can I progress? Can I progress by a technology track? Can I progress into a management track? Or maybe, can I move into non-technology product development or an innovation type of role? Having these capabilities as an organization requires first that the people leading the team, the management over the group, and the executive over the group have a vision, and second, that they have dialogues with people. Career planning and succession planning are two things that we do not do enough of for people. If team members are doing interesting work with interesting people at a place that is interesting to them, they will only look up when they have a break between projects, and that is when you want to make sure thattheyknow thatyou know a lot aboutthem and that there are steps in place for them to progress. You create a depth chart just like you do as a coach. You have to know who is lined up behind whom. It is all about the team. You do not get anything done without good people. Team building, team retention; that is our number one goal.
High: With an organization as expansive as Thomson Reuters, do you try to find opportunities for your team members inside and outside of IT to give people a degree of breadth of experience and not just depth of experience?
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By Peter High, published on Forbes
03-28-17
Former Intel Chief Information Officer turned Chief Operating Officer, Client, IoT and System Architecture Group Kim Stevenson announced she was leaving Intel after seven and a half years with a Tweet stating, “Today was my last day at Intel. It’s been a great 7 1/2 yrs…on to new adventures.” Now, her “new adventures” are known, as she has been named the new Senior Vice President and General Manager of Data Center Infrastructure at Lenovo starting May 1, 2017. This group is responsible for shaping the company’s portfolio of server, storage and networking products, as well as solutions. She will report to Kirk Skaugen, executive vice president & president, Data Center Group, Lenovo.
Skaugen noted that “Kim is a widely respected and highly accomplished technology leader, and we’re honored to have her join our team. Lenovo is attracting some of the industry’s best talent as we continue to expand our capabilities and breadth of solutions as a data center company. In addition, our new market segment-driven structure and global sales and marketing organization will enable us to be even more dynamic and responsive in helping our customers navigate today’s rapidly evolving technology and business landscape.”
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By Peter High, published on Forbes 3/27/17
Yvonne Wassenaar has been the Chief Information Officer of digital intelligence platform company, New Relic, for a bit more than two and a half years. She represents a rising trend among fast growing, Silicon Valley technology companies who reach a certain size after nearly a decade in business, and determine they need a CIO for the first time. (Recent interviewee, Mark Settle of Okta is another example of this.)
In choosing Wassenaar, New Relic’s executive team brought on someone with the killer combination of a technical background as an undergraduate coupled with an MBA followed by an extended period as a partner at Accenture. She brings equal measure of technical and business acumen together with deep problem solving skills. Not surprisingly, she has also gained board access, serving on the boards of multiple organizations, as well. We cover all of the above and more herein.
Peter High: For a little more than two and a half years, you have been the Chief Information Officer of New Relic, a software analytics company founded in 2008. In your own terms, please describe the business and the roles that IT and the CIO position play within the organization.
Yvonne Wassenaar: New Relic is what I call a digital intelligence platform, which in this age of every business becoming a software business, is vitally important. New Relic technology provides a company with insight into what people are doing with their software. For example, because most people bank on their phone or maybe on their laptop, but less at the retail branch, a digital intelligence platform is critical because what matters then, is not how long the teller lines are or how warm the coffee is, but rather, questions like: “How quickly did the app load? How many people were trying to do what type of transaction? Where are people spending their time?” The insight offered by New Relic’s technology is valuable from a developer-operator perspective for designing and running great software. Furthermore, this type of technology is increasingly important from a business perspective because, if done effectively, it offers us new eyes into consumer behavior which will provide us with more insight than we have ever had.
My role as CIO is an interesting one because New Relic is a technology company that was “born in the cloud.” As such, there is some question as to why New Relic even needs a CIO. However, more companies like Octa, DocuSign, and other similar companies “born in the cloud,” have been adding a CIO role to their docket. The reason being, as amazing as technology is, it does not quite run itself yet. The way that I look at my role within New Relic is to, internally, help the company take advantage of the technology that is available to run the business services of the company; things like sales, billing, and so forth. Even more importantly, externally, to get insights into customers; into how we can better serve those customers and to ensure that we are providing the ultimate digitized customer experience. My role is founded on those two principles of ensuring that internally we can leverage the technology well in a decentralized way but with guardrails, and then externally, that we are bringing the best of our insight from technology to bear in partnering with the CTO in thinking about the products we develop and offer to customers.
High: Do you foresee a time, and if so how soon, where the technology will “run itself” to a degree where the CIO will become obsolete?
Wassenaar: I would say if we turn the clock back five to eight years ago, there were some that believed that the CIO role would become extinct because you had data centers in the cloud, you had SaaS applications, you could credit card swipe your way to nirvana in technology. Now I see a resurgence in the role of the CIO for two reasons. The first is that companies today are structured in a functional fashion. This creates a tendency for them to see things only from one angle. That works fine if you are doing a point solution or something that is working in isolation, but few things in a public company fit that mold. For example, technology such as Salesforce, which may have been fine when they were a small company just supporting a sales organization, however, now it is not just a SaaS application, it is a SaaS platform –and it impacts the value chain across the company. First and foremost, you need someone who has a horizontal viewpoint across functions that is geared toward outcomes. The CIO is a perfect role for that because we have cross-function visibility for large applications, for large investments in AWS and Azure, and elsewhere.
The second reason is there is a lot of work to be done around “basic hygiene” when it comes to running technology at scale. There are certain principles that are important to think about whether you are designing for velocity, or for different use cases, or for size and dispersion of transaction; all of these factor into how you might want to structure your enterprise architecture. I have found that the basic functionality of a SaaS app or AWS is easy to get your arms around, but as you augment, and you build on it over the years, unless you have some understanding of how technology runs most effectively, you will start to create a lot of technical debt. You might be blind to this debt, or you may not necessarily understand or appreciate the investments, or the value of things like staging an environment, or how you actually do agile development in a robust, quality, and effective way. I believe the need for both a horizontal viewpoint and the need to bring a technological mindset to how you architect the ecosystem of solutions that is increasingly not just running your business but serving your customers is going to put increased focus on what people call the CIO role, the CTO role, or the chief digitization role. Somebody has got to play that role, and I think for the next five to ten years, it is going to become more important.
High: You began the description of New Relic as a digital intelligence platform. Digital and intelligence are increasingly the domain of other organizations as well, either in concert with IT, or in some cases superseding IT’s involvement. Given your network and your knowledge of the kinds of companies where the CIO leads the conversation on digital intelligence, versus those where they are reacting to it, what differentiates the former versus the latter category in your mind?
By Peter High, published on Forbes 3/20/17
Within Tom Miller’s first year as Chief Information Officer for Anthem, an $85 billion health benefits company, he took a trip to Silicon Valley to better understand where smart money was being spent in healthcare. He has called the experience “mind blowing.” The innovation that he saw in areas like mobile care, the internet of things, and digital led him to conclude that the industry and his company were on the cusp of being disrupted. Rather than wait for others to bring the disruption to Anthem, he decided Anthem would be the source of its own disruption.
With the assistance of a small ecosystem of partners, Miller opened the Anthem Innovation Studio in May of 2016. In the 10 months since then, the team has already developed a number of innovative ideas. Miller’s penchant for seizing opportunities to disrupt are not limited to the companies he serves but he has also disrupted his own career in some ways, spending the first dozen years of his career in Sales and general management roles before disrupting his career and moving into IT roles that have been his mainstay since. We cover all of the above and more in this interview.
Peter High: Could you take a moment and describe Anthem’s business as well as IT’s role in it?
Tom Miller: Anthem is a healthcare provider that serves around forty million consumers. Our goal is to provide quality, affordable healthcare for our members. We offer services in a commercial space under the Blue Cross Blue Shield banner and Medicare and Medicaid Services in our government line. IT’s role is to deliver enabling capabilities to ensure that healthcare is both accessible and affordable and that our that our provider partners are able to engage with us in a way that makes it easy for them to do business. IT also provides thought leadership on how the advancement of technology is shaping the industry. We want to ensure that our business remains relevant and that we are competitive as the business of healthcare continues to unfold.
High: You have been with Anthem for nearly three years now. Prior to that you had a variety of roles within Coca-Cola. You were the Chief information Officer but you also spent time in sales. Please reflect on your unusual career path in and out of IT and what you have drawn from this broad set of experiences.
Miller: I spent my first twelve years in sales and general management and then gradually moved deeper and deeper into IT roles until I became the Chief Information Officer for Coke Refreshments, the North American bottling business, and several groups of the North American company of Coca-Cola. The first thing that I learned was that you simply have to know the business. You need to know what matters at a macro level — what the main service offerings are, the products, the core systems, and the customers’ needs. You also need to know what matters at a detail level. You cannot be in all the details, especially with the pace of technology change today, which means that you need to know what is relevant in terms data, systems, customer service, environments that you are managing, and response times. Knowing the fundamentals of the business is one of the keys to success, especially being able to transfer that understanding from one industry to another. The second thing is that you must operate from the basis of a strategy, especially in the world of technology. There are so many things coming at you all of the time, you must be able to sort them out and make sure that they are relevant to an overall strategic plan that you are running. I think of the IT strategyas being a meld between what IT needs to get done and what the business priorities are that are guiding that. As long as you are operating from the basis of a strategic plan, then you are in a position to add value in whatever industry you are in.
I have learned a number of other things as well. You need to be able to make decisions without all of the facts –that is a hallmark of leadership. You need to be able to communicate with confidence. When you are managing big budgets and big teams for a big business, the ability to communicate with confidence is critical.
High: Historically, the CIO position has been more tactical. You are focused on developing and executing strategic plans and inspiring your team to follow this lead. With the fast pace of change in IT, how do you ensure that the strategic plan is a stake in the ground but not planted so deeply as not to be malleable when circumstances change?
Peter High
March 03, 2017
Excerpt from the Article:
Quest Diagnostics is a $7.5 billion company with 43,000 employees providing diagnostic information services. It focuses on a wide menu of medical testing and diagnostics on a national scale. CIO Lidia Fonseca is responsible not only for typical IT functions, but also for creating and developing many of the company’s client-facing systems, connectivity products, and analytics and informatics solutions in partnership with Quest’s strategy, Information Ventures and other internal teams. This includes bioinformatics—the clinical annotation and reporting service for next-generation sequencing and advanced diagnostics. She is also executive sponsor for Quest’s business transformation program. She recently spoke with CIO Insight contributor Peter High about these issues.
Peter High: You are responsible for traditional IT, along with client-facing solutions and business transformation. What about you and your team lent itself well to the expansion of responsibilities into these nontraditional areas?
Lidia Fonseca: Part of the reason I joined Quest was to drive standardization. The company traditionally had more of a regional model for processes and technology. Healthcare IT has been a growing enabler for our customers, giving us an opportunity to provide solutions and interact directly.
Peter High: The company has strategic imperatives, which you define as accelerating growth and driving operational excellence. Traditional IT departments might be more focused on the latter. What are some examples of how you and your team engage in each.
Lidia Fonseca: I start with driving operational excellence, a strategy we support in a number of ways. One is standardization. We’re moving all of our sites toward standard platforms for laboratory and billing, common instruments in our laboratories and a common test directory.
For example, in 2014 we started a multiyear effort standardizing our platform, Q Suite. We completed four sites in 2015 and three in 2016, increasing the test orders flowing through the platform from 65 to 80 percent in two years. We can now set up new customers faster, speed up specimen processing in our laboratories and move work around our laboratory network. We plan to complete all of our sites. This standardization both drives efficiencies and benefits our customers.
The customer experience is also enhanced by the digital enablement of our operational and billing processes. In 2016, we launched electronic check-in capability, whereby patients check in using an iPad kiosk. If they don’t have an appointment, they see where they are in the queue. The phlebotomist can see how many patients are waiting, how many have appointments or are walk-ins.
Monitors in the patient service center provide information about our services, present marketing or digital messages and allow patients to see if there is a shorter wait time at a nearby facility. Making this process digital creates a better experience for our patients and employees. We perform testing for one in three American adults each year, so a tremendous number of people benefit from these enhancements.
Another area in digital enablement is real-time payment adjudication. We collect payments for patients across our network and instead of saying, “We’d like to collect your credit card information, but we do not know exactly how much you owe,” we can ping the payer’s system directly so there is certainty about the patient’s responsibility. For the three payers for whom we have enabled this capability, collections have risen by double digits. We’ll continue to roll this out.
This year we’ll introduce a patient preregistration service. Typically, when a patient comes to a patient service center, it is a 15-minute interaction. Preregistration translates to significant savings because we’ve collected what we need, informed patients of their responsibility and saved them time.
Another example is our partnership with Safeway. In 2016 we opened 50 clinics in Safeway stores, with new equipment and technology. Patients have easier access, easier parking, can multitask by shopping, and can get something to eat or drink if they’ve been fasting. The reviews from patients, phlebotomists and Safeway have all been very positive.
Peter High: What is IT doing to support Quest’s accelerated growth strategy?
To read the full article, please visit CIO Insight
By Peter High, published Forbes 3/13/17
When Norm Fjeldheim joined Illumina as Chief Information Officer and Head of Global Facilities, he did so after one of the longest tenures by a CIO at a single company: 17 years in that role at Qualcomm. Fjeldheim’s tenure at Qualcomm was a success, but he believes now that his tenure was too long. Though he is proud of what he and his team accomplished, he indicates that he could have used more variety to his roles. In the end, though, he is glad that he landed at Illumina, a $2.4 billion provider of sequencing and array-based solutions for genetic analysis.
Fjeldheim has spread his wings beyond the IT leadership to include Facilities Management. As it turns out, this allowed him to return to his roots, as someone who studied architecture for a time as an undergraduate. It also allows him to take a more hands-on role in creating the workspace of the future.
Peter High: I thought we would begin with your role in your current company, Illumina. If you could, please provide an overview of the organization, as well as a review of your responsibilities both as Chief Information Officer and Head of Global Facilities.
Norm Fjeldheim: The first thing I tell people is that we are not a lighting company, despite our name. We are a company focused on improving human health through the power of genomics. That is our mission. It translates into several different products and customers that we create. We have developed various technologies for unlocking DNA, and we make that information available to our customers. Then our customers do various things with it. We have customers that are researchers, we have customers that are using it for agriculture, trying to improve crop yields, and solving world hunger. We also sell into the clinical space: labs and hospitals use our technology to help with diagnosing diseases — rare diseases or genetically based diseases and that varies from the specific test for cystic fibrosis to neonatal genetic testing, to supporting undiagnosed diseases. We sell to the FBI and law enforcement for DNA testing. One of our biggest customers is ancestry.com. They use our technology in those commercials in which they ask, “Where are you from? Are you Scottish versus German?” We have a wide variety of customers who are doing amazing things by unlocking human DNA, or virtually any DNA for that matter.
As for my role, IT is traditional IT, such as infrastructure, help desk, data centers, and managing our cloud environment. We are one of Amazon’s biggest customers, our machines produce a vast amount of data; unlocking DNA translates to terabytes of data. We store a lot of that at Amazon in the cloud. I am responsible for all of our business systems, and all of our supporting systems with everything that the company does digitally.
I also have responsibility for cyber security. The CSO reports to me, which means I get involved with product security, the security of our instruments, the medical devices, as well as Base Space which is a Software as a Service [SaaS] service that we provide for analyzing patient DNA.
I have responsibility for running our facilities. That includes keeping the lights on, and the plumbing, and the electricity, and the air conditioning. I also have responsibility for constructing new buildings as we grow. We have five major campuses around the world with major construction projects going on in each of those right now. We are in twenty locations around the world and I am responsible for the standards, negotiating and establishing contracts, and bringing in the connectivity to tie in with the rest of the company. Lastly, health, safety, and compliance are part of my job as Global Head of Facilities, since we are an FDA regulated company.
Peter High: What was the logic in having these responsibilities combined under one executive?
Norm Fjeldheim: I think it was opportunistic by Illumina. They knew that I was capable of running a large organization. I had done that in my previous role when I was at Qualcomm. It was a two-thousand-person IT organization, and I had responsibilities beyond IT there, as well. Illumina felt like I could certainly do more and that facilities would be a good fit. They needed leadership there and operational focus. It turned out that it was a better match than they anticipated because my original major in school was architecture and I grew up in the construction industry. My dad was a general contractor and I had been a carpenter all through high school and college. Facilities was something that I understood to a much greater degree than they realized, we had not talked about that in the interview process. It was a chance for me to get back to my roots.
Peter High: How do you divide your time between the various areas that you have described, and, how do you staff them? Is there anyone else who has dual responsibilities like you do, or are they fully independent staffs?
By Peter High, published on Forbes 2/27/17
Keith Collins has been with SAS Institute for most of the time it has been in existence. He rose through the ranks to be an early leader of research and development, and was a long time chief technology officer of the company. As such he became a leading influencer, not only at SAS, but more generally in the emerging field of what would be known later as big data and analytics. This was a field that SAS founder Jim Goodnight pioneered.
Across Collins’ time in SAS, he has taken on new responsibilities roughly every half decade. When he helped lead the search for a new chief information officer for the company a little less than four years ago, he realized that the challenges and opportunities present in that role would be an interesting step in his career journey. Since taking on those responsibilities, Collins has helped IT become a driver of revenue and efficiency-centric value, helped develop a mentality on his team of being “customer zero” to the company, and led a major shift to the cloud, all of which we cover in depth in this interview.
Peter High: Keith, you have been the Chief Information Officer at SAS for three and a half years, though you have been with the organization for thirty-three years. Before becoming CIO, you were the CTO, and you have run R&D within the organization. How did those roles color your experience as a CIO?
Keith Collins: I am of this new generation of CIO that comes from the line of business. My perspective is not understanding the business of IT. I came into it knowing the business of SAS. Running R&D has a strong technology bent, but it was about the business of SAS not running SAS from a technology standpoint.
High: There are a lot of CIOs and a lot of IT teams that have a distance from where value is created for the enterprise. One of the significant advantages you have from leading a line of business is that you were deeply enmeshed in the products that the organization offers. How have you oriented IT towards how the company develops value for its customers?
Collins: When I was CTO, we always wanted to make sure that we were first movers with SAS products. The CIO reported to me. When she retired, I interviewed CIO candidates. I have a habit of changing roles every four or five years. I started to realize that being CIO was something I had not done. I got a chance to hire myself and fire myself. It was a fantastic journey. I brought knowledge of our customers to the team, how to integrate the customer, and how to work with the different business units. What I bring to the team is that connection. What they bring is their expertise about bringing IT value to that connection.
High: The big challenge for a lot of IT organizations within companies where technology is the business, is finding some form of unique value that can be contributed. There is a joke that in a technology company, everyone believes they can do the CIO’s job better than he or she can. How do you think IT organizations within a technology company can contribute that unique value?
By Peter High, published on Forbes 2/21/17
Jay Rogers is the founder and CEO of Local Motors, a company focused on low-volume manufacturing of open source motor vehicles designed using micro-factories. Local Motors produces its own vehicles, including the Strati, the world’s first 3-D printed electric car, and the Olli, and autonomous, electric powered bus.
Rogers has entrepreneurship in his DNA. His grandfather was an entrepreneur from whom Rogers drew inspiration. He headed down an academic and professional route that seemed appropriate for a future entrepreneur, having graduated from Princeton and Harvard Business School, and having spent time in consulting and in banking. Among the aspects of his experience that he believes to have had the most profound impact on his career was a seven year stint in the United States Marine Corps. He learned about leading in precarious situations with imperfect information.
Peter High: Jay, you founded and run Local Motors. It is a business that combines several leading trends: open source technology; micro-manufacturing; 3-D printing; self-driving automobiles; “pretail”; co-creation. How would you describe Local Motors business?
Jay Rogers: Local Motors drives the commercialization of high technology products, using co-creation and micro manufacturing. When you drive the commercialization of technology products, which we do for own accounts and some other large businesses that have similarly complex high technology products, it is about changing a hundred-year paradigm in mass manufacturing. We are now using the crowd. We are using a bespoke community that we build with suppliers and customers. Then we are changing the way we think about manufacturing. We have a mass oriented way of thinking about product commercialization. In our business, our most successful product is a self-driving shuttle, Olli, and it is where we eat our own dog food. It is a new area and it is one where there is strong customer interest and user interests for a lot of reasons. To get the products out, companies that are more traditional in the industry have a much longer timeline because of the way their processes are set up.
High: You mentioned the bespoke community ecosystem that you have developed. Much of the creation depends upon that strong collaboration with the community. How do you foster that? How do you select them and how do they select you?
Rogers: This is something that we are passionate about. We have moved into what Steve Case calls “a third wave” of internet enabled businesses. We think about community not as numbers but as relevance. Our community is something that is a breeding entity and nothing is more real in this age of questions about re-shoring jobs, of constant upheaval in union memberships, and of micro degrees where a college degree is under attack. When we think about a community, we are looking for businesses and individuals to join in an effort that has relevance to something they know. We stand up that community around what is, at best, a project, and we scope carefully what is needed in that project. If we are looking at something that needs metallurgy or material science or integration or controls or flight experience or knowledge of unmanned systems, those are the kinds of things where there is a cognitive surplus of people out there that simply are never going to work for you. You need them more than they need you. You can strike a transaction around a project if you can be open about what you are doing. The way we build a bespoke community is by being clear about what you are looking for and open about the projects you are working on. That has been a big shift. One of the first things that large companies learn about the way we do things is that open development allows them to build a breeding team.
High: You have worked with several leading brands such as General Electric, Lego, Domino’s, and Airbus Group. What are some of the specifics of these partnerships? What are the ways you engage with large enterprises? How do they think of you relative to their traditional manufacturing?
By Peter High, published on Forbes 2/14/17
When Mike Giresi joined Royal Caribbean Cruises as its chief information officer 18 months ago, he did so after having been a CIO three times over, at Tory Burch, Direct Brands, and Godiva Chocolatier. He had depth of knowledge in retail, but not as much depth of experience in travel and hospitality, except as a customer of that industry. That said, he had been exposed to and even driven digital innovations in his prior experiences, especially at Tory Burch, where he saw first hand as the eponymous founder and CEO of the company mastered social media as a driver of growth.
Royal Caribbean introduced its “smart ship,” Quantum of the Seas prior to Giresi’s arrival, but it set a template that he and his team could use as a launching point for further innovation. A key hypothesis of his is that digital is a team sport, touching each part of the company. The CIO and the IT team is well positioned to be a driver of the change given its many touch-points across the enterprise. Giresi shares more specifics on this topic among others in this interview.
Peter High: I thought we would begin with the digital transformation that Royal Caribbean introduced a couple of years ago, with the inception of the Quantum of the Sea as the world’s first “smart ship” with features like faster than ever Wi-Fi, robotic bartenders, virtual balconies, and RFID luggage tags, just to name a few. I am curious to know about where the journey stands now and as you continue to build upon this platform that you created.
Mike Giresi: We are incredibly proud of the progress we made on the Quantum class of ships, where we introduced several technologies that were groundbreaking in the cruise industry. To be completely transparent, I was not part of the company at that point. This was a challenge put forth by our chairman and CEO to the organization to come out with a class of ships that would enable the guest to experience a more immersive and frictionless type of vacation, and that would change the whole aspect of what being on a ship is.
The lessons learned from that are invaluable. We have understood what technologies worked well, which were less well received, and what it means to continuously evolve. Much like anything that is digitally led, there is constant iteration; there should be a consistent learning feedback loop. The entire organization must properly understand how to take the organization forward. Unfortunately, a lot of organizations look at digital as one and done. They think they now have a mobile app, so they are now digital.
I think that Quantum enables this organization to learn where we had digital capabilities, where we were lacking some capabilities, and how we build that into the DNA of the organization. As we evolve it and continue to iterate our solutions forward, it becomes more meaningful to our guests and hopefully productive for our business.
High: Digital, as you mentioned, is a comprehensive topic, and it is a team sport. How is the topic organized within the organization? Who are your primary interlocuters as you think about topics related to digital both internally and externally?
Giresi: Within our organization it starts with our Chairman and CEO. He is completely committed to us being a digital-first business. I think for a lot of organizations, if the senior leadership team is not committed, digital becomes much like other enterprise transformation programs. It either becomes an IT project, which means it is probably going to be sub-optimal at best, or it becomes a bright shiny object that shines bright for a brief period and then disappears into the recesses when something else takes the mantle.
When I joined the company in September 2015, I found an organization that was hungry and had a tremendous passion for technology. If you think about our business, we are a shipbuilding business along with being a hospitality business. We create products that are engineering marvels, and we can put things on ships other companies have not considered or did not think was possible. Because of that, we have tremendous aspirations for what technology should be and how it should work within our organization.
My focus was on harnessing that passion and interconnecting with all the different aspects of the business so that we are starting to talk a common language and think strategically and cross-functionally. Digital here is not an IT project. This is a program led out of the office of our CEO. We have multiple partners throughout the organization to drive it. I think that is the only way it could be successful. When you look at an organization that is undergoing a digital transformation, in most cases the IT function is either not part of the normal business cadence or, if they are, they are not able to transform the organization by themselves.
We have a Digital group. We have a Marketing group. We have multiple Operations groups that work both on the ship and on the shore. All those groups together must work in complete concert. If they do not they will not deliver a solution that is capable of scaling, iterative, and delivering the expected results.
I look at my role as being the inter-connector. It is not for me to own, I do not think anybody owns digital. We must be able to adapt as a cross-functional team to be able to work through the strategies that exist and iterate on those strategies. There is a lot of conflict as you would expect, but that is healthy if you are working towards a common objective. Once you get that objective defined you go after it.
One of the biggest challenges has been creating the DevOps/agile model within the IT organization for a team that was not working that way. It is a huge transformation, and I do not think people understand how impactful it is to the team and the business. Everyone is used to working in a certain way, and now it is completely turned upside down. If you do not put effort into change management and working with people, communicating why we are doing it, and helping to buy their hearts and minds, it is highly unlikely to be successful.
High: This is your fourth role as CIO after turns at Tory Burch, Direct Brands, and Godiva. This is a new industry for you relative to those. In the early days, either in preparation for this role or in the first hundred days upon taking on role, how did you prepare yourself? How did you orient yourself? How did you put yourself in the customer’s shoes? How did you educate yourself as to how technology creates value in this setting?
By Peter High, published on Forbes 2/6/17
Perhaps no one has as many chief information officer roles at as many big, brand-name organizations as Mark Settle. He has been the CIO of Oxy, Arrow Electronics, Corporate Express, BMC Software, IHS, and now Okta. Settle also has a PhD (in Geological Studies from Brown University), and at his roots has an analytical mind that strives to understand the essence of disciplines. It should be no surprise that he has memorialized all that he has learned, passing along important lessons to his peers in his book The Truth from the Trenches: A Practical Guide to the Art of IT Management.
The book does an effective job of articulating the yin and yang nature of the CIO role. For instance, he talks about the need for CIOs to be good managers but that it is even more important that they be great leaders, defining the differences in each attribute. He also indicates that financial acumen is a building block to getting the invitation to take responsibility for innovation. He worries that CIOs often believe that strong technical understanding and management is sufficient, not realizing that developing social bonds with one’s colleagues inside and outside of IT can make or break one’s experience. He shares these details and many others in this interview.
Peter High: Congratulations on a terrific book – The Truth from the Trenches: A Practical Guide to the Art of IT Management. You have an unusual amount of experience with big companies, and multiple companies, as a chief information officer. What was your inspiration for taking time out to think about the important lessons that you would advise other CIOs to live and learn?
Mark Settle: Not only have I done this job in many different industries and companies, but I have an extensive network of contacts and peers who have done the job as well. It is kind of shocking how many mistakes are made repeatedly. It does not have anything to do with what the current technology of the day is – whether we are talking about cloud computing or ERP systems. It does not have to do with the size of the company or the extent of its international operations. The chronic failings of most IT organizations are almost always systemic or endemic. They shoot themselves in the foot in so many common ways repeatedly. Part of [my motivation] was to tell some stories and have an oral tradition of things to watch out for and to avoid, and trying to pass the lessons learned to the next generations of leaders. There is an element of personal therapy as well. This is not me stepping back objectively and critiquing what others have done wrong. It is, in part, a confession of some of the mistakes I have made. It is stunning how many ways we can create problems for ourselves that are predictable in nature. We hide behind a lot of jargon. If other functions in a company were privy to some of the failings in process and leadership and talent management and accountability that are pervasive in many organizations, they would be shocked because they think of IT as being a very sophisticated functional area.
High: One of the things I really liked was your discussion about the dichotomy between leadership versus management. What are your own thoughts about leadership versus management and the role that each one plays?
