Latest Episode
Peter High
11/7/16
Slack is the fastest growing workplace software ever. The company’s CEO Stewart Butterfield co-founded the company in August of 2013, as a cloud-based team collaboration tool.
As fast as the organization has grown, interestingly enough, Butterfield underestimated the true opportunity for the idea that he and his co-founders developed. Originally, when he first pitched Slack, he believed the market for this software was $100 million, which they recently exceeded in revenue in roughly three years.
As the organization has grown at such an impressive clip, Butterfield has been forced to grow the team substantially in parallel. He has done so with a laser focus on certain cultural attributes, aligning recruiting practices to his established mission in order to ensure the continued addition of high quality employees. As Butterfield notes below, the mission is: “to make people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive.”
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the 20th interview in the IT Influencers series. To listen to past interviews with the likes of former Mexican President Vicente Fox, Sal Khan, Sebastian Thrun, Steve Case, Craig Newmark and Meg Whitman, please visit this link).
Peter High: I thought we would begin with the beginning of Slack itself. It was the result of a pivot when you were running a company called Tiny Speck, and it was a component to a game called Glitch, as I understand it. Can you talk a little bit about the genesis of that, the original intent of it, and how this became the idea itself?
Stewart Butterfield: Sure. It was not part of the game, but a tool that we used internally to communicate. The company was started by myself and three other members of the original team. At the time we started it, we had one person in New York, one person in San Francisco, and two in Vancouver, British Columbia, so the natural thing for us to use was IRC. As you know, IRC is now twenty-seven years old and predates the web by a couple of years. By modern standards, it is a clunky and ancient technology. For example, if you and I are using IRC to communicate and you are not connected to the server at a given moment, I cannot send you a message. We built a system to log messages so people could catch up when they got back online. Once we had those messages in a database, we wanted to be able to search, so we added search. I could keep going for a long time with the features we added.
I think one of the critical things was that we were doing this in a subconscious or pre-conscious way, which is not the normal method of software development. There was no ego and no speculation. Whenever a problem got so irritating that we couldn’t stand it or whenever an opportunity for improvement was so obvious that we could not help but take advantage of it, we would do it, and then go back to what we were supposed to be working on. The result of that after three and a half years was this system for internal communications that all of us agreed we would never work without again. We decided to see what else was out there in the market, and there wasn’t anything good, so we made a product at the moment we decided to shut down the game.
High: In those early days, what were the ambitions for it? Clearly, as you say, there was a need that wasn’t being met, even after seeking out something that might be more readily available. How big was the ambition in those early days? There are so many different areas now that Slack covers and so many different products and product categories that it now competes with. Did you see a broader enterprise use in those early days? Did you see this as something that would be taking on the likes of e-mail as well as the Skypes of the world? How did that all occur to you and how quickly did the broader implications of it grow?
Butterfield: It was a little bit of a slow boil in terms of how big it could be. We had taken a bunch of venture capital funding, and when we decided to sit down again, we had five million dollars left. Investors didn’t want their money back, they wanted us to try something else, so when we were putting together the pitch deck for Slack and explaining what we were going to do, we had sized the market at $100 million in revenue.
Click here to read the full article
11/1/16
David Thompson has been the chief information officer at a number of leading companies, including Symantec, Oracle, and PeopleSoft. He has broader responsibilities in his current role as Executive Vice President, Global Operations and Technology and Chief Information Officer at Western Union, the $5.5 billion revenue provider of money movement and payment services based just south of Denver, Colorado. In his role, he is responsible for developing the next generation of payment products and services. He also is responsible for maximizing efficiency, quality, and customer delivery for the company’s global agent network of more than 500,000 agent locations in 200 countries and territories. This puts Thompson squarely in the innovation agenda for the company, helping the organization both grow revenue while also doing so efficiently.
Additionally, given Thompson’s wealth of experience as a technology leader, but also as one who has always thought of the role of CIO as a business role, he has been asked to join the boards of companies. Since 2010, he has served on the board of CoreSite Realty Corporation, a publicly traded an integrated, self-administered and self-managed real estate investment trust (REIT).
As such, Thompson is at the forefront of two leading trends for CIOs: he has joined the ranks of the CIO-plus, as well as board-level CIOs. When I recently interviewed him, I was interested in his current sets of responsibilities, and the creative ideas his team is driving, but also his own career path, which represents an aspirational track for other CIOs.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the 30th interview in the CIO-plus series, including CIO-pluses from Boeing, Verizon, and Walgreens. To read the prior 29 interviews, please visit this link. This is also the 18th interview in my board-level CIO series. To read the prior 17 including the CIOs of companies such as Intel, P&G, Biogen, Kroger, and Cardinal Health, please visit this link.)
Peter High: You’re the executive vice president of global operations and chief information officer at Western Union, and as the name would suggest, you have operation and technology responsibilities. Can you talk a bit about your purview?
David Thompson: I have two jobs. First and foremost, I have responsibility for global operations, which is the management of our customer experience – all of our customer care centers, our interaction with our customers. In addition to that, we have a broad network of partners and agents that service our customers and provide the service globally. Both of those areas require a lot of staff, so a large portion of our employees services our customers’ needs or our agents: Enrolling our agents, training their staff, doing the certifications around [Anti-Money Laundering], and managing the infrastructure associated with our agent network. On the customer care side of the house, I have responsibility to make sure we have a strong, end-to-end process that our customers go through. If a customer has a problem in that process, we have a mechanism for them to interact with us either electronically or via phone, and we can resolve that issue.
The other portion of my job, as the chief information officer for the company, the entire technology portfolio for our customers, our agents, our partners, and the regulators of the company. That is an exciting part of my job. I joined the company as the chief technology officer at a point where we are transforming what we are doing, bringing new capabilities to the market, but at the same time, enhancing the services that we have today.
High: How do you structure your team? Do you have two distinct teams? Are there any other people like yourself that span across both of those?
Thompson: I have a team of 15 direct reports. About half of those direct reports are responsible for our customer care and our operations function – servicing our agents, training our agents, supporting our customers via call center or electronic channels. We also have a series of engineering heads, who are responsible for developing new products on the technology side of the house: engineering capabilities, information security, our global operations’ technical operations: our server infrastructure both in the cloud and on premise.
High: You began to mention in both your responses some of the new things you are doing from a payment product and services perspective. I know this is an area of great innovation for the company. Can you provide some more details?
by Peter High, series on Forbes.com
I would like to introduce a series focused on artificial intelligence. Advances in artificial intelligence are rapidly redefining everything from how we work to how we learn to how we treat diseases. The expertise and background of the individuals interviewed in this series is varied, ranging from startup founders and corporate executives, to academic researchers and leaders of not-for-profit organizations. That said, they share a commonality: they are the world’s foremost leaders in the field of artificial intelligence.
Last week, I noted Gartner’s picks for the top-ten technology trends for 2017. This list differed from the lists for 2016, 2015, and 2014 inasmuch as there are more trends that are not yet implemented by even leading CIOs than in years passed. My informal polling of CIOs suggested that most have roughly half of these trends on their roadmap, with many suggesting the number is less than 50 percent. That said, CIOs are interested in better understanding each of these to determine how many more should be added.
My team and I put together our picks for books, articles, and podcasts to better understand the concepts described. Use these as solid primers for your team to better understand the concepts and to translate their validity to your strategic imperatives.
AI and Advanced Machine Learning
My pick for the best book on this topic in recent months is Kevin Kelly’s The Inevitable. A founding editor of Wired magazine, Kelly is in his mid-60s, but maintains the curiosity and flexibility of mind of someone much younger than him. He has seen trends come and go, and is a good filter for unwarranted hype, as a result. His book is an entertaining foray into the future of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and what it will mean for us.
The authority on the Internet of Things is Stacey Higginbotham, who is a former editor and writer for publications such as Time and GigaOmni Media. She moderates the Internet of Things Podcast.This podcast discusses all angles of the Internet of Things, including interviews with top IoT leaders, as well as unique viewpoints and in-depth analyses on the latest news and trends in the field
Virtual and Augmented Reality
Marc Prosser is a freelance journalist and researcher living in Tokyo and writes about all things science and technology. He has written a great number of pieces on virtual and augmented reality that can be found on SingularityHub. One of the best isAugmented Reality, not VR, will be the Big Winner for Business. Digi-Capital estimates that AR companies will generate $120 billion in revenue by 2020.This article reviews how Boeing and other companies are experimenting with the technology, and the types of benefits it can provide to companies.
Digital Twin
Michael Grieves is the Executive Director of the Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Innovative Design at the Florida Institute of Technology. his paper Manufacturing Excellence through Virtual Factory Replications is the seminal work on the topic of digital twins, and it explores how digital twins can act as the critical connection between the data about the physical world and the information contained in the digital world about the physical asset.
Blockchain and Distributed Ledgers
Don Tapscott is a consultant and author who has written a number of books on digital trends and their impacts on business and society, including the business bestseller, Macrowikinomics. In his latest book, Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World, co-authored with his son, Alex, the concept of blockchain is explained in clear terms with an eye toward practical recommendations on how businesses might adopt the technology and reasons to do so.
Intelligent Apps
S. Somasegar is a former Corporate Vice President of the Developer Division at Microsoft, where he worked for 27 years. In the past year, he he joined Madrona Venture Group as a Venture Partner. In may of this year, he wrote an article entitled The Intelligent App Ecosystem in TechCrunch, describing how every new application built today will be an intelligent application. He offers an overview of this evolution, and highlights companies that are positioning themselves to realize significant competitive advantages in the years ahead.
Conversational Systems
John Smart is a global futurist and foresight consultant. He is CEO of Foresight U, which is a strategic foresight and entrepreneurship learning and development company. He has written a series of articles on The Brave new World of Smart Agents and their Data part 1, 2, 3 & 4. In this series, Smart explores the five to twenty year future of smart agents and the knowledge bases used to build them. Over the course of these four in-depth articles, Smart articulates how any why smart agents will soon become central to how billions of people live their lives.
Digital Technology Platforms
Salim Ismail has spent the last seven years building Singularity University as its founding executive director and current global ambassador. SU is based at NASA Ames, and its goal is to “educate, inspire, and empower a new generation of leaders to apply exponential technologies to address humanity’s grand challenges.”
In his book, Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it), Ismail notes that as businesses become increasingly digital and the pace of change continues to accelerate, traditional organizations will increasingly struggle to compete. Ismail highlights an organizational model that closes the gap between linear organizations and the exponential environment they operate in.
Mesh App and Service Architecture
Author and entrepreneur, Lisa Gansky has focused on building companies and supporting social ventures where there is an opportunity for well timed disruption and a resounding impact. In The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing, she notes that in the last few years a fundamentally different model has taken root; one in which consumers have more choices, more tools, more information, and more peer-to-peer power.
Also, Bala Iyer is a professor and chair of the Technology, Operations, and Information Management Division at Babson College. Mohan Subramaniam is an associate professor of strategy at Boston College’s Carroll School of Management. Together, they authored “The Strategic Value of APIs“ in Harvard Business Review. They note that to shift to an event driven model, organizations must shift their attention from internal information exchanges to external information exchanges, and APIs are at the core of enabling this transition.
Adaptive Security Architecture
To my mind, there is no deeper thinker in the world of cybersecurity than National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Fellow, Ron Ross. He leads the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) Implementation Project, which includes the development of security standards and guidelines for the federal government, contractors, and the United States critical information infrastructure.
In my interview with him on these pages, entitled “A Conversation with the Most Influential Cybersecurity Guru to the U.S. Government,” he details how cyber threats will increase as our appetite for technology increases. He describes the TACIT acronym for technology leaders to keep in mind when managing cybersecurity, which stands for Threats, Assets, Complexity, Integration, and Trustworthiness. He articulates concepts to bear in mind in each case.
Special thanks to Brandon Metzger for his assistance in aggregating this list.
Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. His latest book is Implementing World Class IT Strategy. He is also the author of World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs. Peter moderates the Forum on World Class IT podcast series. He speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @PeterAHigh.
8/1/2016
Jeff Dean was one of the earliest employees of the company, having joined in 1999 after receiving his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington three years earlier. He has been a prominent figure in the company’s growth, having designed and implemented much of the distributed computing infrastructure that supports most of Google’s products.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai has said that Google will become an artificial intelligence company primarily, and as the Senior Fellow in the Systems and Infrastructure Group, Dean and his team are essential to making that happen. In this far-ranging interview, Dean describes his various roles across the Google, the company’s AI vision, his thoughts on how Google has maintained an entrepreneurial spirit despite being a technology giant, as well as a variety of other topics.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link.This is the tenth interview in my artificial intelligence series. Please visit these links to interviews with Mike Rhodan of IBM Watson, Sebastian Thrun of Udacity, Scott Phoneix of Vicarious, Antoine Blondeau of Sentient Technologies, Greg Brockman of OpenAI, Oren Etzioni of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Neil Jacobstein of Singularity University, Geoff Hinton of Google, and Nick Bostrom of Oxford University.
Peter High: Jeff Dean, you have been with Google for most of its history, having joined the company in 1999. Please give a brief depiction of the evolution of your roles across the company in the seventeen years since.
Jeff Dean: When I joined, the company was quite small. We were all wedged in a small office on University Avenue in Palo Alto. One of the first main things I worked on was building one of our first advertising systems. I then spent four or five years working on the crawling, indexing, and search systems used on every query at Google. After that, I worked mostly with my colleague Sanjay Ghemawat and others on building the software infrastructure that Google uses to store and process large data sets and do things like build search indices or process satellite imagery. More recently, I have been working on machine learning systems.
High: Given how broad your purview is and how expansive your role is, I imagine you do not have an “average day.” How do you determine who to interact with inside or outside of the company? I would be interested to know a little bit about how you spend your time on the different things you are working on at present.
Dean: There is no typical day. For the first fourteen or fifteen years, I did not take on any management roles, so that gave me more free time to just focus and write code. In the last couple of years, I have taken on a management role over some of the machine learning efforts, which has been an interesting and new learning experience for me. Since I have worked on a lot of things over the history of the company, and I like to stay in touch with what is going on in those different projects, I tend to get a lot of emails. I spend a fair amount of time dealing with email, mostly deleting them or skimming them to get a sense of what is going on.I have a few technical projects that I am working on at any given time and figure out how to spend my day there, interspersed with various meetings or design review types of things.
High: Google remains a paragon of innovation, despite its dramatic growth. It is ambitious and innovative like it was when it was a smaller organization, but now it has the resources – both human and financial—of a behemoth within the tech space. How does the organization fight stasis and bureaucracy so that it can remain much nimbler than its size would suggest?
To read the rest of the article, please visit Forbes
10-12-2016
Excerpt from the Article:
In her role as CIO of Denison University, Dena Speranza leads a team technologists in support of all campus technology, infrastructure and services. She provides overall vision and leadership for the development and implementation of offerings that support the college mission and strategic goals. Her team manages college-wide information systems and services to provide effective educational technology, administrative systems, and student computing. The team works to build partnerships with colleagues across campus, at peer institutions, and with key vendors to facilitate the liberal arts experience at Denison.
The Technical Services team supports a campus infrastructure consisting of more than 100 virtual and physical servers, more than 1,000 access points, 40TB of storage, and over 300 switches.
Peter High: What are your strategic priorities for the foreseeable future?
Dena Speranza: Earlier this year, the university launched core strategic priorities that are focused on deepening student learning, continuing our strong recruiting of a diverse student body, and positioning our graduates to successfully transition into the professions. These institutional priorities inform the planning and decisions we need to make in our infrastructure and the long-term roadmap for information technology services. I am working with my team, colleagues across campus, and our advisory committees to develop an IT Strategic Plan, which supports the university’s strategic priorities.
This is a transitional time for higher education, as people question the value of a degree and traditional delivery models. In this challenging environment, Denison University is recognized nationally as a healthy and forward-thinking liberal arts college. The faculty and administration are thoughtfully addressing the needs of today’s incoming students and are creating new programs and interdisciplinary offerings that deliver a world-class education with strong mentorship and vigorous career support to our thriving students.
Our strategic priorities in Information Technology Services are being updated in support of recently released institutional strategic priorities. We are assessing the need to become more agile in our delivery models and are developing an infrastructure that is scalable and secure. As a core service provider for the university, our priorities are focused on improving student and employee engagement through an institutional approach that strategically leverages technology. We are expanding transparency into technology decisions, improving communication, increasing collaboration between teams, and identifying needs across multiple constituencies.
Change management is often a challenge for IT organizations, and the continued rapid pace of technology advances makes it even more critical to have open and effective lines of communication between IT and every constituency we support. We are committed to building a culture of trust, information transparency and shared decision-making with a delivery model of excellent customer service.
Strategic initiatives in the foreseeable future are focused on improving service experiences for our primary constituencies including prospective students, current students and their families, employees, alumni, and friends of the college. We look to improve self-service models for workflows and more mobile-friendly experiences. We are developing skill sets around integrating systems and identity access management.
We are implementing tools for organizational effectiveness, and we are focusing on improving administrative business processes, along with increasing access to tools for reporting and data analytics to support decision-making and analysis. We also will continue and expand focus on compliance with regulatory requirements, accessibility, and security. More effort will be devoted to security awareness and digital literacy for both our staff and our students to promote safe practices, reduce risks and maintain compliance.
We have achieved efficiencies by leveraging virtualization and cloud-based technologies over the past few years and will continue to monitor advances in secure and scalable XaaS (Anything as a Service) models to improve our infrastructure and to become more agile to meet growing needs.
Five year strategic technology plans are no longer effective with today’s pace of change and planning processes must evolve into a more rapid update cycle. IT organizations must find ways to scale to needs and stay adaptable while maintaining effectiveness and efficiency. This environment also places stress on existing teams to continually develop skills and to find ways to sunset legacy systems and processes that are draining resources.
Our strategic priorities must also include building risk-tolerance within the organization for innovative solutions that are exploratory and potentially transformational to the liberal arts experience. We also must maintain core services, control costs, effectively prioritize ITS resources, develop talent and plan for succession within the IT organization.
Peter High: Has it been difficult to attract IT talent to Granville, Ohio?
To view the full article, please visit CIO Insight
9-23-2016
Ellucian is an education technology company that has been in business for more than 40 years. It serves 2,400 institutions and 18 million students in 40 countries. Unlike a lot of ed tech companies that get a lot of press today, this is an organization that is far from its startup days.
According to Ellucian CIO Lee Congdon, who was previously the CIO at Red Hat, Ellucian is an education company that is increasingly becoming a cloud company. Ellucian believes in “Student success. Tight budgets. Limited IT resources. More and more higher education institutions are looking for answers to these challenges.” In this interview with CIO Insight contributor Peter High, he also highlights that the company must attract new technology talent who will help the company move faster and in a more agile fashion.
Peter High: Can you describe your role as CIO? What is your purview?
Lee Congdon: Very traditional IT organization in terms of accountability: servers, storage, the network, moving to cloud for many of our purpose-built and software-as-a-service applications. We now have software-as-a-service application for everything from infrastructure compute, single sign on and so on, to collaboration for things like email and video conferencing, to our customer success and sales automation applications. So a pretty standard portfolio. On all of the customer and corporate facing applications in IT we partner with our R&D organization to provide infrastructure for them and policies, guidelines and standards for them as they execute the product transition from on-premises products to cloud-based products. We own engagement with the business, strategic planning for IT, information security, business continuity — pretty traditional responsibilities for an IT organization.
High: Can you talk about your current strategic plan? You have been in the role for roughly six months or so. I have to imagine there was a period of getting up to speed on the education space, generally speaking, obviously, Ellucian more specifically. If I may assume that you have the beginnings of that strategic plan, an area of purview that you mentioned, can you talk a bit about some of the priorities going forward?
Congdon: Sure. We are initially focused on four priorities. Enabling the business; great business engagement and leadership; being strong partners to our business counterparts; ensuring that we are leading on data initiatives for the organization; leading cross-functional projects in terms of discovering the requirements and executing the necessary transitions, not only on the technology side, but on the business side; obviously, delivering projects to enable the business and really focusing on identifying the solutions that are going to deliver the most business value.
As is common in IT organizations, particularly in the transition we talked about, growing our team and our capabilities; providing on the job opportunities to engage with the business to deliver new capabilities for the organization. We are investing in agile, so ensuring that our folks are ready to move faster and with more flexibility; bringing on board select new skills to tackle areas that we need to focus on; setting a culture of both education and expectation that our folks are going to be continuous learners and emerging new technologies I talked about; and changing our corporate culture (IT is a part of that) from one of traditional career and performance management to a much more flexible, modern approach there.
Working out our processes and platforms as we grow in scale; making sure we have the right capabilities in place. I mentioned new networks, new co-location facilities will be a part of that as well, enabling us to be faster, continuing the focus on information security that we had traditionally in a challenging security environment. But investing in specific processes, too, like incident management and change management and project management, to give us the ability to scale and to automate. Agility is a big investment area, both in terms of delivering solutions but also in terms of partnering with the business at a higher level and, of course, retiring our legacy platforms as well.
And then starting to invest for the future. Automation is a key point for us as we move away from traditional environments to cloud-based environments, ensuring that we are not doing things manually in our new cloud environment, but that we are really setting up this software-defined and data center concept in the cloud as well as internally. Continuing to exploit the cloud by taking our remaining applications and a disciplined plan for moving them to the cloud. We probably will be a hybrid cloud for a period of time. But we are definitely continuing to move internal capability to the cloud. And then we have recently engaged an enterprise architect who will help us further flesh out our strategies in each of those domains.
One of the areas I expect that we will invest in that we have not committed to yet is a consistent integration platform. We provide a tool called Ethos for our customers that enables them to tie their Ellucian and non-Ellucian applications together from a data and reporting standpoint, and we believe we need a tool of that nature for our internal application portfolio.
High: You have alluded a couple of times to the fact that you hope to provide the sort of technology and the sort of culture to provide life-long learning for your teams. No doubt, coming to a company, an industry that you were not familiar with, at least professionally, there was a real opportunity for you to become a learner. How did you prepare yourself in the weeks before starting at Ellucian learning more about the field, of course, learning more about the company?
9-8-2016
Novelis is a leading producer of rolled aluminum, and a global leader in aluminum recycling. The company’s aluminum is used in everything from automobiles to architecture to beverage cans to consumer electronics. Much of the company’s aluminum is re-created from material already in the world today, saving natural resources and allowing for the creation of consumer products that have a lower environmental footprint. Through its recycling leadership, what would have otherwise been discarded becomes the material for new creation.
Despite attaining more than $10 billion in revenue with more than 10,000 employees, the company never had a CIO prior to the incumbent, Karen Renner, who joined nearly five years ago. Renner had been a CIO at multiple units within General Electric, and as such was used to process excellence. What she found at Novelis was an IT department in need of new, standardized processes. As she discusses with CIO Insight contributor, Peter High, the journey has been a fruitful one.
CIO Insight: You are the first CIO in the company’s history. The company grew to a tremendous size before hiring a CIO. Why was that, and what led to the conclusion that one was needed?
Renner: In order to deliver on many of Novelis’ transformation strategies, an overhaul of the information technology and data was required. The information infrastructure was unable to meet the aggressive expansions required to enter and provide the data streams required for the automotive market. We also needed modern technology to support our employees working across geographies and to meet growing demands for mobility and collaboration technologies. In order to develop and execute a global IT strategy taking into account the varying regional requirements, the CIO role was created.
CIO Insight: How would you describe the culture of the IT team when you joined, and what have you done to change it?
Renner: We have an excellent team of IT professionals at Novelis with a great mix of technical business process knowledge and program management skills. We act as one team and trusted advisors to deliver best-fit information technology solutions that people value and enjoy using. The biggest cultural shift was to broaden the reach of the team to think bigger and broader–how technology can influence outside of a local requirement to our regions or globally.
CIO Insight: I imagine there was a good deal of foundational investments that were necessary in the early days. How did you prioritize and what did you prioritize to do first?
To read the full article, please visit CIO Insight
8-17-2016
Dan Fallon’s journey from CIO to board member to president and COO has been an interesting one. Fallon, who now serves as the president and COO of GFMI Metalcrafters, credits his strong tech background for understanding how many moving parts work together (and very often, don’t). GFMI (Gaffoglio Family Metalcrafters Inc.) was founded in 1979. An Argentinian father and his sons brought to the U.S. their passion for crafting custom cars. The Metalcrafters division helps engineer and those who create custom vehicles for the auto, aero and rail industries primarily. These can be prototypes to full functioning vehicles, including driverless. The Aerospace division creates glass, carbon fiber and other composite parts for the aerospace, auto and rail industries. Additionally, the Camera Ready Parts division prepares cars for photo shoots and commercials, including logistics management.
After 22 years at Accenture, the CTO role at Navistar and CIO role at Rewards Network, among other IT leadership roles, Dan Fallon was looking for a change that would offer more operational experience. He was convinced to join GFMI Metalcrafters as president and COO in September of 2014. In this interview with CIO Insight contributor Peter High, he highlights the reason for this move.
CIO Insight: How did you become affiliated with it as President and COO?
Dan Fallon: I have known GFMI (Gaffoglio Family Metalcrafters Inc.) for more than 20 years. My father-in-law, Mike Alexander, had worked with the Gaffoglio family for many years. Mike and his brother, Larry, were the Alexander Brothers; ground-breaking, Detroit custom car guys from the late 1950s and Mike, later in his career, worked with GFMI on select projects. Mike’s son, Mike Jr., wound up working at GFMI. In 2014, Mike asked if I’d consider joining the company to help significantly grow revenue. To run a company while growing it was where I wanted to be next. After 22 years at Accenture, and five years in IT leadership positions at a couple Fortune 500 companies, I wanted to get completely immersed in business operations. Running a smaller company seemed to be the ideal—yet humbling—way for me to do so. Wow, have I learned a lot and enjoyed it. And I’m very grateful for my IT background.
CIO Insight: In recent years, you had been CTO at Navistar and CIO at Rewards Network. What did your time as a technology executive do for you in preparing for your current role as COO?
Fallon: Like Finance and HR, IT gets to “see” a very broad swath of the business, yet I believe at an even deeper level. Successful IT leaders have to understand business execution (processes, schedules and results) and where information and automation can change and accelerate execution. OK, we’ve heard that before—and it’s really hard, especially given ever-increasing competitive demands, legacy systems hangovers and the crazy challenges of changing tires on moving cars. So, as an IT guy—both ex-Accenture consultant and Fortune 500 executive—I got to see how all these moving parts work together—and very often, not. It’s like a mosaic in which some elements of the picture are clear and others are really mottled. As a result, I have this deep, innate appreciation for integration. It’s just a sense I have developed—where are the disconnects in data sharing, process performance and automated systems. So now, on yet another side of the table, COO, I can sense these disconnects; yet even more acutely because I am now directly responsible for getting it done. My time in IT helped me hone and deepen that sense which I think as a COO enables me to quickly zero in on those mottled mosaic pieces and more quickly figure out how to unblur them.
CIO Insight: What role does information technology play in your company?
8-10-2016
Greenwich Associates is the leading global provider of market intelligence and advisory services to the financial services industry. The company specializes in providing fact-based insights and practical recommendations to improve business results, and the insights and advice provided is based on the company’s business expertise and research that the team conducts with influential buyers of financial services. The buyers include fund managers, hedge funds, pension funds, endowments, large corporations, small and midsize businesses, and consumers.
Isaac Sacolick joined the company as Global CIO in January 2015 to lead Greenwich Associates’ Business Transformation Initiative, develop its data technology capabilities and to establish its product management practices. To accomplish this, the Digital Business Group (the rebranded IT department) rolled out business intelligence tools, a content management system, new market research tools and upgraded CRM and sales management capabilities. CIO Insight contributor Peter High discusses with Sacolick some of the nuts and bolts that were required to make the initiative ready for action.
Peter High: Part of your focus has been on developing subscription-based revenue for your firm. Please describe the service and the value it has derived.
Issac Sacolick: Greenwich’s core business has historically been delivering consulting, advisory services and market research to banking executives. Much of the insight delivered to clients has been through proprietary data that we source on service quality, market share and other benchmarks as well as research on topics including customer experience, payments, fraud, e-trading, blockchain, and other technology innovations in financial services.
Greenwich is extending its consulting practices to include subscription-based analytical products and services. In some cases, this includes tools that provide customers access to the underlying data visualizations and benchmarks. Using these tools, clients can perform their own analysis on how their products are performing, determine what accounts are at risk, research new opportunities, or develop strategic plans to grow market share. We are also integrating with our customers’ analytical tools, data warehouses, CRM systems, and research tools to help enable the use of our own analytics and research in their workflows.
Peter High: Can you describe how you partner with Greenwich Associates’ Chief Data Officer and CEO to establish the firm’s product strategy?
Issac Sacolick: The three of us along with our SVP of Product Management form a steering meeting that sets strategy, develops plans on transforming existing product offerings, reviews business plans for new investments, and considers partnership opportunities. We bring different knowledge, skills and experiences to the table and have different roles working the details of our product strategy. For example, our CDO may propose a repackaging of our data into a workflow that matches customer needs. Our SVP of Product will then test the concept with customers, and I will review the technology as well as sourcing requirements, while ensuring the product planning is executed efficiently. When we have concepts that resonate in the market, our CEO will consider how we communicate internally and align business leaders to revenue targets or operational changes.
As a team, we’re all focused on developing product pipelines, transforming how we sell, and growing, our analytical capabilities aligned with customer needs.
Peter High: Please describe JavelinStrategy.com and Market Structure and how your team has worked to get these off the ground.
