Today, I am happy to introduce our latest class of Forbes CIO Innovation Award winners. They will each join me on stage today at the at our Forbes CIO Summit in Half Moon Bay, California. These CIOs are pushing the boundaries of their role and are harnessing innovation to drive significant revenue growth at their organizations. Since its commencement, this award has focused on CIO-led, revenue augmenting innovation, which I believe to be one of the biggest differentiators between the best CIOs and others. The first class of 2019 winners are:
Cybersecurity is an issue of rising importance across all industries. The credit card industry is particularly rife with fraud, often derived from cyber issues. Mastercard President of Operations and Technology Ed McLaughlin and his team leveraged artificial intelligence to do something about it, and the results have been remarkable, as he describes.
Mastercard CEO Ajay Banga, noted, “Every day that people see the interlocking circles of the Mastercard brand, they have the trust and peace of mind that their payments and data are safe and secure. Under Ed’s leadership, our best and brightest technologists are combining their artificial intelligence know-how and experience, and partnering with all aspects of our business to protect our customers, consumers and partners. The result of our AI-based predictions is having a meaningful impact on our fight against cyber fraud.”
For this reason, Ed is a 2019 winner of the Forbes CIO Innovation Award.
FedEx has long had a digital presence, but as it has grown, the need to add physical stores to accommodate customers has grown with it. Needless to say, this is a costly proposition. Enter FedEx Chief Information Officer Rob Carter and his team, who help design a partnership with third party retailers to be able to receive packages. Though this idea is not completely new, the technology to enable it is. The idea is called FedEx OnSite, and it has expanded FedEx’s reach by 9,000 stores, and enabled the company to receive over ten million packages as a result. On the strength of this idea, Rob Carter has won the 2019 Forbes CIO Innovation Award.
Nuria Simo was a CIO at Airbus, Royal FrieslandCampina, and Campofrio Food Group for nine years prior to joining the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) as CIO in May of 2014. It was a bit of a left turn for a career spent entirely in the private sector. With IDB, she saw an opportunity to do good while doing interesting and innovative work.
IDB was established in 1959, and it is the largest source of development financing for Latin America and the Caribbean.
The IT department that Simo found when she arrived was in need of a reputation change, going from “traditional IT” to unleashing a culture of innovation to benefit the organization and its constituents. She established a TechLabto accelerate innovation and to generate new solutions for the institution’s international development projects that aim to reduce poverty and inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean. Now her team is experimenting with blockchain and quantum computing, among other innovative topics. She describes the transformation in this interview.
Stuart Kippelman has been named the Chief Information Officer of Parsons, a digitally enabled solutions provider focused on the defense, intelligence, and critical infrastructure markets. He is responsible for the global IT function across Parsons. His responsibilities include leading all aspects of Parsons information technology strategy and operations, including digital business transformation. He plays a crucial role in the implementation of critical capabilities to serve Parsons’ customers, leveraging his experience in global transformations, business intelligence, data mining, and cloud computing to advance commercial offerings.
Parsons Chairman and CEO Charles Harrington noted, “Stu will play a key role in our strategy as we continue to expand technical capabilities in core markets and provide agile, disruptive, and innovative solutions to our defense, intelligence, and critical infrastructure customers.”
A few weeks ago, I co-hosted a meeting with Gamiel Gran of the venture capital firm, Mayfield Fund. It was held in New York, and it included a dozen leading area CIOs. The executives offered thoughts on topics that have them excited and others that keep them up at night. Ultimately, there were five topics that rose to the top of the minds of the gathered CIOs:
Universal Music Group (UMG), a leader in music-based entertainment, today announced Dan Morales has been appointed Chief Information Officer (CIO), overseeing UMG’s global technology platforms and developing new systems to expand the company’s advanced analytics and data platforms.
Morales joins UMG from eBay Inc., where he also served as CIO. In his new role, Morales will now oversee UMG’s global Information Technology team, as well as the company’s internal and external networks. Additionally, he will a develop insights from data across UMG’s organization through analytics, reporting and data intelligence. Morales, whose appointment is effective April 15, will be based at UMG’s global headquarters in Santa Monica and report to Boyd Muir, UMG’s Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and President of Operations.
Singularity University (SU), a global community with a mission to educate, inspire, and empower leaders to apply exponential technologies to help solve humanity’s grand challenges, has acquired the consulting and training firm Uncommon Partners (UP) to expand its capabilities for clients and partners.
Co-founded in 2018 by SU faculty member Kyle Nel and Amanda Manna, UP brings expertise in corporate innovation and specialized capabilities for strategy, research, and emerging technology development that enhance SU’s product offerings. UP also trains leaders to apply lessons from behavioral science to the human challenges of transformation, using tools like narrative, neuroscience, and experimental design. These behavioral transformation tools will be integrated into SU’s portfolio of enterprise solutions, equipping organizations with new advanced tools for driving business transformation.
Craig Richardville has been named Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer of SCL Health, a $2.6 billion faith-based nonprofit healthcare organization based in Denver, Colorado that operates eight care sites and more than 100 physician clinics in addition to home health care, hospice and other facilities.
His responsibilities include leading all aspects of the health system’s information technology strategy and operations, including enterprise systems and applications, information security, core infrastructure and leading the system’s digital transformation and information automation.
“I look forward to working with our executive team, medical group leaders and IT associates to further simplify and modernize our technology ecosystem so that we can be as efficient as possible in advancing patient care through analytics and high-performance business and clinical systems,” Richardville said. “Some key focus areas will include looking at how to apply big data and artificial intelligence technology to help to efficiently and effectively engage patients and staying proactive with cyber security to protect our organization,” he added.
At the Forbes CIO Summit at the Ritz Carlton at Half Moon Bay, the theme of the conference this year is The Digital CIO Takes Charge, as the CIO is now positioned to drive product, revenue and customer experience. At our conference you will see these trends personified.
I have been enormously encouraged by the number of CIOs who have taken digital responsibilities in part or completely for the enterprises they are a part of. As they do, they tend to get more involved in product development, as well. In the process, these grade A CIOs are getting more involved in driving revenue growth for their companies in addition to the traditional purview of CIOs of cost cutting.
We will hear from a number of leading lights who are shaping the technology landscape. Former Cisco CEO, John Chambers will join me on stage to talk about his career in addition to his current work as a venture capitalist.
