Timothy Kasbe has been named the Managing Director for Australia and New Zealand and Global Large Enterprise for Zoho Corporation. A Chennai, India based software development company, Zoho’s business apps are targeted at sales, marketing, customer support, accounting and back-office operations. The company also has an array of productivity and collaboration tools. An experienced technology leader, Kasbe has held positions as Chief Information and Digital Officer at several major global companies including IBM, Reliance Industries, Sears Holdings, and Intrexon, he also was the Chief Operating Officer of Gloria Jeans Company in Russia.
When asked about his goals for the Australian and New Zealand markets, Zoho founder and CEO Sridhar Vembu noted, “Our expansion in Australia and New Zealand is a crucial part of our global expansion. We are committed to serving customers in those markets with a strong local footprint, including a cloud data center build-out in 2019 – our seventh cloud in the world. Our strategy is to locate and store the data in each of the major markets, which is well-suited for large enterprises and public sector customers. With some of the highest rates of tech and mobile adoption, Australia and New Zealand gives us a big enough platform to go test and pilot innovative solutions for the English speaking market.”
Life insurance does not seem like the sexiest of segments. Most of the major players in the industry were founded 150 years ago or more. They often develop such scale and recurring revenue streams that they can develop a bit of strategic laziness, as well. These were among the reasons why entrepreneur, Peter Colis, saw opportunity as he evaluated the life insurance industry.
Colis had a job in advertising prior to attending Stanford Business School. When he arrived in Palo Alto, he met Lingke Wang, a computer scientist who also had an entrepreneurial bent. As they scoured industries that presented opportunities, life insurance checked a lot of boxes suggesting major opportunities. Investors have agreed, as the company has a stable of A-grade venture capital firms have invested in their company, Ethos Life, including Sequoia, (see my interview with Sequoia’s lead investor in Ethos Life here), Accel, and GV, Google’s venture arm. Additionally, Jay-Z and Kevin Durant have also invested in the company.
Life insurance was attractive for two reasons. First, the product is difficult to obtain. It is time intensive, confusing, and it requires many tests to validate coverage. Second, Colis highlights that the incentives for brokers, who are paid on commission, often lead to consumers purchasing coverage that is beyond their needs and their means.
In this interview, Colis describes his entrepreneurial journey, the growth and team composition of Ethos Life, as well as his thoughts on what is next.
Peter High: You are the Co-founder and CEO of Ethos Life, a San Francisco-based company that you founded in September 2016. Your organization has caught quite a bit of momentum, especially in the investor community. Could you talk about the business and the problem that you were looking to solve when you created it?
Peter Colis: My partner Lingke Wang and I started Ethos when we were roommates at Stanford Business School. I came from a background in advertising, and Lingke came from a technical background. Originally, we got interested in a different aspect of life insurance, and we learned a great deal about it. In doing so, we came to understand that life insurance is incredibly important. More than five percent of children in the U.S. are going to lose a parent by the time they turn 18, and 70 percent of families are so unprepared that if they lose a breadwinner, they would be in total financial ruin within three months. This data implies that Americans are vastly unprepared for the loss of a breadwinner. While this is an important industry, we realized that it is executed poorly by the existing players, so we saw an opportunity to dramatically improve how it is executed with technology.
Ethos is a modern and ethical life insurance company. Unlike the traditional life insurance experiences, with Ethos, you go to our website, you fill out an application online in ten minutes, and then you are done. There are no medical exams, no blood tests, no paper applications, and no pushy agents. We launched in early 2018, we are now processing thousands of applications per month, and we look forward to continued growth.
The World Economic Forum recently concluded in Davos, Switzerland. As one scans the highlights from across the sessions, whether conversations with industry titans or presentations by government dignitaries, technology was focal.
For the second year in a row, I asked Jacob Jofe, a Vice President at Index Ventures where he focuses on the firm’s enterprise investments, to provide some thoughts on themes he found particularly poignant. He highlights two areas that have now become CEO-level topics of conversation: the rise of open source software, and the importance of observability.
Peter High: Jacob, you mentioned open source software was one of the most talked about topics at the World Economic Forum. Please explain what that was.
Jacob Jofe: At its heart, its all about people. The best developers want to use the best technology, and today, the best technology is open source. So, its adoption has become central to attracting and retaining the best engineering talent. Conversely, denying access to open source has become a serious roadblock to hiring the best talent. One of the reasons for this is, some of today’s most interesting technology is developed at companies with scarce expertise, which is then contributed to the open source domain. Example include the Tensorflow and Kubernetes projects from Google, and the Kafka project which originated at LinkedIn. Developers want to take advantage of this, which I think is a win-win for everyone. It used to be that a technology decision was buy versus build — its now download versus buy versus build.
Commvault, a global enterprise software leader in the management of data for cloud and on premises environments, today announced the appointment of Sanjay Mirchandani as President and Chief Executive Officer and member of the Board, effective immediately. Mirchandani, previously the CEO of DevOps leader Puppet, replaces retiring President and CEO Bob Hammer. Hammer has led the company for more than two decades, growing it to a $3.1 billion market cap. Also announced today was the appointment of Nick Adamo as Chairman of the Board, replacing Hammer who will remain on the Board as Chairman Emeritus; both changes will become effective April 18, 2019.
From detailed homework review to back office automation, progress in artificial intelligence will continue to explode in the year ahead. In 2018, Metis Strategy interviewed nearly 40 CIOs, CDOs and CTOs of companies with over $1 billion in revenue as part of our Technovation podcast and column. When asked to identify the emerging technologies that are of growing interest or are making their way onto their 2019 roadmap, 75 percent of the technology leaders highlighted artificial intelligence, while 40 percent said blockchain and 13 percent cited the Internet of Things.
AI, an umbrella term for technologies that enable machines to accomplish tasks that previously required human intelligence, could rapidly upend the competitive landscape across industries. While many companies continue to explore AI business cases, seek executive support, and mature their foundational IT and data capabilities, a growing number of enterprises are deploying the technology at scale.
Walmart, the world’s largest company by revenue, has deployed more than 500 bots into its internal environment to automate processes and drive efficiencies, . Early use cases focused on automating processes such as accounts payable, accounts receivable, and compensation and benefits. More recently, robotic process automation (RPA) has been applied to Walmart’s Shared Services organization, where it automates ERP exception handling such as matching purchase orders to invoices.
As expectations rise for technology to unlock business value, Clay is looking to scale AI across the company. Having recently adopted a product model and end-to-end ownership, the company is well positioned to apply machine learning to everything from merchandising operations, which coordinates supplier-relation interactions and affects the in-store displays across more than 5,000 US stores, to improving the productivity of the world’s largest private workforce.
For more insight from Clay, listen to the .
One of the biggest expenses in hard drive manufacturing can be test equipment, so for $19 billion Western Digital, optimizing the test environment can save hundreds of millions of dollars in CapEx. Given the foresight with which the company has developed its AI and big data strategy, it’s no surprise that among its most advanced AI use cases is optimizing that test environment. “We’re using advanced machine learning and convolutional neural networks to improve our wafer yield management,”. “And we’re using those same algorithms to start identifying and optimizing our test processes, which can help us save hundreds of millions of dollars in capital.”
With a global workforce of 68,000, Western Digital has built a big data and analytics platform that supports a variety of workloads, architectures, and technologies to deliver value to business users of all skill levels. While entry-level analysts can leverage the platform to visualize data in Tableau or perform ad-hoc queries in RStudio, data scientists can make use of advanced techniques to monitor and optimize manufacturing and operations capabilities.
As Western Digital finds increasingly advanced AI use cases in 2019, its flexible platform ensures that the organization continues realizing value while its analytics capabilities mature.
For more insight from Steve, listen to the .
As companies race to develop and deploy increasingly powerful AI systems, there’s a growing recognition of the responsibility companies have to mitigate unintended consequences.andhave noted that engineers often don’t have the capacity to fully imagine the implications of the technology they develop. That’s one reason why Bank of America (BoA) Chief Operations and Technology Officer Cathy Bessantwith Harvard Kennedy School to create the Council on the Responsible Use of AI.
While BoA’s most visible application of AI may be Erica, its virtual banking assistant, the Fortune 25 company is increasingly exploring how AI can be applied to fraud detection and anti-money laundering. As proponent ofCathy recognizes that the bank must maintain transparency into the decision-making models and ensure that outcomes are unbiased. Further, as employees begin to question how AI might impact their jobs, Cathy is thinking proactively about how to guide career transformation and development in the age of AI. To explore these critical questions, the Council on the Responsible Use of AI will convene leaders from government, business, academia, and civil society, including Bessant, to discuss emerging legal, moral, and policy implications of AI.
“If you’re a company where your business strategy can be described by the two words, ‘responsible growth,’ then the concept of responsible AI is not a stretch,” says Cathy. “In fact, it is the tough soul of who we are.”
For more insight from Cathy, listen to the.
7-Eleven defined convenience for a generation, but today, the most convenient storefront is the one in consumer’s pockets. In a 2018 interview, how the company uses new technologies to reduce friction for customers and improve their overall experience.
7-Eleven thinks about technology in two broad categories: proven technologies that are ready to scale, and emerging technologies. For emerging technologies, the company has adopted a fast follower approach, which Gurmeet describes as “watch closely and actively experiment.” In addition to operating several global R&D labs, Gurmeet has tasked the company’s CTO with testing new technologies and conducting proof-of-concept tests. Already, 7-Eleven has deployed a Facebook Messenger chatbot that allows users to sign up for the 7Rewards® loyalty program, find a store location, learn about the latest discount offers, and more. The bot, which was developed through a partnership with the tech firm Conversable, is part of Gurmeet’s strategy to redefine the customer experience through technology.
In 2019, 7-Eleven’s technology organization will leverage open-sourced AI libraries such as TensorFlow to explore how AI can streamline back-office processes such as merchandising and operations. They’ll also look to apply voice interfaces to redefine the customer experience.
For more insight from Gurmeet, listen to the.
Albert Hitchcock is the CIO turned COO and CTO of 174-year-old education company Pearson, where he oversees not just IT and digital transformation, but also product development, procurement, supply chain, customer service, and more. Given his broad purview, Hitchcock is well positioned to apply AI across the business. “AI is not five years out. It’s real and it’s happening today,” . “We’re looking at how we transform all spokes of our business using AI, from how we transform customer call centers using chatbots to how we bring AI, learning design, pedagogy, and insights into brain functions to create a personalized learning experience.”
Machine learning is at the heart of many of Pearson’s most recent product innovations, from authentic assessments and automated essay scoring to adaptive learning and intelligent tutoring. To accelerate the infusion of AI into current and future products and services, the company has hired Intel veteran Milena Marinovaas its first SVP, AI Products and Solutions. While Marinova’s initial focus is updating Pearson’s math homework tool to provide more detailed feedback, the vision to to create omniscient virtual tutors personalized for every student. “[Education] is different for every human and therefore you can potentially accelerate learning and delivery, improve outcomes, and help everyone progress in their lives of learning,” notes Hitchcock. “AI is at the center of that thinking.”
For more insight from Albert, listen to the.
Today, Yvonne Wassenaar was named Chief Executive Officer of DevOps leader Puppet. A press release from the company noted, “Under Wassenaar’s leadership, Puppet will continue to grow its market share worldwide and expand its product portfolio to deliver on its promise of pervasive automation in an increasingly hybrid world.”
Principle 1: People
The first of the five World Class IT principles – People – focuses on the recruitment, training and retention of employees, to ensure that an IT department is staffed by top-tier talent and delivers excellent performance. This principle looks at multiple areas of assessment for a company’s IT department.
The first area is about inventorying existing skills. What do you know about your IT department’s skills base? Does your company’s IT department have people with the right skills (technical, management, business or other) for the job? In order to efficiently allocate talent or determine what skill gaps exist, companies need to understand the skills that existing employees have and document them in a manner that allows employees to assess themselves against the defined skills base, as well as determine which abilities they should build on. Subsequently, workforce planning should be aligned to the insights or findings from the skills inventory. Within your IT workforce, which skills should be prioritized when recruiting new talent? What does the direction of the company suggest in terms of IT skills that will be necessary? After understanding the existing skills base, it is essential for IT leaders to consider which skill sets will become increasingly important in the future, which skills gaps need to be filled and what abilities the broader company may value most.
However, like technology, skills can quickly become outdated. Having a structured and thoughtful recruiting approach is vital for an IT department to truly become world-class, as new talent can offer diverse skill sets or fresh perspectives, revitalize existing processes and thinking. Investing in the right people, with the right skills, early on ensures that your IT department has a strong foundational talent base.
Other aspects of the “People” principle – if executed well – will also help your IT department move towards being a world-class place to work. For instance, it is crucial to clarify roles and responsibilities for employees that have various skill sets and of different levels across the IT department, as it can make it easier for employees to succeed in their daily jobs. Moreover, clearly delineating roles and responsibilities helps mitigate redundancies in teams, reduces employee frustration and improves working relationships. In turn, this allows employee performance evaluations to be more easily conducted. Performance evaluations for employees should be prioritized by management, as well as be detailed and constructive. A streamlined, helpful evaluations process can go a long way in nurturing and retaining key talent at every level of the IT department – talent that could play a fundamental role in the future of the company.
Another area that underpins the “People” principle is employee compensation and recognition. Understanding employees’ preferences for recognition and compensation helps enhance employee satisfaction and in turn, their tenure. Additionally, across many industries, IT employees are often overlooked compared to their business counterparts, as they are approached only when technical issues arise. Recognizing and compensating high performers in appropriate ways, as well as emphasizing the relevance that IT’s work has on the business, can incentivize IT employees to go above and beyond in their roles. Career planning – which is heavily related to employee recognition and compensation – is an area which IT leaders should focus on as well. Establishing clear technical and managerial tracks through which IT employees can progress, as well as providing employees with a support structure, will give IT employees the opportunity to define their career goals and motivate them to perform better.
Furthermore, although regarded as difficult to assess, the culture and work environment within your company’s IT department can significantly impact employee happiness and the department’s overall performance. Understanding the existing culture and identifying gaps that need to be filled, followed by implementing positive cultural changes can greatly improve the perception that other business divisions have of IT, as well as facilitate closer collaboration between IT and these other divisions.
In addition to the areas mentioned above, training is vital to how new employees are introduced to the IT organization, how skills are acquired and how practices are shared more broadly. How is training currently conducted in your company’s IT department and how can it be transformed? IT leaders should consider these questions when designing or implementing training, so that training for employees that is up-to-date, engaging and flexible, thereby ensuring that IT employees – both new and existing – are equipped with the necessary skills and knowledge to succeed. Finally, as your company’s IT department continues to evolve, it is essential for IT leaders to think about what the department’s retention strategy should be. A culture of merit-based advancement can help maintain those employees that are looking to develop a career and attract new talent for a truly World Class IT department.
Principle 2: Infrastructure
Infrastructure – which consists of IT hardware, software, data, components, systems applications and the service desks supporting them – is crucial to the day-to-day operations of the IT department, as well as those of the broader company’s Not only is it imperative to have an efficient, well-managed and highly available IT infrastructure, but it is key for IT to be able to translate infrastructure-related jargon into terms that can be easily understood by IT’s business partners. As such, we assess the robustness of our clients’ IT infrastructure on several elements, which we elaborate on below.
Much like Principle 1 (People), the first element of the “Infrastructure” principle involves understanding your company’s existing IT infrastructure, by creating an infrastructure roadmap that displays various components in order of business importance. This exercise can provide the IT department with a comprehensive view of existing tools and technology, help IT understand the components for which maintenance and protection should be prioritized and enable IT leaders to determine a strategy for future investments in infrastructure. A roadmap can also help with efforts to maximize systems’ up-time — another key element of this principle. As systems up-time is directly correlated to business productivity and revenue gain/loss, IT departments should engage in root cause analysis (RCA) when encountering system issues. Moreover, IT leaders should consider the different systems’ criticality to business operations – how can up-time be maximized in a way that is resource and time-efficient? These approaches to issue resolution will allow employees to apply fixes that truly address systemic problems and minimize technical risk to the business.
Overall infrastructure health is, of course, critical to business productivity and revenue attainment as well. Regularly scheduling maintenance and upgrades for all major aspects of infrastructure is a must for any world-class IT department to optimize performance. Additionally, maintenance planning should be based on criteria such as system age, reliability and cost of replacement. This list is not exhaustive, but is a good start to monitoring the status and stability of existing infrastructure. With that, IT leaders should plan to retire and replace infrastructure when appropriate and needed. Incorporating infrastructure lifespan into the IT department’s roadmapping and budgeting process at an early stage can help IT leaders plan for, as well as acquire, replacements on schedule. In turn, this mitigates the risk of a system failure or any interruption to business activities.
Nowadays, another increasingly important element of concern is infrastructure and information security. In addition to conventional physical security practices, a growing number of companies are proactively adopting cybersecurity measures, as well as revisiting existing security practices. Legislation such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2018 have heightened the sensitivity of issues such as consumer data privacy. Given the wide range of potential threats to security – such as natural disaster, network attacks, viruses, fraud, espionage, data portability etc. – it is crucial for organizations to have a designated team or individual (such as a CISO) whose responsibilities are completely security-oriented, rather than assign security as a second or lower-priority responsibility to existing management The CISO and their team should also be up to date on new security threats and trends, industry regulations or best practices, as well as factor security investments into IT’s annual budgeting and resource planning processes. However, it is worth noting that security awareness and compliance apply to every employee – not just the CISO and their team. Approaches such as socializing best practices among employees, conducting company-wide security training or hosting security simulations can help mitigate the regulatory, financial and technical risk of a security incident.
Consequently, business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) is another element of infrastructure on which companies should heavily focus. Disaster recovery is the process by which business resumes after disaster (which can be both man-made or natural) has occurred, whereas business continuity is about how business resumes during other events besides disaster (e.g. leadership changes). When engaging in BC/DR planning, companies should evaluate and identify the primary business units/functions, the people affected, as well as the underlying systems, hardware and software to be prioritized in the case of unexpected scenarios. Furthermore, it may be helpful to determine the probability that certain hypothetical scenarios will occur and develop mitigation and recovery strategies based on that analysis.
Finally, IT leaders should focus on improving their service desk (or help desk). It is vital for the help desk to build credibility among its user base (i.e. employees from the rest of the company), since the help desk is often regarded as the face of IT by the rest of the company and can play a small but significant role in deepening relationships between IT and the rest of the business. True World Class IT departments will recognize this and enable their help desk to provide the best services possible, as well as leverage the help desk to boost IT’s reputation for creative solutions. For proposed ways to enhance the help desk function, please refer to the book World Class IT by our CEO, Peter High.
Principle 3: Project and Portfolio Management
Project and portfolio management is becoming more and more essential for IT departments, as the need for greater transparency continues to increase. Previously, a lot of business executives did not always understand what went into procuring, creating and maintaining technology and as such, were often reliant on the cost and time estimates provided by their IT departments. However, recent reporting regulations as well as rapid digitalization of business and commerce means that companies now need more clarity and insight into where investment in IT is going. If executed well, several components of project and portfolio management can distinguish a World Class IT department from its peers – idea generation, prioritization, budgeting, portfolio management, project management and execution, quality assurance (QA) and post-project analysis.
First, idea generation is a process that is often problematic for companies. Many companies only allow more senior staff members to generate and submit ideas for projects, or give staff a limited time window to submit their ideas. These rules often lead to ideas not being sourced from the broader employee population and cause ideas that emerge outside of the submission window to be held off until following years. Given all of these issues, companies could establish a clear governance structure, comprising several review committees of appropriate business and IT stakeholders. This approach could help align idea generation to the company’s overall strategic goals. Within the governance structure, each committee should have clearly designated roles and various levels of the company should be involved, to ensure that perspectives and feedback are representative of the broader employee base. The submission and review process for ideas should also occur more regularly, rather than once a year. Once determined, projects and portfolios should then be prioritized by the review committees. There are many ways to do this, but several criteria to be considered include: strategic fit, cost to benefit analysis, project interdependency, qualitative benefit versus change and risk analysis. For further elaboration on each of these criteria and how they affect the prioritization process, please refer to World Class IT by our CEO, Peter High.
Furthermore, budgeting can occur more easily once projects have been prioritized. By allocating funding to projects in order of priority, the IT department can set an expectation of projects that will be deferred to the next budgeting cycle. Budgets could also account for projects that may emerge later or throughout in the year, to encourage innovation within the department.
Good budgeting, in turn, helps the IT department better manage its portfolios. However, what defines good portfolio management? Several suggestions include: regular meeting cadences, establishing a program management office, effective project monitoring via dashboards and other tools and so on. When it comes to portfolio management, one key challenge that many companies face is the inability to cancel projects, as sunk costs are often used to justify continuing non-performing projects, rather than canceling them and redistributing resources to other initiatives. True World Class IT departments are unafraid to delay or cancel non-performing projects and reallocate resources to initiatives that they know will create more value in the long term. Similar to portfolio management, IT leaders can rethink their approaches to project management and execution. It is interesting to note that true World Class IT departments typically have a well-developed, well-documented project methodology or toolkit that is applicable to and can be tailored to all kinds of projects. In particular, project managers should play a dynamic role in leading and coordinating the teams for the project, monitoring milestones, etc. IT leadership can significantly encourage active and diligent project management by identifying the appropriate talent, as well as recognizing project managers for their efforts. As such, effective portfolio management, project management and execution can enable IT to maximize performance and deliver better results.
Moreover, quality assurance (QA) is often overlooked by many companies, but is critical in ensuring that any technology released by IT is high-performing, high-quality and does not require constant fixes. Some high-level suggestions for bettering QA processes include clearly defining quality gates and involving QA early on in the development lifecycle, but this list is not exhaustive. World Class IT departments have no qualms reviewing and revamping QA processes as needed and ensuring that they are consistent across portfolios and projects. Similarly, performance reporting can be done on a more regular basis to ensure that resources allocation, obstacles and milestones are all being tracked. In particular, World Class IT departments also track benefits – financial or otherwise – after projects have been completed, as such accomplishments can significantly boost IT’s credibility. Finally, post-project analysis is extremely valuable, as it provides the IT department with benchmarks and lessons learned for future project development and idea generation. All of these components combined can truly help IT become more efficient, organized and an example to follow by its business counterparts.
Principle 4: IT-Business Partnerships
Often considered the “holy grail” of an effective IT organization, IT’s strategic alignment with the rest of the business is no longer a nice-to-have, but rather a necessity in today’s digital marketplace. IT’s alignment with the rest of the organization hinges on five key components: cross-organization communication, IT-business strategic alignment, innovation, IT strategy and internal IT communication.
Beginning with communication, it is important to note that true World Class IT organizations do not solely rely on top-down messaging. Rather, top performing organizations establish information channels at every level between IT and the rest of the business. When successfully implemented, IT is simply considered “part of the team” and less of a reactionary internal service provider. Looking inward into the IT organization itself, there must be robust lines of communication underpinning IT’s role as an internal strategic advisor and enabler. Some of the biggest challenges (communication or otherwise) within IT teams stem from artificial organizational barriers and getting mired in the technical details behind a plan. While not apanacea, rotating employees through IT departments and adopting Agile-style approaches to work are two approaches that can help address poor internal IT communication challenges. Mature internal and external (to the rest of the business) communication habits are hallmarks or any true World Class IT organization.
In the midst of effective IT and Business Partnerships lies strategic alignment and innovation. Firstly, each party must have their own documented (and used) strategy to guide both daily and long term decision making. With established strategies in place IT and Business leaders can upgrade their conversations from tactical question exchanges to comprehensive collaborative sessions. IT’s role is to both follow and adjust to the direction the business is heading while providing subject matter expertise and driving decisions around technology investments made by both the Business and IT. In well functioning IT-Business Partnerships there is a healthy sense of co-dependence and trust that allows innovation to truly take root and grow. Without alignment around common goals and a sense of team innovation cannot thrive. In well functioning organizations the line (or wall) between IT is blurred and the strengths of each group underpin future success
The concept of IT-Business Partnership may sound simple, but even digitally native organizations can struggle sharing resources and ideas for the common good of the firm. Moreover, leveling the field between IT and the rest of the business should be a top priority for any IT leader serious on maturing her organization.
Principle 5: External Partnerships:
Within many organizations IT is the largest spender and consumer of 3rd-party products and services. Given this concentration of vendor spend, business leaders often lean on IT to drive bottom-line savings by cutting (or increasing) vendor spend inline with the prevailing business climate. The existential (and real) threat of budget whiplash can wear on vendor relationships and breed conflict where partnerships should thrive. The best IT organizations know and segment their vendors, they apply rigorous and fair procurement processes and manage vendor relationships on an ongoing basis. Given the rate of technological change it is unreasonable to assume that IT can deliver an organization’s entire technology needs on its own, but there needs to be a thoughtful strategy behind why work should be done outside the organization’s own four walls.
Establishing governance, process and accountability with vendors begins with adequate vendor segmentation. Segmenting (or organizing) vendors by factors such as their size, strategic importance and total spend will help shape the proper vendor relationship and drive the most value. Taking a one-size fits all approach that treats independent contractors the same as the IBMs of the world can both snuff out potential value-add from smaller contractors, while not providing proper performance controls for large managed service providers. Understanding where each vendor fits across a continuum of factors will help both the procurement process and in-life vendor management.
The best IT groups work hand in-hand with central procurement teams and often form joint or independent teams that can leverage IT’s technology expertise to vet potential suppliers. The procurement process is the time and place for rigorous and fair governance to shine. It is here that inlife performance metrics, penalties and incentives will be set. It is also the beginning of a vendor’s formal relationship with the organization and it sets the tone for the rest of the partnership.
Lastly comes in-life Vendor Management. The best IT organizations recognise this as a discrete function outside of the upfront Segmentation and Procurement processes. It is here that relationships with both key and commodity vendors are built and SLAs are monitored appropriately. This function can be dispersed across organizational subunits or IT can build its own Vendor Management Office, the key is to make sure someone is responsible for each vendor, their performance and the overall relationship. Most vendors appreciate a more hands on approach as it gives them more feedback to improve their own internal contract and service management practices. Moreover, while there should be individuals directly aligned with each vendor Vendor Management is the responsibility of everyone who works with a given vendor. By establishing and more formalize structure, individuals on the IT team are able to better raise grievances and praise and key vendor resources have one place to do the same.
As an IT organization aims to become true World Class it is important for External Partners to not be forgotten. External Partners can help IT deliver its strategic edge both internally and for the end customer. By conducting sound Segmentation, Procurement and Management practices IT will be helping set its partners (and ultimately itself) up for sustainable success.
Price matters, a lot. In an era of hyper price transparency, the subtlest price discrepancies will drive consumers to purchase on channels with the lowest price. Often consumers make buying decisions in two steps: first, what they want to buy; second, where they will buy. Especially for goods and services that are not substantially differentiated in terms of quality or features, your average consumer will naturally gravitate towards the lowest price. This has been felt in an especially acute manner for retailers such as Best Buy, where consumers go to window shop, but complete their purchases on lower priced ecommerce alternatives (i.e., Amazon, eBay, Jet, etc.). Best Buy has since woken up to the fact that without differentiating the customer experience, they were unable to create stickiness to convert foot traffic. When selling a commodity, or a good/service with a comparably substitute, price parity is arguably the most important driver in decision making. The challenge, of course, is that the manufacturers of a good, or a provider of a service, don’t always own the end touch point with the consumer. Many companies rely on a network of distribution partners to help market and sell their products. While this approach allows companies to scale revenue without the risk of building a massive salesforce, it also means that the manufacturer/provider will not be able to control all the variables that influence consumer’s buying decisions.
To strike the right balance, many companies develop a distribution strategy that comprises two dimensions: direct and indirect sales. Direct distribution focuses on selling directly to customers, while indirect distribution depends on intermediaries to complete a transaction. A distribution strategy needs to be married with a robust approach to inventory management, which may mean different things to a manufacturer than a service provider. Manufacturing firms typically have robust Sales & Operations process (referred to S&OP), during which they forecast sales and ensure there is enough inventory produces and physically distributed to distribution centers or shelf space to meet consumer demand. Service providers tend to look at inventory as an expiring asset: once time has passed, you can no longer sell that service (e.g., once a plane takes off with an empty seat, or a tee time passes without a foursome teeing off).
Although hospitality was one of the first industries to create robust distribution channels and networks through Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) to capture additional business, one of the consequences of that arrangement is that customers were conditioned to view hotel rooms as a commodity where price was the primary decision factor. While OTAs let reviews and minimal merchandising try to differentiate hotels, consumers also got lost in the noise of the difference between one chain versus another.
Over the past 5 years, intermediaries successfully crafted a narrative that they had the consumer’s best interest at heart by negotiating with the hotels, and only the OTAs could be trusted for the lowest price. Some of this was true; you could find lower prices for last minute deals, and there was benefit to both the OTAs and hotel operators that did not want to see a bed go empty. However, as OTAs further influenced the customer experience, and ate into profits with a greater share of bookings, the hospitality, airline, and other industries recognized that they would have to take decisive action to remove price disparity as the primary reason a consumer would purchase products or services on any indirect channel.
One compelling example is Icelandair and El Al who have begun experimenting with displaying sample prices of their competitors on their own websites, to show how competitive their direct prices are, and to hopefully prevent customers from “clicking” away to competitors and other price aggregators. With the explosive growth of options in the online distribution environment, there are two primary factors that companies should concentrate on: Price Integrity and Price Parity.
Price integrity is the concept of a customer being confident that they are purchasing a product of a certain value. While a customer may be willing to pay more or less, depending on the time and place of their purchase, there is a psychological range that they base their expectations on.
Price parity is the practice of maintaining a consistent rate for the same product across all distribution channels, including both owned and partnership channels. Nothing destroys trust more than being able to find a cheaper price on another website, or worse, when a company’s website is cheaper than its stores.
For industries that rely both on direct channels and distribution channels, there is a “co-opetition” relationship in which it is not uncommon for a firm to be competing with their distribution partners for sales. On the one hand, if a consumer wasn’t going to come to AlaskaAirlines.com, they would be more than happy with a referral from KAYAK, or a booking through Expedia to fill an empty seat. But if there was a chance that customer could have booked directly with Alaska Airlines, they would have fought hard to win that booking.
Hospitality and travel companies are in the middle of an ongoing competition with their distribution partners (OTAs and Metasearch engines – METAs) for the future of guest bookings. According to Hitwise, hotel direct booking only made up ~30.56% of online booking market share in 2017, at the same time OTAs continued to eat away further at market share, growing 60 basis points from 2016 to 2017.
While OTAs and METAs have become an invaluable component of hospitality marketing and distribution campaigns, there are contractual violations that stress the trust necessary for heathy “co-opetition” Some OTAs and METAs may display available prices that undercut contracted prices. Often these discounted prices are provided to the OTAs and METAs by wholesalers in violation of price-parity contracts, but the complex web of distribution relationships and flash-speed of online pricing engines makes it difficult for hospitality companies to really hold their distribution partners accountable.
Despite the challenges, companies must maintain a vigilant eye on how inventory and experiences are being displayed by distribution partners to ensure that consumers that may have the inclination to purchase on direct channels are not actively dissuaded from doing so. A successful distribution strategy must be aggressive and can quickly be implemented and maintained by following these six critical steps:
Metric tracking allows you to better understand if your chosen distribution partners are worth their distribution costs. For example, “NRevPAR” (Net Revenue per Available Room) is the industry standard in hospitality for calculating the revenue generated per available room, net of any discounts or commissions paid to intermediaries. Through the re-evaluation of their NRevPAR, hoteliers can evaluate their current distribution partnerships across their current distribution channels to ensure that their distribution costs are harmonized with their expectations for each partner. A significant drop in a key metric is a telltale sign that it is time to either renegotiate with your current distributors or start looking for replacements.
It is imperative that you monitor how and where your inventory is displayed across your distribution partners’ platforms. You want to have the ability to confirm that your partners are playing by the rules as well as ensuring that your offering is not appearing unofficially on other public channels with rogue prices that undercut you and your partners. If a partner determines that your inventory is floating around the public space at prices that undercut their contracted prices, it won’t be long before you observe your inventory being pushed to the bottom of their display pages—if they don’t remove you altogether for being out of parity.
Andrew Sheivachman of Skift pointed out that in 2017, global digital travel sales were projected to reach $189.6 billion in 2017, of which 40 percent was to be attributed to purchases made through mobile (4% gain over 2016). With such a rapid rise in the adoption of mobile booking and shopping, you cannot let your mobile channel development lag. You must work proactively with your distribution partners to refresh user interfaces and user experiences to optimize their mobile shopping experience. Rich content, descriptions, and high-quality photography also allow you to differentiate your product when it is sitting on a digital shelf with comparable products.
Dynamic yield pricing allows you to base your pricing relative to demand and other variables. Dynamic pricing is being employed across various industries to match supply and demand to move expiring inventory: preventing waste in grocery stores, ensuring that there are enough drivers on the road for ride-sharing platforms, or driving loyalty by generating customer-specific fares for airlines. Within the hospitality industry, dynamic pricing allows for inventory to be priced appropriately in response to the timing of a booking, local events, or any occasion that could cause fluctuating demand. Just make sure that your dynamic price is not undercut by a distribution partner or cached by that distribution partner and out of date when prices go back up.
While channels you directly manage (a website, a social presence, in-store), may not be the first point of interaction between you and your prospective consumer, you still can convert customers to complete their purchase through your owned direct purchase channels as you get to know them and earn their attention. In 2015, of booking journeys that were initiated on OTAs – over 34% of bookings were completed through supplier websites. Bolstering your available offers for customers through loyalty programs, subscription email campaigns, and social media can help drive customers from your distribution partners to your direct-booking channels.
Legacy backend systems may cause you millions of dollars in system outages and will almost certainly inhibit your ability to proactively adjust your distribution network. These legacy platforms cause transactional friction during the process in which a supplier’s prices are sent out to the systems of distribution partners, which in turn forces revenue managers to spend hours a day manually validating that prices and inventory are being migrated accurately to various distribution channels and partners. Rate monitoring platforms are now available that allow for revenue managers to monitor the behavior of their distribution partners using automation. The use of these platforms also increases transparency of your distribution partners’ networks. These platforms can be used to not only monitor the integrity and parity of pricing for your own inventory, but they can be used to quickly determine if you are competitively priced across the globe. With our earlier example of Icelandair and El Al, technology can also automatically allow revenue managers to know when their rates are being advertised by competitors (either accurately or inaccurately).
While your distribution partners can help you reach new customers and markets, you must ensure that their role as an intermediary does not equate to them “owning” the customer. It’s the incentive of your distribution partners to provide you revenue, but they are unlikely to share customer information that can be used to convert a customer into a loyal patron (i.e. personal email address, mailing addresses, etc.). Providing an amazing customer experience is the best way to overcome a consumer’s bias to make decisions based on price. If a company can pair a differentiated customer experience, with an enticing loyalty program that rewards purchasing goods or services through direct channels, there is still hope to maintain a balanced distribution strategy.
“Given a ten percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you’re still going to be wrong nine times out of 10.” –Jeff Bezos
Leading organizations like Amazon, Walmart, Uber, Netflix, Google X, Intuit and Instagram have all vigorously embraced the philosophy that rapid experimentation is the most efficient and effective path to meeting customer needs. In an interview with Metis Strategy’s Peter High, entrepreneur Peter Diamandis explains that the most nimble and innovative companies like Uber and Google X “are running over 1,000 experiments per year and are creating a culture that allows for rapid experimentation and constant failure and iteration.”
Traditional strategic planning taught us to study all the pieces on the chess board, develop a multi-year roadmap, and then launch carefully sculpted new products or services. Executives believed that there was only one chance to “get it right,” which often left organizations allowing perfect to be the enemy of the good.
However, in the digital era, decision velocity is more important than perfect planning.
Accelerating decision velocity through experimentation
The most successful organizations cede the hubris of believing they will always be able to perfectly predict customer or user demands, and instead let data—not opinions—guide decision making. The data that informs decision making is derived from a series of experiments that test a hypothesis against a small but representative sample of a broader population.
The experiment should examine three questions
And then lead to one of three conclusions:
Often, experiments fall into the second category, in which case organizations demonstrate enough viability to iterate on the idea to further hone and enhance the product-market fit. The key is to gain this insight early, and course-correct as necessary. It is easy to correct being two degrees off course every ten feet but being two degrees off course over a mile will cause you to miss your target considerably (+/-0.35 feet vs. +/- 184 feet).
One simple example is when Macy’s was evaluating the desire build a feature that would allow customers to search for a product based on a picture taken with their smartphone. Other competitors had developed something similar, but before Macy’s invested significant sums of money, the retailer wanted to know if the idea was viable.
To test the idea, Macy’s placed a “Visual Product Search” icon on its homepage and monitored the click-through behavior. While Macys.com did not yet have the capability to allow for visual search, tens of thousands of customers clicked through, and Macy’s was able to capture emails of those that wanted to be notified when the feature was ready.
This was enough to begin pursuing the idea further. Yasir Anwar, the former CTO at Macy’s, said teams are “given empowerment to go and test what is best for our customers, to go and run multiple experiments, to test with our customers, (and) come back with the results.”
To accelerate decision velocity, we recommend that all companies develop a framework to create a “Business Experimentation Lab” similar to the likes of Amazon and Walmart. This Business Experimentation Framework (BEF) should outline how people with the right mindset, enabled by technology (though sometimes technology is not necessary), can leverage iterative processes to make more well-informed, yet faster decisions. Doing so frees organizations from entrenched, bureaucratic practices and provides mechanisms for rapidly determining the best option for improving customer experiences out of a list of possibilities.
A Business Experimentation Framework is crucial to:
While nearly every department can introduce some flavor of experimentation into their operating model, a core component and example in eCommerce is A/B testing, or split testing. A/B testing is a way to compare two versions of a single variable, and determine which approach is more effective.
At a recent meetup at Walmart’s Bay Area office, eCommerce product and test managers discussed the investments, processes, and roles required to sustainably hold A/B testing velocity while ensuring the occurrence of clean, accurate, and controllable experiments. Walmart began its journey towards mass A/B testing with a top-down decree—“What we launch is what we test”—and now is able to run roughly 25 experiments at any given time—and Walmart has grown the number of tests each year from 70 in 2016 to 253 in 2017.
To enable A/B testing at this velocity and quality, Walmart developed a Test Proposal process that organizes A/B tests and provides metrics for test governance, so teams can quickly make decisions at the end of a test. A Test Proposal defines:
To facilitate the lasting adoption of a Business Experimentation Framework, organizations must staff critical roles like test managers, development engineers, and test analysts. Walmart, for instance, has created the following roles to enable the launch and analysis of 250 tests per year:
Institutionalizing a bias for experimentation is not easy. We have seen several barriers to adopting a Business Experimentation Framework, such as:
Typically, enthusiasm for experimentation gains momentum with one beachhead department. That department develops a test-approval process that is supported by the tools and data necessary to test, analyze, learn, and make accurate go/no-go decisions.
Here is a blueprint for introducing a test-first culture:
If done well, establishing a Business Experimentation Framework will allow organizations to figure out what matters to most customers, within a limited amount of time, for a limited cost, and with a risk-reward tradeoff that will ultimately play to their favor.
As Bezos said, “We all know that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs. The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it’s important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments.”
In early 2015, when The Manitowoc Company decided to split into two companies, the executive leadership called on the CIO, Subash Anbu, to lead the charge.
The transformation would be the most consequential in its 113-year history. Leaders from the company, then a diversified manufacturer of cranes and foodservice equipment, decided that the whole of the diversified organization was no longer greater than the sum of its parts. It would split into two publicly-traded companies: Manitowoc (MTW), a crane-manufacturing business, and Welbilt (WBT), which manufactures foodservice equipment.
The CIO was a natural choice to lead a change of this magnitude because his role allowed him to understand the interconnectedness of the company’s various business capabilities, which processes and technology were already centralized or decentralized, and where there may be opportunities for greater synergy in the future-state companies.
Subject matter expertise, however, would not have been enough to qualify a candidate; the leader had to be charismatic, and Subash was widely recognized for his servant-leadership mentality. That would prove essential to removing critical blockers across the organization.
It was also important that the CIO had long-standing credibility with the Board of Directors, who were the ultimate decision makers in this endeavor.
Subash embraced the daunting challenge, saying, “While change brings uncertainty, it also brings opportunities. Change is my friend, as it is the only constant.”
In some ways, splitting a company into two may be harder than a merger. When merging, you have the luxury of more time to operate independently and merge strategically.
When Western Digital acquired HGST in 2015 and Sandisk in 2016, CIO Steve Philpott decided to move all three companies to a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system rather than maintain multiple systems or force everyone onto the incumbent Western Digital solution. When splitting a company, there is greater urgency to define the target state business model and technology landscape and execute accordingly.
This split for Manitowoc introduced major consequences for change: duplication of every business function, completed within a fixed four-quarter schedule, while still executing the 2015 business plans. All business capabilities would be impacted, especially Finance, Tax, Treasury, Investor Relations, Legal, Human Resources, and of course, Information Technology.
While the Manitowoc Company had experience with divesting its marine segment (it started as a shipbuilding company in 1902), the scope and scale of the split was unprecedented for the company.
Breaking apart something that has been functioning together is an inherently risk-laden proposition. Subash and his team recognized that to mitigate risk, they would need to be both thoughtfully deliberate in planning and agile in their execution that breaks down big risks into smaller risks, prioritizing speed over perfection.
As Subash led the split of the company into two, he encountered the following risks:
When splitting a public company, the deadlines and outcome are clear. How Subash and the team would execute the split of the company, however, remained largely undefined.
The enormity of the task could have created a paralysis, but the team quickly began working backwards: getting on the same page with the right people; identifying the big-rock milestones; identifying the risks; sketching out a plan to reach the big-rock milestones; breaking the plan into smaller rocks to mitigate risk; and keeping everyone informed as the plan unfolded with greater detail.
In the process, Subash learned five critical lessons that all executives should heed before splitting a company:
Splitting a company requires cross-functional collaboration and visibility at the strategic planning and execution level. Start by creating a Separation Management Office, consisting of senior functional leaders that will oversee the end-to-end split across HR & Organizational Design, Shared Services & Physical Location Structuring, IT, Financial Reporting, Treasury & Debt Financing, Tax & Legal Entity Restructuring, and Legal & Contracts. The Separation Management Office should report to a Steering Committee consisting of the Board of Directors, CEO, CFO, and other C-level leaders. When faced with difficult questions that require a decision to meet deadlines, the Steering Committee should serve as the ultimate escalation point and decision maker to break ties, even if it means a compromise.
A split will require dedicated, skilled resources that understand the cross-functional complexities involved. This project team will need people that understand the interconnectedness of technology architecture, data, and processes, balanced with teams that can execute many detailed tasks. When forming the team, it is important to orient everyone on the common objective to create unity; departmental silos will not succeed. Variable capacity will almost certainly be necessary for major activities, and you may be able to stabilize your efforts by turning to trusted systems integrators or consulting partners to help guide the transition.
Agile evangelists often frown upon working under the heat of a mandated date and scope, but a public split forces such constraints. Treat the constraints as your friend: Work backward to identify your critical operational and transactional deadlines. Ensure the cross-functional team is building in the necessary lead time, especially when financial regulations or audits are involved. Dedicate a budget, but be prepared to spend more than you anticipate, as there will always be surprises to which teams will have to adapt. As part of your project planning, create a risk management framework with your highest priority risks, impacts, and decision makers clearly outlined. When time is of the essence, contingency plans need to be in place to adapt quickly.
Any time a working system is disassembled, there unquestionably will be problems. The key is not to wait for a big bang at the end to see if what you have done has worked. Spending nine months planning for and three months executing this split would have introduced new risks. Instead, Subash and his team built their plan and then iteratively built, tested, and improved in an agile-delivery process. The team was able to identify isolated mistakes early and often, allowing them then to proceed to the following phases with greater confidence—not with bated breath.
In a split, every employee, contractor, supplier, or customer will be impacted. Create a communication plan for the different personas: Steering Committee, operational leaders, functional groups, customers, partners and suppliers, and individual employee contributors. The Manitowoc Company had to communicate on everything from where people would sit, to who would be named as new organizational leaders. In the void of communication, fear and pessimism can creep in. To prevent this, the Separation Management Office launched “Subash’s Scoop,” a monthly newsletter on the separation progress. It brought helpful insight, with a flare of personality, to keep the organization aligned on its common goal.
The Manitowoc Company successfully split into two public companies—Manitowoc (MTW) and Welbilt (WBT)—in March 2016, hitting its publicly-declared target. In fact, many of the critical IT operational milestones were completed in January, well in advance of the go-live date.
Over the last two years, the stock prices for both companies have increased, validating the leadership evaluation that the whole was no longer greater than the sum of its parts.
