488: Ted Colbert is an EVP at Boeing and the President & CEO of Boeing Global Services. Previously, Ted was Boeing’s CIO and SVP, IT & Analytics. In this episode, Ted discusses:
Among a variety of other topics.
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450: XPRIZE Foundation CEO Anousheh Ansari discusses XPRIZE’s Pandemic Alliance, a global coalition of corporate, academic, and non-governmental partners focused on accelerating solutions to the coronavirus pandemic. In the short-term, that means expanding visibility into solutions underway in areas such as remote care and access to testing. We also discuss the XPRIZE Data Collaborative which provides access to exclusive data sets and AI capabilities, how XPRIZE facilitates resource and idea sharing between alliance members, and why XPRIZE is well positioned to bring together uncommon partners to tackle this historic challenge.
To learn more and get involved, click here
To hear our interview with XPRIZE Founder Peter Diamandis, click here
Asia Miles was established as a loyalty program under Cathay Pacific 20 years ago. Though it is still owned by Cathay, Asia Miles now partners with a great number of airlines as well as through an ecosystem of partners to add value to frequent travelers with different ideas of what a great loyalty program should yield.
Michael Yung is the Head of Digital Product and Technology at Asia Miles, and over the past five years, he has helped grow the company, and to help it continue its evolution to become a digital leader in the loyalty space. He explains the evolution of the company from largely a call center-based business to one that services customers across a wide array of digital formats. He describes the different types of customers Asia Miles serves. Yung also talks about the diverse team he has built. Lastly, he details his team’s creative use of blockchain for marketing campaigns using smart contracts. I caught up with Yung recently at Adobe Summit in Las Vegas, and covered all of these topics and more.
(To read future interviews like this one, please follow me on Twitter @PeterAHigh.)
Peter High: Please provide a brief overview of Asia Miles’ business.
Michael Yung: Asia Miles is the loyalty rewards program of the Hong Kong-based airline Cathay Pacific Airways. Similar to any loyalty rewards program, our members can earn miles by flying, traveling, shopping, dining, or even by having a mortgage with our banking partners.Our members can redeem points for many rewards such as hotel stays or laptops. We set up our program in 1999, so we are celebrating our 20th anniversary this year. Over the 20 years, we have accumulated over 11 million members, we have about 700 partners around the world to serve those members, and we are the leading loyalty program in Asia.
If you’re not thinking like a software company, you’re already behind.
Software companies focus on codifying and then scaling everything they do. To do that, business subject-matter expertise and technical expertise must become one in the same, converging once siloed disciplines.
In a recent interview with Metis Strategy, Cathy Bessant, Bank of America’s Chief Operations & Technology Officer, explained that convergence must apply to all companies, saying, “Technology has completely changed the notion of business integration. You cannot say the business is technology or technology enables the business—they are one and the same.”
Your company will not be able to compete at scale and speed if delivery teams have not gone beyond typical IT-business hand offs to true convergence. This convergence extends beyond obvious points of technology dependence, such as an eCommerce website or managing internal productivity tools; it is happening everywhere.
“Metis Strategy helped us make big decisions on a number of key initiatives. Their real-world experience coupled with their ability to perform deep analysis gave our organization confidence in our new direction.” – Gary Reiner
Still, many companies struggle with where to start on this transformation. Business function leaders often communicate high-level goals that are difficult for technology leaders to translate into concrete actions, and technology leaders often approach a problem by addressing the technology first, and the business outcome second. They end up six months into a “digital transformation” effort with a disparate collection of projects, but no cohesive sense of prioritization or interdependence to create a more tech-driven future. The solution to bridge this gap between strategy and execution is for IT leaders to be better collaborators and communicators, and to understand the business and customer needs as well as their business partners do. But that is easier said than done. Start by rooting your IT plans in a well-defined business capabilities map, and then transform the way that IT goes to market by driving cross-functional operating model convergence in the long term.
Business capabilities are an integrated set of processes, technologies, and deep expertise that are manifested as a functional capacity to capture or deliver value to the organization. They outline “what” a business does, as opposed to “how” a business does it. They are the definition of your organizational skills, best represented in a landscape map that allows you to evaluate the full spectrum of capabilities against each other. Business capability maps are not just about technology; these tools are designed to improve an organization’s holistic ability to improve a business outcome, and in many cases, it is not the technology that is the constraint, but rather a process, skill, or policy issue. Consider the process for onboarding a new employee. Strong onboarding capabilities make the experience seamless for the new hire. From the second an employee steps into the office, they might:
• Be welcomed at his/her desk by a hiring manager, who provides a building access card and computer • Be given orientation training videos on the company’s mission, security protocols, etc. • Be added to email distribution lists, Slack channels, file access on shared drives, and to recurring meetings related to his/her role • Be coached through benefits enrollment for 401(k), health-savings accounts, and vacation accrual
Business capability maps are designed to improve an organization’s holistic ability to improve a business outcome.
There are various people, process and technology components behind each of the steps in the employee’s journey. However, the employee does not—and should not—feel the transition between, in this case, HR, facilities, and IT. If the desired outcome for this capability is to provide a seamless employee experience where the employee is productive in less than three days, the different functional areas should integrate their strategic plans to meet that objective. This is often challenging in an organization that thinks and acts in functional silos, but a capability-driven approach will bridge that gap.
Many organizations have never formally documented their business architecture and therefore struggle to understand business priorities. To bridge that gap, IT will generally dispatch enterprise architects or business relationship managers to form bonds with functional leaders, understand their current processes, and identify the pain points. As a result, they map the business capabilities. This exercise elevates technology leaders and their business partners to common ground, on which both can add value to the conversation: one around business process improvement, and the other around technology enablement. We generally suggest no more than four levels of cascading capabilities, with the fourth level most resembling the associated process. Keep in mind that business capability maps are not organizational charts. By definition, they are anchored by the business outcome, with many functional areas converging to realize that outcome.
Once you define your capabilities, prioritize them to help provide strategic direction to the organization. Not all capabilities are of equal importance to your ability to compete, so you need to ensure you are not boiling the ocean. While there is more nuance in practice, for simplicity, capabilities fall on a scale of achieving competitive parity through sustaining competitive advantage, and it is important to evaluate which are the most important to your business’ success. This segmentation will not change tremendously year by year, unless there are major shifts in the competitive forces at play.
• Competitive advantage: Capabilities that—currently, or in the future—are critical to creating or sustaining your market position in a fundamentally unique way. Customers will hire you because of these capabilities, your employees will love you for them, and your investors will celebrate the cost effectiveness that they bring. For example, you may be able to segment customers and tailor offerings in a way that economizes your marketing spend far better than a competitor. Or, if your competitor competes on price, you may compete on amazing customer service. Thus, you might prioritize your capability on managing customer cases. To be clear, further segmentation is needed within the “Competitive Advantage” bucket; remember: not everything is created equal.
• Parity: Capabilities that maintain customer expectations and operational needs. You don’t lose (but also probably don’t gain) fans because of these capabilities. For example, your “process payroll” capability probably needs to stay at current levels, but it does not need to be the target of heavy investment and prioritization. This doesn’t mean you don’t invest in these areas. For example, Uber uses Stripe to instantly pay drivers, giving them cash in hand each day, but Lyft also offers this capability. Uber needs to continue to invest in this area to stay at parity, in the case that, say, Lyft started predicting revenue for drivers and giving them advances. Still, if the offerings are similar, they may not be a deciding factor for whether a driver goes with Uber or Lyft.
Once you segment and prioritize your capabilities, you should evaluate the current state maturity for each capability, as well as the target future state. Evaluating maturity levels is as much art as it is science. As a result, the defining of maturity levels cannot be done independently, and often the conversation around why something is or is not mature is as valuable as whatever score you give yourself. We recommend undertaking this exercise with cross-functional groups that have an understanding of the capability from different perspectives. We often evaluate capability maturity as a function of process definition, degree of automation, organizational reach, and the measurement of the business outcome. This evaluation will influence the prioritization of near-term investments and will not always coincide 1:1 with the segmentation mentioned above. For example, if you have low maturity in a “parity” capability, you would still want to invest in that capability to get it up to par.
Enhancing a capability may require investments in people, processes, or technology. Therefore, a converged team of business function experts and technology leaders should jointly identify improvement activities. IT should lead in aligning the technology services (if your organization uses an ITSM approach) and technical architecture needed to enable these capabilities—but all in the context of how the business process may change. Once you have aligned your technical architecture, IT can identify gaps and redundancies. For example, if you have multiple applications supporting your “expense management” capability, you might opt to undertake a cost-benefit analysis of maintaining all of the applications. Conversely, you might discover you have a prioritized business capability of sales forecasting without a technology architecture supporting or enabling that capability. You might identify this an area where a new technology services is needed to provide data analytics to the sales operations team. Once developed, capability maps can bridge the gap between strategy and execution by driving organizational alignment around where investments are needed. For example, we recently helped a growing technology company through this journey. The IT organization had been viewed as an order-taker, and it often struggled to get budget consideration for more strategic projects that would add value to the business, but the CIO was intent on evolving the organization into a more strategic partner. The CIO knew that the convergence of business process improvement and technology enablement was key, so the team worked closely with business function leaders to develop prioritized capability maps across the organization. Then they leveraged the capability maps to identify areas in greatest need of investment, and in turn forced trade-off decisions that resulted in a meaningful prioritization of focus areas that galvanized the team. The converged business and technology teams, oriented around shared business outcomes, had threaded the needle from strategy to execution. In the end, one of the business partners said, “We have tried to do this many times over the past six years, and this is by far the best it has ever gone.” That is how IT goes to market differently, and wins.
Among other topics, Vince discussed the following issues with Metis Strategy:
Vince is the Senior Vice President, Digital and Chief Information Officer of United Technologies Corp. (UTC), an industrial conglomerate and military contractor with over $57 billion in revenue. Since joining UTC in June of 2016, Vince has been responsible for the strategic direction of the company’s global IT operations, including the continued implementation of UTC’s digital strategies, and identifying opportunities that harness and leverage data to create value for customers and increase UTC’s operational efficiency.
Prior to joining UTC, Vince held a number of executive positions as General Electric, including most recently as Chief Operating Officer for GE Digital. Prior to the COO role, Vince was the General Manager, Cloud Services & CIO of GE Digital. Before GE Digital, Vince spent time as both the CIO & Lean Leader and CIO & Quality Leader of GE Power. Prior to GE Power, Vince was the CIO of GE Corporate.
Vince earned a Bachelor of Science in Information Systems and Marketing from the State University of New York at Albany
Among other topics, Diane discussed the following issues with Metis Strategy:
Diane is Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Textron Inc., a $13.8 billion aerospace, defense, and industrial conglomerate that owns well-known brands such as Bell Helicopter and Cessna. Diane has been CIO for nearly five years and is responsible for managing the business unit CIOs and directing the day-to-day activities of Textron Information Services (TIS), including TIS executive staff. Diane oversees Textron’s Information Management Council and manages Textron’s information technology supplier and outsourcing relationships.
Prior to becoming CIO of Textron Inc., Diane was VP and CIO of Textron Systems, one of Textron Inc’s many business units. Diane joined Textron in 2007 as the Director of IT Services and Support for Bell Helicopter. During her five years at Bell Helicopter, Diane expanded her focus into areas encompassing business application technologies and special projects focused on modernizing technology systems. Prior to joining Textron, Diane was VP of Information Services at Sonitrol. Prior to Sonitrol, Diane was SAP Program Manager for Honeywell Defense & Space. Before Honeywell, Diane spent five years as CIO of Ultrak. Earlier in her career, Diane was a manager at Ernst & Young.
Diane received a Bachelors of Science in mechanical engineering from the University of Notre Dame, and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Among other topics, Linda discusses the following issues with Metis Strategy:
Linda is the Executive Vice President of Technology and Chief Digital Officer for United Airlines, a $19 billion company. Since becoming EVP Technology and CDO this past June, Linda has been responsible for strategy and operations of United’s technology platforms and infrastructure, as well as United’s mobile app, e-commerce, and commercial web platforms.
Linda joined United in 2014 as Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer. Prior to joining United, Linda was Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer for Rogers Communications, and has served as CIO for Energy Future Holdings Corporation and Flowserve Corporation.
Linda is a member of the Board of Directors at Exelon Corporation. She also participates on a variety of not-for-profit and education boards including the Adler Planetarium and the Rensselaer Alumni Association.
Linda holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science and a master’s degree in industrial engineering, both from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Among other topics, Eash discusses the following issues with Metis Strategy:
Eash is Executive Vice President and Chief Digital & Technology Officer of JetBlue Airways, a $6 billion US-based airline. Eash is also the Chair of JetBlue Technology Ventures, a venture capital subsidiary of JetBlue Airways.
Prior to joining JetBlue, Eash served as Senior Vice President of Global Supply Chain and as Chief Information Officer at Pall Corporation. He held leadership positions at McKesson-PSS World Medical and i2 Technologies, as well.
Eash serves as the board director of SITA, a global information technology company that provides services to the air transport industry. He is also on the board of Champ CargoSystems, which delivers IT solutions and distribution services to the air cargo industry.
Eash holds a Master of Science in Transportation Management from the State University of New York, and a bachelor’s degree in Science & Engineering from MK University, in India.
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Among other topics, Rob discusses the following issues with Metis Strategy:
Rob Webb’s Biography
Rob is the Chief Information Technology Officer of the Etihad Aviation Group, comprising Etihad Airways, the national airline of the UAE, and equity partner airlines in Europe, Africa, and South Asia.
Prior to joining Etihad, Rob served as the Chief Executive Officer of the Technology Business Management Council, a nonprofit professional organization dedicated to advancing the discipline of managing the business of IT. He was also an advisor at Greylock Partners, a leading venture capital firm in Silicon Valley primarily investing in start-ups and growth-stage ventures.
Rob served as Chief Information Officer of Hilton Hotels Corporation from July 2009 through May 2012, and as Chief Technology Officer, Chief Information Officer and Corporate Vice President of Equifax Inc. between 2004 and 2009. Prior to his time at Equifax, Rob was an IT executive at General Electric, where he served as CIO for several divisions including Commercial Finance, Consumer Finance Japan, and GE Energy Services.
Rob holds a BA in Political Science and Economics from the University of Western Ontario, and received an MBA with an emphasis on International Business from ESCP Europe.
Among other topics, Joe discusses the following issues with Metis Strategy:
Joe Locandro’s Biography
Joe is the IT Director (CIO equivalent) of Cathay Pacific, the flag carrier airline of Hong Kong. Among other responsibilities, Joe leads the strategic positioning and delivery of the airline’s information management and technology requirements, and he is the co-head of the innovation program for the airline. He’ll speak about some of the creative and innovative ideas that his team are developing in this interview.
Prior to joining Cathay Pacific, Joe served at the director of IT at China Light & Power where he focused on IT strategy, strategic systems development, infrastructure, and developing initiatives supportive of business unit missions. Joe has held a number of CIO positions in other industries including entertainment and energy.
Joe is also a member of the Hong KongSAR government’s Digital 21 Strategy Advisory Committee, as well as several other IT related advisory boards for universities and the Hong Kong Computer Society.
Joe holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics and Commerce from University of Melbourne, and a graduate diploma in Marketing from Monash University, also in Melbourne.
