550: Melanie Kalmar, the CIO & CDO of Dow, and Shamim Mohammad, the chief information & technology officer of CarMax both have experience modernizing large organizations. In this interview, Melanie discusses Dow’s adoption of agile and DevOps practices, offers insight into how she has reoriented IT around service delivery, and gives her take on how to innovate at scale. Meanwhile, Shamim discusses CarMax’s shift from a project orientation to a product orientation and why the traditional way of delivering IT projects does not work anymore. We also discuss how transforming to a nimbler organization has helped CarMax during the pandemic, among a variety of other topics.
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520: AltaGas SVP & CDO Paul Selway discusses
Among a variety of other topics.
509: Domino’s Pizza SVP & Chief Innovation Officer Dennis Maloney
In this interview, we discuss
460: Syngenta Group chief information and digital officer Greg Meyers asserts that we are now heading into the third wave of technology change, which he believes can help reverse some of the effects that we have seen with climate change. Agriculture is responsible for about one third of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, and it consumes about 70 percent of the world’s freshwater supply, which is 30 percent more than we can naturally replenish. This third wave entails bringing computer and data science to the farms to try to find these breakthroughs that allow farmers to continue to increase food production as the world population grows in a way that is more regenerative, keeps more carbon in the soils, and allows us to conserve more water. We also discuss the extreme difference between different market segments that the company operates in, the talent landscape in Switzerland, the evolution of IT going from trying to get IT on the agenda of management teams to extreme excitement around the function, among other topics.
451: Dow CIO and CDO Melanie Kalmar recaps the merger with DuPont, subsequent executive shuffle, and ultimately the spinoff that resulted in Dow and two other publicly traded companies, Corteva and Dupont. The new Dow is a material science company that heavily invests in research and development and collaborating with customers to drive innovation. She notes that mergers present an opportunity to invest in future capabilities, and that Dow invested heavily in its digital transformation. We also discuss the expansion of her role to include the CDO title, the three anchors of Dow’s digital and IT strategy, her interest in artificial intelligence and Dow’s artificial intelligence competency center, and a variety of other topics.
418: GSK’s Chief Digital and Technology Officer Karenann Terrell discusses GSK’s 40, 50, 10 framework for thinking about technology and digital’s impact. The company spends 40 percent of its efforts on digital as usual, which involves its ability to change its landscape of looking cross-enterprise for strikes in value. It spends 50 percent on digital through a reinvention window of its existing business, and it spends 10 percent on the true disruption, which entails the high-end innovation of how digital is disrupting the business that the company works in. We also discuss the benefits Karenann gains from board membership, why GSK’s CEO added the CDO role as a remit to the technology organization, rather than separately, how GSK has looked to mix an infusion of talent externally with skilling the folks in a transformative way internally, among other topics.
407: Hunt Consolidated, Inc. CIO and CDO Diane Schwarz describes her methodology for transitioning into new executive roles using her arrival at Hunt to explain the 90-day process. Extensive planning, learning the business and stakeholders, meeting the company, and, lastly, focusing on suppliers develops the extensive knowledge of an organization needed to effectively lead it. Diane emphasizes the importance of understanding company culture to successfully rally support for changes to foundational pieces of IT, which she did at Hunt after careful investigation and planning. We also discuss the agile skills required for employees working in technology today, Diane’s journey to her leadership role as a woman in a male-dominated field, and the future of women in STEM.
406: CBRE CDO/CTO Chandra Dhandapani breaks down the process of digital transformation through her experience of modernizing technology and rapidly creating agile teams at CBRE. She explains that technology is at the core of any business model, making it crucial to insource the talent necessary for software development and understand the ecosystem of technology trends. Dhandapani describes how building collaboration between product designers and clients yields entrepreneurial services, such as the new flexible spaces and tenant experience lines at CBRE. We also discuss a powerful WhatsApp group for women leaders in technology, the difference between digital and technology, the value of efficient leadership teams, and various other topics.
394: Schneider Electric CDO Herve Coureil discusses how Schneider has blended talent in the new digital unit. Herve believes the organization needs to balance the internal and external view, Herve does not believe in a digital organization that only includes external digital talent looking in from the outside or an exclusively internal team that is made up of subject matter experts, without an infusion of external talent. To create a mix, Schneider has focused on reskilling, retraining, and learning internally so everybody has the basic skills that go with digital while simultaneously recruiting new talent that can bring subject matter expertise and new digital skills to the team. We also discuss Herve’s take on the cloud, AI, and blockchain, how Herve manages such a large, distributed team, how his experience as a CFO helps him in his current role, among other topics.
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