1/2/18
By Peter High, published on Forbes
Clay Johnson has worked at a number of iconic brands, from FedEx to Boeing to General Electric. Roughly a year ago, he joined yet another icon in Walmart. In so doing, he joined a company with 2.3 million associates, 5,000 stores in the U.S. alone, and a complex mix of technology. His priorities in the early days were to meet as many people as possible, to learn the business, and to understand the projects that were ongoing.
He has begun to enact a cultural change within the IT department, and he indicates that the four steps he has followed have been to be transparent, to foster open debates, to push everyone to speak up, and to incorporate a fail-fast approach to work.
Now that he has a year under his belt, he sees his big priorities for the year ahead as developing a product model for IT to facilitate end-to-end ownership of different product areas created, as well as process automation, facilitated at least in part through artificial intelligence. He discusses all of the above and more in this far-ranging interview.
Peter High: Can you please describe your purview as Walmart’s Chief Information Officer and Executive Vice President of Global Business Services?
Clay Johnson: When I joined earlier this year, we consolidated the Internal Technology and the Shared Services teams. Technology encompasses anything that runs internally for the company, from server security and corporate systems to machine learning [ML], analytics, and artificial intelligence [AI]. We split out e-commerce and customer-facing staff to Jeremy King, who is our CTO. Everything else that runs inside the company falls under me. A lot of that is supplier facing rather than customer facing.
Combining these two teams has been incredibly powerful because it enables us to drive end-to-end ownership and use technology all the way through a process. I predict you are going to see a trend of more companies doing this.
High: I know part of the intention was to have a unified view of the associate experience. Could you describe how that is enhanced through digital technologies?
Johnson: The key is a relentless focus on the customer, and my customers are the internal associates of the company. Walmart has over two million associates, which is a huge number. At that scale, any time you can help productivity numbers or improve interactions with the different tools and services that we have, that will result in a massive productivity improvement.
If you look back ten years ago, business technology was better than consumer technology. However, that has now flipped. A lot of the technology that employees use in their personal lives is better than what they have at work. People now expect that when they come to work, the technology will be intuitive like social media and smartphones. They want everything on mobile and at the tip of their fingers. The goal of the Internal Technology and Shared Services team is to provide everything associates need when and how they need it, from tools to analytics.
High: Given this mandate, how much have you had to change in terms of the skill mix of your team? To what degree are you adding new employees, retraining existing employees, or creatively using external parties?
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
11/20/17
Paula Tolliver joined Intel a little more than a year ago as chief information officer. She had spent more than two decades at the Dow Chemical Company. She had been CIO there, as well, but she also ran procurement for a time, and had profit and loss accountability for Dow’s $1 billion services business. Therefore, she came to Intel with an orientation toward driving revenue growth from her post.
Tolliver immediately got to work doing just that. She has helped lead a major push toward deepening the company’s investment in analytics and artificial intelligence, in addition to other new technologies, and has helped drive $350 million in revenue growth in the sales and marketing channels alone, as she notes herein.
Tolliver has also improved IT’s orientation toward being “customer zero” for Intel’s own technologies. As such, she has woven her team into the product development process, and served as an important proxy for CIO and other IT executive customers of the company.
Peter High: You recently celebrated your first year anniversary with Intel. Prior to coming to Intel, you spent a couple of decades at Dow Chemical. What drew you to the CIO role at Intel?
Paula Tolliver: I have been in the profession for close to 30 years. My move to Intel was the result of my beginning to reflect on my career and wanting to be more deeply involved in this exciting time for IT. As I looked around and started to understand the potential of new technologies and how quickly they are advancing, I wanted to be a part of that in a more meaningful way. I saw joining the technology industry as a way to jump in with both feet. Fortunately, for me, Intel was looking for a CIO. What drew me to Intel was that they are a substantial contributor to the advancements happening in the IT industry. The technology that Intel has developed over its long history have driven many significant technology advancements, opened up many of possibilities that we see today, and powered the digital transformation. The privilege and honor of joining the Intel team and being a part of the ecosystem of technology was too exciting for me to pass up. I jumped on board and have enjoyed every minute.
High: Intel has been going through a transformation. Can you describe the changes and the role that IT plays?
11/13/17
The Chief Information Officer of $100 billion revenue Express Scripts Neal Sample has had unusual breadth and depth of experience for someone who is still in his mid-40s. He has a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford, which allows him to dig into the weeds of the technology his team develops with the best of them. He also spent time professionally as a consultant, giving him an orientation and a toolkit to solve a diverse array of problems. He spent time with legendary digital native companies like Yahoo! (where he was Chief Architect) and eBay (where he was CTO of X.Commerce, eBay’s venture to bring together a comprehensive set of commerce products and capabilities to help merchants and businesses compete in the world of social, local, mobile, and digital-driven commerce). At American Express, he grew from CIO of the Enterprise Growth unit to become president of the unit.
Sample took his current role for the St. Louis-based pharmacy benefits management behemoth nearly two years ago. As he notes in this interview, information is the coin of the realm for Express Scripts, and he has helped tune his team to drive better insights through better gathering and synthesis of information. His team helps lead the innovation agenda for the company, and he has grown leaps and bounds.
Peter High: In the 20 or so months that you have been the CIO of Express Scripts, you have been in the throes of a transformation. What was the state of IT and technology when you joined Express Scripts and what changes have you made?
Neal Sample: For 20 years, Express Scripts had primarily grown inorganically through acquisitions. The enterprise’s growth pattern was fairly consistent, they would purchase another pharmacy benefit management company or a related business, integrate it, capture the synergies from the integration, and then leverage those synergies to acquire the next business. From a technology perspective, this meant that they often did not end up with the systems they would have designed or chosen if they had started with a blank sheet of paper. It was not one plus one equals three, it was more like one plus one equals one. There was a lot of technology debt. There were many systems that would have been upgraded if the focus had been on infrastructure, instead of integrating the next company. There were also a plethora of systems. We had 31 development languages. Any technology stack you could imagine was present. Midrange, mainframe, on premise cloud, off premise cloud, it was all there. We had the opportunity to do some clean up, to enhance our reliability, and to become more agile. From a business process perspective, development had been primarily waterfall, which meant that not only were the cycle times long and fairly expensive, but the processes were rigid in their ability to respond to the market.
We had our work cut out for us. We had to decide to start with people, process, or technology. We picked all three. We began a tech debt retirement program and a move from waterfall to agile. We also focused on attracting and hiring in-house talent. Years of outsourcing had left us a little light for the transformation. In summary, I came into an environment that was target rich in people, processes, and technology, and began chipping away.
High: Part of your purview as CIO is innovation. As you have taken care of the efficiency part of the equation, trying to get to that one plus one equals three equation, what innovative ideas have you pursued?
10/30/17
Andrew Moore’s career path at Carnegie Mellon has become emblematic of the way the University fosters its star talent. He became a tenured professor at Carnegie Mellon in 2000. In 2006, Moore joined Google, where he was responsible for building a new engineering office. As a vice president of engineering, Andrew was responsible for Google Shopping, the company’s retail segment. Moore returned to Carnegie Mellon in 2014 as the Dean of the Computer Science department. In that role and given his experience, Moore is among the most influential people in the fields of computer science and artificial intelligence.
In the past, Moore has described the poaching problem that the Computer Science department has, given its stable of extraordinary talent in fields such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, and others that are high in demand. Of course, he recognizes himself in those professors and students who would choose to follow their passions into lucrative positions in the private sector. The department allows professors to leave and come back in many cases, and is hiring at higher rates in anticipation of this trend continuing.
In this interview, Moore offers insights into the evolving field of artificial intelligence, what is likely to be the factors to determine the companies who will win or lose in this space, as well as insights into what makes Carnegie Mellon specifically and Pittsburgh more generally a hot test bed for cutting edge technology.
Peter High: Andrew, you are the Dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Please describe your purview.
Andrew Moore: Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science has a couple of hundred strong faculty members who are working on every aspect of computer technology. We also have a few thousand amazing students. My role as Dean is to make sure the whole organization gets to move forward. I see my role as helping to clear the way for these geniuses to get to do what they want to do.
High: You have said that being at CMU is like being at Hogwarts Academy. That when you walk around the School of Computer Science, the College of Engineering, and the university at large, you see a great number of smart people working on a variety of things that will change the technology landscape, and ultimately our lives. What was the origin of Carnegie Mellon’s influence?
Moore: It all comes down to two visionaries, Allen Newell and Herbert Simon. They were two of the four people who, in 1956, took part in the Dartmouth Artificial Intelligence Conference, where they discussed what might be possible with computers in the future. These two gentlemen were in the business school at Carnegie Tech, which later became Carnegie Mellon University. There was, of course, not a computer science school in the 1960s. Newell and Simon used their passion and extreme intellect to speculate and bring together a team of people who looked at, not what computers would do in the next five to 10 years, but what it would mean to live in a world where there are thinking machines. They inspired so many other thinkers through that period that it snowballed over the decades. Today, we have 250 faculty members in the School of Computer Science. They work on everything from the lowest level details of how photons move and how you count them up, to the highest level details of what it means to have an emotional relationship with a talking machine. It was Newell’s and Simon’s initial interest that sparked this and shaped our computer science department.
On the commercial side, through our digital channels, we continue to advance our product suite to allow our commercial customers to have access to the technology portals that house all of the capabilities and resources of the bank that they use. This includes things like wires, accounts receivable transactions, etc. Many of our interactions with our commercial customers also occur through our digital channels. This will continue to evolve as our customers work to become more efficient, and we develop new ways to help them achieve that. This transformation has been underway for some time, but it has accelerated in the last two or three years.
10/17/17
When Cerner Chief Information Officer Bill Graff joined the company in 2005, he was attracted to the fact that it felt like an entrepreneurial company. The company’s growth since that would certainly back up that assumption. in 2005, Cerner earned roughly $1 billion in revenue. Today, the company is a $5 billion revenue company. In that same period, associate count has grown from roughly 6,000 to over 25,000, and Graff’s team has grown from 35 people to over 1,500.
Graff has run the company’s hosting business for a number of years, growing that part of the business from 30 to 40 clients to over 500 clients today. His CIO responsibilities were added to his hosting responsibilities a year and a half ago, and he has brought that same revenue-centricity and customer focus to IT, as he highlights in this interview, among other topics we covered.
Peter High: Bill, you joined Cerner in 2005 as a senior manager of Infrastructure Operations. You have been the Chief Information Officer of Cerner for about a year and a half. Can you describe your thirteen-year journey, rising through the ranks, to become CIO?
Bill Graff: Prior to coming to Cerner, I held different roles in IT ranging from software engineering to operational responsibilities like running datacenters. When I joined Cerner, I took over the datacenter infrastructure for the hosting site. As we dramatically grew that business from a small startup business inside of Cerner, to a large-scale business across the board, my responsibilities expanded as well. As Cerner grew, it made sense to combine the infrastructure organization and the corporate IT organization. In 2010, many of the infrastructure components from corporate IT, things like the networks and server storage platforms, came into my organization. Soon after that, it also made sense, from operating and cost modeling perspectives, to pull some of the applications into my organization. This was because on the hosting side, we had built processes for a lot of tools, things like automation, ticket tracking, and support services. That was about a three-year process. For the past three years, I have had responsibility for corporate IT, as well as on the hosting side responsibility for all of the global datacenter operations and infrastructure. I have spent a lot of time, both globally and working in the trenches, leveraging technology to enable our associates to be more productive, to deliver great service to our clients, and to help build Cerner.
High: How has the business grown in the time that you have been with Cerner?
Graff: When I joined Cerner, in early 2005, revenue was right around $1 billion dollars. Today, we are a nearly $5 billion revenue company. In 2005, our associate count was around 6,000. Now we are at a little over 25,000 people, worldwide. One of the reasons I came to Cerner was because I had spent a lot of time working at startups, and Cerner felt like a startup company. You were expected to be entrepreneurial and to deliver results. The exciting thing about Cerner was we had good business leaders and the funding to do entrepreneurial things. Through US legislation and hard work on our part to deliver, the company has grown dramatically. I have had a great career over the last 13 years.
High: Can you describe your purview as CIO?
10-04-17
Gartner Symposium is currently under way in Orlando, and the company has identified a top ten strategic technology trends for the year ahead. Gartner defines “strategic” as those technologies that will have significant disruptive potential over the next five years.” Here is a summary of the trends:
Intelligent:
1. AI Foundation
AI has massive potential to enhance decision making, reinvent business models and ecosystems, and remake the customer experience. Many organizations have already taken notice of this, with a recent Gartner survey indicating that 59% or organizations are gathering information to build an AI strategy, while the rest are piloting or adopting AI programs. Given that AI techniques are rapidly evolving, and organizations will need to invest heavily in skills, processes and tools, it is suggested that business focus on tightly scoped solutions targeting specific tasks. With Gartner estimating that by 2020, 30% of CIOs will include AI in their top 5 investment priorities, now is the time to invest in data preparation, integration, algorithm and training methodology selection, and model creation.
2. Intelligent Apps & Analytics
AI has become a major battleground for software and service vendors, with AI expected to be incorporated into every application, app and service, at least on some level. Gartner highlights augmented analytics, which uses machine learning to automate data preparation, insight discovery and insight sharing as an area of growing strategic importance. Organizations should explore intelligent apps that augment human activity, and identify use cases across advanced analytics, intelligent processes and new user experiences
3. Intelligent Things
10/02/2017
Taso Du Val had multiple experiences as lead engineer at start-ups, including at Fotolog, which was acquired by Hi-Media for $100 million, and at Slide, which was acquired by Google for $228 million. His first experience as CEO came while running a small engineering consulting firm. During this time, Du Val developed an international team of co-workers, and discovered that the talent he could access rivaled the best talent in Silicon Valley. US-based companies often have difficulty tapping this high quality and cost competitive talent, but as the war for talent in Silicon Valley and in other US and European tech hubs has become more acute, better alternatives were needed.
Du Val co-founded Toptal, a freelance engineer marketplace, in 2010 to fill that gap. The company’s investors include Andreessen Horowitz and Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo. The company boasts a large and growing client list that includes Airbnb, Rand McNally, JPMorgan Chase, IDEO, and Pfizer. Du Val was selected by Forbes as one of its 30 under 30 in Enterprise Technology in 2015.
Among the most fascinating developments within the company has been both its virtual workforce (the company has no offices) and the technology it has developed. Toptal built its own enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and business process management (BPM) solutions to ensure that they seamlessly meshed, and that the company controlled the pace at which each evolved. These were major technical feats, which are quite unusual in this day-and-age given the fact that there are off-the-shelf versions of each that work quite well. Du Val claims that this provides an advantage in as much as each works with the other seamlessly, and the company is in control of all updates to the technology.
Peter High: Please provide a bit of a background into Toptal’s founding and mission.
Taso Du Val: When we started the company, about seven years ago, the talent marketplace was going in two directions. There were large players such as Pivotal, Accenture, Infosys, and other big shops that had expensive medium-high to high skilled labor within them. On the opposite side, there was freelancer.com, Elance, and a few other freelance marketplaces. They had high skilled labor, but it was difficult to find because it was mixed in with tens of millions of users of varying skill levels. We recognized the opportunity in the market and began our journey.
High: What market segments do you focus on? Are there certain sizes or industries that have been particularly ripe for Toptal?
9-18-2017
Under Armour used to be known primarily for its moisture-wicking t-shirts. In the 21 years since the company was established in founder and CEO Kevin Plank’s grandmother’s basement, the company has expanded its product line extensively to include hats, pants, shoes, gloves, bags, and the like.
In recent years, the company has made three strategic acquisitions that will continue to reshape the company. With the acquisitions of MapMyFitness, EndoMondo, and MyFitnessPal, the company has become the largest digital health and fitness community in the world. I recently spoke with Under Armour’s Chief Technology Officer Paul Fipps, who leads this digital transformation of the company. He sees the future as a combination of the physical and the digital, where one’s clothing and accessories provide better information on heart rates and sleep quality.
Peter High: Under Armour calls itself a digital health and fitness community. Please explain that concept and the role you play as Chief Technology Officer.
Paul Fipps: People move fast in the digital world. They get more information, have more choice, and find more deals. A downside to all of this information is people are bombarded with messages from companies that do not understand them. This happens everywhere in the digital world: on our mobile platforms, social platforms, and on the web. At Under Armour, we believe you need to approach consumers like a hotel concierge who deeply knows his or her guests. A concierge knows all of your preferences and the context. You have an incredible experience because it is highly personalized and memorable. At Under Armour, this experience means creating products that are relevant to our customers on both a personal and community level.
Another thing we recognize is that people spend a lot of time on their smartphones; they are on their smartphones as much as they watch TV. Smartphones are where consumers expect you to meet them. We recently acquired three companies that help us understand our athletes better and make it easier for us to connect with them. Our acquisitions of MapMyFitness, EndoMondo, and MyFitnessPal made us the largest digital health and fitness community in the world. These apps produce a vast amount of data; 215 million people have downloaded one of our apps. People tell us how much they sleep, how much they eat, how much they workout, and the types of workouts they do. We also get data from brand interactions, which are when someone comes into our retail stores, visits our e-commerce site, or interacts with us in some way that we can track. By combining the data from the apps with the brand interaction data, we can understand buying decisions. More importantly, we understand the behavior behind the buying decisions. That has been a huge success for us. We are creating a new digital experience for our athletes by combining connected fitness and our e-commerce engine and our global technology platform. It is game changing for us and our athletes. That is my primary role as Chief Technology Officer of Under Armour.
High: You provided a great overview of where things stand now and customers’ expectations for speed, customization, and transparency. Can you provide an example?
09/18/17
Pegasystems has experienced tremendous success in recent years. The stock is up more than 100 percent in the past year, and enterprises are increasingly adopting the company’s software for customer engagement and operational excellence. It is tempting to think of the company as a start-up, perhaps run by a 20-something entrepreneur in the Bay Area. In fact, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company was founded by 61 year old Alan Trefler in 1983.
In many ways, Pegasystems has bucked the trend of a lot of software companies. Trefler did not accept venture capital early in the company’s tenure, and in so doing, he was able to dictate the pace of growth and mature the company in a way that has been sustainable. Likewise, though the company has been on the target of acquisition planning for several companies, including Salesforce, Trefler considers having an “exit strategy” as anathema to growing a successful company for the long term.
Trefler recently wrote a book, “Build for Change,” which highlights his philosophy and his advice for company’s, who he believes need to evolve with customers as the latter’s needs change or face extinction. He shares insights on all of the above and more in my interview.
Peter High: Alan, you have been in the software industry for multiple decades. You founded Pegasystems, in 1983. During your long tenure as a founder CEO in the software industry, you have seen many trends and competitors come and go. In fact, your own competitive set has evolved from your origins as a case management solution provider to a customer relationship management and business process management software company. Please share your perspective on how the software industry has evolved and where it is going.
Alan Trefler: Prior to starting Pegasystems, I worked for large New York banks as a systems integrator. Computers were getting faster, but we were still working in ways that seemed both grossly inefficient and not amenable to real customer success and happiness. I knew there had to be a better way to handle certain types of customer engagement and customer service issues. We came up with the idea of creating an infrastructure for managing work. Sometimes that is referred to as case management, sometimes it is referred to as business process management. I like the term digital process automation, which Forrester recently came out with. Digital process automation captures how companies become digital, connect to their customers, connect across channels, and bring together those intelligences, along with automation capabilities, into their software.
In the last several years, we have developed a CRM suite for Sales, Service, and Marketing that is built in digital process automation technology. It gives our customers an out-of-the-box application for service and has the power to execute effectively on the environments they want to, whether that is a Pega Cloud we service for our clients or a private cloud they might use in the future.
High: Pegasystems operates in a thriving field. How do you differentiate your organization?
09/11/17
When Cynthia Stoddard joined Adobe as chief information officer in June of 2016, she admits she joined an information technology division that was running reasonably well. She is a good judge of such things, having been a CIO multiple times over, most recently at NetApp for over four years. At Adobe, she joined a company in the throes of transforming itself into a cloud company, and an IT department that operated as “customer zero” for the company’s products. She took the game plan that was in place and added her own aspects to the plan.
She indicates in my interview with her that the first step of the IT transformation was making back-office systems real-time, responsive and highly available. Next, she facilitated a customer-experience-centric strategy for IT. A major component of that was leveraging the seven characteristics of the cloud. She explains all of the above while reflecting on her own career in IT, and the steps she has taken to encourage other women to walk in her footsteps, among other topics covered.
Peter High: You have been the CIO for about a year at Adobe, an organization that has been transforming itself into a cloud business. Please provide a brief overview of this journey and the role IT plays.
Cynthia Stoddard: Adobe began the transition to software as a service, away from box software, a number of years ago. It has been a successful transformation and we continue to be leaders in the market. We have three clouds: Document Cloud, Creative Cloud, and Experience Cloud. I am proud to be a part of the organization and to have a great IT team that enables the business, the organization’s journey, and the tremendous amount of growth Adobe has achieved. Since IT was solid when I joined the organization, I have been able to focus my strategy on the future.
Adobe did a fantastic job when they moved from box software to software as a service. When you enter the real-time online software as a service world, all of the back-office systems that were previously hidden, are exposed to the world.
High: How did the Adobe IT team manage that?
