by Peter High, published on Forbes
1-18-2016
Perhaps nothing signaled the arrival of artificial intelligence quite like January 14, 2011, when IBM Watson defeated two legendary Jeopardy! champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. At last, the computers were smarter than us. Since then, Watson has developed into a growth engine for IBM.
For just over two years, Michael Rhodin has led IBM Watson, having come to that role after a four year stint as the head of the Software Solutions Group at the company. IBM has already found applications for Watson across seventeen industries in over thirty five countries, but as Rhodin notes in this interview, the company is just getting started.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the third article in a series on leaders in artificial intelligence. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Many people will remember that Watson was developed initially to compete on Jeopardy! versus two of the biggest Jeopardy!champions of all time, and it won a million-dollar prize in the process. Then a bit more than a year ago, IBM made the decision to create a business called the IBM Watson Group, which you now lead. The company invested a billion dollars (quite a bit more than the winnings from Jeopardy!) to get the business off the ground. Was there always a desire to turn Watson into a business line?
Mike Rhodin: If you look at what we were trying to do, this was an IBM Research Grand Challenge going after– from a technology viewpoint– something in the AI world that was known as the “open domain deep Q&A problem”. It was a problem that was originally postulated based on a comment by [John] von Neumann in the late 1940′s. At that point in time, after his architecture became the basis for modern computing (the binary system that all computers today are built on), he made a comment in the late ‘40s that said someday computers will be able to answer any question. For the next sixty years, computer scientists were trying to figure out how to do what he said, which is how to build a system that could answer questions on a broad base of domain knowledge. That was the real impetus for the Watson system coming out of IBM Research.
Along the way, we decided that it was going to be necessary to have a proof point that you could answer questions in an open domain. The Jeopardy!quiz show ended up being a great example of something that had a broad topic base, lots of different types of questions, tricks, use of natural language in interesting ways, and it became a great demonstration of the technology and the breakthroughs that the IBM Research team made. So that was what led up to Jeopardy! in the first place.
After the Jeopardy! match, we were thrilled with the outcome. It was not a foregone conclusion. With any of the probabilistic systems, there is a level of chance in everything, but we knew we had a system that we thought would show well in the game show. We were pleased to be able to come out with a win against two incredibly smart leading champions of the game.
We started a period of what I would consider in-market experimentation for the two years after the Jeopardy! match. We started working with a handful of companies that had approached us that wanted to start to experiment with the technology–not to play Jeopardy!, but to use the underlying technology to start to solve problems. The preponderance of them were in the healthcare field. Industry luminaries like Memorial Sloan-Kettering or MD Anderson in cancer, or in general medicine, the Cleveland Clinic. They all started partnering with us to explore how we could take what was inside the Jeopardy! system and morph it into things that could be used in the healthcare profession. We did that for a couple years, and that gave us the confidence that led to the announcement in 2014 of the commercialization project and Watson Group.
When you think about what a doctor does every day, they gather evidence about a patient, they use that evidence to build a level of confidence in a set of hypotheses that could lead to a diagnosis, and then they make a treatment based on that. They were looking for systems that could start to help them with a particular problem that has occurred in the healthcare industry, that is, the amount of information being produced: the amount of new research and publications has outstripped the ability of doctors to keep up. In 2015 alone, we will produce something around seven hundred thousand new reference documents in medicine. I am pretty sure most doctors do not have time to read all of them. They are focused on how we could start to use what we demonstrated in the Jeopardy! match in the pursuit of helping them understand all of the information that is being published in their profession, and how to do it in a way that could help them create better outcomes for their patients. That was one of the first clues that the AI world was ready to be woken up– we have been a little bit dormant for decades — and that the systems were ready to start to move into prime time.
That was how we got to the launch last year. It became a pretty big point for us because we had decided that not only could this technology be used in health care, which we still believe is a huge opportunity, but we also recognize that it had applicability across pretty much any industry we could see. The way we thought of it was that any profession within any industry where the amount of information being produced has surpassed the ability of the humans in those professions to consume it. That is a lot of professions these days with the amount of information being produced. That part became pretty clear to us.
The second thing that was a key decision about the launch of the commercial project was the creation of an open ecosystem: we would open up the APIs on platforms so that startups could get access to the technology and start to build out businesses on top of it. When we launched the Watson Group we had our early adopter customers that we had been working with, but we also had a small number of startups that we had exposed to the technology in advance of the launch so that they could be ready to stand up with us and talk about we were doing. Since then, the ecosystem project has taken off. We have hundreds of companies building on the platform, over one hundred now in-market with commercial solutions. Another four hundred or so are under development behind that, and they will be coming out over the next year or so. That part is taking off as well.
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12-21-2015
CenturyLink’s Chief Information Officer Bill Bradley has been with the $18 billion company through predecessor organizations for more than 30 years. In that time, he has been a part of a technology organization that has gone from a support organization to a driver of innovation and digital transformation. Part of the change has been driven through job rotations, having non-IT employees spend time in IT and vice versa. IT has also championed agile development, engaging end users of technology early and often, validating value along the way. In a company that has grown dramatically through acquisition, Bradley’s organization is often one of the first to get involved when a company is acquired. In this interview, he describes a significant cultural transformation that he has led, and he describes specific innovations that have been developed.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. To read future interviews like this one, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: I thought we would begin with your company, CenturyLink. Could you take a moment to describe the business?
Bill Bradley: We are a traditional network provider at our core, but we are much more than that. We offer video services, and voice services. Cloud and managed hosting are services that we recently added to our portfolio. Even more recently, we bought an analytics company, which will expand our IT services offering that has been in place for a little while. We operate both in the U.S. and internationally.
High: How would you describe your role in the organization?
Bradley: My responsibilities include all of the internal IT systems and platforms, and many of the business processes are encapsulated in those systems. We have grown by acquisition, so we have a significant number of systems that we use to support our business. We work to rationalize those over time. I also have a business leadership role with the rest of the CEO’s direct reports, which is involved in setting the strategic vision of the company.
12-8-2015
Brian Lesser is the CEO of Xaxis, a billion dollar division within $16 billion WPP, a British multinational advertising and public relations company. Lesser has reached this revenue hurdle in less than five years, which has positioned Xaxis among the largest global digital media platforms. The company programmatically connects advertisers and publishers to audiences across all addressable channels. The company’s mission is to “make advertising welcome.” As Lesser notes, this involves advertising reaching the right customer at the right point in a transaction through the right medium with a compelling message. This is easier said than done, but the key to successfully execute this involves better leveraging data and technology.
Lesser highlights the many advantages and the challenges of starting a business within a much larger enterprise as opposed to doing so as a more traditional, venture-backed organization. It has required some cultural changes, but he has been blessed with a CEO who is progressive enough to understand that digital transformation that is necessary. As a result of Lesser’s success, in January he will be promoted to become North American CEO of WPP’s advertising media company, GroupM. This appears to be an acknowledgement that the things Lesser has done well at Xaxis should be embedded more broadly in the company as a whole.
Peter High: Brian, Xaxis is the biggest programmatic media company representing the demand side of the advertising marketplace. Please provide an overview of the business.
Brian Lesser: We started Xaxis about five years ago and the mission was to use data and technology to help advertisers reach and engage with their audiences across all channels and devices. Xaxis is a company that helps advertisers effectively engage with their audiences through the programmatic buying of media. What that means is that we can collect anonymous information about a consumer’s browsing behaviors – what content they like to read, what products they are shopping for, what ads they typically engage with. We gather that information and we build up profiles of users. Once we have those profiles, it means we can go into a marketplace for advertising impressions and enact those profiles in real time. When we see a user in one of these marketplaces or within inventory that we have forward traded or inventory that we own, we can evaluate how valuable that user is to one of our clients and then serve them an advertising impression—whether that be a banner ad, or a video ad, or a social media ad—in real time.
What programmatic advertising allows us to do is disconnect the audience from the context. In traditional media buying, you would define an audience based on the context they are in. So if I am looking for sports fans, I am going to buy sports programming on television or sports websites. Now, because I know so much about the user, I can disconnect that and I can serve relevant advertising to an audience wherever they may be regardless of the context that they are in. Today it is almost a $1 billion revenue business. We have 1,100 people around the world and over 2,000 clients that we service.
High: I was fascinated to learn that a mission of the organization is to make advertising welcome. How does one accomplish that?
Lesser: We fundamentally believe that technology and data can, over time, improve advertising—not just how ads are targeted to a person, but we think that, in general, people do not like interruptive advertising. But in many cases they are very happy to watch a 30 second television commercial if it is a beautiful piece of film and it is engaging and it is for a brand they are interested in. We think that using data and technology we can actually make advertising better for consumers and make advertising welcome for consumers. Because good advertising ceases to become an interruptive message and, in fact, becomes a relevant piece of content.
11-16-15
Sophie Vandebroek has been with Xerox for 25 years, and in that time has seen tremendous change. The one-time elite brand went through a period in the woods, so to speak, and now Sophie (among others) have helped the company return to its innovative roots. As company’s chief technology officer, and as the President of Xerox Innovation Group, she has put a lot of thought both into what has made the company special at its core and from its founding, while incorporating in new methods such as developing “dreaming sessions” in which Xerox employees and customers dream up new ideas without the constraints of what is possible today. She also indicates that innovators must have fun at work, as well as leading balanced lives.
Vandebroek is also one of several examples of female executives. It continues to be rare in technology companies to have CTOs and innovation heads who are women. Vandebroek has spearheaded diversity programs at the company, and she has employed a variety of creative methods to ensure that female technical leaders continue to be found and groomed for leadership. She discusses all the above and more herein.
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Peter High: You are the Chief Technology Officer of Xerox, as well as the President of the Xerox Innovation Group. Please provide a breakdown between the two sets of responsibilities you have.
Sophie Vandebroek: They are very complementary. As you might know, Xerox is a global corporation with 140,000 employees across the world. We are the largest corporation in business process services and document management services. About 60 percent of our revenue comes from business process outsourcing services in areas like healthcare, transportation, financial services, education, etc. 40 percent comes from our traditional printing, imaging, and publishing business, which continues to do very well.
In my role as Chief Technology Officer, I partner with the business group presidents, and with our CEO and senior team to constantly predict disruptive changes that will impact our clients. I help make sure that, as a business, we are positioned to provide the services to our clients that they need to successfully provide services to end users. As part of that, we look at the trends and define the investment portfolio together with our joint venture partner, Fuji Xerox, which is now more than fifty years old. We invest over a billion dollars in research, development, and engineering. We determine the right investment portfolio, what the right strategy is, and how to execute.
As the head of the Xerox Innovation Group, we have people that not only know what disruptive changes are coming, but they also create those new waves, whether that is in computing, machine learning, or the Internet of Everything. Within the labs around the globe, we envision the future together with our clients. We do a lot of co-innovation and co-creation to envision the future and make it a reality for our clients, the world, and our business. Those are the two roles.
High: You talked a bit about the creation of the strategy, as well as the interaction with customers, which are essential to developing the insights as to where innovation will be focused. Can you talk about some of those strategies and some of the things you briefly touched on – computing, the Internet of everything, and machine learning?
11-2-15
Vanguard is an investment management company with more than $3 trillion in assets. It is the largest provider of mutual funds in the world. It is a company that believes in developing breadth and depth in its leaders, and as such, potential executives are likely to do “tours of duty” of sorts in multiple parts of the enterprise in order to get a better sense of all that the company does for individual and institutional investors. IT is no different. In fact, multiple executives outside of IT once held the chief information officer role.
The incumbent, John Marcante, has been the CIO since 2012. As someone who has held leadership roles outside of IT during his 22 years with the company, he thinks about IT in some non-traditional ways. He believes that CIOs have to have technology acumen as a foundation, but that they also need to have business acumen. There is no replacement for having spent time in the business and for interacting with customers. Lastly, he says that CIOs need to build a leadership competency centered on the ability to influence the leadership team through strong analysis and clear communications. He believes that these three competencies need to be shared by leaders of other functions, including the need to be technology savvy, as technology becomes more pervasive in all industries.
In this interview, Marcante describes his own career journey, the way in which he thinks about the value that IT can create, the ways in which he benchmarks start-ups for new ideas and methods, the methods he has used to gain insights from customers, the methods he uses in ensuring that his IT staff (who are also customers of Vanguard) leverage their insights as customers to make IT better, and a variety of other topics.
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Peter High: You are the Chief Information Officer of Vanguard, and in that role you oversee technology to serve clients and manage investments. Can you take a moment to talk about how you work with your colleagues and customers to develop ideas in both of those categories?
John Marcante: The answer to that varies a little bit by business line at Vanguard. We have a long history of getting technology ideas from our Institutional clients – most of the clients that we manage 401(k) plans for, for example. If I remember correctly, in the early ‘90s, the idea for the creation of our first website came from a prospective Institutional client. Today, our tech clients, especially in the Institutional area, like to partner with us on the technology front. This allows us to gain their input, leading to things like custom analytics and data visualization tools. As an example, we just rolled out a new plan manager (My Plan Manager) for our Institutional customers. Getting that feedback, understanding what plan sponsors really want to see, and bringing technology to the forefront is a partnership with our clients. It is a lot less of a service provider mentality. I think the dynamics of the world are changing. It is much more of a true partnership.
On the Retail side, we have millions of clients, so it is more difficult to partner. I think, traditionally, we used to use focus groups, where we could get people in, track eyeballs, create heat maps for our websites, and even solicit feedback from clients by creating virtual labs and having early adopters join those labs to look at their own data. Today, it is much different, with the introduction of big data and the introduction of “continuous delivery.” Today, technology allows our business to have a hypothesis, create a test, experiment with multiple clients seeing multiple experiences, and quickly implement one of those experiences that produces the best business outcome or client experience. Today with data analytics and continuous delivery, we can test, fail, fail fast, fail cheap, learn, and iterate to the best design. That is where we are at on the retail side.
High: What traits do you believe CIOs need in order to be successful today?
10-27-15
Timothy Kasbe has been a chief information officer at three major companies, Reliance Industries, Sears, and Intrexon. For the past three and a half years, he has been the Chief Operating Officer of Gloria Jeans, a Russian retailer that is among the fastest growing retailers in the world. Kasbe credits his rise to being a business leader first and a technologist second. He also spent a decade as a consultant to the retail industry, and as such advised executives across the industry. He believes that CIOs who are oriented as he is will increasingly find opportunities to rise to the role of COO among others.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 26th article in the Beyond CIO series. To read past interviews with executives from American Express, Biogen, BMO Financial Group, and Allstate, among others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above and to the left.)
Peter High: For those who might not be familiar with it, please provide an overview of Gloria Jeans.
Timothy Kasbe: Gloria Jeans is an apparel retailer based in Russia. We operate over seven hundred stores in eleven time zones of Russia and the Ukraine. Until the recent geopolitical turmoil that is unfolding in our backyard, we had enjoyed solid growth. We are among the fastest growing apparel retailer in the world with 56.4 percent CAGR for the preceding five years. To sustain this growth, we have our own production and we import garments from around the world. We market to all ages and sexes across the fashion spectrum. In Russia, especially, we are number one in the kids and ladies jean segment. It is an exciting company with constant change of the fashion trends and tastes of our customers.
In my role, I have responsibility of technology, supply chain, company strategy, and global expansion of our business. In a role like this, there are no strict boundary lines, as such. At times, I have led HR and recruiting and, last spring, some of our ad campaign. I had a major role to play in that, including writing some lyrics to songs, for instance. It is a matter of taking care of business, no matter what a given trading day throws at you. That is how I would explain my role.
High: That sounds exciting and far-reaching. Can you talk a bit about your strategic priorities for the foreseeable future? What is on your roadmap?
Kasbe: Winston Churchill once said “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Our strategic priority right now is to make sure that this crisis that we are going through is not wasted. We are taking care of all the internal operations and fine-tuning business practices based on some deep learnings which we are gaining, both through the slowdown as well as through some technology that we have been able to afford to get those insights. The constant refining of our business operations is a key priority while we are enjoying such a crisis.
The other part is hedging the risks of where we operate. Our definite priority is to expand in other countries. We have stores opening in Georgia and other places in a couple weeks. A lot of our competition is vanishing, but we keep sharp focus on both our operations and our profit engineering. That is a strategic priority for us. At the same time, we make fashion affordable to all segments of Russia. We look to the next three or five years, when the boom returns to the country, to be ready with the capability and the capacity we need for the product, talent, supply chain, etc. Those are our priorities right now.
Peter High
10-21-2015
Excerpt from the Article:
NES Rentals is in the business of renting aerial lifts and related high-reach equipment to companies in the commercial and industrial construction businesses. The company is a privately held midsize company with revenues of about $400 million, 1,200 employees and 75 branches operating in the Gulf Coast, South, Southeast, Midwest and the Northeast. NES Rentals buys equipment from OEMs and sells its used equipment at auction every four to five years in order to keep its equipment fresh. The company maintains its own equipment at the branches or dispatches mechanics to job sites to attend to breakdowns.
Ananda Rakhit has been CIO at NES Rentals for more than nine years, after having served as an IT leader at ADP and United Airlines, among other companies. In this interview with CIO Insight contributor Peter High, he shares what he’s learned across his long tenure in IT, his focus on predictive analytics and managing a large, virtual workforce.
CIO Insight: What are some examples of strategic imperatives you are driving for the foreseeable future?
Ananda Rakhit: Pricing, equipment allocation, predictive analytics for maintenance and security of our systems are strategic initiatives for NES IT. After two years of painstaking work, the pricing system has now entered a continuous improvement phase.
The ecosystem for price setting at NES is extensive. A sophisticated analytical engine based on statistical and operations research techniques is at the heart of the system. Past company data including seasonality and industry forecasts are combined with latest data gathered from the field. Utilization data is collected daily by scanning bar codes on each piece of equipment at delivery and pickup. Price sensitivity data is gathered daily via inputs from field sales via a smartphone app. A forecasting model and an optimization model generate prices by branch and by equipment category which are delivered to sales via desktops and iPads. Every morning a newly calculated set of rates based on the latest information shows up in a pricing app to guide sales.
Equipment allocation is another strategic problem we are working on to go beyond spreadsheet analysis. In a nutshell, this problem entails buying the right mix of equipment, allocating them to the branches where it will deliver most to the bottom line, moving them from one branch to another as demand patterns change and identifying the equipment to send to auction. While some modules, such as demand forecasts are common, the mathematical model is more complex than pricing. A decision support system can allow the user to carry out repeated runs by changing input parameters.
We are in the early stages of predictive analytics for maintenance. We are looking at data on mean time between failures of various parts and exploring how we can gather engine performance data via GPS devices. We hope to build a statistical model that could enable our mechanics to make proactive repairs at customer sites before the equipment breaks and customers have to call us. Customer service benefits are obvious but, in addition, managing repairs on a systematic basis instead on-demand basis, would save maintenance dollars.
We have put a large focus to ensure our systems are secure from external threats as well as we have adequate disaster recovery solutions in place. We have upgraded our backup and data retention systems and procedures and are now working towards rapidly recovering our business-critical systems from failure to minimize business impact. We are also developing clear incident response procedures and shielding our systems from potential attacks and breaches which include implementation of secure coding practices
To read the full article, please visit CIO Insight
10-19-15
Like many executives at Procter & Gamble, Linda Clement-Holmes has had a wide array of responsibilities at the $76 billion Cincinnati, Ohio-based consumer packaged goods company. She has been the chief diversity officer, the senior vice president of global business services, and the global information & decision solutions officer. This is emblematic of the way in which P&G thinks about talent management. Once a rising star has been identified, provide them both depth and breadth of experience. When Clement-Holmes became CIO, she had been groomed for years for this post, and came to it with a much deeper understanding of how value is created within her enterprise than most new CIOs.
Clement-Holmes managed a rare feat for a new CIO, as well, as she was already a board member of a multi-billion dollar public company, Cincinnati Financial Corporation,before she became chief information officer. For those who might wish to follow in her footsteps, she attributes not only the diversity of her experiences within P&G, but also her willingness to spend time on non-profit boards in preparing her for her for-profit board experience. Clement-Holmes goes on to describe the substance of her first IT strategy as CIO, the methods she has used to encourage future female leaders in IT and beyond, and the technology trends that particularly excite her.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 15th interview in the Board-Level CIO series. To read interviews with past interviewees, please visit this link. This is also the 29th interview in the CIO’s First 100 Days series. To read interviews with past interviewees, please visit this link. To read future articles in either series, please click the “Follow” link above and to the left.)
Peter High: You were groomed for this role for some time, and your ascension in many ways is a sign of great continuity between your predecessor and yourself. You had been part of the leadership team that formulated IT strategy before you were CIO, just as you now lead a team doing the same. Given the lead time you have had, how did you use the time to prepare for this role?
Linda Clement-Holmes: I had a great mentor in Filippo [Passerini], who did a great job. Like you said, it was not a case where I came in behind somebody who was asked to leave and so forth. He had been CIO for well over ten years. It was much more about understanding more about what we needed to do going forward, and how to lead an organization or an IT function of IT professionals in a way that keeps us moving and relevant as we had been the last ten years.
At P&G because we promote from within, it is not abnormal to have what happened to me happen to anybody because we have a process of senior leadership looking at a regular review of succession planning that includes everything from whether we have a diverse pipeline, and whether our leaders have the right experiences that we need them to have going forward. They do that in conjunction with looking for where the business as the whole needs to go. They do that constantly. It is not a one-time thing. That is what happens when you have a “promote from within” type company.
Every now and then, we may have a specific unique set of skills needed that are in short supply. For example, I just hired our Chief Information Security Officer from the outside because the world changed so much in the last two years when it comes to cyber security. Those skills are not ones that we naturally have internally and have grown up with. In a case like that, we went outside and hired our Vice President for that. Our two legal officers were the same thing. We needed people with specific types of experiences. We will do that when necessary, but for the most part we try to groom and grow our leadership from within the P&G pipeline of talent because we have such strong talent to begin with.
High: The succession planning process involves a lot of grooming, and rounding out one’s skill set before they ascend to new leadership roles. What was the process like for you, and how has it translated to the leaders who are currently targeted for future leadership roles?
9-28-15
Mike Capone is the chief operating officer of the largest technology company founded in New York by market capitalization – Medidata Solutions, which is a $400 million revenue company that provides cloud-based solutions for life sciences companies. Though new to the industry when he joined the company a year ago, he joined with a deep background in technology, having been the first ever Global CIO of ADP, in product development, having run that function at the global human capital management company. He also has a passion for health issues both personally and professionally, both of which led him to Medidata Solutions, where, as he notes in this interview, he felt he could change the world. This opportunity also put him squarely in the middle of the growing technology scene in New York City.
(This is the 25th article in the “Beyond CIO” series. To read past interviews with executives at Biogen, American Express, Marsh & McLennan, Aetna, Allstate, and Waste Management, please click this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above and to the left.)
Peter High: Please describe Medidata Solutions’ business.
Mike Capone: Medidata Solutions is the world’s leading provider of cloud software for clinical trials. More than half the clinical trials in the world are powered by Medidata’s platform today.The whole value proposition for Medidata is that we make clinical trials run better.
In today’s world, as you can imagine, there are diseases waiting for cures. There are people with rare diseases who really do not have a lot of hope unless we can come up with new compounds and solutions to help cure these diseases. We help biotech companies and pharmaceutical companies bring drugs to market faster, ensure their trials are run the correct way, and provide for a solution to help them get better submissions to the FDA so there are no data quality problems with things that could derail it.
Conversely, we actually help bad drugs fail faster. You do not want to keep making investments in compounds that are not going to make it. Our technology helps pharmaceutical companies get better insight into how their drugs perform in a trial and make faster decisions.
High: Can you talk about the role that information and data analytics play in all of this?
Capone: Like most companies, we started out as a transaction company, a data capture for clinical trials. We made a horrible paper process a lot better. As the technology has gotten better, as our platform has picked up more clients and we have gotten more and more information, we have transformed into much more of an analytics company. So now, not only are we able to help facilitate clinical trials by making sure that all of the data capture and all of the technology is there to make the trial run smoothly. Now we are able to build out analytics to actually support better decision making in trials, as well as benchmark.
08-18-2015
The Georgia Technology Authority (GTA) manages the delivery of IT infrastructure and managed network services to 1,300 state and local government entities across the state of Georgia. GTA promotes an enterprise approach to managing technology services by establishing statewide policies, standards and guidelines based on industry best practices and federal requirements. GTA develops and manages the state’s official website, which provides information and services from more than 115 state agencies and links to city and county government Websites.
Dean Johnson is the Chief Operating Officer for the GTA. Johnson has co-led the move to privatize infrastructure and managed network services for the state of Georgia since 2008. He is currently leading an effort to evolve the current operating and service delivery models to take full advantage of the strong foundation built over the past six years and apply lessons learned along with today’s industry best practices in outsourcing. CIO Insight contributor Peter High discusses with Johnson how he helped save the state $181 million, how he assisted in laying the groundwork for privatizing certain IT services and his take on big data initiatives.
CIO Insight: How do you work with the CIOs in various jurisdictions across the state?
Dean Johnson: GTA has established several councils and forums, structured specifically to invite CIOs’ input, engage in discussion about solutions and offer information about available services. We meet regularly with agency CIOs and have found that building and maintaining positive working relationships with the customers we serve and understanding their business needs to be one of the keys to our success.
CIO Insight: You also helped spearhead the creation of Georgia Enterprise Technology Services, saving the state $181 million in the process. What was the idea behind this?
Johnson: A comprehensive assessment by an independent third party in 2007 documented alarming shortcomings in the state’s ability to comply with IT best practices, refresh aging equipment and software, and address growing threats from hackers and cyber-criminals. In addition, GTA and other state agencies found themselves unable to compete with the private sector in recruiting and retaining knowledgeable and experienced technicians. The third-party assessment recommended outsourcing daily operations to private-sector service providers.
GTA went to the market in 2008 to source IT infrastructure services and managed network services on behalf of the state of Georgia. The Georgia Enterprise Technology Services (GETS) program sought to transform the state’s IT operations into a modern day, well-run IT enterprise by turning to private-sector leaders in technology service delivery.
To read the remainder of the article, please visit CIO Insight
