Peter High
08-10-2015
Excerpt from the Article:
The mission of Word & Brown is to simplify access to better health insurance choices. Privately held for 30 years by entrepreneurs John Word and Rusty Brown, the organization connects businesses to industry-leading solutions in every area of health insurance and employee benefits.
When Allen Fazio joined the company in May of 2014, as Fazio tells CIO Insight contributor, Peter High, the team had a lot of talent, but it was not a high performing team. He embarked on a major transformation that continues today, and Fazio has helped technology bring value to the enterprise.
CIO Insight: What role does IT play in driving Word & Brown’s business?
Allen Fazio: As with many successful 30-year-old organizations, at The Word & Brown Companies, IT plays a critical role on several fronts: transforming current operations by providing technology solutions to streamline operations, move traditional products and services to a Web/mobile consumption model, and manage higher transaction volume at marginal cost; modernizing the legacy systems that have been the backbone to the success of the business; reducing technology operating costs; and leveraging the technology portfolio to gain greater levels of value from technology assets.
CIO Insight: You are not a “back-office only” CIO. Across your career, you have focused on delivering customer-facing technologies, as well as helping to run the operation of the company. How have you inspired your teams to follow your lead to become more cognizant of customer needs?
To read the remainder of the article, please visit CIO Insight
by Peter High, published on Forbes
8-04-15
DNA sequencing has been an area of focus of many of the biggest brains in science for multiple decades. The National Institutes of Health, among others, invested billions of dollars in this area of scientific discovery. As a result, the first genome – DNA – has become less mysterious and better understood. The importance of the second genome, which is the bacteria that each of us has throughout our bodies is less well publicized, but a growing number of companies have chosen this as a domain of focus as the impact of the microbiome (the term that describes the trillions of bacteria each of us has in and on our bodies) on our health becomes clearer.
A leader in this growing field is a Bay Area-based company called Second Genome, suitably enough. Peter DiLaura is the CEO of the company. In this interview, DiLaura, who is a veteran in the healthcare space, defines the microbiome, its impact on our health, how issues with it can lead to disease, and the mission of his company to help develop cures for those diseases. DiLaura and his team are leveraging data science combined with traditional science in order to develop remedies. As he notes, the key to such discovery is to create an environment where people with various areas of expertise (hard science, computer science, data science, traditional business, etc.) can come together to more rapidly develop effective remedies.
Peter High: Could you define the microbiome, as it is a term gaining some traction, but is still quite foreign to most people, just as it is essential for all people?
Peter DiLaura: The microbiome is the term that is used to describe the estimated 100 trillion bacteria that we have living in and on our bodies. We now understand that nearly every biological system in our body is in some way influenced by this bacterial community. It represents three to five pounds of our mass. The hundred trillion bacteria is a huge community that is a connective tissue on most surfaces of our body: It includes our skin; it includes our airway; and it includes our gastrointestinal system, among others.
What we now appreciate is that this bacterial community plays an important part in regulating our health: the way we deal with infections, the way we process our nutrition, the way our immune system develops. We have been conditioned to think of bacteria as bad for us, we think about it in a pathogenic way. For many of us, thinking about a hundred trillion bacteria living in our bodies kind of grosses us out. We generally have been focused on antibacterial wipes and taking antibiotics and getting rid of bacteria, but we now are beginning to realize that our bacterial community, our microbiome, plays a critical role in our health and wellness.
We are essentially (although probably not completely) sterile in utero, and we are colonized by bacteria when we travel through the vaginal canal. And then our nutritional sources give us another bacterial community, and our contact with people and the environment around us further develops this bacterial community. Over the course of our first three or four years of our lives, we build this ecology that is a part of our bodies. This is a developmental path that has evolved with us since the dawn of humanity. We require our microbiome to survive, and it is essential for our health.
However, if you take the roughly last 70 years of Western society, we have changed the way that we are colonized. Kids delivered via C-section have a different bacterial community than those delivered vaginally. We have also changed our nutritional sources: breast-fed infants have a different microbiome than formula-fed infants, and a high fat diet produces a different microbiome than a low fat diet. When you take antibiotics, which we do all the time both through medicine and through our food supply, there is a huge impact on the microbiome. We are just now discovering that these changes are having a pretty profound effect on our health and wellness.
High: How much overlap is there between any two individuals microbiome? Is it above 50 percent? Is it below? How diverse would you say the individual microbiome is from individual to individual?
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
06-03-2015
Excerpt from the Article: The Advisory Board Company is a leading provider of insight-driven technology, research and services to more than 230,000 leaders at 5,200 member organizations across health care and higher education. Dan Holohan joined the company nearly three and a half years ago to oversee the Enterprise Technologies organization while setting direction for member-facing product technologies, enterprise data management and the implementation of social, mobile and collaboration solutions to help the firm’s predominantly Millennial workforce work smarter, faster and better. He has led the introduction of employee productivity, business unit and corporate shared application services and infrastructure. Holohan discusses his passion for IT and how he approaches his work with CIO Insight contributor Peter High.
CIO Insight: Dan, when you joined The Advisory Board Company roughly three years and a half years ago, you inherited a relatively small team in need of development and a portfolio of processes and technologies in need of modernization. What were the first things you addressed and why?
Dan Holohan: After I joined, my early assessment revolved around three primary areas: the capability of our internal network, the management of our data and the delivery of internal software.
My initial focus was to ensure that internal traffic flowed reliably and external Internet bandwidth was robust, redundant and fast. Within the first 90 days, the entire DC office network was completely replaced including the core backbone, all switches and wireless access points which, for the ensuing three years, has resulted in eliminating the serious service interruptions that the firm was used to experiencing.
Next, I noticed the emphasis that was being placed on managing the complex datasets and data flows that were being used by our internal tools and member facing products. I created a new group, Enterprise Data Management (EDM), charged with maintaining the quality, reliability and integrity of firmwide data and data technology platforms.
Lastly, internal stakeholders were dependent on our development team for providing solutions which kept the workforce productive and engaged. The challenge was prioritizing the intake and making sure that we were working on the most important things. I was able to convince six of the most senior leaders in the firm that we needed their input and the Prioritization Steering Committee was born. As a result, investments were made on this development team and we delivered a plethora of upgrades and enhancements in support of our growing business including cloud-based tools for HR, Finance and Member Support functions. One notable achievement was delivering the “360 Degree View of the Member” where nine disparate client systems were migrated to our Salesforce platform enabling staff to interact with all aspects of the member relationship from one place. My development team won the “2013 Breaking the Mold Award” at Dreamforce for their innovative uses of the Salesforce platform.
6-1-2015
Serge Leduc has been the chief information officer of Canadian National Railway for roughly a year and a half. In that time, he has engaged in a transformation of the function, and has facilitated the implementation of the technology to enable the Internet of Things at the railway. This is one of several changes he is enacting that he discusses in the interview below that describe how he and his team are making the railway more reliable and safer.
Among other insights of note, he highlights his time as a consultant to developing an analytical mindset and problem solver’s mentality. He has attempted to instill this same thinking in his team.
(To listen to an unabridged version of this interview, please click this link. This 22nd article in the CIO’s First 100 Days series. To read the prior 21, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Serge, please describe your role and your plans for the foreseeable future at Canadian National.
Serge Leduc: As CIO I am responsible for IT operations of the company. This is a 24-by-7 operation because CN is not a passenger transport, it’s just freight. We have a network across North America, covering Canada from East to West, and covering the United States from North to South. We are moving $250 billion worth of goods across North America, and our operations rely heavily on information systems for the back-office operation, as well as the front-office functions including the Internet of Things. CN has invested in technology over the years to make sure that we have a safe operation. There has been a lot of investment in business intelligence, operational systems, and investment to support our growth. Our business model has evolved significantly over the years, moving to a greater customer service focus in order to improve the first and last line of our operations. A lot of investment has been made in our company in order to support this.
High: You mentioned the network you have put together across Canada and within the US. That network must include various trucking companies for the first mile and last mile, some of whom are also competitors of yours – a bit of “coopetition” that is inherent to your industry. As you think about the systems integration and the data integration that is necessary to make sure that you are serving customers well, it seems like quite a complex web in order to get that right. Can you talk a bit about your approach to sorting out the tracking of goods and ensuring that the data is shared across this ecosystem that you’ve built?
Leduc: That’s a very good question. The company has invested a lot in real-time tracking systems in order to track where our locomotives are, and the overall state of the network. Now we’re trying to extend that to our entire mode of business, including our partners in the trucking business. All the investment over the last 20 to 25 years in the industry targeted the rail portion of the business, but now with the growth that we are seeing in inter-modal and supply chain solutions, which include all the services that we can provide to our customers in order to have an end-to-end service offering, we will need to invest even more in that space in order to cover the full integration of the services that we are providing to our customers.
05-04-15
Kroger Chief Information Officer Chris Hjelm has led IT at a number of leading companies such as FedEx, eBay, and Cendant prior to joining the $108 billion business, operating food retail and drug stores, multi-department stores, jewelry stores, and convenience stores nearly ten years ago. Not content to lead a mere support organization, Hjelm has always thought about the strategic use of technology, and has long been a contributor to top and bottom-line gains to the enterprises of which he has been a part.
For example, Hjelm has instituted a research and development-type function within Kroger IT to investigate new innovations. Examples include investments in locationing technology that help the company ensure enough people are at the cash register before a rush of people have arrived to check-out, and digital shelf signage that help associates and customers more readily find what they seek. He also encourages his team to think like customers as they shop for groceries.
It is no wonder that Hjelm has been asked to join a number of boards in his time, as other companies seek to have him bring the same creative thinking to their companies. In the process, he has forged a path that a variety of others should seek to follow.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This article is part of my series on board-level CIO series. To listen to the prior articles featuring the CIOs of companies like FedEx, Cardinal Health, The World Bank Group, and Southwest Airlines, among others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: You’re the Vice President and Chief Information Officer for the Kroger Company. Please talk about your role at the company.
Chris Hjelm: From the CIO perspective, it has everything to do with technology at Kroger, so that’s everything from technology in our stores, to the systems that run the business, as well as the corporate office and other divisions around the company. The simple thing about Kroger is that, versus some other places I’ve worked, it’s a US company. So we have pretty much everything here in the US market, which makes life a lot easier than traveling the globe, as I’ve done before.
4-20-2015
Rob Carter is on the short list of the finest CIOs in history anywhere. I have profiled his accomplishments in an interview published roughly one year ago. A few months ago, Carter spoke at the Forbes CIO conference with his CEO, FedEx founder Fred Smith. First, it was readily apparent how much Smith values Carter’s opinion, indicating that no strategic decisions are ever made without Carter involved. I was also particularly struck by Carter’s overview of the IT transformation that he has led. As he said then, and as he describes in greater detail in this interview with him, the systems that were at the core of FedEx’s success in recent years in becoming and maintaining its position as a logistics and data analytics leader would not be the same ones that would sustain its success. In fact, as Carter notes, the longer the organization waited to transform, the more those systems would actually impede its success.
Carter graciously agreed to dive into greater detail in describing the transformation, and what he describes as the “Four Horsemen of Dominant Design.” At the heart of this transformation would be a cloud-first strategy. Carter readily admits that this is a decade-long journey that they are roughly in the middle of, but the results so far have already proven the value of simplifying in the ways described herein.
Peter High: You have mentioned that it dawned on you a couple of years ago that the technology that helped FedEx achieve success was not the technology that would help FedEx maintain that success. What led to that insight?
Rob Carter: I started at this role in 2000, and at that time the number one thing that I wanted to do for the business was to become fast and flexible at creating business value, because the world was changing. The needs of FedEx and the expectations of our customers were changing rapidly. The complexity of the system which we had deployed – which at one time was one of our most powerful assets – was becoming a challenge to agility for our business.
The reality of the modern computing era – and with a company like ours that has deployed technology over the last 40 years – is that this is the advent of the modern computer era. 40 years isn’t a long time. We’ve deployed unbelievably strategic technology over the years, but some of them were things like 800 MHz spectrum coast to coast so we could stand up radio towers and communicate with data to our vehicles. These weren’t voice communication tools; they were data communication tools. They communicated with the first generation of handheld computers.
Well, as much of a breakthrough as that was in allowing information to flow freely back so that customers could have the ability to track their packages, it clearly became a legacy that burdened us as the modern generation of connected mobile devices began to surface. One of the first ways they surfaced was with cell networks that could communicate with industrial handhelds, not just consumer devices. So that is a window into creative and strategic deployment of technology which becomes a burden over time.
When you’ve invested in an aggressive way, as FedEx has, to further the technology brand that our company is well known for, you wind up with a lot of things that market forces find a way of providing a more general solution for; and often one that is more economical, flexible, and frankly works better than those first generations of technology.
4-6-2015
Stephanie von Friedeburg is the CIO and Vice President of Information Technology Solutions at the World Bank Group. In that capacity, she has overseen a tremendous transformation of IT across the Group throughout the 186 countries in which it operates. A primary weapon in her arsenal has been better use of cloud technology. This has increased the flexibility of IT, while also enhancing the Bank’s information security around the globe.
Additionally, she has joined a small but growing group of CIOs who have been asked to join the boards of companies. In addition to being a part of the Bank-Fund Staff Federal Credit Union, von Friedeburg is on the board of Box.org. Part of the reason she has been board-ready has been the fact that she has a non-traditional background. With foreign policy degrees and an MBA from the Wharton School, von Friedeburg began her career at the Bank in non-technical roles. She has an auto-didact’s talent to learn quickly, while surrounding herself with a talented team with complementary strengths. She covers all the above and more in this interview.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the ninth article in the Board-Level CIO series. To read the prior eight articles, please click this link. This is also the 13th article in the “Leading Women in Technology Series.” To read the prior 12 articles, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: I thought we’d begin with your role as CIO and VP of Information Technology Solutions at the World Bank Group. Can you describe your responsibilities within the bank?
High: As you mentioned, you have quite a diverse set of constituents. You have employees all over the world, in places with differing quality of technology and Wi-Fi access, for instance. You even have people in Washington who travel to all over the world, as well. Can you talk about he challenges and the ways in which you facilitate collaboration and communication in such a diverse employee set?
Von Friedeburg: When I came to this job almost four years ago, we were a Lotus Notes shop. We had mobile devices that were not owned by the corporation, but were owned by individuals. There were all kinds of different smartphones where people could use smartphone applications and telephone applications, and we paid tremendous roaming costs.
We have 186 country offices, and we had servers in 186 country offices, so to put it in perspective, we have a very big WAN, a big VPN, so I might be an investment officer based in Johannesburg, and I’m going to travel to DRC, and I’m going to try to access my e-mail from that server that sits in Johannesburg. My communications goes either through Paris, Chennai or Washington, all the way back to South Africa, and then back to me. We were very antiquated. So our intention as a team was to ask, “How do we get to a point where we can give access to anyone anywhere from any device to all of the information that we have at our fingertips?” We really set about trying to do that differently and thinking about our 186 country offices, and how are they connected, and that was one of the first places we started. So, we used to spend $12 million a year on connectivity and we have upped that very substantially.
3-9-2015
Since the days of the industrial revolution, cities have been the engines of economic growth. The revolution was effective in developing prosperity for many countries, but the development was not always “smart,” sacrificing health conditions, for instance, for greater productivity.
Now with greater use of technology, a number of cities are accumulating data, delivering innovation, and enhancing lives of citizens. Juniper Research recently compiled its list of top-five “smart cities.” The author of the study, Steffen Sorrell, focuses on two “overreaching” benefits of smart cities: sustainability and efficiency. To that end, he identified five essential components of a smart city.
The people who live in cities are driven economic performers who are seeking to take advantage of technologies to further their personal and collective opportunities. Cities provide them these opportunities and in doing so draw many like-minded parties into their midst. With this drive and an increase in active participants, there are downsides. Most notably, energy consumption, waste and congestion. In this day and age people are increasingly concerned with climate change and awareness of limited resources all while demanding more efficiencies and technological development.
Citizens are not the only factors to consider in the evolution of cities into smart cities. Governmental and commercial entities are going to play increasingly important roles in development and implementation of technologies that pace the way to the smart city.
2-9-2015
Ed Robben has worked in retail for most of the last eight years. He confides that when he joined the industry after having been an IT executive at BNSF Railway, and a consultant at the Feld Group and EDS, retail seemed to be a real laggard in terms of staying on top of technology trends and opportunities. He spent nearly five and a half years at J.C. Penney, including time as the CIO there before joining Fossil Group as its CIO in June of 2012. In recent years, he has seen the influence of IT grow substantially, and as omni-channel strategies are carved out, IT has more potential value that it can contribute to the enterprise. I began our interview by asking him about innovation in the retail setting.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this, please click this link. To read more articles like this one, lease click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: How do you think about technology innovation in the retail space and how do you think about the variety of channels through which you sell?
Ed Robben: I would say that retail has been sort of a laggard in that space. I was amazed by the amount of complexity that goes into running a retail operation. In Fossil’s case, that is wholesale, retail, marketing, manufacturing—all the things we do to operate the company and deliver to our customers. With the advent of the Internet and mobile technology, it is a prerequisite for any company to develop capabilities to engage your customer and listen to them.
On the operational side of things, the analytics required to do this in a targeted and personal way is a capability that all retailers need to develop. I think retailers do a pretty good job of doing the old style of marketing, but when it comes to the Omni-channel style, the consumers end up better armed than we do in most cases. So that is a real need for any retailers doing business today.
At Fossil, given the fact that we are two-thirds wholesaler and one-third retailer, we look at this digital space to include our wholesale customer as well. Our products are found in a lot of the major department stores—a consumer may never walk into a Fossil retail location. So it is important for us to have that brand attraction and the digital capabilities to engage them in the right way. We are not where we wanted to be, but we are working hard to put the right strategies and technologies in place to enable that.
Jean-Michel Ares Moves Beyond CIO To Group Head Of Technology And Operations at BMO Financial Group by Peter High, published on Forbes 1-26-2015
Jean-Michel Ares has been the CIO of such august organizations as Coca Cola and GE Power Systems prior to assuming his current role as Group Head of Operations and Technology at BMO Financial in Toronto. His strong background makes it less of a surprise that he has moved beyond CIO. He has an advanced degree in electrical engineering and an MBA, both from McGill University in Montreal. He also spent time as a telecommunications and banking consultant at McKinsey & Company. He strongly believes that more CIOs will advance to operations leadership posts among other roles above the CIO role due to the natural tendency for those who occupy the role to be highly networked, and equally comfortable in taking on risk through the development of innovative ideas and risk mitigation, represented by investments in security, for example.
Though he is correct that more CIOs are likely to follow in his footsteps, it is no wonder that he was one of the pioneers, given his drive to push IT to be both a driver of efficiencies, but also a source of potential revenue augmentation.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit the Forum on World Class IT podcast . This is the 19th article in the Beyond CIO series. To read past interviews in the series, including beyond CIOs from HP, American Express, Aetna, Marsh & McLennan, and T.D. Ameritrade, among others, please visit To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: You are the Group Head, Technology and Operations at BMO Financial Group. Can you briefly describe your area of responsibility and the parts of the organization that report to you?
Jean-Michel Ares: I am responsible for Technology, Information Security and IT Risk, Product Operations, Sourcing and Governance, Real Estate, and our newly created Data Analytics team under a Chief Data Officer who also jointly reports to our Chief Operating Officer.
High: You are one of a growing number of particularly successful CIOs who have moved beyond that role to be responsible not only for technology but also for a broader set of capabilities. How did it occur to you and your colleagues to combine these areas of focus under a single executive?
Ares: My view is that it is about effectiveness and efficiency. If you look at a bank, technology and operations are the foundation. Essentially, the business teams will develop products – a mortgage, a loan, a card offer, a mutual fund—and technology and operations will work in partnership with these teams to create the business processes, infrastructure, and IT systems that will bring that product to market. Day to day, technology and operations supports the flow of information across these products, so having T&O together simplifies the business model. Whether it is a retail banking or a wealth management team, T&O really needs to act as one to support these teams.
The other element is that having T&O together creates a foundation that enables improvement across the bank. We are working on digitizing the bank, and when you do so you have to consider the business processes, looking at those from front-to-back or from the business to product operation, and technology and data must work together. Pulling them together, I think, gives us a sense of cohesiveness and the ability to execute effectively.
