Peter High
12-1-2015
Excerpt from the Article:
Asbury Automotive is a $5.3 billion automotive retailer based in Duluth, Ga. For years, the more than a 90 dealerships that make up the company had very little interaction with IT. Part of the issue was that corporate IT was a relatively immature function at the company.
>Prior to his ascension to the CIO role, Barry Cohen worked to virtualize almost all of IT, rendering it more flexible and more agile. Freeing up talented people and resources, he was able to put IT people in the regions and, in many cases, in the dealerships themselves. That exposed tech workers where and how business was done, enabling them to glean insights from both dealers and customers.
Now as CIO, Cohen has continued to lead with dealers and customers in mind, and has worked to make IT a much broader driver of value to the enterprise.
CIO Insight: You work for a $5 billion automotive sales company. How do you use information and technology within your operation?
Barry Cohen: Technology is used in all aspect of our automotive operations, including dealership Websites, automotive ERP and CRM systems, business analytics, credit card processing, and another hundred or so applications focused on our employees, vendors and customers. There is a tremendous amount of application integration that takes place to make it all work—not to mention a robust infrastructure to support our 7,800 employees.
CIO Insight: Barry, prior to your time as CIO, you worked to introduce cloud computing to Asbury Automotive. What steps did you undertake in order to do that?
Cohen: I’m very happy to say that we have been data center free for nearly two years. We are 100 percent in public and private clouds, with partners that manage all aspects of their data center operations. The reason for doing that was because I wanted IT to spend most of our time with the rest of the business, and not worrying about technology refresh projects, patching and backups.
Getting there wasn’t too difficult, but it did take three years. We started by creating an application inventory and an integration architecture. This enabled us to move everything one piece a time without much disruption.
CIO Insight: IT did not have the best reputation when you started with Asbury. How did you change that?
To read the full article, please visit CIO Insight
Johnson Controls’ CIO Helps 125 Year Old Company Become Leader In The Internet Of Things
by Peter High, published on Forbes
10-20-2014
On the face of it, you would not think of Johnson Controls as a leading candidate to be an innovator in the world of the Internet of Things. Johnson Controls is a 125-year-old company based in Milwaukee that produces more than $40 billion in revenue per annum. The origins of the company were in building systems, which was primarily heating, ventilation and air control (HVAC). The company’s diversified in recent times to include three other divisions beyond HVAC:
For the past six years, Colin Boyd has been the chief information officer of Johnson Controls, and he has been one of the leaders in the company responsible for the transformation toward being a leader in this trend. In fact, he said that the companies leadership in the trend predates the name of the trend. The company has been involved in what it calls “the Internet of Buildings” for more than a decade. Boyd’s role has been an important one, and it offers a look inside how the CIO might get more involved in taking advantage of this trends, while being mindful of the number of other divisions of the company that are necessary to engage along the way.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
Gartner: Top 10 Strategic IT Trends for 2015
10-07-2014
Gartner Symposium/ITxpo is under way in Orlando. As always, their IT experts have identified what they believe to be the top-ten information technology trends for the year ahead. Strategic technology trends are defined as having potentially significant impact on organizations in the next three years. Here is a summary of the trends:
1. Computing Everywhere
2. The Internet of Things (IoT)
3. 3D Printing
4. Advanced, Pervasive, Invisible Analytics
5. Context-Rich Systems
6. Smart Machines
7. Cloud/Client Architecture
8. Software-Defined Infrastructure and Applications
9. Web-Scale IT
10. Risk-Based Security and Self-Protection
Tim McCabe’s Journey From Legal And Sourcing Leader To CIO Of Delphi Automotive
by Peter High, published on Forbes.com
10-01-2014
Early in his career, Tim McCabe would not have anticipated that he would lead IT for a multi-billion dollar company. He studied philosophy as an undergraduate rather than focusing on a technical discipline. He joined the legal department at General Motors, and led Global Outsourcing for the automotive behemoth. It was during this time that he integrated more deeply into the IT department, first at General Motors, and later as Director of Strategy and Sourcing for Delphi Automotive. When he took over the chief information officer responsibilities at Delphi, he did so as a business-centric IT leader. He notes that even as CIO, he is a business leader first, and a technology leader second.
(This is the sixth article in the business CIOs series. To read past interviews with CIOs from GE, Marriott, and Texas Instruments, among others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: You took on this role in 2008—it is hard to think about that year without remembering the economic malaise that greeted us all then. You are in an industry, among several, that was most acutely impacted by that. Can you talk about what that experience was like in your early days and the way it helped you form your original plans as CIO?
Tim McCabe: To dial the clock back a bit, Delphi had spun out from General Motors as an independent company in 1999, and in the early 2000s it became clear to leadership that our position in the marketplace was not going to be sustainable. We had to go through a Chapter 11 filing, which we think of as the beginning of the transformation.
In early 2006 I was recruited from GM to come and join Delphi as part of the overall IT activity and company transformation. The objective was to lead a three-prong strategy to align costs to the company’s revenue, so we were focused on outsourcing, driving the company towards common platforms, and working with the internal IT team to align capabilities with business realities. We played a role in helping to return some of the money being spent around the globe on IT, and over the course of three years were able to reduce IT costs from over 2% to roughly 1.2%. We sustained that spend as we went through the overall footprint rotation and product offering transformation that the business went through. The objective through all of this was to reduce costs without creating any additional business risk.
My main objective was to ensure we did not miss a single shipment to one of our customers; job one was to reduce costs, improve services, and better our position in the marketplace. Second, we transformed a relatively large, insourced IT organization that was mostly federated and regionally operated into a single, global organization. We wrote and created over 200 processes so we could execute as a global team. We also retrained the staff that we retained through outsourcing. A big part of our change was to not only inform, but to educate our colleagues on the change we were going through and the value we were going to bring back to them. That was a big part of my formative years at Delphi.
Additional topics covered in the article include:
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Dell CIO Andi Karaboutis Helps Dell Put The Customer First
09-02-2014
Much has been written about the benefits and risks of the rise of prominence of the CMO to the CIO. Some have pontificated that it will mean the death of or at least the diminution of influence of the CIO, as CMOs have more authority over technology. Dell Global CIO Andi Karaboutis scratches her head at this notion. She describes Dell’s strategy to put the customer first, and the role that each functional and business unit head must bring in order to realize that vision. It means that IT must shape its unique perspective and apply its unique lens to opportunities and issues. It also means that emerging leaders in IT work in other regions and functions to round out their perspectives on Dell’s business to be able to contribute more value to IT, a practice she learned from a successful tenure in the automotive industry. It also requires IT to have an R&D and innovation role, constantly monitoring trends to choose the best ones to bring to life the needs of Dell and of Dell’s customers. Lastly, it means spending time with external customers, as IT must have a role in developing value for them.
(To listen to an unabridged version of this interview, please click this link. To read more stories about innovative IT leaders, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Andi, Dell has been going through quite a transformation in recent months, not the least of which was the organization going private after having been a public company for some time. I wonder, in your time as global CIO how these changes have manifested themselves in the IT department, if at all.
Andi Karaboutis: One of the things that Michael Dell says – and we’ve all held very strongly to his strategy at Dell – is that our focus is on continuing to be a world-class end-to-end solutions company. Similarly, the strategy and goals of IT and our focus continue to be the same, which is: the customer is at the center of everything that we do and developing our roadmaps, plans, strategies, and instrumentation of disruptive technology around that, continues to be core.
I think the big difference is the intensified focus and speed with which we’re actually pursuing those goals and objectives. Obviously as a public company you have different and added burdens around Wall Street, quarterly earnings, focus on sales in shorter time periods, whereas as a private company our focus is on short, medium, and longer term methods and objectives of how we want to execute things. So it just lets us be that much more intense around our strategy.
To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Andi, click here.
An Interview with the Godfather of Data Analytics, SAS’s Jim Goodnight
05-12-2014
Jim Goodnight is one of the great technology entrepreneurs of the past fifty years. His emphasis on data analytics as a business model starting over 40 years ago with the development of Statistical Analysis System (SAS) while he was an academic at North Carolina State was quite prescient, presaging the analytics boom that has taken over so many industries by multiple decades. Over the years, SAS has been used by pharmaceuticals companies to help them analyze their drug pipelines better, by banks to help them assess who to give credit cards to, and to an increasing extent by a wide array of companies to assess fraudulent activity and risk management, which Goodnight suggests will be a significant area of growth for SAS.
Goodnight has built a multi-billion dollar software company without going public or seeking suitors to buy the company. He points to the advantage that he had in receiving early funding from government and academic sources rather than from venture capital, which meant there was no pressure to create a financial event for his investors. As a result, he has been able to successfully steer his company through many business cycles while avoiding significant layoffs that are de rigeur among so many major companies. This has been a cultural differentiator, and is one of the reasons that SAS is regularly chosen among the best places to work in the United States.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the fifth article in the IT Influencers series. Past interviews with Salman Khan, David Pogue, James Dyson, and Walt Mossberg can be accessed through this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: You began SAS while you were an academic at North Carolina State. What was the genesis of Statistical Analysis System?
Jim Goodnight: When I was a sophomore, I took the only course in programming offered at NC State. The summer of my sophomore year, I had two jobs in programming. In the fall, I went to work for the department of statistics and it had a group of statisticians that were referred to as experiment stations. The experiment stations helped design and analyze all the agricultural experiments that went on on-campus.
NC State is a land grant university – there’s one in every state and the entire Southeast association of experiment stations sent one or two people each year to an annual meeting where they’d discuss computational methods and experiments that they’d been doing. NC State was sort of out in the front of developing analytical software and in the entire Southeast experiment station people decided just to use what was coming out of NC State at the time. Back in late 1966, early 1967, after the IBM 360 came out, everybody at all these universities was buying these IBM machines. They again looked to us to develop software for those machines.
Tony Barr started some of the first parts of SAS and then I joined him once it was stable enough to start writing additional procedures. We announced SAS in 1969 to the experiment station users – they were the group of university statisticians of the southern experiment station and they all liked what they saw and they started using it and we went on developing SAS. I was finishing up my Masters and working on a PhD at the time so I was working about 30 hours a week on the project. Back in 1972, I finished my PhD and we lost all of our funding from the NIH. The NIH, up until ’72, was providing funds for almost every computing facility at all the different universities around the country. Nixon decided he wanted to only spend money on universities that had hospitals, cancer research and things like that so you had to have a medical center from then on for NIH to provide funding. So we went back to our university statisticians group and said “how about supporting us?” They each chipped in $5000 a year to support us and they insisted that we also start licensing our software to other companies and other government agencies so we started doing that to become self-sufficient.
That went on until about 1976 at which time we had a user conference down in Florida. Our users actually put the conference together, but we went down and there were 350 users there. We were most impressed – they really liked some of the stuff we were working on, so when we finished with it and came back we decided to get out of the university. We were not able to grow anymore, there was clearly a lot of interest and we could support ourselves without needing the university. Of course the university, at the time, was not supposed to be a business anyway so they thought it was a good idea that we move off-campus as well – so we moved across the street and that’s how SAS was founded. It had a long development history at NC State before we left – I think we left with about 300,000 lines of code; it’s probably 10 million lines of code now.
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11-11-2013
So much is written about how digital retail is supplanting traditional retail, and there is much data to prove this. However, consumers still spend more time in physical stores than they do on individual websites, they purchase more often, and the opportunity to get to know a customer in a physical setting is better in many ways, potentially forging a stronger and longer-lasting bond with customers.
I recently spoke at an IT conference in Hong Kong. One of my fellow keynote speakers was a Spanish businessman named Ion Cuervas-Mons, who is the CEO of Think Big Factory, a Madrid-based product and strategic design consultancy that creates opportunities at the intersection between digital and physical realities. In his presentation, and in a detailed conversation he and I had later, he described what he refers to as “programmable retail” as a key to unlocking the power of the physical retail experience.
Cuervas-Mons indicates that the term “programmable retail” is “meant to incorporate the characteristics of e-commerce – convenience, efficiency, and personalization – into physical stores, while maintaining certain aspects found in a traditional shop – the ability to generate surprise, discovery and the possibility of touching the products.” Comparable to the changes made in the physical retail format in the 1960s and 1970s with the ascension of big-box retail that was compelling for a couple of decades hence, this represents a great leap forward. The magnitude of change in the physical store space has not been so great since then, and at a time when formidable online competition has arrived in the form of Amazon.com, and other innovative e-channel retailers, it is important for stores with a physical presence to think differently to establish a source of competitive advantage.
Cuervas-Mons describes five steps in the process of developing programmable retail:
1. Identification
Traditionally, it has been difficult to identify customers before payment. As a result, they meander anonymously through the store without any indication of who the biggest potential customer is, who the most loyal customer is, or who proverbial window-shopper is. There is an opportunity to treat the best customers with the best service, but if one only finds out who each person is after he or she has selected what to purchase, an opportunity has been lost.
There are three technologies that are making it easier for customers to gain these essential insights earlier:….
Big data, process automation, multidisciplinary R&D: Gary Wimberly, the CIO of this $94 billion enterprise, thinks of the company as a technology firm that happens to be active in the pharmacy benefit management (PBM) space.
07/29/2013
I recently had the opportunity to tour Express Scripts Technology and Innovation Center in St. Louis. Express Scripts is a $94 billion pharmacy benefit management company (PBM), and as the company’s chief information officer, Gary Wimberly, likes to point out, it is a technology business that happens to be focused on the PBM space. The tour reflected that statement, as I had a chance to observe two key components of the company’s Technology and Innovation Center.
At the Express Scripts Pharmacy, one is struck not only be the size of the operation, but the relatively few people who are involved in fulfilling prescriptions. Computers and machines sort drugs into vials, label them, and pack them seamlessly. As Wimberly notes below, the Express Scripts Pharmacy is substantially more efficient and accurate in that fulfillment than traditional pharmaceutical retailers.
In the Research & New Solutions Lab, one witnesses a digital war room of sorts, as a diverse team drawing upon various scientific and business disciplines collaborates to help optimize patient care while reducing costs at the same time. Their insights ensure that this healthcare behemoth can still turn on a dime.
(This is a condensed and edited version of a Forum on World Class IT interview I conducted with Gary. To listen to it, please click on this link.)
Peter High: Gary, let’s start with a bit of background on Express Scripts, and IT’s role in the operation.
Gary Wimberly: Peter, we are a business-to-business company, and we manage the prescription spend for over 100 million Americans. The typical prescription fulfillment process is for customers to visit a pharmacy. In many cases, the pharmacy sends Express Scripts an electronic transaction, and we do 150 safety and eligibility checks on the transaction. Information is sent back to the pharmacy so that the pharmacist knows whether the patient will have an issue with a drug interaction, whether it is OK to fill the prescription ,and what the cost will be, and how much will be reimbursed for that transaction. That is done in about 0.6 seconds between eight and ten million times per day or about 1.4 billion times per year.
To do this, we have to focus on healthcare more generally. We think about behavioral sciences, focusing on actionable data, and how we focus on being able to manage the prescription spend. Technology is integral to this business. I like to say that we are a technology business that happens to focus on the PBM space.
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Filippo Passerini provides an overview of the steps that P&G took to improve its analytic capabilities and harness the power of big data in real-time.
by Peter High, published in CIO Insight
05-03-2013
Filippo Passerini, CIO and Group President of Global Business Services of Procter & Gamble, discusses the approach he and his team have taken to get better, more accurate data analysis into the right executives’ hands in a timely fashion. The result is a remarkable track record of innovation.
IN SUMMARY
WHO: Filippo Passerini, CIO and Group President of Global Business Services of Procter & Gamble
WHAT: Sharing his approach to data analytics, brought to life with the better use of big data and collaboration technology
WHERE: Cincinnati, Ohio and 75 countries worldwide
Filippo Passerini has as broad a purview as any CIO in the world. In fact, he is not just the CIO of P&G, but is also the Group President of Global Business Services. In his role as CIO, he understands the power of IT to deliver insights to the organization. In his role as head of Global Business Services, he has taken this a step further, making a multi-national consumer packaged goods behemoth feel a bit smaller. In the past, it was an assumption that good practices on one continent would not be enacted on another continent for months. This thinking reinforces the traditional geographic and product silos of a huge company like P&G. Passerini realized that if he could get the right information as close to real-time as possible, while packaging it in a way that executives around the world could view together, down to having meeting spaces that facilitated such global collaboration, a cultural change could be fostered. What emerged is one of the most impressive examples of leveraging corporate data with business intelligence and analytics.
In this Q&A, Passerini tells CIO Insight contributor Peter High about the steps he took to launch this real-time, data-based revolution in business practices.
CIO Insight: You have developed one of the most sophisticated examples of data analytics in the world. What was the genesis of this? How did you determine that this was necessary?
We are big on anticipating what’s coming, and saw that being able to run the business in real-time was going to be essential for growth. So, we have been focused on analytics for a few years now. We want to create an environment where we turn data into knowledge, and knowledge into insights and actions. As the world’s largest consumer packaged goods company—with nearly $84 billion in sales, operations in 75 countries, and reaching 4.4 billion consumers—we have a lot of data. The ability to analyze this massive amount of data is critical to running the business in real-time and being responsive to changes in the marketplace.
It is not about what happened last month or last year; it is about being able to move the business from a rear-view to a forward-looking view. To move the business to a forward-looking view, we realized we needed one version of the truth. In the past, decision-makers spent time determining sources of the data or who had the most accurate data. This led to a lot of debate before real decisions could be made. We’ve elevated their discussions from the “what” to “why” and “how.” Meaning, why things are happening and how we can make interventions to change the outcome, if needed. We believe analytics will get us to the “why” as fast as possible.
We recognized the value in having access to the right data, at the right time, and with actionable insights. We also realized the power of visualizing that real-time data in an immersive environment. I believe in a complex world where there is an incredible amount of information, visualization helps distill what really matters, and the results have proven the value of our investment.
To read the full article, please visit CIOInsight.com
To read an additional profile on Filippo Passerini in Forbes, please click here.
Filippo Passerini of Procter & Gamble powers the Global Business Services for an $84 billion company with advanced analytics and diligent strategic planning.
03-18-2013
Filippo Passerini had a circuitous route to the CIO role, both in terms of functional as well as geographic experience. He rose through the ranks from junior to senior-most positions at P&G beginning in his native Italy through his arrival at P&G’s world headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio. He started in IT, but also spent time in marketing and operations roles before becoming CIO.
As Passerini notes herein, P&G has a history of hiring CIOs who have traditional business experience in the hopes of having IT run as a typical business function. Passerini continued this tradition, and in 2005, as CIO, he led the integration of Gillette. In 2008, Passerini was also named the president of Global Business Services, and 2011 he was named Group President of Global Business Services. Now with his cross-functional responsibilities, he has developed digital war-room of sorts, assembling an assortment of leading edge analytics capabilities to enable the $84 billion colossus to make better decisions, drawing insights from across geographies, product segments, business functions and the like. As such, his organization has managed the “big data” conundrum as well as any organization in the world.
(This is the fourteenth piece in the CIO-plus series. To read the prior twelve interviews with the CIO-pluses from Waste Management, McKesson, Merck, Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, Ameristar Casinos, Owens Corning, Marsh & McLennan, ADP, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, the San Francisco Giants, Walgreens, and GSX as well as a partner in the CIO/CTO practice for Heidrick and Struggles, please click this link. To receive notice about future interviews in the series with CIO-pluses of P&G and others, please click visit the column’s page. in the weeks to come.)
Peter High: Filippo, you have a non-traditional path to the CIO role. You joined P&G as a junior IT resource in Italy, and then spent time in a variety of business functions within the company before being named CIO. How have such diverse experiences colored your thought process in what makes a successful IT leader or a successful IT employee?
Filippo Passerini: I don’t see myself as a “stereotypical CIO.” I continue a long-tradition at P&G of CIOs who are not entirely technical. At P&G, we have a few hiring practices that set us apart from IT organizations elsewhere. First, we hire people for who they are, not what they know. The technology can be learned, but you cannot teach curiosity. You cannot teach passion for the business. So, much of our recruiting focuses on finding people who have the right raw ingredients—leadership, business acumen, communication skills, passion for technology—that helps ensure that they will be successful almost no matter where they are staffed.
We are also a promote from within company. It is rare at P&G to find a person in a senior role who did not rise through P&G. We invest heavily in our people. This long-term commitment that we make to our leaders of tomorrow means that we have well-rounded colleagues with deep knowledge of our business. This business knowledge is more important than technical knowledge.
We take the view that technology is almost always a commodity. It is what you do with it, what business priority you solve, what business capability you enable, what process you render more efficient. This is true value. The conversation should never begin with technology, and our recruiting and training reflect this fact. Therefore, the ideal employee for us is a business person who is passionate about technology as opposed to the other way around.
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