6/25/18
By Peter High. Published on Forbes
Lenovo’s Kim Stevenson Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Data Center Solutions division has had a variety of roles in information technology. At technology behemoths such as IBM, EDS, and HPE, she worked on internal operations, but also gained her first exposure to customers who were technology executives. At Intel, she went from General Manager of IT Operations and Services to Chief Information Officer.
As CIO, she had an strong external customer orientation based on her experience prior to that. As a result, she quickly gained invitations to join boards. (She has served on the boards of Cloudera, Riverbed Technology, and she currently serves on the board of the wealth management and private banking company, Boston Private.) During her time as CIO, she was in the first class of Forbes CIO Innovation Award winners based on her team’s contribution of more than $1 billion in value to the company based on analytics. She would eventually rise to Chief Operating Officer, Client, IoT and System Architecture Group at Intel.
When she joined Lenovo in March of 2017, she did so with a remarkably rich set of experiences across the technology sector. As a result, she is an unusually well connected and highly regarded in the IT community. Now that she serves CIOs as clients again, she sees three things that CEOs and boards expect of CIOs: re imagining customer experience, driving productivity inside the enterprise, and delivering new products and services. She and her team are poised to help CIOs deliver all three, as she notes (among other themes) herein.
To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link.
Peter High: You are now the Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Data Center Solutions division of Lenovo. Could you describe your role and your responsibilities?
Kim Stevenson: At Lenovo, we aligned our Data Center Solutions division with our important customer segments, which is how we run our business. Each of those customer segments then report up into my organization.
The telco market is at a fundamental inflection point. We want to help drive a new, efficient infrastructure into the telco space. This plays into IoT, which will be all endpoints that are going to be connected in the world. And of course, there are data center implications for having multiple, new types of endpoints connecting into the network.
High: You were a former buyer of technology as the CIO of Intel. You rose beyond that role and became the Chief Operating Officer of the Client, IoT, and Systems Architecture Group. Now you are on the other side of the table as someone delivering to CIOs among others. How do you engage the customer set, and what was the transition like from one side of the table to the other?
Stevenson: Even before I joined Intel, I was with EDS and HP Enterprise Services running IT for customers and selling IT services to the CIO organization. When I moved to Intel to run internal IT, I felt like I was becoming my customer. Having that 360-degree view served me extraordinarily well. There were days when I thought to myself, “Why would anyone try to sell you this? It is just not practical.” There were also days that I felt I could understand more of what was possible from an innovation vector because I had seen many different types of accounts.
This is the next chapter, which is coming back to the business side. Now more than ever, the voice of the CIO in every company is becoming more strategic and more critical to the raw execution of the company. There is no business process in any company today that executes without some form of IT at its core. When I look at the role of the CIO today, I see three things that the board of directors and the CEO expect.
At Lenovo, I focus on helping the IT organization deliver on those three fundamental strategic priorities that exist in every company.
High: Can you expand on the translation of those general ideas to the way in which you are doing that in concert with the business?
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6/4/18 By Peter High. Published on Forbes
7-Eleven is a big retailer. It operates 65,000 stores in 18 countries, has 55 million customers in stores on a daily basis, and conducts 20 billion transactions annually. Like most retailers, it is in need of transformation. Enter Gurmeet Singh. With a Ph.D. in Engineering from Rice, and stints with leading companies like FedEx, Intuit, and Capital One, Singh joined 7-Eleven in August of 2016 as chief digital officer. He would add the chief information officer title in November of 2017.
Singh joined the company with a mandate from 7-Eleven CEO Joseph DePinto to make the company a digital leader. Singh embarked on a multi-year journey to become a digitally-enabled organization, including a “full stack transformation” approach which encompasses consumer-facing technology, back-end technology, infrastructure, and the organizational stack. He also expanded the company’s loyalty program from its initial focus on beverages to a full-fledged loyalty offering that is available on mobile, web, digital loyalty card, and even through chatbots.
Singh notes that “the closest store to a customer today is in the palm of [his or her] hand,” and he wanted to go beyond pushing customers from mobile into stores, and allowing customers to interact with 7-Eleven on their terms, through the interface of their choice. To foster this, Singh’s team helps the rest of the organization understand the art of the possible through constant experimentation with new technology. He describes his path to innovation in great detail herein.
Peter High: You are the Chief Digital and Chief Information Officer of 7-Eleven. Could you describe your role?
Gurmeet Singh: I started at 7-Eleven as the Chief Digital Officer, with my primary responsibility being driving digital transformation. This company founded convenience at a global scale, with 65,000 stores in 18 countries, 55 million customers visiting the stores every day, and 20 billion transactions on an annual basis. You take that, and you overlay the consumer trends and the new technology trends like big data and digital payments, and you have the perfect formula for redefining convenience.
Technology is a key element of a digital transformation and it is also key to becoming a digitally-enabled company. Initially, we started off with what most companies have been doing and what most consulting companies have been citing as a strategic approach, which is building a two-tier architectural model. A two-tier architectural model means you have digital technology capabilities that are being developed at a higher speed, and then decoupled from that, you have your legacy enterprise systems which have longer release cycles at slower speeds. Additionally, enterprise and legacy work was being managed in long cycle processes as projects, not as products.
Old models in any company are always changing, and they should be changing. They are a function of maturity of the company, the need of the hour, and the market factor. As we evaluated the speed of our transformation, we felt that we were not getting to the speed we needed. To get there, we needed what I call a full stack transformation. When I say full stack transformation, I am talking all the way from the consumer-facing technology to back-end technologies, all the way to infrastructure and cloud. It even goes beyond that to encompass the organizational stack.
To bring more efficiency and effectiveness to our decisions, our prioritization, while driving the productization of IT, we decided to combine the CDO role and the CIO role. This allows us to drive vertical product slices while working on horizontal capabilities. If you are doing one after the other, you are taking too much time to get the business transformed. If you do not do a vertical slice, you do not know what customer problem you are trying to solve. Combining the functions gets us there faster. It is harder, but you end up driving more synergies. We drive higher team engagement. You speed up your transformation journey, and you end up creating a stronger pool of talent as one team. What we did was then combine digital and IT, which we call DIGIT, which is very much digital.
High: You are clearly thinking multiple years out. The changes require hard work to be done in the near term to make the organization nimbler for the long term. How difficult was the process of selling this internally? Was it difficult in having your peers among the executive leadership understand the rationale behind all the hard work to be done in the near term for a better outcome for the long term?
6/4/18
Most of the tests of self-driving cars have taken place in cities. These are places where 3D mapping of streets, lanes, curbs, signs, and the like is undertaken with precision. One of the biggest challenges for self-driving cars is to navigate the roads less traveled.
“The cars use these maps to know where they are and what to do in the presence of new obstacles like pedestrians and other cars,” says Daniela Rus, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). “The need for dense 3-D maps limits the places where self-driving cars can operate.” Rus and colleagues at CSAIL have developed MapLite, a framework that allows self-driving cars to drive on roads they’ve never been on before without 3-D maps. I caught up with her recently to find out more about this innovative idea.
Peter High: Please describe how MapLite is different from other self-driving technology?
Daniela Rus: Most self-driving car companies only test their fleets in major cities where they’ve developed detailed 3D maps that are meticulously labeled with the exact positions of things like lanes, curbs and stop signs. These maps include environmental features detected by the sensors of the vehicle. The maps are created using 3D LIDAR systems that rely on light to scan the local space, accumulating millions of data points and extracting the features defining each place.
If we want self-driving cars to be a viable global technology, this reliance on detailed prior maps is a problem. Today’s autonomous vehicles are not able to drive in rural environments where we do not have maps — in other words, on the millions of miles of roads that are unpaved, unlit or unreliably marked.
MapLite is a first step for enabling self-driving cars to navigate on roads that they’ve never been on before using only GPS and sensors.
Our system combines GPS data – like the kind you’d find on Google Maps – with data taken from LIDAR sensors. Together, these two elements allow us to autonomously drive a car on multiple unpaved country roads and reliably detect the road more than 100 feet in advance.
MapLite is a first step toward creating safe and capable autonomous cars that can support drivers in new road situations. Imagine if cars could learn how we drive and how to never be responsible for a collision? What if they could become our trusted partners to help us navigate tricky roads, watch our backs when we’re tired, and even make our time in the car fun?
In the future, autonomous cars won’t just be able to sense the state of the road; they’ll be able to recognize the state of the driver. Imagine if your car could tell you were having a bad day and turn on your favorite album. Or imagine if it could talk to your fridge, figure out that you’re out of milk, and suggest where to stop on your way home. Imagine if your car knew that you forgot to call your parents yesterday and could issue a gentle reminder and suggest a safe stretch of highway where you could make the call. These are just a few of the possibilities when we bring together cars, computer science and artificial intelligence.
5/29/18
Dan Olley was recently named to the prestigious CIO Hall of Fame by CIOMagazine. In many ways, however, Olley has not been a traditional chief information officer. For one, he has largely held chief technology officer roles. Moreover, he has also had customer-facing, product-centric roles. In his current role as Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Product Development of Elsevier, his purview is quite broad.
Elsevier is a subsidiary of RELX Group, focusing on academic and clinical research. In his role, Olley helps develop solutions to help academics and clinicians train, while enhancing their ability to help patients at the bedside.
Olley’s focus in recent years has been in machine learning. In fact, he has been immersed in the subject long enough that this insights into its use, the value derived from it, the implications on teams, and the like are unusually deep. We cover all of the above in great depth in this interview.
Peter High: Could you provide an overview of Elsevier and the business you are in?
Dan Olley: Our parent company, RELX Group, is among the largest technology companies no one has heard of. We are an information analytics company, and we predominantly work across four fields: the legal field, the academic and health research fields, the risk business and financial fields, and our large exhibitions business. I am the CTO of Elsevier, which specifically focuses on the academic research and clinical research spaces.
We help clinicians and clinical professionals save lives. We are trying to build solutions that help them do their jobs better, from coming into the profession and training to the patient’s bedside. We also help academic and corporate researchers by providing materials in their field.
We run the peer review process for many academic journals. It is about helping them make breakthroughs. How do we give them solutions that make their research more effective? That is at the core of who we are and what we do.
High: If you gather 10 CTOs together, you have 10 different job descriptions. The CTO can mean everything from the co-founder of a startup in Silicon Valley and the number two person behind the CEO, to the person who owns the plumbing and reports to the chief information officer. I know you also run product development and have customer facing responsibilities in addition to focusing on the technology as it relates to both the efficiency as well as revenue generation. Can you provide an overview of your sets of responsibilities as CTO?
Olley: My background is software product development. I have been doing that for longer than I care to remember. I have had both product management and software engineering responsibilities in my career, but both at technology companies where technology was making a fundamental shift that drove commercial differentiation. At Elsevier, I am responsible for the more traditional IT part that falls under my remit, but over 70% of my responsibility is about building the electronic products and services that we sell. Think of it more like Google and Amazon or a Facebook building that technology solution than a more traditional company.
High: In the world of technology, you have reason to think a lot about how trends are evolving. I know from our prior conversations that you have a passion for contemplating how trends are coming together in some significant ways. Could you talk about the period we are in from a technology perspective and how the confluence of those trends is impacting the way in which all of us are going to be operating between the digital and analog worlds?
To read the full interview, please visit Forbes
5/21/18 By Peter High. Published on Forbes
Stephen Gillett has had a remarkable career for someone as young as he is. At 42, he has been the CIO and General Manager of Digital Ventures at Starbucks, the President of Digital, Marketing, and Operations at Best Buy, and the Chief Operating Officer of Symantec. In 2015, after Symentec was split into two companies, Gillett exited. Soon thereafter, he joined Google Ventures (now known as GV) as an Executive-in-Residence. He would eventually join Alphabet’s “Moonshot Factory” X (formerly Google X), and it was during his time there that the idea for Chronicle arose.
Chronicle is still largely in stealth mode, but Gillett took time to speak with me about his vision for the company, its progress in garnering customers, the process of graduating from X, and the advantages of growing a business within Alphabet as opposed to seeking funding from more traditional venture capital.
Peter High: When we last spoke, you were transitioning from your role as Chief Operating Officer of Symantec to Executive-in-Residence at GV [formerly Google Ventures]. You transitioned to X [formerly Google X], and in recent months, an idea that you have been pursuing, called Chronicle, was graduated from X. Can you talk about the genesis of Chronicle?
Stephen Gillett: First, let me provide some background. While at GV, as I met with entrepreneurs and talked to various categories that GV was making investments in, my goal was eventually to go to a startup having spent the last few years at bigger companies.
In 2015, while I was learning and understanding everything that Google was working on, Alphabet, the parent company, was taking shape. It gave me an opportunity to meet and talk to several of the now Alphabet leaders, at Google, Google X, and Google Ventures to understand what their future paths were.
In that tour of the new Alphabet, I learned about what X’s mission was, their concept of moonshot thinking, and how the “moonshot factory” worked. Rather than joining a startup that Google Ventures was funding, I pivoted and started to work within the X structure to figure out if there was a startup or a moonshot category that I felt compelled to work on. I realized that X was a great platform to achieve my goals, and I could get the support and the access to the resources I needed. That is how I landed at X.
High: Can you talk about the process as you were searching for that category? What was the process of elimination or inclusion? I would also be interested in the inner workings of X, such as how people work together across the organization.
Gillett: I knew one of the categories would be enterprise security, but I was not sure that this was the right place or the platform. X had been experimenting and looking at cybersecurity as a category before my arrival. When I got here, the question X was asking was, “Is this a problem worthy of the mission of X?” Which is to build moonshots, to create radical new solutions, and to touch a billion lives around the world. That is X’s broad framework.
X is not here to create widgets or a new point product. They are tasked with thinking about big problems facing humanity at large. I have spent over 20 years in IT, starting off on the help desk and working my way up to be CIO. Every year, security became a bigger and more important part of what I was doing in technology. Having spent a few years with Symantec – at the time, the world’s largest cybersecurity company – and dealing with the customer needs globally that they were facing, it quickly became apparent that cybersecurity was worthy of moonshot thinking.
X and Alphabet was a great place for us to focus on that because of the resources, thinking, and capabilities you need are not conducive to a quarterly earnings call or having to raise a round of funding. You can focus on long-term problems and assemble the best teams and the best technology to go after that by getting the permission to be curious and think about it at a huge scale. I do not believe there was a better place to start this than at X.
5/21/18
Starting in the fall of 2018, Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science (SCS) will offer a new undergraduate degree in artificial intelligence, providing students with “in-depth knowledge of how to transform large amounts of data into actionable decisions,” according to a statement put out by the University.
“Specialists in artificial intelligence have never been more important, in shorter supply or in greater demand by employers,” said Andrew Moore, dean of the School of Computer Science. “Carnegie Mellon has an unmatched depth of expertise in AI, making us uniquely qualified to address this need for graduates who understand how the power of AI can be leveraged to help people.”hghhhhhh
Reid Simmons is a research professor in the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute, and is the new director of the AI program. His research has focused on developing reliable, highly autonomous systems – especially mobile robots – that operate in rich, uncertain environments and on developing robots that can interact socially with humans. I had a chance to catch up with him last week to discuss the new program in greater depth.
Peter High: What was the genesis of this idea?
Reid Simmons: The AI degree had been under consideration for about four years, but efforts to put the program together began in earnest last fall. The main impetus was that students wanted to come to CMU to study AI, because of CMU’s centrality in that discipline, but were struggling to obtain the combination of math, statistics, algorithms, sensing, planning, and action needed to develop the appropriate expertise in AI. By combining the strengths of a number of the departments of the School of Computer Science, we were able to put together a comprehensive curriculum that teaches the basic concepts, as well as in-depth understanding, of AI and Machine Learning.
High: Can you provide some examples of the curriculum?
4/2/18
By Peter High, published on Forbes
Barry Eggers is the rare venture capitalist in Silicon Valley who grew up in the region. He can recall a time when the area was covered with fruit orchards rather than start-ups. He spent time in the mergers and acquisitions department at Cisco, which had a remarkable track record during his tenure. After a brief stint in private equity, Eggers and a couple of colleagues founded Lightspeed Venture Partners in 2000. As he notes herein, the firm’s approach has been to identify key themes that the company can focus its investments around.
One area of interest for Eggers is Industry 4.0. This describes digital transformation in the manufacturing sector, and the moniker suggests that it is the fourth wave of change to manufacturing. It is especially interesting, as it brings together a wide array of technology trends such as data, analytics, human-machine interactions, and digital-physical conversion. Eggers describes this trend, and its broader implications in this interview.
Peter High: Industry 4.0 is a topic that you focus on at your firm, Lightspeed Venture Partners. Could you define the term and provide insight into the technology trends that are embedded within it?
Barry Eggers: Broadly speaking, Industry 4.0 is the digitization of the manufacturing sector. The reason it is called Industry 4.0 is that many see it as the fourth industrial revolution: the first was steam, the second was electricity, the third was automation, and the fourth is now digitization. Some people also refer to it as cyber-physical systems in the manufacturing industry. We see this as a huge opportunity.
The second technology is analytics and intelligence. That is where breakthroughs like machine learning and artificial intelligence are taking place
The third technology is human-machine interaction. Even with automation, humans are not going away. It has become easier for humans to interact with machines through touch interfaces, voice interfaces, augmented, and virtual reality. I think augmented reality will play a huge role here.
The last enabling technology is the digital-physical conversion. This is what allows you to create things quickly, such as multi-material 3D printing. The combination of these technologies is going to change the way manufacturing is done over the next 10-20 years.
High: You not only have deep connections in the start-up community, but you also spend a good deal of time with leaders – CEOs, CTOs, CIOs – of large organizations. How fast do you see the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies happening, especially among larger organizations?
Eggers: An industrial revolution takes time. You have to look at the amount of machines and equipment that has to be replaced. With the advent of the steam engine, absolutely everything had to be replaced. With the advent of electricity, very little actually had to be replaced because it substituted electricity for steam. With automation, some estimates say that between 80 to 90 percent of machines had to be replaced.
3/5/18
The consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry is a challenging one for a variety of reasons, one of which is the business-to-business-to-consumer nature of the industry. A CPG company must develop a relationship with a customer, who is a middleman in the form of a retailer who owns the relationship with the ultimate consumer of the product. Clorox is a $6 billion revenue CPG company, and its chief information officer Manjit Singh has helped the company work better with customers and with consumers. Singh has developed methods to develop direct relationships with the end-consumers through better consumer journey mapping exercises using digital marketing while facilitating direct shipping enabled through supply chain efficiencies.
At the same time, Singh and his team have gotten involved in new product innovation. An example of this is the Brita Infinity Pitcher, which is an Internet of Things product that measures usage of the filter and will automatically order a replacement filter from Amazon so that the consumer knows to change out the filters when the new filter arrives. IT developed the Brita Infinity Pitcher in concert with the Research & Development department. Singh covers each of these topics among others in this far ranging interview.
Peter High: You are the Chief Information Officer of The Clorox Company. Could you give an overview of the organization?
Manjit Singh: Clorox is a global consumer packaged goods (CPG) company. We operate in most countries around the world, selling a number of large brands including Brita Water Filters, Glad Trash Bags, Fresh Step Cat Litter, and our ubiquitous Clorox bleach product. We are also in the personal care business with our Burt’s Bees business. Most recently, we purchased a probiotics business called Renew Life which is doing well.
High: You have focused on both the internal and external aspects of digital transformation. Could you give us an overview of each of those pathways?
Singh: For the last couple of years, we have been focused on improving our digital marketing capabilities. The IT organization, alongside the Marketing organization, has been busy building a platform and a capability for us to ensure that we understand our consumer journey. We need to ensure we can interact where and how the customer wants, whether that is mobile or web or in a store. We are pleased to be one of the digital leaders in the CPG business.
If we want to be at the right place at the right time with the right product for our customer, we must make sure that our supply chain can match those opportunities. Today, we are not geared to do as well because we are used to shipping large truckloads of product to our customers, which may or may not be the way that the consumer wants to receive our product.
Though we would love everybody to have a truckload of Clorox products show up at their doorstep, they might just want a single item or a set of items. We need to make sure that our supply chain is ready to adapt to that changing world, which means it must be much more agile than it is today, much more capable of predicting where products need to be, and when they need to be at that location.
2/26/18
Gill Haus is the Senior Vice President, Retail and Direct Bank Chief Information Officer at Capital One. In that role, he has overseen many of the changes that have made the Bank synonymous with digital innovation. He believes in having his team regularly experiment with the latest technology to judge applicability to the Bank and its objectives. He has overseen the development of innovation labs that further this mission.
Haus is familiar with the difficult work that companies that are larger and that have been in business for a generation or more must undertake in order to become digital ready. These include cultural changes, process changes, and technology changes. Haus has played a critical role in all three. In this interview, he highlights his excitement for artificial intelligence and blockchain, discusses the value that Capital One has gotten out of developing innovation labs, and more.
Peter High: Yours is a bank that is synonymous with innovation and the move towards digital technologies. Could you provide a bird’s eye view of the transformation that you have helped lead?
Gill Haus: It is like the common saying which is, “Technology changes everything.” If you think about Capital One and who we are, for us to be competitive and provide the services we want to our customers, we must keep up with emerging technologies.
Technologies like the cloud and machine learning are more commonly available than they have ever been in the past. The cost of entry for someone to compete with us is small and our competitive moat only helps to a certain point.
Our focus has been on systematically modernizing everything we do. That means we upgrade our legacy systems and go to the cloud. We have approached this in a few ways. One is making sure that we have the right talent on the ground and making sure that the talent has the tools and systems that they need and want to use.
It is one thing for us to say, “Come work at the bank,” which is already not that appetizing to a technologist.” It is another to say, “Come work in the bank, and you will be able to make your own projects if you have an idea.” “Come work in a bank. You will be the first to move the bank’s platform on to the cloud.” “Come to the bank. You will be able to explore different ways of using data, machine learning, etc.”
Denis Robitaille has does not consider himself a technologist despite being the Global Chief Information Officer of the World Bank Group. He came to IT after a career in Operations at the Bank. When he ascended to his current role, first as acting CIO in November 2016 and then as the permanent CIO in June of 2017, he had profound understanding of how the World Bank operated.
He sees a profound connection between technology and the Bank’s mission to end extreme poverty by 2030 and boost prosperity for the bottom 40 percent of populations in every country. He also believes that Blockchain and artificial intelligence will have enormous impacts on the people who the World Bank serves. We cover all of the above and much more in this conversation.
Peter High: You are the second ever Global CIO of the World Bank. While you are not a technologist, you have tremendous operational experience and have done the “actual work” of the World Bank. The Bank’s mission is to end extreme poverty by 2030 and boost prosperity for the bottom 40 percent of populations in every country. What role does technology play in accomplishing these big goals?
Denis Robitaille: Technology is part of our daily life, and I think we are at the beginning of a big transformation in IT. The role of emerging technologies for development is important. There is a big movement at the World Bank Group to explore how disruptive emerging technologies can help development.
We are looking at how we can use technology in a positive way. The entire organization is mobilized behind this goal. For us in ITS, our focus is to support internal clients and operations and to partner with different parts of the World Bank Group to make sure that we can leverage emerging technology.
High: Yours is an organization that has also been going through a cloud transformation. Can you talk about the work going into building a more sustainable technology stack to support the work of the World Bank?
Robitaille: We are a little bit behind, but our objectives are the same. We have a large scale of legacy applications. Last year, we prepared a new three-year strategy. Part of this strategy is to bring some agility and move to the cloud.
We used to be a traditional IT shop of waterfall, and now I am introducing agile and DevOps combined. We want to enable our lines of business and deliver faster for our clients. When we look at our strategies and solutions for the business, we want to triage faster and deliver more flexibly.
