Latest Episode
by Peter High, published on Forbes
8-3-2015
Mark Sunday has been the CIO of Oracle for ten years, and in that role, he has been the company’s first and best customer. As the CIO of a $38 billion company, his technology needs are quite complex, and he has been the first to use most of the company’s products and services over the past decade. As such, his team offers invaluable counsel to colleagues as to what works well, and what requires further refinement. Also Sunday has been an invaluable advisor to the company’s customers, many of whom are also CIOs. He speaks not as a sales person, but as a peer, and can offer a special depth of knowledge tying together CIOs’ needs with Oracle’s solutions.
Sunday has also joined the ranks of board-level CIOs, having been on the boards of multiple companies over the past decade and a half. He has found the experience invaluable, as it has pushed him to build skills as an advisor in addition to those as an operator in his day-job. He also has drawn insights from each board-level experience to develop innovations he can leverage within Oracle itself.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 14th article in the Board-Level CIO series. To read interviews with the CIOs of Cardinal Health, P&G, Kroger, and FedEx, among others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Mark, you are the Chief Information Officer of Oracle, a company that needs very little introduction, certainly. But for those who may not be so familiar with the role that you specifically play within the organization, I wondered if you could talk about those areas that are under your purview within Oracle.
Mark Sunday: I am responsible for the global competing infrastructure and networking infrastructure and how we service our end users in nearly 100 countries. My team is about 50 strong, supporting those folks around the world. Everything from end user services up through a variety of different things necessary for them to communicate, collaborate, and execute their jobs.
I am complemented by our Oracle’s development organization that also contributes to automating processes across the company as they deploy applications. They have the responsibility to be the first implementer of many of the new products. So between what we do within my organization and my counterparts in development, we serve all of our 140,000+ end users.
High: Oracle is fundamentally a technology company. I can imagine that being the CIO of a technology company has its blessings and its challenges. On the one hand you never have to make the argument to your colleagues that technology ought to be thought of as strategic, but then, on the other hand, you are surrounded by engineers and people with deep technical expertise. Can you talk a bit about culturally what that is like to be within the milieu of a major technology organization running IT?
Sunday: Well, first of all I think it makes it very exciting for the team. So beyond the normal mission IT organizations have of making their organization function, whether it be public or private sector more effective and delivering value to their customers, we take on some additional roles.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
7-13-2015
Within the next week, Jet.com will officially launch. It promises to offer the lowest prices on the Internet. As Marc Lore notes in this interview, the key is to provide pricing that more accurately reflects purchase bundles and the distance that the goods need to travel. Lore spent the early part of his career as an investment banker, and has brought a depth of knowledge about financial models and algorithms to several experiences as an entrepreneur. Chief among those was Quidsi, the parent company of e-commerce websites Diapers.com, Soap.com, and Wag.com, among others. Lore co-founded the company in 2005 and sold to Amazon in 2011 for $550 million. Now Lore and Jet have Amazon squarely in its sites, hoping to under-cut the 800 pound gorilla of retail, and beat it in the marketplace space.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 13th article in the “IT Influencers” series. To read past interviews with Salman Khan, former Mexican President Vicente Fox, Sir James Dyson, Jim Goodnight, and Walt Mossberg, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: I thought we would begin, Marc, with the background on the company name. How did you select Jet dot com as the name of your enterprise?
Marc Lore: It started out with some basic criteria we were looking for. We wanted a name that ,for starters, was easy to say, spell, and remember. That was kind of important given the amount of money we expected to spend in marketing—we wanted solid recall. We also wanted a name that was sort of an empty vessel that we felt we could brand into a household name that would work well for millennials. Something that was a little bit modern and forward-thinking, one that you could envision being for a new-age tech company. It fit all those criteria.
High: No doubt you probably had to procure that from some airline organization of some sort or another, I’d imagine.
Lore: Yeah, it was an individual who had it for a long time. It wasn’t cheap, the domain. I can tell you that.
High: You have said that Jet.com will take on the challenge of providing the lowest prices on the internet by overcoming what you’ve referred to as the “gross inefficiencies that hobble e-commerce today.” What are the gross inefficiencies, and how have do you plan to overcome them?
6-8-2015
Martha Poulter joined Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide just over a year ago after spending 19 years with General Electric, most of it in the financial services side of GE. Her final stop was as CIO of GE Capital. Switching companies and industries is a challenge for most executives, but given how strong GE’s culture is, some executives find it difficult to operate in a new culture, especially one that differs substantially from GE’s metrics-driven, up or out culture.
Sensitive to the need to bring her strengths of experience while deferring to the successes of the team she was inheriting at Starwood, Poulter began her tenure at the company listening more than pontificating. She internalized the strategy that the team was already operating against, and chose to keep most of it, agreeing with the logic of it, by and large. Therefore, she has spent more time capitalizing on the strengths that she found, and was pleased to see that a culture of innovation was already in place, though she has pushed it to an even greater degree. She is now spearheading initiatives related to mobile check-in, development of apps that work with wearables, and further investigating opportunities related to the Internet of Things, all of which we discuss herein.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link: this link. This is the 23rd article in the “CIO’s First 100 Days” series. To read the prior 22 interviews, please visit this link. To read future interviews in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Can you talk a little bit about your role and your vision for the IT organization at Starwood here in the relatively early tenure of your time with the organization?
Martha Poulter: Absolutely. As a business we have a really big agenda that focuses on our guests and customers, figuring out how to marry the elements of our core business, which is very service-oriented, very high touch, with the high-tech capabilities that we can bring to bear on that service model. Over the course of several years, you will see that we have had an opportunity to marry those things. Our keyless initiative has taken a very age-old, analog process from our guests and converted it into a very digital process that allows guests to bypass the front desk and go directly to their assigned rooms. So we are very excited about that kind of marriage of high touch and high tech.
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.
Peter High
05-13-2015
Excerpt from the Article:
To survive, CIOs need to rethink their roles. They need to be more strategic and deeply immerse themselves in both their businesses and industries. The New Style of Business means external partners now perform an increasing number of tasks once relegated to IT departments. Likewise, technology that was once expensive and laborious to maintain has become much less so.
Traditionally, CIOs have been primarily chief infrastructure officers. It’s only recently that an elite cadre of CIOs has begun treating information as a strategic asset. Yet realigning the CIO role will be challenging. Most companies use a timetable that is woefully short—quarter to quarter, or over one year.
TAKE THE LONG VIEW
In my latest book, Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation, I describe the experience of Gerry Pennell, CIO of the London 2012 Summer Olympics. Pennell notes how technology changed over the four-year span between games. At the 2008 summer games in Beijing, the iPhone and Twitter were in their infancy; Myspace and Facebook had roughly the same number of users; cloud computing was more hype than reality; and the iPad didn’t even exist.
If Pennell had translated and transposed the 2008 strategy for 2012, it would have been a disaster. This illustrates why CIOs would do well to develop strategies with multiyear timelines.
To continue reading the Article, please click here:
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.
03-09-2015
Dr. Jan Lee currently serves as the CEO of the Delaware Health Information Network (DHIN), the nation’s first statewide clinical health information exchange. She works with key leaders in the statewide health care community to aggregate clinical data from hospitals, laboratories, radiology centers, ambulatory practices and health plans into a longitudinal health record. Additionally, Dr. Lee is a board certified Family Practice physician with a Master of Medical Management degree and a wealth of leadership experience.
CIO Insight: Describe the Delaware Health Information Network.
Jan Lee: The metaphors we use to describe our core services are “the post office” and “the public library.” We deliver clinical results and reports to providers on behalf of the hospitals, labs, and imaging centers who contract with us to provide that service (our “post office” function). In the process, we archive a copy of that data for future query and retrieval through our provider portal (our “public library” function) by other health care professionals with a need to know. Participation in these core services, either as a “data sender” or an end user or both is nearly universal across the health care community of Delaware.
CIO Insight: As the oldest and longest running statewide health information network, how have you fostered relationships among entities who might otherwise view themselves as competitors?
Lee: Visionary leaders of Delaware’s largest health systems agreed from the beginning that the welfare of patients is best served if all the relevant clinical data is available at every stage in the continuum of care. Time and experience revealed that they each continued to thrive in the environment of data sharing, and we have now reached the point where the few stragglers are coming to us saying they are losing business to competitors who HAVE chosen to share their data through DHIN.
CIO Insight: In 2005, the eHealth initiative developed a framework for assessing and tracking health information exchange development. Seven stages of development were defined. Could you describe those?
Lee: My abbreviated description of the seven stages is as follows:
Stage 1 – Starting (need recognition)
Stage 2 – Organizing (defining goals, funding sources, governance, policies)
Stage 3 – Planning (tactics, business plan, securing funding)
Stage 4 – Piloting
Stage 5 – Operating (fully operational, data actually being used by HIE participants)
Stage 6 – Sustaining (fully operational with a sustainable business model)
Stage 7 – Innovating (expansion of value-added services)
We are happy to report that we are solidly in stage 7.
CIO Insight: How do you impact patient outcomes?
Lee: We save the practices time (and time is money) in searching for missing information. They are less likely to give up the search if it is easy and quick to get all the information they need in one spot. We have seen a 21% reduction over four years in the rate of ordering a specific set of high cost imaging studies and a 64% reduction in the rate of ordering high cost lab studies. This means reduced radiation exposure and out-of-pocket costs for the patient…
To read the remainder of the article, please visit CIO Insight
Father Of The World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, Reflects On The First 25 Years
10-13-2014
This past week, I spoke at IPExpo Europe in London, and I was honored to have Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the World Wide Web as a fellow speaker. He reflected on the 25 years that have passed since he helped create the Internet. He raised a number of interesting topics during the course of his presentation.
First, he indicated that he does not regret baking greater security into the initial version of the web saying, “It might not have taken off if it had been too difficult.” Like the Internet entrepreneurs who would leverage the platform he helped create, he was concerned that the web have an audience first before evaluating changes that would be necessary.
He did go on to say that it is essential that the Internet allow for greater user privacy. “The idea that privacy is dead is hopelessly sad,” Berners-Lee said. “We have to build systems that allow for privacy…People have the right to see how their data is being used.” As examples, he indicated that individuals’ personal medical data should be accessible to doctors and first responders, but not to insurance companies who might use the data to reject potential customers or raise their rates. He went on to say, “We should build a world where I have control of my data and sell it to you. Users should have control, access to and ownership of their data.”
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:
To read the full article, please visit Forbes.com
To explore the full collection of Business CIO Series articles, please click here.
To explore the Technovation Column library, please click here.
To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Tim, 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.
To explore the full collection of IT Influencers Series articles, please click here.
To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Jim, click here.
