1/15/17
By Peter High, published on Forbes
Estonia is, perhaps, the most digitally advanced society in the world. This Baltic region country with less than 1.5 million citizens has been occupied frequently through its history, including by the Soviet Union between 1944 and 1991. In the aftermath of independence, particularly progressive leaders decided to leverage advanced technology as a means of simplifying the lives of citizens. As early as the mid-1990s, the government made radical moves to eliminate paper in its interactions with citizens, forming the basis of what would become an almost entirely digital society.
Taavi Kotka was an Estonian CEO of one of the largest software companies in the Baltic States, Nortal. He left the company in late 2012, and he was under a non-compete agreement for two years. He used the time to join the government, and in the process, helped usher in some more remarkable change. The changes he and others enacted would have profound impacts on the efficiency of and value derived from healthcare, banking, education, voting, law enforcement, among other areas. He also spearheaded the Estonian e-Residency program, which has allowed Estonians abroad and non-Estonians, especially so-called digital nomads, to take advantage of these superior services. As Kotka explains, the degree to which Estonia has become digitized actually enhances its security. He describes all of this and more in this far-ranging interview.
Peter High: Estonia is perhaps the most digitally advanced, technically competent country in the world, and for the past four years, you have led much of that work. I wanted to start with the genesis story. Why Estonia? What are the secret ingredients, either in the combination between the government and the citizenry, or other structural advantages that were there that made this change and transformation possible?
Taavi Kotka: That is a good question, but it was not me. It was set up almost 20 years ago after we broke apart from the Soviet Union. It was clear, especially for the private sector, that Estonia is a huge country geographically – we are bigger than the Netherlands, or Switzerland, or Denmark – but there are only 1.3 million people living here. For the private sector, it was clear that it is impossible to physically serve all the people living in Estonia. It is not economically feasible to have a bank office in every small town, for example.
High: And roughly when was that taking place? How long ago?
Kotka: The internet was born in the 1990s, so the push started 1995 or 1996.
High: Remarkably early.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
1/2/18
By Peter High, published on Forbes Jody Davids has been the chief information officer of four major companies: Cardinal Health, Best Buy, Agrium, and, since April of 2016, of PepsiCo. She had set the goal to be the CIO of a Fortune 200 company, and now she has done so multiple times over. She also set a goal of becoming a board-level CIO, and she accomplished that in January 2015, when she joined the board of the North Carolina-based healthcare company, Premier, Inc.
All of this is particularly remarkable given the fact that she started her career as an executive assistant at General Electric. It was during her time there when her ambition was awakened. She had an assignment that gave her exposure to the paygrades across the company, and she realized how much more she could pay if she joined the IT department. She would go on to do so, and enjoy stops at Apple and at Nike before accomplishing her goal of becoming a chief information officer. She describes her journey, key points along the way, the advice she has for fellow CIOs who wish to join boards, and much more in this conversation.
Peter High:You have been a CIO multiple times. You are currently at PepsiCo but were previously CIO at Agrium, at Best Buy, and at Cardinal Health. While you have been extraordinarily successful, your origins in IT are rather unconventional, as you began your career as an executive assistant. Could you dive into the details of some of those experiences, as well as your pathway into IT?
Jody Davids: My first office job was working as an executive admin for a group of IT people at General Electric’s nuclear energy business group. I was young at the time and was going to college at night as a music major. One of the tasks my boss assigned me revolved around looking at a page full of salaries and reconciling it with some other piece of paper. In that process, I noticed that all the people on the page were making significantly more money than I was. I began to get curious about what the people around me in IT were doing.
At the time, GE had a phenomenal after-hours training program for its employees. I took a class in Fortran which was taught by the one woman in this group of programmers. Apparently, I did okay, and they hired me for their next entry level Fortran programming position.
I was working in GE’s nuclear energy business group around the time of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident [which took place on March 28, 1979]. Three Mile Island was not our reactor, but you can imagine that the whole industry was sent into a tailspin, and eventually, I was laid off at GE. This turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me because I emerged at Apple Computers as a programmer.
High: Can you talk a bit about Apple in its early days and your experience there?
Davids: I was there for fifteen years, from 1982 to 1997. I started as a programmer working on a product called the Apple III, which was later recalled from the market. I was then placed into an IT group that was supporting Finance and HR systems. It was a wild time to be there.
For me, that period was equivalent to working at three different companies. The early days, the first Steve Jobs days before he left, were the Wild West. We were running all our IT systems on a PDP-11/70, and he did not understand why we could not do it all on a Macintosh. There were no networks ready or anything around it yet. Those were interesting conversations in those early days.
That was the first stage of being there. I was growing in my craft as a programmer and then as a project manager, and then as a young manager. Jobs left in 1985, and we had John Sculley take over. Sculley was a ‘professional’ executive who helped us mature as an organization, get focused on process and on cost management, and generally focus on the things that large companies need to be more focused on.
10-04-17
Gartner Symposium is currently under way in Orlando, and the company has identified a top ten strategic technology trends for the year ahead. Gartner defines “strategic” as those technologies that will have significant disruptive potential over the next five years.” Here is a summary of the trends:
Intelligent:
1. AI Foundation
AI has massive potential to enhance decision making, reinvent business models and ecosystems, and remake the customer experience. Many organizations have already taken notice of this, with a recent Gartner survey indicating that 59% or organizations are gathering information to build an AI strategy, while the rest are piloting or adopting AI programs. Given that AI techniques are rapidly evolving, and organizations will need to invest heavily in skills, processes and tools, it is suggested that business focus on tightly scoped solutions targeting specific tasks. With Gartner estimating that by 2020, 30% of CIOs will include AI in their top 5 investment priorities, now is the time to invest in data preparation, integration, algorithm and training methodology selection, and model creation.
2. Intelligent Apps & Analytics
AI has become a major battleground for software and service vendors, with AI expected to be incorporated into every application, app and service, at least on some level. Gartner highlights augmented analytics, which uses machine learning to automate data preparation, insight discovery and insight sharing as an area of growing strategic importance. Organizations should explore intelligent apps that augment human activity, and identify use cases across advanced analytics, intelligent processes and new user experiences
3. Intelligent Things
Last week, I noted Gartner’s picks for the top-ten technology trends for 2017. This list differed from the lists for 2016, 2015, and 2014 inasmuch as there are more trends that are not yet implemented by even leading CIOs than in years passed. My informal polling of CIOs suggested that most have roughly half of these trends on their roadmap, with many suggesting the number is less than 50 percent. That said, CIOs are interested in better understanding each of these to determine how many more should be added.
My team and I put together our picks for books, articles, and podcasts to better understand the concepts described. Use these as solid primers for your team to better understand the concepts and to translate their validity to your strategic imperatives.
AI and Advanced Machine Learning
My pick for the best book on this topic in recent months is Kevin Kelly’s The Inevitable. A founding editor of Wired magazine, Kelly is in his mid-60s, but maintains the curiosity and flexibility of mind of someone much younger than him. He has seen trends come and go, and is a good filter for unwarranted hype, as a result. His book is an entertaining foray into the future of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and what it will mean for us.
The authority on the Internet of Things is Stacey Higginbotham, who is a former editor and writer for publications such as Time and GigaOmni Media. She moderates the Internet of Things Podcast.This podcast discusses all angles of the Internet of Things, including interviews with top IoT leaders, as well as unique viewpoints and in-depth analyses on the latest news and trends in the field
Virtual and Augmented Reality
Marc Prosser is a freelance journalist and researcher living in Tokyo and writes about all things science and technology. He has written a great number of pieces on virtual and augmented reality that can be found on SingularityHub. One of the best isAugmented Reality, not VR, will be the Big Winner for Business. Digi-Capital estimates that AR companies will generate $120 billion in revenue by 2020.This article reviews how Boeing and other companies are experimenting with the technology, and the types of benefits it can provide to companies.
Digital Twin
Michael Grieves is the Executive Director of the Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Innovative Design at the Florida Institute of Technology. his paper Manufacturing Excellence through Virtual Factory Replications is the seminal work on the topic of digital twins, and it explores how digital twins can act as the critical connection between the data about the physical world and the information contained in the digital world about the physical asset.
Blockchain and Distributed Ledgers
Don Tapscott is a consultant and author who has written a number of books on digital trends and their impacts on business and society, including the business bestseller, Macrowikinomics. In his latest book, Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World, co-authored with his son, Alex, the concept of blockchain is explained in clear terms with an eye toward practical recommendations on how businesses might adopt the technology and reasons to do so.
Intelligent Apps
S. Somasegar is a former Corporate Vice President of the Developer Division at Microsoft, where he worked for 27 years. In the past year, he he joined Madrona Venture Group as a Venture Partner. In may of this year, he wrote an article entitled The Intelligent App Ecosystem in TechCrunch, describing how every new application built today will be an intelligent application. He offers an overview of this evolution, and highlights companies that are positioning themselves to realize significant competitive advantages in the years ahead.
Conversational Systems
John Smart is a global futurist and foresight consultant. He is CEO of Foresight U, which is a strategic foresight and entrepreneurship learning and development company. He has written a series of articles on The Brave new World of Smart Agents and their Data part 1, 2, 3 & 4. In this series, Smart explores the five to twenty year future of smart agents and the knowledge bases used to build them. Over the course of these four in-depth articles, Smart articulates how any why smart agents will soon become central to how billions of people live their lives.
Digital Technology Platforms
Salim Ismail has spent the last seven years building Singularity University as its founding executive director and current global ambassador. SU is based at NASA Ames, and its goal is to “educate, inspire, and empower a new generation of leaders to apply exponential technologies to address humanity’s grand challenges.”
In his book, Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it), Ismail notes that as businesses become increasingly digital and the pace of change continues to accelerate, traditional organizations will increasingly struggle to compete. Ismail highlights an organizational model that closes the gap between linear organizations and the exponential environment they operate in.
Mesh App and Service Architecture
Author and entrepreneur, Lisa Gansky has focused on building companies and supporting social ventures where there is an opportunity for well timed disruption and a resounding impact. In The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing, she notes that in the last few years a fundamentally different model has taken root; one in which consumers have more choices, more tools, more information, and more peer-to-peer power.
Also, Bala Iyer is a professor and chair of the Technology, Operations, and Information Management Division at Babson College. Mohan Subramaniam is an associate professor of strategy at Boston College’s Carroll School of Management. Together, they authored “The Strategic Value of APIs“ in Harvard Business Review. They note that to shift to an event driven model, organizations must shift their attention from internal information exchanges to external information exchanges, and APIs are at the core of enabling this transition.
Adaptive Security Architecture
To my mind, there is no deeper thinker in the world of cybersecurity than National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Fellow, Ron Ross. He leads the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) Implementation Project, which includes the development of security standards and guidelines for the federal government, contractors, and the United States critical information infrastructure.
In my interview with him on these pages, entitled “A Conversation with the Most Influential Cybersecurity Guru to the U.S. Government,” he details how cyber threats will increase as our appetite for technology increases. He describes the TACIT acronym for technology leaders to keep in mind when managing cybersecurity, which stands for Threats, Assets, Complexity, Integration, and Trustworthiness. He articulates concepts to bear in mind in each case.
Special thanks to Brandon Metzger for his assistance in aggregating this list.
Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. His latest book is Implementing World Class IT Strategy. He is also the author of World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs. Peter moderates the Forum on World Class IT podcast series. He speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @PeterAHigh.
by Peter High, published on Forbes
5-2-2016
Guy Chiarello has been a towering figure at the intersection between financial services and technology for multiple decades. He foresaw the power of digital business as Chief Information Officer of JPMorgan Chase before digital was the term of art or a department within corporations. He and his team there were responsible for the award-winning Chase Mobile App Suite, which grew its customer base to more than 10 million users in its first two years. He was also among the first to usher in peer-to-peer payments at scale. Perhaps most critical to his success, at a remarkably early period, he understood the power of pushing his businesses to think of IT as a source of innovation, and he ensured that he recruited the kinds of people who could deliver on that promise.
Not so surprisingly, Chiarello has risen definitively above the CIO role, now occupying the role of President of First Data Corporation. As president of the $11 billion global payment technology solutions company that handles almost half of all US credit and debit transactions, he and his team have even more room to leverage technology to innovate. I was interested to hear him reflect on his rise, how he interacts with his CIO and CTO, now that he is their boss, and where his attention is focused for the years ahead.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 28th article in the “Beyond CIO” series. To read through past interview with executives from companies like Waste Management, Biogen, Allstate, Aetna, Marsh & McLennan, and BMO Financial Group, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Guy Chiarello, You have been President of First Data Corporation for nearly three years. What is in your purview as president?
Guy Chiarello: If I simplify it, there are really three aspects of the job every day. One is really helping Frank Bisignano, our CEO, run the company: the day-to-day operations, making it work well for clients, and making it work well for the overall company and the employees that are part of it every day. The second is around clients. I spend a lot of time in the client space, not only helping sell our solutions, but, most importantly, understanding their experiences, their needs, and helping them focus on a forward-looking strategy where First Data can help them. This is a unique company, so explaining the company and helping them understand the value that it can bring to them and their business is key. The third function, which is really what I have really grown up prepared to do every day, is around the innovation, the engineering, and the technical operations of the company: engineering our products, solutions, defining strategy, which is really around not only innovation, but execution of the products and capabilities of the company every day, and then running the company from a technology perspective. I still have my hands in the technology function every day. I do have a CIO and a CTO inside the company, but this is a technology company.
High: What are some of your strategic priorities at right now?
Chiarello: The company is multi-faceted, so we have customers that are 4,000 plus banks as our customers. We are the outsourced party or the enabler for banks who are trying to deliver debit and credit solutions to cardholders around the world. On the other end of the spectrum, we have six million merchant locations where we deliver everything from point of sale and payment enablement. In between, we have the largest independent debit network—we are twenty-eight percent of the world’s e-commerce payment activity. We have a growing presence in “card not present” activity, so those are digital, mobile type payments, and, in a lot of ways as you bring those things together, really we are the go-to solution for people who either want to enable payments or deliver loans, credit or debit capabilities in the marketplace. That is in 100 plus countries on an everyday basis.
High: Both here, as well as in your role as CIO at JPMorgan Chase, innovation has been part of your set of responsibilities. How do you define innovation in a variety of different ways—big “I”, small “i”? What are some of the metrics you use to determine whether or not the organization is innovating appropriately or not?
2-8-2016
Chris Perretta has been an IT executive at State Street Bank since 2007, with most of his tenure spent as chief information officer. A few months ago, he advanced beyond that role to become the Global Head of Enterprise Data and Technology at the company. The role was created as an acknowledgement of the sanctity of data, and digital advances that State Street hopes to lead. Perretta has led a significant transformation of the information technology function in order to help realize this vision. First, he standardized and simplified IT. Next, he implemented what he refers to as “industrial agile.” He also re-organized the IT team significantly, and created a greater emphasis on customer experience and innovation. Perretta describes all of the above and more in this interview.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 27th article in the “Beyond CIO” series. To read through past interview with executives from companies like Waste Management, Biogen, Allstate, Aetna, Marsh & McLennan, and BMO Financial Group, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: I thought we would begin with your responsibilities. Could you talk about the purview of that role?
Chris Perretta: I have a new job titled Global Head of Enterprise Data and Technology. It is an extension of the realization of the importance of the digital world and the creation of digital businesses and enterprises that State Street has recognized. I am excited by that, I think it is the next level of integration of the operational side of things and the technology side of things.
High: I would love to hear more about that – the sanctity of data – and the fact that it is actually called out in the title. I am sure that is meaningful. Can you talk a bit about your growing set of responsibilities?
Perretta: From the data side, it is an important part of what we do. When you look across industries as well, even manufacturing, and you look at what those companies are doing from a data perspective, is it driving revenue. The data component of what we do is so important in providing insights, analytics, and risk management to our enterprise and our customers. There is a need, frankly, to have an enterprise view of yourself as an enterprise, in a more sophisticated way than in the past. Our clients view of what they do with us, and augmenting their data with other data that they could care to look at, and providing that service is a need. The concept of so many more of our products, services, and obligations are data-intensive. There is a recognition that the business has to address the data question, not only in terms of pure technology, but also as a management and governance responsibility. It has to be integrated across what has traditionally been different functional and operational areas. I see my task as putting structure around that task, and to be able to provide visibility, analytics, and insights that has not been the purview, in its entirety, of traditional IT organizations. We are excited about that.
On the technology side, there is so much technology that could be emerging or disruptive that could change the landscape of what financial services do, despite their virtual nature. The designation of technology is a confirmation of the importance to the financial services business, as well as the traditional IT world that I grew up in.
