Latest Episode
Our next Digital Symposium is just around the corner. Join us on May 19 as industry leaders and technology executives share their perspectives on fostering innovative cultures, scaling transformation initiatives, and navigating geopolitical uncertainty, among other topics.
CIOs and other technology leaders, register here to reserve your spot today. We look forward to seeing you!
(Click here for highlights from our most recent Digital Symposium, and stay tuned to our YouTube channel for videos of our panel discussions.)
11:00 – 11:10 a.m.
Welcome and Introductions
Welcome and introduction to the Metis Strategy team.
Peter High, President, Metis Strategy
11:10-11:30 a.m.
Conversation with former President of Mexico Vicente Fox
Pres. Vicente Fox, fmr. President, Mexico
11:30-11:50 a.m.
Building Talent for Digital Operating Models
Mamatha Chamarthi, Head of Software Business and Product Management P&L, Stellantis
Vipin Gupta, Chief Innovation and Digital Officer, Toyota Financial Services
Moderated by Michael Bertha, Vice President & Central Office Lead, Metis Strategy
11:50 a.m. – 12:05 p.m.
Entrepreneur Spotlight: Adyen
Pieter van der Does, CEO, Adyen
Kamran Zaki, COO, Adyen
12:05 – 12:20 p.m.
Fireside Chat: Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud
Thomas Kurian, CEO, Google Cloud
12:20 – 12:40 p.m.
The Journey from CIO to COO
Chris Drumgoole, EVP & Chief Operating Officer, DXC Technology
Jeff Smith, EVP & Chief Operating Officer, World Fuel Services
Moderated by Alex Kraus, Vice President & East Coast Lead, Metis Strategy
12:40 – 1:00 p.m.
Technology-led Business Model Innovation
Ather Williams III; EVP, Head of Strategy, Digital, and Innovation; Wells Fargo
Prakash Kota, Chief Information Officer, Autodesk
Moderated by Chris Davis, Vice President & West Coast Office Lead, Metis Strategy
1:00 – 1:20 p.m.
Innovation Ecosystems as a Source of Growth
Ryan Snyder, SVP & Chief Information Officer, Thermo Fisher
Teddy Bekele, SVP & Chief Technology Officer, Land O’Lakes
Moderated by Steven Norton; Co-Head Executive Networks, Research, and Media; Metis Strategy
1:20 – 1:30 p.m.
Closing remarks and adjourn
Click here for highlights from our last Digital Symposium, or view the panel discussions on YouTube. We look forward to seeing you!
Dean Del Vecchio is the Executive Vice President, Chief Information Officer, and Chief of Operations at Guardian Life, roughly 160-year-old mutual company with roughly $10.5 billion in annual revenue. He leads a team of about 4,500 employees. He is a major driver of innovation across the company, but he and his team hoped to open up innovation to the majority of colleagues rather than make it a purview of a single team at Guardian Life. In fact, he has even facilitated a method to engage outside partners and vendors in the process, as well.
Del Vecchio has defined three categories of innovation:
Core innovation entails finding a better, a faster or a simpler way to perform everyday tasks of the company.
Adjacent innovation requires monitoring other companies, including innovative ideas driven in other industries and translating them back to Guardian Life. “If there is somebody else doing something out there, it does not have to be in our industry, our segment or our market,” said Del Vecchio. “If somebody is doing something interesting and differently than we are today, let’s copy it.”
Transformational innovation fosters the development of truly big and new ideas for the company to pursue. “It is rethinking a market segment, [for example],” said Del Vecchio. “It could be rethinking how we do work entirely. We have been quite innovative in the way we thought about operating in the cloud, for example. We have been operating in the cloud since 2018. We shut down our data center in 2018. We no longer have an owned operating data center.”
To foster the development of all three types of innovation, Del Vecchio has developed innovation challenges for the team. It involves posing a challenge question of the team and leveraging the wisdom of the crowd to develop creative answers to the question. “We have employees vote on [the ideas], and we have them do pairwise comparisons on [them],” noted Del Vecchio. “Then the good ideas that bubble up, we do a Shark Tank experience. We have people put forth their idea, present it to a group of people, we vote, and we challenge [them with] questions. If an idea gets thumbs up, we move it forward to a minimum viable product.”
In recognizing that the best ideas will come when the net is cast widely, Del Vecchio recognized that he had to grow more technical talent, which is especially a challenge these days when the war for talent is raging at a level not previously seen. He introduced a program called Code for Good, which identifies employees in non-traditional technology roles and trains them to become developers. “It is a six-month boot camp [including] programming and learning, and then they are out on the floor,” he said. “We make sure that there is a job for them and that they have an opportunity to participate in that.” He has had multiple cohorts go through this program, and the value derived from these newly minted programmers has been profound.
Del Vecchio is building on this success with the development of an Automation for Good program. This is geared at engaging employees who work on transaction-heavy processes and engaging them to help design automation to take the place of some of the most tedious and time-consuming tasks. “Employees could be adding much more value and dealing with much more complex issues if they had the time, but because they are dealing with all these transactional things,” he noted. “Why not allow them to be able to self-automate and identify those tasks that they wish they did not have to do in the first place, and then create a much more fulfilling job for themselves?”
There is a broader vision to this. Del Vecchio and his team are mapping out the customer experience journey to understand where there are opportunities to digitize, and where to introduce self-service capabilities. He and his team hope to automate to the point of facilitating proactive and predictive capabilities. “We are doing that in ways of a digital agent, for example,” said Del Vecchio. “We have installed, using AI and automation, the digital agent capability so you could chat with a digital agent and get claim status or get eligibility of benefits.”
Del Vecchio and his team have also focused on each aspect of the relationship and the journey, whether it is the initial onboarding piece or further along in their relationship with the company. “Can we help customers with decision tools to help them select the right products?” he asked. “Ultimately, when they are on board and they need services, can we provide them with all of those avenues?” A key is to serve clients as they wish to be served. If they want to interact with a chatbot, they can do so through their mobile device. If they prefer the web, they can do that. If they want a mobile app, Guardian Life provides that capability. “We are not there yet but that is how we are looking at it, and we are looking at it across all medium, as well as all segments of that lifecycle engagement,” said Del Vecchio. He and his team have the processes and the ideas to drive continued innovation through Guardian Life on behalf of its customers.
Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. He has written two bestselling books, and his third, Getting to Nimble, was recently released. He also moderates the Technovation podcast series and speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @PeterAHigh.
Wesley Story has been named Chief Information Officer of Genesys, a global cloud leader in customer experience orchestration. As CIO, he will balance the day-to-day needs around operational efficiencies and scaling challenges that come from surges of rapid growth with new investments and the build-out of new capabilities that help the company position itself for continued future growth.
The company is going through what it refers to as its “Experience as a Service evolution,” and Story believes that IT has a significant role to play in the transformation to come. “Our Experience as a Service evolution…will be a central area of focus for me,” he said. “That means fostering and supporting our company’s cultural transformation that started a couple of years ago so that it’s genuinely baked into the DNA of our organization. Many companies have ‘values’ that are often printed on the back of their badges, posted on the walls in conference rooms, and perhaps used in annual performance reviews. But that can be a blind spot for an organization when it’s not baked into daily interactions. To me, that’s the goal. Our everyday decisions and behaviors should embody the culture.”
Genesys’ Experience as a Service is a new business model for the company. It was featured prominently in the announcement of the company’s most recent funding round of $580 million for a valuation of $21 billion. The round was led by Salesforce Ventures.
Story also noted the sanctity of data in this transformation, as data drives customer and market insights, providing a deeper understanding of how customers use Genesys’ products, fostering growth through better insights. “It’s one thing to have the data and perform analytics on it,” he said. “It’s another to be able to action the data by presenting it in the appropriate context for our employees, or, in some cases, use the data in a cognitive model to automate decisioning. Actions like this require intimacy with our cross-functional business processes like quote to cash, acquire to retire, and procure to pay, as well as customer experience metrics and business pain points so we can unlock value.” Story underscored that IT is a critical enabler in this regard, and he noted that IT will continue to forge tight relationships with the various functions and business units.
Story will report to Genesys Chief Financial Officer Brian Swartz, who noted in reference to Story, “Wesley is a proven leader with a deep understanding of business process improvements and building high-performing organizations grounded in customer experience and collaboration. As part of his responsibilities, he’ll work closely with product marketing, product engineering and many other functions as we grow and scale our business.”
Most recently, Story was an Enterprise Strategist at Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he was responsible for providing strategy guidance at the Board of Director, C-suite and IT leadership levels to advise clients on their transformation efforts. Prior to AWS, he was the interim global CIO at Sysco Foods, a leader in food distribution.
Our first Digital Symposium of the year is just around the corner. Join us on February 24 as technology leaders share their perspectives on scaling data and analytics initiatives, creating cultures of continuous learning, and the state of digital strategy in 2022, among other topics.
(Click here for highlights from our last Digital Symposium, and stay tuned to our YouTube channel for videos of our panel discussions.)
Noon
Fireside Chat: Bill Pappas, MetLife
Bill Pappas, EVP & Head of Technology and Operations, MetLife
Panel: Creating a World-Class Digital Customer Experience
Charu Jain, SVP Merchandising & Innovation, Alaska Airlines
Sanjib Sahoo, EVP and Chief Digital Officer, Ingram Micro
Moderated by Chris Davis, Vice President and West Coast Office Lead, Metis Strategy
12:40 – 12:55 p.m.
Entrepreneur Spotlight: Rakesh Loonkar, Transmit Security
Rakesh Loonkar, President & Co-Founder, Transmit Security
12:55 – 1:15 p.m.
Panel: How Talent and Culture Enable High Performance and Enterprise Agility
Raghu Sagi, Chief Information Officer, Inspire Brands
Onyeka Nchege, SVP and Chief Information Officer, Novant Health
Moderated by Peter High, President, Metis Strategy
1:15 – 1:30 p.m.
Entrepreneur Spotlight: Sunny Gupta, Apptio
Sunny Gupta, CEO & Co-Founder, Apptio
1:30 – 1:50 p.m.
Panel: Building Resilient Digital Supply Chains
Gurmeet Singh, EVP, CTO and CIO, Big Lots Stores
Gary Desai, Chief Information Officer, Discount Tire
Moderated by Michael Bertha, Vice President and Central Office Lead, Metis Strategy
1:50 – 2:10 p.m.
Panel: How Data and Digital Capabilities are Shaping the Future of Work
Vince Campisi, SVP Enterprise Services and Chief Digital Officer, Raytheon Technologies
Edward Wagoner, Chief Information Officer, JLL
Moderated by Steven Norton, Co-Head Executive Networks, Research, and Media, Metis Strategy
Click here for highlights from our last Digital Symposium, or view the panel discussions on YouTube.
General Motors today named two new technology leaders and said it would split its information technology organization into two groups, one focused on global IT and the other on software product development for customers.
Fred Killeen was named VP of global information technology and Chief Information Officer, reporting to CEO Mary Barra. He will lead the Global IT team, which is responsible for back-office IT support and using software to support growth across the company. Killeen most recently was GM’s Chief Information Security Officer and CTO, where he oversaw the automaker’s global information security and IT risk management programs.
Stacy Lynett will run the Digital Business Software group. Reporting to newly appointed Chief Digital Officer Edward Kummer, her team will be responsible for technology strategy and software product development that is geared toward delivering enhanced products and experiences for customers. She will also support global customer and dealer systems.
Lynett most recently was executive director and CIO of Global Product Development and Quality for GM IT, as well as CIO for Global Corporate Functions. In that role, she focused on the company’s Workday solution and supporting IT for the legal and communications functions.
Both Killeen and Lynett previously reported to CIO Randy Mott, who last week announced plans to retire.
The Global IT and Digital Business Software groups will be a critical part of GM’s plan to deliver $20 billion to $25 billion in software-enabled services revenue annually by 2030. In a press release, GM noted that both groups “will continue to collaborate on driving innovation, providing the best software and technology solutions to support the company, attracting and retaining talent, professional development, and more.”
“The new structure and dual operating model will enable GM to fully leverage its strong foundation in IT capability, talent and resources, as well as reduce complexity and improve speed,” Barra said in the statement. “Stacy and Fred bring unique backgrounds and experiences to help us seize the opportunities software plays in our business as we move from automaker to platform innovator.”
Vinny Hoxha, deputy CISO at GM, will take over as Chief Information Security Officer, reporting to Killeen.
PSteven Norton is co-head of CIO networks, research and media at Metis Strategy, a business and IT strategy firm. He previously was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal’s CIO Journal, where he covered the changing role of the chief information officer and the rise of emerging technologies including artificial intelligence and blockchain. At Forbes, he covers new CIO appointments as well as the ways in which technology executives are developing the workforce of the future.
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Our final Digital Symposium of the year is just around the corner. Join us on December 9 as technology leaders across industries share their insights on talent strategy and upskilling, creating new pathways to innovation, and the trends and priorities guiding CIOs’ efforts in the year ahead.
12:00 – 12:05
12:05 – 12:20
Fireside Chat: Jim McKelvey, Square
Jim McKelvey, Co-Founder, Square; Founder, Invisibly; Author, The Innovation Stack
12:20 – 12:40
Panel: Scaling AI to Deliver New Customer Experiences
Amir Arooni, Chief Information Officer, Discover Financial
Dean Del Vecchio, CIO and Chief of Operations, Guardian Life
12:40 – 12:55
Entrepreneur Spotlight: Taso Du Val, Toptal
Taso Du Val, Co-Founder & CEO, Toptal
12:55 – 1:15
Panel: Fostering Agility Across the Enterprise
Warren Kudman, Chief Information Officer, Turner Construction
Michael Ruttledge, CIO and Head of Technology Services, Citizens Financial
Moderated by Alex Kraus, Vice President and East Coast Office Lead, Metis Strategy
1:15 – 1:35
Panel: Rethinking Talent Strategy for the Next Normal
Casey Santos, Chief Information Officer, Asurion
Sri Donthi, Chief Technology Officer, Advance Auto Parts
1:35 – 1:50
Digital Spotlight: Anand Birje, HCL Technologies
Anand Birje, Senior Corporate VP & Head of Digital Business, HCL Technologies
1:50 – 2:10
Panel: Digital Platforms as Strategic Growth Drivers
Shri Santhanam, EVP & Global Head of Analytics and AI, Experian
Anjana Harve, Global Chief Information Officer, Fresenius Medical Care
2:10 – 2:25
Fireside Chat: Mike McNamara, Target
Mike McNamara, Chief Information Officer, Target
Most companies of consequence have a chief information officer. Many others have chief technology officers, who might be the heads of product and engineering for a tech-centric company, or, for some non-tech sector companies, might be the heads of infrastructure or tech-savvy leaders reporting to less technical chief information officers. A growing number of companies have chief digital officers, as well, often signaling the need to have an executive oversee digital transformation efforts exclusively. There are examples where the top tech and digital chief has one or a combination of these titles. The combination of all three roles for three separate executives occurs less frequently, needless to say, but less frequent still are examples of companies with execs with these three titles each of whom report to the chief executive officer. One such company is Johnson Controls.
Johnson Controls is a 136-year-old, Milwaukee-based company that develops products and services that enhance the intelligence of buildings to the tune of nearly $30 billion in annual revenue. Mike Ellis is the company’s chief customer and digital officer, adding customer responsibilities to the CDO title. He joined Johnson Controls in October 2019. Diane Schwarz is the company’s chief information officer, who joined the company in August of 2020. Finally, Vijay Sankaran is the company’s chief technology officer, and he joined the company in May 2021.
Ellis describes his role as chief customer and digital officer as deciphering the impact of the company’s efforts on customers, engaging them to understand what is most important to them. The goal is to innovate in collaboration with them, identifying ideas that will make a difference in their operations. Additionally, Ellis is responsible for digital product innovation and enterprise marketing, as the CMO reports through to him.
Schwarz has been a CIO multiple times over at companies like Hunt Consolidated and Textron. She has what she refers to as the traditional CIO purview of infrastructure, applications, and websites. Beyond that, she owns the customer experience, including “how our employee operates with all of our applications, how they get the day-to-day job done,” she noted. Schwarz added, “Mike owns the customer’s experience with our products, but then when you have the overlap of the Venn diagram, as the customers interact with portals, billing and how to schedule a ticket for field service; that’s where it goes back into the CIO responsibilities. It’s not, black and white to say that everything the customer interacts with Johnson Controls is under Mike’s umbrella. We have to navigate what really is the product experience versus the application experience.”
Sankaran has also been a CIO previously at TD Ameritrade, where he also ran an innovation program for the company. He oversees products for Johnson Controls. “When we think about product, it’s really the game-changing part of what’s going on in our industry right now – the software part of that product,” he said. “[We work on building] the right thing and build the thing right. My focus is all around building the thing right and building out a world-class digital software engineering organization at Johnson Controls.” His team’s focus is on edge Internet of Things (IoT) through a software and data platform called Open Blue. It is a platform that allows Johnson Controls’ customers to drive energy efficiency and sustainability by managing their spaces, smart buildings and then applying artificial intelligence [AI] and machine learning [ML] to be able to generate those insights. This creates a closed-loop so that we fully get to the smart autonomous buildings.
“We’re building the software and all the connectors and the data structures and the AI models in my new organization to support that and work closely with Mike around the customer needs and experiences, and closely with Diane’s organization around the broader ecosystem of service and support and infrastructure and cybersecurity to make sure that the pieces that overlap in that Venn diagram come together seamlessly,” noted Sankaran.
The group that now reports to Sankaran to bring this to life used to partially report to Ellis, who recognized the value in unifying the edge software engineering capabilities together with the integrated Open Blue platform. This has proven to be a strategic differentiator for the company. Sankaran has accelerated Ellis’ vision by implementing the scaled agile framework across the group to accelerate speed to market.
Schwarz noted that a key to determining where one’s responsibilities begin and the next one’s ends boils down to solid communications both informal and formal. “We absolutely get that we need to work productively on figuring out the handoffs and providing clarity to our teams,” said Schwarz. “[We are] a company going through a huge transformational shift to become digital to the core. The kinds of problems that we’re solving are new to the organization.”
When asked about the formal structures in place to facilitate the forging of strong bonds across the company, Schwarz offered the example of cybersecurity. There is an enterprise cybersecurity group, which reports to her, and there is a product cybersecurity team that reports to Sankaran. Though there is some overlap between what they do, they are distinct disciplines. Schwarz and her enterprise chief information security officer (CISO) attend Sankaran’s product cybersecurity briefings, and likewise, Sankaran and his CISO attend Schwarz’s enterprise cybersecurity briefings. This is indicative of a broader desire to keep each other informed especially in the areas where roles overlap.
Ellis notes that the approach Johnson Controls has taken in defining these roles and responsibilities has facilitated the 136-year-old company moving from industrial speed to the speed of a software company. It speaks volumes as to the company’s commitment to a digital future that it has three leaders of such consequence reporting to the CEO of the company. To have that degree of digital sophistication represented at the executive level bodes well for the company to accomplish its goal of becoming digital to the core.
Toyota Financial Services (TFS) is a 35-year-old, wholly-owned subsidiary of Toyota Motor Corporation and is the largest auto finance company in the U.S. with $125 billion in managed assets. The company’s offering includes lending payments, banking, and fleet financing, as well as insurance and protection products to consumers and dealers of Toyota, Lexus, and through private-label partner brands. The emergence of private-label partnerships has been a new part of the company’s operating model, but it was enabled through a radical transformation led by the company’s CIO, Vipin Gupta.
When Gupta joined TFS nearly three and a half years ago, he found a well-run IT organization, though he recognized that it was quite traditional. He was worried the IT department was not ready for the digital transformation necessary to be a bigger, strategic contributor to the company. Gupta faced a choice as to how best to proceed. “[I could] either fix the IT organization or redesign the next version of Toyota Financial Services in a grander way and use technology as a catalyst to design a new business model for Toyota Financial Services.” He chose the latter. Gupta continued, “The question that I used to ask was, ‘How would we design TFS if we were born today?’ If you were born in this digital world, the version of TFS [would] look very different, and the idea was, instead of trying to fix IT, let’s try to design that version, try to realize that [digital] vision of TFS.”
Gupta saw the opportunity to leapfrog the current standard and to make TFS into a platform for other brands to run their captive financial services on. “To do this, we needed to build a completely new technology chassis from the ground up with a multi-tenant architecture that allows us to run multiple brands on a shared infrastructure, but still keeps the data separate,” noted Gupta. The key in his mind was to transform behaviors before transforming technology. By first changing the way the team worked, the technology modernization pathway was clearer. The change required rethinking the way in which the company collaborated, the way new solutions were designed. “The best of strategies will fail without a culture that complements that aspiration,” said Gupta. “On the technology front, our vision is clear. We will use the cloud, and we will design a multi-tenant platform to deliver mobility finance as a service.”
When asked how the culture change was facilitated, Gupta noted how addressing three main points formed his gameplan, each using speed as the key performance indicator. First, there was a need to change the speed of decision-making. Second, there was a need to increase the speed of collaboration. Third, the team needed to increase the speed of engineering.
Speed of decision-making was the lynchpin according to Gupta. “Decision-making is the biggest barrier to speed and flexibility in an organization,” he noted. “The largest waste in IT projects is not in engineering. It is in decision-making and the lack of clarity. If you make decisions quickly supported by data and communicate decisions clearly, the team will consistently deliver with high quality and efficiency.” The key is to start this change from the top of the organization. Leaders needed to become more agile. Gupta facilitated the creation of new scrum-based routines for TFS’s executive team.
To facilitate the speed of collaboration, the digital organization needed to operate as a single ecosystem rather than separate silos. “Any business is a perpetual machine,” said Gupta. “It’s not a collection of time-bound projects. It needs durable teams led by subject matter experts, not by project managers only. These teams need to follow repeatable routines to maintain a continuous dialogue and prioritization.” Gupta developed a product orientation to the company, bringing together skills and teams from across the company aligned with the products that were defined. This common means of operating across product teams created greater output, but it also created greater levels of understanding and empathy across teams. Team members from across product teams shared information and learnings in ways that had not been the norm previously.
Changing the speed of engineering started with an acknowledgment that software is TFS’s product. As such, the company needed to become masters of its own technology. “We need to be as good at software engineering as [Toyota is] at automotive engineering,” said Gupta. “Inspired by our automotive factories, we built digital factories using the lean manufacturing practices of Toyota that have long been admired [the world over]. Just like automotive factories, the new digital factories were formed. They’re founded on consistency and standardization of behaviors, practices, and routines. We developed a new software engineering methodology that combines Toyota manufacturing practices with agile and scrum practice of software development.”
By increasing speed across these three vectors, the company was able to transform in months when years was the going-in assumption of what was possible. The key was to begin with the behavioral transformation. Gupta underscored that the focus on transforming habits before transforming the platform was a game-changer for TFS.
In order to ensure that the entire company and not just the technology employees raised their digital acumen, two years ago Gupta founded the TFS Digital Academy. “Harnessing the power of software is not just IT’s job; it is everyone’s job in a digital company,” noted Gupta. “The idea was not to just to train IT, but to train everyone across the organization, and whether they are employees or consultants, everyone will be trained in the new practices, new methods, new approaches, new behaviors.” This leveled the playing field and ensured that that level was much higher than in the past.
All of these changes have enabled the IT department to grow its contribution to the company’s success without growing costs. The new way of working has “reduced waste dramatically,” according to Gupta. “We’ve been managing our expenses in a very disciplined way, and we are now open to partner with any automaker, mobility provider or services provider, who wants to offer high quality, captive financial services for their brand to their customers and dealers.” As such IT’s transformation has been critical in developing the new private-label business. Mazda was the first partner to engage through Mazda Financial Services. Mazda gains mightily through the partnership by focusing on its products while leveraging the capabilities, talent, and quality of TFS.
The future will include adding more brands to this model, but Gupta also sees the possibility of additional products and services. These will include insurance and payments in the used car business, for example.
Gupta has achieved a tremendous amount in less than three and a half years in his role. With the digital innovation engine that he has created with speed as the metric, no doubt this is just the beginning of what he and the team can accomplish for TFS.
Join best-in-class technology leaders to learn how today’s top companies are driving digital transformations and maintaining an innovative edge amid a time of unprecedented change and uncertainty.
Our agenda is below. CIOs and other technology leaders, register here to reserve your spot today, and stay tuned for more updates.
Welcome
12:10 – 12:25
Fireside Chat: Barbara Lavernos, Deputy CEO, L’Oréal
Barbara shares lessons from the company’s remarkable transformation, which has fused science and technology to create cutting-edge beauty products and design new digital journeys for customers.
Barbara Lavernos, Deputy CEO for Research, Innovation, and Technology, L’Oréal
12:25 – 12:45
Panel: Digital Acceleration and Innovation in Times of Uncertainty
By all accounts, the global pandemic has further accelerated the already rapid pace of digital transformation and increased the urgency for more robust business capabilities across all aspects of organizational operating models and business ecosystems. In this context, many organizations have found ways to strengthen business capabilities for the benefit of all stakeholders. The global CIOs of Corteva Agriscience and Johnson & Johnson will share how their teams have found unique ways to innovate, achieve higher levels of agility, and build sustainable resilience in the face of ongoing uncertainty.
Debra King, SVP, Chief Information Officer and Chief Transformation Officer, Corteva Agriscience
Jim Swanson, EVP & Enterprise CIO, Johnson & Johnson
12:45 – 1:00
Entrepreneur Spotlight: Mickey Boodaei, Transmit Security
Just weeks ago, Transmit Security raised $543 million in Series A funding and had a pre-money valuation of $2.2 billion, marking the largest Series A in the history of cybersecurity and one of the highest valuations for a bootstrapped company. In this fireside chat, Transmit Founder and CEO Mickey Boodaei the evolution of identity and authentication as the world moves toward a post-password future.
Mickey Boodaei, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Transmit Security
1:00 – 1:20
Panel: How Fifth Third Bancorp Drives a Culture of Innovation
Fifth Third Bancorp is among the largest money managers in the Midwest, with $483 billion in assets under management as of June 30. Greg Carmichael, the company’s President, Chairman, and CEO, joined the company in 2003 as Chief Information Officer. In this discussion, he shares lessons learned on his path to the CEO role and chats with the company’s current CIO about the company’s investments in FinTech and its continued push to build world-class digital capabilities for its customers.
Greg Carmichael, Chief Executive Officer, Fifth Third Bank
Jude Schramm, Chief Information Officer, Fifth Third Bank
1:20 – 1:35
Entrepreneur Spotlight: Ed Jennings, Quickbase
The CEO of Quickbase describes how automation, low-code and no-code platforms are enabling organizational agility and the role of Citizen Automation in the future of work.
Ed Jennings, Chief Executive Officer, Quickbase
1:35 – 1:55
Panel: IT-Led Breakthroughs and the Digital Shift in Insurance
Technology leaders from two major insurance companies will discuss the role of IT in defining and enabling the future of work, IT-led digital breakthroughs, and the foundational changes that digital capabilities are bringing to the insurance industry.
Lisa Davis, SVP & Chief Information Officer, Blue Shield of California
Mike Shadler, SVP & Chief Information Officer, Pacific Life
Moderated by Chris Davis, Vice President & West Coast Lead, Metis Strategy
1:55 – 2:15
Panel: A People-Focused Approach to Transformation
Organizations increasingly acknowledge that creating an outstanding customer experience requires enabling an equally outstanding employee experience. In this session, technology leaders will discuss how digital efforts focused on people are driving engagement and enabling the development of new capabilities.
Mike Giresi, Chief Digital Technology Officer, Molex LLC
Tim Dickson, Chief Information Officer, Generac
2:15 – 2:30
Entrepreneur Spotlight: Bernadette Nixon, Algolia
Algolia processes more than 1.5 trillion searches per year across more than 10,000 business customers. In this session, CEO Bernadette Nixon discusses what’s next for search and the growing role that APIs play in delivering seamless customer experiences.
Bernadette Nixon, Chief Executive Officer, Algolia
2:30 – 2:50
Panel: Combining AI and IoT to drive digital processes
Companies today rely on a rapidly evolving combination of artificial intelligence and Internet of Things applications as they modernize their operations for the digital age. In this discussion, technology leaders share their insights on successfully scaling and monitoring these digital processes to drive efficiency and product innovation.
Vagesh Dave, GVP & Chief Information Officer, McDermott International
Danielle Brown, SVP & Chief Information Officer, Whirlpool
Moderated by Michael Bertha, Managing Director and Central Office Lead, Metis Strategy
Like so many companies over the past year and half, Ralph Lauren has had its resilience tested as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. It had to shut down stores and offices, and had to advance efforts to better interact with customers and associates alike, safely.
Fortunately for the company, Janet Sherlock, who has been the chief information officer of Ralph Lauren for the past four years, initiated a number of initiatives that gave the company a leg up. Her purview is such that she has unusual influence for a CIO. She runs strategy and overall management of all of the technology including design conceptualization through to the point when products are distributed to either wholesale partners, the company’s stores, or directly to the company’s consumers. Her team is also responsible for store technology and the full ecosystem of in-product management and user experience. Additionally, Sherlock oversees all global digital platforms, marketing technology, data analytics, and data science. All of this is on top of global infrastructure, cybersecurity, IT risk, compliance, and privacy.
Among the fortuitous programs that were in place prior to the pandemic that aided the company’s transition during the pandemic was a hybrid flexible work arrangement called Flex Place. Upon this foundation, Sherlock’s team rapidly rolled out virtual appointment booking. Her team had already made significant progress on curbside pickup for customers. Completing its rollout ensured that the company could still do business through stores even if customers were unable or less willing to go in them.
“I think our biggest shift left efforts was probably in virtual stores,” said Sherlock. “We had been considering our approach to virtual stores before Covid hit but that was something that we pulled forward very quickly and aggressively. Our stores were such masterpieces, and the experience is so unique, we felt it was important to offer the world of Ralph Lauren to our customers, even if they couldn’t physically visit our stores.” Her team rolled out a rich virtual store experience and quickly integrated it with the company’s e-commerce platform so that customers could purchase certain products via hotspots directly from their virtual experience. “At this point, we have seven different virtual store experiences, and are continuing to build on the capabilities that we have in our virtual store environment,” noted Sherlock.
One of the thornier issues that Sherlock and team had to grapple with how to assist Ralph Lauren’s design and merchandising teams, each of whom relied and thrived on in-person collaboration. Sherlock’s team set up a design collaboration platform for them to use, and it proved to be a silver lining of the pandemic inasmuch as the teams developed new ways to work and collaborate. Now the design and merchandising teams anticipate an ability to continue to work both in person and virtually, adding flexibility to their work routines.
Another process that the company took for granted had to be done in person was the product approval process, which traditionally relied on in-person meetings to discuss milestones related to lines, styles, and fit approvals. It was long assumed that those involved had to be able to physically see and touch the material in order to make decisions. “We were able to leverage our 3D product development for the approval process, which also had the side benefit of streamlining the process,” said Sherlock. “We [also] had to create online experiences to replicate and replace our showroom visits, and support different virtual ordering processes for our wholesale partners.”
As Sherlock contemplated the future, she noted three strategic priorities: experiences, data, and automation. The overarching benefit of these foci should be greater nimbleness for the company. The experiences center around creating a variety of customer journeys and allowing customers to engage in the ways that best suit them rather than dictating how they shop and purchase products from Ralph Lauren. “Everything is interoperable between our online, our [marketing technology] and our in-store capabilities are blended together so we can create seamless experiences and we have some really cool ones planned for the future,” noted Sherlock.
Next, she believes data strategy will be a critical area of focus. “We’re being very deliberate about the overall data strategy for the core elements of data, things like our product data, our digital assets, our customer data, thinking strategically about where they’re stored, how they’re accessed and leveraged, how they’re maintained,” said Sherlock. “[This will impact not only] data analytics, but [it will allow Ralph Lauren] to serve up on a real-time basis things like personalization, real-time actions, real-time decision-making…Then, of course, it leads to our capabilities in advanced analytics and data science, which for us is a major area of emphasis and focus.” She refers to IT as the “connective tissue” of the enterprise relative to data, and that this is a discipline that will lead to better collaboration across the traditional silos of the company.
Sherlock believes that greater degrees of automation will improve the efficiency of all that IT delivers while further modernizing the practices of the company to better compete in the digital age. Sherlock and her team have implemented a variety of changes that have overturned decades of inherited wisdom about how business can be done, providing new benefits along the way. Necessity is the mother of invention, it is said, and many inventions have been created due to the necessities that the pandemic has driven.
