by Peter High, published on Forbes
5-9-2016
Like other companies, the IT function at Intuit used to be one that the rest of the company loved to complain about. It was an easy scapegoat for a number of issues. Atticus Tysen has been at Intuit for 14 years, and for the first 11 years of that experience, he was outside of IT and was quite familiar with the complaints. He held roles in Product Management, in Engineering and Operations, and in Enterprise Business Solutions. Rather than pile on as others complained, Tysen elected to do something about it by joining IT as senior vice president and chief information officer three years ago.
Since then, Tysen has revamped the function such that it has more of a product leadership mentality rather than that of the order takers of old. He has also ensured that IT is transparent in its communications so that the value it contributes is more readily understood by the company and its customers. Tysen covered all of the above while also offering advice for CIOs of non-technology centric companies who might wish to emulate some of what he has done in the transformation he has led.
(To listen to an extended audio version of this interview, please click this link.This is the seventh article in the Business CIO series, featuring executives who have emerged from other corporate functions to become CIOs. Read past interviews with the likes of Marriott CIO Bruce Hoffmeister and World Bank CIO Stephanie von Friedeburg. To read future articles in this series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Atticus, yours is an interesting background. You have been with Intuit for about fourteen years and have been CbIO for more than two and one-half of those years. In the interim between the time you started at the company and two and one-half years ago, you held a variety of roles: product development roles; Vice President of Enterprise Business Solutions; and Engineering and Operations roles. As a result, for the majority of your time at Intuit you were a consumer of IT, as opposed to a leader of it. I know from our past conversations that you have said that one of the main reasons you joined IT was that you kept hearing complaints that IT was the source of many problems, so rather than echo the complaints, you decided to join the team. Can you talk a little bit about that insight and the journey from outside IT to leading it?
Atticus Tysen: One of the big things I discovered being part of IT is the hard job of balancing running all of the existing systems while you are trying to build out the new future. Before I got into IT I did not understand that. All I understood was the latest request I was asking for. We have a legacy as a company– we are a little over thirty years old— and our business model has evolved. We have many different layers of technology, as does every company of our age, and that context is important to understand. The IT organization has to operate all of that well, because that is serving customers and different segments of our customers. If any one of those systems is not performing that means we are not performing for some set of customers. So while operating that flawlessly we also have to build out the future, start to move people to SaaS offerings and migrate the company. It is a difficult trade off to accomplish. I think it is hard to appreciate that on a day to day basis until you really get in and understand it from the inside.
High: Obviously Intuit itself is a technology business: what you are selling is, in so many cases, technology. The other roles I suggested outside of IT are technical and you have made the point, as others who are CIOs and technology jobs have made as well, that you are surrounded by people who feel like they could do your job better than you can. I know from our past conversations, Atticus, you have said they are probably right at least in segments of what you do, but probably not for the entire thing. I wonder if you could also explain that rationale.
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4-25-2016
Paul Chapman has been a chief information officer (among other IT leadership roles) at multiple technology-centric businesses from HP to VMWare to Sun Microsystems. When he joined Box as CIO ten months ago, he had a keen understanding of how a can play an influential role in an organization that has both depth and breadth of technology talent. First, he and his team act as the first customer of the enterprise, working with product leaders to test new products and offer comment on value. As such, he is also well positioned to be a company advocate with the CIOs and other technology executives who are Box’s customers. He also highlights the need for IT leaders to make change a source of strength rather than a source of angst. He also offers thoughts on how best to work with and motivate an IT department and a company that is largely made up of digital natives.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 35th article in the CIO’s First 100 Days series. To read the prior 34 with the CIOs of companies like Ford, Intel, GE, P&G, Kaiser Permanente, and AARP, among many others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Paul Chapman, I thought we would begin with your current role. You are the Chief Information Officer of Box, a role you have held since July of 2015. You had been with other leading technology companies—HP, VMware, Sun Microsystems before this one, to name just a few—but this was a different kind of company, certainly. In the days leading up to your ascension to this position how did you prepare- for the role?
Paul Chapman: I think whenever you are transitioning into a new organization, that organization has some history to it that puts it into its current form. As I spent time with leaders at Box and understanding Box’s positioning in the marketplace, one thing that I would call a difference in terms of transitioning from a more traditional company was that Box was born in the cloud and has grown up digital, so the footprint and the IT services and the IT landscape that you inherit in a company like Box is typically very different than most other organizations in the fact that they have avoided building up a lot of “tech debt”, a lot of legacy infrastructure, legacy operating models. Understanding the platforms that were in place in running the business of Box, and understanding that sort of “cloud first” model, was different than typically most organizations where you are somewhat having to manage your way out of that legacy environment. So it allowed me to jump in very, very quickly, look at the landscape of platforms and services that were in place. Then really the key thing was to make sure we were on leveraging those best of breed capabilities to a greater extent than we were at the time that I joined. But really, the preparation was understanding in advance what those cloud-based services and platforms were that were in place that were running the business of Box.
High: When Aaron Levie announced you were coming on board, he noted “our IT organization is free to focus on connecting best of breed solutions, creating a more agile and productive workforce in solving core problems to differentiate our business.” What are some of the ways that you think of IT as differentiating the business of Box?
Chapman: There were a few things that I quickly settled on as key themes into how IT was going to help Box, not only to scale, but also to become more data-driven and operationally more efficient, and actually to focus on enabling to a greater extent as much productivity as possible. It is all about speed and agility, but at the same time managing scalability and risk. One of the things that I noted early on as a key theme for us was ‘What is going to be our path to one billion dollars?’ As we grow in scale how are we going to get there? What I identified was that we were lacking longer range planning, a roadmap to how we were going to get to one billion dollars, how we were going to scale out and get the right resiliency, and so on, in our environment. We had invested in a lot of best of breed capabilities, but we had not necessarily leveraged them to their fullest extent. We had all the right platforms, but it was like buying a sports car and taking it to the corner store and back and not really getting it out of first gear. One of the early things that I did was focus in on understanding, from a heat map perspective and a roadmap perspective, where we need to invest time to really leverage these platforms to a much greater extent.
The second one was really around a data-driven enterprise. I found that we were not as data-driven as I would have liked to have seen us, and so we spent a lot of time in the environment looking at how we provide better insights, better analytical capabilities, to make better informed decisions.
3-14-2016
I interviewed Ben Fried, CIO of Google, on stage at the Forbes CIO Summit last week, and he offered a number of keen pieces of advice for his fellow CIOs.
He noted the following first principles that he operates under: people are creatures of habit, and yet technology has never moved as quickly as it is today. As a result, CIOs need to make change a core competency. The ability to change is essential to stay competitive. Google is so worried about practices becoming ossified that they hold what are referred to as bureaucracy buster days. Employees from across the company identify areas where bureaucracy has seeped into the company, note them, and projects are devised to destroy them.
Fried said, “IT sits in middle of some hard realities. On the one hand, people are creatures of habit. On the other hand, computing is arguably the fastest moving discipline in the history of the enterprise. Realizing the advantages that come from computing’s rate of innovation means we have to force people out of their technology habits.” He notes that this will not happen without a push because of the strength of inertia. He said, “Plan on making changes every year, and on building an end-to-end technology team that flourishes in change. For example, if you think of the help desk as being about reading FAQs and recipes, that’s a cognitive dissonance — you’re acting as if change is bad.” He said that although many companies have outsourced the help desk, by so doing, they are not equipping the enterprise with the ability to change, as the help desk is a key weapon in any change management program.
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12-21-2015
CenturyLink’s Chief Information Officer Bill Bradley has been with the $18 billion company through predecessor organizations for more than 30 years. In that time, he has been a part of a technology organization that has gone from a support organization to a driver of innovation and digital transformation. Part of the change has been driven through job rotations, having non-IT employees spend time in IT and vice versa. IT has also championed agile development, engaging end users of technology early and often, validating value along the way. In a company that has grown dramatically through acquisition, Bradley’s organization is often one of the first to get involved when a company is acquired. In this interview, he describes a significant cultural transformation that he has led, and he describes specific innovations that have been developed.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. To read future interviews like this one, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: I thought we would begin with your company, CenturyLink. Could you take a moment to describe the business?
Bill Bradley: We are a traditional network provider at our core, but we are much more than that. We offer video services, and voice services. Cloud and managed hosting are services that we recently added to our portfolio. Even more recently, we bought an analytics company, which will expand our IT services offering that has been in place for a little while. We operate both in the U.S. and internationally.
High: How would you describe your role in the organization?
Bradley: My responsibilities include all of the internal IT systems and platforms, and many of the business processes are encapsulated in those systems. We have grown by acquisition, so we have a significant number of systems that we use to support our business. We work to rationalize those over time. I also have a business leadership role with the rest of the CEO’s direct reports, which is involved in setting the strategic vision of the company.
12-8-2015
Brian Lesser is the CEO of Xaxis, a billion dollar division within $16 billion WPP, a British multinational advertising and public relations company. Lesser has reached this revenue hurdle in less than five years, which has positioned Xaxis among the largest global digital media platforms. The company programmatically connects advertisers and publishers to audiences across all addressable channels. The company’s mission is to “make advertising welcome.” As Lesser notes, this involves advertising reaching the right customer at the right point in a transaction through the right medium with a compelling message. This is easier said than done, but the key to successfully execute this involves better leveraging data and technology.
Lesser highlights the many advantages and the challenges of starting a business within a much larger enterprise as opposed to doing so as a more traditional, venture-backed organization. It has required some cultural changes, but he has been blessed with a CEO who is progressive enough to understand that digital transformation that is necessary. As a result of Lesser’s success, in January he will be promoted to become North American CEO of WPP’s advertising media company, GroupM. This appears to be an acknowledgement that the things Lesser has done well at Xaxis should be embedded more broadly in the company as a whole.
Peter High: Brian, Xaxis is the biggest programmatic media company representing the demand side of the advertising marketplace. Please provide an overview of the business.
Brian Lesser: We started Xaxis about five years ago and the mission was to use data and technology to help advertisers reach and engage with their audiences across all channels and devices. Xaxis is a company that helps advertisers effectively engage with their audiences through the programmatic buying of media. What that means is that we can collect anonymous information about a consumer’s browsing behaviors – what content they like to read, what products they are shopping for, what ads they typically engage with. We gather that information and we build up profiles of users. Once we have those profiles, it means we can go into a marketplace for advertising impressions and enact those profiles in real time. When we see a user in one of these marketplaces or within inventory that we have forward traded or inventory that we own, we can evaluate how valuable that user is to one of our clients and then serve them an advertising impression—whether that be a banner ad, or a video ad, or a social media ad—in real time.
What programmatic advertising allows us to do is disconnect the audience from the context. In traditional media buying, you would define an audience based on the context they are in. So if I am looking for sports fans, I am going to buy sports programming on television or sports websites. Now, because I know so much about the user, I can disconnect that and I can serve relevant advertising to an audience wherever they may be regardless of the context that they are in. Today it is almost a $1 billion revenue business. We have 1,100 people around the world and over 2,000 clients that we service.
High: I was fascinated to learn that a mission of the organization is to make advertising welcome. How does one accomplish that?
Lesser: We fundamentally believe that technology and data can, over time, improve advertising—not just how ads are targeted to a person, but we think that, in general, people do not like interruptive advertising. But in many cases they are very happy to watch a 30 second television commercial if it is a beautiful piece of film and it is engaging and it is for a brand they are interested in. We think that using data and technology we can actually make advertising better for consumers and make advertising welcome for consumers. Because good advertising ceases to become an interruptive message and, in fact, becomes a relevant piece of content.
12-7-2015
Ron Ross is a Fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, a non-regulatory agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce. NIST’s mission is to promote U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science, standards, and technology in ways that enhance economic security and improve our quality of life.
Ross’ role at NIST is in the information technology laboratory, where he leads the Federal Information Security Management Act Implementation Project. He is also the principal architect of the NIST Risk Management Framework, and leads the joint taskforce between the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community, and the Committee on National Security Systems that developed the Unified Information Security Framework for the federal government. To my mind, he has one of the clearest and most comprehensive approaches to data security, a topic we drill down into great depth in this article. Last week at a Forbes CIO dinner in Washington, DC that I co-hosted with Forbes Managing Editor, multiple government and private sector CIOs noted how influential Ross has been on their approaches to cybersecurity. For that reason, I’m particularly excited to share some of his biggest ideas.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this article in podcast form, please click this link. This is the 15th article in the “IT Influencers” series. To read past interviews with Meg Whitman, Sal Khan, Sebastian Thrun, Sir James Dyson, Jim Goodnight, and Walt Mossberg among others, please click this link. To read future articles in this series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: For those who may not be familiar, I thought we would begin with a description of your organizations, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, as well as your role in it.
Ron Ross: NIST is an organization that is part of the Department of Commerce. We are one of several bureaus within the department. NIST has three thousand scientists and engineers that work across many different laboratories, from chemistry to physics. The division that I am in – the Computer Security division – is part of the Information Technology Laboratory. We work on standards and guidelines and work closely with industry to collaborate so that the standards and guidelines that we produce are implementable and cost-effective. It is a collaborative way to do business.
High: You have talked about how our appetite for advanced technology is far exceeding our ability to protect it. I wonder if you could talk a bit about the paradigm shift that is happening, the drivers behind that appetite and what makes today different from years past.
Ross: I think what makes the world so much different today is that we are literally living through a transformation from a fully paper-based world to a digital world. Technology is moving forward at such a rapid pace. Every day we see new things with tablets, smartphones, and the Internet of Things. We are driven to the technology because it is so powerful and affordable. When you have those two things, consumers are going to buy a lot of it.
It is an exciting time to be alive because the things that we are seeing computers do today, were not anticipated five or ten years ago. It is great to be a part of this digital revolution, but with that comes some other things that can be troubling. That is where the information security part of the problem comes in.
Peter High
10-8-2015
Excerpt from the Article:
Hudbay Minerals is a Canadian integrated mining company with operations, development properties and exploration activities across the Americas and focuses on the discovery, production and marketing of base and precious metals. The company’s objective is to create sustainable value through increased commodity exposure on a per-share basis by growing long-life deposits, in high-quality and mining-friendly jurisdictions.
Joe AbiDaoud has been CIO of Hudbay for more than five years. He speaks with CIO Insight contributor Peter High about his role in innovation, his input on mergers and acquisitions, the company’s global expansion and a variety topics concerning IT.
CIO Insight: What are some of your strategic IT imperatives for the foreseeable future?
Joe AbiDaoud: We’ve been executing well on our strategy thus far. This has included shifting to cloud and SaaS for many enterprise applications, organizational design based on Gartner’s LEAN model, Single Instance ERP platform, business intelligence-enabled system architecture. What this means from a business perspective is the ability to scale our business effectively. It helps us become a low-cost producer, and drive efficiency and value from our operations.
CIO Insight: You are one of the leaders responsible for innovation. What are some examples of IT-led innovation at HudBay Minerals?
AbiDaoud: HudBay has a great track record for success. I firmly believe success requires innovation. Innovation doesn’t always mean technology but technology can drive innovation. We take a collaborative approach to innovation and work with our stakeholders on ways to transform our business. Some examples include introducing new software capabilities, collaborating on ways to get real-time data into the field through displays and mobile devices; coming up with new ways to improve metal balancing and other operational processes. We look at ways to leverage our ERP to improve our supply chain management. There is a long list and it continues to grow.
CIO Insight: You have also played a key role in mergers and acquisitions activities at the company. Can you describe that role?
AbiDaoud: As I mentioned earlier one of our key strategies was to create/develop an IT environment that was conducive to growth; one that could scale effectively in either direction and respond quickly to business changes, and support our business strategy. The cloud was and is a big part of that. We have the ability to enter new geographies with very little IT infrastructure, low cost and quickly. When it comes to M&A, we take part in a collective integration team that consists of all functions.
To read the full article, please visit CIO Insight
10-6-15
The United States Tennis Association (USTA) is the governing body for United States tennis. It includes over 700,000 members. It also runs the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows, Queens, New York, best known as the site of the US Open, which recently concluded.
For over 13 years, Larry Bonfante has run technology for the United States Tennis Association as its Chief Information Officer. When Bonfante joined, IT was not critical to the work of the USTA, and its flagship event was not necessarily viewed as being powered by IT. Today, all of that has changed. Players (both professional and amateur), employees, and fans all view information as critical ingredient in their experience with the USTA. As Bonfante notes herein, there is a lot that goes into planning the technology for the most highly attended annual sporting event in the world
Peter High: Congratulations on a tremendous US Open, Larry. Can you provide an overview of your responsibilities at the USTA as CIO?
Larry Bonfante: I’m responsible for running all technology for the US Open which is the most highly attended annual sporting event in the world. I’m also accountable for supplying solutions and technology support for our 17 section offices and our 4 national offices. We also provide online services that allow our more than 700K players and members register for and participate in our tennis programs. In addition to my role as CIO, I lead our corporate culture change initiative and run our Learning & Leadership Development function.
High: You have been at the USTA for more than 13 and a half years. Can you reflect on how the role of technology has changed across that time?
Bonfante: When I first got here IT had no role in supporting the US Open. Now every aspect of the event from ticket scanning, to concessions point of sales, to tournament scheduling to the water fountains outside Arthur Ashe stadium are run by technology. Today consumers have more computing power available on their iPhones than we had on our corporate systems when I started 30 years ago. That allows us the opportunity to leverage technology to create a deeper more personal level of engagement with our players, members and fans.
10-5-15
Mondelez International is a $34 billion consumer packaged goods company that was formed in 2012 from what used to be Kraft Foods. Mark Dajani was Mondelez International’s first chief information officer. Though he continues to have this role, his responsibilities have grown to include process ownership (his current title is Chief Information and Process Officer) and Real Estate. He also has significant digital and innovation responsibilities. Ultimately, Dajani sees himself on a path to becoming Chief Change Officer, as embracing and facilitating change are at the heart of all that he does.
His augmentation of skills has in part been due to his ability to simplify IT. He does so by eliminating the bottom ten percent of technology each year. In so doing, he ensures that old, unsupported technology is not the norm, and that there are fewer instances of redundant solutions. This is a laudable goal no matter if one wishes to take on more responsibilities or not.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 24th article in the CIO-plus series. To read past stories with CIO-pluses from Proctor & Gamble, Marsh & McLennan, the San Francisco Giants, Walgreens, and McKesson, among others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above and to the left.)
Peter High: Take a moment to describe the business of Mondelez International?
Mark Dajani: We formally launched it in 2012, when we spun off the Kraft Foods Company. Our products are all over the world. We are the largest chocolate company in the world. We are the number one or number two position in every brand that we have, whether it is Oreo, Nabisco, Cadbury, Trident, etc. It is a phenomenal portfolio that people enjoy every day. We have over a hundred thousand employees in almost every nook and cranny of the world.
High: Can you talk a bit about your role as Chief Information and Process Officer?
Dajani: Something I just took on recently is the Real Estate portion for this company. People might wonder why a CIO might have Real Estate for the company. I asked for these additional responsibilities because I feel that our job is to provide computing experiences for our employees. I like to spend a lot of my time also in providing a better work experience for our employees. Real Estate and facilities have to be an integrated portion of what we do for our employees. I would like to bring Real Estate and technology together to help our employees be even more productive.
9-29-15
For the past 18 years, Mark Brewer has been the CIO of Seagate the $14 billion provider of electronic data storage products. That is an unusually long tenure, and it means that he has been present for a dramatic evolution, as the company has gone from a manufacturer of disk drives to a cloud-centric company, as well. When Brewer began at Seagate, there were 150 companies making disk drives. Now Seagate is among the last in the field. In that time, the company has diversified into solid state products, cloud services and technology, with plans to diversify further. In addition to traditional IT functions, Brewer also has responsibility for manufacturing execution systems in the factories, which is typically under the purview of Engineering or Operations functions.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link . To read future articles like this one, please click the “Follow” link to the upper left of this page.)
Peter High: I thought we would begin with a description of Seagate’s business. No doubt many of our listeners would know of Seagate, but would love to hear in your own world, especially as a veteran of the organization, what it is that Seagate does and also your role in IT.
Mark Brewer: Seagate Technology is one of the long-term tech companies. We have been making disk drives for a long time. There used to be hundred fifty companies doing that; it is down to just a handful now. So we are in the traditional disk drive space. We also have solid state products, some cloud services and technology that we are now selling, and so we are diversifying a little bit. But we are essentially located in the storage space. That is who we are at Seagate. I am the CIO here. I have been the CIO for a long time. I have the traditional IT functions and then I also have responsibility for the manufacturing execution systems in our factories, which typically is in engineering or operations, but here it is in IT.
High: And speaking of your role as CIO, you have an unusually long tenure as the IT lead for Seagate—nearly 18 years—which is really extraordinary at a time when the average tenure is still between four and five years for Chief Information Officers. One of the things that really intrigued me as I thought about that, Mark, is no doubt you have introduced—perhaps even your team built– technologies that you have had to replace; that you have had to transition from the pre-cloud computing period to now more of a software-as-a-service type model solution. You became CIO at a time when offshoring was not necessarily as much a lever that IT leaders were choosing to pull. Now that is much more part of the bailiwick of IT, and again a lever IT leaders choose to pull, and in fact create an IT operation that is more efficient, just to mention a couple of trends. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that evolution over the 18 years, and how IT has changed and how IT specifically at Seagate has.
Brewer: It is interesting to be at a place and see things come in and go out, and we have definitely been here long enough to do that. I tell people that fundamentally I am responsible for everything: everything that is a problem is my fault because I have been here so long. We have had large turnovers in technology. We certainly went through the Y2K era here, and then the dot com era, and then all the supply chain optimization that people did for a while, and then the downturns in 2008/2009. So it has been an interesting journey along the way.
We have done all of the things you mentioned. We have big cloud plays with OpenStack, and we use Google’s applications and Salesforce in the cloud. We have done offshoring. We have big operations in Asia. We have a bit of an advantage in that a lot of our footprint is sitting in Asia, so I have a majority of the IT staff sitting in Malaysia and Thailand and China and Singapore. So we are a global organization IT-wise and leverage really great talent around the world to do the things that we have to do. And then we have third party partners in India and elsewhere that we use at times for projects and for support. We have gone through that whole role. One of the dangers of being a place so long is that you could have made a decision seven or eight years ago on a particular item and in your mind that decision has been made, but the world has changed in seven or eight years, and you need to make a different decision. I think that is one of the risks I have, and I talk about it here, and I talk about it with my staff and with others, that I have to be careful, and my staff has to be careful, that we are not locked into a decision that we made years ago just because I have been here a long time and a some of my IT players have been here long time.
