by Peter High, published on Forbes
6-6-2016
Over the past decade and a half, Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen, has created three “Allen Institutes” for Brian Science, Cell Science, and Artificial Intelligence. The Institute for AI was founded in 2013, andits mission is “to contribute to humanity through high-impact AI research and engineering.”
In early 2014, Allen tapped serial entrepreneur, Oren Etzioni, as chief executive officer. Etzioni has a PhD in computer science, has been a professor at the University of Washington, and founded or co-founded a number of companies, including Farecast (sold to Microsoft in 2008) and Decide (sold to eBay in 2013).
The goal of Etzioni’s research is to solve fundamental problems in AI, particularly the automatic learning of knowledge from text. In our far ranging conversation, we discuss the specifics of his goal, the pace of innovation in AI more generally, safety concerns, and how they should be dealt with, the government’s role in mitigating risks of AI, and a variety of other topics.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the fifth interview in my artificial intelligence series. Please visit these links to interviews with Mike Rhodin of IBM Watson, Sebastian Thrun of Udacity, Scott Phoenix of Vicarious, Antoine Blondeau of Sentient Technologies, and Greg Brockman of OpenAI.)
Peter High: You are the CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence whose mission is to contribute to humanity through high impact AI research and engineering. Can you provide your definition for high impact AI research and engineering?
Oren Etzioni: It starts with Paul Allen, who is a visionary and scientific philanthropist. He won the Carnegie Medal for Philanthropy last year. He has been passionate for decades about AI research and the potential of AI to benefit humanity.
In January 2014, we were launched as a nonprofit research institute in Seattle. We are now fifty people – about half PhDs and half engineers – and the question that we ask ourselves when we get up in the morning is “What can we do using the techniques?” Ultimately, to me, the computer is just a big pencil. What can we sketch using this pencil that makes a positive difference to society, and advances the state of the art, hopefully in an out-sized way? We are small compared to the teams that Google and Facebook and others have, but we want to punch above our weight class.
One of the things we have noticed as we have developed expertise in natural language processing and machine learning is that there are millions of scientific papers published every year – nobody can keep up. Google Scholar came on the scene about a decade ago and indexed all these papers, but there is too much information: You do a simple query and experience overload. What we need are techniques to help people cut through the clutter and hone in on key results. The approach we have taken is to use AI methods to filter irrelevant results—to extract key information like the topic of the paper, the figures that are involved, the citations that are influential, etc., etc.— in order to help people find the papers that they need. We have launched a free service on the internet called SemanticScholar.org, which currently indexes several million computer science papers. Our hypothesis is that if we can make scientists better at their job, then we can help solve some of humanity’s thorniest problems. We are starting with computer scientists, but we want to expand to medical researchers and ultimately doctors. Even a specialist does not have the latest information about your condition– they just cannot keep up. They are diagnosing you and treating you based on, at best, incomplete and potentially erroneous information. We want to help change that.
High: If you were to think about the next decade, what are some of the promising future attributes outcomes that you foresee with the developments that are coming down the pipeline and with regard to AI generally speaking?
Etzioni: AI is becoming pervasive in its use in technology in society. Marc Andreessen famously said that software is eating the world. One might riff on that and say that AI is eating software, in the sense that everywhere where there is a software solution, there is the potential for an AI solution.
Cars are a great example: They have become complex computers. There are more than one hundred fifty computers in the average car. There is the potential now to have a car drive itself using AI. The reason that is exciting is that it could reduce the number of accidents we have on the roads today due to distracted human drivers or humans driving under the influence. Our highways and our roads are underutilized because of the allowances we have to make for human drivers. We could pack the roads a lot more densely and reduce traffic congestion and greenhouse gases and all those things if traffic were more efficient, so that is a great example. But, anywhere you look in society I see the potential for AI to help.
High: I read a paper of yours from a number of months back in which you said, “The popular dystopian vision of AI is wrong for one simple reason: it equates intelligence with autonomy.” I wonder if you could unpack that insight a little bit.
To read the full article, please visit 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?
Peter High
4-28-2016
Excerpt from the Article:
Brown University has a stated goal to be the leader in appropriate use of technology among its peers and beyond. Ravi Pendse serves as the vice president and CIO of Brown University, and in that role, it is his responsibility to enact that vision. He is also a Professor of Practice in Computer Science and Engineering, and therefore is the rare CIO who also teaches students. As he tells CIO Insight contributor, Peter High, he is a technology evangelist through the multiple hats that he wears.
Peter High: Ravi, please describe your role as CIO of Brown University.
Ravi Pendse: I have the privilege and honor to serve as the vice president and Chief Information Officer at Brown University. My areas of responsibility include academic computing, network and telecommunications services, infrastructure services, enterprise applications, desktop and support services, and information security. I also oversee research computing which encompasses high performance computing, a state-of-the-art visualization CAVE, and data science practice. It is our goal to make Brown University the leader in appropriate use of technology among its peers and beyond.
While I have a strong team of 225 reporting to me, I really see myself as working for them. I ensure that they feel empowered to do their job by setting the vision, creating opportunities, assisting them when needed, and getting out of their way when not needed. In addition to our centralized IT staff, Brown has around 160 additional IT staff who work for different units and schools. Some of these positions have dotted reporting lines to me. Overall, yes, we have a federated model. We work collaboratively and strive to add value.
High: You are also a Professor of Practice in Computer Science and Engineering. How much time do you spend teaching versus your role as CIO?
Pendse: I am very passionate about teaching and sharing ideas. Typically, I teach one class every year, advise both graduate and undergraduate students, and conduct research. While most of my time is spent being the technology evangelist, I find time to be in the class and with students. I guess sleep is optional when you are a CIO and a passionate teacher.
High: You have worked extensively at Brown and at Wichita State before in the design of the digital classroom. Please describe some of your thinking relative to that topic.
Pendse: I believe that classroom design should involve partnership and collaboration with faculty, students and applicable staff members. Staff such as instructional designers and media support professionals should play a key role in this process. It is very important to partner with facilities management to enable a collaborative classroom. In my opinion, flexible learning spaces should replace all bolted down chairs and tables. Of course, this means a smaller capacity classroom. Research shows that proper classroom configuration, mood lighting, just-in-time technology, and a well-trained instructor will result in an incredibly conducive learning environment. Technology also powers anytime, anyplace learning; one should always ask the question “If you want to go to class, is a room (classroom) really necessary?” Thoughtful collaboration between all stakeholders will provide an inviting classroom to empower learning.
High: How does your work as a professor inform your insights as a CIO?
To read the full article, please visit CIO Insight
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.
4-18-2016
Greg Brockman is co-founder and CTO at OpenAI, a non-profit artificial intelligence research company that also includes Elon Musk and Y-Combinator’s Sam Altman among other Silicon Valley luminaries as co-founders. OpenAI was founded to ensure that artificial intelligence benefits humanity as a whole, which has defined its non-profit status and long-term perspective. When I asked Brockman who influenced him, he listed Alan Kay of Xerox PARC among others, and highlighted the he hopes to foster a comparable idea lab to PARC. We also discussed how the organization’s bold mission and unique structure acts as a magnet for world-class talent, the trend of open sourcing AI development, how AI may impact jobs and society more broadly, and the promise versus the peril of AI, among other topics.
Prior to OpenAI, Greg was the CTO of Stipe, a FinTech company that builds tools enabling web commerce. Greg was the fourth employee at Stripe, a company that now has a valuation of over $5 billion.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the fourth interview in my artificial intelligence series. Please visit these links to interviews with Mike Rhodin of IBM Watson, Sebastian Thrun of Udacity, Scott Phoenix of Vicarious, and Antoine Blondeau of Sentient Technologies. To read future articles in the series, including with Neil Jacobstein of Singularity University, Oren Etzioni of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and Nick Bostrom of Oxford University, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: The stated goal of OpenAI is to advance digital intelligence in a way that is likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. What advances in digital intelligence are most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, in your mind?
Greg Brockman: I think there is something special going on right now in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) where, for the first time, systems that are based on deep learning and statistical methods suddenly start to have extremely good performance, and you are able to start building computer vision systems, for example, that can classify objects in a certain sense much better than humans can. Rather than having humans spend time understanding “how do I write down the code to specifically solve this problem?”, you build this general architecture, and the architecture learns from the data. We are getting better at writing these algorithms that are able to learn, to understand the world, and operate within it. At the same time, I do not think the world has changed in a significant way as a result yet. It has only been a short period of time that these algorithms started to be best in class – it dates back to a 2012 paper that showed that if you scale up this neural network architecture in the right way, the system starts to perform significantly better in a wide variety of domains. I think we are going to see these techniques mature and start to be baked into a wide variety of products, both at big companies and at new companies, and in a variety of applications.
We are already starting to get a sense of this if you think about self-driving cars. They are basically here. There is a lot of engineering left to do and lot of hard work and a lot of societal questions to answer, but it is a just a question of when; it is not a question of if. I think that is the tip of the iceberg. Robotics, I think, is poised to start working. Imagine you have a robot in your house that can clean things. A couple of years ago that was not something on the horizon. Now it is not even extrapolation anymore to say that it is going to start having an impact.
4-11-2016
Vicarious has the mission to “build the next generation of artificial intelligence algorithms.” That said, its objectives are longer-term in nature. Vicarious has assembled a who’s who of technology legends as investors, including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg. Co-founder, Scott Phoenix is clear that the biggest value Vicarious can contribute will be in the long-term, in the form of artificial general intelligence (AGI), or human-like intelligence. There will be plenty of value created in the interim in the form of what Phoenix refers to as the “exhaust” of the process.
Phoenix is a veteran entrepreneur, having served as CEO of Frogmetrics, which was a Y Combinator company in the class of 2008. He was also the Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Founders Fund, among other roles he has played. In this interview, Phoenix describes the goals of his 30 person organization, how he weighs the risks versus the rewards of artificial general intelligence, how AI may replace more jobs than it creates, new economic and social constructs that could ease the societal shift, Vicarious’s decision to prioritize social good over investor returns, and why more companies should do the same.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the fourth interview in my artificial intelligence series. Please visit these links to interviews with Mike Rhodin of IBM Watson, Sebastian Thrun of Udacity, and Antoine Blondeau of Sentient Technologies. To read future articles in the series, including with Greg Brockman of OpenAI, Neil Jacobstein of Singularity University, Oren Etzioni of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and Nick Bostrom of Oxford University, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: You are the co-founder of Vicarious, a company that is within the artificial intelligence (AI) realm. I thought we could begin with a definition of AI. It is a term that is thrown around in a variety of ways and I would like to take have you unbundle it a little bit.
Scott Phoenix: Artificial intelligence is a really funny thing for a couple of reasons. One is the “moving goal posts phenomena,” which is as soon as something that was formerly called artificial intelligence is solved, it is no longer included the umbra of what is AI. Since it is such a funny term, you can apply it to almost any business or product or company that is developing anything. You could have a consumer gadget that has AI for making sure your windows are clean, or AI in your spam filter.
At Vicarious, we have a particular and specific definition of what we mean when we say AI, which is artificial general intelligence, or human-like intelligence. To put an even more specific frame around it, we say, “given the same sensory experiences that a human being has from birth to adulthood, we are trying to write a program that learns the same concepts and has the same abilities.” That is a specific thing, whereas artificial narrow intelligence (AI as it is commonly used today) can mean just a computer that does some stuff that is useful.
High: As we have machines that are able to do a lot of the processing that humans do today is there any worry that there are aspects of the way that we think or work that are going to change profoundly?
3-8-2016
Kim Stevenson has been the CIO of Intel for the past four years. As I have noted in the past, she has dramatically increased the value derived from IT by adopting the practices of the more traditional revenue centers of the company. One of the best examples of this is the development of an IT annual report that mirrors that of the company as a whole. (Check out her latest IT annual report here.) The theme of her latest annual report is “Intel: From the Backroom to the Boardroom.” This refers to IT’s becoming more relevant to the board of the company, but it is also a good summation of her own career in recent years.
Since becoming CIO, Stevenson has been on the boards of multiple companies including her current appointment to the board of Cloudera. Many CIOs wish to join boards these days, and Stevenson offers sage advice on way sin which others might follow in her footsteps. It begins by performing well internally, being transparent, and, if you truly wish to be a board-level CIO, making that known with anyone who might aid you in that process.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 17th interview in the “Board-Level CIO” series. To read past interviews with CIOs from P&G, Biogen, Kroger, Cardinal Health, and the World Bank Group, among others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: I thought we would talk a bit about some of your priorities in the year ahead, which I know include adoption of Big Data analytics to find opportunities and to solve challenges faster. Could you explain some of the ways in which IT is going to do that, and also some of the other priorities that are on your roadmap for the year ahead?
Kim Stevenson: Analytics is at the top of my pyramid because it is a transformational initiative around Intel. I have shifted from a technology view for 2016 to a leadership problem. We are bringing our entire Intel leadership team forward to think about shifting using Big Data predicative analytics versus traditional statistical methods. The reason I say it is a leadership problem is because often you will find in a predictive model that you will get answers that are inconsistent with your historical experience. We use regression analysis a lot here at Intel. If you look at a regression analysis line, you effectively get a mean and you drive towards that regression line. If you use an isobar analysis, what you get is the personalization of hot spots and you would maybe take three or four different actions than what a regression line would tell you. You get good results with traditional statistics. You can get outstanding results if you switch to the more predictive models. And that takes a shift in a leadership mindset as much as it does a technology mindset. We have been working on that with our most senior leaders at Intel. The receptivity is really high, but the cultural shift is also really difficult.
High: I know you have talked about the need for IT to be an advocate driving this change. What are the methods you are using to communicate this and provide a vision of the value that the organization will garner for this journey?
2-29-2016
Sentient Technologies has patented evolutionary and perceptual capabilities that provide customers with highly sophisticated solutions, powered by the largest compute grid dedicated to distributed artificial intelligence. The company also has a war chest of $143 million in venture investment, the most of any artificial intelligence company. Antoine Blondeau founded Sentient Technologies nearly nine years ago, though it was in stealth mode for the majority of that period.
After stints at Salesforce.com and Good Technology was looking for the next challenge. He had been involved in artificial intelligence for 15 years, making him an early pioneer in the field, and already had hit a home run by being involved in developing the technology that would become Siri, of iPhone fame.
Blondeau claims we are still in the very early days of artificial intelligence’s evolution, but his vision is to create technology that will mimic the human interaction. One of the first uses of the technology is in retail, replicating the experience of having a sophisticated advisory helping to curate your shopping experience. In this interview, Blondeau provides his vision for the company, his thoughts about the future of AI, the balance between AI innovation and AI safety, as well as a variety of other topics.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the fourth article in a series on leaders in artificial intelligence, which includes interviews with Mike Rhodin of IBM Watson and Sebastian Thrun of Udacity. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
High: Artificial intelligence seems to be gaining tremendous momentum, whether it is venture capital, media coverage, or simply progress that is obvious in the world. There are clearly a couple of trends that have made this possible in recent years: the emergence of relatively low-cost available computing power and the vast, growing abundance of data that companies in every industry are collecting. I think I have heard you say that we are in the first inning here of the game, as so much innovation is ahead of us. As somebody who got into this 15 to 20 years ago, long before this boom, where do you see things now, and how do you think things are evolving?
Blondeau: You are right on the money when you talk about what has happened over the past five or seven years that is making this possible. Some of the team members and I worked on the precursor to what became Siri. At the time, we were thinking of an algorithm running on one machine or a few machines. What has happened over the past few years is that you have the data, it is broadly available, and one of the things that we foresaw was not only that data would explode but the dimensionality of data would explode. It will connect a lot of types of data that had not been connected before. That is a big help.
The second thing is that we have moved from thinking of the machine being the compute to the network being the compute, which means that we can harness an enormous amount of compute cycles. In our case, that means running our system on up to two million CPU cores. We also have a few thousand GPU cores. It is a massive system. When we thought of this company seven years ago, we had the vision forward, but could not quite imagine how we could get there. I think now we can.
The last thing is that when you begin to think about the scale, you can begin to address problems that you had not thought were solvable previously. The ambitious nature of what you do can go up significantly. You can tackle dimensionality, you can tackle complex decision making. Effectively, you are looking at comprehensively including every step of decision making in the machine, or in this giant network machine, which previously was not something thought of as possible. That is the high level.
High: I would like to dive a bit further into the details of how this becomes reality, and how that has impacted the way in which you have thought about entering different markets. I have heard you speak about the applications in some of the primary industries where there are tremendous amounts of data and where there are particularly big problems to solve, like financial services and healthcare. I found it interesting that one of your first areas to apply Sentient Technologies is in retail and online shopping. I would love to understand further how you have chosen where to focus.
Blondeau: One of the things we did was building a powerful platform, but you never succeed by building a platform. You need to apply it to know that it is working and scales to multiple industries. So, we decided to monetize it to address trading, aspects of e-commerce, and the online content discovery experience, as well as, at the research level, institutions like MIT, University of Toronto, and Oxford to work on less immediately monetizable problems, but world problems nonetheless. I am talking here about genomics and patients in an ICU context.
In each case, the common denominator is a few things. One, can you try to solve a problem that has not been solved before? The complexity of the decision making process is key here. The second thing is can you encapsulate the whole decision making process within the machine?
2-22-2016
Quest Diagnostics is a $7.5 billion provider of diagnostic testing information services. It collects vast amounts of data: twenty billion test results, one hundred fifty million medical test requisitions in 2014, and testing services that touch about one third of the adults in the US. It is up to Lidia Fonseca, Quest Diagnostics’ CIO to organize, tag, and structure the data so that the company can turn information into insights and insights into actions. By effectively categorizing and partitioning the data, the big data conundrum has turned into a massive opportunity for the company, and it has also made that data much more secure.
Fonseca’s depth of experience in data analytics, security, and developing innovations that are leading to revenue augmentation have brought her to the attention of those who need that experience at the board level. In July of 2014, she joined the board of Gannett, a $2.9 billion international media and marketing solutions company. In this interview, she discusses all the above and more, and toward the end of the interview, provides insights into how she successfully became a board-level CIO.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 16th interview in the “Board-Level CIO” series. To read past interviews with CIOs from P&G, Biogen, Kroger, Cardinal Health, and the World Bank Group, among others, 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 role. You are the Chief Information Officer of Quest Diagnostics. I wonder if you could provide a description of the organization as well as your role within the organization.
Lidia Fonseca: We are a leading provider of diagnostic information services. That is both clinical laboratory services as well as diagnostic information services. 2014 revenues were $7.4 Billion, and we are growing at four percent. Interestingly for us, we see about one third of US adults, and we connect with half of all physicians and hospitals in the country. We are touching the samples of five hundred thousand patients per day. We have an expansive test menu, and thousands of tests ranging from ones for cholesterol and diabetic testing, to advanced genetic, cancer, and neurology testing. We run the full gamut of medical testing.
We count on the services of forty-five thousand employees. We have about seven hundred PhDs and MDs across the company, which is great because harvesting and leveraging that knowledge is pretty significant, as we think about leveraging innovation, both on the medical side, but also on the diagnostic and data side. We operate two thousand two hundred patient service centers around the country. That is a little bit of the scale and scope of Quest.
On the data and technology front, we have the largest private clinical database. We have over twenty billion laboratory testing data points. We have more than fifty thousand providers and hospitals that are leveraging our Care360 connectivity platform. From an interaction and reach standpoint, it has been phenomenal coming here. We integrate with more than four hundred EMR providers. We are integrated with pretty much any EMR that you can think of. If our customer is using it, we are connected with them. We have a patient portal so that patients can access our services directly. We have had more than two million patients access our MyQuest patient portal. We have a significant Big Data and analytics platform that enables population health and gaps in care types of analytics. It is leveraged by partners, including the CDC and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, to name a few.
We have partnered with Inovalon, and we will talk more about that later. By bringing that together, we have a rich data backbone and dataset brought together with what Inovalon has. It is enriching what is already one of the most expansive clinical databases around.
As CIO, in addition to the typical things you would expect a CIO to be responsible for, I have a couple of other responsibilities. One of the things I am responsible for is all of our client-facing products. It is my team that develops those. We also develop the analytics products, whether it is sophisticated reporting or population health tools. Now that is in partnership with other providers as well, bringing a new capability that maybe neither of us could bring on our own. That is a key part of our thinking is that by combining datasets, can you offer something novel to the marketplace.
2-16-2016
Amy Doherty was a four year veteran and right hand woman of the CIO of AARP when she was tapped to become interim-CIO in March of 2015. Her predecessor, Terry Bradwell, was elevated to a newly created role of Chief Enterprise Strategy & Innovation Officer of the membership organization for people age 50 and over that operates as a non-profit advocate for its members and is one of the most powerful lobbying groups in the United States. Following a highly regarded leader who would remain at the firm meant that there was not a mandate for tremendous change, but nevertheless, Doherty got to work at creating her own vision and leadership style.
She has focused continuing the evolution of IT into a value creator and innovator within AARP. She has creatively built bonds and lines of communications with her team through regular meetings with everyone on the team to better understand how things are progressing. Year over year delivery of projects is up ninety-six percent , and there have been thirty-four percent fewer outages. As Doherty notes in this interview, it is the cultural work that has been the secret weapon in her arsenal by driving engagement, accountability, and fun in the department. AARP leadership was sufficiently impressed by the progress to remove the “interim” title in October.
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Peter High: I thought we would begin with your tenure as Chief Information Officer at AARP. You began as interim CIO in March of 2015, and in October removed the interim title. You are now the incumbent of the role. Could you talk about that period when your rose to the role on an interim basis and then took it over permanently? What were some of the things you did during that period?
Amy Doherty: I think the most immediate action I needed to take was to settle the staff. They have a great affection for Terry [Bradwell], and a lot of loyalty. He is an engaging leader, and they needed to see me as personable, approachable, and invigorating in the way that he is. They were big shoes to fill. I needed to take some action immediately, so I amped up my personal engagement with the staff, and then I went on a tour with our business leaders talking about what my focus would be. Which was to be not the external AARP market and constituency, as Terry was taking that one, but I wanted to focus my effort on how I could make an AARP employee as effective as they could be, by providing the right technology, frameworks, etc. That was warmly welcomed.
I listened a lot, and I learned a lot about what expectations were of the role, and where they wanted the focus for now. I believe that served me well. I was able to make a few tweaks in the overall execution strategy to focus on the fundamentals and get things like workforce productivity on track. There was a focused and concerted effort to make sure that it stayed on track.
High: You were in an unusual situation. Many Chief Information Officers come in to replace somebody – even somebody who was asked to leave – and there is a mandate for change as a result of that. You not only followed somebody who was loved, but also followed somebody who moved onto a different role within the organization. As you were putting your fingerprints on a new IT plan, how much of it was continuity of what was already going on versus some new things?
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