Our next Digital Symposium is just around the corner. Join us on December 13 as industry leaders and technology executives share how they are leading their teams through uncertain times and discuss the trends shaping the year ahead.
CIOs and other technology leaders, register here to reserve your spot today, and stay tuned here for agenda updates. 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.)
12:00 – 12:05 p.m.
Welcome and Introductions
Welcome and introduction to the Metis Strategy team.
Peter High, President, Metis Strategy
12:05 – 12:30 p.m.
Establishing the Foundation for a Modern Enterprise
Boris Shulkin, Chief Digital & Information Officer, Magna International
Michael Rodgers, Chief Technology Officer, Pilot Company
Moderated by Steven Norton; Co-Head Executive Networks, Research, and Media; Metis Strategy
12:30 – 12:55 p.m.
Mastering the Human Side of Digital Transformation
Rob Mills, Chief Technology, Digital Commerce, and Strategy Officer, Tractor Supply Co.
Jennifer Hartsock, Chief Information & Digital Officer, Cargill
Moderated by Michael Bertha, Vice President & Central Office Lead, Metis Strategy
12:55 – 1:20 p.m.
Crafting Connected Digital Experiences for Customers and Employees
Atish Banerjea, Chief Information Officer, Meta
Gail Evans; Chief Digital & Technology Officer; Disney Parks, Experiences, and Products
Moderated by Chris Davis, Partner & West Coast Office Lead, Metis Strategy
1:20 – 1:35 p.m.
Leading Transformation: A Conversation with Chief Transformation Officer Kelly Kent
Kelly Kent, Chief Transformation Officer, ServiceNow
Moderated by Peter High, President, Metis Strategy
1:35 – 1:50 p.m.
CIO to CEO: Fireside Chat with Mario Harik
Mario Harik, CEO, XPO
1:50 – 2:05 p.m.
Entrepreneur Spotlight: Taso Du Val, Toptal
Taso Du Val, Co-Founder & CEO, Toptal
2:05 – 2:30 p.m.
Optimizing Value Delivery through Digital and Technology Capabilities
Anita Klopfenstein, Chief Information Officer, Little Caesars
Kirk Ball, Chief Information Officer, Giant Eagle
Moderated by Alex Kraus, Partner & East Coast Office Lead, Metis Strategy
2:30 – 2:40 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!
Our next Digital Symposium is just around the corner. Join us on September 8 as industry leaders and technology executives share their perspectives on fostering innovative cultures, innovating during dynamic times, and creating new digital pathways to reach customers, among other topics.
CIOs and other technology leaders, register here to reserve your spot today. We look forward to seeing you!
12:00 – 12:10 p.m.
12:10 – 12:25 p.m.
Fireside Chat: Gabe Dalporto, Chief Executive Officer, Udacity
Gabe Dalporto, Chief Executive Officer, Udacity
12:25 – 12:50 p.m.
Data & Analytics as a Source of Resilience and Growth
Vinod Bidarkoppa; SVP, Walmart; Chief Technology Officer, Sam’s Club
Susan Doniz, Chief Information Officer and SVP of IT & Data Analytics, Boeing
12:50 – 1:05 p.m.
Entrepreneur Spotlight: Orion Hindawi, Co-Founder & CEO, Tanium
Orion Hindawi, Co-Founder & CEO, Tanium
1:05 – 1:20 p.m.
Fireside Chat: Chandra Dhandapani; Chief Executive Officer, Global Workplace Solutions; CBRE
Chandra Dhandapani; Chief Executive Officer, Global Workplace Solutions; CBRE
Fireside Chat: Kevin Stine, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
Kevin Stine, Chief of the Applied Cybersecurity Division, NIST’s Information Technology Laboratory (ITL)
1:35 – 2:00 p.m.
Transforming a Global IT Operating Model
Ash Banerjee, Global Chief Information Officer, Dentons
Anil Bhatt, Global Chief Information Officer, Elevance Health
2:00 – 2:25 p.m.
Creating Innovative Sustainable Business Models
Frank Cassulo, Chief Digital Officer, Chevron
Bhavani Amirthalingam, Chief Digital Information Officer, Ameren
2:25 – 2:50 p.m.
Driving Strategic IT Modernization Efforts
Marykay Wells, Chief Information Officer, Pearson
Carman Wenkoff, Chief Information Officer, Dollar General
2:50 – 3:00 p.m.
10/22/2018
By Peter High. Published on Forbes.
Shafiq Khan was remarkable digital leader at Marriott International. First as the Senior Vice President of eCommerce and then as the Senior Vice President of Channel Strategy and Distribution, he helped grow the company’s digital sales from $150 million to $15 billion. Under Khan’s watch, the company became one of the top-ten companies in digital sales in the United States.
A native of Pakistan, Khan would return frequently, and the state of the country’s education system for the poorest members of society were stark. Khan began to connect the dots between the work he did at Marriott and a way to help solve global literacy. Teach the World Foundation was born.
The company has developed digital tools to help teach those children who cannot afford basic education Pakistan, and the program has expended to Bangladesh, as well. Later this year, Malawi will be added as the third country. Khan makes the point that global literacy is not only a worthy undertaking to help the most vulnerable of the world’s citizens, but it should also have much broader economic and societal benefits. He describes his journey herein.
(To listen to a podcast version of this interview, please click this link. To read future articles like this one, please follow me on Twitter @PeterAHigh.)
Peter High: You are the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Teach the World Foundation. Could you describe the foundation and its mission?
Shafiq Khan: In a macro sense, our vision is to enhance human potential by furthering knowledge and learning, specifically by increasing literacy. Two out of seven people worldwide are not functionally literate, which is a huge cost for the world. To help minimize this issue, we decided to use our digital background to make a social impact on the world by enhancing human potential. Digital technology has clearly made a massive impact on every domain, and our world has changed as a result. However, this change has not translated effectively into the education space. Because education is a non-profit and non-competitive space, we have not seen digital technology leveraged there. Our mission is to establish and deploy models of literacy and learning effectively and with scale through the power of digital technology. We want to prove that we have a new way of learning that will address two massive issues that the world has.
To read the full article, please visit Fobres.
6/4/18
By Peter High. Published in Forbes
Last September, Tesla and SpaceX Chief Elon Musk provided $15 million to the Global Learning XPRIZE. The goal is to develop methods to teach the 250 million children who do not have access to primary or secondary education the means to teach themselves to read, write, and do math within 15 months. While programs exist to build schools and train teachers, they cannot scale fast enough to meet demand.
Illiteracy has long precluded individuals from joining local economies, but as our world increasingly becomes hyperconnected, this preclusion is greater than ever before. Consider an illiterate child in the developing world. A decade ago, illiteracy may have prevented them from running a farm in their local community. Today, ubiquitous connectivity, digital commerce platforms, and innovations such as Estonia’s e-Residency program means that an illiterate child will instead be locked out of opportunities at a global scale.
A Radical Solution
While technological progress may have made the problem of illiteracy more acute, it may also hold the solution. “The genius to solve these problems resides in the crowd,” says Matt Keller, Senior Director of the Global Learning XPRIZE. “And technology enables XPRIZE to reach the crowd.”
Founded by Peter Diamandis, XPRIZE is an nonprofit “innovation engine” that uses gamification, crowdsourcing, and incentive prize theory to provide incentives for competition and bring about radical breakthroughs that solve global grand challenges. After a number of successful competitions – most famously the $10 million Ansari XPRIZE that catalyzed the private space race.
The Global Learning XPRIZE challenges teams from around the world to develop open source and scalable software that enables children ages seven to ten in developing countries to learn basic reading, writing, and arithmetic without adult assistance within the aforementioned time constraint of 15 months. Hundreds of teams from over 40 countries registered to compete, and last year, five finalists were selected.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
6/4/18 By Peter High. Published on Forbes
7-Eleven is a big retailer. It operates 65,000 stores in 18 countries, has 55 million customers in stores on a daily basis, and conducts 20 billion transactions annually. Like most retailers, it is in need of transformation. Enter Gurmeet Singh. With a Ph.D. in Engineering from Rice, and stints with leading companies like FedEx, Intuit, and Capital One, Singh joined 7-Eleven in August of 2016 as chief digital officer. He would add the chief information officer title in November of 2017.
Singh joined the company with a mandate from 7-Eleven CEO Joseph DePinto to make the company a digital leader. Singh embarked on a multi-year journey to become a digitally-enabled organization, including a “full stack transformation” approach which encompasses consumer-facing technology, back-end technology, infrastructure, and the organizational stack. He also expanded the company’s loyalty program from its initial focus on beverages to a full-fledged loyalty offering that is available on mobile, web, digital loyalty card, and even through chatbots.
Singh notes that “the closest store to a customer today is in the palm of [his or her] hand,” and he wanted to go beyond pushing customers from mobile into stores, and allowing customers to interact with 7-Eleven on their terms, through the interface of their choice. To foster this, Singh’s team helps the rest of the organization understand the art of the possible through constant experimentation with new technology. He describes his path to innovation in great detail herein.
Peter High: You are the Chief Digital and Chief Information Officer of 7-Eleven. Could you describe your role?
Gurmeet Singh: I started at 7-Eleven as the Chief Digital Officer, with my primary responsibility being driving digital transformation. This company founded convenience at a global scale, with 65,000 stores in 18 countries, 55 million customers visiting the stores every day, and 20 billion transactions on an annual basis. You take that, and you overlay the consumer trends and the new technology trends like big data and digital payments, and you have the perfect formula for redefining convenience.
Technology is a key element of a digital transformation and it is also key to becoming a digitally-enabled company. Initially, we started off with what most companies have been doing and what most consulting companies have been citing as a strategic approach, which is building a two-tier architectural model. A two-tier architectural model means you have digital technology capabilities that are being developed at a higher speed, and then decoupled from that, you have your legacy enterprise systems which have longer release cycles at slower speeds. Additionally, enterprise and legacy work was being managed in long cycle processes as projects, not as products.
Old models in any company are always changing, and they should be changing. They are a function of maturity of the company, the need of the hour, and the market factor. As we evaluated the speed of our transformation, we felt that we were not getting to the speed we needed. To get there, we needed what I call a full stack transformation. When I say full stack transformation, I am talking all the way from the consumer-facing technology to back-end technologies, all the way to infrastructure and cloud. It even goes beyond that to encompass the organizational stack.
To bring more efficiency and effectiveness to our decisions, our prioritization, while driving the productization of IT, we decided to combine the CDO role and the CIO role. This allows us to drive vertical product slices while working on horizontal capabilities. If you are doing one after the other, you are taking too much time to get the business transformed. If you do not do a vertical slice, you do not know what customer problem you are trying to solve. Combining the functions gets us there faster. It is harder, but you end up driving more synergies. We drive higher team engagement. You speed up your transformation journey, and you end up creating a stronger pool of talent as one team. What we did was then combine digital and IT, which we call DIGIT, which is very much digital.
High: You are clearly thinking multiple years out. The changes require hard work to be done in the near term to make the organization nimbler for the long term. How difficult was the process of selling this internally? Was it difficult in having your peers among the executive leadership understand the rationale behind all the hard work to be done in the near term for a better outcome for the long term?
4/23/18
By Peter High, published on Forbes
From an early age as an Estonian refugee in the United States, Toomas Hendrik Ilves understood the transformative power of technology. He learned to code in BASIC in the 1970s. He would go on to study psychology at Columbia University and at the University of Pennsylvania, but as Estonia gained independence after the Soviet Union collapsed, Ilves returned to serve his country. Some of the earliest reforms that he ushered in involved the use of technology in schools. He also understood that the blank slate that the country had at its independence was a rare opportunity to rethink how a government interacted with its citizens.
Through many waves of innovation, the country not only made tremendous digital advances, but it also future proofed its technology. Ilves would become president of Estonia in 2006, serving for two terms through 2016. Along the way, he defended his country during the first cyber war with Russia, and ushered a number of radical digital ideas. He describes all of the above in this interview.
Peter High: You have an international background. You were born in Stockholm, Sweden to Estonian parents. You spent much of your upbringing in the United States in Leonia, New Jersey where you graduated from high school. You have degrees from Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. I am curious what you drew from the international experience in the development of your thought process?
President Toomas Hendrik Ilves: To begin with, growing up bilingual often has an impact on people’s thinking and their ability to see things from different perspectives. I am also the child of refugees, so I was far more tuned to foreign policy issues than normal kids my age. I remember beginning to read the New York Times when I was nine because of the Soviet Union and how that was connected to my parent’s country being occupied.
A second major influence is that I learned to program when I was in ninth grade. I had a math teacher who was doing her Ph.D. in Math Education and decided to teach a small group of us how to program. At the age of 14, I was programming in Basic. This was a unique experience, and it had a huge influence on me. It was the inspiration for the first digitization program in my country. Finally, I am fundamentally interested in democracy, and that was fueled by the enormous course load that is required for a Political Philosophy degree at Columbia. These were all influences when I was in the United States.
Later, when I went back to Europe, I worked as what you might call a cold-warrior. I was an analyst for Radio Free Europe, and, later, I headed the Estonian Service. Through this, I met a lot of authors who were part of the underground dissent decades before Estonian independence. Eventually, we would lead the independence movement. That was also formative.
High: It was in the early to mid-1980s that you returned to Europe through Germany at Radio Free Europe. In 1996, you became the Estonian Minister of Foreign Affairs. It was during that period in the early to mid-1990s that this radical transformation of the country began.
Estonia emerged from the Soviet Bloc after the fall of the Soviet Union. It is remarkable how the leaders of the country had the foresight to recognize this tabula rasa and not waste the opportunity to do something special. I am curious, why Estonia? What was it about that environment?
President Ilves: There are a number of reasons. I was the first Estonian Ambassador before I became a Foreign Minister to the United States after the occupation. That is how I became Foreign Minister. In many ways, we had a number of alternative paths before us in the early ‘90s. If you look at the history of post-communist countries, they seemed to have chosen every possible variant from harsh authoritarianism to the very open, liberal approach that we took. Our government focused on economic reforms, privatization, and liberalization of the economy. We created a currency board system that allowed convertibility of our currency at the time.
Much of the digital push was largely my input into the government. I looked at the situation and it seemed so backward. As a point of reference, in 1938, the last full year before World War II, Finland and Estonia had the same GDP per capita. When we emerged in 1991 from the Soviet period, Finland had a GDP per capita 13 times that the GDP per capita of Estonia. Then, we had this direct contrast between them. One of the things associated with that was the enormous success of tech in Finland, such as Nokia.
08/14/2017
As a gifted athlete who was also six feet and five inches tall, all Fortinet founder and CEO Ken Xie wanted to do was to become a professional volleyball player in his native China when he grew up. His parents who were academics at Tsinghua University had other plans for him: to get a PhD at Stanford University and then to return to China to become an academic like them. Xie’s life was transformed at Stanford, as he met fellow students who aspired to start businesses. He notes that the entrepreneurial culture was not something he had ever experienced growing up in China.
He started a company while he was a student to help small companies get online and do so securely. That company would become SIS. He founded a second company, NetScreen, which he would eventually sell to Juniper for $4 billion.
As Xie defines it, these two companies represented the first generation of network security. In 2000, he founded Fortinet to offer the next generation security platform. As the company has grown, it has evolved along with the threat landscape. Fortinet now boasts revenue in excess of $1 billion. In this interview, Xie describes his entrepreneurial path, the culture of innovation that he has fostered at Fortinet, the advantages of having started businesses with his brother Michael Xie, and a variety of other topics.
Peter High: Please describe Fortinet’s business.
Ken Xie: Fortinet was founded in 2000 with the goal of making an impactful change in the network security space. Fortinet is our third company in the same space. Our previous two companies, NetScreen and SIS, dealt with the first generation of network security. However, starting in 2000, this was no longer good enough. It is like air travel, where with the first generation, all you needed was a ticket to get on the airplane, but today, they x-ray your luggage. It is the same thing with the second generation of network security, we need to look inside the connection because most malware comes from permitted connections, whether it comes from the user, the partner, the customer, or from inside. That is how Fortinet started. Seventeen years later, we are nearly 5,000 people strong with over $1 billion in revenue, and growing quickly.
High: You work in a field where you must think proactively, but also where an element of reactiveness is necessary because you need to adapt as the threat landscape evolves. How do you and the company remain current?
By Peter High, published on Forbes 06/05/17
Andrew Ng is one of the foremost thinkers on the topic of artificial intelligence. He founded and led the “Google Brain” project which developed massive-scale deep learning algorithms. In 2011, he led the development of Stanford University’s main Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platform. His course on Machine Learning would eventually reach an “enrollment” of over 100,000 students. That experience led Ng to co-found Coursera, a MOOC that partners with some of the top universities in the world to offer high quality online courses. Today, Coursera is the largest MOOC platform in the world.
Most recently, Ng led Baidu’s Artificial Intelligence Group. Under his watch, Baidu became one of the few companies with world-class expertise in every major artificial intelligence category: speech, neuro-linguistic programming, computer vision, machine learning, and knowledge graph, and his team introduced two new business units to the company: autonomous driving and the DuerOS Conversational Computing platform.
In late March, Ng announced that he would step away from Baidu, and in a Medium post, he noted, “Baidu’s AI is incredibly strong, and the team is stacked up and down with talent; I am confident AI at Baidu will continue to flourish. After Baidu, I am excited to continue working toward the AI transformation of our society and the use of AI to make life better for everyone.” I was curious how his plans have taken shape in the couple of months since the announcement, so I caught up with him at his office at the Gates Computer Science Building at Stanford University. Given how influential his career has been to date, I was curious where he would focus his attention from this point forward. We also covered his recommendations for companies that are nearer to the beginning of the journey of implementing artificial intelligence, the emergence of roles like the chief artificial intelligence officer, and the industries that are most likely to be impacted by AI, as well as his comparison between the business cultures in the United States and China, among a variety of other topics
Peter High: Andrew, since we last spoke, you have departed Baidu. Where do you see your career evolving from this point forward?
Andrew Ng: Over the last few years, AI [artificial intelligence] technologies have taken off. There are so many things that we can do now that were not possible three or four years ago. This creates tremendous opportunities for large tech companies like Baidu, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and many others. It also creates opportunities for smaller teams to do meaningful work, whether they are for-profit, nonprofit, or startup organizations. In the same way that electricity and the internet changed everything, over the next few decades, AI will change everything. I am looking into quite a few ideas in parallel, and exploring new AI businesses that I can build. One thing that excites me is finding ways to support the global AI community so that people everywhere can access the knowledge and tools that they need to make AI transformations.
High: Artificial intelligence is a broad topic. What are some of the areas that are most exciting to you and represent the biggest areas of opportunity in the near term?
Ng: People often ask me, “Andrew, what industries do you think AI will transform?” I usually answer that it might be easier to think about what industries AI will not transform. To be honest, I struggle to think of one. For example, I was speaking at a conference and I said that my hairdresser’s job is probably safe from AI because I do not know how to build a robot to cut hair. A friend of mine, who is a robotics professor, was in the audience, she stood up, pointed her finger at my head and said, “Andrew for most people’s haircuts I would agree, we cannot build a robot, but for your haircut, I could make a robot do that.”
It is difficult to think of a major industry that AI will not transform. This includes healthcare, education, transportation, retail, communications, and agriculture. There are surprisingly clear paths for AI to make a big difference in all of these industries. I have heard you say, Peter, that sometimes AI feels like a far off thing, but it is just over the horizon. I agree, and a lot of the work that will get us there is happening now. Certainly, the smartest CEOs and CIOs, and maybe some new chief artificial intelligence officers, are accumulating the talent and tools necessary, and maybe already using them, to transform their businesses.
High: What suggestions do you have for CEOs, CIOs, and CAIOs that are fairly early in their journey of exploring the implications of AI for their business?
By Peter High, published on Forbes 3/27/17
Yvonne Wassenaar has been the Chief Information Officer of digital intelligence platform company, New Relic, for a bit more than two and a half years. She represents a rising trend among fast growing, Silicon Valley technology companies who reach a certain size after nearly a decade in business, and determine they need a CIO for the first time. (Recent interviewee, Mark Settle of Okta is another example of this.)
In choosing Wassenaar, New Relic’s executive team brought on someone with the killer combination of a technical background as an undergraduate coupled with an MBA followed by an extended period as a partner at Accenture. She brings equal measure of technical and business acumen together with deep problem solving skills. Not surprisingly, she has also gained board access, serving on the boards of multiple organizations, as well. We cover all of the above and more herein.
Peter High: For a little more than two and a half years, you have been the Chief Information Officer of New Relic, a software analytics company founded in 2008. In your own terms, please describe the business and the roles that IT and the CIO position play within the organization.
Yvonne Wassenaar: New Relic is what I call a digital intelligence platform, which in this age of every business becoming a software business, is vitally important. New Relic technology provides a company with insight into what people are doing with their software. For example, because most people bank on their phone or maybe on their laptop, but less at the retail branch, a digital intelligence platform is critical because what matters then, is not how long the teller lines are or how warm the coffee is, but rather, questions like: “How quickly did the app load? How many people were trying to do what type of transaction? Where are people spending their time?” The insight offered by New Relic’s technology is valuable from a developer-operator perspective for designing and running great software. Furthermore, this type of technology is increasingly important from a business perspective because, if done effectively, it offers us new eyes into consumer behavior which will provide us with more insight than we have ever had.
My role as CIO is an interesting one because New Relic is a technology company that was “born in the cloud.” As such, there is some question as to why New Relic even needs a CIO. However, more companies like Octa, DocuSign, and other similar companies “born in the cloud,” have been adding a CIO role to their docket. The reason being, as amazing as technology is, it does not quite run itself yet. The way that I look at my role within New Relic is to, internally, help the company take advantage of the technology that is available to run the business services of the company; things like sales, billing, and so forth. Even more importantly, externally, to get insights into customers; into how we can better serve those customers and to ensure that we are providing the ultimate digitized customer experience. My role is founded on those two principles of ensuring that internally we can leverage the technology well in a decentralized way but with guardrails, and then externally, that we are bringing the best of our insight from technology to bear in partnering with the CTO in thinking about the products we develop and offer to customers.
High: Do you foresee a time, and if so how soon, where the technology will “run itself” to a degree where the CIO will become obsolete?
Wassenaar: I would say if we turn the clock back five to eight years ago, there were some that believed that the CIO role would become extinct because you had data centers in the cloud, you had SaaS applications, you could credit card swipe your way to nirvana in technology. Now I see a resurgence in the role of the CIO for two reasons. The first is that companies today are structured in a functional fashion. This creates a tendency for them to see things only from one angle. That works fine if you are doing a point solution or something that is working in isolation, but few things in a public company fit that mold. For example, technology such as Salesforce, which may have been fine when they were a small company just supporting a sales organization, however, now it is not just a SaaS application, it is a SaaS platform –and it impacts the value chain across the company. First and foremost, you need someone who has a horizontal viewpoint across functions that is geared toward outcomes. The CIO is a perfect role for that because we have cross-function visibility for large applications, for large investments in AWS and Azure, and elsewhere.
The second reason is there is a lot of work to be done around “basic hygiene” when it comes to running technology at scale. There are certain principles that are important to think about whether you are designing for velocity, or for different use cases, or for size and dispersion of transaction; all of these factor into how you might want to structure your enterprise architecture. I have found that the basic functionality of a SaaS app or AWS is easy to get your arms around, but as you augment, and you build on it over the years, unless you have some understanding of how technology runs most effectively, you will start to create a lot of technical debt. You might be blind to this debt, or you may not necessarily understand or appreciate the investments, or the value of things like staging an environment, or how you actually do agile development in a robust, quality, and effective way. I believe the need for both a horizontal viewpoint and the need to bring a technological mindset to how you architect the ecosystem of solutions that is increasingly not just running your business but serving your customers is going to put increased focus on what people call the CIO role, the CTO role, or the chief digitization role. Somebody has got to play that role, and I think for the next five to ten years, it is going to become more important.
High: You began the description of New Relic as a digital intelligence platform. Digital and intelligence are increasingly the domain of other organizations as well, either in concert with IT, or in some cases superseding IT’s involvement. Given your network and your knowledge of the kinds of companies where the CIO leads the conversation on digital intelligence, versus those where they are reacting to it, what differentiates the former versus the latter category in your mind?
By Peter High, published on Forbes 2/6/17
Perhaps no one has as many chief information officer roles at as many big, brand-name organizations as Mark Settle. He has been the CIO of Oxy, Arrow Electronics, Corporate Express, BMC Software, IHS, and now Okta. Settle also has a PhD (in Geological Studies from Brown University), and at his roots has an analytical mind that strives to understand the essence of disciplines. It should be no surprise that he has memorialized all that he has learned, passing along important lessons to his peers in his book The Truth from the Trenches: A Practical Guide to the Art of IT Management.
The book does an effective job of articulating the yin and yang nature of the CIO role. For instance, he talks about the need for CIOs to be good managers but that it is even more important that they be great leaders, defining the differences in each attribute. He also indicates that financial acumen is a building block to getting the invitation to take responsibility for innovation. He worries that CIOs often believe that strong technical understanding and management is sufficient, not realizing that developing social bonds with one’s colleagues inside and outside of IT can make or break one’s experience. He shares these details and many others in this interview.
Peter High: Congratulations on a terrific book – The Truth from the Trenches: A Practical Guide to the Art of IT Management. You have an unusual amount of experience with big companies, and multiple companies, as a chief information officer. What was your inspiration for taking time out to think about the important lessons that you would advise other CIOs to live and learn?
Mark Settle: Not only have I done this job in many different industries and companies, but I have an extensive network of contacts and peers who have done the job as well. It is kind of shocking how many mistakes are made repeatedly. It does not have anything to do with what the current technology of the day is – whether we are talking about cloud computing or ERP systems. It does not have to do with the size of the company or the extent of its international operations. The chronic failings of most IT organizations are almost always systemic or endemic. They shoot themselves in the foot in so many common ways repeatedly. Part of [my motivation] was to tell some stories and have an oral tradition of things to watch out for and to avoid, and trying to pass the lessons learned to the next generations of leaders. There is an element of personal therapy as well. This is not me stepping back objectively and critiquing what others have done wrong. It is, in part, a confession of some of the mistakes I have made. It is stunning how many ways we can create problems for ourselves that are predictable in nature. We hide behind a lot of jargon. If other functions in a company were privy to some of the failings in process and leadership and talent management and accountability that are pervasive in many organizations, they would be shocked because they think of IT as being a very sophisticated functional area.
High: One of the things I really liked was your discussion about the dichotomy between leadership versus management. What are your own thoughts about leadership versus management and the role that each one plays?
