Our first Digital Symposium of the year is just around the corner. Join us on February 24 as technology leaders share their perspectives on scaling data and analytics initiatives, creating cultures of continuous learning, and the state of digital strategy in 2022, among other topics.
CIOs and other technology leaders, register here to reserve your spot today. We look forward to seeing you!
(Click here for highlights from our last Digital Symposium, and stay tuned to our YouTube channel for videos of our panel discussions.)
Noon
Welcome and Introductions
Welcome and introduction to the Metis Strategy team.
Peter High, President, Metis Strategy
12:05 – 12:20 p.m.
Fireside Chat: Bill Pappas, MetLife
Bill Pappas, EVP & Head of Technology and Operations, MetLife
12:20 – 12:40 p.m.
Panel: Creating a World-Class Digital Customer Experience
Charu Jain, SVP Merchandising & Innovation, Alaska Airlines
Sanjib Sahoo, EVP and Chief Digital Officer, Ingram Micro
Moderated by Chris Davis, Vice President and West Coast Office Lead, Metis Strategy
12:40 – 12:55 p.m.
Entrepreneur Spotlight: Rakesh Loonkar, Transmit Security
Rakesh Loonkar, President & Co-Founder, Transmit Security
12:55 – 1:15 p.m.
Panel: How Talent and Culture Enable High Performance and Enterprise Agility
Raghu Sagi, Chief Information Officer, Inspire Brands
Onyeka Nchege, SVP and Chief Information Officer, Novant Health
Moderated by Peter High, President, Metis Strategy
1:15 – 1:30 p.m.
Entrepreneur Spotlight: Sunny Gupta, Apptio
Sunny Gupta, CEO & Co-Founder, Apptio
1:30 – 1:50 p.m.
Panel: Building Resilient Digital Supply Chains
Gurmeet Singh, EVP, CTO and CIO, Big Lots Stores
Gary Desai, Chief Information Officer, Discount Tire
Moderated by Michael Bertha, Vice President and Central Office Lead, Metis Strategy
1:50 – 2:10 p.m.
Panel: How Data and Digital Capabilities are Shaping the Future of Work
Vince Campisi, SVP Enterprise Services and Chief Digital Officer, Raytheon Technologies
Edward Wagoner, Chief Information Officer, JLL
Moderated by Steven Norton, Co-Head Executive Networks, Research, and Media, Metis Strategy
Click here for highlights from our last Digital Symposium, or view the panel discussions on YouTube.
Our final Digital Symposium of the year is just around the corner. Join us on December 9 as technology leaders across industries share their insights on talent strategy and upskilling, creating new pathways to innovation, and the trends and priorities guiding CIOs’ efforts in the year ahead.
12:00 – 12:05
12:05 – 12:20
Fireside Chat: Jim McKelvey, Square
Jim McKelvey, Co-Founder, Square; Founder, Invisibly; Author, The Innovation Stack
12:20 – 12:40
Panel: Scaling AI to Deliver New Customer Experiences
Amir Arooni, Chief Information Officer, Discover Financial
Dean Del Vecchio, CIO and Chief of Operations, Guardian Life
12:40 – 12:55
Entrepreneur Spotlight: Taso Du Val, Toptal
Taso Du Val, Co-Founder & CEO, Toptal
12:55 – 1:15
Panel: Fostering Agility Across the Enterprise
Warren Kudman, Chief Information Officer, Turner Construction
Michael Ruttledge, CIO and Head of Technology Services, Citizens Financial
Moderated by Alex Kraus, Vice President and East Coast Office Lead, Metis Strategy
1:15 – 1:35
Panel: Rethinking Talent Strategy for the Next Normal
Casey Santos, Chief Information Officer, Asurion
Sri Donthi, Chief Technology Officer, Advance Auto Parts
1:35 – 1:50
Digital Spotlight: Anand Birje, HCL Technologies
Anand Birje, Senior Corporate VP & Head of Digital Business, HCL Technologies
1:50 – 2:10
Panel: Digital Platforms as Strategic Growth Drivers
Shri Santhanam, EVP & Global Head of Analytics and AI, Experian
Anjana Harve, Global Chief Information Officer, Fresenius Medical Care
2:10 – 2:25
Fireside Chat: Mike McNamara, Target
Mike McNamara, Chief Information Officer, Target
Another Metis Strategy Digital Symposium is in the books. Thank you to all of you who joined the session and to the global CIOs, CEOs, and entrepreneurs who shared their insights. More than ever, it is critical for leaders to tap into their ecosystem of peers and advisors for information, wisdom, and support as organizations navigate this complex and uncertain environment.
Below are a few takeaways from the event. Check out our YouTube channel and the Technovation podcast in the coming weeks for recordings of individual panel discussions.
Culture is key in the transition to hybrid work. Nearly 60% of attendees noted cultivating a strong culture among teams as the greatest risk to operating in a hybrid work environment. With many return-to-office plans in flux and a new wave of employees joining firms without stepping inside an office, executives continue to place a strong emphasis on employee experience, creating new norms around equity, inclusivity, and productivity, and creating new ways for teams to engage in a hybrid setting. For technology leaders, that also includes managing a growing ecosystem of collaboration tools and emerging technologies to find the mix that works best for their organizations.
Just as CIOs helped pave the way for remote work, they also will have a role to play in helping peers understand the art of the possible regarding the future of work. The road ahead is far from clear, but today’s technology leaders are adapting people, processes, and technologies to help create organizations that can pivot quickly in the face of change and seize new opportunities as they arise.
Innovation comes from empowered teams. The ability to innovate at scale continues to rise in importance as organizations work to future-proof their operations and drive enterprise agility. To do so, a number of executives said they are exploring how to democratize innovation capabilities across their companies and unlock the full potential of their teams. Debra King, SVP, Chief Information Officer and Chief Transformation Officer at Corteva Agriscience, discussed how she and her executive team developed a culture of ownership across the organization in which team members at any level in the company were empowered to come up with an idea and execute it. The leadership team then focused on removing roadblocks and providing resources where needed.
Similarly, Tim Dickson, Chief Information Officer at Generac, discussed how the company’s first hackathon spurred new ideas while revealing pent up demand for employee upskilling. Sixteen teams participated, and over half of the ideas presented have been implemented as production deployments, Dickson said. Generac also launched a digital center of excellence that helped scale the internal capability to bring new ideas to life quickly. These new ways of working made employees feel as if their voices were being heard, while providing an avenue to develop those ideas into new products and services for the company.
Security is critical to creating strong customer experiences. Technology leaders are taking greater responsibility for the ways their organizations’ products and services impact the customer experience, and security is an increasingly critical element of that. Mickey Boodaei, CEO of Transmit Security, which received the largest-ever Series A funding round for a cybersecurity company, shared his perspective on the move toward a passwordless future, the evolution of identity and authentication, and the fine balance between security and user experience.
For consumers, identity is critical to processes such as account opening and credential validation. Too little focus on security and vulnerabilities or compliance risks may arise. Too many security measures and the user experience becomes an obstacle. As authentication technology advances and passwords continue to pose a security threat to consumer accounts, Boodaei anticipates organizations will make a concerted effort to go passwordless.
Companies scale up AI efforts. As companies continue to refine their data strategies and identify opportunities to turn data into actionable insight, significant analytics and AI deployments are only expected to grow. Nearly 40% of respondents said they expect analytics to be their greatest area of investment in the year ahead.
Machine learning and AI, paired with an increasingly sophisticated understanding of customer needs, is powering new waves of innovation across industries. Barbara Lavernos, Deputy CEO for Research, Innovation, and Technology at L’Oréal, described an experience that crunches data to provide customers with personalized advice on their beauty routines. The company is also using AI to mine its extensive store of historical data as well as real-time consumer information to deliver cutting-edge products. For example, L’Oréal has trained an AI algorithm to read the thousands of online customer ratings and reviews of the company’s makeup products. With real-time insight, research and innovation teams can then make relevant product changes and target advertising more effectively.
At Johnson & Johnson, new technologies have enabled the company to reimagine consumer health and deliver care for patients in new ways. Augmented reality and virtual reality, paired with AI, have helped train surgeons eight times faster by combining digital imagery with insights about how to perform the best surgical procedures. AI and digital twins have helped Johnson & Johnson accelerate enrollment in COVID-19 vaccine trials and improve batch production of vaccines, from one batch every two weeks to two batches every half week.
Embracing change and becoming nimble is more important than ever. Of the tips IT leaders shared about sustaining a competitive advantage in the current environment, the most common was the ability to be nimble. That means being able to pivot quickly when the market changes, seize opportunities as they present themselves and stave off issues as they arise. Indeed, more than 75% of attendees said creating a culture that embraces uncertainty, as well as the ability to pivot quickly, would have the greatest business impact over the next six to 12 months.
Companies are making a number of changes to make their organizations more nimble, including transforming their operating model, adopting new technologies, upskilling employees and bringing in new talent, and driving innovation through partnerships.
Nimbleness is at the heart of many of today’s technology transformations, including the shift to embrace cloud, APIs, and other technologies, said Bernadette Nixon, the CEO of Algolia. These modern software architectures ultimately allow organizations to move more quickly and evolve their systems to support market shifts, further empowering teams to become more efficient and nimbler in their processes.
We hope you’ll join us for our next Metis Strategy Digital Symposium on December 9, 2021. Stay tuned to our website for more details.
Join best-in-class technology leaders to learn how today’s top companies are driving digital transformations and maintaining an innovative edge amid a time of unprecedented change and uncertainty.
Our agenda is below. CIOs and other technology leaders, register here to reserve your spot today, and stay tuned for more updates.
Welcome
12:10 – 12:25
Fireside Chat: Barbara Lavernos, Deputy CEO, L’Oréal
Barbara shares lessons from the company’s remarkable transformation, which has fused science and technology to create cutting-edge beauty products and design new digital journeys for customers.
Barbara Lavernos, Deputy CEO for Research, Innovation, and Technology, L’Oréal
12:25 – 12:45
Panel: Digital Acceleration and Innovation in Times of Uncertainty
By all accounts, the global pandemic has further accelerated the already rapid pace of digital transformation and increased the urgency for more robust business capabilities across all aspects of organizational operating models and business ecosystems. In this context, many organizations have found ways to strengthen business capabilities for the benefit of all stakeholders. The global CIOs of Corteva Agriscience and Johnson & Johnson will share how their teams have found unique ways to innovate, achieve higher levels of agility, and build sustainable resilience in the face of ongoing uncertainty.
Debra King, SVP, Chief Information Officer and Chief Transformation Officer, Corteva Agriscience
Jim Swanson, EVP & Enterprise CIO, Johnson & Johnson
12:45 – 1:00
Entrepreneur Spotlight: Mickey Boodaei, Transmit Security
Just weeks ago, Transmit Security raised $543 million in Series A funding and had a pre-money valuation of $2.2 billion, marking the largest Series A in the history of cybersecurity and one of the highest valuations for a bootstrapped company. In this fireside chat, Transmit Founder and CEO Mickey Boodaei the evolution of identity and authentication as the world moves toward a post-password future.
Mickey Boodaei, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Transmit Security
1:00 – 1:20
Panel: How Fifth Third Bancorp Drives a Culture of Innovation
Fifth Third Bancorp is among the largest money managers in the Midwest, with $483 billion in assets under management as of June 30. Greg Carmichael, the company’s President, Chairman, and CEO, joined the company in 2003 as Chief Information Officer. In this discussion, he shares lessons learned on his path to the CEO role and chats with the company’s current CIO about the company’s investments in FinTech and its continued push to build world-class digital capabilities for its customers.
Greg Carmichael, Chief Executive Officer, Fifth Third Bank
Jude Schramm, Chief Information Officer, Fifth Third Bank
1:20 – 1:35
Entrepreneur Spotlight: Ed Jennings, Quickbase
The CEO of Quickbase describes how automation, low-code and no-code platforms are enabling organizational agility and the role of Citizen Automation in the future of work.
Ed Jennings, Chief Executive Officer, Quickbase
1:35 – 1:55
Panel: IT-Led Breakthroughs and the Digital Shift in Insurance
Technology leaders from two major insurance companies will discuss the role of IT in defining and enabling the future of work, IT-led digital breakthroughs, and the foundational changes that digital capabilities are bringing to the insurance industry.
Lisa Davis, SVP & Chief Information Officer, Blue Shield of California
Mike Shadler, SVP & Chief Information Officer, Pacific Life
Moderated by Chris Davis, Vice President & West Coast Lead, Metis Strategy
1:55 – 2:15
Panel: A People-Focused Approach to Transformation
Organizations increasingly acknowledge that creating an outstanding customer experience requires enabling an equally outstanding employee experience. In this session, technology leaders will discuss how digital efforts focused on people are driving engagement and enabling the development of new capabilities.
Mike Giresi, Chief Digital Technology Officer, Molex LLC
Tim Dickson, Chief Information Officer, Generac
2:15 – 2:30
Entrepreneur Spotlight: Bernadette Nixon, Algolia
Algolia processes more than 1.5 trillion searches per year across more than 10,000 business customers. In this session, CEO Bernadette Nixon discusses what’s next for search and the growing role that APIs play in delivering seamless customer experiences.
Bernadette Nixon, Chief Executive Officer, Algolia
2:30 – 2:50
Panel: Combining AI and IoT to drive digital processes
Companies today rely on a rapidly evolving combination of artificial intelligence and Internet of Things applications as they modernize their operations for the digital age. In this discussion, technology leaders share their insights on successfully scaling and monitoring these digital processes to drive efficiency and product innovation.
Vagesh Dave, GVP & Chief Information Officer, McDermott International
Danielle Brown, SVP & Chief Information Officer, Whirlpool
Moderated by Michael Bertha, Managing Director and Central Office Lead, Metis Strategy
As the business world adapts to an era of hybrid work, companies are learning how to effectively foster collaboration across remote and in-office teams. To operate effectively in this new reality, teams must develop creative ways to bring new thinking to life when colleagues are spread across the country, or even the world. Fostering that collaboration is critical to ensuring firms can act in a nimble fashion, able to seize new opportunities and stave off potential threats as they arise.
Metis Strategy frequently uses design sprints as a way to foster collaboration and idea generation among teams. Traditionally, design sprints occur in person. Several people get together in the same conference space to map customer journeys, illustrate design concepts, and paste Post-It notes around a large whiteboard to generate new ideas. In a remote or hybrid setting, however, not everyone is physically in the conference room, making it tougher to quickly sketch a concept or add an idea to the board.
The Metis Strategy team has found that effectively conducting a remote design sprint requires a different approach and a new set of skills to ensure the exercise runs smoothly. For a recent client engagement, our team built and facilitated a five-day, fully remote design sprint. We brought together employees from across the US to develop a tangible solution to a challenge facing the team. Each day was designed to get the team thinking creatively and engaging with the problem at hand, including understanding the challenge, deciding on long-term goals, and mapping user experience, and prototyping a solution that could be tested on a target audience. In this instance, virtual whiteboarding tools (we used Miro) became a critical for facilitating a successful sprint.
Below are a few takeaways from our experience that can help teams that are conducting their own remote or hybrid design sprints:
While a remote design sprint doesn’t deliver the same experience as an in-person session might, we found it to be an effective framework for collaboration and idea generation. As hybrid work takes hold at many companies, we expect sprint facilitators and their teams to be increasingly fluent with virtual whiteboarding tools as they manage collaboration across virtual and in-person settings.
Blue Shield of California is an 83-year-old nonprofit health system that earns roughly $20 billion in annual revenue, but it caps its net income at 2% of revenue. As a result, the company has returned more than $650 million to customers and communities through its history. With 4.5 million customers across the state of California, the company has a mission to create a healthcare system that is worthy of employees’ family and friends while being sustainably affordable. The pandemic has transformed the way in which the company interacts with customers. There has been a digital relationship with customers that has deepened since March of 2020. Blue Shield of California has focused on being holistic and personalized while being high-tech and high-touch.
The leader who has catalyzed much of this change is the company’s chief information officer Lisa Davis. In her role, she runs information technology as well as the company’s data and analytics organization, while setting Blue Shield of California’s technology strategy.
Davis draws upon an unusually deep reserve of experience as a technology leader, having spent 26 years at the United States Department of Defense, rising to the post of CIO at multiple divisions of DOD. She was also a CIO at Georgetown University for nearly three and a half years. After that, she joined Intel, first as a technology leader, and then ran a $9 billion business for the company. All of this was prior to joining Blue Shield of California in February of 2020.
Davis has seen the past 16 months of the pandemic as a remarkable driver of innovation and change. By way of example, she referenced telehealth, which has been an area of focus for Davis, and an area of tremendous growth for the company during the pandemic. “Prior to the pandemic, there was a lot of consternation and a belief that telehealth wasn’t wanted by consumers and wouldn’t be leveraged or used by our members,” said Davis. “In fact, the pandemic showed just the opposite. Telehealth has soared almost 500%. We are seeing better health outcomes, and [in many cases] our members prefer telehealth appointments to having to go into the office.”
Davis also notes that an area that the healthcare system in the United States has lacked historically has been a holistic approach to personal health. The pandemic has underscored the need for the healthcare ecosystem to work more closely together to serve patients. Davis referenced Blue Shield of California’s Health Reimagined program as an example. “Imagine an experience where providers, members and payers have access to the same data; that we’re making decisions that are best for the member or the patient because they have all of the providers sharing information from a single electronic health record,” said Davis. “[We aim to make] decisions based on [information that is] holistic and personalized to that member.”
Davis believes that the best way to serve providers, members and payers is to re-orient the IT function to be more tied to the rest of the organization. She and her team have spent the last year developing a new operating model for the information technology function centered around portfolios and products. “We spent the last year changing our operating model to align against and support the key lines of business and key horizontal functions within the company,” noted Davis. “We have created seven different portfolios: three to support lines of business, four to create horizontal functions such as Medi-Cal, commercial business, senior markets, customer care, and marketing. Corporate services [is] a horizontal function and a large complex horizontal function [is] our Health and Growth Solutions organization, which has a big need around data and analytics capability.”
The portfolio teams have a variety of roles associated with each burgeoning partnership across the organization, including a portfolio leader, a solution delivery lead, solution architects, business architects, security personnel and data and analytics team members. Davis believes that this mix and the stronger partnership increases IT’s business acumen. “[This model creates a] basis of trust and a foundation with our business partners to improve collaboration, understand the opportunities that [they are] trying to solve, the capabilities that we’re trying to bring to market, so that those teams are connected hip-to-hip, working together to ultimately accelerate capabilities and services that we want to bring to market for our members,” said Davis. “That has laid a foundation [toward] being a cloud and data company that is required to support this new digital experience and vision of Health Reimagined that we want for our members.”
Davis joined Blue Shield of California only a couple of weeks before the company went into quarantine. As such, she became a test case for onboarding virtually, and she drew several lessons about how best to lead a team without the benefit of getting to know them in person. She has added more than 150 people to the IT team since the beginning of the pandemic, infusing the team with new talent at a time of great transformation, giving her ample opportunity to test those lessons. The first lesson in leading during these most unusual circumstances is to lead authentically. Davis indicated that it is necessary to “listen more, to understand where our employees are [personally and professionally], to understand the capacity for change that they can handle, to be connected to what all of our employees are dealing with.”
Second, she recognized the sanctity of communications. “I’m a firm believer that you can never communicate enough,” said Davis. “That engagement and trying to stay connected, keep the video on [on video conference calls], trying to find that connection with the employees has been extremely important in navigating this change.”
Third, she models perseverance with the team. These are uncertain times, and it is difficult to predict what opportunities or threats might be around the corner but being steadfast in moving the organization in the right direction remains paramount.
Davis draws strength that helps her persevere through her diverse set of experiences, and she understands that there is more that is common across those experiences than is different. “One of the beautiful things about being a technology leader is no matter what sector that you’re in, our challenges are all pretty much the same,” she noted. “We all address those technology opportunities at a different place, at a different maturity level. Our stakeholders are clearly different, but the technology opportunities and how we leverage technology to support mission or business outcomes doesn’t change.”
Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. He has written two bestselling books, and his third, Getting to Nimble, was recently released. He also moderates the Technovation podcast series and speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @PeterAHigh.
Saul Van Beurden is the Head of Technology for Wells Fargo, a role he has had for nearly two years, after having spent time as the Chief Information Officer of Consumer and Community Banking at JPMorgan Chase. He commands a budget of roughly $9 billion and has a team of 40,000 technologists reporting to him. His purview includes all software developments, IT operations, infrastructure and cloud enablement and cybersecurity. His is a role of tremendous consequence in the bank to say the least.
The top technologists at major companies are most often referred to as chief information officers. They are sometimes referred to as chief technology officers or as chief digital officers. The “head of technology” title is an unusual one. When asked how the company and he arrived at it, he noted that the reason was that when he joined, there was already a chief information officer and a chief technology officer, both of whom would report to him. “For me, it’s not important the title of a role,” noted Van Beurden. “It’s how you act on that role and the responsibility that you have [that is more important].”
Upon joining the company, Van Beurden elected to develop a plan to play both “offense and defense,” as he put it, comparing it to coaching an American football team. “The first role is what you could call the defensive role and is the first operator role,” he said. “This is all about making sure that the plan runs, that the things go. The second role is an offensive role. This is what we call the business enabler role, where it’s more about how do you decrease risk for the bank? How do you maximize revenue? How do you get better return on investments?”
To bring this to life, early in his tenure, Van Beurden and his team defined what he refers to as a “6S Strategy.” They are:
Relative to skills, he highlights that it is critical to build a team that has the skills of today and grows the skills of tomorrow, suggesting a level of learning agility necessary to accomplish the company’s mission. This is the path to being a “trusted operator,” as he put it. “This is all about upscaling and reskilling your workforce,” he said.
Needless to say, security is an important skillset for any enterprise, but especially so for a major financial services company that has so much sensitive data flowing through it. “You could say the only thing that a bank sells is trust: the fact that it’s safe to have your [money and data] with the bank,” said Van Beurden. “Security comes down to cybersecurity, to controls that you need to have in place, and so forth.”
With 90% of all transactions taking place digitally across Wells Fargo, stability is sine qua non. “When the digital app or the online desktop version is down, the bank is down,” Van Beurden underscored. “You need to have a stable shop. That stability is created by more and better resiliency. It’s all about automating the processes on the IT operation side, and with rationalization of your applications.” He noted that these first three “S”s make up the defensive play.
The offensive play begins with scalability. Van Beurden highlighted that this requires on-demand service, so that as transaction volumes increase, the technology seamlessly scales up and then can scale back as necessary.
Next is the focus on speed. As a long-time financial services executive, Van Beurden noted that banks are slow, with the behemoths like Wells Fargo often taking more than a year to deliver programs. He has driven his team to halve or even to cut the time to a third of that. He painted the picture of the typical way of doing things, and then offered the improvement. He highlighted the typical process with many handoffs along the way. “First product requirements, and then the prioritization with finance teams, and then it goes to a PMO, and then it gets to a project leader, and then IT intake, and IT intake to design, to technical design, to developers, to test, to production,” Van Beurden said. “You already near 60 weeks’ worth of work right there.” The improvement comes through multifunctional teams that do not require inefficient handoffs. “The analyst with the product idea sits down with the engineer who is supposed to build a feature, who is also the one who can directly put it in production because he or she is using DevOps tools like we have today. You take away that whole notion of handoff, handoff, handoff.” Next, he noted that process automation is critical. He highlighted that speed is the key differentiator to maximize revenues and to gain advantage over the rest of the market through better return on investment.
The final “S” is satisfaction. “You can do all the other things, but if the end customer is still not happy with and app [for example], and the uptime of the app [are not appropriate], we have failed,” Van Beurden said. “Satisfaction is, for us, the cornerstone of the strategy.”
Van Beuren hoped to simplify things from a strategy perspective to validate progress relative to each of the six “S” categories. By maturing and driving value in each area, the goal is to deliver better capabilities for innovation. The technology team has re-infused the company with the art of the possible. That innovation is based is also structured, in this case into three pillars.
The first pillar is an innovation unit that reports to a peer of Van Beurden’s, Ather Williams III, who is the Senior Executive Vice President, Head of Corporate Strategy, Digital Platforms and Innovation at Wells Fargo. “[Williams’] team constantly looks for what is the next best experience for our customer,” said Van Beurden. “What is the next best feature that we need to develop? They also look a little bit further ahead, like three years, four years into the future, and start to see what is coming and looking around the corner and making sure it is getting adopted.” That team works in an integrated fashion with software engineers on Van Beurden’s team, ensuring there is alignment and a strong collaboration between the teams.
The second pillar is research and development on the technology side. This team is often tasked with the most deeply technical or complicated innovation topics. The team has assembled an ecosystem to stimulate the thinking necessary to tackle big topics, partnering with institutions such as MIT and Stanford. Van Beurden indicated that the R&D team focuses on what he calls “the magical cocktail of artificial intelligence and machine learning, data and compute.” He believes that the future of the bank will be defined at the intersection of these technology disciplines.
Van Beurden offered examples of how Wells Fargo is leveraging each. “We need to explain the outcomes of AI models. If we get a lending request of a customer, and we say yes or no, we need to be able to say why we said yes or why we said no. We cannot say, ‘There was the model and it ran it and we do not know [why the decision was made].’ We need to be able to explain it.” The team has been able to monitor and explain the outcomes of the models while fine tuning them where necessary. With MIT, they have developed a mechanism for AI to explain AI. “This is how we solve the problem of non-explainable AI by putting AI on top of it by which it becomes explainable,” said Van Beurden.
Though many companies think of big data as an operating principle, Van Beurden thinks about small data. “Small data is really finding that smallest significant set of data that will bring you to [the right] outcome, [which may leverage] synthetic data, instead of all the production data that we use for this,” explained Van Beurden. “Can we do synthetic data to come to the same outcome?” In concert with the research institutes, his team is hard at work on this.
The final pillar is related to compute; more specifically, the fast advancements Van Beurden’s team is making on compute power. “That speed that is coming with quantum compute cannot [be expressed] in factors like 10, or hundreds or millions,” he noted. “It’s [beyond] what we think is possible to be done. It doesn’t matter when it’s ready. We do not want to be the one that has regrets that we didn’t do it from the start, and that we weren’t there if it becomes successful and production ready.” There are two areas of focus as his team drives this journey: trading algorithms and cryptographic keys. The former will aid the bank in fostering faster trading. The latter will protect the bank from the time when all possible passwords can be determined at lightning speed by bad actors due to dramatic advances in compute speed.
Though Wells Fargo has taken its lumps in recent years, Van Beurden and his team have positioned the company to gain advantages once again as an innovator.
Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. He has written two bestselling books, and his third, Getting to Nimble, will be released in March 2021. He also moderates the Technovation podcast series and speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @PeterAHigh.
John Hinshaw has held executive positions in technology and operations at a diverse array of companies, from HPE to Boeing to Verizon Wireless. Thus, he has been at high level positions in business-to-consumer, business-to-business and business-to-government companies. He has worked in New Jersey, Chicago, and most recently in Silicon Valley. It was Hinshaw’s last stop at HP, then HPE after the split of the founding company of Silicon Valley, that broadened Hinshaw’s technology ecosystem most dramatically.
In late 2019, Hinshaw added another industry to his resume, as he took on the role of Group Chief Operating Officer and Group Managing Director of HSBC, a global bank with operations in roughly 65 countries and over $500 trillion in payments processed in 2020. Hinshaw had experience in financial services by virtue of his more than five years on the board of BNY Mellon, but he had never been an operator at a bank before. The bank viewed his outsider status as a tremendous asset and Hinshaw notes that collaborating with seasoned colleagues while bringing his own fresh perspective has been a recipe for innovation.
“You certainly need great leaders in key roles who have [deep] financial services experience,” noted Hinshaw. “One of the things I have enjoyed doing is [building bridges with] folks who have 25, 30 years of experience with fresh eyes to look at some of the challenges [the bank faces].” He notes that many of the fintech companies that have emerged as new leaders elsewhere in the financial services industry often are founded by outsiders.
Like those fintech entrepreneurs, Hinshaw is passionate about technology and the ability to enhance customers’ and employees’ experiences digitally with HSBC. In fact, he was convinced to take the role when Mark Tucker and Noel Quinn, HSBC’s Chairman and CEO, respectively, indicated that his mandate was to drive true digital transformation across the company. That means “transforming the bank from where we are today to a digitized bank that is easy to do business with for customers and that our colleagues can have a better experience with,” said Hinshaw. “That would leapfrog a lot of our traditional competition in banking, but [HSBC would] also be able to fend off some of the fintechs that are getting into banking.”
Hinshaw oversees 50,000 technologists and has a budget of over $6 billion. But he has also developed partnerships with fintechs and other startups around the world, which can provide HSBC with new technologies while gaining access to the bank’s platforms, customers, and history “A lot of the new innovative technology is cloud-based, it comes out of Silicon Valley, it comes out of the fintech community,” Hinshaw said. “Bridging those two worlds is really, really important. That is one of the strengths I bring to HSBC, having lived and breathed Silicon Valley for a decade.”
In recent months, Hinshaw helped broker a partnership between HSBC and Google to help detect and prevent money laundering and financial crime using better analytics. “We process trillions of financial transactions per day and figure out which of those might be criminal or fraudulent in nature,” Hinshaw said. “That takes a lot of computing horsepower, it takes a lot of data and analytics.” By partnering with Google Cloud, the company can remove many of the false positives that naturally occur when analyzing trillions of transactions. “We are doing something that no other bank has ever done in looking at that financial crime challenge, and only really Silicon Valley and the way they think, the way Google thinks and technologists think, can help us bridge that gap,” noted Hinshaw.
Hinshaw has pushed the bank to invest in startups as early as in the angel and series A rounds of investment. That way HSBC can influence the evolution of products to a greater extent, which forms a virtuous cycle of sorts. “If we like a technology, we trial it,” he said. “It works well for us, we make an investment so [the startup] can expand.” HSBC can then test the startup’s technology at scale and help it grow, and usually takes on a board or advisory role to do so. “It just builds on itself. They get the advantage of a working product in one of the biggest banks in the world; we get the advantage of helping to guide and direct their capability, and if we make money on the investment, all the better. We will reinvest it in another opportunity.”
Like others, Hinshaw sees the pandemic and quarantine as an extraordinary accelerator to digital transformation. With customers not having a choice but to operate digitally, it led to massive adoption of the company’s digital capabilities. “It really did change the way we look at the digital adoption curve,” he said. “I think we probably leapfrogged three to five years in the digital curve, and it is not going back. Nobody wants to use paper.”
Another learning for Hinshaw is the effectiveness of virtual work. At a time when financial services companies on the whole have been more conservative in their approach to hybrid work in the future, he sees things differently. He noted that the pandemic proved that people could be much more effective and efficient at times working from home. Time in the office, he believes, needs to be purposeful.
“The only reason to come into a headquarters office should be for collaboration, innovation, co-development with your colleagues, socialization with your colleagues, to get to know them because we have not spent time with them. Connecting with customers, connecting live with suppliers [should also be done in person].”
Hinshaw notes that this has been the most interesting among the many executive posts he has held, as it draws upon all of his past experiences in profound ways.
The Metis Strategy team was honored to participate in the 2019 Forbes CIO Next conference, where chief information officers, technology and operations leaders, VCs, and artificial intelligence experts shared their insights into the evolution of AI in the enterprise and gave us a glimpse of where things are headed in 2020. Here are a few lessons we brought home:
“Digital immigrant” companies leverage their strengths. Organizations not born in the cloud, often referred to as “digital immigrants,” continue to face challenges that many of their digital native competitors do not. But as legacy firms upgrade their technology environments and make progress on digital transformation efforts, they increasingly are able to make use of their inherent advantages: stockpiles of valuable data, decades of industry expertise, and the scale to enter new markets quickly.
At Rockwell Automation, for example, the convergence of Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) and an increased focus on data has helped the company improve its on-time delivery, optimize and automate many internal processes, and shift its business model toward services such as telemetry and predictive maintenance. At insurance firm Travelers, aerial photos paired with geospatial data and claims information help the company quickly assess potential losses and deliver help to customers.
In 2020, we expect digital immigrant firms will continue to use their data and scale advantages to optimize internal processes and deliver tech-enabled products and services that can compete with their startup rivals. New technology investments will focus on business capabilities that truly differentiate companies from their competitors.
New ways of working take hold, but developing talent remains a challenge. The line between IT and the business has all but disappeared as firms embrace cross-functional, agile product teams. Many executives noted that this way of working has allowed them to respond more quickly to market changes and provide better customer experiences. We expect this cross-functional collaboration to increase in the year ahead.
At the same time, the battle for talent shows no signs of slowing down. Conference attendees listed talent as a top priority for 2020 as they look to recruit, hire, and retain new people while re-skilling existing employees for jobs of the future. Executives said they continue to seek and develop “T-shaped” employees who have a breadth and depth of skills that span technology and operations. They also recognize the need to create work environments that promote continuous learning at all levels.
We’re still in early innings with AI. Enterprise adoption of AI and machine learning is accelerating as companies explore new use cases and pursue applications that drive concrete business value. In the year ahead, we expect many companies will work to hone existing use cases and develop mechanisms to scale advanced analytics capabilities across the enterprise. Indeed, as many traditional organizations called themselves tech companies in recent years, some panelists suggested we might start hearing them refer to themselves as AI companies.
But significant work remains to be done. Companies continue to invest in their core data infrastructure, and executives are looking for new ways to measure and communicate ROI for their AI initiatives. There are also fundamental issues yet to be resolved, such as how to create explainable algorithms, how to reduce inherent bias in data sets, and whether certain AI technologies should operate without a human in the loop.
The pinnacle: using data to drive growth. Both winners of this year’s Forbes CIO Innovation Award used their companies’ rich data sets to develop new services and drive tangible financial growth:
As we enter 2020, we expect CIOs to play an increasingly visible role in the development of corporate strategy. Many are likely to expand their purview as organizations look to new technologies to drive operational efficiency, deliver top-line growth, and create a differentiated customer experience. CIOs also will continue to be agents of cultural change as they foster new ways of working and develop technology talent across their organizations. We look forward to the year ahead!
This month, $92 billion consumer packaged goods (CPG) company Procter & Gamble named Vittorio Cretella as chief information officer. He will replace Javier Polit on January 7.
Cretella has run his own consulting firm, VCAdvisory, since retiring from Mars Incorporated in 2017 after 25 years with the company, the last four as CIO. He has consulted to a number of CPG companies as well as logistics companies.
Jon Moeller, P&G’s Chief Operating officer, Chief Financial Officer and Vice Chairman, to whom Cretella will report, noted “Vittorio is a thought-leading CIO with a wealth of digitally influenced business experience. He is fluent in today’s IT technology and capabilities – and deeply understands the relationship between IT and business.”
