8/6/2018
By Peter High. Published on Forbes
Bask Iyer has always had a different orientation as a chief information officer. As a divisional CIO at GlaxoSmithKline, then as the Group CIO at Honeywell, and as the Group Senior Vice President of Business Operations and the Chief Information Officer of Juniper Networks, he developed a close relationship with the businesses that he was a part of. He believes that is one of the key factors in his rise at Dell and VMare.
Iyer has the rare distinction of being both the CIO and chief digital officer of both companies in addition to being the Executive Vice President of Dell Digital. As such, he has leadership roles in two publicly traded companies. (Dell has a majority ownership stake in VMware.) He began his tenure with the companies as the CIO of VMware alone, when Michael Dell asked him to take over the same responsibilities at Dell. To Iyer’s surprise, he was not asked to relinquish responsibilities at VMware.
As such, he has led dramatic digital transformations of two very different companies: a Silicon Valley software company and a much larger and more traditional technology company. Iyer notes that the key to his success has been focusing on people and process before technology. He highlights the changes he has ushered in and the methods he has used in this interview.
Peter High: You are the Executive Vice President of Dell Digital as well as the CIO and CDO of both Dell and VMware. Could you unwind all that you do and describe what it entails?
Bask Iyer: I was the CIO of VMware for a long time and had additional digital responsibilities. Nearly two years ago, the Dell-EMC merger happened and Michael Dell and the executives in the Dell-EMC family asked me to help with the integration. They were bringing two cultures together, two different CIOs together, and two IT teams together. Little did I know that my role helping out would turn into a job.
I have a challenging and interesting job. VMware is an independent company and therefore Dell owns only 80 percent of VMware. Additionally, Dell is big partners with a great deal of their competition, and because of this, VMware has to have that independence. It is an independent company with its own audit committee among other independent entities. Because of this, I have to think of it as two separate jobs. As the CIO for VMware, the audit committee asks me questions to ensure that my job for VMware is not being compromised. Moreover, the Dell audit committee and management ask me the same questions.
At Dell, part of the role is the traditional CIO, which covers all infrastructure, all IT, all end-user applications, the program management office, and security, among other areas. Additionally, I am part of the executive team on both sides, so I can understand the strategy and translate it. An interesting part of the digital side of the job, which is a little unusual for IT, is that Dell’s E-Commerce team is supported and run by my team. All the product developer people for e-commerce, who are not necessarily IT employees but instead are product development employees, are a part of it. It is a robust e-commerce platform, it is growing, and we want to put more products for our customers on the Dell e-commerce services. That part of the job is certainly interesting and creative. Similarly, with VMware, we are going to a digital subscription model. My team at VMware works closely with [research and development] to ensure that the products and subscription models we develop can be built and have visibility to end customers. Additionally, the subscription model is a product that IT develops to go in part and parcel with the offering that VMware has. Overall, it is both digital, and it is traditional IT that people understand, but it is two separate jobs. That being said, it is a family of companies and therefore it is a friendly environment. While both executive teams always make fun of me as both believe I am not with them, they have always been supportive. I could not have done it without the support of the two CEOs, presidents, and executive teams.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
4/2/18
By Peter High, published on Forbes
Barry Eggers is the rare venture capitalist in Silicon Valley who grew up in the region. He can recall a time when the area was covered with fruit orchards rather than start-ups. He spent time in the mergers and acquisitions department at Cisco, which had a remarkable track record during his tenure. After a brief stint in private equity, Eggers and a couple of colleagues founded Lightspeed Venture Partners in 2000. As he notes herein, the firm’s approach has been to identify key themes that the company can focus its investments around.
One area of interest for Eggers is Industry 4.0. This describes digital transformation in the manufacturing sector, and the moniker suggests that it is the fourth wave of change to manufacturing. It is especially interesting, as it brings together a wide array of technology trends such as data, analytics, human-machine interactions, and digital-physical conversion. Eggers describes this trend, and its broader implications in this interview.
Peter High: Industry 4.0 is a topic that you focus on at your firm, Lightspeed Venture Partners. Could you define the term and provide insight into the technology trends that are embedded within it?
Barry Eggers: Broadly speaking, Industry 4.0 is the digitization of the manufacturing sector. The reason it is called Industry 4.0 is that many see it as the fourth industrial revolution: the first was steam, the second was electricity, the third was automation, and the fourth is now digitization. Some people also refer to it as cyber-physical systems in the manufacturing industry. We see this as a huge opportunity.
The second technology is analytics and intelligence. That is where breakthroughs like machine learning and artificial intelligence are taking place
The third technology is human-machine interaction. Even with automation, humans are not going away. It has become easier for humans to interact with machines through touch interfaces, voice interfaces, augmented, and virtual reality. I think augmented reality will play a huge role here.
The last enabling technology is the digital-physical conversion. This is what allows you to create things quickly, such as multi-material 3D printing. The combination of these technologies is going to change the way manufacturing is done over the next 10-20 years.
High: You not only have deep connections in the start-up community, but you also spend a good deal of time with leaders – CEOs, CTOs, CIOs – of large organizations. How fast do you see the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies happening, especially among larger organizations?
Eggers: An industrial revolution takes time. You have to look at the amount of machines and equipment that has to be replaced. With the advent of the steam engine, absolutely everything had to be replaced. With the advent of electricity, very little actually had to be replaced because it substituted electricity for steam. With automation, some estimates say that between 80 to 90 percent of machines had to be replaced.
To read the full interview, please visit Forbes
3/26/18
Vint Cerf is considered to be one of the fathers of the internet, having been the co-inventor of TCP/IP, having led influential work at DARPA, then at MCI, where he pioneered an email platform called MCI Mail. Now 74, he remains as busy as ever. Since 2005, he has been Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist. It is a role that gives him plenty of freedom. As he notes herein, “I focus on doing whatever I can to create conditions under which more Internet infrastructure can be built. This means I need to go where there is not Internet infrastructure to find ways to get it built. In weaker economies, affordability is a big issue, and the rationale for investing in Internet infrastructure is not necessarily obvious.”
As our conversation continued, however, he shared several concerns about the future of his creation. He indicates that his goal is to determine how to make the internet safer, more secure, and more private. He also co-founded the People-Centered Internet (PCI) with customer relationship management pioneer, Mei Lin Fung, installing former FCC CIO David Bray as the executive director. He notes that, through PCI, he strives to identify projects that could “materially improve people’s use of the Internet.” He sites as examples, “creating information in local languages or providing services that improve people’s ability to find jobs or improve their economic stability or safety or health.”
Peter High: As the co-inventor of TCP/IP, you are famously considered one of the “Fathers of the Internet.” Can you talk about your early work and the genesis of those ideas?
Vint Cerf: Thank you for being careful about that, as Bob Kahn and I had two hands on one pencil. He deserves huge credit, as do tens of thousands of other people since that time. You do not do anything on this scale without a huge amount of willing collaboration and commitment.
When I was a graduate student at UCLA, I worked with others on the ARPANET project, which was a predecessor to the Internet. ARPANET was a packet switching experiment within DARPA to connect a dozen universities that were doing computer science and artificial intelligence research for the Defense Department. The idea was to link all their computers together so they could share their resources, computing capabilities, and results to make progress more quickly.
The challenge was how to connect those machines together since the circuit switching technology at the time would have been too slow for the interactions we needed. Packet switching, on the other hand, is more like electronic postcards. They get lost and they come out of order. You must do a bunch of little things to make a postcard postal service work reliably, and the same is true for packet switching. We got the ARPANET running, and Steve Crocker, who remains one of my best friends, led the network working group to develop the protocols to allow different brands of computers to communicate across this packet switch ARPANET.
After I finished my Ph.D., I went to Stanford to work on computer networking. Bob Kahn, in the meantime, had left Bolt Beranek and Newman and joined DARPA. He came to my lab and said, “We have a problem.” The problem was that we were going to use computers for command and control because it would help us better manage our resources. However, this would require us to put computers in mobile vehicles, ships at sea, and airplanes, in addition to fixed installations. Obviously, these could not be wired connections, and we were going to have to use mobile radio and satellites in addition to the dedicated telephone circuits that we were using to build ARPANET.
The problem was that the packet switch nets differed in terms of sizes, speeds, and delays. We started working on this problem in the spring of 1973. By September, in collaboration with the International Network Working Group, we had a solution. We began detailing the design in January 1974 and published a paper in May of that year. By the end of ’74, we had a fully detailed specification for what was called Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). The next several years involved implementation and testing and discovery of mistakes and their repair, so we iterated several times until we ended up with a final specification in 1978 which we froze.
By that time, we had split the Internet Protocol [IP] off from the Transmission Control Protocol [TCP] to deal with real-time communications that did not require reliability but required timeliness. With radar communication, for example, you do not want to know where the missile was, you want to know where it is now. You do not need to retransmit old information because it is not of any use. We split the protocols into TCP and IP, and we created something called a User Datagram Protocol which gave the users access to this real-time communications channel.
That occupied my time by 1978, at which point I was already in the Washington area working for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). We continued implementation across as many operating systems as we could and on January 1, 1983, we turned the Internet on. At the time, it consisted of approximately three networks: the ARPANET, mobile packet radio net in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a type of satellite net over the Atlantic. This was followed by rapid growth in the academic community, which DARPA supported.
Without going into another 20 years of history, the National Science Foundation (NSF) picked up the idea and funded the creation of the National Science Foundation Backbone Network and about a dozen intermediate elements to connect 3,000 universities around the US into this growing Internet system. They contributed an enormous amount to the absolute growth of the system and made some important decisions that allowed the network to eventually become a commercial service.
High: At what point in that journey did you see the broader commercial and global implications of what you were creating?
Last week, I noted Gartner’s picks for the top-ten technology trends for 2017. This list differed from the lists for 2016, 2015, and 2014 inasmuch as there are more trends that are not yet implemented by even leading CIOs than in years passed. My informal polling of CIOs suggested that most have roughly half of these trends on their roadmap, with many suggesting the number is less than 50 percent. That said, CIOs are interested in better understanding each of these to determine how many more should be added.
My team and I put together our picks for books, articles, and podcasts to better understand the concepts described. Use these as solid primers for your team to better understand the concepts and to translate their validity to your strategic imperatives.
AI and Advanced Machine Learning
My pick for the best book on this topic in recent months is Kevin Kelly’s The Inevitable. A founding editor of Wired magazine, Kelly is in his mid-60s, but maintains the curiosity and flexibility of mind of someone much younger than him. He has seen trends come and go, and is a good filter for unwarranted hype, as a result. His book is an entertaining foray into the future of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and what it will mean for us.
The authority on the Internet of Things is Stacey Higginbotham, who is a former editor and writer for publications such as Time and GigaOmni Media. She moderates the Internet of Things Podcast.This podcast discusses all angles of the Internet of Things, including interviews with top IoT leaders, as well as unique viewpoints and in-depth analyses on the latest news and trends in the field
Virtual and Augmented Reality
Marc Prosser is a freelance journalist and researcher living in Tokyo and writes about all things science and technology. He has written a great number of pieces on virtual and augmented reality that can be found on SingularityHub. One of the best isAugmented Reality, not VR, will be the Big Winner for Business. Digi-Capital estimates that AR companies will generate $120 billion in revenue by 2020.This article reviews how Boeing and other companies are experimenting with the technology, and the types of benefits it can provide to companies.
Digital Twin
Michael Grieves is the Executive Director of the Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Innovative Design at the Florida Institute of Technology. his paper Manufacturing Excellence through Virtual Factory Replications is the seminal work on the topic of digital twins, and it explores how digital twins can act as the critical connection between the data about the physical world and the information contained in the digital world about the physical asset.
Blockchain and Distributed Ledgers
Don Tapscott is a consultant and author who has written a number of books on digital trends and their impacts on business and society, including the business bestseller, Macrowikinomics. In his latest book, Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World, co-authored with his son, Alex, the concept of blockchain is explained in clear terms with an eye toward practical recommendations on how businesses might adopt the technology and reasons to do so.
Intelligent Apps
S. Somasegar is a former Corporate Vice President of the Developer Division at Microsoft, where he worked for 27 years. In the past year, he he joined Madrona Venture Group as a Venture Partner. In may of this year, he wrote an article entitled The Intelligent App Ecosystem in TechCrunch, describing how every new application built today will be an intelligent application. He offers an overview of this evolution, and highlights companies that are positioning themselves to realize significant competitive advantages in the years ahead.
Conversational Systems
John Smart is a global futurist and foresight consultant. He is CEO of Foresight U, which is a strategic foresight and entrepreneurship learning and development company. He has written a series of articles on The Brave new World of Smart Agents and their Data part 1, 2, 3 & 4. In this series, Smart explores the five to twenty year future of smart agents and the knowledge bases used to build them. Over the course of these four in-depth articles, Smart articulates how any why smart agents will soon become central to how billions of people live their lives.
Digital Technology Platforms
Salim Ismail has spent the last seven years building Singularity University as its founding executive director and current global ambassador. SU is based at NASA Ames, and its goal is to “educate, inspire, and empower a new generation of leaders to apply exponential technologies to address humanity’s grand challenges.”
In his book, Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it), Ismail notes that as businesses become increasingly digital and the pace of change continues to accelerate, traditional organizations will increasingly struggle to compete. Ismail highlights an organizational model that closes the gap between linear organizations and the exponential environment they operate in.
Mesh App and Service Architecture
Author and entrepreneur, Lisa Gansky has focused on building companies and supporting social ventures where there is an opportunity for well timed disruption and a resounding impact. In The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing, she notes that in the last few years a fundamentally different model has taken root; one in which consumers have more choices, more tools, more information, and more peer-to-peer power.
Also, Bala Iyer is a professor and chair of the Technology, Operations, and Information Management Division at Babson College. Mohan Subramaniam is an associate professor of strategy at Boston College’s Carroll School of Management. Together, they authored “The Strategic Value of APIs“ in Harvard Business Review. They note that to shift to an event driven model, organizations must shift their attention from internal information exchanges to external information exchanges, and APIs are at the core of enabling this transition.
Adaptive Security Architecture
To my mind, there is no deeper thinker in the world of cybersecurity than National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Fellow, Ron Ross. He leads the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) Implementation Project, which includes the development of security standards and guidelines for the federal government, contractors, and the United States critical information infrastructure.
In my interview with him on these pages, entitled “A Conversation with the Most Influential Cybersecurity Guru to the U.S. Government,” he details how cyber threats will increase as our appetite for technology increases. He describes the TACIT acronym for technology leaders to keep in mind when managing cybersecurity, which stands for Threats, Assets, Complexity, Integration, and Trustworthiness. He articulates concepts to bear in mind in each case.
Special thanks to Brandon Metzger for his assistance in aggregating this list.
Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. His latest book is Implementing World Class IT Strategy. He is also the author of World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs. Peter moderates the Forum on World Class IT podcast series. He speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @PeterAHigh.
by Peter High, published on Forbes
3-14-2016
Ted Colbert has one of the largest roles in IT, that of CIO of $96 billion aerospace and defense giant Boeing. Still in his early 40s, Colbert’s rise has been like a 787 Dreamliner taking flight. He has balanced an innovation and digital transformation agenda while pushing the diverse businesses to do more commonly. In so doing, he has been a driver of both top and bottom line value for the enterprise. At the same time that he has helped the company become more innovative, he has also stewarded in a sophisticated security program. As a reward for his team’s great work, last week, Colbert added the title of SVP of Information and Analytics to his responsibilities as CIO.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 28th interview in the CIO-plus series. To read the prior 27 with CIO-pluses from the likes of Verizon, Mondelez International, P&G, and Walgreens, among others, please click this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Ted, I thought we would begin with the transformation that you have been leading as chief information officer. Could you give us a brief overview of some of the activities that you’ve been leading?
Ted Colbert: The business we are in is growing, challenging, super diverse, very complex, and change happens at a pace that sometimes is fast and sometimes slow.
Last year, we launched a program around geographic diversification. We have a significant presence down in South Carolina. Two years ago, there might have been 10 IT employees there. Now, we have almost 700 IT employees in South Carolina. We have several hundred additional employees in St. Louis. We balance our workforce around the country to get access to different types of talent, to have diversity, to be connected with our business, and to fit the business around the US. We are spread across the country and that has offered us some other opportunities from the people perspective.
High: IT has created the laudable goal of becoming more aligned with the strategic plans of the different parts of the organization. How do you do that organizationally?
Colbert: We are an engineering company, so innovation is everywhere. You do not have to go the IT team to find innovation. We have engineers and software designers and developers in all the parts of organization.
I also lead the CIO strategy council which is a group of senior executives. It is probably two or three degrees from the CEO. We meet every other month or so, and go through what we are doing to drive operational excellence in the organization. Then we pick some specific topics from a strategic perspective to ensure we are aligned on them.
Peter High
3-11-2016
Excerpt from the Article:
Teacher Retirement System of Texas (TRS) is the largest public retirement system in Texas in both membership and assets. It is the sixth largest public pension plan in the U.S. and is among the 20 largest in the world. The agency serves more than 1.4 million people–1,081,505 are public and higher education members, and 377,738 are retirement recipients. System net assets total approximately $128.5 billion. As CIO, Chris Cutler oversees and provides strategic direction for the use of technology and information resources that enables TRS to successfully fulfill its mission. As Cutler tells CIO Insight contributor Peter High, he wears many hats: business leader, technology evangelist, business partner, recruiter, change agent and bridge builder.
Peter High: Please describe your role as CIO of the Teacher Retirement System of Texas.
Chris Cutler: As CIO, I wear many hats. These hats include: business leader, technology evangelist, business partner, recruiter, change agent and bridge builder.
Business Leader
As a business leader I serve as a member on the TRS Executive Council. The TRS Executive Council is comprised of C-suite executives and led by our executive director. This council provides guidance to the executive director and makes final decisions on overall corporate policies and directions.
Technology Evangelist
As technology evangelist, I am responsible for educating the Executive Council and our business leaders on the technology and services IT provides and how they can best leverage our offerings. This role also includes marketing the value of IT and building support for future technology initiatives.
Business Partner
IT is a business enabler, providing secure and highly available technology solutions that enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of TRS and our members. As such, it’s my job to ensure IT is seen by our individual business areas as a true business partner, not just simply a service provider. IT needs to truly understand the business of TRS and be proactive in helping solve business problems and recommend innovations that move our business forward.
Recruiter
The most important asset an IT division has is its people. This may sound a bit cliché, but it is true–especially in IT. As CIO, it’s my job to promote the TRS IT Division both internally and externally as well as to actively seek out individuals who would make good additions to our team. Also, just as important, is demonstrating the leadership, vision and support needed to keep the great employees we already have.
Change Agent
The one thing that is certain in IT is it’s going to change. Many times these technology changes have a significant impact on the rest of the business and/or provide an opportunity for improving efficiency. As such, the CIO often finds himself or herself in the position of change agent, promoting and leading enterprise projects that bring about significant shifts in the organization.
Bridge Builder
Finally, as CIO I have a unique view into the varying business units and their cultures. This gives me a unique perspective on how the business runs, how it communicates and how decisions are made. This also provides opportunities to build strong business relationships within the different business areas. With this knowledge and relationships, I can often be a catalyst in helping build bridges and achieve understandings across the different business areas when conflicts arise.
To read the full article, please visit CIO Insight
2-1-2016
Jim Swanson has been the Chief Information Officer of $15 billion Monsanto for nearly two and half years after spending almost all of his career to date at healthcare companies at companies like Merck, Johnson & Johnson, and SmithKline Beecham. A scientist by training, Swanson joined the St. Louis-based provider of agricultural products for farmers because it allowed him to continue to pursue opportunities at the intersection between science, technology, and intellectual property innovation. As such, he has thought about the role of CIO much more strategically than most.
Swanson has led a sweeping digital transformation over the organization focused around five pillars that define the digital opportunity: operational excellence, business productivity, customer centricity, revenue enablement, and disruptive innovation, each of which he describes in great depth in this interview. As such, Swanson’s team is playing a significant role in revolutionizing a company in perhaps the oldest industry of all: agriculture.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. To read more articles like this one, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: You are the Chief Information Officer of Monsanto. Please take a moment to describe your role.
Jim Swanson: I have responsibility for all the IT systems and data that spans Monsanto. We are in about 67 countries worldwide, and I have responsibility to deliver on the IT capabilities across that global footprint. Monsanto is comprised of two segments with a third one that is emerging. One is our crop protection business – our chemistry that helps growers with herbicides, pesticides, etc. Our second is our seed trade business – corn, canola, soy, vegetables, etc. Our third emerging area is economic services. We provide information to help growers better improve their yield, improve their outputs, reduce their inputs, and do it more sustainably. As the CIO, I have the responsibility to enable those three segments with data, tools, and capabilities for our business.
High: You operate in the world’s largest and oldest industry – agriculture. To the uneducated outsider, it may seem ironic in some ways that there is a real digital revolution that is happening within agriculture. You have just begun to describe some of that, and how it applies across the three segments of the business. Please talk about the move from analog to digital that is happening within Monsanto and the industry, more generally speaking.
Swanson: We are taking an industry that has probably done it the same way for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Over the last half decade or so, we are digitizing the farm and digitizing agriculture, which is pretty exciting. You think about the seven and a half billion people on the planet, growing to nine billion in a relatively short period, and growing the amount of food we need, and doing it sustainably is an important mission that Monsanto has. We are going to need every tool that we have to enable that. We need information, science, and technology. What is happening on the farm is a leveraging of data and information insights to provide much better ways to do agriculture than has been done in the past.
We connect combines in the field, so we can collect real-time information on how they are performing on the farm. We use analytics and data to get better insights into the performance of our products, as well as sustainable agricultural practices. We internalize and digitize our internal processes, so we connect more effectively across the “ag” ecosystem. It is rapidly evolving with sensor technology, with data, and with insights that have transformed the way that farming is done. It is having a tremendous impact on yield impact, reduced input, and more sustainable agriculture.
High: How tech-savvy are growers? Do you find that adoption is happening readily? Is it readily apparent as to how important and how valuable the new tools that are now available can be?
Brandon Metzger, Metis Strategy Associate discusses how commerce and the customer experience is becoming conversational
12/16/15
It is impossible to overstate the explosive growth that mobile commerce (m-commerce) is about to experience.
In the next three to five years, tapping and swiping will give way to a far more familiar interface: conversation
By 2020, there will be roughly four billion new consumers — not to mention an estimated 21 billion ‘things’ — connected to the Internet. With tens of trillions of new dollars flowing into the global economy, multi-billion dollar organizations will rise and fall largely on the strength of their mobile strategy.
Mobile is quickly becoming the primary channel through which customers and businesses interact, and hopefully it is already a major focus of your organization’s digital strategy.
However, as communication becomes constant, it is increasingly clear that the future of mobile interactions is not websites or native apps.
Instead, in the next three to five years, tapping and swiping will give way to a far more familiar interface: conversation
A few weeks ago, I needed to book travel arrangements for a business trip. Rather than navigate to an airline website or online travel agency such as Expedia, I opened a new app called Operator.
Rather than navigate through countless drop-down menus, imputing everything from destination and dates to preferred airlines and class, I had a pleasant conversation with one of Operator’s ‘travel experts.’
At any given time, I may be engaged in multiple conversations simultaneously (e.g., colleagues on Slack, friends on GroupMe, roommates on Facebook Messenger, etc.) As such, it was effortless — even natural — to book a flight through a conversation.
Further, though the conversation lasted roughly 30 minutes, it was far more convenient than using a travel website or app. I rarely respond to texts as soon as I get them, nor do I expect an immediate response. Indeed, the variable speeds that messages can be produced and consumed are a major advantage of messaging interfaces.
As mobile eats the world and messaging surges — we sent a staggering 43 trillion messages globally in 2015 — businesses and entrepreneurs are beginning to recognize the opportunity for commerce provided by the constant communication that is inherent to mobile messaging.
Led by Tencent-owned WeChat in the East and Facebook Messenger in the West, messaging apps are rapidly evolving to allow users to buy products and order on-demand services, send payments, communicate with businesses, and more generally engage in conversational commerce.
Conversational interfaces allow users to ask questions, receive answers and even accomplish complex tasks in both the digital and physical world though a natural dialog.
The move by major messaging platforms comes years after tech giants such as Apple, Google and Microsoft made conversational plays at the operating system level (Siri, Google Now and Cortana).
However, the tech giants are not alone. There is an ever-expanding list of conversational and invisible apps that do everything from schedule your meetings and book your travel to monitor your health and save you money.
Conversational Interfaces (CIs) allow users to ask questions, receive answers and even accomplish complex tasks in both the digital and physical world though a natural dialog.
Our relationship with the digital world will completely change due to intelligent agents you can interact with. — Yann LeCun (Director of Facebook AI Lab)
While it is increasingly clear that conversational interfaces are the next big thing in business, design and technology, there exists no clear best practices for how to implement them.
When I was booking my flight, Operator’s CI acted as an intermediary between American Airlines and myself. However, the interface can also be used to give businesses a more direct relationship with their customers.
As a launch partner for their Businesses on Messenger program, KLM will send your itinerary via interactive chat bubble in Facebook Messenger after you book a flight. When it is time to check in, you will be notified in the same thread, as well as receive your boarding pass and any updates. If you want to change your flight, simply search “KLM” on messenger, open the thread, and ask. By providing permanent context, the experience becomes friction-less.
The true promise of conversational interfaces are realized when the conversational user interface intersects the trend of intelligent agents:
As the price-performance of computation continues to advance exponentially, technologies such as machine learning, natural language processing, neural networks, and cloud computing are finally powerful enough to realize the Sci-Fi holy grail of intelligent conversational interfaces — or Virtual Personal Assistants (VPAs).
Infused with intelligence, VPAs anticipate users’ needs, further reducing the friction between the user and their goal. Imagine how my interaction with Operator could be different in the not too distant future:
Only then does it require my attention.
The night before, I set my alarm for 3:30am and go to bed.
I awake at 3am to a message from my VPA informing me that travelers are complaining of broken security equipment and long lines on twitter. It suggests I depart earlier than intended to ensure I make my flight.
I agree, and at 3:30 I get a message that my Uber is arriving.
In the current discovery based landscape, companies largely rely on brand recognition and marketing budgets to drive customers to their website or use their app.
However, as messaging and notifications replace search and discovery, the factors of competition will change. By 2016, Gartner projects that companies will compete primarily on the customer experience they provide.
Guided by the philosophy of anticipatory choice, concealed by the familiarity of messaging, and armed with powerful technologies and mountains of data, conversational interfaces will prove to be the preferred point of contact between customers and the digital realm.
In this new age, those that succeed will do so not on the strength of their brand, but on their overall ability to accomplish the tasks and sub-tasks that make up a user’s goal.
As functions such as sales, advertising, customer service and CRM increasingly shift to conversational channels, Gartner predicts that by the end of 2016, $2 Billion in online shopping will be performed by digital assistants. This may prove to be a low estimate, but Gartner echoes Ben Thompson’s analysis that conversational assistants will be the “killer application.”
Old systems will collapse as entrepreneurs figure out how to optimize and reinvent inefficient businesses, products, and services to provide consumers with all things better, faster and cheaper. — Peter Diamandis
Looking forward, companies like Viv — founded by the team behind Siri — are aiming to provide an intelligent interface to the world around us. In the new paradigm they are working to usher in, intelligent conversational interfaces become the “orchestrating mechanism to the world of information and services.” As co-founder Dag Kattlaus writes, billions of connected ‘things’ and thousands of services will cooperate and compete with each other to accomplish the user’s goal in a massive marketplace hidden behind a familiar messaging interface.
As these feedback loops continue to accelerate, conversational interfaces will quickly bring about a tectonic shift in the relationship between businesses and consumers.
Companies may be tempted to study the best practices of their competitors before committing to a strategy. However, the time it takes for a technology to go from deceptive to disruptive is plummeting, as are the barriers to entry. It is better to forge your own path — even if you are uncertain — than to be caught flatfooted.
Let there be no doubt, as conversational interfaces proliferate and consumers adapt, businesses that can provide the best experience, with the least friction between the user and their goal, will enjoy massive success.
To best position themselves, companies can prepare by taking the following steps:
Companies must put legacy, reputation and ego aside and address fundamental questions about their core values, as well as the value they provide to customers. Such questions may include:
Companies should digitize as many aspects of their products and services as they can.
In the hypothetical scenario to the left, Mattel looses a customer — despite their preference for the brand — because they were not best positioned to accomplish the user’s goal. Meanwhile, Disney gained the customer because they digitized their product and made it easily accessible.
Finally, organizations must automate as much as possible. To achieve this, companies must be able to collect, analyze and repackage data effectively, as well as be willing to integrate. As the Internet of Things explodes and machine-to-machine communications surpass human-to-machine communications, this will be critical.
In 2003, systems theorist and futurist John Smart observed that the number of words per search query was increasing at a quasi-exponential rate. Given that the average human-to-human query length is 11 words, he predicted that intelligent conversational interfaces would emerge in the 2015–2020 time frame.
Their emergence, he said, was likely to be the most important enabling information technology development and collective intelligence advance our planet would see in the next quarter century.
This is just the beginning.
Brandon Metzger is an Associate at Metis Strategy, a business and technology strategy and management consulting firm headquartered in the Washington D.C. metro area
11-12-2015
Catalent Pharma Solutions is a global provider of advanced delivery technologies and development solutions for drugs, biologics and consumer health products. With more than 80 years of experience, Catalent has proven expertise in bringing more customer products to market faster, enhancing product performance and ensuring reliable clinical and commercial product supply.
Catalent employs approximately 8,700 people, including more than 1,000 scientists, at 31 facilities across five continents, and in 2015 generated more than $1.8 billion in revenue. The company’s brand promise is “More products. Better treatments. Reliably supplied.” In partnership with the company’s customers, including companies of all sizes, Catalent develops, formulates and supplies many life-saving therapies. Catalent’s CIO, Michael Del Priore, shares with CIO Insight how IT plays a role in mergers and acquisitions, the benefits of engaging key strategic vendors and some exciting trends in the pharma industry.
CIO Insight: This is not your first stint as an IT executive at a pharmaceutical company, as you were once the vice president and global head of Commercial Operations IT at Roche. You spent more than three years as CIO of consumer packaged goods company Church & Dwight in between, however. When you returned to the industry, what struck you as having changed during that period from an IT perspective?
Del Priore: Personalized medicine, an emerging practice of medicine that uses an individual’s genetic profile to guide decisions made in regard to the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of disease, was in its early stages when I was at Roche and has progressed significantly since. This requires new ways of analyzing data to develop and deliver better medicines to patients in a more targeted way. Also, the implementation of product serialization, the means by which drugs can be tracked throughout the supply chain to counter threats such as counterfeiting, adulteration and diversion has progressed. The regulatory frameworks were just being developed when I was at Roche and now they are in effect in certain countries. Therefore, we have invested at Catalent to be in position to service customers who have serialization requirements.
CIO Insight: You have been a member of the mergers & acquisitions team at Catalent. What role do you play as IT leader relative to M&A?
Del Priore: I am part of the team that evaluates potential acquisition targets during the due diligence process to determine whether the target company fits with our strategy, assess how it is run and what it would take to integrate it into Catalent. From an IT perspective, we evaluate their current IT landscape and identify integration costs as well as potential synergies. Of course, if we should acquire a company, we execute the integration using our M&A playbook.
10-21-2015
NES Rentals is in the business of renting aerial lifts and related high-reach equipment to companies in the commercial and industrial construction businesses. The company is a privately held midsize company with revenues of about $400 million, 1,200 employees and 75 branches operating in the Gulf Coast, South, Southeast, Midwest and the Northeast. NES Rentals buys equipment from OEMs and sells its used equipment at auction every four to five years in order to keep its equipment fresh. The company maintains its own equipment at the branches or dispatches mechanics to job sites to attend to breakdowns.
Ananda Rakhit has been CIO at NES Rentals for more than nine years, after having served as an IT leader at ADP and United Airlines, among other companies. In this interview with CIO Insight contributor Peter High, he shares what he’s learned across his long tenure in IT, his focus on predictive analytics and managing a large, virtual workforce.
CIO Insight: What are some examples of strategic imperatives you are driving for the foreseeable future?
Ananda Rakhit: Pricing, equipment allocation, predictive analytics for maintenance and security of our systems are strategic initiatives for NES IT. After two years of painstaking work, the pricing system has now entered a continuous improvement phase.
The ecosystem for price setting at NES is extensive. A sophisticated analytical engine based on statistical and operations research techniques is at the heart of the system. Past company data including seasonality and industry forecasts are combined with latest data gathered from the field. Utilization data is collected daily by scanning bar codes on each piece of equipment at delivery and pickup. Price sensitivity data is gathered daily via inputs from field sales via a smartphone app. A forecasting model and an optimization model generate prices by branch and by equipment category which are delivered to sales via desktops and iPads. Every morning a newly calculated set of rates based on the latest information shows up in a pricing app to guide sales.
Equipment allocation is another strategic problem we are working on to go beyond spreadsheet analysis. In a nutshell, this problem entails buying the right mix of equipment, allocating them to the branches where it will deliver most to the bottom line, moving them from one branch to another as demand patterns change and identifying the equipment to send to auction. While some modules, such as demand forecasts are common, the mathematical model is more complex than pricing. A decision support system can allow the user to carry out repeated runs by changing input parameters.
We are in the early stages of predictive analytics for maintenance. We are looking at data on mean time between failures of various parts and exploring how we can gather engine performance data via GPS devices. We hope to build a statistical model that could enable our mechanics to make proactive repairs at customer sites before the equipment breaks and customers have to call us. Customer service benefits are obvious but, in addition, managing repairs on a systematic basis instead on-demand basis, would save maintenance dollars.
We have put a large focus to ensure our systems are secure from external threats as well as we have adequate disaster recovery solutions in place. We have upgraded our backup and data retention systems and procedures and are now working towards rapidly recovering our business-critical systems from failure to minimize business impact. We are also developing clear incident response procedures and shielding our systems from potential attacks and breaches which include implementation of secure coding practices
