This article was written by Rana Abbaszadeh, a Senior Associate in Metis Strategy’s West Coast Office
As companies look for ways to harness data and AI to deliver on business outcomes, they first need to develop the foundational governance capability that enables them to do so effectively. Data governance requires significant time and resource investment, to be sure, but it ultimately enables organizations to realize the long-term value from their AI and analytics initiatives.
At a high level, data governance refers to the development and management of information about an organization’s data. It includes maintaining a catalog of a company’s data from lineage to definition and utilization. When done well, data governance creates a single source of truth that can be used to unlock trusted insights, inform strategic decision making, and enable personalization at scale.
Companies that implement data governance can:
Metis Strategy takes a strategic approach to data governance and recommends that organizations start with the data that drives significant value. For example, a retail company could focus first on the governance of customer and product data, as this information is core to the company’s growth. Focusing on high-value data helps generate buy-in from key stakeholders and builds momentum for governance initiatives. After that, organizations can turn to other data until governance becomes embedded into the company culture.
This article will outline how to develop a data governance program within your organization, including the different roles and stakeholders involved.
Identifying governance opportunities
Using the Metis Strategy methodology, organizations can quickly realize value while improving overall data maturity. We recommend developing a cross-functional steering committee consisting of senior leaders across business and technology units who will guide the governance process. The steering committee is responsible for setting strategy, direction, and prioritization for the data governance program.
The committee’s primary responsibilities include:
In addition to the responsibilities above, the committee also will evaluate the business case for specific initiatives, approve funding and resource requests, and guide program adoption throughout the enterprise.
Building the Governance Council
In addition to the steering committee, the data governance program should include a governance council that will scope, document, and monitor data assets and lead governance operations. The council should consist of individuals across different business units to provide varied perspectives across domains. Members take on roles such as data owner, steward and custodian to ensure accurate data sets for their respective business units. A high-level overview of this is shown below.
The Data Governance Council consists of several roles with varying responsibilities. Metis Strategy recommends the council have at least the following three roles:
Business unit end users
Business unit end users will have access to trusted data based on their business unit needs and role requirements. They will collaborate with the business data owners to ensure maximum utility of the enterprise data.
Conclusion
Data governance is critical to ensuring the success of strategic data projects across any organization. Having the right structures in place will enable a faster return on investment and allow the governance capability to scale throughout the organization. As more high-value use cases come to life, analytics and AI teams will be empowered to use trusted data to improve business performance, enhance the customer experience and improve operational efficiency.
Companies have had great success in initial governance efforts, unlocking the utilization of customer and product data to help drive product design and improve sales outcomes. For example, after developing a governance program around its consumer and product data, one retailer improved the personalization of a merchandising ad unit by 17% through an enhanced understanding of user engagement and behavioral patterns. Success in this area helped the company make the business case for future analytics and AI use cases. In this case, a strong data governance capability built confidence and momentum for the organization as it continued to scale its analytics efforts.
To learn more about developing a robust data governance program, please contact us at information@metisstrategy.com
Advancements in artificial intelligence have opened the door for innovative ways companies can deliver unique and personalized customer experiences. Join us virtually on May 21 for our next Metis Strategy Digital Symposium where global business and technology executives describe how AI has improved their organizations, how they are continuing to foster a customer-centric mentality, and what the future of technology and digital looks like in the Age of AI.
C-level technology leaders, register here reserve your spot and stay tuned for agenda updates. We look forward to seeing you!
(Click here for highlights from our most recent Digital Symposium, and stay tuned to our YouTube channel for videos of our panel discussions.)
12:00 – 12:15 p.m.
Welcome and Introductions
Welcome and introduction to the Metis Strategy team
Peter High, President, Metis Strategy
12:15 – 12:40 p.m.
Customer Experience in the Age of AI
Marty Brodbeck, Chief Technology Officer, Priceline
Bala Subramanian, Chief Digital & Technology Officer, UPS
Moderated by Steven Norton; Co-Head Executive Networks, Research, and Media; Metis Strategy
12:40 – 1:05 p.m.
Driving Digital Innovation Ahead of Disruption
Greg Moore, Chief Information Officer, KB Home
Michael Lucas, Chief Information Officer, Wilson Sonsini
Moderated by Chris Davis, Partner & West Coast Office Lead, Metis Strategy
1:05 – 1:30 p.m.
Shaping the Story: Future-Oriented Talent and Innovation
Monica Caldas, Global Chief Information Officer, Liberty Mutual
Amir Kazmi, Chief Information & Digital Officer, WestRock
Moderated by Alex Kraus, Partner & East Coast Office Lead, Metis Strategy
1:30 – 1:45 p.m.
Entrepreneur Spotlight: CEO of Augment
Scott Dietzen, CEO, Augment
Moderated by Peter High, President, Metis Strategy
1:45 – 2:15 p.m.
Emerging AI Opportunities in Pharmaceuticals and Healthcare
Diogo Rau, Chief Information & Digital Officer, Eli Lilly
Cindy Hoots, Chief Digital Officer & Chief Information Officer, AstraZeneca
Greg Meyers, Chief Digital & Technology Officer, Bristol Myers Squibb
2:15 – 2:40 p.m.
Blueprint for AI Organizational Readiness
Praveen Jonnala, Chief Information Officer, CommScope
Tim Dickson, Chief Digital & Information Officer, Regal Rexnord
Moderated by Michael Bertha, Partner & Central Office Lead, Metis Strategy
2:40 – 2:55 p.m.
Closing Remarks and Adjourn
Click here for highlights from our February Metis Strategy Digital Symposium, or watch the panels on our YouTube channel. We look forward to seeing you!
Thank you to everyone who attended and participated in the 16th Metis Strategy Digital Symposium. Highlights from the event are below. If you missed the event, check out Metis Strategy’s Youtube channel and Technovation podcast in the coming weeks for recordings of each conversation.
Our next event will take place May 21. More details and an agenda coming soon. CXOs, are you interested in attending? If so, kindly register here. We look forward to seeing you!
The COVID-19 pandemic, global supply chain challenges and the broad resurgence of artificial intelligence created a sense of urgency among many technology leaders to modernize and improve their organizations’ digital capabilities. Today, many companies are beginning to see the results of those investments and talking about the strategic ways technology can continue to enable innovation and resilience. Tech leaders recognize the importance of playing both offense and defense as they continue to navigate an uncertain business landscape, and the continued need to align talent and business strategies as they plan for future growth.
Investing in resilience
Some leaders outside IT may argue that there is never a good time to invest in IT. But given how quickly the competitive landscape is changing, organizations can’t afford to pause. For CIOs, a question is where – and when – to make those strategic investments.
“It’s much more beneficial to invest in a downturn than in an upcycle,” said Gates Corporation CIO Diego Silva. During a downturn, there is more capacity and willingness for people to drive change, put new skills into practice, and move projects forward. The greater acceptance for change gives companies the opportunity to drive productivity and resilience, and ultimately put them in a position of strength when the next upswing comes around.
Indeed, many organizations took advantage of time during the pandemic to invest in digital capabilities. When the world was in “shutdown mode,” Sunbelt Rentals Chief Digital & Technology Officer JP Saini invested in the organization’s omnichannel retail capabilities, talent development, new innovation models, and other initiatives to strengthen the resilience and adaptability of the enterprise. As Metis Strategy partner Chris Davis notes: “Businesses are cyclical, but progress and innovation don’t have to be.”
MSDS attendees shared that the biggest barriers to advancing and maintaining digital capabilities are legacy operating models and legacy infrastructure
Managing both offense and defense
True transformation means not just building innovative products and services but also ensuring that all the processes that support those innovations are running as they should. For CIOs, that means playing both offense and defense well.
At pharmaceutical firm GSK, innovation has long been a core competency. As leaders discussed transforming parts of the organization, there was growing recognition that the company had to balance playing offense and defense, playing to win rather than “playing not to lose.” Offense includes those digital and data capabilities at the core of a company’s strategy, while defense-oriented activities may focus on areas like responsible AI and cybersecurity. It becomes a virtuous cycle, GSK Chief Digital & Technology Officer Shobie Ramakrishnan said. “Defense in service of the offense becomes important.”
Tech modernization is another area where offense and defense must be balanced. As Grainger CTO Jonny LeRoy noted, organizations that have been early adopters have a duty to tend to the IT garden over time, “to keep the weeds out.” Putting that into practice, Grainger is focused on the mechanics of how it grows, using its understanding of processes like customer acquisition and inventory management to guide the continuous development of its systems and solutions. Meanwhile, Grainger keeps an eye on the horizon and experiments with new technology as it comes so it can be ready for what’s next.
Continuously improving
Responding to a fast-changing market requires organizations to deploy new capabilities quickly and pivot when necessary. That requires a mindset of continuous improvement and a constant search for opportunities to align people, process and technology toward a common outcome.
Consider a zero-day cybersecurity vulnerability, one that takes advantage of an unknown or unaddressed issue and needs to be fixed immediately. Jen Felch, Chief Digital Officer and CIO at Dell, said the best way to be prepared is “not only to take care of it early, but figure out how to get fast.” While some may view behavior or process change as antithetical to speed, the efforts to make those changes and continuously improve can be major levers to increase speed and efficiency.
Felch recognizes the desire for continuous improvement among teams as well, not only to build skills but also to see the results of their work. Rapid experimentation cycles have helped, she said: “let’s see what we can do in two weeks and build on that and see how it goes.” Giving appropriate context, bringing in knowledge from across the organization, and encouraging a test-and-learn mindset can also drive empowerment across teams. On the process side, constantly improving data quality, information retrieval methods and learning opportunities have also aided progress.
The top talent efforts that technology executives are focused on to advance AI are widespread education/upskilling and scaling AI-based productivity tools
Adopting new ways of working
Technology leaders are also adapting their talent strategies to better suit their strategic goals. Barry Perkins, COO at Zurich North America, noted that having a majority of technology employees in India limited productivity and agility. Noting “ABCD” – AI, Big Data, Cyber, and Development – as four critical digital capabilities, the company has begun to reassess its talent strategy, including which roles should be closer to headquarters. “We can’t have agility if we’re having conversations thousands of miles away with different time zones,” he said. “It’s much easier side by side.”
Effective talent management also requires leaders to inspire teams about the organization’s future vision and help team members see their place in the plan. As Brinks Inc. CIO Neelu Sethi said, transformation of any sort is less about technology and more about people. She is working to create a true “three-legged stool” of people, process and technology rather than letting a single element be the focus.She also reiterated the need for true collaboration. “You cannot whistle a symphony,” she said. “It takes an orchestra.”
At Travelers, preparing talent for large-scale change has involved a focus on four areas: Customer First; Empower and Act; Test and Learn; and Prioritize. Chief Technology and Operations Officer Mojgan Lefebvre also emphasized the need for effective communication to drive trust and accountability through transparency. “People want to play a role,” she said. “Bringing them along and giving them that capability is important.”
A majority of MSDS participants are either experimenting with Copilots or other generative AI tools to enhance software developer productivity or scaling the adoption of these tools
Advancing generative AI adoption
Naturally, artificial intelligence continues to be a priority in 2024. After a year of initial exploration and education, many organizations are ramping up AI experiments and seeing ways to expand AI across the enterprise. Underpinning all of this exploration is a focus on value delivery and safety.
GSK established an AI policy and set up an AI governance council five years ago when the organization decided to scale AI across the company. Now, Ramakrishnan is thinking about additional risks around adoption and procurement to ensure AI can scale. Similarly, Travelers many years ago set up an AI accelerator team to explore potential use cases and create a framework for responsible AI use. Now, they are prioritizing a handful of use cases and in the process of scaling them across the organization.
“Generative AI is top of mind for every executive to accelerate their workforce and accelerate the products of the business,” said Varun Mohan, CEO & Co-Founder of Codeium. In a poll, participants said the biggest benefit to AI and generative AI adoption is increased productivity (67%), followed by improved products and services (17%). When it comes to advancing AI, 40% of attendees said talent efforts are focused on scaling AI-based productivity tools.
Around two-thirds of respondents see increased productivity as the biggest benefit to AI/generative AI adoption
Many speakers said they are currently using AI for use cases such as developer productivity and internal process automation. A key outcome: speed. “The more we eliminate the drudgery from the process, the more we can start to deliver value,” said Jen Felch of Dell. At Travelers, Levebvre’s team is exploring how generative AI can be an assistant or collaborator, such as quickly searching through and summarizing documents or helping team members access needed information. The company is also exploring how AI can be used to improve job descriptions and recruiting processes. Lefebvre noted that while many of their use cases are internally focused, they want to be able to scale the technology and “make it good before turning it around with customers” as there is also a lot of external value to capture.
At Grainger, LeRoy’s teams are experimenting with generative AI in technology (coding assistants) as well as customer service. Through internal hackathons, the technology team developed tools that are boosting employee productivity and allowing them to do more with a constrained budget. As use of these tools continues to scale, financial management becomes an important factor, LeRoy said. “Some of that is selecting the right model with the right capability level that’s not overly expensive, and managing how much information you put into them.”
Our next event will take place May 21. If you are a CXO and interested in attending, please register here.
Thank you to everyone who participated in the 15th Metis Strategy Digital Symposium. Check out some event highlights below, and stay tuned to the Metis Strategy YouTube channel and Technovation podcast in the coming weeks for full sessions.
For businesses across the globe, 2023 was the year of generative AI. Since ChatGPT’s launch and meteoric rise last November, digital leaders have been experimenting with a range of new GenAI products and services as they searched for the most effective, and least risky, way to bring the technology to their organizations. As GenAI (and the hype around it) took off, it prompted important and complex conversations about the future of work and how to accelerate innovation while managing new and significant risks.
A little over a year in, leaders continue to experiment with new tools as a means to drive new value and improve the experience for customers and employees. They are also turning their focus back to the fundamentals, building strong data governance and data hygiene practices to ensure their organizations have the strategic and operational foundation needed to take advantage of their data.
GenAI is still the shiniest thing out there, but as technology leaders look to 2024, they are focused on integrating it, and AI more generally, into their organization’s operating model and championing use cases that can produce tangible value at scale.
If year one of generative AI was about deciphering its risks and enabling organizations to experiment safely, year two will be about finding ways to drive value at scale. With new use cases emerging regularly, technology leaders are figuring out how to prioritize the initiatives that show the most promise to the business.
At BNSF Railway, CIO Muru Murugappan and his team use a value feasibility matrix to assess technical feasibility, timing, and complexity of new AI initiatives versus the expected payback. Some companies are also using business interest and executive sponsorship as criteria for deciding which initiatives to pursue. One overarching lesson: the more ambitious the project, the more challenges it is likely to face.
In addition to delivering on generative AI’s opportunities, CIOs now are contending with a new set of costs as well. Speakers also highlighted the fact that simply “turning on” a new AI tool does not guarantee value.
For many, the path to unlocking AI’s value means getting back to basics. “This is reinforcing the need for analytics fundamentals,” said Filippo Catalano, Reckitt’s Chief Information & Digitisation Officer. “If you don’t have good data practices, at best you’re going to use whatever others are using, but you will not be able to generate competitive advantage. Great data practices … become even more important.”
While new AI tools have helped organizations explore the art of the possible, they also have created a number of new risks, from more advanced cyberattacks to the negative impact of training algorithms on biased data. Just over one quarter of attendees cited data privacy as the largest AI-related risk to their organizations. The delicate balance for CIOs: managing the new risk landscape while empowering teams across the organization to experiment and innovate.
Martin Stanley, who leads the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency R&D portfolio, is currently assigned to the Trustworthy and Responsible AI program at NIST. Among his team’s goals is promoting adoption of the AI Risk Management Assessment Framework, which provides a construct for deploying AI responsibly and managing risk among a diverse set of stakeholders. The framework means to address a few key concepts: building a language around AI risk beyond simply monitoring potential vulnerabilities, creating a shared understanding of how to manage that risk across the enterprise, and driving a trust-driven, “risk- aware culture” that influences how people interact with the technology.
CIOs are working to build trust into every layer of the process. As Vishal Gupta of Lexmark noted, technology is only as good as people’s ability to adopt it and trust what it’s saying. “Otherwise, you really can’t do much with it.” At Lexmark, Gupta is taking a layered approach, creating trust in the underlying data via stronger governance and management practices; driving trust in AI and machine learning models by setting up an AI ethics board and rigorously vetting use cases; and continuously testing to validate AI’s ability to truly drive business outcomes.
New AI tools such as developer copilots have the potential to drive significant productivity gains and reshape how many of us do our jobs. As humans and technology continue to interact in new ways, CIOs are focused on optimizing the digital employee and customer experience while helping teams navigate a changing world of work. Indeed, 50% of MSDS attendees plan to apply AI and generative AI to impact employee experience and productivity, with 30% planning to use it to improve the customer experience.
At TransUnion, CIO Munir Hafez and his team are taking a human-centered approach to the digital experience with a focus on ensuring tech equity and establishing policies that allow teams to safely experiment with new tools, among other initiatives. When investing in employee experience, “our goal was to create a consumer-grade experience that enables employees to be engaged and productive in an environment that is integrated, modern, frictionless, and connected anywhere,” Hafez said.
AI’s ability to deliver frictionless employee experiences and deliver real productivity gains far beyond IT is likely to be a big focus for 2024. Many panelists noted how access to accurate, AI-enabled real-time data can help field managers make decisions more quickly, and how technologies like digital twins can streamline design processes and speed time to market.
Navigating an uncertain economic environment and rapid technological advances are top of mind for CIOs in the year ahead. The convergence of these two factors continues to underscore the importance of bringing a strategic, value-based lens to AI development and adoption.
The hype around generative AI may come back down to earth in 2024 as companies begin to understand its complexities in the enterprise. “I think there is going to be…a little bit of a trough that we’ll hit with GenAI,” said Graphic Packaging International CIO Vish Narendra. “The commercialization of that is going to take a little longer in the enterprise than people think it’s going to.”
As technology becomes embedded across a broader range of products and services, the spotlight will be on CIOs to show the art of the possible, create future-ready workforces, and manage risk. Given their broad purview that spans horizontally across organizations, CIOs are well positioned to influence and shape enterprise strategy in the year ahead, setting their companies up for continued resilience and growth.
Our final Digital Symposium of the year is rapidly approaching. Join us virtually on December 13 as global technology leaders discuss the changing AI landscape, enabling data strategy at scale, the future of customer and employee experience, and what’s ahead for 2024.
C-level technology leaders, to reserve your spot and stay tuned for agenda updates. We look forward to seeing you!
12:00 – 12:10 p.m.
Welcome and introduction to the Metis Strategy team.
12:10 – 12:35 p.m.
Transforming Organizations for a Data-Driven Future
Vish Narendra, Chief Information Officer & SVP, Graphic Packaging
Filippo Catalano, Chief Information & Digitisation Officer, Reckitt
12:35 – 12:50 p.m.
The Future of Secure, Responsible AI with NIST’s Martin Stanley
Martin Stanley, Strategic Technology Branch Chief, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency
12:50 – 1:15 p.m.
Optimizing the Digital Employee Experience
Munir Hafez, Chief Information Officer & SVP, TransUnion
Muru Murugappan, Chief Information Officer, BNSF Railways
1:15 – 1:30 p.m.
Entrepreneur Spotlight: Pankaj Patel, Co-Founder of Nile Security
Pankaj Patel, CEO & Co-Founder, Nile Secure
1:30 – 1:55 p.m.
Driving the Enterprise AI Mindset
Vishal Gupta, Chief Information & Technology Officer, Lexmark
Sumedh Mehta, Chief Information Officer, Putnam Investments
1:55 – 2:10 p.m.
Entrepreneur Spotlight: Gustavo Sapoznik, Founder of ASAPP
Gustavo Sapoznik, CEO & Founder, ASAPP
2:10 – 2:40 p.m.
Scaling Your AI Operating Model
Yasir Anwar, Chief Technology Officer & Chief Digital Officer, Williams-Sonoma
Cisco Sanchez, SVP & Chief Information Officer, Qualcomm
2:40 – 2:45 p.m.
Click here for highlights from our September Digital Symposium, or watch the panels on our YouTube channel. We look forward to seeing you!
This article was written by Marjorie Freeman.
A data strategy is a plan of action to manage an organization’s data assets across its technology, processes, and people. In practice, that entails understanding how data is generated, where and why it is consumed, and how its use helps organizations achieve strategic objectives.
On Metis Strategy’s Technovation podcast, Peter High has interviewed many global, digital-forward CIOs about their data strategies. Below are insights from those leaders about how companies can use enterprise data assets to their fullest potential.
Artificial intelligence has been top of mind for many organizations, even more so in 2023 with the rise of ChatGPT and increased discussion around generative AI. This has prompted a multitude of conversations around AI’s core facet: data, and how it can drive the business forward.
During the February 2023 Metis Strategy Digital Symposium, Krzystof Soltan, the Chief Information Officer of Vulcan Materials Company, and Anupam Khare, the Chief Information Officer of Oshkosh Corporation, shared their experiences building data strategy into complex, scaled organizations.
At Oshkosh, Khare leads with the question: “How do we extract financial value from data by bringing people and data together?” The company is working to become what Khare calls a predictable enterprise, using four fundamental principles to guide the journey:
For Vulcan Materials, data strategy is linked to the organization’s technology strategy. “It always comes back to business value, the time to value, how fast we are able to provide the insights” Soltan said. Vulcan Materials’ looks to the following principles to guide its data and analytics work:
Both Khare and Soltan’s stories underscore the need to tie data strategy to business value, work toward a common tech stack, and engage people at every level of the organization in the data journey.
OneDigital, which provides customizable and cost-effective HR solutions to organizations and their workforces, acquires around 30 organizations per year. This is no easy feat, but CIO Marcia Calleja-Matsko strives to create a seamless experience for every organization that is onboarded.
When acquiring a new organization, especially one in a different vertical or industry, it is important to ensure there is a consistent record across multiple platforms, Calleja-Matsko says. Cue the single source of truth, or what she calls the “golden record.” Once that record has been created, it must be maintained.
Over the years, Calleja-Matsko has been working to build OneDigital’s data strategy in three key ways:
If data is the new oil and speed is the currency of business, then data governance is the link that fuses the two. For more, see Michael Bertha’s commentary: Data Strategy at the Speed of Business.
CIOs play an instrumental role in creating a common language around data and making sure teams across the enterprise have the tools and concepts they need to harness data effectively. To develop this data literacy, many organizations have built enterprise-wide curriculums and training resources.
Monica Caldas, the CIO of Liberty Mutual, which has its own professional development training programs, including one specifically geared toward executives, said it well:
“Technology is everybody’s responsibility these days in terms of understanding what it can do. … Everyone that sits around the table needs to be beyond, ‘How do I click this?’ and [be] somewhat well versed [in topics like] what can an API do, and why does that matter.”
Many organizations have launched digital academies to train employees on digital skills, including technology and data literacy. In 2019, for example, Toyota launched an academy to knock down the invisible wall often found between IT and the business and give end users greater knowledge of the software they use every day. “The idea was to not just train IT, but everyone across the organization.” said then Chief Innovation, Strategy and Digital Officer, Vipin Gupta. The approach has empowered associates across the business to truly understand how to capitalize on the tools, data, and processes at their disposal.
Data literacy is also key to enabling citizen development, an approach that encourages those outside IT to contribute to software development, often via low-code/no-code tools. Paired with increased data literacy, this can make it easier for teams across organizations to apply data and analytics to their work and accelerate time to insight.
Chief Information and Digitization Officer of Reckitt Benckiser Group, Filippo Catalano encourages executives to create opportunities for properly governed self-service data access:
You want to also make sure that, as much as possible, everybody in the company becomes a data scientist. … Get out of the way so you can unleash creativity, empower people everywhere in the organization to do what they need to do on data and analytics, but also to do it on the right platforms so that things are done in a fair way, but also in a safe way.
CIOs, CDIOs, and CDOs are in incredible positions to influence the change they’d like to see within their organizations. Directly engaging individuals in the company’s data journey through hands-on learning opportunities can not only build knowledge and morale, but also can catalyze new competitive advantages.
Any successful data strategy needs a compelling, ambitious vision and a clear path to success that resonates across an organization. CIOs, then, need skillful storytelling to get buy-in from multiple stakeholders and create forward momentum.
Telling the story effectively means, once again, putting business outcomes front and center. “I can talk all day about ‘hey, you should have data governance and you should think about a data lake or a single view of the customer,’” said Dak Liyanearachchi, Head of Data and Technology at NRG Energy. “All of those are really interesting, but what does it really mean to the organization?”
One useful move includes thinking about data as an enterprise asset that requires strong partnership across every part of the business. While companies can notch small wins leveraging data within silos, the real benefit comes when that great work logically connects across the organization.
“If you think about connecting the dots across the value chain, that’s where you start to see some significant business opportunities,” Liyanearachchi said. When that happens, “the value you bring multiplies at a faster rate.”
Our next Digital Symposium is just around the corner. Join us on September 20 as technology executives and business leaders from across industries share insights on high-priority topics including data as an enterprise change agent, developing and scaling AI-led products, new approaches to talent development, and the future of customer experience, among other topics.
12:10 – 12:40 p.m.
Strategic Automation Across the Enterprise
Amy Brady, Chief Information Officer, KeyBank
Ryan Kean, Chief Information Officer, Total Quality Logistics
12:40 – 1:10 p.m.
Developing and Scaling AI-Led Products and Services
Dak Liyanearachchi, Chief Data and Technology Officer, NRG Energy
Salumeh Companieh, Chief Digital and Information Officer, Cushman & Wakefield
1:10 – 1:25 p.m.
Entrepreneur Spotlight: Domino Data Lab
Nick Elprin, CEO & Co-Founder, Domino Data Lab
1:25 – 1:55 p.m.
The Future of the Digital Customer Experience
Fahim Siddiqui, Chief Information Officer, The Home Depot
Kristie Grinnell, Chief Information Officer, DXC Technology
1:55 – 2:25 p.m.
Data and AI Strategy as an Enterprise Change Agent
Rajan Kumar, Chief Information Officer, Intuit
Sesh Tirumala, Chief Information Officer, Western Digital
2:25 – 2:55 p.m.
Talent Strategy in the Age of AI
Lakshman Nathan, Chief Information Officer, Paramount
Shubham Mehrish, Global Vice President, Mars
2:55 – 3:00 p.m.
Click here for highlights from our May Digital Symposium, or watch the panels on our YouTube channel. We look forward to seeing you!
Sastry Durvasula has an unusual title and remit at TIAA. As Chief Information and Client Services Officer of the Fortune 100 company, with more than $1.2 trillion in assets under management, he manages global technology and client services, including all the front office, middle office, back office functions and shared services of the firm that serve the company’s clients. Thus, Durvasula and team build solutions on the technology side that are used by colleagues on the other sides of his organization that serve the clients across the businesses, including retirement, asset management and wealth management. This responsibility gives him an opportunity to see the positive impact of his team’s work first-hand. The clients represent four constituent groups:
Therefore, Durvasula and his team support customers that include business-to-business, business-to-consumer, and business-to-business-to-consumer models. There is a fintech ecosystem that he helps bring to life: RetireTech, focused on building solutions for retirement participants on the accumulation side, and SilverTech, focused on the decumulating side. Managing through the complexity of different constituent groups, representing different generations together with a century old company that has forged contracts across decades is extremely complex. “The mission statement for my organization is ‘Power the business’ strategic shifts, fuel the innovation, while transforming the core,’” he noted. “The transforming of the core is as important and complex as fueling innovation and powering it. These strategic shifts enable us to provide lifetime income, delighting our clients and strengthening how we operate.”
Given TIAA’s size and breadth of offerings, Global Technology is divided up to reflect that breadth. “We have the unit CIOs that face off to the CEOs across our primary businesses in retirement, asset management and wealth management. Same thing with our client services side of the house where our client services officers are serving these specific business units, ” Durvasula explained. “Then we have global technology shared services like information security, data, AI, infrastructure and architecture, as well as shared client services like fraud and financial crimes management, serving all business units and affiliates. That’s my organizational grid. We have verticals and horizontals.”
Guiding these teams is a six-pillar strategy:
Durvasula notes that client-obsessed products and services refers to products both on the technology side as well as on the client services side of his responsibilities. “Whether it’s 403(b) solutions and products in the Higher Ed and Healthcare markets, or on the 401(k) side that we are getting very active on from a retirement perspective, as well as wealth management and asset management and so forth; that’s where we are focused on building those next-generation products and services,” he offered.
Digital first refers to modernizing a heritage company for the digital age, building the next generation of digital platforms, and providing solutions and client experiences, working closely with the company’s chief digital and client experience officer, Jessica Austin Barker.
To bring to life the integrated data and AI strategy pillar, Durvasula hired a chief data and AI officer, Swatee Singh, who’s focuses on that, to build the next generation of the data foundation and providing AI solutions to create those experiences for plan sponsors and participants.
Building the talent and culture needed to operate effectively includes key hires, like the ones noted already, but also creating a learning culture that strives to build the skills that will bring to life the digital vision he has articulated.
The best-of-breed ecosystem helps rethink the mix of buy versus build versus partners decisions across the technology landscape. “We want to build for differentiation, but we also want to buy and partner for parity,” Durvasula noted. “While I do that, obviously I have to uplift the technology ecosystem which is a big job for our teams.”
Finally, like all CIOs, he must do all the above while being secure by design and be on top of the regulatory and compliance demands. Given the emergence of numerous cyber threats, he must remain vigilant to ensure that the most valuable asset: the company’s data, does not get into the wrong hands.
Durvasula lingered a bit longer on the data piece, given the sanctity of sound data practices in a company that is awash in data. “The advantage we have is, because we have been at this for a long time and we are a highly regulated firm, we do have a number of data assets that actually are within the firewalls of TIAA that we can capitalize on,” he said. “How do we bring all the data from our global data assets and build that platform? While we do that, obviously we want to be cloud-first as we do.” Durvasula and team focus on leveraging open-source tools wherever possible. They have also focused on developing what he referred to as “killer use cases” that are powered by AI for each of the aforementioned constituent groups that TIAA serves. “As an example, we forged a strategic partnership with Google AI that we are now actively deploying solutions starting with our client services area,” he said. “It’s made it easy to deploy at scale.”
Additionally, Durvasula and team use conversational AI solutions to minimize client wait times. He believes this is a major customer enhancement, removing friction from their experience. Many of these new solutions are conceived in TIAA’s client tech labs, which leverage a multi-cloud/hybrid cloud environment to pilot ideas, work with clients to co-innovate and test beta versions of solutions, course correcting some to optimize them while canceling others that prove to be of insufficient value for customers. For those that go into production, Durvasula and team proceed with greater confidence.
Durvasula and TIAA more generally work closely with universities as strategic partners. “We want to have a different level of engagement and conversation with [universities],” he noted. “As an example, we have a partnership with NYU where we have launched programs, and we have over 70 cyber graduates that are going to be graduating from NYU – employees of our own – who are going through this coursework. We have something similar at [the University of North Carolina], but we also have a robust internship program. As an example, at the client tech labs that I mentioned earlier, we’ve had over one hundred interns actively hacking in our client tech labs and coming up with solutions. Some of them are winners of our hackathons and have opted to continue with us during their semesters as well. That’s is representative of the strategic advantage we have to build [a strong] talent pipeline.” By giving interns interesting work, the program has proven to be a rich source of full time recruits. This has developed a solid, long-term talent pipeline for the tech and digital team.
The connection with students and professors at universities are critical for the company given its history in the industry. (TIAA is an acronym for Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America.) “When it comes to client co-innovation on emerging technology and research projects with faculty and their students because that’s what we do for our business,” Durvasula offered. “With client advisory councils that we have, we open doors for our clients where faculty and students can come and conduct research with us and partner with us on a number of ideas. That’s exciting because it not only adds more talent to our pipeline, but it also opens the dialogue with our clients in a differentiated way for impact.”
Finally, Durvasula has taken a much longer-term view in the development of female talent in technology by serving on the board of Girls in Tech, a global nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating the gender gap in tech. “I’ve had the opportunity to learn and benefit from the wisdom of the board as well as the founder, Adriana Gascoigne, who started this several years ago with a few thousand people in the West Coast,” said Durvasula. “Now, it has grown almost 100,000 members across 50 different countries. I’ve had the privilege to work with Adriana and the leadership team and the broader chapters to grow the impact of Girls in Tech.” He notes that the power of the organization is to foster empowerment, learning, communications, networking and especially mentoring. He believes Girls in Tech will be a pathway to building the diverse and inclusive tech workforce the world needs. He also forged strategic partnerships with non-profits including Blacks in Technology Foundation, AfroTech and Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers.
Durvasula has enacted remarkable, long-term change across TIAA in a relatively short amount of time, and he and his team remain ambitious about the future.
Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. He has written three bestselling books, including his latest Getting to Nimble. He also moderates the Technovation podcast series and speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @PeterAHigh.
Now a household name in personal finance, Intuit was founded in 1983 by Scott Cook. The company’s four decades of success — the company reported 2022 annual revenue of $12.7 billion and a portfolio of valued products including TurboTax, QuickBooks, Credit Karma, Mint, and Mailchimp — has been possible in part by the company’s dedication to innovation. Innovation is necessary for modern businesses to maintain a competitive advantage, meet evolving customer needs, and attract top talent. Prioritizing innovation can also improve the IT-business relationship by positioning the IT organization as a partner that is uniquely suited to evaluate ideas and pursue those most likely to succeed.
Two conversations on Peter High’s Technovation podcast with Intuit’s Chief Information Security and Fraud Prevention Officer, Atticus Tysen, and Chief Data Officer, Ashok Srivastava, show how Intuit has reinvented itself through IT-driven experimentation driven by a desire to solve real business problems and foster a strong IT-business partnership in the process. These interviews show how a formalized test-and-learn process, a set of practices formalizing the steps taken to ideate, conduct pilots, analyze results and scale valuable ideas across an enterprise, can be used to systematically scale innovation and deliver a range of benefits. Among them:
–Change the culture of the IT organization to encourage more frequent ideation and support team members in voicing ideas they might not have previously
–Empower the IT organization with data and agility that allows it to show up as a true business partner
-Increase the influence of the IT organization to build trust and credibility with the business
-Eliminate silos and encourage expansive thinking to ensure the creation of durable, enterprise-grade solutions
Intuit’s innovation journey highlights these improvements in action, as we’ll see below. We will also share Metis Strategy’s 10-step test-and-learn process that you can implement in your own organization.
“At Intuit, experimentation is everyone’s job,” said Brad Smith, Intuit’s former Executive Chairman. Building a culture of experimentation and innovation requires creating a safe space to allow risk-taking and encourage more people to bring ideas to the table. Intuit’s IT organization prides itself on its hypothesis-driven testing culture designed to pursue new ideas with clear business outcomes rather than rely on legacy solutions, bolstering the IT organization’s strategic value.
Solidifying a test-and-learn process positions IT organizations to play a more active role with business teams, understand customer needs, unlock innovation opportunities, and change the culture of IT from reactive order-takers who “just” keep the lights on to partners who help shape the future of the enterprise. At Intuit, the test-and-learn process is guided by the company’s two innovation competencies, Customer Driven Innovation and Design for Delight, which drive all solution development and ensure strategic focus throughout the ideation process. These defined principles, outlined and enforced by the Intuit labs, help narrow down and develop winning ideas by ensuring new solutions unlock value and solve real problems.
IT leaders must be change champions to ensure the successful adoption of a test-and-learn process and the subsequent shift in culture required to improve the IT-business partnership. Broad participation in the test-and-learn process happens when the process is accessible and engagement is encouraged across all roles and tenures.
Intuit’s technology leaders incentivize innovation by giving employees unstructured time for ideation and solutioning, which fosters their participation in the test-and-learn process and refines the company’s ideation muscle outside of day-to-day responsibilities. Other incentives used to ensure test-and-learn participation include the Scott Cook Innovation Awards, which recognize employee innovators; mentorship programs to guide new participants through the test-and-learn process; rotational development programs to upskill employees; and workshops to refine critical thinking skills.
By enabling test-and-learn experimentation, IT leaders can begin to change their organizations’ culture and empower the IT organization to become a true business partner. Intuit notes that the test-and-learn culture has enabled a durable competitive advantage that allows the company to differentiate itself from competitors while focusing on what matters most to its customers.
In a recent survey, 63% of CIOs reported that they struggle to communicate IT’s business value to business partners. Formalizing a test-and-learn process can improve that communication by giving IT leaders the data needed to tell their innovation story and tie new ideas to tangible business outcomes.
Test-and-learn experimentation produces data surrounding the feasibility and value of scaling an idea. Ideas that are ultimately chosen to scale are backed by data on their projected success and business impact. IT organizations can also provide their business counterparts with data on risk mitigation and projected costs based on the initial testing.
Tysen names data as the primary enabler for successful test-and-learn experimentation as it creates opportunities to take calculated risks. Tysen and Srivastava work together to break down data silos and democratize data so teams can more effectively derive and deliver insights.
Pairing test-and-learn with agile delivery methods can promote a culture that rewards failing fast, iterating, and delivering value in the shortest sustainable time. Intuit focuses on lessons learned from experiments rather than if one was a success or a failure.
Intuit’s innovation competency, Design for Delight, further showcases agile ways of working by prioritizing constant customer feedback, quick prototypes, and iterative solutions to ensure initiatives pursue maximum customer value.
Since experimentation often happens on top of day-to-day responsibilities, transparent and realistic expectations must be set to prevent under-delivery or delays and preserve working relationships. Tysen manages business expectations by ensuring that the IT organization outperforms traditional IT metrics as a prerequisite for experimentation. Operational excellence builds trust between IT and business partners and creates space for test-and-learn experimentation that builds that trust further via successful ROI-generating innovation initiatives.
The typical IT delivery muscle must be refined, and often rebranded, to position the IT organization as an innovator rather than an expensive bottleneck. Tysen says his organization builds credibility with the rest of the business by leveraging business metrics and KPIs, not just IT metrics, when evaluating ideas generated through the test-and-learn process. Applying business metrics to IT-generated ideas ensures that the IT organization and the business are being held to the same standard and can help ensure fair appraisal and understanding of each initiative’s value.
In a recent survey, fewer than 5% of CIOs reported that they spend time talking about business outcomes or measuring the business outcomes created by the technology they deploy. This is a significant oversight preventing buy-in and limiting the IT-business partnership. Tysen emphasizes the importance of listening to partners to ensure his organization accurately understands their problems so he knows what is needed to create relevant soultions. The consistent use of business metrics across Intuit also ensures the appropriate acknowledgment of IT’s test-and-learn successes.
Test-and-learn experimentation breaks down traditional business silos and seeks to prevent ad-hoc ideation, eliminate repetitive solutioning, and facilitate cross-functional collaboration. It also promotes enterprise thinking, a practice of monitoring cross-functional requirements, scalability considerations, and long-term needs such as reducing future rework and technical debt.
Srivastava notes that Intuit’s process for test-and-learn experimentation relies on conducting deliberate tests that solve specific and identified problems rather than needless, temporary solutions. Test-and-learn experimentation not only brings MVPs to life with speed but also facilitates deliberate and intentional conversations about long-term considerations and dependencies during the product creation process, ensuring that the final product meets as many consumer needs as possible.
When working with clients seeking to streamline and scale innovation, we use a 10-step test-and-learn process to govern the intake of ideas, manage stakeholder expectations, accurately reflect capacity, and capture data to inform a solution’s journey. This process helped a recent client identify and eliminate silos that hindered collaboration while elevating the IT organization to the status of a business partner rather than an order taker.
Implementing a test-and-learn experimentation process enables an organization to narrow an infinite number of ideas and pursue only those that will deliver the most value. The IT organization is uniquely positioned to facilitate this process and help the business identify winning ideas due to its digital testing capabilities and data collection methodologies.
Working closely with business partners can help teams across the organization avoid placing big bets on ideas that may drain their resources without delivering the needed value. Prioritizing resource allocation based on test data and iterating throughout the solution development process creates a virtuous cycle where the business will increase its speed to market for winning ideas while guaranteeing maximum customer satisfaction.
The benefits that come from implementing a test-and-learn process will not be realized overnight. A structured approach to change management and user adoption is needed to ensure an effective transition. It makes sense to start small. With support from internal change champions, consider piloting a beta test-and-learn process, secure quick wins, and use that momentum to facilitate a broader rollout.
Once adopted, an enterprise might face execution hurdles that prevent maximum value realization. For example, a company may not have the discipline needed to define the hypotheses that drive testing, resulting in the creation of tests that do not produce the needed information.
Alternatively, existing data collection and analysis capabilities may not be sufficient to derive conclusive test results. An enterprise may also suffer from “analysis paralysis,” which can create stagnation when a test fails and lacks ownership over revisions. To learn more about avoiding these experimentation pitfalls, see this article that outlines how business experimentation frameworks can help mature a test-and-learn culture across an enterprise.
Metis Strategy President Peter High joined Joel Beasley on the Modern CTO Podcast to discuss why the winning strategies in the future of work aren’t clear yet; why tech leaders should never commit to one-way doors; and how Domino’s avoided becoming the next Blockbuster.
Listen to the episode here:
Check out the Modern CTO Podcast here.
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