Johnson Controls has appointed Vijay Sankaran as vice president and chief technology officer, a new role aimed at accelerating product software engineering development and expanding customer solutions. This will expand upon the company’s OpenBlue digital platform, which allows the company to connect all building systems and to optimize interior environments by learning from the data the systems share. Johnson Controles is a global leader for smart, healthy and sustainable buildings. Sankaran was most recently chief information officer and head of innovation at TD Ameritrade, with responsibility for digital strategy, customer platforms, software engineering, technology operations, cybersecurity, data management and analytics, and enterprise innovation.
“Vijay brings a wealth of strategic software experience to Johnson Controls and is ideally positioned to strengthen our solutions and market competitiveness through world class software engineering,” said Johnson Controls chairman and chief executive officer George Oliver to whom Sankaran reports. “In this new, enterprise-wide chief technology officer role, Vijay and the software engineering team will accelerate our innovation, solve for unique customer outcomes and deliver for our customers on the key secular trends of sustainability, energy efficiency, and healthy, safe and connected smart buildings.”
Sankaran’s is a newly created organization, with software engineering team members from across Johnson Controls global portfolio reporting into it. His team will accelerate and unify the product software engineering development efforts creating common software architecture to further drive the enterprise software technology strategy.
“Vijay’s role as CTO will be pivotal in driving continued growth and expansion for our OpenBlue digital platform as all of the elements of a building’s operational technology become connected,” said Johnson Controls Chief Customer and Digital Officer Mike Ellis. “Through OpenBlue, that connectivity enables us to leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence, as well as edge computing technologies, to predict patterns and trends, and provide positive customer outcomes for sustainability, energy efficiency, security and healthy building environments.”
“I couldn’t be more excited to have this opportunity to lead customer facing engineering as no other company has the breadth of capabilities to provide healthy, smart, sustainable building environments,” said Sankaran upon reflecting on this new opportunity. “The Johnson Controls team already successfully developed and rolled out an outstanding platform, OpenBlue.”
Sankaran’s role is to integrate software engineering across the company in a holistic way so that we can further expand the capabilities of OpenBlue and leverage the breadth of the company’s building systems portfolio. When asked about the technologies that will be most important to this journey, he noted, artificial intelligence, machine learning, data analytics and connectivity, each of which he referred to as “game changers” to help customers meet their goals on sustainability, energy efficiency and healthy, smart buildings.
Prior to working at TD Ameritrade, Sankaran held executive roles at Ford Motor Company from 2001 to 2013, including IT Chief Technology Officer, Director of Application Development, as well as leadership roles in architecture, emerging technologies, data and analytics, and enterprise transformation programs.
Sankaan has a B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an M.B.A. at Duke University Fuqua School of Business.
Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. He has written two bestselling books, and his third, Getting to Nimble, was recently released. He also moderates the Technovation podcast series and speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @PeterAHigh.
Saul Van Beurden is the Head of Technology for Wells Fargo, a role he has had for nearly two years, after having spent time as the Chief Information Officer of Consumer and Community Banking at JPMorgan Chase. He commands a budget of roughly $9 billion and has a team of 40,000 technologists reporting to him. His purview includes all software developments, IT operations, infrastructure and cloud enablement and cybersecurity. His is a role of tremendous consequence in the bank to say the least.
The top technologists at major companies are most often referred to as chief information officers. They are sometimes referred to as chief technology officers or as chief digital officers. The “head of technology” title is an unusual one. When asked how the company and he arrived at it, he noted that the reason was that when he joined, there was already a chief information officer and a chief technology officer, both of whom would report to him. “For me, it’s not important the title of a role,” noted Van Beurden. “It’s how you act on that role and the responsibility that you have [that is more important].”
Upon joining the company, Van Beurden elected to develop a plan to play both “offense and defense,” as he put it, comparing it to coaching an American football team. “The first role is what you could call the defensive role and is the first operator role,” he said. “This is all about making sure that the plan runs, that the things go. The second role is an offensive role. This is what we call the business enabler role, where it’s more about how do you decrease risk for the bank? How do you maximize revenue? How do you get better return on investments?”
To bring this to life, early in his tenure, Van Beurden and his team defined what he refers to as a “6S Strategy.” They are:
Relative to skills, he highlights that it is critical to build a team that has the skills of today and grows the skills of tomorrow, suggesting a level of learning agility necessary to accomplish the company’s mission. This is the path to being a “trusted operator,” as he put it. “This is all about upscaling and reskilling your workforce,” he said.
Needless to say, security is an important skillset for any enterprise, but especially so for a major financial services company that has so much sensitive data flowing through it. “You could say the only thing that a bank sells is trust: the fact that it’s safe to have your [money and data] with the bank,” said Van Beurden. “Security comes down to cybersecurity, to controls that you need to have in place, and so forth.”
With 90% of all transactions taking place digitally across Wells Fargo, stability is sine qua non. “When the digital app or the online desktop version is down, the bank is down,” Van Beurden underscored. “You need to have a stable shop. That stability is created by more and better resiliency. It’s all about automating the processes on the IT operation side, and with rationalization of your applications.” He noted that these first three “S”s make up the defensive play.
The offensive play begins with scalability. Van Beurden highlighted that this requires on-demand service, so that as transaction volumes increase, the technology seamlessly scales up and then can scale back as necessary.
Next is the focus on speed. As a long-time financial services executive, Van Beurden noted that banks are slow, with the behemoths like Wells Fargo often taking more than a year to deliver programs. He has driven his team to halve or even to cut the time to a third of that. He painted the picture of the typical way of doing things, and then offered the improvement. He highlighted the typical process with many handoffs along the way. “First product requirements, and then the prioritization with finance teams, and then it goes to a PMO, and then it gets to a project leader, and then IT intake, and IT intake to design, to technical design, to developers, to test, to production,” Van Beurden said. “You already near 60 weeks’ worth of work right there.” The improvement comes through multifunctional teams that do not require inefficient handoffs. “The analyst with the product idea sits down with the engineer who is supposed to build a feature, who is also the one who can directly put it in production because he or she is using DevOps tools like we have today. You take away that whole notion of handoff, handoff, handoff.” Next, he noted that process automation is critical. He highlighted that speed is the key differentiator to maximize revenues and to gain advantage over the rest of the market through better return on investment.
The final “S” is satisfaction. “You can do all the other things, but if the end customer is still not happy with and app [for example], and the uptime of the app [are not appropriate], we have failed,” Van Beurden said. “Satisfaction is, for us, the cornerstone of the strategy.”
Van Beuren hoped to simplify things from a strategy perspective to validate progress relative to each of the six “S” categories. By maturing and driving value in each area, the goal is to deliver better capabilities for innovation. The technology team has re-infused the company with the art of the possible. That innovation is based is also structured, in this case into three pillars.
The first pillar is an innovation unit that reports to a peer of Van Beurden’s, Ather Williams III, who is the Senior Executive Vice President, Head of Corporate Strategy, Digital Platforms and Innovation at Wells Fargo. “[Williams’] team constantly looks for what is the next best experience for our customer,” said Van Beurden. “What is the next best feature that we need to develop? They also look a little bit further ahead, like three years, four years into the future, and start to see what is coming and looking around the corner and making sure it is getting adopted.” That team works in an integrated fashion with software engineers on Van Beurden’s team, ensuring there is alignment and a strong collaboration between the teams.
The second pillar is research and development on the technology side. This team is often tasked with the most deeply technical or complicated innovation topics. The team has assembled an ecosystem to stimulate the thinking necessary to tackle big topics, partnering with institutions such as MIT and Stanford. Van Beurden indicated that the R&D team focuses on what he calls “the magical cocktail of artificial intelligence and machine learning, data and compute.” He believes that the future of the bank will be defined at the intersection of these technology disciplines.
Van Beurden offered examples of how Wells Fargo is leveraging each. “We need to explain the outcomes of AI models. If we get a lending request of a customer, and we say yes or no, we need to be able to say why we said yes or why we said no. We cannot say, ‘There was the model and it ran it and we do not know [why the decision was made].’ We need to be able to explain it.” The team has been able to monitor and explain the outcomes of the models while fine tuning them where necessary. With MIT, they have developed a mechanism for AI to explain AI. “This is how we solve the problem of non-explainable AI by putting AI on top of it by which it becomes explainable,” said Van Beurden.
Though many companies think of big data as an operating principle, Van Beurden thinks about small data. “Small data is really finding that smallest significant set of data that will bring you to [the right] outcome, [which may leverage] synthetic data, instead of all the production data that we use for this,” explained Van Beurden. “Can we do synthetic data to come to the same outcome?” In concert with the research institutes, his team is hard at work on this.
The final pillar is related to compute; more specifically, the fast advancements Van Beurden’s team is making on compute power. “That speed that is coming with quantum compute cannot [be expressed] in factors like 10, or hundreds or millions,” he noted. “It’s [beyond] what we think is possible to be done. It doesn’t matter when it’s ready. We do not want to be the one that has regrets that we didn’t do it from the start, and that we weren’t there if it becomes successful and production ready.” There are two areas of focus as his team drives this journey: trading algorithms and cryptographic keys. The former will aid the bank in fostering faster trading. The latter will protect the bank from the time when all possible passwords can be determined at lightning speed by bad actors due to dramatic advances in compute speed.
Though Wells Fargo has taken its lumps in recent years, Van Beurden and his team have positioned the company to gain advantages once again as an innovator.
Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. He has written two bestselling books, and his third, Getting to Nimble, will be released in March 2021. He also moderates the Technovation podcast series and speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @PeterAHigh.
The pace of change is faster than it has ever been, and yet it is the slowest it will be from this point forward. There is a quotation that is often mis-attributed to Charles Darwin that states, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” The father of evolution may not have said this, but it is an important point that applies to companies as much as it applies to species.
As you think about once successful companies like Circuit City, Blockbuster and A&P, each leaders in industries that they played in that no longer exist, each failed to adapt to changes, even though each could have pivoted to where the industry or customers’ tastes were going.
In 1955, the average time a company on the S&P 500 would remain on the index was 61 years. Fast forward to today, and it is closer to 15 years. Since 2005, 52% of the companies on that index have fallen off of it entirely. This is a remarkable tale of creative destruction, but is also is tale of innovation at a pace and scale that we have not seen before as rapidly scaling organizations take the places of the old stalwarts.
To quote Dow’s Chief Information and Digital Officer Melanie Kalmar, “What separates successful companies from those that have faded? Nimbleness.” She is not alone in this focus. When Shamim Mohammad, the Chief Information Officer and Chief Technology Officer of CarMax, was asked about the trends that excited him most looking three or four years out, he responded, “I do not know how the world is going to be in three or four years. It is hard to predict. What I am trying to do…is position [CarMax] so that we are ready to take those changes and be nimble, agile, and responsive: an organization that can move quickly. That is what I do because I cannot predict what is going to happen. I have to position [CarMax] to be that nimble company.”
In my new book, Getting to Nimble: How to Transform Your Company into a Digital Leader, I highlight five themes that are essential to harness to foster nimbleness:
Relative to people, you can do worse than to emulate the great practices of Rob Alexander, who has, for 14 years, been the Chief Information Officer of Capital One. He recognized early the changes that the digital age were foisting upon companies born in an earlier era. He posed a difficult question to himself and his team: “How do you become a great technology organization if you do not start as one?” Alexander set the goal to develop an engineering-centric technology division that would be oriented toward building technology rather than simply buying it and managing it. He wanted the organization to be oriented around a digital-first mentality.
Alexander and his team started by recruiting a core group of engineers who would form a software center of excellence. These people were recruited based on a pioneering spirit that each possessed. They would be the proselytizers for others.
Alexander and his team developed a curriculum to train existing employees on the technologies of the future, noting that learning agility was another key ingredient to cultural nimbleness. Finally, the company developed the gold standard of intern programs, regularly being ranked as number one on Vault.com’s list for internships. By giving great engineering and computer science students meaningful work to do in an innovative environment, the company began to compete with the stalwarts of Silicon Valley for talent, and the intern program allowed the company to get to know a wide swath of would-be employees deeply before handing out full-time offers. The yield on those offers rose, and the best among those new employees were given opportunities to rise quickly through the ranks of Capital One. The company’s nimbleness gave it a reputation as a talent factory that many wanted to join.
Relative to processes, retired four-star general, Stanley McChrystal, has become a guru to CEOs and other leaders on how to foster nimbleness. He recognized that the pace of change was such that if the American military did not modernize, it would not be successful in its critical missions around the world. The military had been silo’d by design, but McChrystal fostered collaboration across the traditional silos, bringing elite members from multiple branches of the military together.
He now counsels companies to do the same, pushing them to foster innovation through better collaboration. Process changes such as agile development, DevOps and the product orientation that many technology and digital organizations have instituted require non-traditional collaboration across silos and ownership of ideas from cradle to grave to a greater extent. Many companies have seen rapid increases in their ideation, throughput, and innovation success as a result.
Relative to technology, Rob Carter, Chief Information Officer of FedEx recognized that the crown jewels of the company were aging to the point where they might be the source of the company’s downfall if a new path forward were not forged. He had the humility to recognize that his team’s work for which they were rightly so proud had to be changed dramatically. His pathway to nimbleness revolved around five steps: first leveraging enterprise architecture to get a full accounting of ones technology portfolio, warts and all. Modernization only begins when a full documentation has been concluded. Second, he established a cloud-first strategy. The clouds flexibility, allowing an organization to scale up and back as necessary was sacrosanct. Third, Carter and his team focused on loosely coupled technology so that changes to one platform would not necessarily require changes to others. The use of microservices and application programming interfaces (APIs) also had many security benefits to boot. Lastly, he focused on standardizing the technology wherever possible. This is easier said than done in a company that is part airline, part trucking company, part logistics organization, part office services enterprise, and more. That said, he pushed for a common core of technologies to set standards to achieve greater simplification while de-risking the organization through minimized complexity.
Competition today is less company-to-company. Rather, it is ecosystem-to-ecosystem. Angela Yochem, the Chief Transformation and Digital Officer of Novant Health has been a model of building ecosystems to marshal innovation at levels beyond what one’s team alone might accomplish. Yochem has an unusual ability to meet an entrepreneur, learn about his or her company and make rapid judgements about potential mutual value that might derive from partnership. An example is Zipline International, the world’s only on-demand drone logistics service. Along with other technology and digital executives, she met with the company’s founder and CEO Keller Rinaudo to hear the story of the company’s genesis and its mission, at the time primarily helping deliver medical supplies to people in need in countries that suffered from road infrastructure issues, for example. Yochem translated what she heard to Novant Health’s business and saw an opportunity especially in light of the pandemic. She and her team became the first organization in the U.S. to be granted a Part 107 waiver by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to use drones for distribution of medical supplies for Covid-19 pandemic response. The vision is growing, as over the next two years, the partnership plans to expand beyond emergency operations in the Charlotte area, where Novant Health is headquartered, to regular commercial operations to serve health facilities and, ultimately, patients’ homes across North Carolina. Nimble leaders and organizations recognize great ideas, translate their relevance to one’s own company, and build the partnerships that can make a difference rapidly.
Finally, during a time of such rapid change, one might think that strategy is becoming less relevant. There is an African proverb that says, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” One might add to those important words, “and take a map.” The company’s strategy is the map. Especially during times of great change, having a strategy at the enterprise level translated to the divisions and functional areas and to the technology and digital team through to data strategy is even more important. Granted, changes in the economy, the competitive landscape, and one’s own company, to name three of many factors, will require modifications to those plans as the assumptions behind the plans require changes, but having the well-articulated plans is essential.
Shailesh Prakash, the Chief Information and Product Officer of the Washington Post underscores this need. A decade ago, when he joined the company, it was languishing: ad revenues and subscribers were decreasing at an alarming rate. Prakash helped set the strategy that would bring the traditional print and digital sides of the house closer together. In so doing, he set the Post on a path to a better experience for readers and for the company’s reporters and columnists. He discovered through his collaboration with his colleagues that the company’s publishing platform was antiquated and a source of frustration. Prakash set a strategy to improve the platform. In so doing, he leapfrogged the industry to such a dramatic degree that it occurred to him and to his team that the platform, itself, could be a business for the Washington Post. Arc Publishing was born, and it is now on a path to being a $100 million business annually for the Post. Nimble leaders set bold and well-articulated strategies that rally one’s team to drive new value to one’s company.
Please note the examples given: a financial services company, the American military, a courier conglomerate, a healthcare company, and a media organization. None of these are traditional technology companies. They are not digital native companies with built in advantages of a recent founding. These are likely companies yours, each in challenging environments. Each drove change rather than being driven by it. This is essential in a time when change is coming so rapidly. Only the nimble will survive and thrive. Emulate the lessons of these great leaders.
Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. He has written two bestselling books, and his third, Getting to Nimble, is out this month. He also moderates the Technovation podcast series and speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @PeterAHigh.
As companies work to adapt to a fast-changing business environment and increasingly complex technology landscape, leaders are taking a closer look at their enterprise architecture strategy to ensure their IT portfolio supports strategic business objectives. Done well, a strong enterprise architecture provides the foundation that enables companies to be more agile, scale new innovations quickly and securely, and ultimately deliver greater value to customers.
Creating a solid enterprise architecture strategy can help take product development organizations to the next level by providing the technological runway they need to create seamless customer experiences and respond quickly to market needs. Inside many organizations, however, we often find that enterprise architecture has not reached the level of maturity needed to deliver on those promises. Often, employees rely on patches and workarounds to get data from one system to another, time that could be spent working on product and system enhancements. In other cases, existing technology architectures no longer align with strategic business objectives. One of the main problems stemming from this lack of alignment is that it limits the capacity to create efficiencies and synergies that support business goals. It can also hamper business agility by making it more difficult to create and share relevant data and insights across the organization.
To overcome these challenges, firms need an enterprise architecture strategy that can adapt to changing market demands. That requires making EA an ongoing and evolving part of any digital transformation initiative.
At its core, enterprise architecture refers to the configuration of IT resources in service of an organization’s business strategy. It creates alignment among a company’s strategic goals, its existing business processes, the data and information created, and the underlying infrastructure that supports it. It forms a blueprint of sorts, noting not only what technology the company currently has, but also how future technology investments will fit into or change what currently exists.
There are four main components of the EA:
We will explore each of these later in the article. These components cascade down from one another, each serving a different purpose (see image).
Having a clear EA does not magically solve business operations issues, nor does it enable a company to generate insights with a single tool. What it does is create vertical alignment of the business and functional objectives, foster collaboration between functions, and help create synergies based on data.
For many companies, the Enterprise Architecture is an afterthought, something only relevant to the architect who needs to give his or her sign-off during product feasibility meetings. But as mentioned above, the EA needs a seat at the table throughout the process to share guidelines and strategies with product development and IT teams that enable key growth levers. Among the reasons a clear EA is essential:
There are four key components of any enterprise architecture strategy:
The first step in creating an enterprise architecture strategy is understanding the overall business outcomes an organization wants to achieve. The Objectives, Goals, Tactics & Metrics (OGTM) framework provides a useful framework for aligning business goals to the mission and vision of the organization, then tying those goals to specific operational tactics. You can read more about the OGTM framework here.
Once there is clarity about the organization’s path and desired outcomes, it is important to partner with business functions to help each understand their role in the company’s strategy. Conversations with functional leaders should focus on objectives, roadmaps and blockers, the functional leader’s needs, and which technologies support and enable their goals.
Discussions with functional leaders should also include how they use data to influence their processes and decisions. This creates a bridge between business strategy and data strategy and leads to understanding about how data will flow across and within the organization. In the age of artificial intelligence, it is important to discuss and set a direction for the use of tools and structures that enable the use of algorithms, automation, machine learning and eventually AI.
With an understanding of the overall strategy and functional objectives, as well as the data needed to execute business processes, technology leaders can determine the tools and applications that will best help the organization achieve its goals.
These tools may be internal, such as an employee lifecycle management tool. At the center may be an application that includes an employee’s personal information and is connected to recruitment and onboarding tools. That data may also connect to a learning management system (LMS) to track training and employee growth paths. Connecting all of these applications can, for example, allow HR team can generate valuable insights used by the management teams.
Applications may also be external, directly related to customer-facing products or digital channels. Say a financial services firm sells an application to help bank branches process customer transactions. If the firm also offers related products, such as mobile or web banking or fraud detection products, it is important that the different products work seamlessly and appear as a single system to the end user. A single application architecture can help influence requirements for user experience, product development, and operations teams.
When creating an application architecture, it is also important to understand the role that Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs, play within the business. APIs are the building blocks that ensure all systems can communicate and share data effectively. This is one of the most important, yet often overlooked, aspects of the product development process that needs to be addressed by your EA strategy.
Organizations first should assess whether the company has all of the technological components necessary to support the business tools and applications. This includes hardware and software that will enable these tools to be deployed, such as on-premise servers or cloud storage, networking, and security. When thinking through technology architecture, it is critical to consider how infrastructure will affect the organization’s agility and ability to grow.
There are different risks and challenges associated with the creation of an enterprise architecture strategy. Due to how quickly technology changes, it is very easy for systems, applications, and even entire methodologies to become obsolete in a short period of time. Combined with an inclination to go after the latest trend, it is particularly easy for the EA model to become outdated or to have changed by the time a standard version is in place. In this scenario, enterprise architects constantly play catch up and the strategy fails to deliver its real value.
Similarly, business teams may perceive architects as people sitting in an ivory tower, not tied to the reality developers face. As a result, developers may not see the value in creating documentation. Technology leaders, then, must constantly communicate the strategic importance of enterprise architecture in achieving both short-term and long-term business goals, and drive operational accountability for documentation across the organization.
With a clear understanding of the business objectives, as well as the data, applications, and infrastructure that will help a company achieve its goals, technology leaders can create a roadmap for transforming the organization. That includes thinking through which frameworks and tools may be used to implement the new enterprise architecture. There are a number of EA management tools in the market that you can use to map all business capabilities to the strategy, as well as to the logical and physical infrastructure. Depending on an organization’s maturity, leaders may also opt to have more informal plans and architecture mapping, but it’s worth noting that this may inhibit the speed and effectiveness of implementation.
At the same time, it is important to frame EA as a light tool rather than an onerous process that only delivers documentation. When creating or improving an enterprise architecture, leaders should think through how EA teams will continue to add value by enabling new product development and creating new opportunities for innovation at scale.
Creating a comprehensive EA strategy is not a linear process, and it takes time and many conversations to go from an idea to full execution. The journey does not stop once the EA has been implemented, but rather is an iterative process that will change and mature over time as technology evolves and priorities shift.
Chris Boyd co-wrote this article.
Leading digital transformations is the CEO’s top priority for CIOs, according to the 2020 IDG State of the CIO study. Doing so effectively requires an IT operating model that allows business and IT to work together to navigate a dynamic competitive landscape, a seemingly infinite set of digital tools and shifting stakeholder demands.
In our work with Fortune 500 companies, we have found IT organizations that use the traditional “plan, build, run” operating model struggle to conceptualize, launch and maintain momentum on digital transformations. To bolster their transformation capability, IT organizations across industries and geographies are shifting toward product-oriented operating models, or “product-based IT”. When done right, organizations experience increased agility, happier customers and more successful transformations.
A product is a capability brought to life through technology, business process and customer experience that creates a continuous value stream. Examples of products are eCommerce, supply chain, or HR. An operating model defines how an organization positions its people, process and technology to deliver value to both internal and external customers.
A product-oriented operating model, then, is one in which IT resources are organized around business capabilities or “products” instead of specific IT systems (e.g. SAP, CRM) or functions (QA, Engineering, Infrastructure). In this model, each product team works as if they are managing a market-facing product such as a consumer electronics device. They develop a product strategy and roadmap in lockstep with the business that clearly articulates how they will mature the product to better meet customer needs and optimize competitive positioning. Every feature on the roadmap is aligned with a measurable business outcome and goes through a rapid discovery phase to validate value, usability and feasibility before it is slotted in a sprint to achieve a minimum viable product.
Most organizations have honed their ability to deliver when the scope and desired outcome are static, but struggle when next steps aren’t defined or are painted with a broad brush. Several leading IT organizations have turned to product-based IT to cut through this ambiguity and elevate their role from service provider to business partner.
Art Hu, the global CIO of Lenovo, is one of the pioneers in the shift from project-to-product. He noted in a recent conversation that his organization grappled with the question of what to work on next after completing a series of legacy ERP integrations resulting from acquisitions. “The fundamental paradigm shift for us was that the level of uncertainty had changed when there was no longer one single imperative,” he said, referring to the ERP project. “When we took that away, it was a totally different world and traditional waterfall didn’t make sense anymore. Until we as an organization realized that, the business teams and my teams struggled.” Product-based organizations rely on continuous customer engagement to remove guesswork from the prioritization process, which often leads to better business outcomes and increased agility.
CIOs have targeted key behavioral changes to jumpstart the shift to a product-based operating model:
Project plans developed with fixed deliverables and timelines encourage predictability but rarely equate to business outcomes. This plan-driven work is increasingly yielding to continuous discovery and delivery, which seeks to answer two questions on a recurring basis: what should we build, and how should we build it? A discovery track intakes opportunities, ideas and problems to solve. Teams then engage with customers to validate that those ideas create value (desirability), will be used once released (usability) and are feasible in the current business model (feasibility/viability).
“Great companies that have built a product orientation start with desirability and leverage design thinking to have empathy-based conversations to get to the core of problems,” Srini Koushik, the CIO/CTO of Magellan Health, said during a recent product management panel. Ideas that make it through discovery are added to a product backlog and are slotted into sprints for delivery based on relative business priority. Discovery and delivery tracks operate concurrently to ensure that a steady stream of validated ideas and a working product that drives business outcomes is delivered at the end of each sprint.
In a recent strategic planning session, one CIO stated that “transformation is not a part time job,” noting that dedicated teams are critical for both digital transformation and building a product orientation in IT. Teams that are formed on a project-by-project basis spend valuable time ramping up subject matter expertise and building chemistry, but then are disbanded just when they start to hit their stride. Product-based IT organizations, on the other hand, favor dedicated teams that own a product from introduction until sunset, including the execution of discovery, delivery, testing and maintenance/support. In this model, the dedicated teams become true experts on the domain and avoid pitfalls resulting from intraorganizational handoffs and revolving resources.
The increased frequency and quality of customer interactions is a hallmark of product-based IT. Ideally, customers are engaged during the discovery phase to validate ideas and prototypes, and then provide feedback at regular intervals after the product is released. If your end customer is a business unit, you should strive to have even more interactions. Some organizations have business stakeholders participate in daily stand ups, and some may even have their product owners sourced directly from the business instead of IT.
Atticus Tysen, the Chief Information Security, Anti-Fraud and Information Officer at Intuit, is another pioneer in the shift from project to product. At the 2019 Metis Strategy Summit, he emphasized that true product organizations reflect on key questions that demonstrate their strong relationships with customers. For example, do you really know who your customers are, and are you organized around serving them? Do you have metrics to measure customer happiness and show you are working with them in the correct way? “You have to have customers if you’re going to have a product organization,” Tysen said. “Product managers in a lot of ways are relationship managers.”
To achieve the benefits of a product-centric operating model, the funding model must shift as well. Rather than funding a project for a specific amount of time based on estimated requirements, teams instead are funded on an annual basis. Also known as perpetual funding, this setup provides IT product teams with stable funding that can be reallocated as the needs of the business change. It also allows teams to spend time reducing technical debt or improving internal processes as they see fit, which can improve productivity and quality in the long run.
Here are a few key steps to begin the journey…
Organizations should first and foremost target business impact when shifting to product-based IT. For example, one Fortune 500 client chose to measure Net Promotor Score to assess business satisfaction, product team velocity to assess speed to market and the number of critical defects per product to assess quality. It is also prudent to create metrics that track the adoption of key aspects of the working model. For example, you may track the percentage of product teams that have developed strategic roadmaps, or survey product teams on a regular basis to see how many feel like they have the skills needed to succeed in the product-based operating model.
Start by identifying the highest-level customer-facing and internal capabilities in the organization, such as Product Development, Sales, Marketing, Supply Chain, HR and Finance. At the highest level, these are your Product Groups, or “Level 1.” If your organization is smaller and has a relatively simple technical estate, you may not need to break this down any further.
However, we have found most enterprises with multiple business units and geographies need to do so. Inside the Sales group at a SaaS company, business processes would likely include steps such as Discovery, Lead to Cash and Customer Success (which includes activation, adoption, expansion and renewals). These may become your product groups since each of these steps involves different business stakeholders, targeted KPIs and technology components. However, the way you design your product teams will ultimately depend on the intricacies of your organization.
Absent a one-size-fits-all approach, we suggest the following guiding principles:
A key to product-based IT is building cross-functional teams that have the business and technical skills needed to accomplish most tasks inside their teams. The most important role in your product team will be the Product Owner (or Product Manager). Referred to as unicorns by some, these individuals possess the unique blend of business (strategy, competitive analysis), technical (architectural vision, technical project management) and leadership (decision-making, stakeholder management) skills and are responsible for driving the product vision and strategy and leading execution.
To fill this role, many organizations will conduct a skill assessment with their organizations to determine the skills needed to be successful, gather an inventory of available skill sets and shape a training program to fill gaps. As you structure the rest of the product team, think about how the skills of other team members can complement the product owner skill set so you are creating a strong blend of business, technical and leadership skills in the team. Beyond the Product Owner, you may have a Business Analyst that serves as a Junior Product Owner and supports detailed data and process analysis. A Scrum Master would drive Agile ceremonies, a Technical Lead would create a solution architecture and orchestrate technical activities, and an Engineering/QA team would ensure delivery of a high-quality product.
Think about IT services that are BU agnostic, needed across all product teams and in demand only on a part-time basis by the product group. These are your Shared Services. Shared Services cut horizontally across the product groups and teams. Just like products, these specialized groups endeavor to mature and develop new capabilities and empower their customers (in this case the product teams themselves).
Typical Shared Service groups include Enterprise Architecture, Infrastructure & Cloud, Security, DevOps, Customer/User Experience, Data & Analytics, Integration, Program/Vendor Management and IT Operations/Support. The Office of the CIO is an increasingly prevalent Shared Service that is responsible for defining the enterprise IT strategy, setting metrics and measuring success. Each Shared Service should publish a service catalog detailing their offerings and processes for engagement with a bias towards self-service (where possible). Shared service resources can be “loaned” to product teams if there is demand for an extended period.
IT often starts with feasibility and viability, approaching desirability only if the former two boxes are checked. Product managers need to start with desirability and build the ability to adapt their storyline based on the audience. Avoiding technical speak and endless strings of three letter acronyms will also go far in building this rapport.
Shifting to product-based IT is a major cultural and operational change. When done well, it can result in better relationships with customers and business partners, increased agility and improved business outcomes.
This article originally appeared on CIO.com. Chris Boyd co-authored the piece.
As technology departments shift from traditional project management frameworks to treating IT as a product, it is triggering a broader re-think about how technology initiatives are funded.
Under the existing “plan, build, run” model, a business unit starts by sending project requirements to IT. The IT team then estimates the project costs, works with the business to agree on a budget, and gets to work.
This setup has several flaws that hamper agility and cause headaches for all involved. Cost estimates often occur before the scope of the project is truly evaluated and understood, and any variations in the plan are subject to an arduous change control process. What’s more, funding for these projects usually is locked in for the fiscal year, regardless of shifting enterprise priorities or changing market dynamics.
To achieve the benefits of a product-centric operating model, the funding model must shift as well. Rather than funding a project for a specific amount of time based on estimated requirements, teams instead are funded on an annual basis (also known as “perpetual funding”). This provides IT product teams with stable funding that can be reallocated as the needs of the business change. It also allows teams to spend time reducing technical debt or improving internal processes as they see fit, improving productivity and quality in the long run.
“We have to adapt with governance, with spending models, with prioritization,” Intuit CIO Atticus Tysen said during a 2019 panel discussion. “The days of fixing the budget at the beginning of the year and then diligently forging ahead and delivering it with business cases are over. That’s very out of date.”
Business unit leaders may be skeptical at first glance: why pay upfront for more services than we know we need right now? A closer look reveals that this model often delivers more value to the business per dollar spent. For example:
Shifting away from old ways and adapting a new funding model can seem like a daunting task, but you can get started by taking the following first steps:
First, establish the baseline to which you will measure the funding shift’s effectiveness. A technology leader must consider all the dimensions of service that will improve when making the shift. Two areas of improvement that have high business impact are service quality and price. To establish the baseline for service quality, it is important to measure things like cycle time, defects, net promotor score, and critical business metrics that are heavily influenced by IT solutions.
The price baseline is a little more difficult to establish. The most straightforward way we have found to do this is to look at the projects completed in the last fiscal year and tally the resources it took to complete them. Start with a breakdown of team members’ total compensation (salary plus benefits), add overhead (cost of hardware/software per employee, licenses, etc.) and then communicate that in terms of business value delivered. For example, “project A cost $1.2M using 6 FTE and improved sales associates productivity by 10%”. When phrased this way, your audience will have a clear picture of what was delivered and how much it cost. This clear baseline of cost per business outcome delivered will serve as a helpful comparison when you shift to perpetual funding and need to demonstrate the impact.
The shift to a new funding model will be highly visible to all business leaders. To create the greatest chance of success, focus on selecting the right teams to trial the shift. The best candidates for early adoption are high-performing teams that know their roles in the product operating model, have strong credibility with business unit stakeholders, and experience continuous demand.
In our work with large organizations piloting this shift, e-commerce teams often fit the mold because they have a clear business stakeholder and have developed the skills and relationships needed to succeed in a product-based model. Customer success teams with direct influence on the growth and longevity of recurring revenue streams are also strong candidates as their solutions (such as customer portals and knowledge bases) directly influence the degree to which a customer adopts, expands, and renews a subscription product.
Estimation in the product-based funding model is different than in the project model. Under the new model, teams are funded annually (or another agreed-upon funding cycle) by business units. As funding shifts to an annual basis, so should cost estimation. Rather than scoping the price of a project and then building a temporary team to execute it (and then disbanding after execution), leaders should determine the size and price of the team that will be needed to support anticipated demand for the year, and then direct that team to initiate an ongoing dialogue with the business to continuously prioritize targeted business outcomes.
When completing a team-based cost estimation, it is important to include the same cost elements ( salary, benefits, hardware, licenses, etc.) that were used to establish your baseline so that you are comparing apples to apples when demonstrating the ROI of product-based funding. Where you will see a difference in the team-based model is resource capacity needed to deliver demand. In a product model, a cross-functional team is perpetually dedicated to a business domain, and there is often zero ramp-up time to acquire needed business and technical knowledge.
Since the teams have been perpetually dedicated to the domain, they are encouraged to take a longitudinal view of the technology estate and are able to quickly identify and make use of reusable components such as APIs and microservices, significantly improving time to market. For these reasons, among others, teams in the product-based operating model with perpetual funding can achieve more business value for less cost.
Pilot teams should work closely with the BU leadership providing the funding. Stakeholders should work together to generate a list of quantitative and qualitative business outcomes for the year (or other funding cycle) that also satisfy any requirements for existing funding processes operating on “project by project” basis.
If you don’t already have a great relationship with finance, start working on it now. Your partnership with finance at the corporate and BU level will be critical to executing your pilot and paving the way to wider enterprise adoption of team-based funding models. Ideally. Leaders should engage with finance before, during, and after the team-based funding model so that everyone is in lockstep with you throughout the pilot. This alignment can help bolster adoption with other areas of the enterprise.
Each finance department has unique processes, cultures, and relationships with IT, so while you will need to tailor your approach, you should broach the following topics:
You will need to achieve success in the pilot to bolster adoption in other areas of the business. Your success needs to be communicated in terms that resonate with the business. As your pilot comes to an end, gather your baseline data and match it up with the results of your pilot. Put together a “roadshow deck” to show a side-by-side comparison of costs, resources, and business outcomes (Business KPIs, quality metrics, cycle times, NPS, etc.) before and after the shift to team-based funding.
Depending on your organization, it may be prudent to include other observations such as the number of change control meetings required under each funding model, indicators of team morale, and other qualitative benefits such as flexibility. Have conversations with other areas of the business that may benefit from team-based funding (start off with 1-on-1 meetings) and offer to bring in your partners from finance and the product teams as the discussion evolves. The most important part of your story is that the team-based funding model delivers more business impact at a lower cost than the old model.
Establish light and flexible governance mechanisms to monitor performance of the teams operating in the teams-based model. The purpose of these mechanisms is to validate that the increased level of autonomy is leading to high-priority business outcomes, not to review progress on design specs or other paper-based milestones. A $40B global manufacturing client adopting the team-based funding model established quarterly portfolio reviews with BU leadership and the CIO to review results. BU leadership reviews results of the teams and the planned roadmap for the subsequent quarter. BU leadership is then given the opportunity to reallocate investment based on changing business needs or can recommend the team proceed as planned.
It is important to communicate that this process requires constant buy-in from business units. While funds will be allocated annually, demand will need to be analyzed and projected on at least a quarterly basis, and funds should be reallocated accordingly. In cases where investments need to be altered in the middle of a fiscal year, it is important to note that the unit of growth in this model is a new cross-functional team focused on a targeted set of business outcomes. The idea is to create several high-performing, longstanding, cross-functional teams that have the resources needed to achieve targeted business outcomes, rather than throw additional contracted developers at teams as new scope is introduced.
Making the shift from project-based funding to product team-based funding is a major cultural and operational change that requires patience and a willingness to iterate over time. When executed successfully, CIOs often have closer relationships with their business partners, as well as less expensive, more efficient ways to deliver higher-quality products.
This article was co-written with Chris Davis.
Summary: People, not technology, are the true center of any digital transformation initiative. The half-life of skills is rapidly shortening, necessitating a mindset that embraces change, an adaptable skill set, and a workforce plan that ensures an organization has the talent necessary to operate at speed and scale through hiring, automating, upskilling, and sourcing.
Putting talent at the center of digital transformation
The biggest challenge of any digital transformation is not revamping technology, but rather shifting the company’s mindset to embrace new ways of working. Just like you can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink, little can be achieved by making the latest tools available to an organization that is anchored to traditional processes.
Transformation efforts should have people at their core, and leaders must be intentional about inspiring, listening, and investing in change management to bring everyone along on the journey. We find that organizations typically under-communicate by a factor of 5X, don’t clearly articulate a pathway for current employees to help be a part of the future, and take an imbalanced approach to closing skill gaps.
With that in mind, there are three steps to developing an effective talent strategy for transformation:
While not an exhaustive list of activities to drive a transformation, executives that do not prioritize the people component of change management will inevitably fail.
Start with why and communicate relentlessly
People do not change their beliefs, values, and attitudes without good reason. They are especially unlikely do so when the norms, practices, and measures of success are inherited from a company legacy that has historically been successful. Success forgives a lot of sins, and even when there is a collective recognition of a need to change, it feels safer to endure the predictable way of working rather than venture into the unknown. This is why author Simon Sinek, whose TED talk amassed 48 million views, encourages leaders to “start with why.” In practice, that means explaining why the team is undergoing the change, what the expected impact and outcome will be, and how the firm and its people will benefit as a result of the transformation.
Communication must be personal. We regularly find that a senior leadership team will spend roughly 50 hours agreeing on a transformation plan, but an individual contribute receives less than ten hours of cumulative explanation. As those individual contributors are most directly affected by the change, this ratio is dramatically disproportionate. In this scenario, by the time the message reaches individual contributors the rationale for change is unclear, which can prompt fear and resistance. Develop a communication plan that segments personas by seniority, functional domain, and project/product team. Establish a communication campaign cadence per persona that specifies varying levels of detail tailored to the channel of communication (group meetings, training workshops, webcasts, 1:1s, etc.)
To catalyze the change, focus on creating a compelling vision for the future and explain how the leadership team will work with individuals to ensure a smooth transition. Communication is bi-directional, so ensure there is an active feedback loop. Workshop role-specific examples of new work patterns. Even if people raise concerns, it is more valuable to identify active resistance and change “detractors” early on than to succumb to passive resistance that erodes momentum. However, to create an environment of trust, it is critical not to shame anyone that has a concern into submission. Be judicious about delineating whether a voiced concern is someone being obstructionist or whether it is sign that the leadership team is not being effective in its communication.
In addition to the qualitative feedback loop, it is important to define and track outcome-oriented metrics that drive desired behaviors. Monthly dashboards at different levels of the organization can help transformation teams promote a successful, sustainable digital transformation. Done well, they can highlight areas where the right talent and skills are missing, monitor the achievement of key transformation change management milestones, and gauge the sentiment of the team. The metrics should serve as a compass to enable leaders to make data-driven decisions on how to steer the transformation when waters get choppy.
Assess your skills, knowledge, and traits and identify gaps compared to future state needs
Digital transformation will require people across your company to learn new skills and adapt to new ways of working. These skills typically fall into one of three buckets:
First, functional leaders should partner with HR to conduct a skills assessment and identify gaps between existing and needed skills. When speaking with employees, it is critical to communicate that this is not a performance evaluation. Otherwise, you may run the risk of employees overselling their abilities and skewing the results of the assessment. Instead, think of this as a way to identify and prioritize where the organization will dedicate its training and development resources. Explain how the newly acquired skills will advance one’s career and personal brand so that there is motivation to be vulnerable rather than self-aggrandizing.
Identify the people whose work creates the benchmark for the skills, knowledge, and traits your transformation needs, and deputize those high-performing and high-potential individuals as change agents for new skill adoption. Some practical skills to measure include consultative and technical skills, product and project management, and self-development and adaptability traits.
Next, develop a plan to close existing skills gaps and align it with the firm’s overall goals. Create training plans, with clear goals by level and function, and turn this into a digital transformation workstream like those used to manage other process or organizational changes. Set realistic timelines for skills adoption so employees are not paralyzed by the enormity of the change. One large financial services company set a bold vision to move its entire infrastructure to the cloud but was clear with employees that it would do so over five years and offered an internal “university” to certify people in new technologies like AWS S3. As a leader, you cannot just tell people to improve. You need to show them how to improve and invest in their development.
Define a balanced workforce plan around hiring, automating, upskilling, and sourcing
As companies define and identify skill gaps, they also need to develop a strategic staffing strategy that will help them achieve their transformation goals through the HAUS model:
The HAUS model allows leaders to decide how to fulfill their talent needs across core, value-added and transactional activities. For example, a company may decide to hire its head of DevOps, automate its software delivery value chain through CI/CD, upskill its current developers to learn to use the new tools, and in the interim source talent that can “teach to fish” while implementing the first wave of the new approach.
Another example can be drawn from the first wave of mobile app development. In 2010, iOS development was a fairly rare skill, so any major non-tech company developing its own mobile app was likely hiring an agency. Fast forward a decade, and you’ll find that most companies with major mobile-powered commercial operations will have in-sourced that skill set to have more control over their own destiny. The next wave of skills following this pattern is artificial intelligence and machine learning; most companies are outsourcing this skill set now but will likely have more internal talent in 2030. In this way, the HAUS model becomes a living, adaptable framework, instead of a one-time solution.
People and behaviors lead digital processes and tools, not the other way around. Putting people at the heart of the transformation while tracking results and behaviors is key to ensuring a successful and sustainable talent strategy. Your talent strategy must be managed as an equally weighted workstream within the overall transformation portfolio in order to ensure that the company’s most important assets are not overlooked. Finally, be humble. No transformation is perfectly planned, so be prepared to communicate, listen, and transform yourself first, if you want others to follow you.
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
6/18/2018
Randy Mott is used to big challenges. Prior to joining General Motors as Senior Vice President of Global Information Technology and Chief Information Officer of General Motors in 2012, he served as CIO of Walmart, Dell, and HP. One might argue that the current transformation is the largest of his career, however. When he joined GM, 90 percent of the IT staff were outsourced. He elected to bring those jobs back into GM, insourcing 10,000 new roles in the company and hiring 3,000 recent college graduates.
You might think that hiring into a Fortune 10 company in an industry that has been replete with bankruptcies across the decades would be a challenge. Mott makes the point that great IT staff want big challenges, and the scale of the opportunities he looks to seize are remarkable.
He set up innovation centers at the company’s headquarters, in downtown Detroit, in Austin, outside of Atlanta, and just outside of Phoenix. As Mott notes, this means that these centers are “within hiring distance of about 75 percent of the talent in the United States from an IT standpoint based on the locations of those centers and the geographic radiuses that they represent.”
Now, that team is focused on everything from helping facilitate self-driving car technology to better data analytics for and from the vehicles, to identifying ways to better tapping partners as sources of inspiration and innovation.
Not so surprisingly, Mott has joined the ranks of board-level CIOs, as he has been on the board of Dun & Bradstreet since 2015. He reflects on his career, his current post, and advice for others who would wish to follow in his footstep in this far reaching interview.
(To read an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link.
5/29/18
Dan Olley was recently named to the prestigious CIO Hall of Fame by CIOMagazine. In many ways, however, Olley has not been a traditional chief information officer. For one, he has largely held chief technology officer roles. Moreover, he has also had customer-facing, product-centric roles. In his current role as Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Product Development of Elsevier, his purview is quite broad.
Elsevier is a subsidiary of RELX Group, focusing on academic and clinical research. In his role, Olley helps develop solutions to help academics and clinicians train, while enhancing their ability to help patients at the bedside.
Olley’s focus in recent years has been in machine learning. In fact, he has been immersed in the subject long enough that this insights into its use, the value derived from it, the implications on teams, and the like are unusually deep. We cover all of the above in great depth in this interview.
Peter High: Could you provide an overview of Elsevier and the business you are in?
Dan Olley: Our parent company, RELX Group, is among the largest technology companies no one has heard of. We are an information analytics company, and we predominantly work across four fields: the legal field, the academic and health research fields, the risk business and financial fields, and our large exhibitions business. I am the CTO of Elsevier, which specifically focuses on the academic research and clinical research spaces.
We help clinicians and clinical professionals save lives. We are trying to build solutions that help them do their jobs better, from coming into the profession and training to the patient’s bedside. We also help academic and corporate researchers by providing materials in their field.
We run the peer review process for many academic journals. It is about helping them make breakthroughs. How do we give them solutions that make their research more effective? That is at the core of who we are and what we do.
High: If you gather 10 CTOs together, you have 10 different job descriptions. The CTO can mean everything from the co-founder of a startup in Silicon Valley and the number two person behind the CEO, to the person who owns the plumbing and reports to the chief information officer. I know you also run product development and have customer facing responsibilities in addition to focusing on the technology as it relates to both the efficiency as well as revenue generation. Can you provide an overview of your sets of responsibilities as CTO?
Olley: My background is software product development. I have been doing that for longer than I care to remember. I have had both product management and software engineering responsibilities in my career, but both at technology companies where technology was making a fundamental shift that drove commercial differentiation. At Elsevier, I am responsible for the more traditional IT part that falls under my remit, but over 70% of my responsibility is about building the electronic products and services that we sell. Think of it more like Google and Amazon or a Facebook building that technology solution than a more traditional company.
High: In the world of technology, you have reason to think a lot about how trends are evolving. I know from our prior conversations that you have a passion for contemplating how trends are coming together in some significant ways. Could you talk about the period we are in from a technology perspective and how the confluence of those trends is impacting the way in which all of us are going to be operating between the digital and analog worlds?
To read the full interview, please visit Forbes
