5/14/18 By Peter High, published on Forbes
Of all the CIO-plus roles that exist, that of chief information officer and chief technology officer may seem to be the one that is least expansive. Each are technology roles after all, right? Pawan Verma’s purview offers an interesting counter-point. In his case, his responsibilities include traditional information technology, but it also includes data and digital marketing, supply chain, and customer experience, among other areas. As such, he has remarkable influence over Foot Locker’s customer journey’s no matter the channel they choose to engage with the company.
In this interview, he offers thoughts on his breadth of responsibilities, innovations he is driving, his thoughts on the customer experience of the future, and much more.
Peter High: You are the Global Chief Information Officer and Technology Officer at Foot Locker. Could you give an overview of Foot Locker’s business?
Pawan Verma: We are a global brand. We do business in North America as well as in Europe, parts of Australia, and New Zealand. All in, we have approximately 3000+ physical stores and sizable engagement from our consumers. We are primarily focused on the athletic footwear and apparel business. However, I would say that we are in the engagement and experiences business.
The youth that we connect with and are engaging with either digitally or physically are interested to know about the new sneakers that are coming. The sneakers are not only for them to wear, but they are a status symbol or currency. The products that we sell are not only used on the basketball court, but there are a lot of products that we sell that are used as a lifestyle products.
We have a diverse portfolio of products and have about $7.8 billion in revenue. Consumers engage with us in different ways. We do not focus on what channel the customer is using. Instead, we believe in listening to them more than selling to them. We are here to create that emotional engagement experience in what I call a “phygital” world. By that I mean we want to be part of the customer’s journey whether it is in the store, on their mobile device, on the web, or anywhere else. We want to add value to that customer journey in whichever way we can to help them in that consumer journey.
The kids that we are servicing happen to have high mobile penetration. Somewhere between 85 percent to 90 percent connect with us on mobile. They connect with us for our launch experiences, and it is a high energy culture around social, digital, and physical. That is why I use the term “phygital,” which commands all those experiences. It is at the center of that engagement, and it caters to that energy that they are creating.
High: You have a diverse role yourself. Your title is Executive Vice President and Global Chief Information and Technology Officer. As we peel back the onion, I was amazed by the number of responsibilities you have. Can you give a brief overview of all that your role encompasses?
Verma: There are four primary functions, but they are all intertwined. The first big function for my team is the global technology piece. They are focused on the core, the POS systems, the dotcom systems, the infrastructure, and the mobile piece. This is the typical CTO responsibilities.
The second big part of my function is creating the customer experience across all the different touch points in the form of data and digital marketing. All the digital marketing functions include performance marketing, mobile marketing, how we activate, how we create demand, SEO, and so on. The reason that mining the marketing data is one of my functions is because I believe that we need to create this platform wherein our consumer can engage with us, and that engagement can only be encouraged if you are activating a given marketing method based on what the customer is looking for. To do that, you must listen to those signals and connect them back.
To read the full interview, please visit Forbes
3/19/18
By Peter High, published on Forbes
Naresh Shanker was named CIO of HP Inc. prior to the company’s separation from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) This was the apotheosis of a remarkable career. He had been an IT executive in the technology industry for many years, including the CIO role at Palm until its acquisition by HP. The separation would be the biggest challenge he would yet face in his career.
At the time of the separation, there were some who believed that HP Inc. would be substantially weakened by this separation. Moreover, Meg Whitman, who had been the CEO of HP Inc. remained as Chairman of the company and would take over the CEO role of HPE. HP Inc. would be led by a new CEO Dion Weisler. Remarkably, the separation proceeded with few issues and was on time, and the company has flourished.
Since the separation, Shanker turned his attention to a major digital transformation of the business. The legendary OEM that had been the founding company of Silicon Valley would need to truly become a digital enterprise. Shanker noted that with the hyperconnected economy that we now have, HP Inc. needed to reflect this in its own business. In this far ranging interview, he covers all of the above, and offers essential lessons for other companies who must transform in a comparable fashion.
Peter High: You are the Chief Information Officer of HP Inc. HP Enterprise [HPE] separated from HP Inc. in November of 2015. This was one of the biggest separations in corporate history, and you were involved on both sides of that transformation. Can you talk about the scale of separation, and how you thought about planning the separation of a roughly $120 billion revenue company into two roughly $60 billion revenue companies?
Naresh Shanker: We first looked to determine the mandatory minimum requirements that we had to meet from a regulatory and compliance perspective. Our goal was to prioritize and execute the separation into an independent company within 12 months. That is not a small feat, and it has never been accomplished before with a high-tech company of this magnitude, scale, and complexity.
After defining the scope of the mandatory requirements, we looked at what it would take to fundamentally stand up two public entities. HPE focused on our compute network storage solutions coupled with HP Software, as well as HP Enterprise Services. HP’s focus is predominantly around our printing business, our personal systems business, and our 3D additive manufacturing business.
A major task was to separate out the architectures from the infrastructure layer, the wide area networks, local area networks, and the underlying solutions, which is the applications fabric. Several facilities and sites worldwide had to be separated and secured so that we could deem ourselves separate identities and meet all the financial and regulatory requirements of standing up our public companies.
We successfully achieved that in 12 months. After that separation was completed, we were able to stand ourselves up as two public companies. We then embarked on using this opportunity as a catalyst for each of our independent companies to transform and reinvent ourselves. We took advantage of the separation so that we could compete in our independent markets more aggressively and in a more focused manner.
The first thing we did was lay out a five-year roadmap. 2015 was the separation year. 2016 was the year of standing up the company and our independent operations. IT had a lot of work to do here, including rebuilding all the operations and capabilities ground up, from the infrastructure layer to the applications layer, and putting in place all the operational metrics and SLAs so that we could stabilize and run our operations on a 24/7 cadence.
2017 was focused on starting our transformation journey. Our goal from 2017 to 2020 is to complete the execution of our transformation journey. A significant portion of that is in flight, and a lot of it has already been completed.
Our current strategic focus is pivoting from being a transaction-oriented company, where our systems are designed around transactions and physical goods flows, to being a more contractual and digital centric organization. How do we move from a hardware player to being more of a solutions services player? That is what we laid out from an IT architecture point of view to start building the foundation of this journey so that we could pivot ourselves to being a digital company.
We focused on two things: one is supporting an omni-channel go-to-market strategy, and the second is everything-as-a-service play, which involved solutions and services across all lines of business. The separation served as the catalyst to help us pivot from a physical goods and hardware OEM manufacture to more of a digital goods solutions and services technology company.
As we go forward, we will continue to evolve our solutions and services with more user centered experiences and designs in mind. Our focus is ensuring that the user experience, the partner experience, and the customer experience are delivered with a digital mindset. Using the separation as a catalyst, we have fundamentally transformed ourselves to become a digital player in the industry.
High: The transformation that you have been leading is in many ways the transformation that is necessary across a number of industries. As the CIO of one of the original Silicon Valley companies, and one which is now transforming from a manufacturer of physical goods to being focused on digital solutions, can you talk about the changes that are necessary from an IT perspective to deliver that transformation?
1/29/18
The integration of a major acquisition is the bane of the existence of many executives. Chief information officers have special challenges during such scenarios, since, after all, they must think about the people, processes, and technologies that must be integrated. This is an enormous amount of change to usher in.
When Steve Phillpott became CIO of $19 billion revenue developer, manufacturer and provider of data storage devices and solutions, Western Digital less than two and a half years ago, the company was nearly a third of its current size. With the acquisition of HGST in 2015 and the acquisition of SanDisk in 2016, there was no avoiding the fact that this would be a heavy lift for Phillpott and his colleagues. This was all announced in his first months on the job.
Phillpott noted that across the technology stacks of the three companies, in most areas, two-thirds of employees would be impacted, as the “winning” solution would be named. Phillpott recognized this as an opportunity to choose best-in-breed solutions across the technology portfolio. The mandate for change that any integration brings about would be a boon.
This would lead to the integration of more than 3,000 applications and would test the company’s change management practices, but Phillpott and his team have made enormous progress, as he notes herein.
Peter High: You are the Chief Information Officer of Western Digital. In its current generation, Western Digital is the combination of three multi-billion dollar organizations: Western Digital itself, the 2012 acquisition of HGST, and the acquisition in 2016 of SanDisk. I know you took an interesting approach to integrating these companies. Please explain.
Steve Phillpott: We integrated three large multi-billion dollar, Fortune 500 companies into one future Fortune 150-ish company. You are looking at integrating systems, integrating processes, and integrating technologies. As we started on this journey, this integration became a great opportunity to transform the company. By transforming the company I mean looking at those applications systems and processes that we have today, thinking where we want to be in a couple years, and starting to lay the foundation for that journey.
Consider ERP as an example. Across the three legacy sub-companies, we had three different ERP systems. Going forward, we could have picked any one of the three. In a typical acquisition where you have two companies; one large company, one small, it may default to the larger company’s ERP. Two like-sized companies integrating together, you may flip a coin, or you pick the best one and go forward. With three, it provides an interesting dynamic because, at a minimum, two-thirds of the company are going to have to go through change.
Our thinking was if two-thirds of the company are going to have to go through that massive amount of change, why should we not look at a newer, best-in-breed solution and have the entire company go through that change. What that does is it allows us to transform a foundational application that will support us as we grow to $20 billion, $25 billion, and beyond. It became a great opportunity to go through and rebuild processes and applications that we knew would not scale. We were able to revisit chart of accounts, revisit cost centers, and revisit the reconciliation process with an eye to the future and a focus on ensuring those processes would support us as we grow past a $20 billion company.
High: You have had to rationalize around 3,000 applications. Could you share how far you have come in that process, as well as what learnings you have had?
Phillpott: We had roughly 3,000-plus applications across the three major companies, and then we added a couple more acquisitions after that, which added more applications to the mix. I would say we are still early in the journey, but we have completed some major activities and 2017 was a very productive year for us. We focused on getting a lot of the collaboration and communication tools correct. Communication tools allow for the flattening of the organization, which is increasingly important as you are trying to go through these integration activities.
The speed at which companies can effectively collaborate is essential in helping move these integrations forward and trying to harmonize the processes in the system. The other interesting thing about focusing on those collaboration and communication tools is it also sets us up well for future M&As. Once we get those in as we move forward and have more acquisitions, we can bring them into the mix much quicker. We determined best-of-breed technologies across a variety of communication and collaboration tools.
Globally, we have everybody on the same email, the same file sharing around Box, the same intranet, Jive, WebEx, Jabber – those core collaboration and communication tools. If you look beyond those initial communication and collaboration activities, we have started to migrate many of the legacy applications. Now we are on a global Human Capital Management system which we consolidated with our CRM. We consolidated on a global ServiceNow instance which was interesting because that is another area where we try to get everybody’s information into one area, but it is diverse in terms of what activity we need to help the end users with.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
1/22/18
By Peter High, Published on Forbes
Diane Schwarz has the killer combination of skills and experiences to be a chief information officer. She was an engineer as an undergraduate, and therefore learned important technical skills. She has an MBA from the University of Chicago and learned key business disciplines. She was a consultant, gaining experience solving problems across many different companies who were her clients. By the time she joined IT departments, she had depth and breadth to her experiences, and quickly rose to become a CIO.
For nearly five years, Schwarz has been the Enterprise CIO of Textron, the $14 billion revenue multi-industry conglomerate in aircraft, defense, industrial and finance businesses. With such diverse businesses in the company’s portfolio, it can be tricky to get the balance right between standardizing processes and technologies, and allowing the business units of the company to have autonomy. She has simplified things by operating with four key strategies that she describes in more depth in this interview:
Peter High: You are the enterprise level Chief Information Officer of Textron, but I know there is also IT leadership within the business units themselves. Could you talk about the structure of IT at an organization as complex as yours?
Diane Schwarz: We have a CIO in each of our business units and major product lines, and they have their own IT organizations that report to them. Those CIOs have dual reporting to the business unit leadership as well as to me. The business units do what I call the fun stuff. They support the stakeholder applications, whether it is ERP or CRM or PLM tools.
With that much disparity in the organization, we communicate often and at great lengths to make sure that we know what is going on in our different locations. I have only 50 percent of the staff in the United States. I have many folks in India, who roll up independently to each of their business units, but who also happen to sit in a common office building. It may seem complex to an outsider, but we know how our puzzle pieces fit together.
High: In an organization as diverse as yours, how do you think about what should be common versus what should be unique as it applies to that diverse range of businesses?
Schwarz: That is a question our CEO answers. He has said our business units are empowered to make decisions on what is going to be best for them to meet their strategic objectives. Of course, profitability is part of that. Let’s say a business unit wanted to host its own email system. We do not have any rules that say they cannot, but it is going to cost more for them.
Profitability objectives help keep people in line without deviating too much from the standards. This enables employees to be able to interact across our locations. Our CEO also recognizes that when it comes to, for instance, ERP systems, what serves a business unit in aerospace is different than what serves somebody in automotive. If you make people share too much, you sub-optimize what is going to support their business. We look at what is going to best serve their business needs.
High: Could you talk about your strategy? What has risen to the top of your strategic plan?
11/20/17
Paula Tolliver joined Intel a little more than a year ago as chief information officer. She had spent more than two decades at the Dow Chemical Company. She had been CIO there, as well, but she also ran procurement for a time, and had profit and loss accountability for Dow’s $1 billion services business. Therefore, she came to Intel with an orientation toward driving revenue growth from her post.
Tolliver immediately got to work doing just that. She has helped lead a major push toward deepening the company’s investment in analytics and artificial intelligence, in addition to other new technologies, and has helped drive $350 million in revenue growth in the sales and marketing channels alone, as she notes herein.
Tolliver has also improved IT’s orientation toward being “customer zero” for Intel’s own technologies. As such, she has woven her team into the product development process, and served as an important proxy for CIO and other IT executive customers of the company.
Peter High: You recently celebrated your first year anniversary with Intel. Prior to coming to Intel, you spent a couple of decades at Dow Chemical. What drew you to the CIO role at Intel?
Paula Tolliver: I have been in the profession for close to 30 years. My move to Intel was the result of my beginning to reflect on my career and wanting to be more deeply involved in this exciting time for IT. As I looked around and started to understand the potential of new technologies and how quickly they are advancing, I wanted to be a part of that in a more meaningful way. I saw joining the technology industry as a way to jump in with both feet. Fortunately, for me, Intel was looking for a CIO. What drew me to Intel was that they are a substantial contributor to the advancements happening in the IT industry. The technology that Intel has developed over its long history have driven many significant technology advancements, opened up many of possibilities that we see today, and powered the digital transformation. The privilege and honor of joining the Intel team and being a part of the ecosystem of technology was too exciting for me to pass up. I jumped on board and have enjoyed every minute.
High: Intel has been going through a transformation. Can you describe the changes and the role that IT plays?
7/24/2017
Kumud Kalia has been a CIO multiple times over, at Direct Energy, at Qwest Communications, and at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein. For nearly six years, he has been the CIO of Akamai Technologies a $2.3 billion global content delivery network services firm. Kalia is responsible for leading the strategy, development, and operation of the applications and infrastructure that support the company’s business operations. As a CIO leading IT at a technology company, in some cases, his team provides guidance of CIO needs and validate the value of the products the company has in development. Moreover, he and his colleagues in IT have developed internal solutions that can be adopted by the end- customer.
Among other areas, Kalia attributes his success to developing a culture that embraces expansive thinking and that is agile in its mentality and its approach. Both have been essential as the company has grown tremendously during his tenure, and its needs and demands for IT’s services are different and far greater than they were six years ago. We cover all of the above and more in this interview.
Peter High: Kumud, you have been the Chief Information Officer at Akamai Technologies for five and a half years. Please describe Akamai’s business and your role as chief information officer.
Kumud Kalia: Akamai has been at the heart of the internet for the past 20 years. Companies that do a lot of internet-based, commercial business use our services to distribute content over the internet. For example, media and e-commerce companies depend on Akamai to run and scale their businesses. We store our customers’ content on our global network of servers that we position geographically close to their end-users. The online experience that the end-user has is the fastest and richest possible because our servers remove latency caused by distance and congestion on the internet. In effect, we speed up the internet by overcoming its natural limitations.
As the CIO of a technology company with many technology-savvy employees, I work with a tough crowd. There are at least 2,000 people in the company who think they can do my job better than I can. There are advantages, of course. Being technologically-aware makes my colleagues more willing to experiment. They also provide critical feedback on technology that we are considering and are adept at debugging my solutions. However, even technology people can be reluctant to embrace new solutions. Engineers tend to consume products that have been built by themselves or by someone they know, and then develop a tribal allegiance to that solution. This challenge is similar to what many enterprise CIOs find with their end-users. I have much in common with CIOs of other enterprises, but I have some natural advantages that come from being in a tech-savvy user community.
High: In our previous conversations, you have said that a CIO and his or her team should foster business agility. IT should not gum up the operation, but rather, as the organization identifies new opportunities to seize, IT should be an accelerator. When you joined Akamai, it was roughly half the size it is now. Presumably, it has plans to continue to grow. How do you think about agility in a fast-growing company?
06-21-17
Bridget Engle has been named Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer of BNY Mellon a global investments company which provides investment management and investment services in 35 countries and more than 100 markets with $30.6 trillion in assets under custody and/or administration, and $1.7 trillion in assets under management. Engle will take responsibility of the company’s Client Technology Solutions group, which provides critical technology platforms and applications that support BNY Mellon’s role as the leading provider of technology solutions to the financial markets. She will be responsible for setting the strategic direction and execution of the firm’s technology agenda. This includes advancing the firm’s NEXEN digital investment platform, investing in and integrating industry leading applications, accelerating its digital and agile development efforts, and attracting and developing top IT talent.
Engle has spent the past 30 years at companies like AT&T, Lehman Brothers, Barclays Capital, DTCC, and Bank of America. She will succeed Suresh Kumar, who has held the CIO role for over five years, and who will depart at the end of July.
Click here to read the full article on Forbes
By Peter High, published on Forbes 06/19/2017
As the Chief Operations and Technology Officer of $94 billion Bank of America, Cathy Bessant has tremendous influence in the technology ecosystem that surrounds the financial services industry from fintech start-ups with which she partners, from the war for talent with the would be employees of the company to the vendor partners that she engages to the rising influence of artificial intelligence (which she prefers to refer to as “responsible automated intelligence”).
It had been three and a half years since I last caught up with Bessant, and she had mentioned that she had rethought a few things. She used to refer to Bank of America as a fintech firm. She has come to realize that it is not a fintech firm, but that fintech firms are an important part of the ecosystem that the company has built. In fact, she highlights the advantages a company with the scale that Bank of America has relative to the fintech companies who compete with aspects of what Bank of America does. She also used to note that Bank of America would never be involved in public cloud solutions, but she now foresees a day when that will be possible. She explains these changes of heart in great depth herein. She also covers the boards that she has joined in recent years and the value she has derived from them and vice versa among a variety of other topics.
Peter High: Cathy, several years ago, we spoke about your purview over both technology and operations at Bank of America. Since our last conversation, the trend toward the intersection of these two disciplines has become more profound. We see it with a number of executives who have taken on both sets of responsibilities, walking in your footsteps, if you will. We see it even at a more granular, technical level with topics like DevOps, which combines the two. Having owned these areas for such an enormous organization, what new insights do you have regarding the advantage of having them together?
Cathy Bessant: When we combined the areas seven years ago, even our own people thought we were crazy. Today, the intersections are becoming increasingly apparent. Everything we do in operations, from the most manual to the most sophisticated task, is better when it is automated. It is better, cheaper, and safer when it is digital; and it performs better for customers. For a classic operations organization, technology is not just nice to have, it is a requirement. By the same token, technology is nothing if it does not perform. The intersection of the operations team’s contributions to platform stability and to ensuring that there is not only a technological experience, but a human experience, is what today’s customer expects.
High: The rise of artificial intelligence has been profound in recent years. You prefer to refer to it as “responsible automated intelligence,” rather than artificial intelligence. Can you define the term and share the reason for your preference of that specific terminology?
Bessant: I do not like the term artificial because by definition it means fake, so it is partly a linguistic preference. More importantly though, intelligence is created by humans, even if it is run on an automated basis. We can think about artificial intelligence as algorithmic intelligence, as well, because what takes data and produces an outcome are algorithms that are written, overseen, governed, and managed by people. Automated intelligence is often better, more predictable, faster, cheaper, and has a lower error rate – as long as our algorithms work. There is no doubt AI is the term of the day, but we have been using automated intelligence for a lot longer than people think. For instance, we have been using models to create credit scores for 25 years. You can go through a lot of different elements of banking and say, “This is a more sophisticated or more tech enabled deployment of automated or artificial intelligence,” but it is not something we are not used to, which is an important point.
High: You use the word responsible when referring to automated or artificial intelligence. How do you think of the responsibility aspect?
By Peter High, published on Forbes 5/29/17
Nick Colisto is the CIO of $4.5 billion water technology company Xylem, a company that was created after the trivestiture from ITT Corporation in 2011. The spin off combined five businesses that would also add a sixth in 2016 with the $1.8 billion acquisition of a company called Sensus. Colisto joined the company in 2012, and drove many steps to help implement CEO Patrick Decker’s vision to operate as a single company. He was able to draw upon the playbook he has created, much of which was codified in a book of the same name: The CIO Playbook: Strategies and Best Practices for IT Leaders to Deliver Value. The efforts centered around creating a common business operating platform (common processes, business software, and infrastructure) to enable people to work better together, produce more, and deliver superior product and service experiences to customers.
Now, multiple years into his journey as CIO, Colisto leads a team that drives strategic digital transformation initiatives to drive new solutions, several of which are customer facing. He has created a culture that is more cognizant of the needs of the company, customers, and shareholders. In the process, Colisto’s team has contributed mightily to the bottom line of the company in the process. He describes his journey in detail in this interview.
Peter High: Nick, you are the CIO of Xylem. The company was created in October 2011 as part of a trivestiture from ITT and became a stand-alone global water technology company. Can you provide a basic description of the business?
Nick Colisto: Xylem is a $4.5 billion company with about 16,000 employees across the world. It is a world leader in the design, manufacturing, and application of highly engineered technologies for the water industry. We are a leading equipment and service provider for water and wastewater applications. Xylem has a broad portfolio of products and services that address the full cycle of water from collection to distribution to use to the return of water back into the environment. Xylem has leading market positions among equipment and service providers in core application areas of the water equipment industry including transport, treatment, test, building services, industrial processing, and irrigation. Some of our company brands that people might know are Bell & Gossett and Flygt.
High: I know from our past conversations that you are in the throes of a digital enterprise agenda. You are transforming the way IT works at Xylem. Can you describe the Five Star Model that you are using to accomplish this goal?
Colisto: We are on a transformational journey to create a digital business for Xylem. In the last few years we have built a platform called Xylem’s Integrated System, or XIS, to support this. It is a modernized IT platform that harnesses the power of disruptive technologies including social, mobile, analytics, cloud, and IoT platforms to enable customer engagement, operating efficiency, and growth.
The Five Star Model that we use for selecting technology for XIS was inspired by a model created by Kim Stevenson, formerly of Intel. The five stars are:
By Peter High, published on Forbes 04/03/17
Rick King has had an unusual path to the CIO role of Thomson Reuters. He began his professional career as a high school teacher and as a coach. In his mind, continues to play both roles. He has taken great pride in building great and loyal teams. Moreover, he has pushed Thomson Reuters to have a remarkably diverse mix of women in information technology, though he is first to note that he wants to push the envelope further on that front.
King has joined the elite but growing club of CIOs who have joined the boards of publicly traded companies, as he is on the board of the bank holding company, TCF Financial. In this interview, he offer insights on how others might follow his lead toward board membership, how best to leverage external partners, how to build world class teams, along with a variety of other topics.
Peter High:I thought we would begin with your role as Chief Information Officer at Thomson Reuters. Your organization is information based — data is the key ingredient. How do you, as CIO, and your IT team add value in ways that are different than your peer CIOs that are at organizations that produce physical products, for example?
Rick King: It is significant because you are not the creator of a lot of technologies. However, you use many leading technologies to do things with your data that are unique and that your customers find value in. IT’s responsibility is to ensure that the infrastructure and innovation aspects are in place so that our product people are free to create a product that can go after data sets and harvest unique insights from them. That requires having the data and being able to manipulate it. We deal with different data sets worldwide; abiding by restrictions, like permissions and entitlements; and then allowing the analytics to go after the key insight that somebody is looking for. IT is right in the middle of the value proposition at Thomson Reuters. We are not selling the technology but rather the delivery of the content. The insights and the information that are our product come from having a strong, creative, innovative, and execution oriented technology team.
High: I know that you have always taken great pride in building strong teams, in both recruiting and retaining strong people. This dates to your first job as a teacher and coach before joining corporate America and eventually IT in organizations like Josten’s Learning, Ceridian, and since 2000, Thomson Reuters. Today, top technology talent is increasingly sought after as different divisions, beyond just IT organizations, are looking for people who are technology savvy and technology experienced. What insights can you share about building and retaining strong teams?
King: There is nothing like a strong team to attract strong players. As of the first hire you have to build a team that is strong at technology and strong at delivery. Then, every hire must raise that capability, not diminish it. To do that I involve the team in the hiring situation, they bring in the players that up their game. I think people stay at a place if they work with smart people, they have good tools to use, and the infrastructure works for them.
The career path is as important as anything else. What is my opportunity here? Can I progress? Can I progress by a technology track? Can I progress into a management track? Or maybe, can I move into non-technology product development or an innovation type of role? Having these capabilities as an organization requires first that the people leading the team, the management over the group, and the executive over the group have a vision, and second, that they have dialogues with people. Career planning and succession planning are two things that we do not do enough of for people. If team members are doing interesting work with interesting people at a place that is interesting to them, they will only look up when they have a break between projects, and that is when you want to make sure thattheyknow thatyou know a lot aboutthem and that there are steps in place for them to progress. You create a depth chart just like you do as a coach. You have to know who is lined up behind whom. It is all about the team. You do not get anything done without good people. Team building, team retention; that is our number one goal.
High: With an organization as expansive as Thomson Reuters, do you try to find opportunities for your team members inside and outside of IT to give people a degree of breadth of experience and not just depth of experience?
