By Peter High, published on Forbes 3/20/17
Within Tom Miller’s first year as Chief Information Officer for Anthem, an $85 billion health benefits company, he took a trip to Silicon Valley to better understand where smart money was being spent in healthcare. He has called the experience “mind blowing.” The innovation that he saw in areas like mobile care, the internet of things, and digital led him to conclude that the industry and his company were on the cusp of being disrupted. Rather than wait for others to bring the disruption to Anthem, he decided Anthem would be the source of its own disruption.
With the assistance of a small ecosystem of partners, Miller opened the Anthem Innovation Studio in May of 2016. In the 10 months since then, the team has already developed a number of innovative ideas. Miller’s penchant for seizing opportunities to disrupt are not limited to the companies he serves but he has also disrupted his own career in some ways, spending the first dozen years of his career in Sales and general management roles before disrupting his career and moving into IT roles that have been his mainstay since. We cover all of the above and more in this interview.
Peter High: Could you take a moment and describe Anthem’s business as well as IT’s role in it?
Tom Miller: Anthem is a healthcare provider that serves around forty million consumers. Our goal is to provide quality, affordable healthcare for our members. We offer services in a commercial space under the Blue Cross Blue Shield banner and Medicare and Medicaid Services in our government line. IT’s role is to deliver enabling capabilities to ensure that healthcare is both accessible and affordable and that our that our provider partners are able to engage with us in a way that makes it easy for them to do business. IT also provides thought leadership on how the advancement of technology is shaping the industry. We want to ensure that our business remains relevant and that we are competitive as the business of healthcare continues to unfold.
High: You have been with Anthem for nearly three years now. Prior to that you had a variety of roles within Coca-Cola. You were the Chief information Officer but you also spent time in sales. Please reflect on your unusual career path in and out of IT and what you have drawn from this broad set of experiences.
Miller: I spent my first twelve years in sales and general management and then gradually moved deeper and deeper into IT roles until I became the Chief Information Officer for Coke Refreshments, the North American bottling business, and several groups of the North American company of Coca-Cola. The first thing that I learned was that you simply have to know the business. You need to know what matters at a macro level — what the main service offerings are, the products, the core systems, and the customers’ needs. You also need to know what matters at a detail level. You cannot be in all the details, especially with the pace of technology change today, which means that you need to know what is relevant in terms data, systems, customer service, environments that you are managing, and response times. Knowing the fundamentals of the business is one of the keys to success, especially being able to transfer that understanding from one industry to another. The second thing is that you must operate from the basis of a strategy, especially in the world of technology. There are so many things coming at you all of the time, you must be able to sort them out and make sure that they are relevant to an overall strategic plan that you are running. I think of the IT strategyas being a meld between what IT needs to get done and what the business priorities are that are guiding that. As long as you are operating from the basis of a strategic plan, then you are in a position to add value in whatever industry you are in.
I have learned a number of other things as well. You need to be able to make decisions without all of the facts –that is a hallmark of leadership. You need to be able to communicate with confidence. When you are managing big budgets and big teams for a big business, the ability to communicate with confidence is critical.
High: Historically, the CIO position has been more tactical. You are focused on developing and executing strategic plans and inspiring your team to follow this lead. With the fast pace of change in IT, how do you ensure that the strategic plan is a stake in the ground but not planted so deeply as not to be malleable when circumstances change?
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
By Peter High, published on CIO Insight.
02-02-2017
Capital Power is a growth-oriented North American power producer headquartered in Edmonton, Alberta. The company develops, acquires, operates and optimizes power generation from a variety of energy sources. Capital Power owns more than 3,200 megawatts of power generation capacity at 18 facilities across North America. More than 700 megawatts of owned generation capacity is in advanced development in Alberta and Kansas.
Darryl Vleeming is the company’s vice president of information services and CIO. As such, he is responsible for all information services spend, excluding technology, connected directly to the company’s plant control systems. As he tells CIO Insight contributor Peter High, he also has to be a big contributor of the company’s bottom line.
Peter High: How have you organized your team in terms of direct reports and roles?
Darryl Vleeming: I have five direct reports. They are responsible for the following:
High: Please provide some examples of the strategic use of technology in the context of Capital Power.
Vleeming: Our team implemented energy management operations center software and a business intelligence solution that was so successful that we now offer it as a service to multiple other participants in the Alberta Power market. We also developed a custom business intelligence solution used to manage our wind farms in real time, and [another one] used to manage our long-term forecasts (everything from economic indicators to power prices) and analysis as it relates to acquisitions, divestures and new construction around North America.
Click here to read the full article on CIO Insight
Peter High
11/1/16
David Thompson has been the chief information officer at a number of leading companies, including Symantec, Oracle, and PeopleSoft. He has broader responsibilities in his current role as Executive Vice President, Global Operations and Technology and Chief Information Officer at Western Union, the $5.5 billion revenue provider of money movement and payment services based just south of Denver, Colorado. In his role, he is responsible for developing the next generation of payment products and services. He also is responsible for maximizing efficiency, quality, and customer delivery for the company’s global agent network of more than 500,000 agent locations in 200 countries and territories. This puts Thompson squarely in the innovation agenda for the company, helping the organization both grow revenue while also doing so efficiently.
Additionally, given Thompson’s wealth of experience as a technology leader, but also as one who has always thought of the role of CIO as a business role, he has been asked to join the boards of companies. Since 2010, he has served on the board of CoreSite Realty Corporation, a publicly traded an integrated, self-administered and self-managed real estate investment trust (REIT).
As such, Thompson is at the forefront of two leading trends for CIOs: he has joined the ranks of the CIO-plus, as well as board-level CIOs. When I recently interviewed him, I was interested in his current sets of responsibilities, and the creative ideas his team is driving, but also his own career path, which represents an aspirational track for other CIOs.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the 30th interview in the CIO-plus series, including CIO-pluses from Boeing, Verizon, and Walgreens. To read the prior 29 interviews, please visit this link. This is also the 18th interview in my board-level CIO series. To read the prior 17 including the CIOs of companies such as Intel, P&G, Biogen, Kroger, and Cardinal Health, please visit this link.)
Peter High: You’re the executive vice president of global operations and chief information officer at Western Union, and as the name would suggest, you have operation and technology responsibilities. Can you talk a bit about your purview?
David Thompson: I have two jobs. First and foremost, I have responsibility for global operations, which is the management of our customer experience – all of our customer care centers, our interaction with our customers. In addition to that, we have a broad network of partners and agents that service our customers and provide the service globally. Both of those areas require a lot of staff, so a large portion of our employees services our customers’ needs or our agents: Enrolling our agents, training their staff, doing the certifications around [Anti-Money Laundering], and managing the infrastructure associated with our agent network. On the customer care side of the house, I have responsibility to make sure we have a strong, end-to-end process that our customers go through. If a customer has a problem in that process, we have a mechanism for them to interact with us either electronically or via phone, and we can resolve that issue.
The other portion of my job, as the chief information officer for the company, the entire technology portfolio for our customers, our agents, our partners, and the regulators of the company. That is an exciting part of my job. I joined the company as the chief technology officer at a point where we are transforming what we are doing, bringing new capabilities to the market, but at the same time, enhancing the services that we have today.
High: How do you structure your team? Do you have two distinct teams? Are there any other people like yourself that span across both of those?
Thompson: I have a team of 15 direct reports. About half of those direct reports are responsible for our customer care and our operations function – servicing our agents, training our agents, supporting our customers via call center or electronic channels. We also have a series of engineering heads, who are responsible for developing new products on the technology side of the house: engineering capabilities, information security, our global operations’ technical operations: our server infrastructure both in the cloud and on premise.
High: You began to mention in both your responses some of the new things you are doing from a payment product and services perspective. I know this is an area of great innovation for the company. Can you provide some more details?
Click here to read the full article
10-12-2016
Excerpt from the Article:
In her role as CIO of Denison University, Dena Speranza leads a team technologists in support of all campus technology, infrastructure and services. She provides overall vision and leadership for the development and implementation of offerings that support the college mission and strategic goals. Her team manages college-wide information systems and services to provide effective educational technology, administrative systems, and student computing. The team works to build partnerships with colleagues across campus, at peer institutions, and with key vendors to facilitate the liberal arts experience at Denison.
The Technical Services team supports a campus infrastructure consisting of more than 100 virtual and physical servers, more than 1,000 access points, 40TB of storage, and over 300 switches.
Peter High: What are your strategic priorities for the foreseeable future?
Dena Speranza: Earlier this year, the university launched core strategic priorities that are focused on deepening student learning, continuing our strong recruiting of a diverse student body, and positioning our graduates to successfully transition into the professions. These institutional priorities inform the planning and decisions we need to make in our infrastructure and the long-term roadmap for information technology services. I am working with my team, colleagues across campus, and our advisory committees to develop an IT Strategic Plan, which supports the university’s strategic priorities.
This is a transitional time for higher education, as people question the value of a degree and traditional delivery models. In this challenging environment, Denison University is recognized nationally as a healthy and forward-thinking liberal arts college. The faculty and administration are thoughtfully addressing the needs of today’s incoming students and are creating new programs and interdisciplinary offerings that deliver a world-class education with strong mentorship and vigorous career support to our thriving students.
Our strategic priorities in Information Technology Services are being updated in support of recently released institutional strategic priorities. We are assessing the need to become more agile in our delivery models and are developing an infrastructure that is scalable and secure. As a core service provider for the university, our priorities are focused on improving student and employee engagement through an institutional approach that strategically leverages technology. We are expanding transparency into technology decisions, improving communication, increasing collaboration between teams, and identifying needs across multiple constituencies.
Change management is often a challenge for IT organizations, and the continued rapid pace of technology advances makes it even more critical to have open and effective lines of communication between IT and every constituency we support. We are committed to building a culture of trust, information transparency and shared decision-making with a delivery model of excellent customer service.
Strategic initiatives in the foreseeable future are focused on improving service experiences for our primary constituencies including prospective students, current students and their families, employees, alumni, and friends of the college. We look to improve self-service models for workflows and more mobile-friendly experiences. We are developing skill sets around integrating systems and identity access management.
We are implementing tools for organizational effectiveness, and we are focusing on improving administrative business processes, along with increasing access to tools for reporting and data analytics to support decision-making and analysis. We also will continue and expand focus on compliance with regulatory requirements, accessibility, and security. More effort will be devoted to security awareness and digital literacy for both our staff and our students to promote safe practices, reduce risks and maintain compliance.
We have achieved efficiencies by leveraging virtualization and cloud-based technologies over the past few years and will continue to monitor advances in secure and scalable XaaS (Anything as a Service) models to improve our infrastructure and to become more agile to meet growing needs.
Five year strategic technology plans are no longer effective with today’s pace of change and planning processes must evolve into a more rapid update cycle. IT organizations must find ways to scale to needs and stay adaptable while maintaining effectiveness and efficiency. This environment also places stress on existing teams to continually develop skills and to find ways to sunset legacy systems and processes that are draining resources.
Our strategic priorities must also include building risk-tolerance within the organization for innovative solutions that are exploratory and potentially transformational to the liberal arts experience. We also must maintain core services, control costs, effectively prioritize ITS resources, develop talent and plan for succession within the IT organization.
Peter High: Has it been difficult to attract IT talent to Granville, Ohio?
To view the full article, please visit CIO Insight
9-23-2016
Ellucian is an education technology company that has been in business for more than 40 years. It serves 2,400 institutions and 18 million students in 40 countries. Unlike a lot of ed tech companies that get a lot of press today, this is an organization that is far from its startup days.
According to Ellucian CIO Lee Congdon, who was previously the CIO at Red Hat, Ellucian is an education company that is increasingly becoming a cloud company. Ellucian believes in “Student success. Tight budgets. Limited IT resources. More and more higher education institutions are looking for answers to these challenges.” In this interview with CIO Insight contributor Peter High, he also highlights that the company must attract new technology talent who will help the company move faster and in a more agile fashion.
Peter High: Can you describe your role as CIO? What is your purview?
Lee Congdon: Very traditional IT organization in terms of accountability: servers, storage, the network, moving to cloud for many of our purpose-built and software-as-a-service applications. We now have software-as-a-service application for everything from infrastructure compute, single sign on and so on, to collaboration for things like email and video conferencing, to our customer success and sales automation applications. So a pretty standard portfolio. On all of the customer and corporate facing applications in IT we partner with our R&D organization to provide infrastructure for them and policies, guidelines and standards for them as they execute the product transition from on-premises products to cloud-based products. We own engagement with the business, strategic planning for IT, information security, business continuity — pretty traditional responsibilities for an IT organization.
High: Can you talk about your current strategic plan? You have been in the role for roughly six months or so. I have to imagine there was a period of getting up to speed on the education space, generally speaking, obviously, Ellucian more specifically. If I may assume that you have the beginnings of that strategic plan, an area of purview that you mentioned, can you talk a bit about some of the priorities going forward?
Congdon: Sure. We are initially focused on four priorities. Enabling the business; great business engagement and leadership; being strong partners to our business counterparts; ensuring that we are leading on data initiatives for the organization; leading cross-functional projects in terms of discovering the requirements and executing the necessary transitions, not only on the technology side, but on the business side; obviously, delivering projects to enable the business and really focusing on identifying the solutions that are going to deliver the most business value.
As is common in IT organizations, particularly in the transition we talked about, growing our team and our capabilities; providing on the job opportunities to engage with the business to deliver new capabilities for the organization. We are investing in agile, so ensuring that our folks are ready to move faster and with more flexibility; bringing on board select new skills to tackle areas that we need to focus on; setting a culture of both education and expectation that our folks are going to be continuous learners and emerging new technologies I talked about; and changing our corporate culture (IT is a part of that) from one of traditional career and performance management to a much more flexible, modern approach there.
Working out our processes and platforms as we grow in scale; making sure we have the right capabilities in place. I mentioned new networks, new co-location facilities will be a part of that as well, enabling us to be faster, continuing the focus on information security that we had traditionally in a challenging security environment. But investing in specific processes, too, like incident management and change management and project management, to give us the ability to scale and to automate. Agility is a big investment area, both in terms of delivering solutions but also in terms of partnering with the business at a higher level and, of course, retiring our legacy platforms as well.
And then starting to invest for the future. Automation is a key point for us as we move away from traditional environments to cloud-based environments, ensuring that we are not doing things manually in our new cloud environment, but that we are really setting up this software-defined and data center concept in the cloud as well as internally. Continuing to exploit the cloud by taking our remaining applications and a disciplined plan for moving them to the cloud. We probably will be a hybrid cloud for a period of time. But we are definitely continuing to move internal capability to the cloud. And then we have recently engaged an enterprise architect who will help us further flesh out our strategies in each of those domains.
One of the areas I expect that we will invest in that we have not committed to yet is a consistent integration platform. We provide a tool called Ethos for our customers that enables them to tie their Ellucian and non-Ellucian applications together from a data and reporting standpoint, and we believe we need a tool of that nature for our internal application portfolio.
High: You have alluded a couple of times to the fact that you hope to provide the sort of technology and the sort of culture to provide life-long learning for your teams. No doubt, coming to a company, an industry that you were not familiar with, at least professionally, there was a real opportunity for you to become a learner. How did you prepare yourself in the weeks before starting at Ellucian learning more about the field, of course, learning more about the company?
9-8-2016
Novelis is a leading producer of rolled aluminum, and a global leader in aluminum recycling. The company’s aluminum is used in everything from automobiles to architecture to beverage cans to consumer electronics. Much of the company’s aluminum is re-created from material already in the world today, saving natural resources and allowing for the creation of consumer products that have a lower environmental footprint. Through its recycling leadership, what would have otherwise been discarded becomes the material for new creation.
Despite attaining more than $10 billion in revenue with more than 10,000 employees, the company never had a CIO prior to the incumbent, Karen Renner, who joined nearly five years ago. Renner had been a CIO at multiple units within General Electric, and as such was used to process excellence. What she found at Novelis was an IT department in need of new, standardized processes. As she discusses with CIO Insight contributor, Peter High, the journey has been a fruitful one.
CIO Insight: You are the first CIO in the company’s history. The company grew to a tremendous size before hiring a CIO. Why was that, and what led to the conclusion that one was needed?
Renner: In order to deliver on many of Novelis’ transformation strategies, an overhaul of the information technology and data was required. The information infrastructure was unable to meet the aggressive expansions required to enter and provide the data streams required for the automotive market. We also needed modern technology to support our employees working across geographies and to meet growing demands for mobility and collaboration technologies. In order to develop and execute a global IT strategy taking into account the varying regional requirements, the CIO role was created.
CIO Insight: How would you describe the culture of the IT team when you joined, and what have you done to change it?
Renner: We have an excellent team of IT professionals at Novelis with a great mix of technical business process knowledge and program management skills. We act as one team and trusted advisors to deliver best-fit information technology solutions that people value and enjoy using. The biggest cultural shift was to broaden the reach of the team to think bigger and broader–how technology can influence outside of a local requirement to our regions or globally.
CIO Insight: I imagine there was a good deal of foundational investments that were necessary in the early days. How did you prioritize and what did you prioritize to do first?
To read the full article, please visit CIO Insight
8-17-2016
Dan Fallon’s journey from CIO to board member to president and COO has been an interesting one. Fallon, who now serves as the president and COO of GFMI Metalcrafters, credits his strong tech background for understanding how many moving parts work together (and very often, don’t). GFMI (Gaffoglio Family Metalcrafters Inc.) was founded in 1979. An Argentinian father and his sons brought to the U.S. their passion for crafting custom cars. The Metalcrafters division helps engineer and those who create custom vehicles for the auto, aero and rail industries primarily. These can be prototypes to full functioning vehicles, including driverless. The Aerospace division creates glass, carbon fiber and other composite parts for the aerospace, auto and rail industries. Additionally, the Camera Ready Parts division prepares cars for photo shoots and commercials, including logistics management.
After 22 years at Accenture, the CTO role at Navistar and CIO role at Rewards Network, among other IT leadership roles, Dan Fallon was looking for a change that would offer more operational experience. He was convinced to join GFMI Metalcrafters as president and COO in September of 2014. In this interview with CIO Insight contributor Peter High, he highlights the reason for this move.
CIO Insight: How did you become affiliated with it as President and COO?
Dan Fallon: I have known GFMI (Gaffoglio Family Metalcrafters Inc.) for more than 20 years. My father-in-law, Mike Alexander, had worked with the Gaffoglio family for many years. Mike and his brother, Larry, were the Alexander Brothers; ground-breaking, Detroit custom car guys from the late 1950s and Mike, later in his career, worked with GFMI on select projects. Mike’s son, Mike Jr., wound up working at GFMI. In 2014, Mike asked if I’d consider joining the company to help significantly grow revenue. To run a company while growing it was where I wanted to be next. After 22 years at Accenture, and five years in IT leadership positions at a couple Fortune 500 companies, I wanted to get completely immersed in business operations. Running a smaller company seemed to be the ideal—yet humbling—way for me to do so. Wow, have I learned a lot and enjoyed it. And I’m very grateful for my IT background.
CIO Insight: In recent years, you had been CTO at Navistar and CIO at Rewards Network. What did your time as a technology executive do for you in preparing for your current role as COO?
Fallon: Like Finance and HR, IT gets to “see” a very broad swath of the business, yet I believe at an even deeper level. Successful IT leaders have to understand business execution (processes, schedules and results) and where information and automation can change and accelerate execution. OK, we’ve heard that before—and it’s really hard, especially given ever-increasing competitive demands, legacy systems hangovers and the crazy challenges of changing tires on moving cars. So, as an IT guy—both ex-Accenture consultant and Fortune 500 executive—I got to see how all these moving parts work together—and very often, not. It’s like a mosaic in which some elements of the picture are clear and others are really mottled. As a result, I have this deep, innate appreciation for integration. It’s just a sense I have developed—where are the disconnects in data sharing, process performance and automated systems. So now, on yet another side of the table, COO, I can sense these disconnects; yet even more acutely because I am now directly responsible for getting it done. My time in IT helped me hone and deepen that sense which I think as a COO enables me to quickly zero in on those mottled mosaic pieces and more quickly figure out how to unblur them.
CIO Insight: What role does information technology play in your company?
8-10-2016
Greenwich Associates is the leading global provider of market intelligence and advisory services to the financial services industry. The company specializes in providing fact-based insights and practical recommendations to improve business results, and the insights and advice provided is based on the company’s business expertise and research that the team conducts with influential buyers of financial services. The buyers include fund managers, hedge funds, pension funds, endowments, large corporations, small and midsize businesses, and consumers.
Isaac Sacolick joined the company as Global CIO in January 2015 to lead Greenwich Associates’ Business Transformation Initiative, develop its data technology capabilities and to establish its product management practices. To accomplish this, the Digital Business Group (the rebranded IT department) rolled out business intelligence tools, a content management system, new market research tools and upgraded CRM and sales management capabilities. CIO Insight contributor Peter High discusses with Sacolick some of the nuts and bolts that were required to make the initiative ready for action.
Peter High: Part of your focus has been on developing subscription-based revenue for your firm. Please describe the service and the value it has derived.
Issac Sacolick: Greenwich’s core business has historically been delivering consulting, advisory services and market research to banking executives. Much of the insight delivered to clients has been through proprietary data that we source on service quality, market share and other benchmarks as well as research on topics including customer experience, payments, fraud, e-trading, blockchain, and other technology innovations in financial services.
Greenwich is extending its consulting practices to include subscription-based analytical products and services. In some cases, this includes tools that provide customers access to the underlying data visualizations and benchmarks. Using these tools, clients can perform their own analysis on how their products are performing, determine what accounts are at risk, research new opportunities, or develop strategic plans to grow market share. We are also integrating with our customers’ analytical tools, data warehouses, CRM systems, and research tools to help enable the use of our own analytics and research in their workflows.
Peter High: Can you describe how you partner with Greenwich Associates’ Chief Data Officer and CEO to establish the firm’s product strategy?
Issac Sacolick: The three of us along with our SVP of Product Management form a steering meeting that sets strategy, develops plans on transforming existing product offerings, reviews business plans for new investments, and considers partnership opportunities. We bring different knowledge, skills and experiences to the table and have different roles working the details of our product strategy. For example, our CDO may propose a repackaging of our data into a workflow that matches customer needs. Our SVP of Product will then test the concept with customers, and I will review the technology as well as sourcing requirements, while ensuring the product planning is executed efficiently. When we have concepts that resonate in the market, our CEO will consider how we communicate internally and align business leaders to revenue targets or operational changes.
As a team, we’re all focused on developing product pipelines, transforming how we sell, and growing, our analytical capabilities aligned with customer needs.
Peter High: Please describe JavelinStrategy.com and Market Structure and how your team has worked to get these off the ground.
6-20-2016
Thrifty White may not have the broad footprint of a national player, but the company’s continued focus on health-and-wellness initiatives sets it apart from the competition in small towns and cities in the upper Midwest. The company is 100 percent owned by the employees. Thrifty White believes its greatest asset is its employees who cooperate in the spirit of teamwork to help the company continue to grow and prosper. The company also prides itself on helping the communities in which it does business.
As CIO, Matt Ode ensures that all areas of the business (from executives to staff) are working together executing on the corporate strategy. This includes both top- and bottom-line projects and initiatives across the organization as well as regulatory and security items as they continually emerge. As he tells CIO Insight contributor, Peter High, he also believes that technology will shape the company’s future.
Peter High: What are your priorities for the year ahead?
Matt Ode: Our goals for 2016 are to grow our specialty pharmacy volume, grow our long-term care pharmacy business, and continue to focus on our retail pharmacy operations. One area in which we have taken the lead is in medication synchronization. Kicked off in November 2011, the program synchronizes all of a patient’s prescriptions and enables patients on multiple medications to pick up their prescriptions at once. On the day of pickup, the pharmacist will review the prescription list, monitor changes after doctor or hospital visits and check for possible drug interactions. We have over 61,000 patients on this program today and they love the convenience and how it significantly improves their medication adherence.
High: Please describe your organization structure and the size of your team.
Ode: Our organization structure is composed of the following areas. We have 31 people in IT today. I started as an IT team of one so I take a lot of pride in our team and how it is positioned today as a strategic enabler of our business.
Pharmacy Team: responsible for all design and development of our proprietary pharmacy system. Allows us to be nimble as changes in the marketplace seem to happen at a rapid rate these last several years. Med Sync program mentioned above was completely developed and implemented within our in-house system.
Infrastructure Team: responsible for 2 server rooms, disaster recovery facility, connectivity, security, and all associated hardware/software/mobile/network equipment.
Business Applications Team: responsible for all applications used in the back office and retail store teams – intranet/internet, HR/Financials ERP, data warehouse, content management systems, and cloud applications.
Store Systems: responsible for all store systems including physical desktops/laptops, printers, POS systems, and automation equipment at both store level and central fill sites. Includes Help Desk as well.
IT Business Partner/Project Manager: individual who works directly with the business executing on corporate strategy and managing incoming requests that then are prioritized in quarterly executive review meetings. Key role recently created in the last 2 years based on Joe Topinka’s book IT Business Partnerships. Also serves as a project manager that can be plugged into any IT/Business initiative. Previous background in IT software/database development a must from my perspective along with excellent communication skills.
High: What are your strategic priorities currently?
by Peter High, published on Forbes
5-31-2016
When one thinks of Motorola, one might think of the consumer brand, but $6 billion Motorola Solutions no longer includes the consumer brand, which was sold to Lenovo in October of 2014. Currently, the $6 billion company is a leader in public safety, providing two-way radios and for providing some of the most reliable voice communication networks around the world. It is focused on the areas of public safety, such as police, fire, and EMS. The company is also focused on smart public safety, which is how first responders use advanced technologies to help communities be safer and work more efficiently.
Technology has always been at the center of what made Motorola an iconic brand, but ironically the IT department was until recent times viewed as a support organization rather than a driver of innovation and efficiency. When Greg Meyers joined Motorola Solutions nearly two years ago, he did so after spending the prior dozen years in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries. He was attracted to history of the firm, now dating back eighty-eight years, but also to the transformation that he would lead. In the period since, he has led IT to become much more customer-centric, deriving ideas directly from those who Motorola Solutions serves. He has also rethought the hiring and training methods to ensure that his team has the make-up to drive higher levels of value. He has also ushered in a “cloud-first” strategy to ensure that IT is more nimble, agile, and flexible.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 36th article in the CIO’s First 100 Days series. To read the prior 34 with the CIOs of companies like Ford, Intel, GE, P&G, Kaiser Permanente, and AARP, among many others, please visit this link.)
Peter High: Can you provide an overview of what is within your purview as chief information officer of Motorola Solutions?
Greg Meyers: It is a pretty simple structure. We are one business unit, one division, and I am the head of IT for the whole company. We are a global company in about one hundred and fifty locations around the world. I am responsible for all the IT that you would expect, which would include the typical systems around G&A, so the ERP environment, the HR systems, legal systems, and supply chain systems, but also play an important role in the front office. A large part of our business is done over e-commerce. My organization is responsible for all the digital interfaces that we have with our customers, both pre-sales marketing, actual commerce of product services and software, as well as post-sales support. Increasingly we are moving into areas that are helping our business evolve into a company that is focused on cloud, Big Data, and those areas. So we incubate a number of those core technologies as well.
High: Can you talk a bit about some of the things that are on your roadmap for the year ahead?
Meyers: Absolutely. For us, there are three things that we are primarily focused on as a department. We are seeing increased revenue around managed services, but also smart public safety. We are seeking to transform from an IT perspective how we interact and engage our customers to drive top line, but also simplify and make it easier for us to do business with them. That obviously helps us improve our bottom line, but also helps improve the customer experience.
The second thing is helping to reimagine our culture. By adopting what we call a cloud-first, mobile-first, wireless-first philosophy, we are looking to untether our workforce from cubicles and wires in their offices to allow them to collaborate wherever they need at any time. We had a pretty well-publicized change last year. We moved 22,000 users from the Microsoft stack to Google stack in one day. We have the largest PBX to cloud transition ever made in the world. We have over five thousand seats that are purely voiceover IP. No hardware. The phone closets are gone.
The third thing is around rethinking what IT means to the company. Rather than it being a back office function, that is, keeping support systems alive, how do we help the company and our customers capitalize on some of the shifts that are caused by the move to mobile, to cloud? And then there is this complicated environment around security, digital mobile. That helps us have the best talent we can ultimately export to our business to create future products and services, and also to incubate a number of those services that will eventually make their way into the products and services that we commercialize.
