by Peter High, series on Forbes.com
I would like to introduce a new series, which I refer to as “Business CIO.” Information Technology is becoming much more of the business by the business and for the business than ever before. This is true because almost all business trends have deep technology components to them. Not only every industry, but practically every function within every company needs IT to run its most strategic processes and platforms. Lastly, customers are becoming ever more technology savvy. As a result, companies are demanding that IT leadership reflect this business-centricity. This is a diverse lot, including individuals like:
In the kick-off article to the series, I highlight some key themes from the broad perspectives of these diverse CIOs:
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Like other companies, the IT function at Intuit used to be one that the rest of the company loved to complain about. It was an easy scapegoat for a number of issues. Atticus Tysen has been at Intuit for 14 years, and for the first 11 years of that experience, he was outside of IT and was quite familiar with the complaints. He held roles in Product Management, in Engineering and Operations, and in Enterprise Business Solutions. Rather than pile on as others complained, Tysen elected to do something about it by joining IT as senior vice president and chief information officer three years ago.
Since then, Tysen has revamped the function such that it has more of a product leadership mentality rather than that of the order takers of old. He has also ensured that IT is transparent in its communications so that the value it contributes is more readily understood by the company and its customers. Tysen covered all of the above while also offering advice for CIOs of non-technology centric companies who might wish to emulate some of what he has done in the transformation he has led.
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Stephanie von Friedeburg is the CIO and Vice President of Information Technology Solutions at the World Bank Group. In that capacity, she has overseen a tremendous transformation of IT across the Group throughout the 186 countries in which it operates. A primary weapon in her arsenal has been better use of cloud technology. This has increased the flexibility of IT, while also enhancing the Bank’s information security around the globe.
Additionally, she has joined a small but growing group of CIOs who have been asked to join the boards of companies. In addition to being a part of the Bank-Fund Staff Federal Credit Union, von Friedeburg is on the board of Box.org. Part of the reason she has been board-ready has been the fact that she has a non-traditional background. With foreign policy degrees and an MBA from the Wharton School, von Friedeburg began her career at the Bank in non-technical roles. She has an auto-didact’s talent to learn quickly, while surrounding herself with a talented team with complementary strengths. She covers all the above and more in this interview.
Early in his career, Tim McCabe would not have anticipated that he would lead IT for a multi-billion dollar company. He studied philosophy as an undergraduate rather than focusing on a technical discipline. He joined the legal department at General Motors, and led Global Outsourcing for the automotive behemoth. It was during this time that he integrated more deeply into the IT department, first at General Motors, and later as Director of Strategy and Sourcing for Delphi Automotive. When he took over the chief information officer responsibilities at Delphi, he did so as a business-centric IT leader. He notes that even as CIO, he is a business leader first, and a technology leader second.
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With the high profile issues plaguing the technical implementation of the Affordable Care Act, the gulf between those who understand healthcare and those who understand technology has been quite stark. There are precious few CIOs who have a practitioner’s perspective when it comes to healthcare. The stereotype between doctors and nurses and IT executives highlight very different qualities. The former are noted for their interpersonal skills, their ability to listen, while being generally technophobes in practice. The latter have historically been introverted problem solvers who often operated more as order takers rather than as proactive advisors. Each should take attempt to draw from the strengths of the others to become more well-rounded.
An executive who exhibits the strong qualities of each is Linda Reed because she is each. Reed is a registered nurse whose earliest experience was in that field. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she saw the transformative power of technology early on and embraced it, and then became deeply involved in it. As a result, she rose to become the CIO of Atlantic Health System. She did not leave her credentials as an RN at the door, however, drawing strength from her earlier experience. In fact, she became a CIO-plus when she added responsibilities to become the Vice President of Integrated and Behavioral Medicine & CIO of Atlantic Health System.
As Reed explains in this video interview that I conducted with her, the advantages of having experience as a healthcare practitioner and as a technology executive offers her an almost unique ability to see opportunities and threats in the business and address them in equal measure with technology solutions. If only there were more people like her assisting the President of the United States at the moment.
Brian Bonner is the CIO of Texas Instruments, a $13 billion dollar semi-conductor company, and he manages a central IT organization that supports all aspects of IT including manufacturing, sales, and product development throughout the world. His organization is 1,100 people strong. Although Bonner has engineering degrees at the undergraduate and graduate levels, he spent time in a wide array of functions outside of IT, such as his role as vice president of Worldwide Mass Marketing and Acquisition Integration at Texas Instruments. He has also held general management, sales, and product development roles and was responsible for product strategy & development as well as revenue generation. His vast experience across nearly 20 years at Texas Instruments has made him a particularly business savvy IT executive, and it has meant that he has not been patient with any perception of IT as a support organization.
His business savviness has also made him an attractive candidate to sit on boards of different kinds. Currently, he is a board member of Copper Mobile and he is an advisory board member to for Gemini Israel Ventures. Bonner says that board membership has made him a much stronger executive at Texas Instruments, and recommends that others who might seek a board position first work on demonstrating business value in their current roles as CIO, demonstrating that they have the know-how necessary to become a board-level CIO.
Bruce Hoffmeister’s path to the role of Global CIO of Marriott has been an interesting one. He actually grew in the Finance function of the company. Having minored in computer science as an undergraduate before receiving his MBA with concentrations in finance and accounting, he had an appreciation for technology. He realized early that there was power at the nexus of technology and finance. One way in which he brought the functions closer together at Marriott was by developing a training module for IT employees on the basics of finance, with a special emphasis on the financial metrics that were of particular importance to the hospitality industry. An example is revenue per available room, or RevPAR, as it is commonly referred to in the industry. He found that too few members of the IT team were familiar with its make-up, and therefore were disconnected with the role IT could play in improving it. His training modules ensured that more people in IT were thinking about applying technology to great value for the company.
Just as more IT employees had reason to think further about finance, Hoffmeister had more reason to think about the power of technology. He left his post as SVP of Global Revenue Management to become the head of Global Sales & Marketing Technology and the Shared Services before becoming Global CIO.
When I asked Hoffmeister about the logic of his rising to the role with his background, he indicated that he believed he was the right person for the role at the time he took it, but he also said that he realizes that the needs of a company change, and the ideal executive today may be the wrong one in the future as needs change. This humility is rare among executives with such a broad purview, and has served Hoffmeister well in focusing on the present needs of Marriott, but also in preparing the future leaders of the IT function.
Jamie Miller runs information technology for one of the most complex and admired companies in the world: General Electric. One would think that the CIO of such a company would have a deep technical background, perhaps having an advanced degree in an engineering discipline along with multiple stints as CIO previously. Miller’s resume may not have these items on it, but she has something that IT departments increasingly need: financial expertise.
IT used to be a part of Finance in many companies, as some of the earliest technologies developed at big companies was technology applied to the general ledger, accounting systems more generally, and the like. Likewise, when technology was taught at busienss schools, it was often a sub-set of the accounting department. It is perhaps ironic that a growing number of CIOs have grown up through the Finance function. Miller has leveraged her background to make IT more transparent and accountable, and ever more cognizant of the value that it delivers to the enterprise. CIOs with or without financial backgrounds should follow her lead.
Peter High
4-28-2016
Excerpt from the Article:
Brown University has a stated goal to be the leader in appropriate use of technology among its peers and beyond. Ravi Pendse serves as the vice president and CIO of Brown University, and in that role, it is his responsibility to enact that vision. He is also a Professor of Practice in Computer Science and Engineering, and therefore is the rare CIO who also teaches students. As he tells CIO Insight contributor, Peter High, he is a technology evangelist through the multiple hats that he wears.
Peter High: Ravi, please describe your role as CIO of Brown University.
Ravi Pendse: I have the privilege and honor to serve as the vice president and Chief Information Officer at Brown University. My areas of responsibility include academic computing, network and telecommunications services, infrastructure services, enterprise applications, desktop and support services, and information security. I also oversee research computing which encompasses high performance computing, a state-of-the-art visualization CAVE, and data science practice. It is our goal to make Brown University the leader in appropriate use of technology among its peers and beyond.
While I have a strong team of 225 reporting to me, I really see myself as working for them. I ensure that they feel empowered to do their job by setting the vision, creating opportunities, assisting them when needed, and getting out of their way when not needed. In addition to our centralized IT staff, Brown has around 160 additional IT staff who work for different units and schools. Some of these positions have dotted reporting lines to me. Overall, yes, we have a federated model. We work collaboratively and strive to add value.
High: You are also a Professor of Practice in Computer Science and Engineering. How much time do you spend teaching versus your role as CIO?
Pendse: I am very passionate about teaching and sharing ideas. Typically, I teach one class every year, advise both graduate and undergraduate students, and conduct research. While most of my time is spent being the technology evangelist, I find time to be in the class and with students. I guess sleep is optional when you are a CIO and a passionate teacher.
High: You have worked extensively at Brown and at Wichita State before in the design of the digital classroom. Please describe some of your thinking relative to that topic.
Pendse: I believe that classroom design should involve partnership and collaboration with faculty, students and applicable staff members. Staff such as instructional designers and media support professionals should play a key role in this process. It is very important to partner with facilities management to enable a collaborative classroom. In my opinion, flexible learning spaces should replace all bolted down chairs and tables. Of course, this means a smaller capacity classroom. Research shows that proper classroom configuration, mood lighting, just-in-time technology, and a well-trained instructor will result in an incredibly conducive learning environment. Technology also powers anytime, anyplace learning; one should always ask the question “If you want to go to class, is a room (classroom) really necessary?” Thoughtful collaboration between all stakeholders will provide an inviting classroom to empower learning.
High: How does your work as a professor inform your insights as a CIO?
To read the full article, please visit CIO Insight
by Peter High, published on Forbes
3-28-2016
Anne Margulies is the Chief Information Officer of perhaps the best known university on earth, Harvard University. She has been an education technology pioneer for much longer, however. She was the founding Executive Director of MIT OpenCourseWare, the internationally acclaimed initiative to publish the teaching materials for their entire curriculum openly and freely over the Internet. As such, she was involved in some of the earliest precursors of today’s MOOCs.
It should come as no surprise that Marguilies was intricately involved in HarvardX, Harvard’s contribution to edX. For her own team, she has developed what she calls the IT Academy, aggregating training materials to provide common IT skills across her entire department. Therefore, Margulies is a remarkably innovative CIO, especially when it comes to training and education.
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Peter High: Anne Margulies, you are the Chief Information Officer of Harvard University, one of the biggest brands in the world. Could you could give a definition of what is within your purview?
Anne Margulies: Harvard is a large, complex, decentralized university. As the University CIO I am responsible for information technology strategies, plans, and policies, as well as all of the University-wide infrastructure and applications that serve all of our schools. In addition, I am directly responsible for end-to-end technology for the central administration and for the faculty of Arts and Sciences, the largest of our schools. It includes our undergraduate, college, as well as our graduate school of Arts and Sciences. It is a large portfolio.
High: You mentioned that strategy is one of those areas that is under your watch. Can you talk about your method of crafting strategic plans and maybe share some of the details of your latest plan?
Margulies: Absolutely. We have an important leadership group here at Harvard called the CIO Council, which I chair. It is comprised of the CIO councils of our professional schools, as well as our Chief Technology Officer and our Chief Information Security Officer. This leadership group is responsible for developing Harvard’s IT strategic plan. The way that we do that is we focus much on those things that make sense and are most important for us to work on together as a university, as opposed to those technologies that should be done separately school by school. Five years ago we developed a strategic plan with key strategic initiatives for the University, and the CIO Council has now also been responsible for overseeing the implementation of the strategic plan. Since then, we have updated and revised the strategic plan because we finished some initiatives and we have added some new ones. It is a process that I think is actually working quite well for Harvard.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
3-21-2016
Cars.com is a web 1.0 company, having launched in 1998. It receives roughly thirty million visits per month, and it focuses on the merchandising of new and used vehicles. Kevin Steele leads IT and product for the company, and as such has typical CIO responsibilities, but also is responsible for the Cars.com website, the products the company sells to dealers, the features the company presents to consumers. Therefore, he has an unusually strategic set of responsibilities. Within the past three and a half years, Steele has shepherded in the rise of Cars.com’s mobile presence to reflect the fact that customers increasingly wish to access the site on their smartphones.
In being a customer-centric IT executive, Steele and his team must bear in mind two sets of constituents, both dealers and those who purchase cars. In this interview, Steele describes the methods he uses to stay on top of the needs of each, the sanctity of having a solid strategic planning process, and the need to develop in an agile fashion, among other topics.
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Peter High: Kevin, you are the Vice President of Technology at Cars.com, and I wonder if we could begin with a description of Cars.com’s business. I know you are one of the older of the dot com companies, actually having emerged during the internet 1.0 period. This is an organization I would imagine that has gone through a variety of iterations, changes, evolutions, perhaps some pivots through time. I would love to get your high level overview of the business itself as it stands today.
Kevin Steele: Cars.com is essentially a web platform that enables the connection of consumers that are looking to buy vehicles, both new and used, with dealers that are looking to sell vehicles, both new and used. We are a website that gets approximately thirty million visits per month and we focus on the merchandising of new and used vehicles.
High: When you think about the website and your customer you are in between a couple of different parties— both the dealers and the people who are purchasing cars. How do you think about the experience for each of those sets of constituents? And as you are iterating around the development of products, for instance, when you are reaching out to customers does it tend to be a cross-section between those two different sets of constituents?
Steele: Yes, it is. Our objective is to try to strike a balance between the two. Certainly our site is structured and focused on being a consumer-centric site. We look to create features and content and search capabilities that favor the ways that consumers want to engage with vehicle shopping, in particular engage with dealers from a connections standpoint—whether that be viewing a map and how to reach a dealer through a mobile device, or sending a dealer an email and seeking a quote on a vehicle they are interested in. On the dealer side, we look to make sure that we are leveraging our large audience to the best of our abilities to merchandise dealers in a positive light, make sure that they have the largest exposure to consumers for their inventory, and provide them with products to merchandise, attract, and build brand for their dealerships.
3-14-2016
Ted Colbert has one of the largest roles in IT, that of CIO of $96 billion aerospace and defense giant Boeing. Still in his early 40s, Colbert’s rise has been like a 787 Dreamliner taking flight. He has balanced an innovation and digital transformation agenda while pushing the diverse businesses to do more commonly. In so doing, he has been a driver of both top and bottom line value for the enterprise. At the same time that he has helped the company become more innovative, he has also stewarded in a sophisticated security program. As a reward for his team’s great work, last week, Colbert added the title of SVP of Information and Analytics to his responsibilities as CIO.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 28th interview in the CIO-plus series. To read the prior 27 with CIO-pluses from the likes of Verizon, Mondelez International, P&G, and Walgreens, among others, please click this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Ted, I thought we would begin with the transformation that you have been leading as chief information officer. Could you give us a brief overview of some of the activities that you’ve been leading?
Ted Colbert: The business we are in is growing, challenging, super diverse, very complex, and change happens at a pace that sometimes is fast and sometimes slow.
Last year, we launched a program around geographic diversification. We have a significant presence down in South Carolina. Two years ago, there might have been 10 IT employees there. Now, we have almost 700 IT employees in South Carolina. We have several hundred additional employees in St. Louis. We balance our workforce around the country to get access to different types of talent, to have diversity, to be connected with our business, and to fit the business around the US. We are spread across the country and that has offered us some other opportunities from the people perspective.
High: IT has created the laudable goal of becoming more aligned with the strategic plans of the different parts of the organization. How do you do that organizationally?
Colbert: We are an engineering company, so innovation is everywhere. You do not have to go the IT team to find innovation. We have engineers and software designers and developers in all the parts of organization.
I also lead the CIO strategy council which is a group of senior executives. It is probably two or three degrees from the CEO. We meet every other month or so, and go through what we are doing to drive operational excellence in the organization. Then we pick some specific topics from a strategic perspective to ensure we are aligned on them.
3-11-2016
Teacher Retirement System of Texas (TRS) is the largest public retirement system in Texas in both membership and assets. It is the sixth largest public pension plan in the U.S. and is among the 20 largest in the world. The agency serves more than 1.4 million people–1,081,505 are public and higher education members, and 377,738 are retirement recipients. System net assets total approximately $128.5 billion. As CIO, Chris Cutler oversees and provides strategic direction for the use of technology and information resources that enables TRS to successfully fulfill its mission. As Cutler tells CIO Insight contributor Peter High, he wears many hats: business leader, technology evangelist, business partner, recruiter, change agent and bridge builder.
Peter High: Please describe your role as CIO of the Teacher Retirement System of Texas.
Chris Cutler: As CIO, I wear many hats. These hats include: business leader, technology evangelist, business partner, recruiter, change agent and bridge builder.
Business Leader
As a business leader I serve as a member on the TRS Executive Council. The TRS Executive Council is comprised of C-suite executives and led by our executive director. This council provides guidance to the executive director and makes final decisions on overall corporate policies and directions.
Technology Evangelist
As technology evangelist, I am responsible for educating the Executive Council and our business leaders on the technology and services IT provides and how they can best leverage our offerings. This role also includes marketing the value of IT and building support for future technology initiatives.
Business Partner
IT is a business enabler, providing secure and highly available technology solutions that enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of TRS and our members. As such, it’s my job to ensure IT is seen by our individual business areas as a true business partner, not just simply a service provider. IT needs to truly understand the business of TRS and be proactive in helping solve business problems and recommend innovations that move our business forward.
Recruiter
The most important asset an IT division has is its people. This may sound a bit cliché, but it is true–especially in IT. As CIO, it’s my job to promote the TRS IT Division both internally and externally as well as to actively seek out individuals who would make good additions to our team. Also, just as important, is demonstrating the leadership, vision and support needed to keep the great employees we already have.
Change Agent
The one thing that is certain in IT is it’s going to change. Many times these technology changes have a significant impact on the rest of the business and/or provide an opportunity for improving efficiency. As such, the CIO often finds himself or herself in the position of change agent, promoting and leading enterprise projects that bring about significant shifts in the organization.
Bridge Builder
Finally, as CIO I have a unique view into the varying business units and their cultures. This gives me a unique perspective on how the business runs, how it communicates and how decisions are made. This also provides opportunities to build strong business relationships within the different business areas. With this knowledge and relationships, I can often be a catalyst in helping build bridges and achieve understandings across the different business areas when conflicts arise.
12-28-2015
Like the rest of NetApp, Cynthia Stoddard’s IT team has been part of a major transformation at the company in recent years. Stoddard has been the Chief Information Officer of NetApp for nearly four years, and has helped evolve the “NetApp on NetApp” program such that IT tests products, processes, and procedures before customers, providing insights to the Engineering team, and allowing the IT team to be advocates on the company’s behalf with customers. Stoddard estimates that she spends roughly 30 percent of her time with customers. The combination of these activities have primed IT to become a source of innovation for the company, as well.
The NetApp Innovation Lab includes multiple people from IT who help test new technologies and think of new wrinkles to existing solutions. The team has generated significant value in this process.
Despite going through a trying transformation, the company continues to invest mightily in its people, providing technical and leadership training for those who seek it, ensuring that the next round of leaders of the company are groomed well in advance of their promotion.
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Peter High: I thought we would begin with a discussion about NetApp itself. The company is obviously in the midst of a significant transformation. Could you let us know how things are, and IT’s role in that transformation?
Cynthia Stoddard: Within NetApp, and NetApp IT, we recognized, a few years ago, that cloud was going to be a key enabler and key building block to anything that we would do. We have built our infrastructure within IT to enable not only the flexibility and agility that the cloud brings, but also to contribute to showcasing our products. We have been a leader in the data management and storage space, but if you look at the cloud and what we have been doing within the cloud space, we have a vision for data fabric. What the data fabric does is allow you to connect your information between your on premise, cloud, and SaaS providers in a hybrid environment and maintain control and ownership of that information and that data. If you look at what we have done within NetApp, we are fully hybrid in our environment. We are able to host on premise traditional, on premise private cloud, public cloud, or hyperscaler. It is all tied together with our data fabric and with a series of orchestration tools that bring everything together. It is a unified view of data throughout all these environments that becomes powerful and helps enable the business to make the decisions and have the productivity that they need during business processes.
High: As you talk about topics that are relevant to the company, relevant to IT, and obviously relevant to your company’s customers, it brings to mind something I have heard you talk about, in the past, that you have been a proponent of NetApp on NetApp – the idea of the IT department becoming the first client of the organization. Can you describe how you have gone about that and the advantages that you have garnered as a CIO in a company that serves IT departments?
12-18-2015
Chobani is the No. 1 Greek yogurt in the United States. Founded in 2005 by Turkish immigrant Hamdi Ulukaya, the company now has more than 1,200 employees. One year ago, Jindra Zitek was promoted to the position of interim-CIO at the company. He had been vice president of sales, marketing, business analytics and employee solutions within IT. Within a few months, he dropped the interim part of his title. As he discusses with CIO Insight contributor, Peter High, as CIO, he is responsible for Chobani’s global IT strategy, delivery and support—namely technical services including network operations, help desk and cyber-security; applications, starting with the company’s ERP and other functional tools, as well as company-wide collaboration and productivity tools.
CIO Insight: You do not have a traditional educational background for a CIO, as you studied finance and economics as an undergraduate at the London School of Economics, and you received an MBA from Columbia University. You then worked as a consultant with McKinsey. How did your background in finance and as a consultant help you in your current role and how did you develop your technical skills?
Jindra Zitek: I believe my non-technical background in finance and consulting and project implementation experience from McKinsey actually helps me be an effective IT leader and partner for the business. At McKinsey, I specialized in business transformations, turnarounds and growth strategies. Across a number of industries (automotive, energy, health care, telecommunications), I experienced how technology and applications help businesses and individual functions unlock value—for example through increasing efficiency and consistency of business processes, or delivering insights and functionality that would otherwise not be possible (or with significant manual effort only). Being a business leader first enables me to identify where IT can deliver value and effectively communicate it to my business partners and then align on joint business/IT strategy and funding. My finance and McKinsey background drives me to look for clear benefits in each IT project at Chobani, and once we kick off a new project I ensure that we have clear accountability on both the IT and business side and measurable benefits milestones. As a rule, all of our projects have business sponsors to make sure we work on initiatives that matter to the business.
I am able to focus on the value to the business and prioritization thanks to our very strong IT leadership team who I focus on technical and applications-specific knowledge and skills. While I have not worked in IT directly previously, my relationship with IT and hardware goes back to my early teenage years when I started working part time at my dad’s business back in the Czech Republic-reverse logistics and repairs for end-user devices (printers, PCs, cell phones, cameras etc). In my current role, I am making sure that I leverage both McKinsey and TPG [private equity investor into Chobani] network of IT professionals.
CIO Insight: When you first took on the role of CIO, how did you organize yourself in the early days of this period? Were there changes to the IT strategy, to the organization structure, to processes, or to technologies that you implemented?
11-30-2015
When Jack Clare joined Dunkin’ Brands, holding company of Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin-Robbins in 2012, he did so after a stint as CIO of Yum! Restaurants International. He took over a traditional IT function, but two and a half years into his time at Dunkin, there was a need for someone to lead corporate strategy for the company. The leadership team called upon Clare to take on these added responsibilities. The leadership team was impressed with the job he had done as CIO, but also were pleased that he had management consulting experience, and had worked on matters of strategy in his past. The fact that so much of business strategy is enabled by information and technology was an added reason. As such, Clare, now the Chief Information and Strategy Officer of Dunkin’ Brands, is part of a small but growing group of CIOs who have taken over the strategy function. In this interview, he describes the reasons why he feels he got the combined role, the reasons why CEOs he spoke with were not surprised, and his thoughts about whether other CIOs will increasingly follow in his footsteps.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 26th interview in the CIO-plus series. To read the prior 25 articles in the series with CIO-pluses from companies like Waste Management, Marsh & McLennan, Walgreen’s, the San Francisco Giants, P&G, and Nissan-Renault, among many others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above and to the left.)
Peter High: You are the Chief Information and Strategy Officer of Dunkin’ Brands. I thought we would begin with the two sides of your role, starting with the CIO role, as that is the role you have had longer. Can you talk a bit about what the Chief Information Officer role entails within Dunkin’ Brands?
Jack Clare: I was hired as the CIO, and it is a somewhat typical enterprise role – global IT for the organization. Being a franchise restaurant retailer though, the nuances here at Dunkin’ are that we have all the traditional corporate IT function that everyone might expect, but we are also focused on the retail systems in our stores and that face our consumers. We have a number of mobile applications and other systems that we support that have become, or evolved in the last few years to, mission critical. Additionally, I handle anything that is directly revenue-driving for our franchisees in store. Those are the two focus areas for us, but I still provision client devices, phones, etc. for our enterprise employees as well as handling all the traditional infrastructure functions.
High: You have the advantage of having IT employees who are presumably customers of your business. As a result, do you find that your employees have the ability to suggest new innovations and new technologies that might enhance the customer experience, as differentiated from an aerospace and defense company, for instance?
Clare: That is true not just in our IT function, but with our peers and colleagues in Marketing, Operations, or any of the functions. We are a broad-based consumer brand, and everyone in the company is also part of the target consumer base. As it has turned out, I have been in branded consumer businesses, on both the consumer packaged goods side and now restaurant retailing, for a number of years. I have always been in the target user base of the particular businesses that I have worked for.
11-16-15
Sophie Vandebroek has been with Xerox for 25 years, and in that time has seen tremendous change. The one-time elite brand went through a period in the woods, so to speak, and now Sophie (among others) have helped the company return to its innovative roots. As company’s chief technology officer, and as the President of Xerox Innovation Group, she has put a lot of thought both into what has made the company special at its core and from its founding, while incorporating in new methods such as developing “dreaming sessions” in which Xerox employees and customers dream up new ideas without the constraints of what is possible today. She also indicates that innovators must have fun at work, as well as leading balanced lives.
Vandebroek is also one of several examples of female executives. It continues to be rare in technology companies to have CTOs and innovation heads who are women. Vandebroek has spearheaded diversity programs at the company, and she has employed a variety of creative methods to ensure that female technical leaders continue to be found and groomed for leadership. She discusses all the above and more herein.
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Peter High: You are the Chief Technology Officer of Xerox, as well as the President of the Xerox Innovation Group. Please provide a breakdown between the two sets of responsibilities you have.
Sophie Vandebroek: They are very complementary. As you might know, Xerox is a global corporation with 140,000 employees across the world. We are the largest corporation in business process services and document management services. About 60 percent of our revenue comes from business process outsourcing services in areas like healthcare, transportation, financial services, education, etc. 40 percent comes from our traditional printing, imaging, and publishing business, which continues to do very well.
In my role as Chief Technology Officer, I partner with the business group presidents, and with our CEO and senior team to constantly predict disruptive changes that will impact our clients. I help make sure that, as a business, we are positioned to provide the services to our clients that they need to successfully provide services to end users. As part of that, we look at the trends and define the investment portfolio together with our joint venture partner, Fuji Xerox, which is now more than fifty years old. We invest over a billion dollars in research, development, and engineering. We determine the right investment portfolio, what the right strategy is, and how to execute.
As the head of the Xerox Innovation Group, we have people that not only know what disruptive changes are coming, but they also create those new waves, whether that is in computing, machine learning, or the Internet of Everything. Within the labs around the globe, we envision the future together with our clients. We do a lot of co-innovation and co-creation to envision the future and make it a reality for our clients, the world, and our business. Those are the two roles.
High: You talked a bit about the creation of the strategy, as well as the interaction with customers, which are essential to developing the insights as to where innovation will be focused. Can you talk about some of those strategies and some of the things you briefly touched on – computing, the Internet of everything, and machine learning?
