9/04/2018
By Peter High. Published on Forbes
Index Ventures General Partner, Mike Volpi, has an unusual distinction in the world of venture capital: he sits on the board of one of the oldest and largest automotive companies in the world, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (the company was actually formed in 2014, but the parts that came together are each quite old), and on the board of companies like Aurora, which provides self-driving car technology. As such, he understands and is helping to shape autonomous driving from the supply and demand sides deeper than most.
Born in Italy, raised in Japan, and educated in the United States, Volpi spent time at Cisco during times of extraordinary growth. As Chief Strategy Officer for the company he led corporate strategy, strategic alliances, and business development. During the seven years in which he held that role (spanning from 1994 through 2000), Volpi oversaw the acquisition of over 70 companies.
He started Index’s San Francisco office in 2009, ahead of the curve on tech’s move up the peninsula of Silicon Valley and into the city. Since then, he has led investments Arista Networks, Cloud.com, Hortonworks, Pure Storage, Sonos, and Zuora, among many other companies. We discuss the future of self driving cars, and several other topics in this far reaching interview.
(To listen to a podcast version of this interview, click this link. To read future articles like this one, follow me on Twitter @PeterAHigh.)
Peter High: You have been a General Partner with Index Ventures since you joined the firm in 2009. One of the most prominent technologies you are involved in is the technology that powers autonomous vehicles. As you are an investor in that space, you have sat on the board of startups, such as Aurora, as well as the board of Fiat Chrysler. Could you elaborate on the different perspectives you gain from these diverse experiences with both digital native and digital immigrant organizations? Furthermore, can you talk about the progress that has been made in this industry now that the innovation that has been hyped up for years is becoming a reality?
Mike Volpi: There are two important messages to take away. The first is that the use of technology is enormously transformative and important to the business world, various segments of the industry, and society in general. There are 38,000 deaths in traffic accidents in the United States per year while places such as India see close to half a million deaths a year. This technology is built to change that and to create a safer environment for people to drive in. Additionally, this technology has a wide variety of ancillary benefits, such as the reduction of parking lots, the creation of urban driving environments, commute patterns, reduction of traffic, among others.
To read the full interview, please visit Forbes
8/28/2018
It has been quite a decade for Frederic Kerrest. In 2009, he co-founded Okta after a long and productive stint at Salesforce. Since then, the company has gone from two to 1,300 employees, and has gone public. With a focus on web single sign-on, identity, and lifecycle management, Kerrest and Okta have become one of the ubiquitous digital native companies, leveraged by many household name companies.
As a firm that serves CIOs and CISOs in many cases, Kerrest had each of those roles at different times at Okta. He has ceded each, and now has people playing each role who not only run those internal functions for the company, but provide deep insights regarding the company’s product offering. In this interview, Kerrest talks about his entrepreneurial journey, the path to success, and what’s on the horizon for the company.
(To read future articles like this one, please follow me on Twitter @PeterAHigh.)
Peter High: Since you co-founded Okta in 2009, the company has seen an enormous amount of change and growth. Could you elaborate on the genesis of Okta, focusing on what aspects from your prior experiences led you and Todd McKinnon to start the company?
Frederic Kerrest: All companies are becoming technology companies as they build applications and unlock new routes to the market that are engaging with their customers. Okta is focused on helping companies in this transition, both by improving the way they manage their extended enterprise, employees, contractors, and partners, as well as helping them improve their customer experience. Since starting in early 2009, we have gone from two to roughly 1,300 employees, zero to approximately $350 million in revenue, while serving 4,700 customers along the way. We went from two shared offices in one of my friend’s offices to ten locations in five countries. What is exciting is that from our perspective, we are just getting started.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
12/18/17
By Peter High, published on Forbes
Thaddeus Arroyo has a remarkable journey in technology. He began his career in telecommunications, eventually became an IT executive at Sabre, and then returned to telecommunications as the Chief Information Officer of Cingular Wireless. Via acquisition, he would later join AT&T and become the company’s global CIO.
As he describes it, Arroyo was fortunate to be exposed to growth-oriented, innovative, and transformative opportunities. This included time as the President of Technology Development at AT&T. In that role, Arroyo was responsible for the development of AT&T’s products and services, digital experiences for customers, and systems supporting the operations across AT&T business segments, networks, and services. He notes that, “These experiences equipped me with a broad perspective across many technology and business operation disciplines, and this set me on the path to acquiring the skills required for any successful business leader.”
Opportunity called in Mexico when AT&T acquired multiple businesses in that market, and Arroyo would become the CEO of AT&T Mexico for a two year period in 2015 through 2016. Earlier this year, he became the CEO of AT&T Business.
Arroyo believes that this rapid rise beyond the CIO role will be accessible to many others. He believes that great IT leaders who understand business processes as well as anyone, and who use their unique visibility across all business units to contribute and help drive the business strategy will follow in his footsteps.
Peter High: You have gone from chief information officer of multiple companies to Chief Executive Officer of AT&T Business. Can you describe your career path in brief?
Thaddeus Arroyo: Over the course of my career, I have moved across industries and roles serving businesses and enabling capabilities. Most of my career has been spent in the technology and telecommunication space. Having worked across multiple industries, I have been appointed to positions that have led to technology transformation and integration, and I have focused on enabling business strategies that create business velocity and drive product innovation.
I have looked for roles that position me to broaden my skills through new experiences. That was true at the beginning of my career when I started in the IT department of Southwestern Bell, which was the nucleus of what today is AT&T. While working there, I served in the US Army Reserve as a Signal Corps Officer. That part-time experience was a large element of how I developed my core management and leadership foundation.
After beginning my career in the telecommunication space, I left and changed industries. I went to work for the IT department of American Airlines with Sabre Corporation. There, I had an opportunity to work on expanding their international data networks, then work on application development, and finally on product marketing. My time with Sabre allowed me to move across disciplines and get experience around not just the application of technology, but around operating the business too. That experience was instrumental in positioning me for what I do today.
My experience with Sabre led to my first CIO role, which was at Cingular Wireless. Cingular Wireless was the result of the consolidation of several regional wireless players, including BellSouth and SBC, which evolved from Southwestern Bell Telephone. At Cingular, I had an opportunity to direct the scaling of our operations and the integration of our systems during a period when the wireless industry was consolidating. During that scaling, Cingular purchased AT&T Wireless. When AT&T acquired BellSouth in 2007, I had an opportunity to become the Global CIO for all of AT&T.
High: How and when did you pivot from CIO to CEO?
Peter High
10-8-2015
Excerpt from the Article:
Hudbay Minerals is a Canadian integrated mining company with operations, development properties and exploration activities across the Americas and focuses on the discovery, production and marketing of base and precious metals. The company’s objective is to create sustainable value through increased commodity exposure on a per-share basis by growing long-life deposits, in high-quality and mining-friendly jurisdictions.
Joe AbiDaoud has been CIO of Hudbay for more than five years. He speaks with CIO Insight contributor Peter High about his role in innovation, his input on mergers and acquisitions, the company’s global expansion and a variety topics concerning IT.
CIO Insight: What are some of your strategic IT imperatives for the foreseeable future?
Joe AbiDaoud: We’ve been executing well on our strategy thus far. This has included shifting to cloud and SaaS for many enterprise applications, organizational design based on Gartner’s LEAN model, Single Instance ERP platform, business intelligence-enabled system architecture. What this means from a business perspective is the ability to scale our business effectively. It helps us become a low-cost producer, and drive efficiency and value from our operations.
CIO Insight: You are one of the leaders responsible for innovation. What are some examples of IT-led innovation at HudBay Minerals?
AbiDaoud: HudBay has a great track record for success. I firmly believe success requires innovation. Innovation doesn’t always mean technology but technology can drive innovation. We take a collaborative approach to innovation and work with our stakeholders on ways to transform our business. Some examples include introducing new software capabilities, collaborating on ways to get real-time data into the field through displays and mobile devices; coming up with new ways to improve metal balancing and other operational processes. We look at ways to leverage our ERP to improve our supply chain management. There is a long list and it continues to grow.
CIO Insight: You have also played a key role in mergers and acquisitions activities at the company. Can you describe that role?
AbiDaoud: As I mentioned earlier one of our key strategies was to create/develop an IT environment that was conducive to growth; one that could scale effectively in either direction and respond quickly to business changes, and support our business strategy. The cloud was and is a big part of that. We have the ability to enter new geographies with very little IT infrastructure, low cost and quickly. When it comes to M&A, we take part in a collective integration team that consists of all functions.
To read the full article, please visit CIO Insight
10-2-2015
Conair is a leading manufacturer and marketer of professional and consumer products. After more than 50 years in business it has grown into a multibillion dollar consumer packaged goods company with operations in more than 25 countries. The company operates in multiple product categories with 24 major brands, including Conair, Cuisinart, Waring, Rusk, Scunci and BaByliss.
Jon Harding has been CIO of Conair for more than 11 years. Over that span, he has taken a leadership role in mergers & acquisitions, partnered creatively with marketing to develop systems to serve existing customers better and acquire new ones, built an ecosystem of partners to facilitate innovation, all while managing a diverse, global team. He speaks about these challenges and more with CIO Insight contributor Peter High.
CIO Insight: Conair has grown substantially in your 11 years with the company. As it has acquired businesses, IT has been a key integrator of those businesses. How do you plan for the integration of a business?
Jon Harding: I plan for the integration of an acquisition as early as possible by getting involved in the due diligence process. During this early planning phase I work to make sure I understand the strategic (longer-term) objectives in making the acquisition as well as the tactical (short-term) objectives of quickly integrating the acquisition. To meet these business objectives, we then compare our standard set of core business applications (SAP) and global infrastructure standards to the current processes and systems of the new business unit. We assume all processes will change to the Conair standard processes enabled by our SAP solutions and focus in on any exceptions due to unique aspects of the new business, whether trade-driven, product-driven or statutory (especially important in overseas acquisitions).
CIO Insight: How much of a blueprint is there and to what degree does it vary, acquisition by acquisition?
Harding: Our blueprint is to vary our standard operating model only to meet mandatory local needs, whether trade-driven, product-driven or statutory.
CIO Insight: You have collaborated with your colleagues in marketing in the past few years to use information to serve existing customers better, and to acquire more customers. What shape has this partnership taken, and what are examples of some ideas you have introduced?
Harding: Traditionally here in Conair like in many consumer goods companies, IT focused on supply chain, finance and other “back office” processes. With the advent of many software-as-a-service solutions for all sorts of data analysis and business decision-making problems, I saw opportunities to improve the level of information availability for my colleagues in marketing and sales. Improvements, both in how quickly data can be transformed into usable analytics and in the availability of actionable information. The partnership with marketing has been built on working together on the evaluation and implementation of robust solutions for marketing’s data problems. IT has been the catalyst by providing funding and expertise in managing solution vendors. Marketing has provided subject matter expertise and all of the hands-on execution of these projects.
by Peter High, published on Forbes
9-15-15
David Guzman has held the top IT role at a number of major companies including K-Mart, eBay Enterprise, Acxiom, and Owens & Minor. For the last four years, he has been the CIO of HD Smith, a multi-billion pharmaceutical products distribution and services business based in Springfield, Illinois. During that time, he has simplified the way in which IT does business, employing cloud technologies to simplify the infrastructure and introducing process excellence in the form of Lean Six Sigma and ITIL, for example. He has introduced a number of analytics and mobile solutions that have changed employee and customer experience, and he intends to have more of his team’s time spent on externally focused innovation. He covers all of the above and more with me in this interview.
(To read future stories like this one, please click the “Follow” link to the upper left-hand portion of this page.)
Peter High: For those who may be less familiar with your organization, could you talk a bit about the business H.D. Smith is in?
David Guzman: H.D. Smith is a pharmaceutical products distribution and services business based in Springfield, Illinois. We are a private company and do not publish financials, but we would be in the vicinity of the Fortune 500 company if we were a public company. We have been around for over 60 years since 1954 and our scope is the entire United States. Our key customers are the community pharmacies, as opposed to the big retail chains, as well as hospitals and institutions. Our suppliers in the health care supply chain are a big part of our customer base as well.
High: What role do you see IT playing in this business? I know this is an industry you know well from multiple turns in it in different areas, among other industries you have been a part of. Can you talk a bit about the role you see IT playing?
Guzman: Our senior leadership team has a very enlightened view of the role of IT. As the CIO, I am a member of the executive committee, the top senior leadership of the company. We meet once a month for a full day as a leadership team. We also have an operating council that runs the day to day aspects of the business, and I am part of that as well, which also meets once a month for a full day. I make presentations to our board on key issues and I am a part of the small core of people that are building the strategy of the company as well. So IT is seen as an enabler of the company’s strategy and a key partner in delivering that strategy.
9-8-15
When David Bray joined the Federal Communications Commission in 2013, it had had roughly nine CIOs in eight years. Clearly something new needed to happen. Though Bray was still in his 30s, he had been in government for more than half his life, as his government service began at the age of 15. The IT department had a significant need to modernize. Bray recognized that cloud computing and “as-a-service” technology represented a significant opportunity to modernize the FCC’s technology portfolio.
At the same time, in less than two years, he has gone from zero to more than 142,000 Twitter followers. He has creatively leveraged that and other networks he has created for inspiration for new ideas, to test ideas, and to help others. In this interview, he shares the details of his career journey, the transformation he has led at the FCC, the way in which he sees his job as part venture capitalist, the benefits of being social, and a variety of other topics.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the 27th article in the CIO’s First 100 Days series. To listen to the prior 26 with the CIOs of Intel, J. Crew, GE, CVS Caremark, and Ecolab among many others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link to the upper left-hand part of this page.)
Peter High: Most people are probably familiar with the FCC, but perhaps not the inner workings of it, and certainly not the inner workings of the CIO’s role. Could you take a few moments to introduce your role within the organization?
David Bray: Sure. I parachuted into my role as CIO of the FCC about 20 months ago. When I arrived, there had been about nine CIOs in eight years prior to my arrival. The FCC itself is about 18 different bureaus and offices with about 1,750 government employees. Our scope is anything involving wired or wireless across the United States.
My role as CIO was focused on the fact that when I arrived, I assessed that they had about 207 different IT systems – again, for only 1,750 people. I sometimes joke that I’m Oprah Winfrey – “Look under your chair, everyone is going to go home today and you get an IT system. Take it, it’s free!” I think we got there because over the last 20 years, whenever there was a new request, either from the administration, or from Congress, or whether it was a new law, the FCC would roll out a new IT system. That works for the first five or ten years, but over time you accumulate so many different IT systems that at least 80% of our IT budget was spent merely sustaining what we already had. That limited what I could do in terms of new development. While I am sure I could spend the next five or ten years updating each one of those 207 systems – and I should note that more than half of them are over ten years old – I think by the time I did that I would have to do it all over again.
We decided to do a new shift technology-wise to move to a common data platform that would be cloud based. We take the data from legacy systems and build a thin user interface with reusable code because there may be elements that are common across these different systems like user authentication, export to PDF, and map production that we do not have to produce 207 different times. Instead, we could reuse that code as part of a service catalog and that way we can be more effective and efficient in what we are doing. We have had some early successes.
We have also addressed the human element. The team was at half strength and while we are probably not going to bring it back to historical strength size-wise, we are trying to bring in new people and integrate them with the existing staff.
09-03-2015
Group Health Cooperative offers care system, care delivery and insurance coverage in order to achieve one goal: affordable, quality health care for all. Founded in 1947, the company now consists of 25 medical centers within Washington and northern Idaho. The company’s focus is on preventive care, combined with medical education, a charitable foundation and a nationally recognized research institute.
Don Lewis is the vice president and CTO at Group Health, and as he discusses with CIO Insight contributor Peter High, technology plays a significant role in ensuring that the company serves its customers while maintaining efficiencies.
CIO Insight: You have focused on turning IT from a cost center to a profit center at Group Health. How have you done so?
Don Lewis: We are working to improve the visibility that other business units have into what is going on within the entire IT environment. The goal is that IT serves as the caretaker for IT systems and applications, and as an advisor and expert collaborator on how technology can help grow the overall business.
While it’s true there are expenses associated with IT, there’s also value. However, that value does not always accrue within IT, which means there isn’t a true revenue side within IT. The value instead is what accrues across the entire business. So we work closely with the other business units to put in place strong business cases that clearly call out where that value accrues. If it’s in the health plan part of our business, the cost may all be within IT, but the value accrues with the health plan, that’s fine because from an overall organization standpoint, that’s what we’re looking for.
We focus on having those conversations with the business leaders and demonstrating the value technology delivers to the entire organization. We know technologies we implement generally have significant business value, but we haven’t always been good at capturing that. Now we have a more formalized process to do just that.
CIO Insight: You have also focused on more tightly aligning IT strategy to business strategy. What methods have you employed to do so?
Lewis: One example is how we rolled out an enterprisewide service management platform, in this case a service made possible through a vendor relationship with ServiceNow. We started the implementation with IT about a year ago, and we’ve led its rollout to other parts of the business including HR and purchasing. Serving as a model for how to implement and use technology to improve business processes is not a new role for IT here, but we are being more deliberate and collaborating more closely with our business partners. We’re showing first-hand how we use technologies, and educating our colleagues on how their areas of the business can realize similar benefits.
To read the remainder of the article, please visit CIO Insight
7-12-2013
When Ken Piddington joined Global Partners as the firm’s first-ever CIO five years ago, the energy supply business was already a Fortune 500 company. In the four years since, revenues have tripled, but his IT department remains lean. A key to his success has been better vendor management in general, and better software vendor management more specifically.
IN SUMMARY WHO: Ken Piddington WHAT: An overview of his approach to software license management and the company’s Strategic Partner Program and Strategic Partner Summit WHERE: Waltham, Mass.
CIO Insight: You were the first-ever CIO of Global Partners, a large company that has grown astronomically during your tenure. Naturally, as Global Partners has prospered, you’ve had to creatively leverage external partners. Can you talk about the way in which you have thought about vendor engagement?
You are right. When I joined Global Partners in 2009, our revenues were $5.8 billion. Last year, with the rapid growth we’ve experienced, primarily through acquisition and commodity diversification, we stood at $17.6 billion. We do not have any intention to slow down either.
We run lean, and with so many growth initiatives going on at the same time we had to better leverage our vendor partners in order to be successful. In my opinion, an organization receives the most value from its vendor partners when a real effort is made to build true partnerships. These are partnerships and relationships that are mutually beneficial. If you expect to always take from your vendor partners and never give anything back, the partnership and relationship will fail and the organization won’t receive the expected value. This is the basis for our vendor management initiative that we call our Strategic Partner Program.
How did you develop the concept of the Strategic Partner Summit?
When we developed the concept for our Strategic Partner Program I didn’t want to have to explain the details of the program to each and every vendor one at a time, plus I wanted our vendors to know that they had to compete and earn Global Partners’ continued business. So I created the Strategic Partner Summit, which is a dinner hosted by me in which we invite all our vendor partners, and which is an opportunity for Global Partners to give back to them and at the same time lay out and reinforce the ground rules and expectations for being a partner of ours.
As we increasingly rely on our vendors to deliver key components of our technology, it is important that we be open with them about where we see the company going. Therefore, our CEO speaks at these events, providing insights about our corporate strategy, and then I speak to provide insights about our IT strategy. The key is to ensure that as they suggest solutions for us, that they do so with our plans in mind, not theirs. Companies that keep secrets from their vendor partners are developing a relationship that is all tree and no forest, so to speak.
Do you engage software vendors differently than you do hardware vendors?
With Everything as a Service, CIOS need a new recipe for success.
Full article by Tom Fare in: Smart Enterprise, Volume 6, Issue 1, 2012, Page 32
The trend toward Everything as a Service (XaaS) has CIOs scrambling to set the right strategy. To learn more about how CIOs will succeed in a services world, Contributing Editor Tom Farre spoke recently with Peter High, President of CIO advisory firm Metis Strategy and author of World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs (Jossey-Bass, 2009).
SE: In today’s enterprise, how can smart CIOs use XaaS to improvethe IT infrastructure?
PH: Traditional on-premises IT infrastructure is typically capitalintensive.The more of it you have to control and manage, the moredifficult it is to keep current; and as demand changes, you can’teasily ratchet it up and back. But by leveraging a service-basedmodel, you are better positioned with a variable cost structure.In tough economic times, your costs should more closely reflectthe realities of the business environment.
Other questions in the interview:
– But with IT and business services available directly from thecloud, how can CIOs ensure that business users won’t bypass IT? – How about people? What impact will XaaS have on IT personnel? – So in a world-class IT organization, what should this “muscle”be doing? – What else should CIOs know about world-class IT? – So how important are internal communications?
Please visit the interactive digital copy of Smart Enterprise, page 32, for the full interview with Peter High.
Alternatively, you can access the PDF version of the interview here: Peter High, President of Metis Strategy- Smart Enterprise Interview on Everything as a Service, Volume 6. Issue 1. 2012.
