11/26/2018
By Peter High. Published on Forbes.
Next month, Sasan Goodarzi will become the Chief Executive Officer of Intuit. He once made his ambition to rise to the CEO role clear to his superiors, and as they cottoned to the idea and more officially put in him the succession path for CEO, he was exposed to each business unit of the company. He notes in my interview with him that, though it was important for him to make his hopes clear, he also gained even more mightily when he focused on more on enjoying the jobs he took on for the opportunity and learning that each offered.
His three most recent roles have been Executive Vice President of Small Business, Executive Vice President and General Manager of TurboTax, and Chief Information Officer. Interestingly, he counts the CIO role as his most exciting. The reasons include the expansive view of the business that the CIO role offers, but also ability to influence the next generation of technology change that will position the company for growth.
Among the special attributes that Goodarzi holds dear, and will remain areas of emphasis in his administration will be the company’s culture and its focus on customers. He believes strongly that a fulfilling work environment yields better results for customers.
In this interview, we cover his preparations for the CEO role, how he sees the company growing in his tenure, the role that artificial intelligence will play, and a variety of other topics.
(To listen to an unabridged podcast version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 40th article in the “Beyond CIO” series. To read through past interviews with executives from companies like Waste Management, Biogen, Allstate, Aetna, Marsh & McLennan, and BMO Financial Group, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please follow me on Twitter @PeterAHigh.)
Peter High: In early 2019, you will ascend to the Chief Executive Officer role of Intuit. Congratulations. Can you talk about the point at which you found out about this news?
Sasan Goodarzi: I found out about the news several days before it went public. Intuit is an incredible company, and to have the opportunity to move into [outgoing CEO] Brad Smith’s role is truly an honor. Over the past eleven years, Brad has done a remarkable job of positioning the company for an incredible next chapter, so he deserves a great deal of credit for his leadership. Building leadership capabilities and mobility are core competencies for Intuit. Although this announcement is a visible one, we are extremely deliberate about ensuring that we have successors for key roles across the company. In his eighth year, Brad notified the board that he would be stepping down at some point in the future. The board and Brad agreed to the rigorous process of hiring an outside firm to look at external leaders, assess leaders within the company, and determine what the company needed in its next chapter. While that was taking place, Brad chose to do what we do across the company. Several leaders, including myself, switched businesses a few years ago. I have had the privilege of being in all of the company’s businesses, including the CIO role. The point of this switch was to ensure that we had strong internal candidates who could take over when Brad was ready to step down.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes.
1/29/18
By Peter High, published on Forbes
The integration of a major acquisition is the bane of the existence of many executives. Chief information officers have special challenges during such scenarios, since, after all, they must think about the people, processes, and technologies that must be integrated. This is an enormous amount of change to usher in.
When Steve Phillpott became CIO of $19 billion revenue developer, manufacturer and provider of data storage devices and solutions, Western Digital less than two and a half years ago, the company was nearly a third of its current size. With the acquisition of HGST in 2015 and the acquisition of SanDisk in 2016, there was no avoiding the fact that this would be a heavy lift for Phillpott and his colleagues. This was all announced in his first months on the job.
Phillpott noted that across the technology stacks of the three companies, in most areas, two-thirds of employees would be impacted, as the “winning” solution would be named. Phillpott recognized this as an opportunity to choose best-in-breed solutions across the technology portfolio. The mandate for change that any integration brings about would be a boon.
This would lead to the integration of more than 3,000 applications and would test the company’s change management practices, but Phillpott and his team have made enormous progress, as he notes herein.
Peter High: You are the Chief Information Officer of Western Digital. In its current generation, Western Digital is the combination of three multi-billion dollar organizations: Western Digital itself, the 2012 acquisition of HGST, and the acquisition in 2016 of SanDisk. I know you took an interesting approach to integrating these companies. Please explain.
Steve Phillpott: We integrated three large multi-billion dollar, Fortune 500 companies into one future Fortune 150-ish company. You are looking at integrating systems, integrating processes, and integrating technologies. As we started on this journey, this integration became a great opportunity to transform the company. By transforming the company I mean looking at those applications systems and processes that we have today, thinking where we want to be in a couple years, and starting to lay the foundation for that journey.
Consider ERP as an example. Across the three legacy sub-companies, we had three different ERP systems. Going forward, we could have picked any one of the three. In a typical acquisition where you have two companies; one large company, one small, it may default to the larger company’s ERP. Two like-sized companies integrating together, you may flip a coin, or you pick the best one and go forward. With three, it provides an interesting dynamic because, at a minimum, two-thirds of the company are going to have to go through change.
Our thinking was if two-thirds of the company are going to have to go through that massive amount of change, why should we not look at a newer, best-in-breed solution and have the entire company go through that change. What that does is it allows us to transform a foundational application that will support us as we grow to $20 billion, $25 billion, and beyond. It became a great opportunity to go through and rebuild processes and applications that we knew would not scale. We were able to revisit chart of accounts, revisit cost centers, and revisit the reconciliation process with an eye to the future and a focus on ensuring those processes would support us as we grow past a $20 billion company.
High: You have had to rationalize around 3,000 applications. Could you share how far you have come in that process, as well as what learnings you have had?
Phillpott: We had roughly 3,000-plus applications across the three major companies, and then we added a couple more acquisitions after that, which added more applications to the mix. I would say we are still early in the journey, but we have completed some major activities and 2017 was a very productive year for us. We focused on getting a lot of the collaboration and communication tools correct. Communication tools allow for the flattening of the organization, which is increasingly important as you are trying to go through these integration activities.
The speed at which companies can effectively collaborate is essential in helping move these integrations forward and trying to harmonize the processes in the system. The other interesting thing about focusing on those collaboration and communication tools is it also sets us up well for future M&As. Once we get those in as we move forward and have more acquisitions, we can bring them into the mix much quicker. We determined best-of-breed technologies across a variety of communication and collaboration tools.
Globally, we have everybody on the same email, the same file sharing around Box, the same intranet, Jive, WebEx, Jabber – those core collaboration and communication tools. If you look beyond those initial communication and collaboration activities, we have started to migrate many of the legacy applications. Now we are on a global Human Capital Management system which we consolidated with our CRM. We consolidated on a global ServiceNow instance which was interesting because that is another area where we try to get everybody’s information into one area, but it is diverse in terms of what activity we need to help the end users with.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
1/22/18
By Peter High, Published on Forbes
Diane Schwarz has the killer combination of skills and experiences to be a chief information officer. She was an engineer as an undergraduate, and therefore learned important technical skills. She has an MBA from the University of Chicago and learned key business disciplines. She was a consultant, gaining experience solving problems across many different companies who were her clients. By the time she joined IT departments, she had depth and breadth to her experiences, and quickly rose to become a CIO.
For nearly five years, Schwarz has been the Enterprise CIO of Textron, the $14 billion revenue multi-industry conglomerate in aircraft, defense, industrial and finance businesses. With such diverse businesses in the company’s portfolio, it can be tricky to get the balance right between standardizing processes and technologies, and allowing the business units of the company to have autonomy. She has simplified things by operating with four key strategies that she describes in more depth in this interview:
Peter High: You are the enterprise level Chief Information Officer of Textron, but I know there is also IT leadership within the business units themselves. Could you talk about the structure of IT at an organization as complex as yours?
Diane Schwarz: We have a CIO in each of our business units and major product lines, and they have their own IT organizations that report to them. Those CIOs have dual reporting to the business unit leadership as well as to me. The business units do what I call the fun stuff. They support the stakeholder applications, whether it is ERP or CRM or PLM tools.
With that much disparity in the organization, we communicate often and at great lengths to make sure that we know what is going on in our different locations. I have only 50 percent of the staff in the United States. I have many folks in India, who roll up independently to each of their business units, but who also happen to sit in a common office building. It may seem complex to an outsider, but we know how our puzzle pieces fit together.
High: In an organization as diverse as yours, how do you think about what should be common versus what should be unique as it applies to that diverse range of businesses?
Schwarz: That is a question our CEO answers. He has said our business units are empowered to make decisions on what is going to be best for them to meet their strategic objectives. Of course, profitability is part of that. Let’s say a business unit wanted to host its own email system. We do not have any rules that say they cannot, but it is going to cost more for them.
Profitability objectives help keep people in line without deviating too much from the standards. This enables employees to be able to interact across our locations. Our CEO also recognizes that when it comes to, for instance, ERP systems, what serves a business unit in aerospace is different than what serves somebody in automotive. If you make people share too much, you sub-optimize what is going to support their business. We look at what is going to best serve their business needs.
High: Could you talk about your strategy? What has risen to the top of your strategic plan?
by Peter High, published on Forbes
1-25-2016
When Jim Fowler was promoted to become the Chief Information Officer of GE, it was a move that he was aware of well in advance. A hallmark of GE’s legendary talent management program is to have leaders identify people who could take their places in advance of the need for that transition. Jamie Miller, who had been CIO for two and a half years prior had identified Fowler – then CIO of GE Capital – as her possible successor. As Miller ascended to the role of President & CEO of GE Transportation, Fowler had been preparing for this move. In turn, in his first six months in his current role, he will be planning who might succeed him, even though he has no plans to leave the role any time soon.
In this interview, Fowler describes how he has organized himself in the early stages of his role. He already has developed audacious goals of driving $1 billion in productivity gains by 2020 while also generating $15 billion in revenue growth from software and technology. At the heart of this is Predix, an analytics platform to help assets run more effectively. GE is using it internally, and has already garnered $5.5 billion in revenue gains by making it available to GE’s customers. All the while, Fowler has developed a well thought out plan to keep GE’s information secure. He talks about all of the above and more in the following interview.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 32nd article in the CIO’s First 100 Days series. To read past interviews with the CIOs of P&G, Kaiser Permanente, Microsoft, CVS Caremark, and Ecolab, among many others, please click this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: In our last conversation, a number of months back, you were the Chief Information Officer of GE Capital, a unit that has since been sold off, and you have taken over the role of global CIO for all of General Electric. I wonder if you could reflect on the transition, how you found out about the new role, how you began to prepare to the ascension to the role, and how the news of the role came to you.
Jim Fowler: The role came about as a series of leadership succession movements were planned in the company. Those successions, based on a few retirements, led to the previous group’s CIO, Jamie Miller, taking on the CEO role of our Transportation business. That planning started to happen over the summer as some of the retirements came to be known. I think I found out about it around mid-July. The plan was to have me step in as the group CIO later in the year. I had thirty days’ notice before the formal announcements went out to start to think through what I had to do to prepare for the role and to lay out a plan.
I used that thirty days to spend some time with Jamie, understanding what her thoughts were as I transitioned into the role, what things she felt needed to be continued or changed, and get her feedback on what it had taken her to be successful in the role. I also used the opportunity for myself to reflect on my experiences in the company and where I thought the company was headed relative to digital products, what we were doing related to growing the company in new areas, and how that was going to relate to the priorities for the IT function. So, that let me lay out a ninety day plan. I am coming to the end of that ninety days having worked through a lot of the steps in the plan.
High: Can you describe your purview as CIO of GE?
1-5-2016
Eric Sigurdson co-leads the Information Officers practice at Russell Reynolds Associates. In his nearly 20 years as a recruiter, he has diagnosed what sets successful IT leaders apart from those who do not succeed. in this interview, he notes that IT leaders must first understand the culture of the organization before attempting to transform the IT function. He also speaks about the rising trend of CIOs coming from other functional areas, the increased appreciation of IT from the rest of the company and the board, among several other topics.
(This is the 30th article in the CIO’s First 100 Days series. To read past interviews with CIOs from Intel, J. Crew, Johnson & Johnson, Ecolab, and Microsoft, among many others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Eric Sigurdson, let us begin with what separates successful CIOs from unsuccessful ones, especially in the first 100 days. What are some of the characteristics that set apart the stars from the also-rans?
Eric Sigurdson: I think human nature says that they want to invest time in listening, asking questions, evaluating the team, not jumping to any quick conclusions, but be viewed as someone who is open to ideas and trying to learn the culture of the organization. Of the CIOs I know, two years in as they reflect back on the first 100 days, almost unanimously they wish they had moved faster. So there must be a balance between those two reflecting motivations: taking your time, get behind them, do not feel like you have to move too quickly, and, by same token, do not let the grass grow under your feet. You have to move fast enough because you were brought in typically as a change agent. Frankly, if a CIO is placed by an executive search firm, there is a mandate for change almost always.
High: Out of curiosity, maybe these percentages are not readily available, off the top of your head, how often when they have gone to search is it succeeding a successful CIO—say someone who is retiring or has been promoted – versus a scenario where a transformation of one sort or another is necessary?
Sigurdson: I would say of the work that we do, 75 or 80 percent of the time it is the latter. The 20 to 25 percent where it is continuation is that stage where someone is stepping into a broader role trying to bring in an individual to take over responsibility for IT. Even if it is a successful, retiring CIO, without exception, the client will always say, “They were successful in the period we needed them. We now need somebody different.” Rarely have I heard a client say, “We want someone just like them.” Even when they were happy with person vacating the CIO role, they always want someone different.
High: As somebody who thinks a lot about CIOs and CTOs, but also delves a degree beneath to the reports, I am wondering what kinds of roles are you seeing as increasing in frequency of demand at the degree under the CIO? A CIO comes in what tend to be the kinds of positions that are growing or increasing in need as you do some of the searches that are a degree removed from the CIO?
