The fifth and final Metis Strategy Digital Symposium of 2021 is in the books. Thank you to the global CIOs, CEOs, and entrepreneurs who joined the conversation. 

Looking to 2022, technology leaders said developing and maintaining strong cultures, motivating teams, and providing continuous learning and development opportunities are among their continued priorities. Also on the CIO agenda: maintaining agility and momentum following a period of significant digital acceleration.  

Additional highlights from the event are below. Check out our YouTube channel and the Technovation podcast in the coming weeks for recordings of individual panel discussions.

New ways of working enable agility and speed to market. CIOs noted that a continued shift to product-based operating models, paired with advanced applications of data and analytics, has led to greater enterprise agility. More nimble technology architectures also support more nimble operations.
 

Increased customer adoption of digital channels during the pandemic accelerated the shift to new team structures, roles and responsibilities and reinforced the need to deliver products and services to customers faster and with less friction. Michael Ruttledge, CIO at Citizens Financial, noted a 30% increase in the use of digital channels. Over the past year, his team has introduced more than 900 features in its mobile app. Citizens has leveraged advanced technology in those efforts, Ruttledge said, “but at the same time we’ve had to get that to market very quickly, and we’ve done that by changing our agile culture.”  

Pairing new ways of working with agile, scalable technology architectures has helped the IT organization at Target move faster and deliver more value across the organization, CIO Mike McNamara said. Today, Target has hundreds of products across the business that can release updates daily or weekly. “The rate limiter is how quickly our business and our guests can absorb change rather than how quickly we can produce it,” McNamara said.  “That speed and agility has just been a phenomenal benefit to the business.”

Fostering a strong culture is more critical than ever. As the war for talent intensifies and organizations embrace more flexible working arrangements, technology leaders are thinking about how best to foster a sense of connectivity and maintain innovative cultures as teams collaborate in new ways, both in the office and remotely.

Asurion CIO Casey Santos noted that her team is telling the company’s story in a more personal way, emphasizing the strength of their culture and technology, becoming more flexible, and relying on less formal recruiting techniques. Santos’ team is also training leaders at the company to be better coaches and sponsors so that they can help employees through their journey at the company. Asurion is also bulking up its internship, internal mobility, and rotational programs.

Underpinning many of those actions is a push to create learning and development opportunities for talent across the organization. As the pace of change continues to accelerate, “lifelong learning isn’t optional anymore,” said Sri Donthi, Chief Technology Officer at Advance Auto Parts. He shared the guiding principles he has followed while developing an engineering culture: creating a comfortable environment for employees to challenge themselves and excel; starting with the customer in mind while looking at the big picture; and keeping innovation top of mind. Donthi emphasized the need to lead with empathy and care, and encouraged fellow leaders to develop skills including crisis leadership, virtual leadership, and inspirational leadership.

Companies double down on upskilling and talent initiatives. Creating learning and development opportunities remains top of mind for CIOs in the year ahead, with 35% of participants noting reskilling or upskilling as their talent development priority in 2022, followed by enhancing employee experience.

Toptal Co-Founder and CEO Taso Du Val predicts that there will be a plethora of online courses that will allow employees to earn certifications. More meaningful content and a better user experience, among other factors, will make these programs more impactful than traditional education programs, he said.  

Citizens Financial introduced academy programs that allow engineers to spend 10 days learning skills such as React, Java, Python, or learning APIs, CIO Michael Ruttledge said. The company also developed 38 different badging and certification programs across a range of technologies. At Discover Financial, the Discover Technology Academy runs a series of courses while also serving as a hub for multidisciplinary teams to share their knowledge and experience with others, encouraging collaboration and allowing innovation to scale more effectively.

Target CIO Mike McNamara said engineers at the company are expected to spend 20% of their time on learning and development, part of the framework Target has built to recruit, develop, and provide continued learning experiences for teams. He’s also proud that many leaders who have worked under his leadership have taken on CIO or senior executive roles at large companies around the world.

Common platforms enable data-driven customer experience at scale. Heading into 2022, leaders across industries continue to develop and refine platforms that allow their organizations to leverage analytics and AI across a broader range of products and services, deliver sufficient governance, and scale new solutions quickly.

At Experian, EVP & Global Head of Analytics and AI Shri Santhanam is leveraging a technical and commercial platform, along with the company’s vast troves of data, to develop more products powered by AI and machine learning. Common platforms allow Experian to bring in new data sets more easily and create more sophisticated models that give individuals, particularly those whose experiences may not have been reflected in traditional models, access to credit. 

Anjana Harve, Global Chief Information Officer at Fresenius Medical Care, has focused on developing a platform that helps patients manage their care effectively and provides continuous insights throughout the user journey from early care to dialysis treatment. Through connected platforms, Fresenius can drive standardization, bring innovation and speed to end users, and guide workflows while providing the most relevant and personalized information for patients and clinicians. 

Leaders continue to unlock new capabilities with data and analytics. Nearly 40% of attendees noted that they expect to see the most technology investment in data and analytics in the year ahead, and 71% noted that advanced AI is the emerging technology that holds the most promise for their organizations in 2022. 

Discover Financial CIO Amir Arooni emphasized the importance of advanced AI in giving customers “actionable data that empowers them.” Applications of AI at Discover include real-time fraud detection and analyzing past spending data to advise customers on what to purchase and when, providing guidance on how to save more money and earn rewards. 

Advanced analytics techniques are also making strides in the construction industry, which has begun to embrace technology as more digital tools, accessible via the cloud, went mobile. Turner Construction CIO Warren Kudman said the industry is “waking up to the value of data” and has used digital tools to visualize and manipulate environments virtually, reducing the likelihood of costly mistakes. Turner is also using data and ML to track and assess safety conditions at job sites, proactively identify interventions, conduct remote inspections, and track materials as they arrive on job sites.

Dean Del Vecchio, CIO and Chief of Operations at Guardian Life, discussed how the company is using data and AI to develop insurance products faster, easier, and with less friction for customers. Thanks to new tools and new ways of working, some processes that used to take 45 days have been cut to 30 seconds, he said.   

Life insurance does not seem like the sexiest of segments. Most of the major players in the industry were founded 150 years ago or more. They often develop such scale and recurring revenue streams that they can develop a bit of strategic laziness, as well. These were among the reasons why entrepreneur, Peter Colis, saw opportunity as he evaluated the life insurance industry.

Colis had a job in advertising prior to attending Stanford Business School. When he arrived in Palo Alto, he met Lingke Wang, a computer scientist who also had an entrepreneurial bent. As they scoured industries that presented opportunities, life insurance checked a lot of boxes suggesting major opportunities. Investors have agreed, as the company has a stable of A-grade venture capital firms have invested in their company, Ethos Life, including Sequoia, (see my interview with Sequoia’s lead investor in Ethos Life here), Accel, and GV, Google’s venture arm. Additionally, Jay-Z and Kevin Durant have also invested in the company.

Life insurance was attractive for two reasons. First, the product is difficult to obtain. It is time intensive, confusing, and it requires many tests to validate coverage. Second, Colis highlights that the incentives for brokers, who are paid on commission, often lead to consumers purchasing coverage that is beyond their needs and their means.

In this interview, Colis describes his entrepreneurial journey, the growth and team composition of Ethos Life, as well as his thoughts on what is next.

Peter High: You are the Co-founder and CEO of Ethos Life, a San Francisco-based company that you founded in September 2016. Your organization has caught quite a bit of momentum, especially in the investor community. Could you talk about the business and the problem that you were looking to solve when you created it?

Peter Colis: My partner Lingke Wang and I started Ethos when we were roommates at Stanford Business School. I came from a background in advertising, and Lingke came from a technical background. Originally, we got interested in a different aspect of life insurance, and we learned a great deal about it. In doing so, we came to understand that life insurance is incredibly important. More than five percent of children in the U.S. are going to lose a parent by the time they turn 18, and 70 percent of families are so unprepared that if they lose a breadwinner, they would be in total financial ruin within three months. This data implies that Americans are vastly unprepared for the loss of a breadwinner. While this is an important industry, we realized that it is executed poorly by the existing players, so we saw an opportunity to dramatically improve how it is executed with technology.

Ethos is a modern and ethical life insurance company. Unlike the traditional life insurance experiences, with Ethos, you go to our website, you fill out an application online in ten minutes, and then you are done. There are no medical exams, no blood tests, no paper applications, and no pushy agents. We launched in early 2018, we are now processing thousands of applications per month, and we look forward to continued growth.

11/19/2018

By Peter High. Published in Forbes.

Shaleen Devgun is a remarkable innovator in the chief information officer community. For the past three years, he has been the CIO of $4 billion Schneider National, a trucking and logistics company based in Green Bay, Wisconsin. You might suspect that running IT for a trucking company based in Green Bay might be an enormous challenge. His burden is a shade lighter inasmuch as two other members of the executive committee at Schneider National are former CIOs, including the company’s CEO Chris Lofgren. (In the past, I interviewed Lofgren about his rise from CIO to CEO.)

Moreover, he has taken a creative approach toward recruiting to his his humble city: he and his team work on tough problems. The logistics business has endless opportunities for greater efficiency and for revenue gains. Devgun’s Forbes CIO Innovation award was based upon his team’s work on a multivendor transportation marketplace with consumer grade tablets, Internet-of-Things devices, and apps. This is just one of several examples of the ideas that have led Devgun and others in the company to think of Schneider National as a technology company masquerading as a trucking company.

(To listen to an unabridged podcast version of this interview, please click this link. To read future articles like this one, please follow me on Twitter @PeterAHigh.)

Peter High: Please describe Schneider National’s business and your role as their Chief Information Officer.

Shaleen Devgun: Schneider National is one of the nation’s largest truckload carriers, and we are a leader in the transportation and logistics space. The breadth of our business is large as we serve our customers through a diverse set of offerings, from over-the-road [OTR] to intermodal, and we also have a healthy logistics business. I have been with the company for around a decade, and I am three years into the CIO role. As part of the executive team, I report to our President and CEO. In addition to my traditional CIO responsibilities, I have accountability for the business transformation, our logistics engineering efforts, and the corporate venturing around our technology.

To read the full article, please visit Forbes.

10/29/2018

By Peter High. Published on Forbes.

Arthur Hu joined Lenovo nine years ago after more than eight years as a consultant at McKinsey & Company. Hu ascended the ranks to become Chief Information Officer a bit more than two years ago while still in his 30s. In that role, leads the information technology function and business transformation activities for a Chinese company with major operations in the US and in a variety of other countries. As a Chinese-American who speaks fluent Mandarin, he leads a diverse team, and spends roughly half of his time in Beijing, and half of his time either in the United States or at other strategic locations for the company.

Hu pushes his IT leadership team to have a strong grasp of Lenovo’s strategy, what is happening in the broader industry, as well as to remain abreast of crucial technology trends in order to drive transformation. He also strives to be the company’s first and best customer, leveraging its technology, and providing feedback on its strengths and where it might improve.

Hu represents the CIO of the future, in many ways. His ability to work seamlessly across the two biggest economies, his ability to impact the company’s transformation and products, and his ability to master both strategy and tactics set him apart. He describes his journey and his methods herein.

(To listen to an unabridged podcast version of this interview, please click this link. To read future articles like this one, please follow me on Twitter @PeterAHigh.)

Peter High: Could you describe your role as the Chief Information Officer of Lenovo?

Art Hu: As the CIO and business transformation leader at Lenovo, I have a dual role. I am responsible for keeping the business running and creating a strong employee experience, which involves our workspace and our private and public cloud. The second element of my position targets Lenovo’s business transformation. In this role, I focus on defining and evolving our business processes and models, which ultimately helps us serve our customers better and improve Lenovo’s competitiveness.

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.

by Peter High, published on Forbes

5-16-2016

When one thinks about the companies that laid the foundation of the commercial internet, one thinks of companies like Cisco, AOL, IBM, and Sun Microsystems, among others.  Sun was co-founded by Scott McNealy, who did not have a technical background, and yet ran one of the most successful tech-centric companies of ‘80s and ‘90s. The company created Java , Solaris Unix, and the Network File System to name three of many products designed by the company. Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems in 2010 for $7.4 billion, and since then, McNealy has invested in and advised a number of technology companies from his home-base in Silicon Valley.

In 2010, he co-founded Wayin, a social intelligence company that integrates social content into new experiences for consumers and delivers greater value and control for brands. The company recently merged with EngageSciences, a British social media firm that McNealy suggests will give Wayin a dominant position in his space.

(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 16th article in the IT Influencers series. To read past interviews with Meg Whitman, Walt Mossberg, Jim Goodnight, Sir James Dyson, and former Mexican President Vicente Fox, among others, please visit this link.)

Peter High: Steve Case recently wrote a book called The Third Wave in which he describes the three waves of the internet: the first wave from 1985 to 1999 of building the internet, laying the foundation, and organizations like AOL, Sun Microsystems, Cisco would typify that; the second wave from, 2000 to maybe 2015, which was exemplified by the app economy, the mobile revolution, certain social and e-commerce startups. Leaders of the second wave include Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Now, he defines this third wave as involving the Internet of Everything—this ubiquitous connectivity that allows entrepreneurs to transform major, real world sectors.

I would love your thoughts as someone who has been a leader across each of these “waves.” Case posits that this third wave is going to look a lot more like the first one than the second one. He highlights that the second required people, products and platforms, but the first added to that the need for greater partnership and an understanding of the nuances of policy and working with the government. I am curious about your own perspectives on that analysis, as well as your own thoughts about the evolution of the internet as you see it.

Scott McNealy: We talked about all this stuff back in the ‘80s and the ‘90s—the Internet of Things. I was on the cover of Fortune with a Java ring on, and it might have been back in the ‘80s, early ‘90s, and I always used to talk about how price lists would go away and everything will be a bid ask, and I said eventually people will bid out their time by the hour and that will be the last frontier unless government can regulate us back into the dark ages again. The second our company saw the browser and the web and threw Java on it, we started talking about the Internet of Things. I used to say everything with a digital, electrical or biological heartbeat would get connected to the Internet, and people looked at me like “what are you talking about?” We said the network was the computer in the ‘80s; now we call it the cloud. That is smarter: it is only one word instead of a few. But all of these concepts were out there. And no price list or bid ask system. But the biggest challenge we have is the meddling of government bureaucrats getting paid off by big companies to prevent the new stuff from happening. Have you ever met anybody who got in an Uber and thought it needed to be regulated? I am talking about a basic consumer, not somebody with a vested interest in a cab company or city revenues. And even cabs now are getting better because Uber came along and just destroyed them, so why do we need to regulate that stuff?  So my biggest concern for the future of the internet and the written and spoken language of computing is government intervention. There is so much, massive, government scope creep that they are getting involved in everything now, whether it be net neutrality, whether somebody is an employee or not, healthcare, we have ignorant voters because they are being trained by the government. The government is a monopoly. We know monopolies are inefficient, not innovative, and corrupt. We know that. That is why we have anti-trust laws. Well, the government is a monopoly. Why do we let them do healthcare and education, or even get near banking? It is stunning to me.

High: In 2010 you founded Wayin, a real-time digital marketing software company. Can you describe the original inspiration for the idea? Since it was founded relatively soon after Sun’s acquisition by Oracle, was this something that had been in your head for a while, or was it something you began to think about in earnest upon breaking away from the company?

To read the full article, please visit Forbes