404: Align Technology Senior Vice President of Information Technology Sreelakshmi Kolli discusses how the company is leading the evolution in digital dentistry by transforming the industry from analog to digital. Kolli claims that there are over 300 million consumers that could benefit from teeth straightening, and the only way to reach all of them is through digital technologies. Because of this, Kolli cites that everything the company does is dependent on digital and that IT is the central nervous system for the company. Through this transformation, Kolli is focused on delivering great treatment outcomes with data science, driving consumer demand to doctors’ offices, helping with conversion as customers become Invisalign patients, using global scalable infrastructure to support real-time ordering from over 100 countries, and manufacturing over 400,000 customized aligners per day. We also discuss Kolli’s take on IoT and blockchain, Align Technology’s value proposition to potential employees, how being a consumer of the product helps the company better understand the customers’ needs, among other topics.
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403: Sierra Ventures Managing Director Mark Fernandes discusses the five attributes he looks for in an entrepreneur. These five attributes include their ability to raise money beyond the early stages, their ability to attract talent, their ability to generate momentum, if they come prepared, and their ability to tell their story. In terms of what Mark looks for in a company, he cites that there needs to be a technology platform shift or a business model innovation that is applicable to something that they are doing. We also discuss Mark’s accidental path to the VC community, the CXO Advisory board Sierra has started, the importance of approaching investing from a bottoms-up and top-down approach, among other topics.
402: UPS CIO Juan Perez details how the company has taken data from simply being an input for descriptive analytics to prescriptive analytics, which goes beyond predictive analytics. Juan has played an integral role in developing the company’s on-road integrated optimization and navigation system [ORION], which helps optimize the delivery paths that the company’s drivers take to make sure that they efficiently satisfy their service commitments to its customers. Juan also describes an advanced big data analytics project, which is designed to constantly take the massive amount of data points the company collects, learn from them, and use them to better predict what volume is going to come into their operations. We also discuss UPS’ strategic pillars, Juan’s take on artificial intelligence, the cloud, drones, and robotics, how UPS is using digital to enhance the physical experience that the customer receives, and a variety of other topics.
401: Express Scripts CTO emeritus Phil Finucane details Express Scripts’ integration with Cigna. While Cigna has a strong engineering organization, the two companies have different visions for how to execute a successful integration. Because of this, a large part of Phil’s job was to help Cigna understand how Express Scripts operated, to understand how Cigna operated, and to understand how the combined entity would interface with its business partners. From there, Phil looked to build a path that brought together the best of both worlds by bringing complementary strengths together. We also discuss the lessons Phil has pulled from his time in Silicon Valley, Express Scripts’ approach to eliminating technical debt, his take on artificial intelligence, and a variety of other topics.
397: Atlassian’s President, Jay Simons, and CIO, Archana Rao, discuss the unique culture of Atlassian. Both note that the company is extremely open, honest, and direct. The work of the executives is transparent to the rest of the company. Archana believes that allowing people to see other’s work, performance, and perspectives provides a recognition that there are challenges everywhere and it builds an immensely strong culture because people tend to work well together in this way. Jay has seen the company go from 100 to 3,000 employees in his 11 years with the company, and he declares that this culture has scaled remarkably, which in his mind is a testament to foundational parts of the culture that the company created.
396: E. & J. Gallo Winery CIO Sanjay Shringarpure elaborates on the changes the company has made to achieve its transformational vision. One of the major changes has involved transitioning IT toward supporting four verticals supporting each of the business functions of the company. We also discuss the cultural changes necessary to realize this vision, Sanjay’s take on blockchain and the cloud, the Wine OS platform the company has created, and a variety of other topics.
395: Liberty Mutual CIO James McGlennon discusses the company’s agile and cloud transformation, which has included a multi-pronged approach designed to eliminate or refactor legacy technology, send existing employees to coding immersion programs, have 90 percent of teams working in an agile fashion, and move from one percent to 25 percent of technology in the cloud with a goal to reach 100 percent. We also discuss James’ take on artificial intelligence, robotics, and augmented and virtual reality, how Liberty Mutual works with its different customer groups, what the company does at the business unit level versus the enterprise level, among other topics.
394: Schneider Electric CDO Herve Coureil discusses how Schneider has blended talent in the new digital unit. Herve believes the organization needs to balance the internal and external view, Herve does not believe in a digital organization that only includes external digital talent looking in from the outside or an exclusively internal team that is made up of subject matter experts, without an infusion of external talent. To create a mix, Schneider has focused on reskilling, retraining, and learning internally so everybody has the basic skills that go with digital while simultaneously recruiting new talent that can bring subject matter expertise and new digital skills to the team. We also discuss Herve’s take on the cloud, AI, and blockchain, how Herve manages such a large, distributed team, how his experience as a CFO helps him in his current role, among other topics.
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392: Ingram Micro CIO & CDO Tom Peck says that Ingram Micro is in race to win the customer experience. The speed in which IT is delivered has changed dramatically. In response, Ingram Micro has made massive changes around its IT team. These changes include shifting from a traditional waterfall approach to agile and scrum methodologies, changing its technology stack to be more reliant on microservices, getting people to collaborate in small teams, and showing businesses that a near-perfect product delivered in a short period of time is better than a perfect one in a long period of time. We also discuss Tom’s view on AI, IoT, and zero-trust architecture, why CIOs need to focus on strategy, ways in which the CIO role has remained the same over Tom’s several decades in the role, among other topics.
390: LinkedIn co-Founder Reid Hoffman argues that companies should value speed over efficiency. In the modern world of network effects, being the first to scale often provides significant first mover advantages in creating a transformative company. While second place can be a decent consolation prize, Reid believes that if you are third or worse, you failed. However, while speed is important, Reid warns against having a blind adhesion to size as companies also need to determine which components put them in the best possible position. We also discuss the lessons Reid took from SocialNet, a company he founded before LinkedIn, his experience as a founding board member at PayPal, how China is able to move at such an extraordinary pace, among other topics.
