Podcast tags Archives: Big Data

In this interview, Chris Lofgren, CEO of Schneider National, a multi-billion dollar trucking, logistics, and intermodal service provider, and discusses World Class IT principle four, IT and Business Partnerships, with Metis Strategy. Some of the topics discussed include:

• Schneider National’s history as a early technology adopter
• The transition from CIO to COO to CEO
• The intersection of marketing and technology
• Interacting with a CIO as a current CEO and former CIO
• Eye on the Trends: the power of business analytics to find valuable trends that allow Schneider to proactively tackle both issues and opportunities

In this interview, Martha Poulter, Executive Vice President and CIO of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, discusses World Class IT principle one, People, principle four, IT & Business Partnerships, and principle five, External Partnerships with Metis Strategy. Some of the topics discussed include:

• Her role and vision for the IT organization at Starwood
• The way in which the IT team gets involved in the customer experience
• How her experiences as a customer of Starwood colors her experience to developing internal plans
• How she divided her time during her first 100 days as she came on-board at Starwood
• Some of the early plans Martha had for the organization and how she sees those plans moving forward into the future
• IT’s role from an innovation perspective and how they organize around those activities
• How her tenure at GE Capital helped her transition to Starwood
• Eye on the Trends: Data as an asset, computing miniaturization – mobile, wearables, etc, and the Internet of Things

In this interview, Jeff Dean, Google Senior Fellow & Head of Google Brain, discusses World Class IT Principle One, People, Three, Project & Portfolio Management, and Principle Four, IT & Business Partnerships. Some of the topics discussed include:

• How Jeff’s role at Google (and the company itself) has evolved since he joined in 1999, and his current role as the head of Google Brain
• How Google resists organizational stasis and remains innovative, despite growing into a corporate behemoth
• Google’s vision for an AI first world, and how the company applies its fundamental AI research to improving and creating new products and service
• Trends in artificial intelligence such as open source software and conversational assistants
• Major challenges AI presents
• How companies in any industry can leverage artificial intelligence

In this interview, Paula Tolliver, discusses World Class IT Principle Four, IT & Business Partnerships, and World Class Principle Five, External Partnerships. Some of the topics discussed include:

• Paula’s decision to move to Intel after 20 years at Dow Chemical
• IT’s role in the transformation and growth of Intel’s portfolio of products and services
• How IT’s partnerships with businesses within Intel help shape the products and solutions Intel brings to the market
• The Intel IT Annual Performance Report
• Implementing predictive analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to drive efficiency, effectiveness, and value
• Paula’s career path and the diverse roles that she has held

In this interview, Vivek Kundra, Executive Vice President of Emerging Markets at Salesforce.com, discusses World Class IT principle one, People, principle two, Infrastructure, and principle four, IT and Business Partnerships, with Metis Strategy. Some of the topics discussed include:

• His career progression from first federal CIO to his role at Salesforce.com
• Technology in the Obama presidential campaign
• How brand ownership is shifting to consumers
• The evolution of the CIO
• Why IT leaders can and must use technology to invent and reinvent new markets
• Eye on the Trends: With close to 5 billion mobile devices globally, Kundra foresees the ability for users to “instrument the planet.”- how big data algorithms can be used to look at the grievances and recommendations that consumers are sharing, and analyze that data to determine how to better and more personally serve them

In this interview, Abe Lietz, CIO of Jenny Craig and Curves International, discusses World Class IT principle two, Infrastructure, and principle four, IT & Business Partnerships, with Metis Strategy. Some of the topics discussed include:

• The synergies between Jenny Craig and Curves and the effects of their merger
• The role of IT at Jenny Craig and Curves encouraging collaboration between businesses
• His responsibilities as CIO and VP of Service Operations
• The unique technological demands of Jenny Craig and Curves’s core demographic
• The implementation of e-business and mobile technology
• The role of a CIO in a consumer facing context
• Eye on the Trends: Data analytics to improve the experience and weight loss success, cloud based infrastructure, and bio-metric tracking

In this interview, Baljit Dail, CEO of JDA Software, discusses World Class IT Principle One, People; Principle Two, Infrastructure; and Principle Four, IT and Business Partnerships. Some of the topics discussed include:

• Importance of cross-functional team work to figure out product offerings
• Continually improving talent management and building people skills
• Importance of technology to drive strategic decisions
• Staying abreast of the competitive landscape
• Importance of investments in R&D towards developing more integrations
• Traditional brick and mortar retails versus digital natives
• Eye on the Trends: Talent Management; Integration Platform; Supply Chain Solutions

In this interview, Steve Phillpott discusses World Class IT Principle One, People, World Class IT Principle Two, Infrastructure, World Class IT Principle Three, Project and Portfolio Management, World Class IT Principle Four, IT and Business Partnerships, and World Class IT Principle Five, External Partnerships. Some of the topics discussed include:

• How Steve used the multibillion-dollar acquisitions of HGST and SanDisk as an opportunity to transform Western Digital’s systems, processes, and technologies and lay the foundation for the company to scale
• The journey of integrating 3000+ applications, and specifically the importance of focusing first on putting communications and collaboration tools in place to enhance the speed and efficiency with which the organization can move forward
• How the focus on good governance has allowed them to build out program work streams and application roadmaps around ERP, Human Capital Management, PLM, among others
• How Steve set up change management programs within each workstream to ensure that the users can adapt to the new technology at the same rate it is implemented
• The criteria Steve uses to prioritize the integration effort
• Western Digital’s Predictive Analytics as a Service offering and how Steve created a big data platform that is flexible enough to support users at all maturity levels across the business
• How Western Digital leverages on-premise and cloud-based CPU and GPU high-performance computing clusters to run massive engineering simulations that greatly improve speed to market as well as reduce the cost of development
• Eye on the trends: artificial intelligence and machine learning, and the industrial IoT

In this interview, John Michelsen, Chief Technology Officer of CA Technologies, a $4.6 billion software and solutions company, discusses World Class IT principle two, Infrastructure, and principle four, IT and Business Partnerships, with Metis Strategy. Some of the topics discussed include:

• The internal and external facing role of the CTO in a tech company
• The need for speed in IT delivery
• Employing Agile principles to segment large projects into multiple manageable threads
• How IT should advise, rather than fight, business units that want to build their own applications
• Eye on the Trends: The exciting possibilities of the “Internet of Things,” and how cloud computing, mobile, big data, and consumerization of IT will be trailblazers in developing a fully interconnected world

In this interview, Jim Dubois, CIO of Microsoft, discusses World Class IT principle one, People, principle two, Infrastructure, and principle four, IT & Business Partnerships, with Metis Strategy. Some of the topics discussed include:

• His role and how he prepared for his role as an interim CIO
• How he drove progress during his initial time as CIO
• How he ensured that IT was on the same page with business units from a strategic standpoint
• The changes that are reflected in the way IT now does its work
• As CIO he acts as an initial customer to his organization, and how he can lend an empathetic ear to other customers of Microsoft
• Some of the ways that the IT organization is able to work across multiple levels of the organization
• The strategic roadmap for the future at Microsoft (including the ongoing integration with Nokia, as well as the move to a subscription basis for major Microsoft products)
• Advice on how to move from an interim CIO to a full time fit for the position
• Balancing innovation and security with his background as Chief Information Security Officer for Microsoft
• Eye on the Trends: Big Data, Machine learning, BYOD capabilities, Digitization