Podcast tags Archives: Big Data

In this interview, Jim Knight, EVP & Global Chief Information Officer of Chubb & Son, a global property and casualty insurance company, discusses principle three, Project and Portfolio Management, principle four, IT-Business Partnerships, and principle five, External Partnerships, of World Class IT with Metis Strategy. Some of the topics discussed include:

• Technology in the competitive arms race
• Collaboration in a Global CIO governance structure
• The enterprise PMO’s ability to facilitate consistent delivery
• IT’s stabilizing value in uncertain economic times
• The importance of establishing business intimacy
• Eye on the trends: Three major disruptive technologies- portable devices with enhanced functionality and performance to enable the workforce, big data and the potential for analytics to drive critical business decisions, and cloud computing and its ability to facilitate faster market entry

In this interview, Jon Harding, Global CIO of Conair Corporation, discusses World Class IT principle one, People, with Metis Strategy. Some of the topics discussed include:

• The centralized structure of IT within Conair
• The methodology of expanding an organization’s information technology system on a global scale
• Vendor management practices, and the implications of local and more global partnerships for a major corporation
• Eye on the Trends: The potential of big data, and the internet of things – ability of all sorts of devices to communicate

In this interview, Lidia Fonseca, CIO of Quest Diagnostics, discusses World Class IT principle two, Infrastructure, and principle four, IT-Business Partnerships. Some of the topics discussed include:

• Quest Diagnostics, their scale, technology, and partnerships
• Her role as Chief Information and the responsibilities of her role
• How she encourages her team to engage with customers
• Big Data and how her team structures and analyzes the huge amount of data at Quest Diagnostics
• Security and how she balances innovation and risk-taking with security considerations
• Her membership on the board of Gannett, and how she came across the opportunity to join
• How boards of directors will continue to look for technical expertise as companies try to become digital

In this interview, Stuart Sackman, discusses World Class IT Principle One, People and World Class Principle Four, IT & Business Partnerships. Some of the topics discussed include:

• The value of combining product and technology under one executive
• The advantages of having multiple diverse roles in one organization for both the individual and the organization
• Adapting in an evolving competitive landscape
• Strategies for recruiting millenials and technologists
• The development of Lifion, ADP’s innovation lab
• Using hackathons to improve how services are developed and delivered
• ADP Ventures: an internal team that builds and tests new product offerings

In this interview, David McCue, Chief Information Officer of Computer Science Corporation (CSC), a $16 billion provider of information technology and professional services to governments and commercial enterprises. discusses World Class IT principle two, Infrastructure, principle three, Project Portfolio Management, and principle four, IT-Business Partnerships, with Metis Strategy. Some of the topics discussed include:

• David’s role and responsibilities as Global CIO and Corporate Vice President
• CSC’s three-legged approach to global governance
• Standardizing around process, not technology, and deploying global solutions
• Methods for effective best practice sharing
• Approaching the role of CIO from a business perspective
• Eye on the trends: Mobility, and how it enables individuals to be able to do anything, anytime and anywhere; analytics that enable seeing data in large amounts, and how it enables near real-time answers to business queries; and the importance of security in terms of protecting intellectual property so as to maintain a competitive advantage

In this interview, Gary Beach, publisher emeritus of CIO magazine, discusses World Class IT principle one, People, with Metis Strategy. Some of the topics discussed include:

• Discussion of Gary Beach’s bestselling book, The U.S. Technology Skills Gap, and the need for America to produce more IT talent
• The technology skill gap in America, and potential education solutions to resolve the problem
• The growing importance of emerging MOOCs, and their necessary emphasis on STEM subjects
• The state of the CIO today in comparison to the last five years, and the stagnation of business perception of IT
• Eye on the Trends:Positive potential of big data mining in relation to customer happiness and product development; downside of this data cache from the security point of view

In this interview, Antoine Blondeau, CEO of Sentient Technologies, discusses World Class IT Principle One, People, and Principle Two, Infrastructure. Some of the topics discussed include:

• The state of the artificial intelligence industry and his work over the past fifteen years
• How Sentient Technologies has applied there work to the retail and online shopping industry
• How the technology maps out the process of interaction to create a better user experience
• The large amount of capital currently held by Sentient Technologies and his plans for those funds
• The war for talent in Silicon Valley
• The balance between innovation and safety within the artificial intelligence industry
• How he thinks about artificial intelligence in his daily life
• The strategic planning process, and what he sees coming in the next five to ten years
• Why he chose to pursue his career in the United States as opposed to Europe

This is the first episode of our “What is?” series, where we tackle topics of rising importance in technology and business, more generally speaking. We will tackle, “What is artificial intelligence?,” “What is Blockchain?,” “What is robotics?,” “What is 3d printing?,” and the like. Today, my question is: “What is microservices?” To answer that question, I speak with a Matt Miller, a Partner at Sequoia Capital and Jay Kreps, the CEO of Confluent.

In this interview, Dan Fallon, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Navistar, a $14 billion truck and engine manufacturer, discusses World Class IT principle four, IT-Business Partnerships, with Metis Strategy. Some of the topics discussed include:

• Dan’s role in facilitating how technology is leveraged within IT and across the business
• IT’s broad view of the business enabling IT to see opportunities for integration
• The demarcation between business strategy and IT strategy
• How the culture of collaboration acts as a foundation for a culture of innovation
• Eye on the trends: IT teaming with the business to achieve specific results through Centers of Excellence, the consumerization of IT and how it has helped accelerate the advancement of IT, location-based services and how it ties to Big Data, and the use of bio-informatics

In this interview, Mike Lucas, Global Chief Information Officer of Hogan Lovells, discusses World Class IT principle one, People, and principle four, IT-Business Partnerships, with Metis Strategy. Some of the topics discussed include:

• The steps he took to prepare for the Global CIO job at Hogan Lovells
• The most important processes or technologies implemented within the first “100 days” on the job
• Movement towards the role of “global” CIO, and the implications this position will have for firms in the future
• Defining the parameters of success from an IT standpoint in a global organization
• Eye on the Trends: The growing importance of IT services in the legal field – enabling remote working capabilities for lawyers and protecting client data