10-23-17
By Peter High, published on Forbes
Over the past four years, James Swanson has been leading a digital transformation in the agriculture industry. In is current role as Chief Information Officer at Monsanto, Swanson has been trying to develop ways to make use of Monsanto’s vast pools of data and derive insights that can inform company strategy. In a previous interview, he explains that this digital transformation is focused around five pillars that define the digital opportunity: operational excellence, business productivity, customer centricity, revenue enablement, and disruptive innovation. Since then, Swanson and his team have launched “science@scale,” their internally branded cloud analytics ecosystem. This highly scalable data science platform has drastically increased the speed of data analysis driving a cost savings increase of over $15MM and sales revenue increase of $17MM in the U.S. by completing months of scientific work in a matter of hours. As he notes in this interview, the results have been thrilling, and for that reason Swanson is a recipient of the 2017 New York Summit Forbes CIO Innovation Award.
When asked about Swanson’s contribution, Monsanto CEO and Chairman Hugh Grant noted, “At Monsanto, collaboration is our competitive advantage. Collaboration with scientists across R&D was essential to the successful development and launch of science@scale. By marrying extremely talented big data and cloud analytics engineering team with skilled scientists, the team created a unique partnership to drive innovative thinking.”
Peter High: Please describe the innovative idea that you and your team in IT pursued.
James Swanson: Monsanto’s IT division wanted to provide our data scientists the ability to collaborate and share analytics models on a global scale and enable our scientists to take full advantage of our ever-expanding information assets. With this goal in mind, the team developed “science@scale,” our internally branded cloud analytics ecosystem. Since its release, this platform has proven to accelerate the development of analytics-driven decision models by turning data into actionable insights across our R&D pipeline and Commercial and Global Supply Chain, paving the way by transforming data science from exploration to full production implementation.
Our science@scale combines the best-in-class data science tools, like R/Sparklyr, Python/PySpark, OR/OPL, and Java/Scala, with scalable big data and cloud analytics infrastructure, like Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform, to support high performance computing and memory intensive data analyses to solve complex agricultural challenges for Monsanto’s next-generation plant genomics research.
High: What opportunity or issue to be resolved led to this IT-led innovation?
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Lynden Tennison has spent the majority of his career leading and staying on top of technological developments within the railroad industry. In his current role as Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Union Pacific, Tennison has been working to commercialize internal software and leverage corporate assets to secure advantage in a competitive industry. To this end he and his team have developed PS Technology, a subsidiary built to tap into and market internal software, and launched Breeze Broadband Communications, a new wireless ISP company. These efforts have been extremely successful, bringing in an additional $50 million in revenue, and for that reason, Tennison is a recipient of the 2017 New York Forbes CIO Innovation Award.
When asked about Tennison’s contribution, Union Pacific CEO Lance Fritz said, “Union Pacific has a six-track strategy that drives value for our four key stakeholders: customers, shareholders, employees, and communities. Leveraging our technology assets through subsidiary companies is a great example of how our IT team helps foster innovation with new products and services, focuses on resource productivity by leveraging corporate assets, and maximizes the overall value of the Union Pacific franchise for all stakeholders.”
Lynden Tennison: We commercialized much of our internally developed software through a separate technology subsidiary company, PS Technology, plus we leveraged other corporate assets to launch a new wireless ISP company targeting rural America, called Breeze Broadband Communications.
The software subsidiary, PS Technology, leverages internal R&D within the railroad IT department and also reinvests 15 percent of their revenue in new product R&D.
The new wireless ISP business, Breeze Broadband Communications, is using communications infrastructure, including our towers and other transmission assets, originally built to support the railroad to deliver wireless broadband services to rural markets. Breeze was conceptualized within the IT department and a thorough market study was done, including full business case development, prior to launch in 2017.
For the third time, I have the privilege of announcing the Forbes CIO Innovation Award winners, recently announced at our Forbes CIO Summit in New York City. As in previous iterations, the award focuses on chief information officers who are making some of the biggest impacts on revenue growth through innovation. We focus on these individuals and their teams because they are pushing the boundaries and expanding the domain of the CIO; a position that has historically not lead revenue augmenting innovation activities. The 2017 New York Summit winners of the Forbes CIO Innovation Award have each driven significant revenue through their commitment to innovation and leadership in the information technology division of their companies.
The 2017 New York Summit winners are:
Suren Gupta, Executive Vice President of Allstate Technology and Strategic Ventures, who has helped to launch Good Hands Rescue Mobile, an innovative digital solution that makes it easier for stranded motorists to get the help they need. This innovation is responsible for helping around 25,000 stranded drivers a month and providing the company an eight digit revenue lift.
James Swanson, Chief Information Officer of Monsanto, has lead his team in developing “science@scale,” a cloud-based, highly scalable data science platform. This analytics ecosystem has driven a cost savings increase of over $15MM and sales revenue increase of $17MM in the U.S. by completing months of scientific work in a matter of hours.
Lynden Tennison, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Union Pacific, and his team have worked to commercialize much of their internally developed software through a separate technology subsidiary company, PS Technology, while leveraging other corporate assets to launch a new wireless ISP company, called Breeze Broadband Communications. These efforts have generated over $50 million in revenue, growing at double digits annually.
Earlier in 2017, the award was bestowed upon Lidia Fonseca, the CIO of Quest Diagnostics, Jim Fowler, CIO of General Electric, and Trevor Schulze, the CIO of Micron Technology.
10/17/17
When Cerner Chief Information Officer Bill Graff joined the company in 2005, he was attracted to the fact that it felt like an entrepreneurial company. The company’s growth since that would certainly back up that assumption. in 2005, Cerner earned roughly $1 billion in revenue. Today, the company is a $5 billion revenue company. In that same period, associate count has grown from roughly 6,000 to over 25,000, and Graff’s team has grown from 35 people to over 1,500.
Graff has run the company’s hosting business for a number of years, growing that part of the business from 30 to 40 clients to over 500 clients today. His CIO responsibilities were added to his hosting responsibilities a year and a half ago, and he has brought that same revenue-centricity and customer focus to IT, as he highlights in this interview, among other topics we covered.
Peter High: Bill, you joined Cerner in 2005 as a senior manager of Infrastructure Operations. You have been the Chief Information Officer of Cerner for about a year and a half. Can you describe your thirteen-year journey, rising through the ranks, to become CIO?
Bill Graff: Prior to coming to Cerner, I held different roles in IT ranging from software engineering to operational responsibilities like running datacenters. When I joined Cerner, I took over the datacenter infrastructure for the hosting site. As we dramatically grew that business from a small startup business inside of Cerner, to a large-scale business across the board, my responsibilities expanded as well. As Cerner grew, it made sense to combine the infrastructure organization and the corporate IT organization. In 2010, many of the infrastructure components from corporate IT, things like the networks and server storage platforms, came into my organization. Soon after that, it also made sense, from operating and cost modeling perspectives, to pull some of the applications into my organization. This was because on the hosting side, we had built processes for a lot of tools, things like automation, ticket tracking, and support services. That was about a three-year process. For the past three years, I have had responsibility for corporate IT, as well as on the hosting side responsibility for all of the global datacenter operations and infrastructure. I have spent a lot of time, both globally and working in the trenches, leveraging technology to enable our associates to be more productive, to deliver great service to our clients, and to help build Cerner.
High: How has the business grown in the time that you have been with Cerner?
Graff: When I joined Cerner, in early 2005, revenue was right around $1 billion dollars. Today, we are a nearly $5 billion revenue company. In 2005, our associate count was around 6,000. Now we are at a little over 25,000 people, worldwide. One of the reasons I came to Cerner was because I had spent a lot of time working at startups, and Cerner felt like a startup company. You were expected to be entrepreneurial and to deliver results. The exciting thing about Cerner was we had good business leaders and the funding to do entrepreneurial things. Through US legislation and hard work on our part to deliver, the company has grown dramatically. I have had a great career over the last 13 years.
High: Can you describe your purview as CIO?
10/10/17
It has been a remarkably eventful couple of years for Symantec. In early 2016, the company went through one of the largest corporate divestitures when it spun out its Veritas business. In June of 2016 the company acquired Blue Coat, and then followed that up with the acquisition of LifeLock in early 2017. The rationale was to focus on being a pure play cyber security company, with end-to-end solutions. In the process Symantec has built itself into the largest cyber security company in the world by revenue.
Sheila Jordan has been chief information officer of the company throughout the journey. She came to the company nearly four years ago from Cisco. The latter is a legendarily acquisitive company, and Jordan has leveraged her experience to develop a playbook of sorts for the team at Symantec to integrate each of the major companies it has acquired. She also has developed the company’s CustomerONE program, highlighting her team’s use of the company’s products. Jordan discusses all of the above and more in this interview.
Peter High: Symantec recently acquired Blue Coat and LifeLock. What advantages was Symantec trying to garner for the enterprise, your partners, and your customers through those acquisitions?
Sheila Jordan: With the Blue Coat acquisition, we were able to retain Greg Clark, who is our CEO, and Mike Fay, who is our president and COO. They came in and quickly established the vision and overall strategy for the company, which is what we call our Integrated Cyber Defense Platform. An integrated platform is important for CIOs and chief information security officers (CISOs) because fragmentation and lack of integration generate risk by creating white spaces where the bad guys hang out and cause damage. Acquiring Blue Coat gave us the opportunity to improve the security posture of our small, medium, and enterprise customers.
Improving operational efficiencies also reduces costs. Fixing technology sprawl by using an integrated solution, which allows you to remove some products, drives a lot of value. We have been implementing the transformation on cloud products and on-prem. We just had our earnings reports, the positive results tell us it is resonating with our customers across verticals and with small, medium, and enterprise organizations.
From an IT perspective, we want to make sure we are enabling the organization. It is important that CIOs think about run, change, and grow. You have to run the company and be efficient and effective, but that is table stakes. You also want to position yourself with the new technology to be able to help the CEO and the C-suite change and grow. The acquisitions of Blue Coat and LifeLock gave us the opportunity to not only integrate, but also to transform how we do our work and think about the future.
The combination of us moving into cloud products and IT having a stake in driving integration and transformation, allowed us to think about taking our global subscription platform to a new level. One of the things we thought about was: How do we make sure our customers can consume their products the way they want to? We created an end-to-end reference architecture for our global subscription platform. It starts with our engineering products; they have provisioning, metering, and monitoring in the cloud products. Then it goes all the way through to how we quote an order, configure an order, how we do quote-to-cash, and, ultimately, to distribution. We want our products to be widely distributed and our global subscription platform to be frictionless. Our goal is a process that only takes a few clicks. We are accomplishing that through the integration of our cloud products with our subscription platform.
High: Your clients are often IT departments. To what extent do you and your team spend time in the field working with CIOs and learning about issues that you can help solve?
10-04-17
Gartner Symposium is currently under way in Orlando, and the company has identified a top ten strategic technology trends for the year ahead. Gartner defines “strategic” as those technologies that will have significant disruptive potential over the next five years.” Here is a summary of the trends:
Intelligent:
1. AI Foundation
AI has massive potential to enhance decision making, reinvent business models and ecosystems, and remake the customer experience. Many organizations have already taken notice of this, with a recent Gartner survey indicating that 59% or organizations are gathering information to build an AI strategy, while the rest are piloting or adopting AI programs. Given that AI techniques are rapidly evolving, and organizations will need to invest heavily in skills, processes and tools, it is suggested that business focus on tightly scoped solutions targeting specific tasks. With Gartner estimating that by 2020, 30% of CIOs will include AI in their top 5 investment priorities, now is the time to invest in data preparation, integration, algorithm and training methodology selection, and model creation.
2. Intelligent Apps & Analytics
AI has become a major battleground for software and service vendors, with AI expected to be incorporated into every application, app and service, at least on some level. Gartner highlights augmented analytics, which uses machine learning to automate data preparation, insight discovery and insight sharing as an area of growing strategic importance. Organizations should explore intelligent apps that augment human activity, and identify use cases across advanced analytics, intelligent processes and new user experiences
3. Intelligent Things
10-03-2017
Roger Martin has been a leading strategist and consultant for many years. He is consigliere to CEOs of many multi-billion dollar enterprises. He also spent a decade and a half as the dean of the Rotman School of Management in Toronto, a post he took as an act of patriotism in the hopes of creating Canada’s first world-class business school. (He achieved that goal.)
Martin is also a prolific author, having written numerous business best sellers such as Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works (co-authored with P&G CEO A.G. Laffley), The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage, and Creating Great Choices: A Leader’s Guide to Integrative Thinking (co-authored with Rotman School Adjunct Professor, Jennifer Riel), which is his most recent book.
In this interview, he reflects on the future of social democracy, and posits that economic shifts have transpired that have altered the viability of the American Dream.
Peter High: Please describe the work you are doing with the Martin Prosperity Institute on the future of Democratic Capitalism.
Roger Martin: We are in the middle of a six-year project with the goal of answering the following mystery: Between 1776 and 1989, a period of a mere 213 years, the median family in the U.S. economy had a 95 percent probability of their income being higher, in real terms, than it was the year before. In those 213 years, they were two bad periods where this was not true. The first was the Long Depression in the late 1800s. People know less about that depression than the Great Depression, but it was equally bad. The second was the Great Depression, which began in 1929 and went for several years. Other than those periods, it was only the odd year or two where the median income did not increase. Additionally, up to 1989, the income of the top 1 percent dropped dramatically more than the median person’s income. That is American history up to 1989. Then, between 1989 and 2014, where we have the latest revised figures, median income was flat. 2014 was not higher than 1989.
There are two things to notice here. One, that is longer than any other time in American history, by far, and it is continuing. Two, in this period, the top 1 percent has done better than any time in American history. It is not even close, and it is accelerating. The mystery we are trying to solve is what changed about the American economy that makes the post 1989 period different from the period prior to 1989 whereby the median income person now has no expectation that their income is going up next year or the year after. Meanwhile, the top 1 percent’s incomes are getting better every year.
Why do I care about that? In Democratic Capitalism, the median income family is the swing voter. Unless the public vote’s for the status quo, you will have the government producing that negative result punted out. After the Great Depression, if we consider the industrialized democratic countries of that era, which was Europe and the U.S., virtually all of Europe went either communist, socialist, or fascist in response to that stagnation. The United States did not. In fact, the FDR administration took the country leftward, but still it was avowedly democratic capitalist. The reason that was politically plausible was the median family, the swing voter, could say, “At least we are all in this together. The rich are getting slammed super hard. We are getting slammed. The whole economy is getting slammed. Let’s try to work our way out of it together.” We do not have that condition anymore. The median family, if they are paying any attention, is saying “We are getting slammed and those guys couldn’t possibly be doing more awesome.”
10/02/2017
Taso Du Val had multiple experiences as lead engineer at start-ups, including at Fotolog, which was acquired by Hi-Media for $100 million, and at Slide, which was acquired by Google for $228 million. His first experience as CEO came while running a small engineering consulting firm. During this time, Du Val developed an international team of co-workers, and discovered that the talent he could access rivaled the best talent in Silicon Valley. US-based companies often have difficulty tapping this high quality and cost competitive talent, but as the war for talent in Silicon Valley and in other US and European tech hubs has become more acute, better alternatives were needed.
Du Val co-founded Toptal, a freelance engineer marketplace, in 2010 to fill that gap. The company’s investors include Andreessen Horowitz and Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo. The company boasts a large and growing client list that includes Airbnb, Rand McNally, JPMorgan Chase, IDEO, and Pfizer. Du Val was selected by Forbes as one of its 30 under 30 in Enterprise Technology in 2015.
Among the most fascinating developments within the company has been both its virtual workforce (the company has no offices) and the technology it has developed. Toptal built its own enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and business process management (BPM) solutions to ensure that they seamlessly meshed, and that the company controlled the pace at which each evolved. These were major technical feats, which are quite unusual in this day-and-age given the fact that there are off-the-shelf versions of each that work quite well. Du Val claims that this provides an advantage in as much as each works with the other seamlessly, and the company is in control of all updates to the technology.
Peter High: Please provide a bit of a background into Toptal’s founding and mission.
Taso Du Val: When we started the company, about seven years ago, the talent marketplace was going in two directions. There were large players such as Pivotal, Accenture, Infosys, and other big shops that had expensive medium-high to high skilled labor within them. On the opposite side, there was freelancer.com, Elance, and a few other freelance marketplaces. They had high skilled labor, but it was difficult to find because it was mixed in with tens of millions of users of varying skill levels. We recognized the opportunity in the market and began our journey.
High: What market segments do you focus on? Are there certain sizes or industries that have been particularly ripe for Toptal?
9/25/17
What are microservices? In the first part in this series, I interviewed Matt Miller of Sequoia Capital. In this, the second part of the series, I interview Jay Kreps, the founder and CEO of Confluent, an open-source streaming platform based on Apache Kafka. Kreps developed Kafka while he was the Principal Staff Engineer at LinkedIn. Three years ago, he left that social media giant to develop his own company to develop real-time data streams leveraging microservices.
In this interview, he describes his entrepreneurial journey, highlights the opportunity that microservices offer to large and small companies alike, and offers advice on how best to harness the power of this trend.
Peter High: Jay, you were at LinkedIn for seven years; the last three as the principal staff engineer. You came to microservices through that experience, and then developed some key technology in the evolution of the topic. Can you talk about the opportunity as you saw it from your position at a fast-growing dynamic technology company?
Jay Kreps: When I joined LinkedIn in 2007, they were starting to figure out how to effectively break up a monolithic application that everybody put their code into. There had been an earlier wave of technology called service-oriented architecture, which is pretty much the same thing as microservices, that had died off. LinkedIn was born in the space between service-oriented architecture and the advent of microservices. Generally, to scale a software engineering effort, you add software engineers. However, when you add engineers you do get more done, but each individual engineer adds less capacity than the one before. This is a fundamental problem of big projects with lots of people and big applications; as you add people, you get slower. When people talk about microservices, they discuss scaling for more web traffic, reliability, and all kinds of other things. Microservices do not help those things.
Microservices only help one thing — scaling software engineering efforts. It lets you add more money and turn it into more software at a more constant rate.
LinkedIn made a lot of mistakes when they were trying to scale because not a lot was known about best practices. As a fast-growth company, one of the most important things was creating a product that could evolve quickly. Having agility and speed was critical because the social networking space was competitive. It ended up working out in the end because everyone could deploy their part of the application and move independently. However, there were a bunch of hills and valleys in between where we made changes that were supposed to make us more effective, but had the opposite effect.
A significant evolution in technology was needed to get the promised outcome. This is where Apache Kafka came in. People starting out today benefit from the knowledge of what works and what does not, and many of the tools around deployment and the communication between services are built up. There is now a whole family of technologies that solve problems around deployment, how you monitor your applications to make sure they are all running well, how they communicate with each other, and how you can ensure reliability and security globally when you have many moving pieces.
High: Apache Kafka is the open source data-streaming platform you co-developed during your time at LinkedIn. It is also part of the backbone of Confluent. What was the process of codifying that into open source technology?
As I work with chief information officers, the topic of microservices has risen in importance and curiosity. What is it? How does it differ from containers or service-oriented architecture? Is it primarily a weapon in the arsenal of start-ups? Given the level of curiosity, but also differences in understanding, this seemed like a topic ripe for further investigation.
Matt Miller is a Partner at Sequoia Capital, and he is among the foremost experts on microservices. He has invested in many leading companies in the space, and maintains a microservices ecosystem roadmap that highlights the various aspects of the topic and the leaders in each aspect. He seemed like the perfect person to ask the question, “What are Microservices?”
Peter High: As a partner at Sequoia and someone who has been investing in this space for some time, how do you define microservices?
Matt Miller: Microservices is the easiest way to go big by going small. It is taking what may have been a large traditional application and breaking it into many smaller autonomous pieces. Those pieces are defined as services that operate uniquely across the different use cases you have. Microservices provide a lot of benefits for the startup community Sequoia works with, as well as the corporate Fortune 500 Global 2000 community we work with, since many of our companies are our startup community’s vendors. Going to smaller applications makes you far more scalable because it is easier to scale smaller pieces. It is also significantly faster to iterate and make changes on small pieces. Additionally, the smaller pieces are far more resilient because the systems are designed to be completely independent. Meaning, if there is a failure in one of the pieces, the rest of the system continues to operate. The result of all of this is a better user experience. It is also significantly less expensive than maintaining the monolithic applications people have worked with for years.
High: You have argued that microservices represent the biggest disruption we have seen in enterprise technology this decade. Can you elaborate?
