By Peter High, published on Forbes
7/24/2017
Kumud Kalia has been a CIO multiple times over, at Direct Energy, at Qwest Communications, and at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein. For nearly six years, he has been the CIO of Akamai Technologies a $2.3 billion global content delivery network services firm. Kalia is responsible for leading the strategy, development, and operation of the applications and infrastructure that support the company’s business operations. As a CIO leading IT at a technology company, in some cases, his team provides guidance of CIO needs and validate the value of the products the company has in development. Moreover, he and his colleagues in IT have developed internal solutions that can be adopted by the end- customer.
Among other areas, Kalia attributes his success to developing a culture that embraces expansive thinking and that is agile in its mentality and its approach. Both have been essential as the company has grown tremendously during his tenure, and its needs and demands for IT’s services are different and far greater than they were six years ago. We cover all of the above and more in this interview.
Peter High: Kumud, you have been the Chief Information Officer at Akamai Technologies for five and a half years. Please describe Akamai’s business and your role as chief information officer.
Kumud Kalia: Akamai has been at the heart of the internet for the past 20 years. Companies that do a lot of internet-based, commercial business use our services to distribute content over the internet. For example, media and e-commerce companies depend on Akamai to run and scale their businesses. We store our customers’ content on our global network of servers that we position geographically close to their end-users. The online experience that the end-user has is the fastest and richest possible because our servers remove latency caused by distance and congestion on the internet. In effect, we speed up the internet by overcoming its natural limitations.
As the CIO of a technology company with many technology-savvy employees, I work with a tough crowd. There are at least 2,000 people in the company who think they can do my job better than I can. There are advantages, of course. Being technologically-aware makes my colleagues more willing to experiment. They also provide critical feedback on technology that we are considering and are adept at debugging my solutions. However, even technology people can be reluctant to embrace new solutions. Engineers tend to consume products that have been built by themselves or by someone they know, and then develop a tribal allegiance to that solution. This challenge is similar to what many enterprise CIOs find with their end-users. I have much in common with CIOs of other enterprises, but I have some natural advantages that come from being in a tech-savvy user community.
High: In our previous conversations, you have said that a CIO and his or her team should foster business agility. IT should not gum up the operation, but rather, as the organization identifies new opportunities to seize, IT should be an accelerator. When you joined Akamai, it was roughly half the size it is now. Presumably, it has plans to continue to grow. How do you think about agility in a fast-growing company?
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7/17/2017
Chris Corrado has been an IT leader at many esteemed financial services companies such as Morgan Stanley, UBS, Merrill Lynch, and Deutsche Bank. He has also held CIO and CTO roles at technology companies such as eBay, AT&T Wireless, and Asurion. Along the way, his purview has grown from traditional CIO responsibilities to non-traditional ones, such as product development. Currently, he serves as the Chief Information Officer and Chief Operations Officer at the London Stock Exchange Group, a $2.2 billion British-based stock exchange and financial information company. It is headquartered in London.
He notes that CIOs need to be much more cognizant of the “I” In their title. Information is the key to garnering better insights on behalf of the company and its customers. Those CIOs who harness information effectively will take on greater and more strategic responsibilities. Corrado is optimistic that more CIOs will follow in his footsteps to become COOs.
Peter High: Chris, you are the Chief Information Officer and the Chief Operating Officer of the London Stock Exchange Group. Please provide a brief overview of the organization and explain your purview.
Chris Corrado: The London Stock Exchange Group is a collection of complementary businesses. We have a core strategy called Open Access, which reflects our philosophy of transparency and choice. The Group directly runs the London Stock Exchange and the Borsa Italiana. We provide the infrastructure, operations, and technology for the Oslo Stock Exchange. We also run clearinghouses and information businesses that produce indexes and analytics. The firm has experienced remarkable growth since Xavier Role became CEO, in 2009. The existing businesses have grown significantly and we have made 22 acquisitions. Today, the Group is comprised of diversified and complimentary businesses that provide a robust value chain that enables our clients to manage their investment processes. To achieve this goal, we maximize cost effectiveness, time to market and the quality of information. Technology is the fulcrum of this.
There are some unique aspects of the firm that, in turn, make my role as the CIO unique. For example, we sell hosting services because our customers want their technology in our datacenters because this makes our services more robust and less latent. The hosting services fall under me. When Xavier took over, he realized that technology is critical to what we do. However, he was not satisfied with the performance of our technology, which was being outsourced pretty significantly. Since his focus is on time-to-market, we bought technology companies. The companies have maintained their existing clients and have grown their client base as commercial enterprises. We have scaled and stabilized them internally. These fall under me as well. As we continue, I will touch on some other aspects of my position. As an overview, my role is running the company day-to-day operationally, and helping to determine the best client experience for our customers, by leveraging our capabilities.
High: It seems like the best CIOs are thinking about their job more along the lines of being a chief operating officer of technology, as opposed to the traditional order-taking, back office type of role it once was. Do you see this as a natural evolution for a strong CIO?
07/10/17
Eight years ago, Dave Evans asked Bill Burnett to lunch. Dave was a management consultant and lecturer at the University of California Berkeley, and a co-founder of Electronic Arts. Bill was and continues to be the Executive Director of the Design Program at Stanford University. Evans had been teaching a class at Cal on vocation, and based on that experience, he thought that Burnett and he might be able to address a need in combination for the students in the Design Program. He thought that the fact that students in that program had a multi-disciplinary degree that they may have difficulty finding their first jobs. Evans notes, “I thought this was going to be a multi-part discussion and that I’d have to have a couple of meetings to sell Bill on this idea. Within 15 minutes, I had the deal done!”
Since then, Evans and Burnett have taught an open enrollment class at Stanford together, which has become one of the most popular electives at the university. The method has been the subject of two PhD theses and had demonstrated significant results in helping people design the life they want. The method is centered on the principles taught in the Product Design Program and the d.school at Stanford called “design thinking.” As the ideas grew in popularity, Evans and Burnett elected to memorialize many of the key insights and exercises in a book, Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life, which has been a bestseller since its release in September of last year. They discuss many of the key themes herein.
Peter High: Bill, as the Executive Director of the Design Program at Stanford, the Co-Director of the Stanford Life Design Lab, and the co-author of the book we are discussing, please provide an overview of the Design Program at Stanford, which is foundational to the work that the two of you have been doing.
Bill Burnett: Most people, when they hear the word design, think of graphic design or industrial design. That is commonly the way design is taught, but Stanford took a different tact. We have been teaching design as a human-centered practice, since 1957. A couple of big thinkers, John Arnold and Bob McKim put together what we call human-centered design, which is Engineering, plus Psychology and a little Anthropology to try to understand people well; and then leaning hard into the concepts of creativity and ideation. This is what we now call “design thinking,” which is an innovation methodology that relies on multiple sets of tools and focuses on human needs. It is a way of innovating in anything: a product, a service, or experiences. What we primarily do at Stanford is teach undergraduates and graduates how to be design thinkers. Then they go out into the world and work at all the big companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and IBM. Most of my work is around teaching our Engineering students how to be innovators, the Designing Your Life class popped up as a little side project. It has kind of gotten out of control.
High: Dave, I understand the genesis of the Designing Your Life class was about eight years ago and began with you taking Bill to lunch. That then led to the recently released book, Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived Joyful Life. What was the problem you hoped to solve or the opportunity that you recognized that led you to collaborate with Bill?
07/03/17
Ann Kono wears a lot of hats at Ares Management, the $1.2 billion alternative asset manager. She is a Partner and Chief Information and Risk Officer of the company, and she is a member of the Management Committee of Ares Management. She also serves as Vice President of Ares Dynamic Credit Allocation Fund, Inc. and CION Ares Diversified Credit Fund. She additionally serves as a member of the Ares Operations Management Group and the Ares Enterprise Risk Committee.
Kono’s ability to push to other areas beyond IT can be traced to her roots in Finance (she has a BA and an MBA both with Finance as the areas of focus), and in consulting, where she became passionate about solving difficult and varied problems for clients. Her financial acumen and customer focus have served her well in building an IT team that adds to both the top and bottom lines of the company. By having responsibility for innovation activities while also serving as the company’s first ever risk officer, she helps ensure the company balances both perspectives well.
During her more than ten years with Ares, she has helped usher in remarkable growth, moving the company an order of magnitude forward from a revenue perspective, and ensuring that technology remains modern, reliable, and flexible. She shares her perspectives on her journey, the many hats she wears, and more in this interview.
Peter High: Ann, you are a Partner, the Chief Information Officer, and the Chief Risk Officer at Ares Management. Please describe your responsibilities.
Ann Kono: My responsibilities have evolved over my last ten years at Ares. I started off managing technology and then quickly took over the investment operations functions. My risk responsibilities began about seven or eight years ago, when we developed an enterprise risk function during the financial crisis. We started with operational risk to create the business resilience that was needed for a large-scale multinational firm. Then, we added information risk, which encapsulates information security and cybersecurity. Finally, we added investment risk, which is core to our offering.
In the last three years, I have also taken on responsibility for what we call the “middle office,” which is the bridge between our investment professionals and our operations professionals. Within our industry, the role of the middle office is to enable the transition of assets between the two parties that are buying and selling transactions and assets within the marketplace.
My most recent set of responsibilities resulted from us brainstorming how to optimize high scale, high volume, operational processes. We developed a group called Global Shared Services. The first function within that is Accounts Payable. As we begin to talk, you will see how technology enables all the functions within this group and how we leverage technology to make these functions more efficient.
High: What is the rationale of having IT and risk together?
06/28/17
Brian Lillie set his sights on the becoming a chief information officer early in his career, and he carefully planned the moves necessary to get there. He determined he would lead each of the functions that make up a traditional IT department. Through his beginnings in technology at the Air Force, to time spent at Silicon Graphics, and then at Verisign, he gathered the necessary experiences. Then he took a left turn and spent a year getting a master’s degree in Management from Stanford Graduate School of Business. When he came back to Verisign, it was as Vice President of Global Sales Operations. Through this experience, he gained invaluable customer-centric experience and insights.
When Lillie joined Equinix in 2008, he finally realized his dream, becoming CIO, but he made this role a much more customer-centric one than is typical. As a $3.6 billion leader in the global colocation datacenter space, the company’s customers are often CIOs and their IT teams. As such, he was able to serve as a empathetic peer to his company’s customers, while also making the case for the use of Equinix’s offering. He also established an Equinix-on-Equinix program, ensuring that his team was the first and best customer of the company, making his team’s insights sharper when working with customers.
In September 2016, Lillie was promoted to chief customer officer and executive vice president of Technology Services. In that role, he leads the Global Customer Success Organization, which includes Global Customer Care, Global Customer Experience, Global Customer Process, and Global Technology Services, including IT and Interconnection Product Engineering. In many ways, this role was simply a continuation of what he had already been doing.
Now he has a CIO reporting to him, and as such he has had a chance to reflect further on the nature of the role and what separates those who succeed in it versus those who do not. He has defined “Four Pillars of Excellence,” which he believes to be the four cornerstones for building a career as a CIO. He believes CIOs must be operational, transformational, innovational, and organizational. He covers all of the above and more in depth in this interview, and more.
Peter High: Brian, you are the Chief Customer Officer and Executive Vice President of Technology Services at Equinix. Your current role is interesting, as is the path that led you to it. Can you share a few highlights from the journey you took, how you managed your career, and the goals that led you to where you are today?
Brian Lillie:I started my career in the Air Force. I was an officer for almost a decade. My last two jobs in the Air Force, as a commander of a communications squadron and as a captain in a mission control center operating satellites, prepared me well for IT. My first civilian job was as the network manager at Silicon Graphics (SGI). In this position, I gained both communications infrastructure and international experience because after a while with the company I moved to Switzerland and ran IT infrastructure for Europe for two years. At this point in my career, a mentor told me that a strong CIO should have experience in every box on the org chart. I have used this advice to guide my career.
When I came back to the U.S. with SGI, I transitioned into apps. When I joined Verisign as VP of IT, I picked up apps and infrastructure, and worked on integrating acquisitions. During this time, I thought I wanted to become a CEO, so I took a year off and attended the Stanford Graduate School of Business where I earned a master’s degree in management. After I earned my degree and came back to Verisign, I knew that I wanted to get in on the business side. The CEO was reorganizing the company and asked me to organize the sales force, along with a colleague. Ultimately, this led to me running Global Sales Operations.
When I knew it was time for a change, I took six months off, drove around the country with my family, and ultimately landed at Equinix as CIO. They were rapidly growing and needed a CIO to scale the company’s systems with the business. Equinix is a phenomenally good place to work.I want it to be my last place. Once I got the CIO role under control and had a solid team, I started adding to my remit. I picked up product engineering, that is the technology part of my job. Last fall, I took on the chief customer role to get in front of and roll up our new Global Customer Organization.
High: You started on a standard CIO path, which is to say you sat in all the different chairs in IT, presumably on the past to becoming a CIO. Instead, you rounded out your experience in a way that few CIOs have by pursuing a graduate degree to increase your business acumen, as well as by spending a period in Sales, which gave you deeper customer-centric experience. How did those experiences color your thinking about what could be achieved in the role of CIO?
By Saeed Elnaj, published on Inside NGO
06-19-17
Peter High, president of Metis Strategy and author of the book “World Class IT,” will be speaking at InsideNGO’s Annual Conference on Thursday, July 20. In his session, “Technovation: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation,” High will address how to align business goals and technology for greater synergy and impact, the role of the IT leader, and how to harness the power of the IT team as a platform for innovation. In this blog, Saeed Elnaj, vice president of Global ICT at Project Concern International, reviews “World Class IT.”
It is rare that strategic IT advice comes in a recipe wrapped with a framework and a methodology, but this is exactly what Peter High has done in his well-written and insightful book World Class IT. In this seminal and timeless book, High offers a framework with five principles and a detailed methodology that is easy to follow and to execute. Each of the principles is covered in its own chapter with a set of performance indicators, step-by-step processes, and flowcharts that end up molding these five principles into a well-developed methodology. This makes the book unique, valuable, and a must-read reference for IT leaders, managers, and practitioners.
The five principles are well articulated and presented in such a simple way that they seem familiar and obvious. High’s framework is the IT equivalent of Michael Porter’s revolutionary and well-known five competitive forces framework. In my opinion, understanding both of these frameworks is essential to any IT leader to practice excellence and produce tangible business results from IT investments.
Click here to read the full article on Inside NGO
06-21-17
Yvonne Wassenaar has been named Chief Executive Officer of Airware, a company that provides end-to-end solutions that enable enterprises to scale their commercial drone operations and turn aerial data into actionable business intelligence. She will officially take over on June 26. In a post on Medium.com, company founder and outgoing CEO Jonathan Downey noted, “Our next chapter is all about growth and scale — in customers, deployments, geographies, and use cases. It’s going to mean turning our vision and strategy into consistent execution. As different stages in a company’s history often require different leaders and different skills, I’ve been thinking seriously about who will best lead Airware through its next stage of growth and where I can best add the unique value that I can bring to the organization as its founder.” Downey indicated that he would remain heavily involved in the company.
Wassenaar joined Airware as Chief Operating Officer in May of this year after having spent nearly three years as the Chief Information Officer at New Relic. She noted, “Serving as a CIO has given me deep empathy for what enterprise customers will be looking for Airware to deliver as we partner with these Fortune 1000 companies and work to digitize their businesses.”
Click here to read the full article on Forbes
Clifford Eric Lundgren, CEO of electronics reuse and recycling company, IT Asset Partners (ITAP) was sentenced to 15 months in federal prison on February 28, 2017 for his role in an effort to copy, import, and sell counterfeit Microsoft software. Lundgren pled guilty to criminal copyright infringement and conspiracy to traffic in counterfeit goods, and in May, a judge for the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Florida sentenced him to the prison time, three years of supervised release, and a $50,000 fine. Lundgren is in the process of appealing the sentence. As of June 19, 2017, he stepped down as CEO of the company.
ITAP is a Los Angeles-headquartered company with locations in Vancouver, British Columbia and Hong Kong. Lundgren founded the company four years ago, and wipes data and resells electronics, harvests components for use in new devices, and shreds devices to recover commodities. Lundgren is one part tech entrepreneur and two parts environmentalist.
Lundgren also gained fame through a project called The Phoenix, which was an electric vehicle made with recycled parts. It set a world record for distance covered on a single charge, which he describes at some length herein.
Lundgren also discusses his broader vision for the future of hybrid recycling angd global electronic asset management, the charges against him, the basis of his appeal.
Peter High: Eric, you were recently sentenced to 15 months in prison and you were fined $50,000. You pled guilty to participating in a conspiracy to traffic in counterfeit goods and committing criminal copyright infringement. Despite your guilty plea, you are fighting the charge. Please explain what has transpired.
Eric Lundgren: Yes, I pled guilty to distributing a repair tool/recovery software called a “Dell Restore CD” in an effort to help people and our environment. The repair tools/software can be downloaded for free at Dell.com by any owner of a Dell computer. I provided these Restore CDs to refurbishers so that consumers could restore their computers back to factory settings in case of a software or hardware failure.
I believe that I am going to prison because I attempted to help consumers repair their computers and I got in the way of “planned obsolescence.” My purpose was to empower consumers to restore their Dell computers for re-use. Simply put, Microsoft did not want me to share the free repair tool/software with Dell consumers. Because I provided to the consumer a way to fix their computer using a free Dell restore CD, Microsoft argued that this equated to a potential loss of a repeat sale to Microsoft. However, the important thing to note here is twofold: First, Microsoft was paid for the sale of Windows in the original sale of the computer, and second the ability of a user to use and reload the version of Windows which originally came on the computer travels with the computer in perpetuity. Never are they required to repurchase Windows from Microsoft. Dell, frankly, wanted nothing to do with the case.
I also did this to keep working computers out of landfills. Electronic waste is the fastest growing waste stream in the United States and has been known to leach toxic chemicals into our environment and water table. We sold these at a nominal cost, mainly to cover our costs and shipping, as I was not doing this in order to make money. Indeed, as incredulous as this may sound to many in the “corporate” world, as it did to Microsoft and the judge, much of what I do in my recycling business causes me to break even or even to lose money. I do what I do to help consumers and the environment simply because it is the right thing to do.
Bridget Engle has been named Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer of BNY Mellon a global investments company which provides investment management and investment services in 35 countries and more than 100 markets with $30.6 trillion in assets under custody and/or administration, and $1.7 trillion in assets under management. Engle will take responsibility of the company’s Client Technology Solutions group, which provides critical technology platforms and applications that support BNY Mellon’s role as the leading provider of technology solutions to the financial markets. She will be responsible for setting the strategic direction and execution of the firm’s technology agenda. This includes advancing the firm’s NEXEN digital investment platform, investing in and integrating industry leading applications, accelerating its digital and agile development efforts, and attracting and developing top IT talent.
Engle has spent the past 30 years at companies like AT&T, Lehman Brothers, Barclays Capital, DTCC, and Bank of America. She will succeed Suresh Kumar, who has held the CIO role for over five years, and who will depart at the end of July.
By Peter High, published on Forbes 06/19/2017
As the Chief Operations and Technology Officer of $94 billion Bank of America, Cathy Bessant has tremendous influence in the technology ecosystem that surrounds the financial services industry from fintech start-ups with which she partners, from the war for talent with the would be employees of the company to the vendor partners that she engages to the rising influence of artificial intelligence (which she prefers to refer to as “responsible automated intelligence”).
It had been three and a half years since I last caught up with Bessant, and she had mentioned that she had rethought a few things. She used to refer to Bank of America as a fintech firm. She has come to realize that it is not a fintech firm, but that fintech firms are an important part of the ecosystem that the company has built. In fact, she highlights the advantages a company with the scale that Bank of America has relative to the fintech companies who compete with aspects of what Bank of America does. She also used to note that Bank of America would never be involved in public cloud solutions, but she now foresees a day when that will be possible. She explains these changes of heart in great depth herein. She also covers the boards that she has joined in recent years and the value she has derived from them and vice versa among a variety of other topics.
Peter High: Cathy, several years ago, we spoke about your purview over both technology and operations at Bank of America. Since our last conversation, the trend toward the intersection of these two disciplines has become more profound. We see it with a number of executives who have taken on both sets of responsibilities, walking in your footsteps, if you will. We see it even at a more granular, technical level with topics like DevOps, which combines the two. Having owned these areas for such an enormous organization, what new insights do you have regarding the advantage of having them together?
Cathy Bessant: When we combined the areas seven years ago, even our own people thought we were crazy. Today, the intersections are becoming increasingly apparent. Everything we do in operations, from the most manual to the most sophisticated task, is better when it is automated. It is better, cheaper, and safer when it is digital; and it performs better for customers. For a classic operations organization, technology is not just nice to have, it is a requirement. By the same token, technology is nothing if it does not perform. The intersection of the operations team’s contributions to platform stability and to ensuring that there is not only a technological experience, but a human experience, is what today’s customer expects.
High: The rise of artificial intelligence has been profound in recent years. You prefer to refer to it as “responsible automated intelligence,” rather than artificial intelligence. Can you define the term and share the reason for your preference of that specific terminology?
Bessant: I do not like the term artificial because by definition it means fake, so it is partly a linguistic preference. More importantly though, intelligence is created by humans, even if it is run on an automated basis. We can think about artificial intelligence as algorithmic intelligence, as well, because what takes data and produces an outcome are algorithms that are written, overseen, governed, and managed by people. Automated intelligence is often better, more predictable, faster, cheaper, and has a lower error rate – as long as our algorithms work. There is no doubt AI is the term of the day, but we have been using automated intelligence for a lot longer than people think. For instance, we have been using models to create credit scores for 25 years. You can go through a lot of different elements of banking and say, “This is a more sophisticated or more tech enabled deployment of automated or artificial intelligence,” but it is not something we are not used to, which is an important point.
High: You use the word responsible when referring to automated or artificial intelligence. How do you think of the responsibility aspect?
