By Peter High, published on Forbes
06/12/17
David Trone has been on a mission for quite some time. First, that mission took the form of entrepreneurship, then philanthropy, and finally politics. He learned entrepreneurship at the knee of his father, who developed a variety of businesses related to the family farm in Pennsylvania. Trone developed his own egg-centric venture as an undergrad at Furman University to help pay for college. He then developed his first beer-centric business while getting his MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and then launched Total Wine & More soon thereafter with his brother, Robert Trone.
25 years later, Total Wine & More has grown into the largest alcohol-specific retailer, with roughly $3 billion in revenue with 172 stores in 22 states. Trone emphasizes that the future is more about clicks than bricks, however, and the company is investing heavily in e-commerce and digital experience capabilities. The company is also doubling down on customer experience, providing wine, beer, and spirit education, virtual experiences with people behind beloved brands, and a chance to meet the makers in the company’s stores. An educated buyer is someone who is likely to pursue and enjoy higher ticket items.
Over the years, Total Wine & More and Trone more specifically have donated millions of dollars to charities, often in the communities in which the company operates. It is a form of doing well by doing good ala Adam Grant’s book “Give and Take – Why Helping Others Drives Our Success,” which Trone indicates was an influential book for him. As he has gotten more immersed in healthcare, education reform, and prison reform through his charitable work, his third mission was sparked a couple of years ago, as David campaigned for the Democratic nomination in Maryland’s 8th Congressional District, hoping to fix what he believes to be a broken government. Although his run was not successful, he believes his future remains in politics as much as in business and in philanthropy. He covers all the above and more in this interview.
Peter High: Let’s start at the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey. You started your first business during college at Furman University, having grown up on a farm, it was an egg business. Then, while getting your MBA, you started a beer business. Where did your entrepreneurial spirit come from?
David Trone: My entrepreneurial spirit came from my dad. He was a serial entrepreneur. He was involved in many different ventures including egg processing, egg marketing, hog finishing, a farm vacation business, a gas and grocery business, and a picnic business.
High: You are the co-founder and co-owner, with your brother Robert, of Total Wine & More. An organization that has 172 stores in 22 states, and has been around for over a quarter of a century. In both the short term and long term, what are some of the areas on your roadmap for continued growth?
Trone: Our strategy is bricks and clicks. Bricks is where we have been in the past, but the future has to be clicks. Right now, we continue to build across the country. We are focused on growth states like Texas and California and filling out traditional markets in places like Florida and Boston. At the same time, we realize that the evolution of retail in America is e-commerce. We are creating an e-commerce solution that will allow us to be omnichannel and agnostic. If does not matter if our customers want to shop in the store, pick up the products, or have them delivered, we have to do all three and do them seamlessly.
High: You have lived in Pennsylvania and Maryland, both have particularly restrictive laws with regard to the sale of adult beverages. How has that impacted the way you manage and expand your organization?
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06-06-17
David Steinberg is a serial entrepreneur. In 1999, he founded Inphonic, a company that would reach a billion dollar valuation, and had a successful IPO. The company grew too quickly and with too much debt, and Steinberg resigned in 2007.
He immediately got to work on his next venture, a data drive marketing company called XL Marketing Corporation, and he leveraged the good of his past ventures, including collaborating with former Pepsi and Apple CEO, John Scully, who had been a part of the founding team at Inphonic, while learning the lessons of the trying times. This time around, they would self-fund the company, and do something that was anathema with many start-ups, especially at that time: it would grow profitably.
The caution paid off during the economic crisis the year after its founding, as Steinberg was able to assemble a world class team, and he was able to shop for many companies to fill out its portfolio of offerings on the cheap. When Steinberg initially sought venture funding, he heard many complaints about how the company was “too profitable.” Some VCs indicated that the company needed to put more money into sales staff and marketing campaigns.
Fast forward a few years, and the company, now called Zeta Global, recently announced a $140 million funding round led by GPI Capital and Blackstone’s GSO Capital, elevating the company to “unicorn” status as a venture funded company with a valuation above $1 billion. In this interview, Steinberg talks about the evolution of the company, the role that machine learning will play in the future, the value in having developed a 20 year partnership with one of the leading marketers in the world, as well as a variety of other topics.
Peter High: David, please provide a brief history and overview of your organization.
David Steinberg: We started out as a customer acquisition vehicle named XL Marketing. We recognized that to increase our success and help our customers, we needed to add customer relationship management to our services. This led us to buy a small company called Zeta Interactive. We broke up this company quickly. In fact, we sold off two-thirds of the business. We kept and ran the platform and it became one of our most important products. That was the first big step in our pivot from being a customer acquisition company to being a software-as-a-service company. As we continued to grow and move more into data and analytics, in addition to software-as-a-service, we thought the word interactive pigeonholed us, so we changed the name to Zeta Global to represent who we are today.
High: Zeta Global has grown considerably through acquisitions. A key success factor of your organization is how well you integrate businesses post-acquisition. Is there a playbook that you use when integrating acquired companies?
Steinberg: Acquisition and organic growth are mission critical to the growth of the business. Last year, the company grew almost 50 percent; half of our growth was organic and half of our growth was through acquisitions. We use four specific criteria for acquiring a company:
Most of our competitors think of their marketing cloud as a container. They buy businesses and put them in there, and it certainly works for them. We think of our marketing cloud as a fully integrated software solution. Full integration has been critical to our success. We have been successful in eight of our nine acquisitions. We have a campus in Hyderabad, India and another growing campus in Chennai, India. At these locations there are 600 to 700 full-time engineers and data scientists; over 75 percent hold a PhD or a graduate degree. At these campuses, we scale up operations as we buy companies. This allows us to dramatically increase profit, workflow, or, in most cases, both.
Over the last four years, our compounded growth rate was just under 50 percent, on average. Zeta Global is also profitable. Our profit is higher than most software companies that have grown at our size and scale. Part of our success is due to the fact that we have run companies before that were not profitable, and none of us wanted to do that again.
High: It is interesting to hear you say that your past entrepreneurial experiences of growing without profit, understandably, color the way you manage Zeta Global. You co-founded this business just prior to the worst economic downfall of either of our lifetimes. Did beginning a business during an intense and suboptimal business climate affect your entrepreneurial journey and choices, as well?
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By Peter High, published on Forbes 06/05/17
Andrew Ng is one of the foremost thinkers on the topic of artificial intelligence. He founded and led the “Google Brain” project which developed massive-scale deep learning algorithms. In 2011, he led the development of Stanford University’s main Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platform. His course on Machine Learning would eventually reach an “enrollment” of over 100,000 students. That experience led Ng to co-found Coursera, a MOOC that partners with some of the top universities in the world to offer high quality online courses. Today, Coursera is the largest MOOC platform in the world.
Most recently, Ng led Baidu’s Artificial Intelligence Group. Under his watch, Baidu became one of the few companies with world-class expertise in every major artificial intelligence category: speech, neuro-linguistic programming, computer vision, machine learning, and knowledge graph, and his team introduced two new business units to the company: autonomous driving and the DuerOS Conversational Computing platform.
In late March, Ng announced that he would step away from Baidu, and in a Medium post, he noted, “Baidu’s AI is incredibly strong, and the team is stacked up and down with talent; I am confident AI at Baidu will continue to flourish. After Baidu, I am excited to continue working toward the AI transformation of our society and the use of AI to make life better for everyone.” I was curious how his plans have taken shape in the couple of months since the announcement, so I caught up with him at his office at the Gates Computer Science Building at Stanford University. Given how influential his career has been to date, I was curious where he would focus his attention from this point forward. We also covered his recommendations for companies that are nearer to the beginning of the journey of implementing artificial intelligence, the emergence of roles like the chief artificial intelligence officer, and the industries that are most likely to be impacted by AI, as well as his comparison between the business cultures in the United States and China, among a variety of other topics
Peter High: Andrew, since we last spoke, you have departed Baidu. Where do you see your career evolving from this point forward?
Andrew Ng: Over the last few years, AI [artificial intelligence] technologies have taken off. There are so many things that we can do now that were not possible three or four years ago. This creates tremendous opportunities for large tech companies like Baidu, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and many others. It also creates opportunities for smaller teams to do meaningful work, whether they are for-profit, nonprofit, or startup organizations. In the same way that electricity and the internet changed everything, over the next few decades, AI will change everything. I am looking into quite a few ideas in parallel, and exploring new AI businesses that I can build. One thing that excites me is finding ways to support the global AI community so that people everywhere can access the knowledge and tools that they need to make AI transformations.
High: Artificial intelligence is a broad topic. What are some of the areas that are most exciting to you and represent the biggest areas of opportunity in the near term?
Ng: People often ask me, “Andrew, what industries do you think AI will transform?” I usually answer that it might be easier to think about what industries AI will not transform. To be honest, I struggle to think of one. For example, I was speaking at a conference and I said that my hairdresser’s job is probably safe from AI because I do not know how to build a robot to cut hair. A friend of mine, who is a robotics professor, was in the audience, she stood up, pointed her finger at my head and said, “Andrew for most people’s haircuts I would agree, we cannot build a robot, but for your haircut, I could make a robot do that.”
It is difficult to think of a major industry that AI will not transform. This includes healthcare, education, transportation, retail, communications, and agriculture. There are surprisingly clear paths for AI to make a big difference in all of these industries. I have heard you say, Peter, that sometimes AI feels like a far off thing, but it is just over the horizon. I agree, and a lot of the work that will get us there is happening now. Certainly, the smartest CEOs and CIOs, and maybe some new chief artificial intelligence officers, are accumulating the talent and tools necessary, and maybe already using them, to transform their businesses.
High: What suggestions do you have for CEOs, CIOs, and CAIOs that are fairly early in their journey of exploring the implications of AI for their business?
By Peter High, published on Forbes 5/29/17
Nick Colisto is the CIO of $4.5 billion water technology company Xylem, a company that was created after the trivestiture from ITT Corporation in 2011. The spin off combined five businesses that would also add a sixth in 2016 with the $1.8 billion acquisition of a company called Sensus. Colisto joined the company in 2012, and drove many steps to help implement CEO Patrick Decker’s vision to operate as a single company. He was able to draw upon the playbook he has created, much of which was codified in a book of the same name: The CIO Playbook: Strategies and Best Practices for IT Leaders to Deliver Value. The efforts centered around creating a common business operating platform (common processes, business software, and infrastructure) to enable people to work better together, produce more, and deliver superior product and service experiences to customers.
Now, multiple years into his journey as CIO, Colisto leads a team that drives strategic digital transformation initiatives to drive new solutions, several of which are customer facing. He has created a culture that is more cognizant of the needs of the company, customers, and shareholders. In the process, Colisto’s team has contributed mightily to the bottom line of the company in the process. He describes his journey in detail in this interview.
Peter High: Nick, you are the CIO of Xylem. The company was created in October 2011 as part of a trivestiture from ITT and became a stand-alone global water technology company. Can you provide a basic description of the business?
Nick Colisto: Xylem is a $4.5 billion company with about 16,000 employees across the world. It is a world leader in the design, manufacturing, and application of highly engineered technologies for the water industry. We are a leading equipment and service provider for water and wastewater applications. Xylem has a broad portfolio of products and services that address the full cycle of water from collection to distribution to use to the return of water back into the environment. Xylem has leading market positions among equipment and service providers in core application areas of the water equipment industry including transport, treatment, test, building services, industrial processing, and irrigation. Some of our company brands that people might know are Bell & Gossett and Flygt.
High: I know from our past conversations that you are in the throes of a digital enterprise agenda. You are transforming the way IT works at Xylem. Can you describe the Five Star Model that you are using to accomplish this goal?
Colisto: We are on a transformational journey to create a digital business for Xylem. In the last few years we have built a platform called Xylem’s Integrated System, or XIS, to support this. It is a modernized IT platform that harnesses the power of disruptive technologies including social, mobile, analytics, cloud, and IoT platforms to enable customer engagement, operating efficiency, and growth.
The Five Star Model that we use for selecting technology for XIS was inspired by a model created by Kim Stevenson, formerly of Intel. The five stars are:
By Peter High, published on Forbes 05-23-17
Last week, CrowdStrike, a cloud-based security company headquartered in Irvine, California raised $100MM in a series D, led by Accel Partners. With this injection of funds, the company has reached “unicorn” status as a venture funded company with a valuation over $1 billion. In a post on Medium, Sameer Gandhi, a partner at Accel, noted, “Crowdstrike has more than tripled the growth of its total billings year-over-year. [CEO and co-founder] George [Kurtz], [CTO and co-founder] Dimitri [Alperovich] and team have accomplished quite a lot in just a few years. The team’s vision, product excellence and overall execution is what inspired us to lead the company’s Series D.”
In recent days, inquiries for CrowdStrike’s services have increased dramatically in the wake of the WannaCry ransomware attack. Previously, the company received great attention for identifying the hackers behind the Democratic National Committee data breach prior to the American election in 2016. Kurtz has noted, “That work raised our profile considerably, solving a high profile problem, separating us from a crowded field in the security space.” CrowdStrike now counts more than ten percent of the Fortune 1000 among its clients.
A serial entrepreneur, Kurtz founded worldwide security products and services company Foundstone in late 1999. The company developed a leading incident response practice, and was acquired by McAfee in 2004. He would rise to the role of Worldwide Chief Technology Officer of McAfee.
While there, he grew frustrated by the antiquated technology at the company that, as Kurtz recalls, “felt more like Siebel when I wanted to develop something that felt more like Salesforce.” He left the company to co-found CrowdStrike in 2012, developing the next generation anti-virus powered by artificial intelligence.
At a recent interview on stage at the Forbes CIO Summit at Half Moon Bay, California, I asked Kurtz for some recommendations on how executives can safeguard their enterprises, and he offered the following advice
By Peter High, published on Forbes 5/22/17
Terry Bradwell is not only an executive at AARP, he is a member. He has risen from chief information officer to chief enterprise strategy and innovation officer at the $1.5 billion, Washington, DC based non-profit that advocates for Americans who are over 50. He notes that though he is 54 years old, he is not the same 54 that his father was, and, in turn, in a few years, a 54 year old at that time will have a different makeup than he does. This notion drives his ambition toward continuous innovation.
This orientation toward innovation began when Bradwell was the company’s chief information officer. Having spent time as a consultant in IBM’s Media and Entertainment practice, he developed a strong business acumen that meant that as he joined IT departments, he did not accept that the department should be relegated to a supporting role.
Bradwell established innovation labs for AARP while he was CIO, but through a series of conversations with AARP CEO Jo Ann Jenkins, he realized there was value in carving off his CIO duties, responsibilities that would go to his key deputy, Amy Doherty, the current AARP CIO. This allowed him to focus more on innovation. His time in IT helped foster relationships across the entire enterprise, and a cognizance of the strategic needs of each. His impact on innovation and strategy made is move beyond CIO logical.
Peter High: Terry, you are the Chief Enterprise Strategy and Innovation Officer at AARP, quite an interesting title. Could you unwind that and provide an overview of your purview?
Terry Bradwell: Providing some context will help explain my role. AARP is arguably the leading voice of and advocate for the 50-plus population. Our purpose is to empower this population to live their best lives. AARP started out as an innovative organization almost 60 years ago, and has continued along that path. The 50-plus population has continued to evolve; I am 54 years old now, but I am not the same 54 year old that my father was, and a few years from now a 54 year old will not be the same 54 year old that I am today. This evolution means that AARP has to innovate to stay relevant and to be able to continue to drive our social mission and advocacy. We are a social mission organization, but it takes revenue to power that.
My role as chief enterprise strategy and innovation officer is to address opportunities and risk for the organization. From a strategy perspective, I am responsible for the creation of a multiyear plan that encompasses our opportunities, threats, and risks. It is my responsibility to develop a strategy that is outcome-focused that the organization can rally around, but is also flexible enough to change as the conditions on the ground change. We use innovation as a primary lever to deliver outcomes that ensure that we strengthen our value proposition for the people who we serve. We are a strong organization, and our strategy aims to keep AARP that way by addressing potential long-term relevancy and revenue risks.
When they are doing well and feeling secure, many companies become complacent. We are fortunate to have a dynamic CEO who recognizes that simply being in a successful position creates a risk. At AARP, we double down and push twice as hard when we are comfortable. That is why my function was created. At the highest level, I am responsible for shaping a strategy that ensures the outcome is a strengthened value proposition through innovation.
High: Innovation can be hard to define. Can you define innovation for AARP and how you measure progress?
Bradwell: At AARP, innovation is strategy-driven and focused in areas that we call health, wealth, and self; these are health security, financial resilience, and personal fulfillment. Let me provide a few examples. In the financial resilience zone, we looked at the trends and recognized that work and jobs are a huge concern for the 50-plus population because jobs are being transformed due to disruption and new categories of jobs created by the sharing and gig economies. Gone are the days when you worked 20 or 30 years for a company and had a pension and a retirement package. We are exploring these trends and innovating around financial resilience. With health security, we are innovating around a huge area within caregiving; which includes bringing products, services, content, and information to individuals who have caregiving challenges. We know from our insights and data that caregiving is a growing challenge. Over the next five to 10 years, there will be 117 million people in this country that will need some form of care, but only about 43 million unpaid caregivers available to provide that care. Likewise, there are only about 4 million paid caregivers. We are innovating around these caregiving shortages and other trends.
High: You run AARP’s innovation lab. Please share examples of the motivations behind setting up the lab, how it was developed and set up, and its place within the larger organization.
By Peter High, published on Forbes 5/15/17
There is a common misconception that Airbnb has disrupted the major hospitality companies in a comparable fashion to the disruption that Uber has wrought upon the taxi industry. In fact, last year was a record year for multiple of the major players. Marriott International earned $17 billion in revenue, and 30 percent of that was earned through digital channels according to the company’s senior vice president of Digital, George Corbin.
Corbin has been a digital leader at Marriott for nearly 15 years, which is to say longer than the term “digital” has been in vogue. As such, he has a lot to say about the so-called disadvantages of the digital immigrant companies relative to their digital native counterparts. Corbin notes that “different operating realities require different operating models and mindsets to enable both the core legacy business and the digital subsidiary to succeed.” Few companies have succeeded as Marriott has in this transformation.
Much of the innovation that has been the focus of Corbin’s recent efforts center around re-thinking the customer experience from searching for a hotel room, to booking, to the period before the stay, through and then after the stay itself. That customer journey is being re-thought with digital channels enhancing each step, as he describes in detail herein. Corbin also offers advice on what sets apart successful chief digital officers from their average to middling counterparts.
Peter High: George, can you describe your purview as the Senior Vice President of Digital at Marriott?
George Corbin: Digital has grown to be a major part of Marriott’s business. Our digital channels, Marriott.com and Marriott Mobile, now make up about 30 percent of the company’s gross revenue. This substantial growth represents a huge shift in the customer and how they buy, and in the business overall. Marriott.com, Marriott mobile, all aspects of the digital component of the customer booking experience, and the parts of a guest’s stay that digital powers, all fall under my umbrella.
High: Digital has grown to be a major part of Marriott’s business. Our digital channels, Marriott.com and Marriott Mobile, now make up about 30 percent of the company’s gross revenue. This substantial growth represents a huge shift in the customer and how they buy, and in the business overall. Marriott.com, Marriott mobile, all aspects of the digital component of the customer booking experience, and the parts of a guest’s stay that digital powers, all fall under my umbrella.
Corbin: We are. Last year our gross revenue via our digital channels, not third party, was over $13 billion gross. It is a material number. For comparison purposes, it is not far behind what Walmart.com does. It often surprises people to find out that we are a big player among consumer facing sites.
High: In our past conversations, I have found your thoughts about the challenges that incumbent companies face as they head toward digital intriguing. In particular, the idea that in some ways companies are operating two businesses in different places on the maturity, or S-curve. Whereas some of the rising digital native organizations only have to deal with the realities of being lower on the S-curve. Please describe some of these challenges and the ways that you have managed through them.
By Peter High, published on Forbes 5/08/17
At the recent Forbes CIO Summit in Half Moon Bay, California, I had the opportunity to share the stage with about a dozen leading technology leaders from a variety of different companies. Included among them were CEOs, CIOs, and venture capitalists. After the event concluded, I reached out to a number of contacts of mine who were in the audience to gauge what they found most interesting, and the person who was mentioned more than any other was Kyle Nel, who is the Executive Director of Lowe’s Innovation Labs at Lowe’s Home Improvement. You might think to yourself, “‘Innovation Labs’ sounds interesting, but Lowe’s? How innovative can that be?” Very innovative, as it turns out.
I first heard about Nel when spending time with Rob Nail, the CEO of Singularity University. He indicated that Nel was a leading example of someone who was a leading innovator. Under Nel’s watch, the Lowe’s Innovation Labs have worked with professional science fiction writers to develop comic book stories plotting Lowe’s future. Those stories have helped seed everything from augmented reality showrooms for customers, robots that will lead you to the product you came to the store to purchase, and the first 3D printer in space. We cover all of the above and more in this wide ranging interview.
Peter High: Kyle, you are the Executive Director of Lowe’s Innovation Labs at Lowe’s Home Improvement. Can you describe your purview and the value that the Innovation Labs add to the broader organization?
Kyle Nel: They are a means to an end. There is a lot of talk about innovation labs, and a lot of money and resources thrown at them, but few results. There are a couple of big success stories, but not in proportion to the amount of resources put into them. We wanted to develop a differentiated, new model for approaching innovation. The labs are just places, it might sound silly and hyperbolas, but they are a different state of mind where we work with what we call uncommon partners, which are organizations that you would not expect Lowe’s to work with, to do things that we would never be able to do on our own because we lack the skills or the resources.
Every organization on the planet is trying to innovate; the problem is that many companies do not know what that means for them. This is an especially difficult problem because the answer is constantly shifting. For Lowe’s, meaningfully innovating is not incrementally improving, which is incredibly important, but incrementally improving is never going to create the next platform of growth. For meaningful growth, you need to have somebody on the outside, or on the inside, creating and building new platforms. Much in the same way that the genesis of every organization was a couple of people got together, they were the rogues and the outliers, and they hit on something at the right place, at the right time. That became the new thing, and they grew an edifice out of it. Lowe’s Innovation Labs are all about making sure that we continuously grow.
The fundamental difference between our lab and others is that I am not a tech person. I am a behavioral scientist. I want to create meaningful behavior change and develop new things that solve problems that people have not only now, but will have in the future. Usually the way to solve problems is through new technology, but it is not the only way. Another fundamental difference with our labs is a system we developed called narrative-driven innovation. There is a science, a process, and rigor to the system. We hire professional, published science fiction writers, give them our marketing research and trend data, work with them to sift through the probable convergences of tech and people trends, and then they create a story with characters, conflict, and a narrative arc. We turn those stories into comic books, and these are what we think of as our strategic documents for the future. Next, I give the comic books or product to our CEO and his direct staff, and they use them to tell me what to build.
High: Please briefly describe the form of the comics and how the story unfolds.
05-01-17
Trevor Schulze has been an information technology executive across a number of major technology companies. When he joined Micron Technology as Chief Information Officer two years ago, the company, like others, was in the midst of defining its big data opportunities. Schulze, recognizing the tremendous growth and productivity potential that could be derived from better insights from the data, developed a dedicated team to champion these opportunities. Thus the Enterprise Analytics And Data IT Group was born. As he notes in this interview, the results have been tremendous, and for that reason, Schulze is a recipient of the 2017 Forbes CIO Innovation Award.
When asked about Schulze contribution, Micron Technology Chief Executive Officer D. Mark Durcan said, “We are supplying the new data economy with innovative technology that helps our customers take full advantage of their data assets. We are doing the same within Micron. The innovations that our CIO Trevor Schulze and his team are delivering provide Micron the insights we need to drive our business forward.”
Peter High: Please describe the innovative idea that you and your team in IT pursued. Please be specific, including the steps you undertook to implement the idea.
Trevor Schulze: Although localized point solutions will remain important to creating incremental value, integrated insights across the enterprise will be the competitive advantage we all chase in the years to come. Building this capability is a multi-year effort. Over the past year, we have put in place a few key practices to drive this idea forward and deliver tangible insights.
When we created our enterprise data science team, we intentionally placed this team within our Enterprise Analytics and Data IT group. This gives our enterprise data scientists direct access to our business intelligence teams that have invaluable experience working with the company’s most important data. The synergy between these teams decreases the time to locate and understand relevant data across business areas. Because data preparation is also time consuming, we chose to embed architects and data engineers directly within the team, working shoulder-to-shoulder to deliver quick turns through the highly iterative data science process, reducing data acquisition and preparation time by up to 50 percent. As we near solution deployment, the embedded architecture and data engineers take the lead to deliver solutions to decision makers and to embed algorithms into enterprise systems, while our data scientists begin working on the next business problem. This close collaboration allows us to deliver solutions at a faster pace.
Next, we wanted to bring the power of data science to areas of the business that lack data science expertise but that are data-rich and ready to drive change. Our supply chain and procurement organizations have been ideal early partners based on their extensive data, history of data-driven processes, and their position in the company’s value chain–it is hard to find other functions with the same degree of impact. In just its first year, the enterprise data science team has delivered machine learning solutions that create new insights into product availability, robust forecasts of customer demand, optimized raw material inventory, and many others. Each solution reveals new connections between complex business processes and their supporting data. This uniquely places our enterprise data science team in a position to deploy their deep technical skills across the wide and deep network of Micron’s processes and data.
Lastly, we knew that a truly integrated set of predictive models and insights would require all areas of the company to trust the methods and understand the insights. This step cannot be overlooked, as black boxes are rarely blindly accepted by the business. As a result, our enterprise data science team has been delivering a variety of education sessions explaining fundamental data science and machine learning concepts to stakeholders at all levels. These sessions range from department-tailored presentations to data science book clubs to detailed demonstrations of data science techniques. We have found that awareness and education is essential to driving adoption of data science solutions, building confidence with the insights they produce, and ultimately gaining support for further investment.
High: What opportunity or issue to be resolved led to this IT-led innovation?
For the second year in a row, I have the privilege of announcing the Forbes CIO Innovation Award winners, recently announced at our Forbes CIO Summit at Half Moon Bay. Like last year, the award focuses on revenue enhancing innovation led by the information technology department. It has been wonderful to see such a wide array of chief information officers drive aspects of the innovation conversation as a starting point, as this is not yet the domain of the average CIO, but rarer still is the CIO who leads revenue augmenting innovation activities. The 2017 winners of the Forbes CIO Innovation Award have each driven significant revenue from their perch as leaders of the information technology division of the company.
The three winners of the 2017 award are:
Jim Fowler, Chief Information Officer of General Electric, who has helped drive Predix, which is the operating system for the Industrial Internet, powering digital industrial businesses that drive the global economy. It has already led to nearly $1 billion in productivity gains, and is projected to garner billions more in revenue lift for the company.
Trevor Schulze, the Chief Information Officer of Micron Technology drove the development of an Enterprise Analytics and Data IT group that has developed nine figures of revenue growth.
Lidia Fonseca, the Chief Information Officer of Quest Diagnostics, who drove the development of an end-to-end digital experience for the company’s customers through the Quanum suite of technology and data analytics solutions, also driving roughly nine figures of revenue lift for the company.
In 2016, the award was bestowed upon John Marcante, the CIO of Vanguard, Federico Flores, the Chief Information and Innovation Officer of Ferrovial, Michael Macrie, CIO of Land O’ Lakes, and Kim Stevenson, the CIO of Intel.
