by Peter High, series on Forbes.com
I would like to introduce a new series, which I refer to as “IT Influencers.” The field of Information Technology is home to many innovators and thought-leaders. These individuals, all from vastly differing walks of life, share a commonality: Their expertise and unique insights have made them some of the most influential members in their professions and in IT. This is a diverse lot, including individuals like:
In the kick-off article to the series, I highlight some common denominators among these trailblazers:
by Peter High, published on Forbes
7-11-2016
Mike Macrie was in the inaugural class of the Forbes CIO Innovation Award. Learning about his remarkable story as a revenue-driving chief information officer of the $15 billion agricultural-cooperative was fascinating. I recently spent more time with him in his office just north of St. Paul, Minnesota, and learned more about his remarkable rise.
Macrie became CIO of Land O’Lakes in his mid-30s, and his progressive use of technology befits someone of his young age. He has embraced digital technologies both as a means to render the operation more efficient, but also to aid farmers, as he details in this interview. In this wide ranging interview, he highlights his priorities, and the trends he thinks will drive ongoing innovation at his company and in the industry more broadly.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of my conversation with Mike Macrie, please click this link.)
Peter High: Mike, your CEO, Christopher Policinski mentioned that the digital transformation of the business “Demonstrates Land O’Lakes leadership and is helping to build the farm of the future with cutting edge concepts and technologies”. Can you tell us a bit about the methods you are using and the roles that IT is playing in that digitization.
Mike Macrie: In our IT organization here at Land O’Lakes we are working with our business leaders and everyone out in the field to help our membership-which is farmers and agricultural retailers-transform the way they think about technology. Everything from operations to the way they trade, and deal with their customer. It effects every aspect of everything they do, and many aspects of everything we do here. The one that’s the most exciting though, is how technology is transforming what happens on the farm. I think we are just at the beginning of that, but at Land O’Lakes we want to be a leader in that space. We believe we help farmers with decisions in agriculture-in the way they grow, make decisions in planting, and make decisions in environmental questions. We believe that technology is going to radically change the way they make those decisions in the future and we want to be in the forefront of that
High: You mentioned a variety of constituents here, you have growers, agricultural retailers and your colleagues. Can you talk about the process of leading them through some of the changes you are describing?
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
7-6-2016
EarthLink Holdings Corp., a leading network services provider, today announced the appointment of Jacob J. (Jay) Ferro, Jr. as Executive Vice President, Chief Information and Product Officer (effective July 18th). Ferro will provide leadership and oversight of EarthLink’s technology operations including R&D, product and customer services offerings, acquisitions, and investments. He will report directly to Joe Eazor, EarthLink’s President and CEO.
Ferro has extensive experience in executive-level technology and finance roles. Prior to joining EarthLink, Ferro was Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the American Cancer Society (ACS) where he was responsible for the people, strategy, and operations of hundreds of local offices nationwide. He played an integral role in ACS’s historic transformation, which included the consolidation of 12 independent divisions into a single agile and focused global entity. Ferro will continue to support ACS and the organization’s important mission to save lives and cure cancer as a senior volunteer.
In earlier professional roles, Ferro served as CIO at AdCare HealthSystems and AIG. He was selected as Georgia CIO of the Year in both 2011 and 2015, Global CIO Breakaway Leader in 2013 and Computerworld Premier 100 IT Leader in 2015, among other accolades. Ferro also dedicates his time to many charitable and community involvement efforts including founding the nonprofit group, Priscilla’s Promise, in honor of his late wife, which raises funds for cervical cancer education and research.
“We are proud to welcome Jay to the EarthLink team and know that his advanced technology expertise and robust business acumen will support the ongoing evolution of our company,” said Joe Eazor, President and CEO of EarthLink. “His extensive experience working on complex initiatives that deliver superior operational efficiencies, along with his personal value system and belief in collaboration and service, makes him the perfect addition to the executive team here at EarthLink as we drive the business forward.”
“I am honored and excited to join EarthLink,” said Ferro. “I am fully committed to building on the team’s current success and serving the company and customers with the highest degree of integrity and passion. My focus is on making what’s great even better and ensuring the delivery of best-in-class customer service.”
The CIO’s First 100 Days series in Forbes explores what the CIOs at some of the world’s most recognizable firms did, and what they could have done differently at the onset of their tenure.
In a recent article, I highlighted a number of lessons, some of them common, and others unique, to which I will develop the series titled, “The CIO’s First 100 Days.” For years, the CIO was among the “c-level” executive with the shortest or near shortest average tenure. The reasons for this were manifold including the fact that the average c-level executive (almost all of whom outranked the CIO) did not clearly understand technology, and it was easy to choose the CIO as a scapegoat if things were amiss within the company generally or within IT more specifically. Given the fact that so much that is managed by the IT leader can be esoteric in the minds of other business executives within the company, it is essential to push hard in one’s first 100 days to build relationships, to communicate a plan, and to track progress against that plan. Column pieces will be published over several weeks, and will include the following discussions with leaders about their 100-day strategic plans:
6-29-2016
Medallia, a global Customer Experience Management (CEM) company, has appointed Ashwin Ballal as the company’s first chief information officer. Ballal, who has more than 20 years of executive experience, will assume global responsibility for Medallia’s information services organization.
“After getting to know Medallia—its team, customers, partners, investors—I realized that this is a once-in-a-decade opportunity,” said Ballal. “Medallia is the leading software provider in a mission-critical business category. Its platform helps the world’s most admired companies eliminate customer pain points and create new value for customers at scale. It’s the future of how companies relate to customers, and I can’t wait to get started.”
Ballal had been Chief Information, Intelligence, and Data Officer for KLA-Tencor. He received the CIO 100 award from CIO magazine in 2013 among other awards. Previously, Ballal held executive positions in KLA-Tencor’s Engineering, Operations, Sales, and Marketing divisions, including serving as General Manager of a Product division and as President and Managing Director of KLA-Tencor India.
“We are delighted to add a CIO of Ashwin’s caliber to Medallia’s leadership team,” said Mike Kourey, CFO of Medallia. “Driven by our rapid growth around the world, Ashwin will partner with our entire organization and customer ecosystem to evolve our processes, systems, and infrastructure for scalability and optimization.”
“The breadth of Ashwin’s technological and business management experience makes him a powerful addition to Medallia’s management team,” said Borge Hald, co-founder and CEO of Medallia. “He is also an incredibly supportive leader who fits wonderfully with Medallia’s culture,” said Hald, noting that Ballal served as a mentor for Women Unlimited and as chairperson of the KLA-Tencor Foundation’s efforts in promoting STEM education. “We are thrilled to welcome him on board.”
Ballal earned his PhD and postdoctorate degrees in materials science and engineering from the University of Maryland at College Park and a bachelor’s degree in metallurgy from India’s National Institute of Technology.
6-27-2016
There has been a lot written about the transformational power of artificial intelligence. If you are a regular reader of this column, you have gained the perspectives of eight of the leading thinkers on the topic. (See links to each below.) Nick Bostrom is perhaps the most influential thinker on safety concerns associated with the march toward artificial intelligence. He calls artificial intelligence “the single most important and daunting challenge that humanity has ever faced.”
Bostrom is an extraordinary polymath, having earned degrees in physics, philosophy, mathematical logic, and neuroscience. In many ways, he personifies the need for thinkers to collaborate at the intersection of disciplines in order to fully understand the opportunities and challenges represented by artificial intelligence. In his bestselling book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, the Oxford University professor and the founding Director of the Future of Humanity Institute highlights that just as the fate of gorillas depends on the actions of humans rather than on gorillas themselves, the fate of humanity may come to depend on superintelligent machines. He points out that we have the advantage in that we are the authors of this fate, unlike our primate relatives. He worries that we are not taking full advantage, however.
His work has profoundly influenced leading thinkers such as Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Stephen Hawking. In this wide ranging interview, Bostrom explains his concerns with artificial intelligence, providing thoughts on what we might do to avoid them.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the ninth interview in my artificial intelligence series. Please visit these links to interviews with Mike Rhodin of IBM Watson, Sebastian Thrun of Udacity, Scott Phoenix of Vicarious, Antoine Blondeau of Sentient Technologies, Greg Brockman of OpenAI, Oren Etzioni of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Neil Jacobstein of Singularity University, and Geoff Hinton of Google.)
Peter High: Nick, you described yourself as a dis-interested student prior to age 15, but you experienced a profound awakening that led you to ambitious intellectual pursuits. At university you studied physics, philosophy, mathematical logic, neuroscience, and I am sure that this is not an exhaustive list. You perhaps are the first among an elite group that I have had the pleasure of speaking with who personify this need to be a polymath, having covered so many different topics. I am sure that does not mean that you do not require collaboration with people in these and many other areas, but I wonder how did it occur to you and why did you elect to pursue so much breadth in addition to depth in your studies? This seems not to be the norm with a lot of thinkers who operate in a similar space.
Nick Bostrom: I was following my instinct as to what I thought was interesting and potentially important from an intellectual point of view, and what I thought were interesting and important insights, ideas, and techniques in a number of different academic fields. I would say that among quite a few of my colleagues here at the research institute, many also have multi-disciplinary degrees in their background having studied more than one subject in university or having done masters in one field and then switching to a different field for their Ph.D.
High: In 2004 you were among the founders of the principles of ethics in emerging technologies. Not only were you studying the opportunities represented in the various areas that we just described, but you were also thinking about the ethical aspects about developing technology. How did the idea of ethics become something relevant to you?
Peter High
6-20-2016
Excerpt from the Article:
Thrifty White may not have the broad footprint of a national player, but the company’s continued focus on health-and-wellness initiatives sets it apart from the competition in small towns and cities in the upper Midwest. The company is 100 percent owned by the employees. Thrifty White believes its greatest asset is its employees who cooperate in the spirit of teamwork to help the company continue to grow and prosper. The company also prides itself on helping the communities in which it does business.
As CIO, Matt Ode ensures that all areas of the business (from executives to staff) are working together executing on the corporate strategy. This includes both top- and bottom-line projects and initiatives across the organization as well as regulatory and security items as they continually emerge. As he tells CIO Insight contributor, Peter High, he also believes that technology will shape the company’s future.
Peter High: What are your priorities for the year ahead?
Matt Ode: Our goals for 2016 are to grow our specialty pharmacy volume, grow our long-term care pharmacy business, and continue to focus on our retail pharmacy operations. One area in which we have taken the lead is in medication synchronization. Kicked off in November 2011, the program synchronizes all of a patient’s prescriptions and enables patients on multiple medications to pick up their prescriptions at once. On the day of pickup, the pharmacist will review the prescription list, monitor changes after doctor or hospital visits and check for possible drug interactions. We have over 61,000 patients on this program today and they love the convenience and how it significantly improves their medication adherence.
High: Please describe your organization structure and the size of your team.
Ode: Our organization structure is composed of the following areas. We have 31 people in IT today. I started as an IT team of one so I take a lot of pride in our team and how it is positioned today as a strategic enabler of our business.
Pharmacy Team: responsible for all design and development of our proprietary pharmacy system. Allows us to be nimble as changes in the marketplace seem to happen at a rapid rate these last several years. Med Sync program mentioned above was completely developed and implemented within our in-house system.
Infrastructure Team: responsible for 2 server rooms, disaster recovery facility, connectivity, security, and all associated hardware/software/mobile/network equipment.
Business Applications Team: responsible for all applications used in the back office and retail store teams – intranet/internet, HR/Financials ERP, data warehouse, content management systems, and cloud applications.
Store Systems: responsible for all store systems including physical desktops/laptops, printers, POS systems, and automation equipment at both store level and central fill sites. Includes Help Desk as well.
IT Business Partner/Project Manager: individual who works directly with the business executing on corporate strategy and managing incoming requests that then are prioritized in quarterly executive review meetings. Key role recently created in the last 2 years based on Joe Topinka’s book IT Business Partnerships. Also serves as a project manager that can be plugged into any IT/Business initiative. Previous background in IT software/database development a must from my perspective along with excellent communication skills.
High: What are your strategic priorities currently?
To read the full article, please visit CIO Insight
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a white hot topic today as judged by the amount of capital being put behind it, the number of smart people who are choosing it as an area of emphasis, and the number of leading technology companies that are making AI the central nervous system of their strategic plans. Witness Google’s CEO’s plan to put AI “everywhere.”
There are some estimates that five percent of all AI talent within the private sector are currently employed by Google. Perhaps no on among that rich talent pool has as deep a set of perspectives as Geoff Hinton. He has been involved in AI research since the early 1970s, which means he got involved before the field was really defined. He also did so before the confluence of talent, capital, bandwidth, and unstructured data in need of structuring came together to put AI at the center of the innovation roadmap in Silicon Valley and beyond.
A British born academic, Hinton is considered a pioneer in the branch of machine learning referred to as deep learning. As he mentions in my extended interview with him, we are on the cusp of some transformative innovation in the field of AI, and as someone who splits his time between Google and his post at the University of Toronto, he personifies the value at the intersection between the research and theory and the practice of AI.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the eighth interview in my artificial intelligence series. Please visit these links to interviews with Mike Rhodin of IBM Watson, Sebastian Thrun of Udacity, Scott Phoenix of Vicarious, Antoine Blondeau of Sentient Technologies, Greg Brockman of OpenAI, Oren Etzioni of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and Neil Jacobstein of Singularity University.
Peter High: Your bio at the University of Toronto notes that your aim is to discover a learning procedure that is efficient at finding complex structure in large, high dimensional data sets, and to show that this is how the brain learns to see. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that and about what you are working on day to day as the Emeritus University Professor at the University of Toronto as well as a Distinguished Researcher at Google today.
Geoffrey Hinton: The brain is clearly very good at taking very high dimensional data, like the information that comes along the optic nerve is a million weights changing quite fast with time, and making sense of it. It makes a lot of sense of it in that when we get visual input we typically get the correct interpretation. We cannot see an elephant when there is really a dog there. Occasionally in the psychology lab things go wrong, but basically we are very good at figuring out what out there in the world gave rise to this very high dimensional input. After we have done a lot of learning, we get it right more or less every time. That is a very impressive ability that computers do not have. We are getting closer. But it is very different from, for example, what goes on in statistics where you have low dimensional data and not much training data, and you try a small model that does not have too many parameters.
The thing that fascinates me about the brain is that it has hugely more parameters than it has training data. So it is very unlike the neural nets that are currently being very successful. What is happening at present is we have neural nets with millions of weights and we train them on millions of training examples and they do very well. Sometimes billions of weights and billions of examples. But we typically do not have hugely more parameters than training data, and that is not true with the brain. The brain has about ten thousand parameters for every second of experience. We do not really have much experience about how systems like that work or how to make them be so good at finding structure in data.
High: Where would you say we are on the continuum of developing true artificial intelligence?
6-14-2016
Steve Case was one of the architects of the first wave of the Internet. For many who learned about him and his company in the mid-1990s, it may have seemed as though his was an overnight success, but AOL took nearly a decade to truly take off. The early days required building a great team, working on the product, and building strong platforms. It also required perseverance, a familiarity with and an ability to influence government policy, and an ability to establish strong partnerships.
In Case’s new book, The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur’s Vision of the Future, he talks about the how the work of entrepreneurs today will have to heed the lessons of the entrepreneurs of the first wave of the Internet (roughly from 1985 to 1999) more than those of the the second wave (roughly 2000 to 2015). He also talks about how venture capital will flow to cities that have not traditionally been tech-sector hubs, as the “rise of the rest” phenomenon. Some of his insights come from his having witnessed the rise of Washington, DC from an entrepreneurial back-water when he founded AOL in that area to a dynamic technology hub today.
His book is an interesting read; part memoir, part history lesson, and part crystal ball. In it, he offers sage advice from one who has experienced the highest of highs in founding a company that was, as he points out, “for most Americans…for its time, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Spotify, YouTube, and Instagram combined.” He also covers candidly the low points after the acquisition of Time Warner in 2000. In the years since, he has focused on venture capital and philanthropy, and he has developed a healthy perspective on how the lessons of the past will impact the future.
(This is the 17th article in the IT Influencers series and my 250th article for Forbes. To read past interviews with Meg Whitman, Walt Mossberg, Jim Goodnight, Sir James Dyson, and former Mexican President Vicente Fox, among others, please visit this link.)
Peter High: Steve, in your book, The Third Wave, you articulate three waves. The first from 1985-1999, roughly, which was the laying of the foundation of the online world. The companies that were the architects of this phase include AOL, Cisco, Sun, IBM, Apple, etc. The second wave companies took advantage of that foundation in the period of roughly 2000-2015. You note that this was the period of the app economy, mobile revolution, and companies that are the best representatives include Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, and Google, among others. Now you put this year as the date that starts the third wave of organizations, the Internet of Everything. You talk about six different factors, all beginning with “P”, that are germane to the first and third waves. There are three of the Ps that pertain to all three waves, namely people, products, and platforms. You articulate that policies, partnerships, and perseverance are the factors that were of particular importance in the first wave and will become increasingly important in the third. Please explain.
Steve Case: Great summary of the core themes! First, I think partnerships are going to be much more important in the third wave than they were in the second. In the second there were some overnight successes that were apps that just came out of nowhere, they did not need help from anybody, whether it be Facebook or Snapchat, what have you, a dorm room phenomenon. There will still be examples of that in this third wave, but I think that will be rare. If you really want to revolutionize health care, while there are some things you can do with apps, I think there is more you can do when you work with doctors and partner with hospitals. Similarly, in education, there are a lot of apps and influential MOOCs [massive open online courses] like Khan Academy and others. Other things that are really interesting in terms of learning in the cloud—but I think most people are still going to learn in the classroom, whether it be young kids or adults when they are in colleges or universities and partnering with those institutions so you can create more personalized, adaptive approach to learning will become more important. So I think it will shift from being about the software and the app, which is the hallmark of the second wave, to being much more about partnerships with players in each of these sectors of healthcare, education, energy, transportation, government services, or other kinds of things, and innovators that are skilled at partnerships will be the winners.
The second is policy. These are regulated sectors. Entrepreneurs do not like to deal with government and do not like to deal with regulation. But issues around driverless cars are going to need regulation to make sure that the benefits of that accrue to society without risk. In healthcare, there is a lot regulation around drugs and devices. There are a lot of issues around food safety. Those are not going to go away. As we move the internet into the real world in much more profound ways, the role of policy, the role of regulation, the role of government will be ongoing. Innovators will need to have more of a dialogue with government.
Finally, the third factor is perseverance, again I recognize that people are not going to like to hear this because overnight successes are awesome when you get them, but in many cases these are complicated problems and are going to require engaging over a long period of time with partners on policy and other things. Perseverance is going to matter. I used to say that AOL was a decade in the making overnight sensation. In the mid-90s it looked like we came out of nowhere, but we had been slogging away for a decade before anybody really noticed. I think that dynamic is going to become more important in the third wave. Some of the things around people, products, and platforms will continue to be important, but partnership, policy, and perseverance will be critical in the third wave as they were in the first wave.
High: You talked about how in the second wave there were companies that were born in dorm rooms, came out of nowhere, did not have the decade long slog to become overnight successes, as you indicated was the history of AOL. As I think about the three characteristics you just highlighted, all of them would seem to suggest that it requires a greater level of experience and patience, factors young people do not necessarily have in great supply. To what extent do you see the mix of entrepreneurs or the average age of those who are founding the great companies shifting up a little bit as a result?
6-13-2016
Singularity University is part business incubator and part think tank founded by Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil in 2008 in the NASA Research Park in Silicon Valley. Among the topics that have risen in prominence in the curriculum of the University is artificial intelligence.
Neil Jacobstein is a former President of Singularity University, and currently he chairs the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Track at Singularity University on the NASA Research Park campus in Mountain View California. We recently spoke, and the conversation covered his thoughts on how AI can be used to augment current human capability, strategies technology executives should use to think about AI, the role the government should play in helping mitigate the potential job losses from AI, his perspectives on the dangers of artificial intelligence that have been expressed by major thought leaders, advice on how to train workers to be prepared for the coming wave of AI, and a variety of other topics.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the sixth interview in my artificial intelligence series. Please visit these links to interviews with Mike Rhodin of IBM Watson, Sebastian Thrun of Udacity, Scott Phoenix of Vicarious, Antoine Blondeau of Sentient Technologies, Greg Brockman of OpenAI, and Oren Etzioni of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.)
Peter High: Let’s begin with your role at Singularity University, and perhaps a little bit about the University itself. You were president of the University from 2010-2011 and are currently co-chair of the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics track. Can you describe the University, as well as your role in it?
Neil Jacobstein: Singularity University started on the NASA Research Park campus around 2008. We had our first graduate summer program in 2009. The University’s purpose is to help leaders utilize and understand the business, technical and ethical implications of exponential technologies, which are technologies that increase in price performance every eighteen to twenty-four months. Examples include artificial intelligence, robotics, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and some other technologies that depend on those. Biology, for example, has become an information science and it is now growing in capability on an exponential curve.
We bring in leaders from around the world to attend our executive programs that are given every couple months or so. Usually there are about eighty to one hundred people in those executive programs and they last about five days. We have a nine-week long summer program that we have conducted every summer since 2009 and typically about eighty people attend. Oftentimes, they have won their seat in that program by winning a contest in their country. I am proud that we now have slightly more women in the program than we have men—we have a good ratio now, finally. We have people from forty plus countries represented, and they are absolutely top students, super competitive students. They cannot buy their way in. The program is sponsored by Google and other companies and in other ways. They live on the NASA research park campus here at Moffett Field and they first are exposed to a few weeks of exponential technologies, including AI, robotics, synthetic biology, nanotechnologies and other technologies that depend on those, such as energy, manufacturing, 3D printing, and medicine. They address building next generation businesses with each other and also non-profit entities. They form teams and use principles that include crowd sourcing and being able to build and scale entities rapidly, using the principles of exponential organizations. They then address global grand challenges like climate change, education, poverty, global health, energy, and security. Those kind of challenges really require the scale that exponential technologies can provide. The students in their teams—it might be up to twenty different teams—are coached by a wide variety of faculty and staff during the summer program. They then go on to perhaps join an incubator program that we have on campus if they meet certain thresholds, and we have had several successful businesses spin out every year. We are proud of the program and think we are getting better at it every year.
High: In the book Exponential Organizations by Salim Ismail, it is noted that AI and algorithms could be used to mitigate and compensate for heuristics in human cognition, such as anchoring bias, or ability bias, confirmation bias, cost bias, others like that. As an expert in AI, could you describe that insight, and also the way in which AI, and algorithms more generally speaking, can mitigate those issues?
