by Peter High, published on Forbes
4-27-2016
Of those CIOs who work at multi-billion dollar, publicly traded companies, the list is in excess of 15 executives at least according to research done by Henry L. Schuck and Rob Liander of DiscoverOrg. It is noteworthy that the average across the top ten is $3,372,977. This about $100,000 higher than the top ten from a list I put together from based on 2012 compensation figures.
A few interesting characteristics pop out upon reviewing this list more thoroughly. First, half of the ten CIOs have additional responsibilities:
It is not surprising that those CIOs who have taken on a broader set of responsibilities would be compensated at a higher level. Moreover, the path to get these additional responsibilities were through extraordinary work done while “only” being a CIO prior to accruing additional responsibilities.
It is also noteworthy that eight of the ten report to the CEOs of their businesses. These CIOs do not require any translation of the CEO’s imperatives through another executive. They are treated as true members of the executive team, and are present when corporate strategy is created. At the Forbes CIO Summit in 2014, FedEx founder and CEO, Fred Smith indicated that there is not a single strategic imperative that is approved that does not go through his CIO Rob Carter, as an example.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
4-25-2016
Paul Chapman has been a chief information officer (among other IT leadership roles) at multiple technology-centric businesses from HP to VMWare to Sun Microsystems. When he joined Box as CIO ten months ago, he had a keen understanding of how a can play an influential role in an organization that has both depth and breadth of technology talent. First, he and his team act as the first customer of the enterprise, working with product leaders to test new products and offer comment on value. As such, he is also well positioned to be a company advocate with the CIOs and other technology executives who are Box’s customers. He also highlights the need for IT leaders to make change a source of strength rather than a source of angst. He also offers thoughts on how best to work with and motivate an IT department and a company that is largely made up of digital natives.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 35th article in the CIO’s First 100 Days series. To read the prior 34 with the CIOs of companies like Ford, Intel, GE, P&G, Kaiser Permanente, and AARP, among many others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Paul Chapman, I thought we would begin with your current role. You are the Chief Information Officer of Box, a role you have held since July of 2015. You had been with other leading technology companies—HP, VMware, Sun Microsystems before this one, to name just a few—but this was a different kind of company, certainly. In the days leading up to your ascension to this position how did you prepare- for the role?
Paul Chapman: I think whenever you are transitioning into a new organization, that organization has some history to it that puts it into its current form. As I spent time with leaders at Box and understanding Box’s positioning in the marketplace, one thing that I would call a difference in terms of transitioning from a more traditional company was that Box was born in the cloud and has grown up digital, so the footprint and the IT services and the IT landscape that you inherit in a company like Box is typically very different than most other organizations in the fact that they have avoided building up a lot of “tech debt”, a lot of legacy infrastructure, legacy operating models. Understanding the platforms that were in place in running the business of Box, and understanding that sort of “cloud first” model, was different than typically most organizations where you are somewhat having to manage your way out of that legacy environment. So it allowed me to jump in very, very quickly, look at the landscape of platforms and services that were in place. Then really the key thing was to make sure we were on leveraging those best of breed capabilities to a greater extent than we were at the time that I joined. But really, the preparation was understanding in advance what those cloud-based services and platforms were that were in place that were running the business of Box.
High: When Aaron Levie announced you were coming on board, he noted “our IT organization is free to focus on connecting best of breed solutions, creating a more agile and productive workforce in solving core problems to differentiate our business.” What are some of the ways that you think of IT as differentiating the business of Box?
Chapman: There were a few things that I quickly settled on as key themes into how IT was going to help Box, not only to scale, but also to become more data-driven and operationally more efficient, and actually to focus on enabling to a greater extent as much productivity as possible. It is all about speed and agility, but at the same time managing scalability and risk. One of the things that I noted early on as a key theme for us was ‘What is going to be our path to one billion dollars?’ As we grow in scale how are we going to get there? What I identified was that we were lacking longer range planning, a roadmap to how we were going to get to one billion dollars, how we were going to scale out and get the right resiliency, and so on, in our environment. We had invested in a lot of best of breed capabilities, but we had not necessarily leveraged them to their fullest extent. We had all the right platforms, but it was like buying a sports car and taking it to the corner store and back and not really getting it out of first gear. One of the early things that I did was focus in on understanding, from a heat map perspective and a roadmap perspective, where we need to invest time to really leverage these platforms to a much greater extent.
The second one was really around a data-driven enterprise. I found that we were not as data-driven as I would have liked to have seen us, and so we spent a lot of time in the environment looking at how we provide better insights, better analytical capabilities, to make better informed decisions.
4-18-2016
Greg Brockman is co-founder and CTO at OpenAI, a non-profit artificial intelligence research company that also includes Elon Musk and Y-Combinator’s Sam Altman among other Silicon Valley luminaries as co-founders. OpenAI was founded to ensure that artificial intelligence benefits humanity as a whole, which has defined its non-profit status and long-term perspective. When I asked Brockman who influenced him, he listed Alan Kay of Xerox PARC among others, and highlighted the he hopes to foster a comparable idea lab to PARC. We also discussed how the organization’s bold mission and unique structure acts as a magnet for world-class talent, the trend of open sourcing AI development, how AI may impact jobs and society more broadly, and the promise versus the peril of AI, among other topics.
Prior to OpenAI, Greg was the CTO of Stipe, a FinTech company that builds tools enabling web commerce. Greg was the fourth employee at Stripe, a company that now has a valuation of over $5 billion.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the fourth 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, and Antoine Blondeau of Sentient Technologies. To read future articles in the series, including with Neil Jacobstein of Singularity University, Oren Etzioni of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and Nick Bostrom of Oxford University, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: The stated goal of OpenAI is to advance digital intelligence in a way that is likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. What advances in digital intelligence are most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, in your mind?
Greg Brockman: I think there is something special going on right now in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) where, for the first time, systems that are based on deep learning and statistical methods suddenly start to have extremely good performance, and you are able to start building computer vision systems, for example, that can classify objects in a certain sense much better than humans can. Rather than having humans spend time understanding “how do I write down the code to specifically solve this problem?”, you build this general architecture, and the architecture learns from the data. We are getting better at writing these algorithms that are able to learn, to understand the world, and operate within it. At the same time, I do not think the world has changed in a significant way as a result yet. It has only been a short period of time that these algorithms started to be best in class – it dates back to a 2012 paper that showed that if you scale up this neural network architecture in the right way, the system starts to perform significantly better in a wide variety of domains. I think we are going to see these techniques mature and start to be baked into a wide variety of products, both at big companies and at new companies, and in a variety of applications.
We are already starting to get a sense of this if you think about self-driving cars. They are basically here. There is a lot of engineering left to do and lot of hard work and a lot of societal questions to answer, but it is a just a question of when; it is not a question of if. I think that is the tip of the iceberg. Robotics, I think, is poised to start working. Imagine you have a robot in your house that can clean things. A couple of years ago that was not something on the horizon. Now it is not even extrapolation anymore to say that it is going to start having an impact.
Peter High
4-13-2016
Excerpt from the Article:
Dan Fallon’s journey from CIO to board member to president and COO has been an interesting one. Fallon, who now serves as the president and COO of GFMI Metalcrafters, credits his strong tech background for understanding how many moving parts work together (and very often, don’t). GFMI (Gaffoglio Family Metalcrafters Inc.) was founded in 1979. An Argentinian father and his sons brought to the U.S. their passion for crafting custom cars. The Metalcrafters division helps engineer and those who create custom vehicles for the auto, aero and rail industries primarily. These can be prototypes to full functioning vehicles, including driverless. The Aerospace division creates glass, carbon fiber and other composite parts for the aerospace, auto and rail industries. Additionally, the Camera Ready Parts division prepares cars for photo shoots and commercials, including logistics management.
After 22 years at Accenture, the CTO role at Navistar and CIO role at Rewards Network, among other IT leadership roles, Dan Fallon was looking for a change that would offer more operational experience. He was convinced to join GFMI Metalcrafters as president and COO in September of 2014. In this interview with CIO Insight contributor Peter High, he highlights the reason for this move.
CIO Insight: How did you become affiliated with it as President and COO?
Dan Fallon: I have known GFMI (Gaffoglio Family Metalcrafters Inc.) for more than 20 years. My father-in-law, Mike Alexander, had worked with the Gaffoglio family for many years. Mike and his brother, Larry, were the Alexander Brothers; ground-breaking, Detroit custom car guys from the late 1950s and Mike, later in his career, worked with GFMI on select projects. Mike’s son, Mike Jr., wound up working at GFMI. In 2014, Mike asked if I’d consider joining the company to help significantly grow revenue. To run a company while growing it was where I wanted to be next. After 22 years at Accenture, and five years in IT leadership positions at a couple Fortune 500 companies, I wanted to get completely immersed in business operations. Running a smaller company seemed to be the ideal—yet humbling—way for me to do so. Wow, have I learned a lot and enjoyed it. And I’m very grateful for my IT background.
CIO Insight: In recent years, you had been CTO at Navistar and CIO at Rewards Network. What did your time as a technology executive do for you in preparing for your current role as COO?
Fallon: Like Finance and HR, IT gets to “see” a very broad swath of the business, yet I believe at an even deeper level. Successful IT leaders have to understand business execution (processes, schedules and results) and where information and automation can change and accelerate execution. OK, we’ve heard that before—and it’s really hard, especially given ever-increasing competitive demands, legacy systems hangovers and the crazy challenges of changing tires on moving cars. So, as an IT guy—both ex-Accenture consultant and Fortune 500 executive—I got to see how all these moving parts work together—and very often, not. It’s like a mosaic in which some elements of the picture are clear and others are really mottled. As a result, I have this deep, innate appreciation for integration. It’s just a sense I have developed—where are the disconnects in data sharing, process performance and automated systems. So now, on yet another side of the table, COO, I can sense these disconnects; yet even more acutely because I am now directly responsible for getting it done. My time in IT helped me hone and deepen that sense which I think as a COO enables me to quickly zero in on those mottled mosaic pieces and more quickly figure out how to unblur them.
To read the full article, please visit CIO Insight
4-11-2016
Vicarious has the mission to “build the next generation of artificial intelligence algorithms.” That said, its objectives are longer-term in nature. Vicarious has assembled a who’s who of technology legends as investors, including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg. Co-founder, Scott Phoenix is clear that the biggest value Vicarious can contribute will be in the long-term, in the form of artificial general intelligence (AGI), or human-like intelligence. There will be plenty of value created in the interim in the form of what Phoenix refers to as the “exhaust” of the process.
Phoenix is a veteran entrepreneur, having served as CEO of Frogmetrics, which was a Y Combinator company in the class of 2008. He was also the Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Founders Fund, among other roles he has played. In this interview, Phoenix describes the goals of his 30 person organization, how he weighs the risks versus the rewards of artificial general intelligence, how AI may replace more jobs than it creates, new economic and social constructs that could ease the societal shift, Vicarious’s decision to prioritize social good over investor returns, and why more companies should do the same.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the fourth interview in my artificial intelligence series. Please visit these links to interviews with Mike Rhodin of IBM Watson, Sebastian Thrun of Udacity, and Antoine Blondeau of Sentient Technologies. To read future articles in the series, including with Greg Brockman of OpenAI, Neil Jacobstein of Singularity University, Oren Etzioni of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and Nick Bostrom of Oxford University, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: You are the co-founder of Vicarious, a company that is within the artificial intelligence (AI) realm. I thought we could begin with a definition of AI. It is a term that is thrown around in a variety of ways and I would like to take have you unbundle it a little bit.
Scott Phoenix: Artificial intelligence is a really funny thing for a couple of reasons. One is the “moving goal posts phenomena,” which is as soon as something that was formerly called artificial intelligence is solved, it is no longer included the umbra of what is AI. Since it is such a funny term, you can apply it to almost any business or product or company that is developing anything. You could have a consumer gadget that has AI for making sure your windows are clean, or AI in your spam filter.
At Vicarious, we have a particular and specific definition of what we mean when we say AI, which is artificial general intelligence, or human-like intelligence. To put an even more specific frame around it, we say, “given the same sensory experiences that a human being has from birth to adulthood, we are trying to write a program that learns the same concepts and has the same abilities.” That is a specific thing, whereas artificial narrow intelligence (AI as it is commonly used today) can mean just a computer that does some stuff that is useful.
High: As we have machines that are able to do a lot of the processing that humans do today is there any worry that there are aspects of the way that we think or work that are going to change profoundly?
4-6-2016
Deutsche Bank announced today that it has opened an innovation lab in Palo Alto, enabling the Bank to remain abreast of emerging technologies in Silicon Valley, applying those learnings to develop new products, services, and processes. The hope is also to develop deeper relationships with start-ups. The launch event included Deutsche Bank Co-Chief Executive John Cryan on Tuesday.
The opening follows the successful launch of innovation labs in Berlin and London last year. The three innovation labs, known as Deutsche Bank Labs, form part of the digital element of the Bank’s Strategy 2020. The Bank plans to spend up to EUR 1 billion on digital initiatives over the next five years.
At the event, Cryan and Kim Hammonds, Deutsche Bank’s Group Chief Operating Officer, heard pitches from 15 start-ups. The early-stage start-ups pitched a range of ideas including software that analyses data in documents, an online identity verification portal and a number of blockchain-related initiatives. The event also included venture capital firms along with Deutsche Bank clients and technology partners.
Hammonds said, “The Silicon Valley lab will help Deutsche Bank offer clients new and improved products and services, strengthen efficiency and deepen its relationships with the Valley’s innovation and investor communities.”
The Bank’s innovation lab team has been active in Silicon Valley since 2014, previously working from a local start-up accelerator center. The team has met with more than 500 start-ups in the Valley, introducing those with the most promising ideas to representatives from Deutsche Bank’s business divisions to trial and develop technology solutions.
IBM is partnering with Deutsche Bank. The former will contribute resources, expertise and relationships to the partnership.
4-4-2016
Arne Josefsberg has held a number of technology executive positions in his career. He spent 26 years at Microsoft developing the company’s data center and cloud infrastructure, dating back to the original MSN team and continuing up through Office 365 online service. He spent time as the Chief Technology Officer at ServiceNow. A bit more than two years ago, he joined GoDaddy as its chief infrastructure officer and chief information officer — an important role for the company as it expanded from a US-centric domain registrar to a multi-national cloud-services company for small businesses. During his tenure, the company’s revenue has grown nearly 50 percent to $1.6 billion.
This CIO-plus role that Josefsberg has is part “classic IT,” as he calls it, and part driver of the development of a “globally scalable cloud infrastructure that is high performance and secure that delivers services to our small business customers.” Though his mandate and purview is broader than that of the average CIO, the way he thinks about his role offers insights to all CIOs as they strive to add greater levels of value to their company’s and to the company’s customers.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 29th interview in the CIO-plus series. To read the prior 28 with CIO-pluses from the likes of Boeing, Verizon, P&G, and Walgreens, among others, please click this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: I thought we would begin with a background on GoDaddy’s business. I have no doubt a number of people will know it from its provocative Super Bowl commercials, which is certainly the first place that I heard about the organization. It has clearly grown a great deal since its early days. Could you take a moment to provide an overview of the business?
Arne Josefsberg: I joined GoDaddy almost two years ago. GoDaddy is the world’s largest domain registrar. It is what we were known for, and that is where the business started twelve plus years ago. What some people do not understand now is that we have expanded our product suite quite a bit over the years. Domain registry continues to be a big part of our business, but we also do hosting for small businesses – everything from managed WordPress to dedicated hosting – a broad suite of hosting services. We have a website builder that is super easy for the non-technical audience to quickly build a website. We have also started to build various productivity tools for small businesses, search engine optimization tools to make their websites more resonant and visible in the market. We also added a GoDaddy bookkeeping application.
Our vision is to be the enabler for small business. Our focus is exclusively on small business. We count well over thirteen million customers globally and have grown pretty fast. It is an exciting area, and is quite inspiring. Our mission is to help the little guy be successful running and managing the business by providing accessible and cost efficient technology for them to get online. What I found super exciting is that we have thirteen million customers, but if you look at the market globally, we believe that there is in the range of two hundred and twenty million small businesses around the world. Many of them are not even online today, but clearly that is where the world is going. You have to have a website to present your business and interact with your customers.
We also think there is a circular trend from a business world dominated by large enterprises (big conglomerates) and we think that is breaking down to much more entrepreneurial smaller companies. We want to enforce and enhance that trend, and arm the small business with the kind of tools, websites, and domains that can help them get online without having an IT organization. We are about leveling the playing field between the little guy and the larger companies.
The CIO-Plus series in Forbes explores the trend of CIOs who are taking on more C-level titles. Most CIOs wear many hats. The good news is, those hats are getting more strategic. by Peter High, series on Forbes.com In a recent article, I mentioned the trend in companies around the US and beyond of expanding the CIO’s responsibilities based on the translation of good work done in IT into other divisions and departments in the company. I refer to this phenomenon as the CIO-plus role, and there are many reasons to believe that it is here to stay. CIOs are now also Chief Innovation Officers, Heads of HR, Chief Supply Chain Officers, and Heads of Shared Services to name just a few. Column pieces will be published over several weeks, and the following interviews with leaders who have assumed these additional responsibilities, will include:
3-28-2016
Anne Margulies is the Chief Information Officer of perhaps the best known university on earth, Harvard University. She has been an education technology pioneer for much longer, however. She was the founding Executive Director of MIT OpenCourseWare, the internationally acclaimed initiative to publish the teaching materials for their entire curriculum openly and freely over the Internet. As such, she was involved in some of the earliest precursors of today’s MOOCs.
It should come as no surprise that Marguilies was intricately involved in HarvardX, Harvard’s contribution to edX. For her own team, she has developed what she calls the IT Academy, aggregating training materials to provide common IT skills across her entire department. Therefore, Margulies is a remarkably innovative CIO, especially when it comes to training and education.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. To read future articles like this one, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Anne Margulies, you are the Chief Information Officer of Harvard University, one of the biggest brands in the world. Could you could give a definition of what is within your purview?
Anne Margulies: Harvard is a large, complex, decentralized university. As the University CIO I am responsible for information technology strategies, plans, and policies, as well as all of the University-wide infrastructure and applications that serve all of our schools. In addition, I am directly responsible for end-to-end technology for the central administration and for the faculty of Arts and Sciences, the largest of our schools. It includes our undergraduate, college, as well as our graduate school of Arts and Sciences. It is a large portfolio.
High: You mentioned that strategy is one of those areas that is under your watch. Can you talk about your method of crafting strategic plans and maybe share some of the details of your latest plan?
Margulies: Absolutely. We have an important leadership group here at Harvard called the CIO Council, which I chair. It is comprised of the CIO councils of our professional schools, as well as our Chief Technology Officer and our Chief Information Security Officer. This leadership group is responsible for developing Harvard’s IT strategic plan. The way that we do that is we focus much on those things that make sense and are most important for us to work on together as a university, as opposed to those technologies that should be done separately school by school. Five years ago we developed a strategic plan with key strategic initiatives for the University, and the CIO Council has now also been responsible for overseeing the implementation of the strategic plan. Since then, we have updated and revised the strategic plan because we finished some initiatives and we have added some new ones. It is a process that I think is actually working quite well for Harvard.
3-22-2016
The Vanguard Group is an organization that values both depth and breadth in their leaders. As a result, if someone has risen to the head a business unit or a functional area, it is likely that he or she has had experiences across range of business areas within the largest provider of mutual funds in the world. Chief information officer John Marcante is no exception.
Marcante has spent 23 years at Vanguard. From 1998 until 2001, he led Vanguard’s Institutional IT organization, supporting Vanguard’s Institutional Investor Group, which serves large institutions and is a leading provider of company-sponsored retirement plans. Shortly after September 11, 2001, Marcante became the head of Global Technology Operations, focusing on data center management and disaster recovery. He was responsible for building out and managing Vanguard’s global infrastructure. He was promoted to CIO in 2012.
Marcante has encouraged comparable outreach and breadth of experience in his leadership team. The leader of his Retail IT team is a member of the leadership team of both IT and of the Retail division. It was through this tight collaboration that the Vanguard Personal Advisor came to life. In the words of Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb, “Vanguard Personal Advisor Services represents our continued effort to lower the cost and complexity of investing by giving investors access to affordable, high-value financial advice. Demographic and behavioral trends point to an increased demand for advice, and we believe this new service can help more of our clients reach their financial goals.”
Based on this idea, John Marcante has been awarded the Forbes CIO Innovation Award for 2016. Here is our conversation about the idea. (For an overview of the award and its criteria, please visit this link.)
Peter High: Describe the genesis of Vanguard Personal Advisor.
John Marcante: In recent years, Vanguard has recognized that customer expectations in terms of technology and client experience have risen dramatically. Investors no longer judge us against our peers in the financial services industry; they have an expectation that we can deliver the same kind of customer experience as technology leaders like Google, Apple, and Amazon. As a financial services company, our clients want technology-based solutions that are sophisticated enough to navigate the complexities of their unique circumstances but are simple and intuitive to use.
Vanguard has a long history of innovating in many different ways to simplify and lower fund and ETF [exchange-traded fund] expenses to keep costs low for clients. We realized that we could leverage this experience and in-house technology to bring a greater client experience and lower the cost of advice. As the Baby Boomer generation transitions from capital accumulators to capital consumers, Vanguard saw an opportunity to better serve the increasingly complex needs of our clients. We also recognized that we had the opportunity to make advice more accessible and affordable for our clients. Our solution was to create a virtual advisory relationship that combines our time-tested investment methodology with a best-in-class online experience and sophisticated investment modeling technology. Our new Vanguard Personal Advisor Services (Personal Advisor) is rooted in Vanguard’s enduring goals-based investment approach and philosophy of broad diversification, balance, low costs, and long-term investing. Clients receive comprehensive financial planning, on-going portfolio management, access to salaried financial advisors, and a highly personalized web experience. Importantly, the current annual cost for Personal Advisor is 0.30 percent of assets under management—well below the industry average of 1.32 percent for similar services.
High: What is new about this idea?
