by Peter High, published on Forbes
3-11-2016
We Solve for X, a part of X (formerly Google X), brings together a community of moonshot thinkers to collaborate on new ideas that could solve big global problems. The latest of those thinkers is Stephen Gillett, former CIO and GM of Digital Ventures at Starbucks and COO of Symantec. I recently wrote about Stephen Gillett’s move to become Executive-in-Residence at GV (Google Ventures). That position, which was designed as a temporary role has been expanded as Gillett and Google determined there was longer-term fit.
We Solve for X is a moonshot factory with a mission to invent and launch technologies that could someday make the world a radically better place. Perhaps the most famous of these moonshot ideas is the self-driving car.
The organization aims to provide radical solutions and breakthrough technology to solve huge problems
A spokesman for We Solve for X noted, “A maven across many industries, Stephen is a natural fit for the X moonshot factory. We’re fortunate to have him join the team.”
Gillett said, “I am extremely proud and excited joing the team at X.” Not yet 40 years old, Gillett has already had a fuller set of career experiences than most people twice his age, having become a CIO at Starbucks at the age of 31. He joined the board of Symantec soon thereafter. He joined that company full-time as COO after a brief stint as President of Digital, Marketing & Operations at Best Buy. As of a year ago, Gillett is also a member of the board of Chipotle.
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3-8-2016
Kim Stevenson has been the CIO of Intel for the past four years. As I have noted in the past, she has dramatically increased the value derived from IT by adopting the practices of the more traditional revenue centers of the company. One of the best examples of this is the development of an IT annual report that mirrors that of the company as a whole. (Check out her latest IT annual report here.) The theme of her latest annual report is “Intel: From the Backroom to the Boardroom.” This refers to IT’s becoming more relevant to the board of the company, but it is also a good summation of her own career in recent years.
Since becoming CIO, Stevenson has been on the boards of multiple companies including her current appointment to the board of Cloudera. Many CIOs wish to join boards these days, and Stevenson offers sage advice on way sin which others might follow in her footsteps. It begins by performing well internally, being transparent, and, if you truly wish to be a board-level CIO, making that known with anyone who might aid you in that process.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 17th interview in the “Board-Level CIO” series. To read past interviews with CIOs from P&G, Biogen, Kroger, Cardinal Health, and the World Bank Group, among others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: I thought we would talk a bit about some of your priorities in the year ahead, which I know include adoption of Big Data analytics to find opportunities and to solve challenges faster. Could you explain some of the ways in which IT is going to do that, and also some of the other priorities that are on your roadmap for the year ahead?
Kim Stevenson: Analytics is at the top of my pyramid because it is a transformational initiative around Intel. I have shifted from a technology view for 2016 to a leadership problem. We are bringing our entire Intel leadership team forward to think about shifting using Big Data predicative analytics versus traditional statistical methods. The reason I say it is a leadership problem is because often you will find in a predictive model that you will get answers that are inconsistent with your historical experience. We use regression analysis a lot here at Intel. If you look at a regression analysis line, you effectively get a mean and you drive towards that regression line. If you use an isobar analysis, what you get is the personalization of hot spots and you would maybe take three or four different actions than what a regression line would tell you. You get good results with traditional statistics. You can get outstanding results if you switch to the more predictive models. And that takes a shift in a leadership mindset as much as it does a technology mindset. We have been working on that with our most senior leaders at Intel. The receptivity is really high, but the cultural shift is also really difficult.
High: I know you have talked about the need for IT to be an advocate driving this change. What are the methods you are using to communicate this and provide a vision of the value that the organization will garner for this journey?
Peter High
Excerpt from the Article:
Teacher Retirement System of Texas (TRS) is the largest public retirement system in Texas in both membership and assets. It is the sixth largest public pension plan in the U.S. and is among the 20 largest in the world. The agency serves more than 1.4 million people–1,081,505 are public and higher education members, and 377,738 are retirement recipients. System net assets total approximately $128.5 billion. As CIO, Chris Cutler oversees and provides strategic direction for the use of technology and information resources that enables TRS to successfully fulfill its mission. As Cutler tells CIO Insight contributor Peter High, he wears many hats: business leader, technology evangelist, business partner, recruiter, change agent and bridge builder.
Peter High: Please describe your role as CIO of the Teacher Retirement System of Texas.
Chris Cutler: As CIO, I wear many hats. These hats include: business leader, technology evangelist, business partner, recruiter, change agent and bridge builder.
Business Leader
As a business leader I serve as a member on the TRS Executive Council. The TRS Executive Council is comprised of C-suite executives and led by our executive director. This council provides guidance to the executive director and makes final decisions on overall corporate policies and directions.
Technology Evangelist
As technology evangelist, I am responsible for educating the Executive Council and our business leaders on the technology and services IT provides and how they can best leverage our offerings. This role also includes marketing the value of IT and building support for future technology initiatives.
Business Partner
IT is a business enabler, providing secure and highly available technology solutions that enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of TRS and our members. As such, it’s my job to ensure IT is seen by our individual business areas as a true business partner, not just simply a service provider. IT needs to truly understand the business of TRS and be proactive in helping solve business problems and recommend innovations that move our business forward.
Recruiter
The most important asset an IT division has is its people. This may sound a bit cliché, but it is true–especially in IT. As CIO, it’s my job to promote the TRS IT Division both internally and externally as well as to actively seek out individuals who would make good additions to our team. Also, just as important, is demonstrating the leadership, vision and support needed to keep the great employees we already have.
Change Agent
The one thing that is certain in IT is it’s going to change. Many times these technology changes have a significant impact on the rest of the business and/or provide an opportunity for improving efficiency. As such, the CIO often finds himself or herself in the position of change agent, promoting and leading enterprise projects that bring about significant shifts in the organization.
Bridge Builder
Finally, as CIO I have a unique view into the varying business units and their cultures. This gives me a unique perspective on how the business runs, how it communicates and how decisions are made. This also provides opportunities to build strong business relationships within the different business areas. With this knowledge and relationships, I can often be a catalyst in helping build bridges and achieve understandings across the different business areas when conflicts arise.
To read the full article, please visit CIO Insight
The Board-Level CIO series in Forbes explores what CIOs at some of the world’s most recognizable firms did that led to inclusion of the CIO seat at the organization’s board.
by Peter High, series on Forbes.com
When you look up the boards of prominent companies, they are typically littered with CEOs of other businesses. The reasons are obvious. The experience of CEOs of other businesses are relevant, and the advice that they can offer is likely to be the kind that will help augment revenue and/or cut costs as appropriate because no executive in any company thinks as much about these considerations as do the CEOs. The roles that have been the breeding grounds of CEOs, namely CFOs, COOs, and business unit heads have also been board members for the same reasons.
One “c-level” role that has not done nearly as well historically in gaining access to boards is the chief information officer. It is not as though CIOs have not had the ambition to become board members. In fact, of the many CIOs that I advise, over half have articulated their desire to join the boards of companies to me. Historically, there are a variety of reasons why this has been a difficult goal for CIOs to achieve, but there are now many reasons why CIOs are likely to gain greater traction. I explore these reasons in detail in the kick-off article for this series.
Many leading CIOs are blazing a new path that others are sure to follow. Organizations will increasingly think about including the strongest CIOs on their boards to ensure that they do not have any blind spots in their plans both from an innovation and from a risk mitigation perspective.
The series will include the following board-level CIOs, among others:
2-29-2016
The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) exists to improve people’s lives throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Since its foundation in 1959, the bank has been working with countries throughout the region to help them address their economic and social development challenges and provide them with solutions that are tailored for their own unique situations. In partnership with 26 borrowing member countries, the bank works to reduce poverty and inequality by not only providing financial resources to bring to life sustainable, practical and in some cases innovative solutions, but also conducting cutting-edge research across a wide range of development issues as well as providing policy advice.
Nuria Simo has been with the IDB for nearly two years, having joined the company after many experiences around the world in private industry. She was excited about the opportunity, but was curious if the pace of the organization would match that of AirBus and Cargill (two of the major companies she had worked with previously). Simo discusses with CIO Insight contributor Peter High how tech can improve lives, why adding connection points between IT and the business makes sense and what the future holds for CIOs.
CIO Insight: How large is your IT department, and what is within your purview as CIO?
Simo: Our IT department is almost 100 staff strong, plus an ecosystem of partners and contractors that complements the talents of our team. Together we work towards meeting the mission of the bank by providing infrastructure and business support to colleagues in 29 countries around the world.
Beyond the day-to-day services we provide to ensure our IT infrastructure is running smoothly to meet the needs of our staff, our team is charged with looking for new and innovative ways to facilitate the work of development. In these times, being an enabler of innovation and digitalization goes far beyond the IT department, so we have the responsibility to reach out outside our teams to find better solutions.
My job as CIO includes ensuring we recruit, retain and develop professionals who are not only specialists in their field, but who want to apply their skills to contribute to improving the quality of life of people in the region, but I’m also co-responsible for ensuring compliance with our institutional strategy, promote teamwork with other IDB leaders and employees, and support the management of organizational change.
CIO Insight: You have led a digital transformation at the bank. Can you describe what this has entailed and some of the value derived so far?
Simo: The IDB intends to become a digital leader in the development sector by evolving the way we think about the use technology and changing the way we work. We see digital innovation as a critical success factor to help Latin America and the Caribbean move forward in enhancing the quality of life of its citizens. But, we need to start inside the organization first.
Our digital transformation has included a bank-wide understanding of the importance and value that digitalization and the use of technology, such as open data or business intelligence, can have in identifying and shaping development opportunities.
Sentient Technologies has patented evolutionary and perceptual capabilities that provide customers with highly sophisticated solutions, powered by the largest compute grid dedicated to distributed artificial intelligence. The company also has a war chest of $143 million in venture investment, the most of any artificial intelligence company. Antoine Blondeau founded Sentient Technologies nearly nine years ago, though it was in stealth mode for the majority of that period.
After stints at Salesforce.com and Good Technology was looking for the next challenge. He had been involved in artificial intelligence for 15 years, making him an early pioneer in the field, and already had hit a home run by being involved in developing the technology that would become Siri, of iPhone fame.
Blondeau claims we are still in the very early days of artificial intelligence’s evolution, but his vision is to create technology that will mimic the human interaction. One of the first uses of the technology is in retail, replicating the experience of having a sophisticated advisory helping to curate your shopping experience. In this interview, Blondeau provides his vision for the company, his thoughts about the future of AI, the balance between AI innovation and AI safety, as well as a variety of other topics.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the fourth article in a series on leaders in artificial intelligence, which includes interviews with Mike Rhodin of IBM Watson and Sebastian Thrun of Udacity. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
High: Artificial intelligence seems to be gaining tremendous momentum, whether it is venture capital, media coverage, or simply progress that is obvious in the world. There are clearly a couple of trends that have made this possible in recent years: the emergence of relatively low-cost available computing power and the vast, growing abundance of data that companies in every industry are collecting. I think I have heard you say that we are in the first inning here of the game, as so much innovation is ahead of us. As somebody who got into this 15 to 20 years ago, long before this boom, where do you see things now, and how do you think things are evolving?
Blondeau: You are right on the money when you talk about what has happened over the past five or seven years that is making this possible. Some of the team members and I worked on the precursor to what became Siri. At the time, we were thinking of an algorithm running on one machine or a few machines. What has happened over the past few years is that you have the data, it is broadly available, and one of the things that we foresaw was not only that data would explode but the dimensionality of data would explode. It will connect a lot of types of data that had not been connected before. That is a big help.
The second thing is that we have moved from thinking of the machine being the compute to the network being the compute, which means that we can harness an enormous amount of compute cycles. In our case, that means running our system on up to two million CPU cores. We also have a few thousand GPU cores. It is a massive system. When we thought of this company seven years ago, we had the vision forward, but could not quite imagine how we could get there. I think now we can.
The last thing is that when you begin to think about the scale, you can begin to address problems that you had not thought were solvable previously. The ambitious nature of what you do can go up significantly. You can tackle dimensionality, you can tackle complex decision making. Effectively, you are looking at comprehensively including every step of decision making in the machine, or in this giant network machine, which previously was not something thought of as possible. That is the high level.
High: I would like to dive a bit further into the details of how this becomes reality, and how that has impacted the way in which you have thought about entering different markets. I have heard you speak about the applications in some of the primary industries where there are tremendous amounts of data and where there are particularly big problems to solve, like financial services and healthcare. I found it interesting that one of your first areas to apply Sentient Technologies is in retail and online shopping. I would love to understand further how you have chosen where to focus.
Blondeau: One of the things we did was building a powerful platform, but you never succeed by building a platform. You need to apply it to know that it is working and scales to multiple industries. So, we decided to monetize it to address trading, aspects of e-commerce, and the online content discovery experience, as well as, at the research level, institutions like MIT, University of Toronto, and Oxford to work on less immediately monetizable problems, but world problems nonetheless. I am talking here about genomics and patients in an ICU context.
In each case, the common denominator is a few things. One, can you try to solve a problem that has not been solved before? The complexity of the decision making process is key here. The second thing is can you encapsulate the whole decision making process within the machine?
2-24-2016
Gary Wimberly is the CIO and a senior vice president at Express Scripts, a $94 billion pharmacy benefit management company. CIO Insight contributor Peter High recently had the opportunity to tour Express Scripts Technology and Innovation Center in St. Louis with the company’s CIO. In this CIO Insight Q&A, Wimberly explains how data is captured and analyzed, how technology can detect when a potential prescription conflict arises and how to reconcile risk taking with security practices.
Peter High: Gary, we have just done a quick tour of the Technology and Innovation Center and I wonder if you can take a moment to describe the center, but then also peel back the onion a little bit to describe IT’s role in all this?
Gary Wimberly: Here at Express Scripts we have a Technology and Innovation Center and it is really focused around data analytics. We bring resources from teams across all disciplines within IT, so not only IT for the technology we utilize, but our economists, our clinicians, our physicians that really are focused on analyzing all of the data that we capture at Express Scripts—and we have an enormous amount of data. I think we are close to up to 20 petabytes at this point. We utilize that data to identify opportunities to improve health outcomes and eliminate waste in the healthcare space.
High: Can you talk a little bit about the variety of disciplines that are brought together in this effort?
Wimberly: We have IT people, obviously. We have a lot of technology in here: not only from an infrastructure perspective with all the servers, but the amount of software, the tools that we use to do this analytics, to ensure that those are operating and that we are developing the right solutions. A lot of them are self-serve kinds of applications, so our responsibility on those is to make sure that they are available and that they are performing to what the user experience should be.
2-22-2016
Today, Ralph Loura, former Vice President and Chief Information Officer for Enterprise and Global Sales Operations at Hewlett-Packard, joined Rodan + Fields, a leading prestige skincare brand and social commerce company. Loura will serve as Chief Technology Officer. As CTO, Loura will lead Rodan + Fields’ global information technology organization, defining and advancing IT strategy and infrastructure to support the company’s significant growth momentum. He will oversee the Information Technology, Engineering, Project Management and Digital Product Management teams. He will report to newly appointed President and CEO Diane Dietz.
“We are thrilled to have Ralph join our team to advance our IT strategy,” said Ms. Dietz. “Ralph’s significant experience in driving growth and business transformation through technology enablement combined with his business leadership skills and customer-centric approach make him an exceptional choice to lead our IT organization as we embark on the next chapter of growth and innovation at Rodan + Fields.”
“Rodan + Fields, through its unique entrepreneurial business model, has been a pioneer in leveraging technology to forge strong relationships with its customers,” said Mr. Loura. “I am excited for the opportunity to grow a global brand through technology solutions that create additional value for all our stakeholders.”
At HP, Loura led business intelligence, operations and customer-relationship management teams in identifying market opportunities and implementing go-to-market strategies for Enterprise and Global Sales Operations.
Prior to HP, Loura spent more than four years as Senior Vice President and CIO of The Clorox Company. He has also held technology leadership roles at Symbol Technologies, Medicis, Cisco, and Lucent Technologies, among others. Among the awards Loura has won are Computerworld’s 2012 Premier 100 IT Leaders and Consumer Goods Technology’s 2013 CIO of the Year. He has served on the boards of numerous organizations, and has an M.S. in computer science from Northwestern University and a B.S. in computer science-mathematics from Saint Joseph’s College.
Quest Diagnostics is a $7.5 billion provider of diagnostic testing information services. It collects vast amounts of data: twenty billion test results, one hundred fifty million medical test requisitions in 2014, and testing services that touch about one third of the adults in the US. It is up to Lidia Fonseca, Quest Diagnostics’ CIO to organize, tag, and structure the data so that the company can turn information into insights and insights into actions. By effectively categorizing and partitioning the data, the big data conundrum has turned into a massive opportunity for the company, and it has also made that data much more secure.
Fonseca’s depth of experience in data analytics, security, and developing innovations that are leading to revenue augmentation have brought her to the attention of those who need that experience at the board level. In July of 2014, she joined the board of Gannett, a $2.9 billion international media and marketing solutions company. In this interview, she discusses all the above and more, and toward the end of the interview, provides insights into how she successfully became a board-level CIO.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 16th interview in the “Board-Level CIO” series. To read past interviews with CIOs from P&G, Biogen, Kroger, Cardinal Health, and the World Bank Group, among others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: I thought we would begin with your role. You are the Chief Information Officer of Quest Diagnostics. I wonder if you could provide a description of the organization as well as your role within the organization.
Lidia Fonseca: We are a leading provider of diagnostic information services. That is both clinical laboratory services as well as diagnostic information services. 2014 revenues were $7.4 Billion, and we are growing at four percent. Interestingly for us, we see about one third of US adults, and we connect with half of all physicians and hospitals in the country. We are touching the samples of five hundred thousand patients per day. We have an expansive test menu, and thousands of tests ranging from ones for cholesterol and diabetic testing, to advanced genetic, cancer, and neurology testing. We run the full gamut of medical testing.
We count on the services of forty-five thousand employees. We have about seven hundred PhDs and MDs across the company, which is great because harvesting and leveraging that knowledge is pretty significant, as we think about leveraging innovation, both on the medical side, but also on the diagnostic and data side. We operate two thousand two hundred patient service centers around the country. That is a little bit of the scale and scope of Quest.
On the data and technology front, we have the largest private clinical database. We have over twenty billion laboratory testing data points. We have more than fifty thousand providers and hospitals that are leveraging our Care360 connectivity platform. From an interaction and reach standpoint, it has been phenomenal coming here. We integrate with more than four hundred EMR providers. We are integrated with pretty much any EMR that you can think of. If our customer is using it, we are connected with them. We have a patient portal so that patients can access our services directly. We have had more than two million patients access our MyQuest patient portal. We have a significant Big Data and analytics platform that enables population health and gaps in care types of analytics. It is leveraged by partners, including the CDC and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, to name a few.
We have partnered with Inovalon, and we will talk more about that later. By bringing that together, we have a rich data backbone and dataset brought together with what Inovalon has. It is enriching what is already one of the most expansive clinical databases around.
As CIO, in addition to the typical things you would expect a CIO to be responsible for, I have a couple of other responsibilities. One of the things I am responsible for is all of our client-facing products. It is my team that develops those. We also develop the analytics products, whether it is sophisticated reporting or population health tools. Now that is in partnership with other providers as well, bringing a new capability that maybe neither of us could bring on our own. That is a key part of our thinking is that by combining datasets, can you offer something novel to the marketplace.
2-16-2016
Amy Doherty was a four year veteran and right hand woman of the CIO of AARP when she was tapped to become interim-CIO in March of 2015. Her predecessor, Terry Bradwell, was elevated to a newly created role of Chief Enterprise Strategy & Innovation Officer of the membership organization for people age 50 and over that operates as a non-profit advocate for its members and is one of the most powerful lobbying groups in the United States. Following a highly regarded leader who would remain at the firm meant that there was not a mandate for tremendous change, but nevertheless, Doherty got to work at creating her own vision and leadership style.
She has focused continuing the evolution of IT into a value creator and innovator within AARP. She has creatively built bonds and lines of communications with her team through regular meetings with everyone on the team to better understand how things are progressing. Year over year delivery of projects is up ninety-six percent , and there have been thirty-four percent fewer outages. As Doherty notes in this interview, it is the cultural work that has been the secret weapon in her arsenal by driving engagement, accountability, and fun in the department. AARP leadership was sufficiently impressed by the progress to remove the “interim” title in October.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 33rd article in the CIO’s First 100 Days series. To read interviews with CIOs from GE, P&G, Microsoft, CVS Caremark, and Ecolab, please visit this link. To read future interviews like this one, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: I thought we would begin with your tenure as Chief Information Officer at AARP. You began as interim CIO in March of 2015, and in October removed the interim title. You are now the incumbent of the role. Could you talk about that period when your rose to the role on an interim basis and then took it over permanently? What were some of the things you did during that period?
Amy Doherty: I think the most immediate action I needed to take was to settle the staff. They have a great affection for Terry [Bradwell], and a lot of loyalty. He is an engaging leader, and they needed to see me as personable, approachable, and invigorating in the way that he is. They were big shoes to fill. I needed to take some action immediately, so I amped up my personal engagement with the staff, and then I went on a tour with our business leaders talking about what my focus would be. Which was to be not the external AARP market and constituency, as Terry was taking that one, but I wanted to focus my effort on how I could make an AARP employee as effective as they could be, by providing the right technology, frameworks, etc. That was warmly welcomed.
I listened a lot, and I learned a lot about what expectations were of the role, and where they wanted the focus for now. I believe that served me well. I was able to make a few tweaks in the overall execution strategy to focus on the fundamentals and get things like workforce productivity on track. There was a focused and concerted effort to make sure that it stayed on track.
High: You were in an unusual situation. Many Chief Information Officers come in to replace somebody – even somebody who was asked to leave – and there is a mandate for change as a result of that. You not only followed somebody who was loved, but also followed somebody who moved onto a different role within the organization. As you were putting your fingerprints on a new IT plan, how much of it was continuity of what was already going on versus some new things?
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