by Peter High, published on Forbes
12-7-2015
Ron Ross is a Fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, a non-regulatory agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce. NIST’s mission is to promote U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science, standards, and technology in ways that enhance economic security and improve our quality of life.
Ross’ role at NIST is in the information technology laboratory, where he leads the Federal Information Security Management Act Implementation Project. He is also the principal architect of the NIST Risk Management Framework, and leads the joint taskforce between the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community, and the Committee on National Security Systems that developed the Unified Information Security Framework for the federal government. To my mind, he has one of the clearest and most comprehensive approaches to data security, a topic we drill down into great depth in this article. Last week at a Forbes CIO dinner in Washington, DC that I co-hosted with Forbes Managing Editor, multiple government and private sector CIOs noted how influential Ross has been on their approaches to cybersecurity. For that reason, I’m particularly excited to share some of his biggest ideas.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this article in podcast form, please click this link. This is the 15th article in the “IT Influencers” series. To read past interviews with Meg Whitman, Sal Khan, Sebastian Thrun, Sir James Dyson, Jim Goodnight, and Walt Mossberg among others, please click this link. To read future articles in this series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: For those who may not be familiar, I thought we would begin with a description of your organizations, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, as well as your role in it.
Ron Ross: NIST is an organization that is part of the Department of Commerce. We are one of several bureaus within the department. NIST has three thousand scientists and engineers that work across many different laboratories, from chemistry to physics. The division that I am in – the Computer Security division – is part of the Information Technology Laboratory. We work on standards and guidelines and work closely with industry to collaborate so that the standards and guidelines that we produce are implementable and cost-effective. It is a collaborative way to do business.
High: You have talked about how our appetite for advanced technology is far exceeding our ability to protect it. I wonder if you could talk a bit about the paradigm shift that is happening, the drivers behind that appetite and what makes today different from years past.
Ross: I think what makes the world so much different today is that we are literally living through a transformation from a fully paper-based world to a digital world. Technology is moving forward at such a rapid pace. Every day we see new things with tablets, smartphones, and the Internet of Things. We are driven to the technology because it is so powerful and affordable. When you have those two things, consumers are going to buy a lot of it.
It is an exciting time to be alive because the things that we are seeing computers do today, were not anticipated five or ten years ago. It is great to be a part of this digital revolution, but with that comes some other things that can be troubling. That is where the information security part of the problem comes in.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
12-1-2015
Roger Gurnani has been with a Verizon since its inception, and worked for one of the predecessor companies for a while prior to that. As such, he has had a front-row seat in the development of the internet practically since its popular inception. He has been involved in dial-up connectivity through to the fastest wifi connections; he has helped evolve from 1G through 4G phone connectivity, and he and his colleagues are working on 5G at the moment. He has also been involved in digital business in a variety of meaningful ways, including digital streaming of content through practically all functional forms of consumption. Gurnani is now involved in leading one of the biggest Internet of Things implementations in the world, and Verizon is already among the largest revenue companies when it comes to IoT.
Earlier this year, Gurnani was promoted from Global CIO to Chief Information and Technology Architect, a role which essentially encompasses both the CIO and the CTO role. As such, the breadth of his purview is massive. He spoke about all of the above in great depth in this interview.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview in podcast form, please visit this link. This is the 27th interview in the CIO-plus series. To read the prior 26 with CIO-pluses from Nissan-Renault, P&G, Mondelez International, Dunkin’ Brands, McKesson, and EMC, among many others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Roger, I thought we would begin with your role. You are currently the Chief Information and Technology Architect at Verizon. Could you talk a little bit about that role, that new title?
Roger Gurnani: My role encompasses all of technology. Traditionally, we have had two groups: a CTO organization that is focused on our networks – our wireless networks and telecom networks – and then a CIO role that is focused on other information technology and digital technologies to drive customer engagement and run the factory – the business processes. About a year ago, my boss, our CEO, and a few others, and I realized it was time to look at technology more holistically. The world is getting more programmable; everything is becoming software-driven.
My role entails developing our technology strategy, guiding our technology investments, technology planning, which includes technical architecture and roadmaps. I also provide oversight to all our CIOs and CTOs across the organization, across different business units; manage key technology supplier partnerships/relationships; look at various technology shifts that are occurring and marry those into our overall business strategy. That is what I have been doing for the last ten months and it is a new way to leverage technology within our business.
High: Can you talk a bit about some of the things that have made the top of the list of your strategy – some of the imperatives that you and your team are pursuing?
Gurnani: One key area is to look at technology advancements and shifts and figure out how we can leverage those. As we know, no matter which part of technology you look at, you always see performance improving and economics – the price points – keep coming down. For example, in our wireless business, we were the first ones to lead the industry with 4G. We, in fact, deployed our LTE networks a couple of years ahead of the rest of the industry. We are doing the same thing with 5G – the fifth generation of wireless technology. So while others think it is still a few years out, we have started working on 5G in our labs and expect to be conducting field trials in the next several months. The goal is to have a first mover’s advantage and create that competitive edge.
11-30-2015
When Jack Clare joined Dunkin’ Brands, holding company of Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin-Robbins in 2012, he did so after a stint as CIO of Yum! Restaurants International. He took over a traditional IT function, but two and a half years into his time at Dunkin, there was a need for someone to lead corporate strategy for the company. The leadership team called upon Clare to take on these added responsibilities. The leadership team was impressed with the job he had done as CIO, but also were pleased that he had management consulting experience, and had worked on matters of strategy in his past. The fact that so much of business strategy is enabled by information and technology was an added reason. As such, Clare, now the Chief Information and Strategy Officer of Dunkin’ Brands, is part of a small but growing group of CIOs who have taken over the strategy function. In this interview, he describes the reasons why he feels he got the combined role, the reasons why CEOs he spoke with were not surprised, and his thoughts about whether other CIOs will increasingly follow in his footsteps.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 26th interview in the CIO-plus series. To read the prior 25 articles in the series with CIO-pluses from companies like Waste Management, Marsh & McLennan, Walgreen’s, the San Francisco Giants, P&G, and Nissan-Renault, among many others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above and to the left.)
Peter High: You are the Chief Information and Strategy Officer of Dunkin’ Brands. I thought we would begin with the two sides of your role, starting with the CIO role, as that is the role you have had longer. Can you talk a bit about what the Chief Information Officer role entails within Dunkin’ Brands?
Jack Clare: I was hired as the CIO, and it is a somewhat typical enterprise role – global IT for the organization. Being a franchise restaurant retailer though, the nuances here at Dunkin’ are that we have all the traditional corporate IT function that everyone might expect, but we are also focused on the retail systems in our stores and that face our consumers. We have a number of mobile applications and other systems that we support that have become, or evolved in the last few years to, mission critical. Additionally, I handle anything that is directly revenue-driving for our franchisees in store. Those are the two focus areas for us, but I still provision client devices, phones, etc. for our enterprise employees as well as handling all the traditional infrastructure functions.
High: You have the advantage of having IT employees who are presumably customers of your business. As a result, do you find that your employees have the ability to suggest new innovations and new technologies that might enhance the customer experience, as differentiated from an aerospace and defense company, for instance?
Clare: That is true not just in our IT function, but with our peers and colleagues in Marketing, Operations, or any of the functions. We are a broad-based consumer brand, and everyone in the company is also part of the target consumer base. As it has turned out, I have been in branded consumer businesses, on both the consumer packaged goods side and now restaurant retailing, for a number of years. I have always been in the target user base of the particular businesses that I have worked for.
11-23-15
This is my 200th contribution to the Technovation column. My team has had a chance to slice and dice the data behind the many extraordinary technology executives and innovators who have been featured in the 199 prior columns since October of 2012, and there were some particularly interesting conclusions that developed based on the women executives who have been featured. Accomplished female IT executives are more likely to take on additional responsibilities in addition to CIO roles. These CIO-pluses include CIOs who head Human resources, Shared Services, Integrated and Behavioral Medicine, and Operations. They are also joining boards at a higher rate than their male counterparts. Let’s quantify where things stand.
Currently, 17 percent of CIOs of S&P 500 companies are women, as compared to 13 percent of chief financial officers and roughly 4 percent of CEOs. Some key CIOs of major companies have also recently been promoted to roles definitively above that. Three examples include
Of the CIOs that I have profiled in my Board-Level CIO series, 42% of them have been women, including:
Women are increasingly filling board slots, and BloombergBusiness reports that for cybersecurity board openings, two-thirds of those roles are filled by women.
Based on our review of the profiles of the women IT executives I have featured, there are a few reasons why women CIOs are succeeding in these ways:
1. Female CIOs Tend to be Autodidacts When It Comes to IT
There is more room for growth, needless to say, but this all points to progress being made among women. Interestingly enough, of the women profiled in my column, the majority did not have technology degrees as undergraduate or as graduate students. This suggests an autodidacts ability to learn on the job. They learned what they needed to on the job in order to lead the IT function. Part of this speaks to the fact that the job of CIO is not as deeply technical as it was at its foundation. Coding and development is now, more than ever, handled by third parties, and most companies are buying technology more than they are building it. That said, it remains a complex function, and the success of CIOs who have risen from outside of IT to take over the IT function bodes well for these CIOs to follow in Miller’s, Jacoby’s, and Karaboutis’ footsteps to positions definitively beyond the CIO role.
11-16-15
Sophie Vandebroek has been with Xerox for 25 years, and in that time has seen tremendous change. The one-time elite brand went through a period in the woods, so to speak, and now Sophie (among others) have helped the company return to its innovative roots. As company’s chief technology officer, and as the President of Xerox Innovation Group, she has put a lot of thought both into what has made the company special at its core and from its founding, while incorporating in new methods such as developing “dreaming sessions” in which Xerox employees and customers dream up new ideas without the constraints of what is possible today. She also indicates that innovators must have fun at work, as well as leading balanced lives.
Vandebroek is also one of several examples of female executives. It continues to be rare in technology companies to have CTOs and innovation heads who are women. Vandebroek has spearheaded diversity programs at the company, and she has employed a variety of creative methods to ensure that female technical leaders continue to be found and groomed for leadership. She discusses all the above and more herein.
(To listen to an unabridged podcast version of this interview, please visit this link. To read future stories like this one, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: You are the Chief Technology Officer of Xerox, as well as the President of the Xerox Innovation Group. Please provide a breakdown between the two sets of responsibilities you have.
Sophie Vandebroek: They are very complementary. As you might know, Xerox is a global corporation with 140,000 employees across the world. We are the largest corporation in business process services and document management services. About 60 percent of our revenue comes from business process outsourcing services in areas like healthcare, transportation, financial services, education, etc. 40 percent comes from our traditional printing, imaging, and publishing business, which continues to do very well.
In my role as Chief Technology Officer, I partner with the business group presidents, and with our CEO and senior team to constantly predict disruptive changes that will impact our clients. I help make sure that, as a business, we are positioned to provide the services to our clients that they need to successfully provide services to end users. As part of that, we look at the trends and define the investment portfolio together with our joint venture partner, Fuji Xerox, which is now more than fifty years old. We invest over a billion dollars in research, development, and engineering. We determine the right investment portfolio, what the right strategy is, and how to execute.
As the head of the Xerox Innovation Group, we have people that not only know what disruptive changes are coming, but they also create those new waves, whether that is in computing, machine learning, or the Internet of Everything. Within the labs around the globe, we envision the future together with our clients. We do a lot of co-innovation and co-creation to envision the future and make it a reality for our clients, the world, and our business. Those are the two roles.
High: You talked a bit about the creation of the strategy, as well as the interaction with customers, which are essential to developing the insights as to where innovation will be focused. Can you talk about some of those strategies and some of the things you briefly touched on – computing, the Internet of everything, and machine learning?
Peter High
11-12-2015
Excerpt from the Article:
Catalent Pharma Solutions is a global provider of advanced delivery technologies and development solutions for drugs, biologics and consumer health products. With more than 80 years of experience, Catalent has proven expertise in bringing more customer products to market faster, enhancing product performance and ensuring reliable clinical and commercial product supply.
Catalent employs approximately 8,700 people, including more than 1,000 scientists, at 31 facilities across five continents, and in 2015 generated more than $1.8 billion in revenue. The company’s brand promise is “More products. Better treatments. Reliably supplied.” In partnership with the company’s customers, including companies of all sizes, Catalent develops, formulates and supplies many life-saving therapies. Catalent’s CIO, Michael Del Priore, shares with CIO Insight how IT plays a role in mergers and acquisitions, the benefits of engaging key strategic vendors and some exciting trends in the pharma industry.
CIO Insight: This is not your first stint as an IT executive at a pharmaceutical company, as you were once the vice president and global head of Commercial Operations IT at Roche. You spent more than three years as CIO of consumer packaged goods company Church & Dwight in between, however. When you returned to the industry, what struck you as having changed during that period from an IT perspective?
Del Priore: Personalized medicine, an emerging practice of medicine that uses an individual’s genetic profile to guide decisions made in regard to the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of disease, was in its early stages when I was at Roche and has progressed significantly since. This requires new ways of analyzing data to develop and deliver better medicines to patients in a more targeted way. Also, the implementation of product serialization, the means by which drugs can be tracked throughout the supply chain to counter threats such as counterfeiting, adulteration and diversion has progressed. The regulatory frameworks were just being developed when I was at Roche and now they are in effect in certain countries. Therefore, we have invested at Catalent to be in position to service customers who have serialization requirements.
CIO Insight: You have been a member of the mergers & acquisitions team at Catalent. What role do you play as IT leader relative to M&A?
Del Priore: I am part of the team that evaluates potential acquisition targets during the due diligence process to determine whether the target company fits with our strategy, assess how it is run and what it would take to integrate it into Catalent. From an IT perspective, we evaluate their current IT landscape and identify integration costs as well as potential synergies. Of course, if we should acquire a company, we execute the integration using our M&A playbook.
To read the full article, please visit CIO Insight
11-9-15
Donagh Herlihy is one of the first Chief Information Officers in the US to take on additional responsibilities. He did so when he took over the Human Resources function at Wrigley while he was still CIO nearly 15 years ago. Since then, he has been the CIO and Vice President of Supply Chain Strategy and Planning at Wrigley, CIO and Senior Vice President of IT and eCommerce at Avon, and now he is the Executive Vice President Digital and CIO at Bloomin’ Brands, which is a $4.5 billion revenue casual dining restaurant company based in Tampa, Florida.
Donagh’s catholicity has been remarkable, and he owes it to a combination of good timing, a desire to think of business outcomes first and IT second, and simply putting his hand up to let others know that he had this ambition. He believes others will likely follow in his footsteps, as he notes in this interview, and he offers a variety of lesson for those who wish to do so.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 25th article in the CIO-plus series. To read the prior 24, please visit this link. To listen to future interviews in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: I thought we might begin with Bloomin’ Brands. Could you take a moment to describe the business?
Donagh Herlihy: Bloomin’ Brands is one of the world’s largest casual dining restaurant companies with about 100,000 team members and we are headquartered in Tampa, Florida.
Our portfolio of brands includes Outback Steakhouse, Carrabba’s Italian Grill, Bonefish Grill and the fine dining concept Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse & Wine Bar. We have close to 1,500 restaurants throughout 48 states, Puerto Rico, Guam and 22 countries. We are listed on the NASDAQ with revenues of about $4.5 billion annually.
High: Your role at Bloomin’ Brands is Executive Vice President of Digital, in addition to holding the title of Chief Information Officer. The topic of digital, as broad as it is, is certainly very hot these days. Could you take a moment to describe your responsibilities as the head of Digital?
Herlihy: The mission of our digital innovation team at Bloomin’ Brands is to create consumer relevant digital solutions that drive traffic to our restaurants, increase customer satisfaction and enable an ongoing relationship between our customers and our brands. The team is very cross functional and as they transform important aspects of our business, they need a leader on the executive leadership team to support them. I am fortunate to have that responsibility, but I also work closely with the brand’s Presidents and our CMO.
11-2-15
Vanguard is an investment management company with more than $3 trillion in assets. It is the largest provider of mutual funds in the world. It is a company that believes in developing breadth and depth in its leaders, and as such, potential executives are likely to do “tours of duty” of sorts in multiple parts of the enterprise in order to get a better sense of all that the company does for individual and institutional investors. IT is no different. In fact, multiple executives outside of IT once held the chief information officer role.
The incumbent, John Marcante, has been the CIO since 2012. As someone who has held leadership roles outside of IT during his 22 years with the company, he thinks about IT in some non-traditional ways. He believes that CIOs have to have technology acumen as a foundation, but that they also need to have business acumen. There is no replacement for having spent time in the business and for interacting with customers. Lastly, he says that CIOs need to build a leadership competency centered on the ability to influence the leadership team through strong analysis and clear communications. He believes that these three competencies need to be shared by leaders of other functions, including the need to be technology savvy, as technology becomes more pervasive in all industries.
In this interview, Marcante describes his own career journey, the way in which he thinks about the value that IT can create, the ways in which he benchmarks start-ups for new ideas and methods, the methods he has used to gain insights from customers, the methods he uses in ensuring that his IT staff (who are also customers of Vanguard) leverage their insights as customers to make IT better, and a variety of other topics.
(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 in the upper right hand side of this page.)
Peter High: You are the Chief Information Officer of Vanguard, and in that role you oversee technology to serve clients and manage investments. Can you take a moment to talk about how you work with your colleagues and customers to develop ideas in both of those categories?
John Marcante: The answer to that varies a little bit by business line at Vanguard. We have a long history of getting technology ideas from our Institutional clients – most of the clients that we manage 401(k) plans for, for example. If I remember correctly, in the early ‘90s, the idea for the creation of our first website came from a prospective Institutional client. Today, our tech clients, especially in the Institutional area, like to partner with us on the technology front. This allows us to gain their input, leading to things like custom analytics and data visualization tools. As an example, we just rolled out a new plan manager (My Plan Manager) for our Institutional customers. Getting that feedback, understanding what plan sponsors really want to see, and bringing technology to the forefront is a partnership with our clients. It is a lot less of a service provider mentality. I think the dynamics of the world are changing. It is much more of a true partnership.
On the Retail side, we have millions of clients, so it is more difficult to partner. I think, traditionally, we used to use focus groups, where we could get people in, track eyeballs, create heat maps for our websites, and even solicit feedback from clients by creating virtual labs and having early adopters join those labs to look at their own data. Today, it is much different, with the introduction of big data and the introduction of “continuous delivery.” Today, technology allows our business to have a hypothesis, create a test, experiment with multiple clients seeing multiple experiences, and quickly implement one of those experiences that produces the best business outcome or client experience. Today with data analytics and continuous delivery, we can test, fail, fail fast, fail cheap, learn, and iterate to the best design. That is where we are at on the retail side.
High: What traits do you believe CIOs need in order to be successful today?
10-27-15
Timothy Kasbe has been a chief information officer at three major companies, Reliance Industries, Sears, and Intrexon. For the past three and a half years, he has been the Chief Operating Officer of Gloria Jeans, a Russian retailer that is among the fastest growing retailers in the world. Kasbe credits his rise to being a business leader first and a technologist second. He also spent a decade as a consultant to the retail industry, and as such advised executives across the industry. He believes that CIOs who are oriented as he is will increasingly find opportunities to rise to the role of COO among others.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 26th article in the Beyond CIO series. To read past interviews with executives from American Express, Biogen, BMO Financial Group, and Allstate, among others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above and to the left.)
Peter High: For those who might not be familiar with it, please provide an overview of Gloria Jeans.
Timothy Kasbe: Gloria Jeans is an apparel retailer based in Russia. We operate over seven hundred stores in eleven time zones of Russia and the Ukraine. Until the recent geopolitical turmoil that is unfolding in our backyard, we had enjoyed solid growth. We are among the fastest growing apparel retailer in the world with 56.4 percent CAGR for the preceding five years. To sustain this growth, we have our own production and we import garments from around the world. We market to all ages and sexes across the fashion spectrum. In Russia, especially, we are number one in the kids and ladies jean segment. It is an exciting company with constant change of the fashion trends and tastes of our customers.
In my role, I have responsibility of technology, supply chain, company strategy, and global expansion of our business. In a role like this, there are no strict boundary lines, as such. At times, I have led HR and recruiting and, last spring, some of our ad campaign. I had a major role to play in that, including writing some lyrics to songs, for instance. It is a matter of taking care of business, no matter what a given trading day throws at you. That is how I would explain my role.
High: That sounds exciting and far-reaching. Can you talk a bit about your strategic priorities for the foreseeable future? What is on your roadmap?
Kasbe: Winston Churchill once said “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Our strategic priority right now is to make sure that this crisis that we are going through is not wasted. We are taking care of all the internal operations and fine-tuning business practices based on some deep learnings which we are gaining, both through the slowdown as well as through some technology that we have been able to afford to get those insights. The constant refining of our business operations is a key priority while we are enjoying such a crisis.
The other part is hedging the risks of where we operate. Our definite priority is to expand in other countries. We have stores opening in Georgia and other places in a couple weeks. A lot of our competition is vanishing, but we keep sharp focus on both our operations and our profit engineering. That is a strategic priority for us. At the same time, we make fashion affordable to all segments of Russia. We look to the next three or five years, when the boom returns to the country, to be ready with the capability and the capacity we need for the product, talent, supply chain, etc. Those are our priorities right now.
11-5-2014
Jay Vijayan, CIO for Tesla Motors, is responsible for the company’s business applications, infrastructure, network, systems operations and security. Learn how he helped IT evolve into a global organization that is a key enabler supporting the growth and success of the company’s business.
CIO Insight: Jay, you’ve been the CIO of Tesla for two years, and you’ve been with the company for nearly three. Can you please highlight the evolution of the IT function during that time?
Jay Vijayan: The IT function in Tesla has been evolving extremely fast with the evolution of the company. The company had quarterly revenue of $39.5M in Q4 2011, but in the last quarter (Q2 2014), we reported quarterly revenue of $769.35M. Our exponential growth is not in revenue alone, but in all areas—from production volume to global sales.
We have produced a car [Tesla Model S] that won all the prestigious awards in the automotive industry in its first year of production. We are continuing to grow and move faster than ever to achieve our goal of accelerating the world’s transition to electric mobility, with a full range of increasingly affordable electric cars.
As part of this exciting and continuing journey, the IT team built Tesla’s entire global systems network and data center infrastructure; software applications for the factory, corporate and retail network; and the necessary information security infrastructure and tools. We continue to ensure that everything we do in IT is aligned with a larger business goal. IT has evolved to a global organization and a key enabler to the global growth and success of our growing business.
CIO Insight: I’ve been fascinated by the fact that during a time when most IT departments chose to buy technology rather than build it, you have a bias toward building your solutions. Why is that?
