Peter High
08-03-2015
Excerpt from the Article:
WSFS Bank is a $5 billion bank headquartered in Wilmington, Del. It is the seventh oldest bank in the United States still in operation today. Founded in 1832, WSFS Bank was chartered seven days before the city of Wilmington. WSFS operates out of 56 locations in Delaware, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Nevada. In addition to retail banking, the company also has a trust & wealth management division that manages about $1.5 billion in client assets and an additional $10 billion in assets under administration. The Cash Connect division provides cash management services to ATM owners across all 50 states and the company currently manages cash replenishment services for more than 15,000 ATMs. Through Array Financial, WSFS offers mortgage financing services to customers across all 50 states. James Mazarakis is the executive vice president and CIO of WSFS, a role he has had for more than five years. Mazarakis discusses with CIO Insight contributor Peter High cyber-security fraud, digital technology in banking and more.
CIO Insight: You lead technology and operations. What is under your purview in these two areas, and how did your role evolve to take both on?
James Mazarakis: These two areas of the bank had been managed together prior to my arrival. What we have further supplemented since my arrival is our operational risk and application delivery areas. Operational Risk was supplemented because, as everyone is aware, in the last few years we have seen significantly increased cyber-security fraud activities across all types of industries and governmental institutions. Our bank has been proactive in supplementing our capabilities in this area to protect our customers and their confidential information.
We have also further supplemented our application delivery area to allow the bank to build applications that support our customers’ needs. Customer needs have grown very significantly in the last few years and banks have responded by providing more online capabilities and new mobile facilities. We have responded to these needs by issuing mobile and tablet software that address these needs. Our most recent enhancement is WSFS Mobile Cash. WSFS Mobile Cash allows customers to withdraw cash from our branch ATMs by using their mobile phones. In essence WSFS Mobile Cash is a cardless ATM transaction. This product represents the latest in security, convenience and speed in regards to digital technology in banking.
CIO Insight What are some core areas of your current strategy? What are your team and you focused on at the moment?
To read the remainder of the article, please visit CIO Insight
by Peter High, published on Forbes
8-3-2015
Mark Sunday has been the CIO of Oracle for ten years, and in that role, he has been the company’s first and best customer. As the CIO of a $38 billion company, his technology needs are quite complex, and he has been the first to use most of the company’s products and services over the past decade. As such, his team offers invaluable counsel to colleagues as to what works well, and what requires further refinement. Also Sunday has been an invaluable advisor to the company’s customers, many of whom are also CIOs. He speaks not as a sales person, but as a peer, and can offer a special depth of knowledge tying together CIOs’ needs with Oracle’s solutions.
Sunday has also joined the ranks of board-level CIOs, having been on the boards of multiple companies over the past decade and a half. He has found the experience invaluable, as it has pushed him to build skills as an advisor in addition to those as an operator in his day-job. He also has drawn insights from each board-level experience to develop innovations he can leverage within Oracle itself.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 14th article in the Board-Level CIO series. To read interviews with the CIOs of Cardinal Health, P&G, Kroger, and FedEx, among others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Mark, you are the Chief Information Officer of Oracle, a company that needs very little introduction, certainly. But for those who may not be so familiar with the role that you specifically play within the organization, I wondered if you could talk about those areas that are under your purview within Oracle.
Mark Sunday: I am responsible for the global competing infrastructure and networking infrastructure and how we service our end users in nearly 100 countries. My team is about 50 strong, supporting those folks around the world. Everything from end user services up through a variety of different things necessary for them to communicate, collaborate, and execute their jobs.
I am complemented by our Oracle’s development organization that also contributes to automating processes across the company as they deploy applications. They have the responsibility to be the first implementer of many of the new products. So between what we do within my organization and my counterparts in development, we serve all of our 140,000+ end users.
High: Oracle is fundamentally a technology company. I can imagine that being the CIO of a technology company has its blessings and its challenges. On the one hand you never have to make the argument to your colleagues that technology ought to be thought of as strategic, but then, on the other hand, you are surrounded by engineers and people with deep technical expertise. Can you talk a bit about culturally what that is like to be within the milieu of a major technology organization running IT?
Sunday: Well, first of all I think it makes it very exciting for the team. So beyond the normal mission IT organizations have of making their organization function, whether it be public or private sector more effective and delivering value to their customers, we take on some additional roles.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
7-27-2015
Jenny Craig and Curves came together as part of a private equity buy-out in late 2013. The businesses complement each other in that one (Jenny Craig) focuses on nutrition and diet, and the other (Curves) focuses on exercise. Tying the value proposition together requires leaders who develop enterprise-wide perspectives on customers and how to serve them better.
From his post as chief information officer, Abe Lietz has proven to be one such leader. He joined Jenny Craig three years ago. As he explains in my interview with him, as an IT leader, he has pushed to be more customer-facing and cognizant of customer experience than the average CIO. By thinking about business and customer outcomes first, he has pursued technology investments always in support of those needs. In so doing, IT (along with Operations and Marketing) has become a primary driver of customer experience.
By demonstrating that he is an executive who can apply glue across this diverse enterprise, Lietz’s responsibilities have grown. He was asked to take on Service Operations, which provides service to customers and to colleagues. In so doing, Lietz and his team are delivering higher value to the combined company and its customers.
(If you don’t have time to read this, consider downloading it in audio form to listen to later. You can do so at this link. This is the 23rd article in the CIO-plus series. To read the prior 22 articles with CIO-pluses from organizations like ADP, P&G, Marsh & McLennan, EMC, and Walgreen’s, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Jenny Craig and Curves are two organizations that came together under your watch while you have been in the organization. Could you take a minute to describe those two businesses and the synergies they have drawn from coming together? What are your thoughts on IT’s role in these organizations.
Abe Lietz: The thesis behind bringing these two companies together is that they both serve very similar customer demographics. They both ultimately have one goal of driving a healthy lifestyle and getting our customers fitter and healthier. They do it in different ways, but a truly healthy lifestyle is a mixture of diet and fitness. Jenny Craig is a 30 plus year old business, historically with a distributed retail model. We have over 500 locations throughout the US and Australia and we are a food based diet program. Curves has a different model of a 100% franchised business throughout the world. We have Curves locations in Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America.
The goal of bringing those two businesses together was first to synergize the back-end and the administrative components of the business like finance. The second goal was to drive some of that synergy around a healthy lifestyle and to bring both the diet and weight-loss component of a healthy lifestyle and fitness together.
High: What role does IT play in an organization like this one?
I would like to introduce a new series, which I refer to as “Education Technology Innovation.” It will includes interviews and strategy discussions with some of the leading names in the field:
In the kick-off article to the series, I set the stage for some of the questions that will be explored in the interviews in the series:
“What does the future hold for these innovative companies, and how will it change the way in which our children and their children are educated? Will it serve to lower the costs of education? Will it create pressure on high cost private universities with less prestigious brands, as one can spend much less and learn from the top professors from Ivy Leagues schools?“
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Mike Feerick leads a company that has been credited as being the first ever massive open online course or MOOC. He founded ALISON in 2007. Unlike other prominent MOOCs such as Udacity, Coursera, and edX, ALISON’s content is not drawn from elite US-based universities. Rather, the Galway, Ireland based company focuses on practical workplace skills that can be tested by employers to gauge growing competencies. Since I last spoke with Feerick, the company registered its five millionth user, and much of the growth has been in the developing world. India, for instance, is the company’s fastest growing market. ALISON has thrived on serving traditionally underserved education marketplaces.
As Feerick probed for opportunity to serve additional groups of people that have been underserved, perhaps the most marginalized group of all became a target: the population of formerly incarcerated people. In the US alone, 20 million people are among the formerly incarcerated, and one of the triggers of recidivism is a lack of solid job opportunity. As Feerick describes in this interview, he believes ALISON is perfectly suited to serve this often marginalized population while reducing the rates of recidivism in the process.
Click here to read the full article
Stanford and MIT receive well deserved recognition as hotbeds of entrepreneurship, but neither of those is as singularly influential in the US as the Israel Insitute of Technology, better known as the Technion. Since the university’s founding over one hundred years ago, a quarter of the university’s graduates have started businesses. Since 2004, graduates of the Technion have won four Nobel Prizes, and a remarkable two-thirds of Israeli companies listed on NASDAQ have been founded by graduates of the Technion. Israel is often referred to as “start-up nation”, and the Technion has contributed more than any other institution to that reputation.
Since 2009, Peretz Lavie has served as President of the Technion. During that time, he has hired faculty who are experts across traditional academic silos, encouraged more professors and students to get involved in starting businesses, and in the process has bolstered the university’s reputation as a hot-house for new businesses.
In decades past, companies derived value from deep knowledge and discipline within specific functional areas. They were strong at operations or in finance or in service, etc. Companies were often strong at multiple of those, but the organization structure that owes tremendously to Alfred Sloan and General Motors was almost militaristic in its hierarchy and in its silos. Just as the military has had to think creatively about how breaking down these silos, promoting people who have breadth of experience as well as depth, companies too have derived great value at thinking about value derived at the nexus of disciplines.
Harrah’s Entertainment (now Caesars Entertainment) leap-frogged the competition in the casino gaming industry by virtue of the insights derived by Gary Loveman, a Harvard Business School professor whose specialty was at the intersection of marketing and technology, together with an extremely talented team in his Marketing and IT departments at Harrah’s, the company was an early winner with customer relationship management (CRM).
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Shai Reshef is an Israeli-born entrepreneur who now lives in Pasadena, California. Although his master’s degree is in Chinese politics, he has made his name professionally in private education. He served as chairman and CEO of the Kidum Group, an Israeli test preparation which he sold to Kaplan, Inc. in 2005. He also led KIT eLearning, a subsidiary of Kidum and the eLearning partner of the University of Liverpool. KIT provided MBAs and Master in IT degrees, and was eventually acquired by Laureate Online Education.
In 2009, Reshef founded the University of the People, which in February 2014 received accreditation from the Distance and Education Training Council, a U.S. Department of Education authorized accrediting agency. This made it the world’s first non-profit, tuition-Free, accredited, online university.
This is the tenth article in the Education Technology Innovation series, and it is fair to say that Nic Borg’s background is unlike any of the other entrepreneurs featured in the series. Like others, he comes from academe, but rather than being a former Stanford professor like Sebastian Thrun or Daphne Koller, or an MIT professor like Anant Agarwal, Borg spent seven years at Kaneland High School in Maple Park, Illinois building web-based tools and learning management solutions. The small-scale innovation that he introduced proved to be a pilot for something bigger to come.
Armed with his practical experience at a Kaneland High School, Borg co-founded Edmodo five and a half years ago. Edmodo is the largest K-12 social learning network, which provides teachers and students a safe and easy way to connect and collaborate; it has been called “the Facebook of education.” It is used heavily in the classroom, but also extends that classroom environment. The mission of the organization is to help all learners reach their full potential, and he believes that by connecting them to the resources and concepts they need, they achieve that goal. It has already had profound implications on students, teachers, parents, and content providers, as he explains herein. He was recently honored by this publication as “30 Under 30” winner.
Umar Saif has done a lot in his 35 years. A Pakistani, he earned his PhD in computer science from the University of Cambridge at 22. He began a post doctorate degree at MIT at an age when most of his peers – age wise – had not completed their bachelor’s degrees. He worked at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory where he was part of the core team that developed system technologies for the $50 million Project Oxygen. He collaborated with Anant Agarwal, now the president of edX, among other legendary computer science and artificial intelligence professors. After spending years away from his native Pakistan, he found that he enjoyed the entrepreneurial spirit of MIT and of the US more generally. However, it was a conversation with a colleague about what he wanted to achieve in his life that got him to rethink his plans for the future. He decided that he wanted to help establish a comparable entrepreneurial hot-bed like the one he found at MIT back in Pakistan.
He returned to the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), where he found that his top students were the equivalent of the top students at MIT, but they did not realize the potential they had. His own story became an inspiration for a series of entrepreneurs, many of whom he has started businesses with. He was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2010, selected as one of top 35 young innovators in the world by MIT Technology Review in 2011 and received a Google faculty research award in 2011.
In late 2010, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration put out a request for proposal for a new kind of university program. Recognizing the importance of establishing New York City as a technology hub, he hoped to attract a leading university to establish a graduate school in engineering and computer science in Manhattan, and proposed that it be built on Roosevelt Island.
The proposal submitted by Cornell University was the winner, and though the permanent campus will not be ready until 2017, Cornell NYC Tech has set up shop in Google’s Manhattan offices in Chelsea. Daniel Huttenlocher is dean of the program, and he has an ambitious vision that befits an academic who has experience in the business world. He has hired a Chief Entrepreneurial Officer, and the school has already established deep ties with the start-up community in New York. Huttenlocher measures the success of his program on the number of people who start and who join high growth organizations. Establishing a program with ready access to major corporations, start-ups, and even City Hall means that Cornell NYC Tech is in an enviable position, and will likely be a key player in pushing New York to be the tech start-up hub that has longed to be for some time.
MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Professor Anant Agarwal has personified the educator-entrepreneur, as he has had a foot in academe and a foot in new ventures for more than a decade. He has led CSAIL, MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, just as he was a founder of Tilera Corporation, which created the Tile multicore processor. He led the development of Raw, an early tiled multicore processor, Sparcle, an early multi-threaded microprocessor, and Alewife, a scalable multiprocessor. He also led the VirtualWires project at MIT and was the founder of Virtual Machine Works. His start-ups have largely been focused on his areas of research and areas of interest, but he had not focused on the education space itself until late 2011.
It was at that point that Agarwal taught what would become MITX’s first massive open online course (MOOC) on circuits and electronics, which drew 155,000 students from 162 countries. This overwhelming response showed the promise of having his academic and his entrepreneurial pursuits coincide. Agarwal developed a partnership between MIT and nearby Harvard to establish edX. Unlike rivals Coursera and Udacity, edX is a not-for-profit. Therefore, when Agarwal thinks about the competitive landscape among the MOOCs, his perspective is “the more the merrier.” In fact, in June of last year, edX became open sourced, and the source code, OpenedX, has led to interesting collaborations with Google, Stanford University, and even with countries such as France and China.
Much time and attention has been given to the MOOCs started in the US, but as I have mentioned in my interview with Mike Feerick of ALISON, the phenomenon actually first emerged in Europe. Another more recent entry to the MOOC field out of the United Kingdom is FutureLearn. Unlike other prominent MOOCs like Udacity, Coursera, and edX that feature university content, FutureLearn is not led by a former academic. Simon Nelson is a businessman, but he was a logical choice to head FutureLearn given his experience working in a variety of media fields that have been threatened and transformed by technology. As a result, Nelson has been programmed to see opportunity in the chaos.
FutureLearn also has the advantage of a 44 year old pre-cursor to the MOOCs: Open University. The university has many things in common with the MOOCs — it has an open entry policy, and the majority of courses are taken off-campus anywhere in the world. As such, Nelson has been able to work with Open University Vice Chancellor Martin Bean to learn from the decades of experiences and experiments forged, and many of them have translated well to the new format. Therefore, while FutureLearn is a new entrant to this marketplace, it stands to become a formidable one.
I have had the a good fortune of speaking with good number of the leaders in education technology today. Since so many of these players have emerged from academe, the competition between companies is fierce certainly, but there is also a collegial willingness to acknowledge the successes of other companies. In the case of non-profits like edX, CEO Anant Agarawal says, the more companies that enter this space, the merrier. (Stay tuned for my interview with Agarwal on January 20th.) Several of these leaders acknowledge that the most influential person to the MOOC landscape has been Salman Khan. As Agarwal lists the genesis of the MOOCs, he lists Khan and his Khan Academy first among the major players. Sebastian Thrun acknowledged in my interview with him that “I stumbled into this after listening to a gentleman named Sal Khan of Khan Academy. In his speech he noted that he had tens of millions of students in his classes. I was teaching at Stanford at the time and had tens of dozens of students in my classes, and I felt I should try something different and see if we could do what I do and scale it to many people.” In fact, in my podcast interview with Thrun, as he listed those who had been most influential to him over the course of his career, he listed Khan on the short list.
There has been much press for the massive open online courses or MOOCs, including in my series of interviews to date with Sebastian Thrun and Daphne Koller, CEOs of Udacity and Coursera respectively. If one is new to these companies, one might be under the impression that the MOOC phenomenon is less than two years old. That is not the case. The company that many credit as being the first ever MOOC is Advance Learning Interactive Systems ONline, better known as ALISON. Irish-American entrepreneur, Mike Feerick founded that company in 2007, and whereas many other companies in this industry are still trying to determine the business models, Feerick has nearly seven years of testing, experimenting, and succeeding behind him. In this interview, Feerick talks about the genesis of the idea, his rationale for focusing on vocational training, and his vision for the future of the company.
Last week, I kicked off a series on education technology with an interview with Sebastian Thrun, CEO of Udacity. Daphne Koller who co-founded and is the co-CEO of Coursera, by some measures the largest of the for-profit educational technology companies offering massive open online courses or MOOCs with over five million students across most countries, has much in common with Thrun. They both were foreign-born Stanford professors with backgrounds in artificial intelligence when they started the companies they currently lead. Each has also taken a leave of absence from Stanford in order to pursue their current opportunities.
Though their companies compete, they have chosen very different areas of focus. Udacity, like several other companies that provide MOOCs has chosen to focus on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses. Coursera has chosen a much broader offering, including many disciplines in the humanities. This breadth of offering has been a strength of the company in building a broad student-base, and it has signed up over 60 universities as partners. That said, it has required particularly creative approaches both process and technology-wise in order to facilitate learning, collaboration, and grading.
There are few entrepreneurs who can compete with Sebastian Thrun in terms of creativity and breadth of innovation. He led the development of Stanley, a robotic vehicle on the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. He was a founder of the Google X Lab, and parlayed his earlier success with Stanley into the Google driverless car system. He also was among the leaders who developed Google Glass. All the while he was a professor first at Carnegie Mellon and then at Stanford.
In early 2012, based on inspiration from Salman Khan of Khan Academy, he co-founded Udacity, a for-profit education company offering massive open online courses, or MOOCs. Thrun’s Stanford course “CS 373: Programming a Robotic Car” was among the first couple of courses offered through Udacity, and it attracted 160,000 students in 190 countries. The youngest was ten and the oldest was 70. Moreover, none of the top-400 students were Stanford students. He was so excited about what he learned, that he gave up his post at Stanford to focus on Udacity full-time.
Education Technology is in its Infancy, but it is Growing-up FastMuch has been written of late about the need for healthcare reform in our country. Whether one is a fan of the Affordable Care Act or not, the case for change is quite clear. The fact that healthcare makes up such a high proportion of our gross domestic product (north of 17 percent), and has grown at such a fast clip relative to the consumer-price index (one and a half times) underscores the need for change. However, there is an industry the fundamentals of which have not dramatically changed in hundreds of years, and yet its costs have risen at a rate three times as fast as the consumer-price index. That field is education.
The classroom setting with a professor standing at the head of a class talking at a roomful of students is largely the same model that existed when the first universities were established in the United States. It is no wonder that some creative people have stepped forward with truly innovative ideas in the education space to attempt to turn the traditional model upside down.
7-21-2015
As Feerick probed for opportunity to serve additional groups of people that have been underserved, perhaps the most marginalized group of all became a target: the population of formerly incarcerated people. In the US alone, 20 million people are among the formerly incarcerated, and one of the triggers of recidivism is solid job opportunity. As Feerick describes in this interview, he believes ALISON is perfectly suited to serve this often marginalized population while reducing the rates of recidivism in the process.
(This is the 14th article in the Education Technology series. To read past articles with such luminaries as the CEOs of Khan Academy, Udacity, Coursera, and edX, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Mike, I was intrigued to hear this announcement about ALISON getting involved with the formerly incarcerated to provide training to make them both more employable and presumably less inclined to recidivism. The data is actually quite stark. There has been a lot written recently on the incarcerated population in the United States. The data indicates that 2.3 million people are currently incarcerated in the United States, there are up to 20 million ex-offenders, and that up to six million people are still under supervision of one kind or another. There certainly is a big population you might serve. Could you talk about the genesis of this idea?
Mike Feerick: I enjoy using new technologies and business systems to organize solutions to address social issues. With ALISON, we are making education more accessible the world over, but some marginalized groups have greater challenges than others in accessing what we provide – incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people among them. The need is huge, not just in the USA, but globally. For instance, there was one article in the Guardian yesterday that said that 92 percent of those being released from UK prisons feel unprepared for the world outside the penitentiary. These people have some of the greatest educational need in society.
The percentage of the US population in prison is just extraordinary. You have 25 percent of the world’s prison population, and yet America has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. Something is seriously wrong. For the 20 million people you mentioned who are already out of prison—if you have a felony, it is hard to get on with life as there are so many roadblocks. The one thing a formerly incarcerated person can do however is educate themselves, and the beauty of ALISON providing a massive number of free courses at many different levels is that the starting point can vary to suit every potential student.
As we have been leading this education revolution, I have had an eye on this social group and I thought, “OK, there are very few education dollars left for these people when they get out, yet it costs $100,000 on average per year to keep prisoners in jail. But when they get out, the government pays very little money to keep them out.”
07-20-2015
Allianz Global Assistance is a leader in assistance services, travel insurance and medical health insurance for travelers or ex-patriots. “Assistance” refers to roadside assistance, but it also refers to repatriation services for people who have issues while they are traveling. As Chief Operating Officer of the Americas, Jay Levine notes in this interview with CIO Insight contributor, Peter High, how the assistance label is so meaningful to the company’s mission.
Levine has been a CIO several times over, and joined Allianz Global Assistance as CIO of the Americas before rising to his current role. Levine reflects on his journey and the lessons it might provide on those who might follow in his footsteps.
CIO Insight: Can you talk a bit about your responsibility as COO? What is under your purview, Jay?
Jay Levine: I am the Chief Operations Officer for the Americas zone, which includes Canada, Mexico, the U.S., and I share responsibility for Brazil. These zones all have standalone business units serving the products I just described. There are a number of areas of interest starting with organizational management, serving as a PMO. We are responsible for the claims area, the assistance area and travel services, which includes the call center. We also have a financial services group where we do TPA services for specialty products that we provide on behalf of a credit card company. Finally, I oversee administrative services to do staff planning, reporting analytics and budgeting across the business units for which I am accountable.
CIO Insight: Talk about the process transitioning from CIO to COO, especially how the opportunity presented itself to you and what it is about your experiences as CIO that made you ready for this set of responsibilities.
Levine: I certainly aspired to move beyond the CIO role over the last 10 years. I came up through the software ranks as you mentioned as CTO. The more mature I got into my career, the more involvement with the business beyond the technology became more interesting to me. So it was an aspiration of mine and I was unsure whether I would fulfill it as I moved into the last third of my career.
One of my colleagues, the COO, moved out of the company to a great opportunity, at a time when I was fulfilling both the zone CIO role and overseeing a business transformation in Paris. The former COO and I shared the same boss, so when this happened, I threw my hat into the ring. Obviously my boss felt I was qualified and I had attributes he wanted to see more of in the operations area. It is such a technology-driven operation that he was looking for someone with a technology background. I knew the infrastructure, the domain from a business point of view and I had a burning desire to be closer to customers.
CIO Insight: Is it your assumption that at businesses that are going through similar technological transformations, CIOs who are appropriately equipped and have the ambition to do so might follow in your footsteps?
7-20-2015
As chief information officer of Microsoft, Jim Dubois has one of the largest CIO roles in the world. A long-time veteran of the company, he held a wide array of positions around the world, and was the company’s chief information security officer prior to being asked to become CIO. When he was promoted, initially it was as the interim-CIO. The company sought candidates externally while giving Dubois a shot at the permanent role. As he notes herein, he did not believe he would get the permanent role, but he chose not to operate as though he was an interim. He charged ahead, focusing on revamping IT’s processes to help the enterprise increase productivity and business velocity. In doing so more readily than even he believed was possible, first he proved to himself that he could be the permanent CIO, and then he proved it to the company.
Dubois operates IT as customer one for Microsoft, leveraging the company’s products and services at scale, providing feedback to colleagues on what works well and what could be improved in the offering, and acting as an advocate for CIO customers of the company.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 24th interview in the CIO’s First 100 Days series. To read past interviews with the CIOs of Intel, AmerisourceBergen, GE, Deutsche Bank, and CVS Caremark among others, please visit this link. To read future interviews in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Jim, I thought we would begin with your role. You are the Chief Information Officer of Microsoft. You were promoted into that role. You have been with Microsoft for over 20 years. How did you organize yourself upon receiving the promotion? How much of your vision was one of continuity versus fundamentally new strategies?
Jim Dubois: The whole tech industry is changing at a phenomenal pace right now, and Microsoft obviously needed to do the same to accelerate a lot of what we were doing as a company. That drove the need in IT to change the pace at which we worked. We needed to enable a faster pace within the company.
That was balanced on top of keeping everything going while we set out on this new mission to transform us into a platform and productivity company in a cloud-first, mobile-first world. We had a mission in IT that was “Create tomorrow. Deliver today”. That helped focus the team on what we were doing to enable this new transformation for the company, but also make sure that we continued to keep everything running and continue to execute on all that was happening across the business to begin with.
High: As someone who has been a part of the organization for some time, it was not as though you were joining a new company. I am curious how you prepared for your new role, and what sorts of steps you took as you prepared to ascend to the role of CIO?
07-14-2015
Capriotti’s is a fast-casual restaurant chain founded in Delaware in 1976. In 2004, Ashley Morris and Jason Smylie became franchisees of the business in Las Vegas. Four years later, they would lead an investment team to take over the company. Morris was installed as CEO and Smylie as CIO. Smylie would add the role as CMO a bit later. They have more than doubled the number of restaurants and revenue in the interim between then and now.
In the process, Smylie has become incredibly influential in the CIO/CMO communities, as he has accrued roughly 25,000 Twitter followers. In this interview with CIO Insight contributor, Peter High, Smylie talks about the growth of Capriotti’s, his career path and how he has developed his personal brand online.
CIO Insight: Could you please describe Capriotti’s business, and the role of technology in the company?
Jason Smylie: Capriotti’s Sandwich Shop is a fast-casual chain based in Las Vegas. We pride ourselves on having really good sandwiches that are often described as “life-changing.” Technology has three roles in our company. One: Efficiency. Making it easier and less costly to run our day-to-day business. Two: Growth. Helping drive frequency and spend among our customers. Three: Transformation. Making sure we’re relevant in a rapidly evolving marketplace.
CIO Insight: You were part of a team that acquired Capriotti’s. Can you describe how that idea occurred to you?
Jason Smylie: My best friend Ashley and I were huge fans of the food in college. We invested in a few Capriotti’s franchises after getting established in our careers. The shops were doing so well and we were so passionate about the business that we started to wonder what we were doing spending a majority of our time in our day jobs. Our initial plan was to build out a territory and be franchisees, but the founders of Capriotti’s weren’t on board for selling a large area development agreement. After a brief period of frustration, Ashley called me up after he had an epiphany, “Why not make an offer to buy the whole company?” The offer was entertained, and a month later we had the company in escrow and began feverishly raising the capital to close the deal.
CIO Insight: You are both the chief information officer and chief marketing officer of Capriotti’s. How do you divide your time between these sets of responsibilities?
Jason Smylie: There’s no clear cut division. These days most marketing projects have such overlap with IT that it just makes sense to have someone strategically overseeing both departments.
7-13-2015
Within the next week, Jet.com will officially launch. It promises to offer the lowest prices on the Internet. As Marc Lore notes in this interview, the key is to provide pricing that more accurately reflects purchase bundles and the distance that the goods need to travel. Lore spent the early part of his career as an investment banker, and has brought a depth of knowledge about financial models and algorithms to several experiences as an entrepreneur. Chief among those was Quidsi, the parent company of e-commerce websites Diapers.com, Soap.com, and Wag.com, among others. Lore co-founded the company in 2005 and sold to Amazon in 2011 for $550 million. Now Lore and Jet have Amazon squarely in its sites, hoping to under-cut the 800 pound gorilla of retail, and beat it in the marketplace space.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 13th article in the “IT Influencers” series. To read past interviews with Salman Khan, former Mexican President Vicente Fox, Sir James Dyson, Jim Goodnight, and Walt Mossberg, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: I thought we would begin, Marc, with the background on the company name. How did you select Jet dot com as the name of your enterprise?
Marc Lore: It started out with some basic criteria we were looking for. We wanted a name that ,for starters, was easy to say, spell, and remember. That was kind of important given the amount of money we expected to spend in marketing—we wanted solid recall. We also wanted a name that was sort of an empty vessel that we felt we could brand into a household name that would work well for millennials. Something that was a little bit modern and forward-thinking, one that you could envision being for a new-age tech company. It fit all those criteria.
High: No doubt you probably had to procure that from some airline organization of some sort or another, I’d imagine.
Lore: Yeah, it was an individual who had it for a long time. It wasn’t cheap, the domain. I can tell you that.
High: You have said that Jet.com will take on the challenge of providing the lowest prices on the internet by overcoming what you’ve referred to as the “gross inefficiencies that hobble e-commerce today.” What are the gross inefficiencies, and how have do you plan to overcome them?
7-7-2015
In September of 2013, the Science Applications International Corporation, better known as SAIC, split into two companies. The services arm retained the name SAIC, and is a $4 billion technology integrator providing life cycle services and solutions in the technical, engineering, intelligence and enterprise information technology markets.
Bob Fecteau joined SAIC as CIO in early 2013. He did so after having spent time as a CIO at BAE Systems and the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM). He joined a company that served government agencies and the military, and he did so as someone who was deeply immersed in both worlds. He had the great challenge in the first few months of joining the company of helping to lead the separation of the two companies, ensuring that people, processes, and technologies were productive on behalf of clients all the while.
He has also helped create a fascinating model where IT talent is accessible and available to customers. If a customer has a need that can be filled by one of his staff, he may send them off to work with that customer for a period of time. If and when they come back to do internal IT work, they do so with a much broader perspective of what IT does for SAIC and its customers, and in the process can help generate new ideas on how IT can become a bigger contributor of value to the company and its customers.
Lastly, he has employed a servant-leader model for IT to ensure that, from top to bottom, people feel as though they have the resources and the tools they need.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 24th interview in the CIO’s First 100 Days series. To listen to prior interviews with the CIOs of Intel, Johnson & Johnson, J. Crew, Deutsche Bank, CVS Caremark, and General Electric among many others, please click this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” button above.)
Peter High: You have a flexible labor pool that can be dedicated to IT work that is internal to SAIC one day and then customer facing the next. Can you describe this model?
Bob Fecteau: I’m responsible for ensuring that the labor pool in the IT shop internally is balanced with the service line labor pool that we offer to the government. So then if there is somebody that has a vacancy inside of the government or customer workspace, we can take an IT asset from my CIO office and push it into the service line, generate the revenue, and when the task is done, they can come back to the IT space. Conversely, if they have people coming off contracts supporting the customer and the contract ends early, we can take those assets and move them in the IT shop. They can help us do internal things until they get reassigned to the next contract. So that for us has been a real distinguishing change in how we implemented matrix support to the business.
