by Peter High, published on Forbes
7-6-2015
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. Sincet 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 2008, 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.
(This is the 12th article in the “IT Influencers” series. To read past interviews with executive such as Sal Khan of Khan Academy, Jim Goodnight of SAS, Sebastian Thrun of Udacity, Yves Behar of Fuseproject, former Mexican President Vicente Fox, and Sir James Dyson of Dyson Company, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: President Lavie, the Technion, for those who may not be as familiar with it, has a really storied place in Israeli entrepreneurial culture. Many people refer to your nation as startup nation, and many rightly believe that your university is at least partially, if not largely, responsible for that boom in entrepreneurship. Amazingly, a full quarter of the graduates of the university have started businesses. How has the university been such a hotbed of entrepreneurship?
Peretz Lavie: Indeed the Technion is the engine behind a startup nation. I have been asked this question many, many times and I have come to the conclusion that a world class university that plays such a major role in the economy of its environment or its state must have three ingredients: excellent students, excellent faculty members, and this is obvious, but it must have also a third ingredient and it is not so clear when you think about universities. This is a statement of mission. A mission statement must be part of the DNA of the university. I’ll give you some examples from the history of the Technion where the mission statement historically changed the Israeli economy. First, the Technion was established in the early 20th century as a mission to allow the Jewish people to get education in engineering. When the decision was made to establish the Technion in 1905, Jews in Europe could not study engineering. So there was a mission for this engineering school to allow engineering education for the Jewish people.
Then, the school was opened in 1924 after the First World War. When the state was established, David Ben Gurion, the legendary prime minister of Israel, made a decision that the Technion would be one of the more important institutes for the future of the newly established state. He picked a site on the top of the Carmen Mountain, and he also made the decision of which faculty to open first: the faculty of aeronautical engineering. Why? Because he realized that this was important for the future of the state even as early as 1954. The same year, the Israeli aircraft industry was established which is now one of the three largest industrial complexes in Israel and every one of the 5,000 engineers was educated at the Technion.
Another example is 1969. The Technion decided to open a micro-electronic institute. At that time, few people knew how to spell micro-electronic. The decision was made to provide the country with badly needed semiconductors that were deprived by an embargo that was imposed on Israel by Charles de Gaulle after the Six Day War. So the university had the mission to serve the country and mankind as part of its DNA.
Students who were educated under such an environment knew that when they graduate from the Technion, they also should serve a mission. Therefore combining excellent students and excellent faculty with the DNA of the university that it serve higher goals: humanity, the country, etc., I think you have an outcome like changing the economy and changing the environment.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
by Peter High, published on iRise
6-26-15
The CIO role is becoming more strategic yet more complex in recent times. In the last few years, the level of advancement of technology is mindboggling, as are the demands of business.
Of greatest concern is the speed of disruption—the rate at which an entirely new competitor, often driven by technological innovation, can materialize and dominate a key sector of your business. In the face of this, CIOs are less often thought of as back-end managers; instead, they are increasingly called on for business innovation and strategic thinking.
The role is more complex, as well. Security is factored into every conversation. The board cares about IT strategy, data policies and security operations. Startups enter the marketplace eager to disrupt long-established players. And those enterprises speak openly of their fear of being “ubered” by these aggressive, digital-native upstarts.
In this arena, CIOs have to make the potentially uncomfortable transformation into change agents.
In the sharply accelerating evolution from the mainframe era to today, technology has become more a daily part of the business, and consumerization of IT has made users both more capable and more demanding. Yet many IT leaders still do not view technology and their relationships with the rest of the enterprise in the way today’s marketplace demands.
CIOs have to be change agents. They cannot just wait for the next startup to disrupt them. It’s very important that they find ways to cannibalize themselves. Intel has championed the position that the best competitor should be the company itself. But disrupting yourself is incredibly difficult. It runs counter to human nature.
To continue reading, please visit iRise
6-23-2015
Dion Weisler is the Executive Vice President of HP’s Printing and Personal Systems organization, a $57 billion annual revenue business that includes personal computers, mobility devices, technical workstations, printers, graphics solutions, managed-print services, and internet services. He has been named the future CEO of HP Inc. when that company separates from Hewlett Packard Enterprise later this year. His rise at HP has been meteoric, and his prior success at both Acer and Lenovo, including stints in dozens of countries across the globe mean that he has a healthy knowledge of the competitive landscape and appreciation for the need to balance serving mature markets and developing markets differently.
I met with Weisler at HP Discover, the company’s customer event in Las Vegas earlier this month. We met in a make-shift office his leadership team kept in the Venetian Las Vegas. He was surrounded by members of his leadership team as we spoke, but the casual yet insightful conversation offered great insight into where things stand in the separation, his own thoughts about where he sees opportunities for the future, and I got a glimpse into how excited he is about the future of HP Inc., and the need to emphasize innovation (including pursuing moon-shot-type projects), and the need to find talent across the globe.
(This is the 11th article in the IT Influencers series. To read past interviews with executive such as Sal Khan of Khan Academy, Jim Goodnight of SAS, Sebastian Thrun of Udacity, Yves Behar of Fuseproject, former Mexican President Vicente Fox, and Sir James Dyson of Dyson Company, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Dion, I thought that we would begin with how things are progressing as HP Inc. becomes its own independent entity, separate from Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Where are you in the transition?
Dion Weisler: This is a massive undertaking for all the right reasons. We are more convinced with every day that goes by, that this was exactly the right thing to do because our markets are changing, and the customers are changing.
The personal systems business, the printing business, and the consumer side of the business has always moved pretty quickly. What you could always count on in the past is that the enterprise business took things a little slower and in its stride. The pace is much faster now. Therefore, to service our customers’ needs to be flexible, to be agile, to be really focused on what we have to do here, it makes all the sense in the world. As we talked to CIOs, as we speak to customers, and as we speak to our partners, they absolutely get what we are doing here. We are more than halfway through our journey, and I think things are going exactly according to plan.
When we started, we established a separation management office. I think we had every consulting agency on the planet involved at one point or another. The best practice is to keep the business running. Ninety-nine and a half percent of us are focused on the day-to-day running of the business and mainly focused on the customers and partners, whilst a relative handful of folks are focused on separation all day, every day, and they are doing a colossal task. The long pole in the tent, of course, is IT because this company has been together for 75 years and we have made something like 70 acquisitions along the way, sucked all those companies in, and bulked their IT systems onto our IT systems. We must now disentangle this organization that operates in more than 160 countries around the planet with thousands of applications, disentangling all of the entities and the tax structures, and the like. This will be completed in the back-half of the year.
As excitement builds, we are emboldened to accelerate innovation, to accelerate our focus on the customers, and you can feel it around the company. People are feeling very accountable for their business. They feel sharp and they are excited about what this means for both.
6-22-2015
As interim CEO of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), Andre Mendes sits atop a broadcasting enterprise with as broad a reach as any in the western world. Unlike some other organizations that you might think of among leaders in this space, the BBG operates in the corners of the world that tend to be most inhospitable to the dissemination of unfiltered media. What makes Mendes even more interesting is his path to his current perch. He was a chief information officer before his further rise. As Mendes notes, however, with so much of media being dominated by new media, much of it of a social variety, his background as a technology executive are quite suitable to the times. In this interview, Mendes describes the mandate of the BBG and its various brands such as Voice of America, the traditional and new media methods he and his colleagues use, and his own unique path to become interim CEO.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 20th article in the Beyond CIO series. To read the prior 19 articles, featuring interviews with executives at HP, Schneider National, Marsh & McLennan, Symantec, and Allstate, among others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Andre, for those who may not be familiar with your organization, you are the Interim Chief Executive Officer of the Broadcasting Board of Governors. I wonder if you could take just a moment to describe this organization and its mandate.
Andre Mendes: The Broadcasting Board of Governors is the agency of the federal government that is responsible for all of the United States’ civilian broadcasts throughout the entire world. We have a very clear mission: to address populations that live under regimes that have no freedom of the press and freedom of information, and to address those populations in any platform in which they choose to consume news and other information. We are about a $750 million agency that comprises five different networks of brands that disseminate information. The largest one is our flagship: the Voice of America, which is an organization with tremendous roots going back to the 1940’s with preponderant roles in World War II, and also during the Cold War in addressing the issues in Eastern Europe. Our other brands include Radio Free Asia, which addresses some of the freedom of the press issues in Southeast Asia; Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), which also has a strong role associated with disseminating information in the former Soviet Union and satellite countries; the Middle Eastern Broadcasting Networks, which is comprised of Alhurra TV and Radio Sawa and targets the Middle East in Arabic; and, finally, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, which has been broadcasting into the island for a couple of decades, which has had a tremendous impact in the dissemination of information in what is one of the most restrictive systems in the world.
High: And in terms of methods, since you’re broadcasting in areas where the government often does not welcome the broadcasts, what methods are used?
Mendes: It’s actually an interesting proposition about this agency. We have what is likely the widest distribution portfolio of any western media organization. We range from operating very large short-wave stations throughout the entire world– some owned and operated, some via leases—to medium-wave stations running some of the largest AM transmitters, along with a large FM distribution network. We utilize satellites for direct-to-home for both TV and radio and data. We also have substantial presence on the web, on social media and through mobile dissemination, including Twitter. So from short-wave to Twitter, it is a lot of different steps. But the truth is that we operate in areas where short-wave is still a very viable mechanism. For example, in rural Afghanistan or North Korea or in parts of Africa, like Nigeria, where there is still a huge population numbers consuming short-wave, to medium-wave because it allows us have a very powerful signal from outside the borders of a country—it’s what is called a cross-border transmission methodology. For example, in Iran, we have a very large transmitter in the United Arab Emirates that covers the entire country. We are constantly expanding our FM network, some of it being operated in some of the most dangerous, and to a certain degree, chaotic places in the world.
Peter High
06-17-2015
Excerpt from the Article: Mentor Graphics is a $1.2 billion multinational company, based in Wilsonville, Ore. It is a leader in supporting electronic design automation, which enables companies to develop better electronic products faster and more cost-effectively. The company’s engineers conquer design challenges in the increasingly complex worlds of board and chip design.
When Ananthan Thandri joined the company eight years ago, IT was a regional player in the company, and it largely had an order-taking role. In this interview by CIO Insight contributor Peter High, Thandri discusses the cultural and technical changes that he has made to change IT’s culture, improving user satisfaction and aggrandizing his own portfolio of responsibilities in the process.
CIO Insight: When you joined Mentor Graphics eight and a half years ago, the department was a classic “order-taking” function. What steps did you undertake to change the culture of IT to be proactive and involved in innovation?
Ananthan Thandri: First and foremost, we focused on bringing the IT talent to the forefront. We had abundant IT talent when I started at Mentor and with some changes in middle management that brought talent from the outside, we have encouraged the culture to become more innovative. For example, we changed the organization to be a global function rather than regional, which helped create a global perspective in IT solutions. We also made IT an objective-driven organization, with every IT employee’s objective directly connected to the overall organization’s objective. We increased communication within IT and between IT and the rest of the business and invested in new technologies to help increase productivity, while bringing quantitative (metrics-driven) data into decision making. By empowering our IT leaders and employees, we gave them opportunities to come up with innovative ideas to solve business problems. The overall result has been to transform IT into a partner, not just a naysayer, making customer satisfaction the responsibility of everyone, not just the CIO.
CIO Insight: You are a customer-facing CIO, can you speak about the ways in which you and your team engage external customers?
Thandri: Mentor IT has been involved with external customers for quite some time with Emulation Hardware Field Support and providing a secured collaborative environment between Mentor and its customers.
Emulation Hardware support involves Mentor IT system administrators located around the world who provide first-level support (diagnosis of problem, replacement hardware) at customer locations. As our emulation business grew significantly over the last several years, the need arose for more manpower and expertise around the globe to support our external customers. IT stepped in with the full support and confidence of the president of the company and designed and built a scalable support organization and practice. This model is instrumental in providing support turnaround times quickly for our customers. Mentor IT also helps with emulation benchmark activity with customers and helps qualify new emulation servers and systems.
Customer Collaborative Environment (CCE) is a secure workspace that provides remote access technologies for secure collaboration between Mentor and its customers. Today’s complex designs require the ability for designers to collaborate in secure and easily accessible development environments. Mentor’s secure collaborative workspace allows real-time interaction between Mentor and its customers. This significantly reduces the time for test case development as well as provisioning of same design data while protecting both Mentor and customers’ IP. This also helps Mentor better leverage our key talent around the world to help customers be successful. There are several engagements happening at any given time.
To read the remainder of the article, please visit CIO Insight
6-15-2015
There is perhaps no more iconic brand in India than that of the Tata Group. The company is remarkably diverse, and its leaders have been among the most respected members of the country’s elite since the company’s founding in 1868. Tata Group has been viewed among the most innovative companies in India, but CEO Cyrus Mistry set a goal for the company to viewed among the top ten innovators in the world. The man he has tapped to help lead the efforts behind that is Gopichand Katragadda. Katragadda is Tata Group’s first ever chief technology officer, and he comes to the company after a long and distinguished career at General Electric, where most recently he was the Managing Director of GE’s India Technology Center. In this interview, Katragadda describes the steps he is taking to put Tata Group on the path to being considered among the most innovative companies on earth, the ecosystem he is fostering to do so, and the areas of focus that will be the first entrees in this effort.
(For an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. To read more stories like this one in the future, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Gopichand, you are the first ever Chief Technology Officer of the Tata Group. How was it determined that now was the right time to establish the role?
Gopichand Katragadda: Many of the conglomerates have the parent as the listed company and the subsidiaries all roll up to the parent, whereas in our case, the Tata Group (the parent) is not listed, and it is the subsidiaries which are listed. The parent has partial ownership of the subsidiaries, but it has quite a parental leverage, and hence a parental obligation, if you will, in multiple areas. It has served this application in many ways, which is the brand aspects of the company and the group companies as well. The technology aspect of each company is doing what they are doing well, but also serving the parental obligation and bringing together companies to address some of the needs which no one company can address. That is the thought process in setting up this role at this point in time.
High: As I understand it, from some of your early conversations with the Tata Group chairman, Cyrus Mistry, his goal was to make Tata Group one of the ten most technologically innovative companies in the world, so I suppose in some ways that was a mandate of yours from the early stages. Can you talk a bit about pursuing that goal and the methods you’re using? I know that you’re a few months into your current role. What are some of the things you’ve done in the early stages to begin to shift the organization towards pursuing that goal?
Katragadda: Some rankings have us in the top 50 innovative companies. I do strongly feel that it is the business model and process innovations that have given us that spot. To move from there into the top ten innovative companies, the role technology plays and adding a good amount of intellectual property, differentiation in products in services, would be what will get us there.
06-11-2015
Excerpt from the Article: From its founding in 1955, PAE has offered enduring support for the essential missions of a wide range of customers, including the U.S. government, its allied partners and international organizations. PAE’s current portfolio includes capabilities in critical facility infrastructure, aviation, logistics, training, range operations and national security solutions, to support complex missions for customers around the world.
John Lambeth is the CIO of PAE and is responsible for all aspects of IT strategy, corporate application development and IT support to large-scale customer facing programs. Additionally, he is responsible for internal IT transformation initiatives, as well as providing support to customer programs and business development. CIO Insight contributor Peter High discusses with Lambeth data security, taking risks and the latest trends in IT.
CIO Insight: Your role as CIO of PAE has required that you spend time in some pretty difficult environments. Can you talk about your experiences, and the role that IT plays in these remote locations?
John Lambeth: PAE relies on IT to support its customers, even in the most difficult environments. As CIO for PAE, I have had the opportunity to spend time in locations such as Kabul, Afghanistan, and Baghdad, Iraq. I believe that it is only through going into these environments that a CIO can truly understand the challenges that field operators have in using sophisticated technologies in tough environments. My experiences also tell me that field employees appreciate corporate leadership coming out to the field, sleeping a CHU [containerized housing unit] next to them and experiencing a day in their shoes.
Information technology plays a unique role at PAE. We run the enterprise solutions that support business operations. We also play multiple roles supporting the external customer through deploying infrastructure in support of new contracts and providing logistical, supply chain and analytical systems. Corporate IT staff members will routinely travel to these environments and I believe that the team needs to see me out there in these places as well.
CIO Insight: What are your priorities for the foreseeable future?
Lambeth: Over the last year, PAE has undertaken a significant business transformation initiative that will carry us forward into the foreseeable future. Multiple IT systems have also been replaced or transformed as a result.
Because of their physical location at customer locations, in remote geographic locations or classified environments, employee access to these transformed systems varies greatly. One of my key objectives for this year is to transform data from these systems into information that can be delivered using a comprehensive mobility strategy.
6-8-2015
Martha Poulter joined Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide just over a year ago after spending 19 years with General Electric, most of it in the financial services side of GE. Her final stop was as CIO of GE Capital. Switching companies and industries is a challenge for most executives, but given how strong GE’s culture is, some executives find it difficult to operate in a new culture, especially one that differs substantially from GE’s metrics-driven, up or out culture.
Sensitive to the need to bring her strengths of experience while deferring to the successes of the team she was inheriting at Starwood, Poulter began her tenure at the company listening more than pontificating. She internalized the strategy that the team was already operating against, and chose to keep most of it, agreeing with the logic of it, by and large. Therefore, she has spent more time capitalizing on the strengths that she found, and was pleased to see that a culture of innovation was already in place, though she has pushed it to an even greater degree. She is now spearheading initiatives related to mobile check-in, development of apps that work with wearables, and further investigating opportunities related to the Internet of Things, all of which we discuss herein.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link: this link. This is the 23rd article in the “CIO’s First 100 Days” series. To read the prior 22 interviews, please visit this link. To read future interviews in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Can you talk a little bit about your role and your vision for the IT organization at Starwood here in the relatively early tenure of your time with the organization?
Martha Poulter: Absolutely. As a business we have a really big agenda that focuses on our guests and customers, figuring out how to marry the elements of our core business, which is very service-oriented, very high touch, with the high-tech capabilities that we can bring to bear on that service model. Over the course of several years, you will see that we have had an opportunity to marry those things. Our keyless initiative has taken a very age-old, analog process from our guests and converted it into a very digital process that allows guests to bypass the front desk and go directly to their assigned rooms. So we are very excited about that kind of marriage of high touch and high tech.
06-03-2015
Excerpt from the Article: The Advisory Board Company is a leading provider of insight-driven technology, research and services to more than 230,000 leaders at 5,200 member organizations across health care and higher education. Dan Holohan joined the company nearly three and a half years ago to oversee the Enterprise Technologies organization while setting direction for member-facing product technologies, enterprise data management and the implementation of social, mobile and collaboration solutions to help the firm’s predominantly Millennial workforce work smarter, faster and better. He has led the introduction of employee productivity, business unit and corporate shared application services and infrastructure. Holohan discusses his passion for IT and how he approaches his work with CIO Insight contributor Peter High.
CIO Insight: Dan, when you joined The Advisory Board Company roughly three years and a half years ago, you inherited a relatively small team in need of development and a portfolio of processes and technologies in need of modernization. What were the first things you addressed and why?
Dan Holohan: After I joined, my early assessment revolved around three primary areas: the capability of our internal network, the management of our data and the delivery of internal software.
My initial focus was to ensure that internal traffic flowed reliably and external Internet bandwidth was robust, redundant and fast. Within the first 90 days, the entire DC office network was completely replaced including the core backbone, all switches and wireless access points which, for the ensuing three years, has resulted in eliminating the serious service interruptions that the firm was used to experiencing.
Next, I noticed the emphasis that was being placed on managing the complex datasets and data flows that were being used by our internal tools and member facing products. I created a new group, Enterprise Data Management (EDM), charged with maintaining the quality, reliability and integrity of firmwide data and data technology platforms.
Lastly, internal stakeholders were dependent on our development team for providing solutions which kept the workforce productive and engaged. The challenge was prioritizing the intake and making sure that we were working on the most important things. I was able to convince six of the most senior leaders in the firm that we needed their input and the Prioritization Steering Committee was born. As a result, investments were made on this development team and we delivered a plethora of upgrades and enhancements in support of our growing business including cloud-based tools for HR, Finance and Member Support functions. One notable achievement was delivering the “360 Degree View of the Member” where nine disparate client systems were migrated to our Salesforce platform enabling staff to interact with all aspects of the member relationship from one place. My development team won the “2013 Breaking the Mold Award” at Dreamforce for their innovative uses of the Salesforce platform.
6-1-2015
Serge Leduc has been the chief information officer of Canadian National Railway for roughly a year and a half. In that time, he has engaged in a transformation of the function, and has facilitated the implementation of the technology to enable the Internet of Things at the railway. This is one of several changes he is enacting that he discusses in the interview below that describe how he and his team are making the railway more reliable and safer.
Among other insights of note, he highlights his time as a consultant to developing an analytical mindset and problem solver’s mentality. He has attempted to instill this same thinking in his team.
(To listen to an unabridged version of this interview, please click this link. This 22nd article in the CIO’s First 100 Days series. To read the prior 21, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Serge, please describe your role and your plans for the foreseeable future at Canadian National.
Serge Leduc: As CIO I am responsible for IT operations of the company. This is a 24-by-7 operation because CN is not a passenger transport, it’s just freight. We have a network across North America, covering Canada from East to West, and covering the United States from North to South. We are moving $250 billion worth of goods across North America, and our operations rely heavily on information systems for the back-office operation, as well as the front-office functions including the Internet of Things. CN has invested in technology over the years to make sure that we have a safe operation. There has been a lot of investment in business intelligence, operational systems, and investment to support our growth. Our business model has evolved significantly over the years, moving to a greater customer service focus in order to improve the first and last line of our operations. A lot of investment has been made in our company in order to support this.
High: You mentioned the network you have put together across Canada and within the US. That network must include various trucking companies for the first mile and last mile, some of whom are also competitors of yours – a bit of “coopetition” that is inherent to your industry. As you think about the systems integration and the data integration that is necessary to make sure that you are serving customers well, it seems like quite a complex web in order to get that right. Can you talk a bit about your approach to sorting out the tracking of goods and ensuring that the data is shared across this ecosystem that you’ve built?
Leduc: That’s a very good question. The company has invested a lot in real-time tracking systems in order to track where our locomotives are, and the overall state of the network. Now we’re trying to extend that to our entire mode of business, including our partners in the trucking business. All the investment over the last 20 to 25 years in the industry targeted the rail portion of the business, but now with the growth that we are seeing in inter-modal and supply chain solutions, which include all the services that we can provide to our customers in order to have an end-to-end service offering, we will need to invest even more in that space in order to cover the full integration of the services that we are providing to our customers.
