Peter High
02-02-2015
Excerpt from the Article:
Richie Etwaru is a man in a hurry. He took on his first CIO role in his late 20s. He would hold that same title at the divisional level at Barclay’s bank in his early 30s. In 2007, he began a successful tenure at UBS, rising first to the role of Chief Technology Officer of UBS Wealth Management Americas and later as Chief Innovation Officer of UBS Wealth Management.
He has since moved to Cegedim RM, which is a data, technology and services company delivering a portfolio of innovation to the life sciences industry, specifically pharmaceutical manufacturers. He is currently the Chief Digital Officer of that organization. As he has continued his speedy career ascent, he has also founded an online media organization (BRAINFOOD TV) and started a health data analytics organization (The Human API), all while pursuing a doctorate and writing a book.
In this interview, Etwaru discusses his career, what drives him and his thoughts on the path from CIO to CDO, among other topics.
CIO Insight: Richie, you grew up in IT departments, rising to become a CIO and CTO of multiple organizations. You then became more innovation-centric. How did this turn come about?
Richie Etwaru: I would love to say I was always innovative. That is absolutely not the case. I may have always had an innovative gene but I did not start to innovate purposefully until I studied the design of businesses. Businesses come down to capturing value between supply, demand generation and demand fulfillment. Once I understood how value is created and captured, repeatedly and sustainably I started to find ‘problems’ to solve. Innovation coupled with corollary problems is purposeful innovation because you may have an innovative gene for tinkering. I was tinkering for a while until I became ‘problem aware,’ leading to ‘purposeful innovation.’
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by Peter High, published on Forbes
2-16-2015
The time before going to bed is critical to ensure that one closes out the day that has passed, plans for the day ahead, but it is also critical that the mind is calmed so that one has a restful sleep. Too many successful executives get this wrong. One can only burn the candle at both ends for so long before it will mean that they are not as productive as they should be at work, and not as happy as they should be overall. Based on research and conversation with successful executives on the topic, here are the five things that successful people do before they go to sleep:
Spend Time with Family
Successful executive often have a difficult time drawing the line between work and personal life, simply picking work back up upon arrival at home. The time to decompress with family is essential. As David Brooks points out, a happy marriage (and by extension a happy family) is more important than a good job to one’s well being. I must admit that I was also struck by Alex Blumberg’s thoughts during episode four of the excellent Startup podcast entitled, “Startups are Risky Business“, in which he describes how he was overcome with emotion in reading Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, and learning for the first time the lesson intended for parents: you only have so much time before your children will be independent of you. Make the most of your time with them.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
2-9-2015
Ed Robben has worked in retail for most of the last eight years. He confides that when he joined the industry after having been an IT executive at BNSF Railway, and a consultant at the Feld Group and EDS, retail seemed to be a real laggard in terms of staying on top of technology trends and opportunities. He spent nearly five and a half years at J.C. Penney, including time as the CIO there before joining Fossil Group as its CIO in June of 2012. In recent years, he has seen the influence of IT grow substantially, and as omni-channel strategies are carved out, IT has more potential value that it can contribute to the enterprise. I began our interview by asking him about innovation in the retail setting.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this, please click this link. To read more articles like this one, lease click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: How do you think about technology innovation in the retail space and how do you think about the variety of channels through which you sell?
Ed Robben: I would say that retail has been sort of a laggard in that space. I was amazed by the amount of complexity that goes into running a retail operation. In Fossil’s case, that is wholesale, retail, marketing, manufacturing—all the things we do to operate the company and deliver to our customers. With the advent of the Internet and mobile technology, it is a prerequisite for any company to develop capabilities to engage your customer and listen to them.
On the operational side of things, the analytics required to do this in a targeted and personal way is a capability that all retailers need to develop. I think retailers do a pretty good job of doing the old style of marketing, but when it comes to the Omni-channel style, the consumers end up better armed than we do in most cases. So that is a real need for any retailers doing business today.
At Fossil, given the fact that we are two-thirds wholesaler and one-third retailer, we look at this digital space to include our wholesale customer as well. Our products are found in a lot of the major department stores—a consumer may never walk into a Fossil retail location. So it is important for us to have that brand attraction and the digital capabilities to engage them in the right way. We are not where we wanted to be, but we are working hard to put the right strategies and technologies in place to enable that.
Tom Murphy on bringing his for-profit experience to the non-profit world
University of Pennsylvania Vice President of IT and University Chief Information Officer Tom Murphy has held the CIO role at a number of leading companies, including AmerisourceBergen, Royal Caribbean Cruises, Omni Hotels, and Davita Healthcare Partners. He has been elected to CIOMagazine’s prestigious CIO Hall of Fame in 2010. The move to become a university CIO was unusual, as many CIOs of universities grow up in the university setting. Having been an influential executive at a number of massive corporations, he has needed his skills as an influencer all the more at Penn, where different schools such as the Medical School, the Wharton School of Business, and the Law School each have CIOs with their own imperatives and budgets. Murphy’s background is unusual in that he was an English major as an undergraduate, and has no formal training in engineering or IT disciplines other than what he has learned on the job. As a result, his ability to communicate in written form in addition to his strong oral communications skills have proven to be a recipe for success. Herein, Murphy shares the steps he undertook in the first 100 days of his time at Penn. (This is the 20th article in the CIO’s First 100 Days series. To read interviews with other in the series, including the CIOs of GE, Time Warner, Caterpillar, Intel, and Johnson & Johnson, among many others, please visit: this link . To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.) Peter High: Can you describe your purview in your current role as CIO of the University of Pennsylvania? Tom Murphy: I am the Vice President of Information Technology and University CIO. My responsibility is providing central IT services, so think of all of the utilities that are provided to support the school—the network, the telephony, and the wireless— we also run the primary data centers and administrative systems essential to Penn.
We provide all of the foundational support necessary, then the schools and centers all have their own IT organizations that run very proximate to the faculty and the students. Our local service providers are hyper-vigilant to the needs of the school.
We are a little different here, in that we charge back everything. So we literally sell our services, which requires reliability and consistency as well as us constantly looking for ways to do more with less. There is an expectation that we will continue to develop opportunities that support growth on campus while maintaining the same price—which is not that dissimilar from being the CIO of a Fortune 500. We use a budget model called Responsibility Center Management, which is a model that essentially allows each school to operate as its own business. It is a different model, but it has worked for many years. I just have to get very good at how to use it…
To read the full article, please visit Forbes.com To explore the Technovation Column library, please click here. To explore the CIO’s first 100 days series, please click here.
by Peter High, series on Forbes.com
I would like to introduce a new series, which I refer to as“ Strategic CIO.”Chief information officers are playing an increased role in running strategy for their companies. As I mention in my book, Implementing World Class IT Strategy, the reasons for this include that IT now needs to bring to life the strategic imperatives of every part of the company, and it behooves CIOs to become more woven into the fabric of the strategic planning process of all parts of the company. A CIO who finds strategic plans lacking, or where it produces plans that are of differing levels of clarity and granularity (rendering them difficult to compare and contrast) should take matters into his or her own hands, both to ensure that the right priorities are made and for self-preservation. This is a diverse lot, including individuals like:
In the kick-off article to the series, I highlight some key themes from the broad perspectives of these diverse CIOs:
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Chief information officers are playing an increased role in running strategy for their companies. As I mention in my book, Implementing World Class IT Strategy, the reasons for this include that IT now needs to bring to life the strategic imperatives of every part of the company, and it behooves CIOs to become more woven into the fabric of the strategic planning process of all parts of the company. A CIO who finds strategic plans lacking, or where it produces plans that are of differing levels of clarity and granularity (rendering them difficult to compare and contrast) should take matters into his or her own hands, both to ensure that the right priorities are made and for self-preservation.
One of my favorite stories from the book is from Chris Laping, who joined Red Robin as CIO in June of 2007. Laping has the “killer combination” that so many of the people featured in the CIO-Plus and Beyond CIO series have exhibited. He is an engineer with an MBA. He also spent time as a consultant. Therefore, he is a tech savvy problem solver with a mind geared toward developing business ideas that will benefit the entire company and its customers. Laping’s recommendation led to him being named Senior Vice President of Business Transformation, which made him the de facto head of strategy for the company. As someone who personifies the strategic CIO, I reached out to Laping to learn more about how this evolution came about.
Click here to read the full article.
Jean-Michel Ares Moves Beyond CIO To Group Head Of Technology And Operations at BMO Financial Group by Peter High, published on Forbes 1-26-2015
Jean-Michel Ares has been the CIO of such august organizations as Coca Cola and GE Power Systems prior to assuming his current role as Group Head of Operations and Technology at BMO Financial in Toronto. His strong background makes it less of a surprise that he has moved beyond CIO. He has an advanced degree in electrical engineering and an MBA, both from McGill University in Montreal. He also spent time as a telecommunications and banking consultant at McKinsey & Company. He strongly believes that more CIOs will advance to operations leadership posts among other roles above the CIO role due to the natural tendency for those who occupy the role to be highly networked, and equally comfortable in taking on risk through the development of innovative ideas and risk mitigation, represented by investments in security, for example.
Though he is correct that more CIOs are likely to follow in his footsteps, it is no wonder that he was one of the pioneers, given his drive to push IT to be both a driver of efficiencies, but also a source of potential revenue augmentation.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit the Forum on World Class IT podcast . This is the 19th article in the Beyond CIO series. To read past interviews in the series, including beyond CIOs from HP, American Express, Aetna, Marsh & McLennan, and T.D. Ameritrade, among others, please visit To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: You are the Group Head, Technology and Operations at BMO Financial Group. Can you briefly describe your area of responsibility and the parts of the organization that report to you?
Jean-Michel Ares: I am responsible for Technology, Information Security and IT Risk, Product Operations, Sourcing and Governance, Real Estate, and our newly created Data Analytics team under a Chief Data Officer who also jointly reports to our Chief Operating Officer.
High: You are one of a growing number of particularly successful CIOs who have moved beyond that role to be responsible not only for technology but also for a broader set of capabilities. How did it occur to you and your colleagues to combine these areas of focus under a single executive?
Ares: My view is that it is about effectiveness and efficiency. If you look at a bank, technology and operations are the foundation. Essentially, the business teams will develop products – a mortgage, a loan, a card offer, a mutual fund—and technology and operations will work in partnership with these teams to create the business processes, infrastructure, and IT systems that will bring that product to market. Day to day, technology and operations supports the flow of information across these products, so having T&O together simplifies the business model. Whether it is a retail banking or a wealth management team, T&O really needs to act as one to support these teams.
The other element is that having T&O together creates a foundation that enables improvement across the bank. We are working on digitizing the bank, and when you do so you have to consider the business processes, looking at those from front-to-back or from the business to product operation, and technology and data must work together. Pulling them together, I think, gives us a sense of cohesiveness and the ability to execute effectively.
One Of The First Board-Level CIOs Shares Insights From 14 Years Worth Of Experience
1-20-2015
Few CIOs accomplished so much in such a short amount of time as Gregor Bailar. By the time he retired from Capital One, he had been a technology executive at Citibank and the Executive Vice President of Operations and Technology at NASDAQ prior to taking on the role of CIO of Capital One. He was in his mid-40s at the time of his departure. He was still in his 30s when he was invited to join his first board – that of Digitas, Inc. in 2001. While at Capital One, he was invited to join the board of the Corporate Executive Board, a board that he is still a part of. Today, he is no longer a CIO, but in addition to his public board affiliation, he sits on a number of non-profit boards, as well. In this interview, he shares his path to gaining board access, the advantages that CIOs bring to boards, and reasons why more CIOs are likely to be asked to join boards in the future.
(This is the ninth article in the “Board-Level CIO” series. To read past interviews with board-level CIOs from FedEx, Southwest Airlines, Texas Instruments, General Motors, and Cardinal Health, please visit this link. To read future articles in this series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Gregor, you were one of the earliest CIOs to be invited to join the board of companies. In 2001, you joined the board of Digitas, Inc. How did that opportunity present itself?
Gregor Bailar: I was working at NASDAQ at the time and we were in discussions with Hellman and Friedman about funding opportunities for potential expansion for NASDAQ. I worked closely with several members of their team on a few deals over the course of several months. At the time H&F had an investment in Digitas (one of the first advertising firms to unlock digital on-line advertising) and wanted add a technologist to the board. They spoke to Frank Zarb, the Chairman of NASDAQ and got his nod and then approached me for the role. It was a great first board with a fantastic team. Ultimately, we sold Digitas to Publicis in 2007 for $1.3 billion. Digitas gained global access and growth and the investors saw a handsome return.
High: What was the company looking for in adding a CIO to the board?
Bailar: Digitas wanted someone who saw business through a technology-enabled perspective and someone who had experience in what was then the New Frontier of the internet.
Former Mexican President, Vicente Fox, Pushes Mexico To Become Technology Hub
1-12-2015
Recently, I was thrilled to be invited to meet with former Mexican President Vicente Fox at his presidential library, the first for a Mexican president. Among the many opportunities he has pursued is to develop a Charlie Rose-style interview program. I was a guest on his show, and he agreed to return the favor.
Fox’s story is an extraordinary one. He rose from delivery route supervisor to President of Coca-Cola KO +0.35% Mexico. He was elected as Governor of Guanajuato after first serving in the federal Chamber of Deputies. As he explained in my interview, he did not grow up dreaming of being President of Mexico. Rather, he got involved because he had grown so frustrated with corruption. He won an improbable victory on his 58th birthday, July 2, 2000. In this interview, we spoke about his major accomplishments as president, the importance of thinking strategically, the transformative power of technology, as well as a variety of other topics.
(To hear an unabridged podcast version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the tenth interview in the IT Influencers series. To read past interviews in the series with Sal Khan, David Pogue, Walt Mossberg, Jim Goodnight, Sir James Dyson, and Sebastian Thrun (among others), please visit this link. To read future interviews in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: As we sit here in Centro Fox, the first presidential library in Mexico and a center for education and exploration, I thought we would begin with the objectives of Centro Fox.
Vicente Fox: Our vision is that leaders, persons with a name and a face, are who change and build the world that we live in much more than institutions. So if we believe in leadership and that it can change the fate of Latin America, this can be changed.
We are a Latin American center that is geared around ideas, leadership, and strategies. We do it through, number one, young kids. The middle-upper class and the rest have access to the best universities. But the broader constituency does not receive any messages or aspirations of happiness in life at home. What they get, it seems, is the message to be poor all of their lives or be migrants and move all around the world. That is the core of what we do, academically, as a think thank, and as a social institution committed to the poor. We tackle the issues of education, poverty, health, and housing, which are the main four ingredients that people need to have a better life.
We have a program, for instance, called President for the Day where we bring up to 500 kids a day, 60,000 a year, to give them that message to try and change their minds. We wish we could have a “next experience,” but for the moment it is enough; they go back home saying, “I can be President” or “I can be an architect”. We also do some think tank in relation to public policies that we take to government. Thirdly, we are also concentrated on gender equity, which in Mexico as well as Latin America is a weakness. It is a passion, so every single one of our programs has an emphasis on women and gender equity.
Five New Year’s Resolutions For CIOs
01-06-2015
In recent weeks, I have collaborated with a number of chief information officers at large companies, discussing not only their strategies for the year ahead, but also talking to them about their personal career objectives. Some interesting thematic New Year’s resolutions have emerged from these conversations. The topic of velocity comes up a lot, as CIOs look for ways to increase the pace with which they can anticipate demand, partner with colleagues across the enterprise, and increasingly be viewed as a source of innovation. Many CIOs also recognize that the strategic perch they have within the corporate structure can provide insights into opportunities to make single investments that will impact multiple parts of the company and its customers. By leveraging this unique perch, more CIOs foresee greater value contribution to the enterprise out of IT in 2015.
A. Build IT for Speed
1. Develop an IT Organization that Better Fits the Enterprise
2. Refresh the Architecture and Infrastructure
3. Streamline Governance
B. Increase IT’s Value Contribution to the Enterprise
4. Become a Strategic Facilitator to the Company
5. Develop and R&D Mentality within IT
The best business books of 2014 for CIOs
by Kenny MacIver, published on I-CIO
12-18-2014
With themes of digital disruption, business transformation, the CIO’s evolving role and more, we pick the books that were essential reading for IT leaders in 2014.From the unstoppable, disruptive power of digital technology to the rise of the Internet of Things, big data, cloud and wearable devices, the megatrends of 2014 were put into context in the best technology and business books of 2014. We identify the ones that stand out as essential reading for CIOs, with all of them underscoring how the momentous changes underway across business and society are reshaping the role of the CIO as a leader of digitally defined business transformation.
The Second Machine AgeWork, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant TechnologiesErik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
Confessions of a Successful CIOHow the Best CIOs Tackle Their Toughest Business ChallengesDan Roberts and Brian Watson
Implementing World Class IT StrategyHow IT Can Drive Organizational InnovationPeter High
The Strategic CIOChanging the Dynamics of the Business EnterprisePhilip Weinzimer
The KeyHow Corporations Succeed by Solving the World’s Toughest ProblemsLynda Gratton
Staying the Course as a CIOHow to Overcome the Trials and Challenges of IT LeadershipJonathan Mitchell
The Innovator’s MethodBringing the Lean Start-up into Your OrganizationNathan Furr and Jeff Dyer
IT Business Partnerships — A Field GuidePaving the Way for Business and Technology ConvergenceJoseph Topinka
The Innovators How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution Walter Isaacson
To read the full article, please visit I-CIO
