Peter High
12-17-2014
Except from the article:
Barry Perkins is the chief operating officer for UK General Insurance and Shared Services, which includes commercial and personal insurance. He handles all the big decisions on run costs, strategic initiatives and technology, as well as overseeing the provisioning of management information.
CIO Insight: What are your primary areas of responsibility as the COO of Zurich UK?
Barry Perkins: My official title is chief operating officer for UK General Insurance and Shared Services. By way of background, UK General Insurance (GI) is a diverse area of the business that includes all distribution channels and most flavors of commercial and personal insurance with a Gross Written Premium (GWP) of approximately £1.6bn.
Specifically, I am responsible for managing approximately 40 percent of the expense base (approximately $200 million), the bulk of which is IT. That means all the big decisions on run costs, strategic initiatives and technology come through to me.
I’m also responsible for overseeing the provisioning of management information; our strategy on big data; ensuring that our BPO [business process outsourcing] operation in India runs smoothly; encouraging the use of lean techniques; running the central lean team to ensure operational efficiency; looking at strategic sourcing opportunities; ensuring our corporate real estate strategy is aligned to our business strategy; ensuring that our facilities are running smoothly; and driving the digital agenda.
The shared services part of the title points to the responsibilities I have for the services we share with our UK Life business—a separate entity within Zurich that shares services in countries where they make sense. This includes overall management of document logistics, supplier assurance, and our switch board. This part of the job gives me the opportunity to have an impact at the country level because of the scales involved.
Finally, I am also responsible for ensuring that the UK GI operation is in lockstep with the strategy and services of Zurich as a whole. UK GI’s project spending plans must be approved by the group and fall in line with the overall group strategy. This brings some big challenges, but also some great opportunities to be part of a global group operating in over 200 countries, which means I have to have a strong voice at the table in the GI operations council with my international peers.
Before taking on my current role I held the position of UK CIO, which felt very much like trying to drive the bus from the back seat. The COO role gets you forward a few seats, even if you’re not driving the bus directly!
To read the remainder of the article, please visit CIO Insight.
3 Tips for Creating an Innovative IT Department
by Rob Stott, published on Associations Now
Staying ahead of the technology curve and connecting it to your business goals is a daunting task, but that’s the job of a strategic IT team. Opening the 2014 ASAE Technology Conference & Expo on Tuesday, the head of a CIO advisory firm shared some tips on how those tech-savvy folks at your association can help drive innovation and business results.
Three Highlights:
To read the full article, please visit Associations Now
Keeping Conversations with Divisional Heads Focused on Strategy, Not Tactics
by Peter High, published on CIO.com
12-16-2014
CIOs that meet with divisional heads on a regular basis have a better chance of shaping demand and ensuring that IT is a strategic enabler and source of innovation.
But the problem is that IT leaders too often waste these opportunities, asking narrow questions about the specific technology needs of divisional leaders when they should be helping set technology strategy for the company. This narrow approach puts the burden of IT expertise on leaders who are not the company’s experts on technology. A sales executive may have a profound appreciation of technology, but conversations of this sort quickly become one about tactics rather than strategy. A classic example from sales would be “we need iPads.” That may be, but to what end? What is the business need that will be addressed through greater dissemination of iPads? If the company has a hardware contract with a supplier that makes a competing tablet, why wouldn’t that company’s tablet work just as well? Jumping straight into specific solutions limits the conversation, and may mean the company will make a rash decision that IT will have to deal with for many years, as the supporter and maintainer of the technology chosen.
To prevent this from happening CIO should encourage conversations centered on business needs. Although this may mean that items arise that have nothing to do with technology, these conversations that provide both a “forest and trees” perspective of plans are invaluable for IT. From these conversations, IT should have some of the earliest indication of where there are common needs and opportunities across the organization that can be pursued with greater collaboration, leading to single investments in technology as opposed to a series of one-off solutions.
To read the full article, please visit CIO.com
Mike Gioja Of Paychex’s Career Ascent To Lead IT And Product Management And Development
by Peter High, published on Forbes
12-15-2014
Paychex is a $2.5 billion revenue provider of payroll, HR, insurance, and benefits outsourcing solutions for small to medium- sized businesses, and was founded in 1971. The company has more than 100 offices around the Unitedi States as well as locations in Germany and Brazil, and has about 12,700 employees that service 580,000 clients.
Mike Gioja joined the company in late 2008 as the vice president of product development and management. He had spent considerable time in product roles at companies like Fidelity, Oracle, Workscape, and HRsoft. He also studied computer science as an undergraduate, and held a number of technical jobs early in his career. As products in the human capital management (among many others) became more driven by technology, Gioja recognized the rising importance of technology, and his IT savvy was an advantage for him. In mid-2011, when the CIO role opened up, Gioja added the IT function to his responsibilities. Among other topics, Gioja talks about the advantage of having the same person in charge of IT and product development and management.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of the podcast, please click this link. This is the 20th article in the series. To read the prior 19 with CIO-pluses from companies like ADP, Walgreens, P&G, McKesson, and Marsh & McLennan, among many others, please visit this link. To read future stories in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.
Peter High: Mike, you are not only the CIO equivalent for Paychex but also the head of Product Management and Development. Can you talk about the logic in having a single executive oversee both of these different areas, as well as how you’ve structured both your time and your teams in those directions?
Mike Gioja: It is a great role and a very good capability of having those various pieces together within the organization. From a responsibilities point of view, I head Product Management, the program office for all of our products, Development, the IT operations call center, and am also the Chief Information Security Officer.
From an internal point of view we support all of the employee-basic services as well as, of course, providing all the product offerings for our clients, including all of the back-end capabilities required for our various service providers. We also have a call center to provide service to external clients.
From an external point of view, we don’t have a direct connection to the clients. In other words, my team is not servicing any clients but we are obviously servicing the products and have to maintain a high availability environment through our Software-as-a-Service platform, which our clients interact with. Our field operations, business operations, branch locations, and various call centers are those that directly interface with clients, so when any of our service providers have questions or problems with those they directly interact with us.
The main driver for this structure was really to help enable the speed of transformation to a Software-as-a-Service company, as well as to drive the culture and process transformation from a service-based company to a software and technology-based company. To do that, with a lot of todays practices of technology, really requires the ability to quickly and daily deal with product-related issues, platform-related issues, and IT-related issues. So it really allows us to quickly execute against our Paychex Next Generation issues in this area.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
Why Companies Should Start Celebrating Millennials
Business needs to stop complaining about Millennials and start celebrating them. Here are two steps that can change your company’s perception of Millennials.
Chris Davis
12-08-2014
I attended a conference recently in which a main thread throughout was “the next-generation customer.” Two primary things disappointed me as the conference proceeded:
1. No presenter analyzing and postulating about the next generation of Millennial customers was, in fact, a Millennial. 2. The tone used to describe Millennial customers was always slightly negative and—perhaps unintentionally—condescending, with comments about why and how they are different, and with an overtone of criticism for their narcissism, laziness, impatience, disloyalty, demands for instant gratification and willingness to blast businesses on social media.
Six Characteristics Of Strategic CIOs
During the course of writing Implementing World Class IT Strategy (Wiley Press, September 2014), I had the great pleasure of speaking with and collaborating with a great number of the best strategic chief information officers in the United States. Each was a savvy technologist, but there were a variety of other skills that each possessed that seemed to be the key to enabling them to drive strategic change on behalf of the companies that they are a part of.
Summary of Six Characteristics:
12-1-2015
Excerpt from the Article:
Asbury Automotive is a $5.3 billion automotive retailer based in Duluth, Ga. For years, the more than a 90 dealerships that make up the company had very little interaction with IT. Part of the issue was that corporate IT was a relatively immature function at the company.
>Prior to his ascension to the CIO role, Barry Cohen worked to virtualize almost all of IT, rendering it more flexible and more agile. Freeing up talented people and resources, he was able to put IT people in the regions and, in many cases, in the dealerships themselves. That exposed tech workers where and how business was done, enabling them to glean insights from both dealers and customers.
Now as CIO, Cohen has continued to lead with dealers and customers in mind, and has worked to make IT a much broader driver of value to the enterprise.
CIO Insight: You work for a $5 billion automotive sales company. How do you use information and technology within your operation?
Barry Cohen: Technology is used in all aspect of our automotive operations, including dealership Websites, automotive ERP and CRM systems, business analytics, credit card processing, and another hundred or so applications focused on our employees, vendors and customers. There is a tremendous amount of application integration that takes place to make it all work—not to mention a robust infrastructure to support our 7,800 employees.
CIO Insight: Barry, prior to your time as CIO, you worked to introduce cloud computing to Asbury Automotive. What steps did you undertake in order to do that?
Cohen: I’m very happy to say that we have been data center free for nearly two years. We are 100 percent in public and private clouds, with partners that manage all aspects of their data center operations. The reason for doing that was because I wanted IT to spend most of our time with the rest of the business, and not worrying about technology refresh projects, patching and backups.
Getting there wasn’t too difficult, but it did take three years. We started by creating an application inventory and an integration architecture. This enabled us to move everything one piece a time without much disruption.
CIO Insight: IT did not have the best reputation when you started with Asbury. How did you change that?
To read the full article, please visit CIO Insight
Suren Gupta Moves Beyond CIO At Allstate
12-01-2014
Allstate Executive Vice President of Technology & Operations Suren Gupta has a remarkably diverse background. He spent time as Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer for Consumer Lending at Wells Fargo, but he focused as much time on developing technologies that enhanced customer experience as he did on traditional IT. For example, he re-engineered the company’s real estate lending with new delivery capabilities that enabled the field sales force, enabling them to serve customers more effectively with just-in-time information. He was an entrepreneur, having co-founded a start up wireless Internet venture called Airclic. He also held senior operations, sales, marketing and strategic development roles at INTELSAT, a telecommunications company, and at Thomson Corporation before leading technology and operations at GMAC. Finally, he has the classic background that so many of the people profiled in the “Beyond CIO” series, with an engineering undergraduate degree, and an MBA. He combines technology and business acumen together with an entrepreneurs eye toward customer-centric innovation.
He has brought all of this to bear in his current role at Allstate. He is directly responsible for technology that can be applied to the company’s products and services. He also runs the company’s back-office operations. A big piece of the operations role is also customer service and agency customer service. The company has 10,000 agents across the nation that Gupta’s team serves through the products and services that they bring to them to sell on behalf of the company’s customers. The second piece of that customer service side is when a customer has a need that has not been fulfilled or a problem – his team is responsible for that, as well.
(To listen to an unabridged podcast version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 19th article in the “Beyond CIO” series. To read the prior 18 articles, including interviews with Beyond CIOs from HP, Symantec, Aetna, American Express, T.D. Ameritrade, Marsh & McLennan, and Schneider National among others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: I know that you are in the throes of a business transformation and have been for some time now, actually. Please describe the framework you are using for the transformation.
Suren Gupta: We are in the midst of a huge transformation of the company, from a product standpoint – how we serve our customers— and how we bring those products and services to our agencies, which is our sales distribution channel too. If you think about that as the core business, there is a huge amount of change that we are going through both in terms of the services that we provide and the innovative products we are bringing to our customer base.
There are three key buckets that we divide our work into across the enterprise. The first is made up of all of the work that needs to be done to simplify our environment and continuously improve the current environment that we are in. The second bucket is building technology and platforms that would lend themselves to the future of the company. Things like our platform Drivewise where we provide incentives to our customers based on their driving records; well, we are the first company to launch something like that on the cell phone. That comes under the bucket too, where we are building new platforms and technologies to enable the business to move forward. Then the third bucket is all about creating innovative solutions that are longer term and allow the company to sustain itself.Obviously, technology plays a key role in all of those three key buckets—at the end of the day, there is nothing the company does without technology. So we are hand-in-glove with our business partners in terms of making sure that we move the business forward.
From Acquired To Leading the Acquirer: Stewart McCutcheon’s Journey At Ecolab
11-24-2014
Ecolab ECL -0.05% is an example of a business-to-business leader that you may not know. They are a $15 billion colossus that provides cleaning and sanitizing products and programs, as well as pest elimination, equipment maintenance and repair services primarily to customers in the food service, food and beverage processing, hospitality, healthcare, government, and education, retail, textile care, commercial facilities management and vehicle wash sectors. It has been one of the best performing companies in the US stock market over the past decade.
Roughly three years ago, the company acquired Nalco, a leader in water treatment company. Nalco’s Chief Information & Productivity Officer was Stewart McCutcheon. McCutcheon has been the COO and CEO of a technology firm prior to joining Nalco, and as a result, he has brought an unusually broad perspective to the CIO role. The value he had created from his “CIO-plus” position at Nalco was one of the chief reasons he was one of the Nalco leaders to take a “chief” role at Ecolab despite coming from the acquired entity.
Even in the early days of the integration, McCutcheon and his team focused on being a source of innovation to the company becoming involved in Ecolab’s efforts in the Internet of Things, for example, as he details in my interview with him.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview please visit this link. This is the 20th interview in the CIO’s First 100 Days series. To read past interviews in the series with the CIOs of companies like Intel INTC +1.83%, Time Warner TWX +1.33%, General Electric GE +0.04%, AmerisourceBergen ABC +1.46%, and CVS Caremark among others, please visit this link. To read future interviews in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Six Steps To a High-Performing IT Department
11-13-2014What sets high-functioning IT organizations apart from the rest? That’s something every IT leader wants to know. After all, we live in a highly competitive business climate and IT performance can be the difference between success and failure. To conquer the challenge, we need to be informed and collaborative and we need to do this in a cost-effective manner.In this webcast, you will hear from two experts on some of the technology that’s driving today’s high-functioning IT organizations. Find out how your company can be aligned, agile and ready to respond to ever-changing business requirements and competitive pressures.
Featured Speakers:
Moderated by Joel Shore – Technology Analyst
To watch the interview video, please click here. (Please register first on xMatters.com)
To explore the recent Beyond CIO Series articles, please click here.
To explore the recent CIO-plus Series articles, please click here.
To explore the Technovation Column library, please click here.
