General Motors’ Former CIO Is Among The Most Sought After Board Members
by Peter High, published on Forbes.com
06-02-2014
Ralph Szygenda was one of the first star CIOs in the US. He was the CIO of Texas Instruments from 1989 through 1993, the CIO of Bell Atlantic from 1993 through 1996, and then he took on perhaps the largest IT job in America as CIO of General Motors in 2000, and he would remain in that post through 2009. Szygenda’s was among the first CIOs to be asked to join the boards of major companies, starting 20 years ago. He has been on seven boards since. Szygenda has also been quite influential in terms of the number of major company CIOs who once worked for him. Given the size scale of operations that he led, and the long period in which he was a CIO, that is not surprising.
I was curious about what he got out of his board participation, what, in turn, the companies valued from his counsel, and what lessons he might impart on CIOs who would wish to follow in his footsteps.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the sixth article in the “Board Level CIO” series. To read the prior five articles, please visit this link. To be alerted when future articles in the series are released, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Ralph, you were a CIO at a variety of companies during your career. You were among the first CIOs to be asked to join a board, having joined the Sodalia Corporation board in 1994 while you were the CIO of Bell Atlantic. What compelled you to join the board of Sodalia Corporation while you were the CIO of Bell Atlantic, and what compelled them to ask in the first place?
Ralph Szygenda: Sodalia was a telecommunication software company, and at that time, I was in the telecommunication business. So it was a nice fit, where clearly, you want to add value to a board that you’re going to, and as well, you want to learn from it. They gave me that opportunity; they wanted me to come and be part of it. It had an international flare, because it also was owned to some extent by Telecom Italia and Bell Atlantic. I think it was interesting; it was the time of deregulation of the telecommunication industry and so there was a lot of innovation happening, which made this opportunity particularly interesting.
High: You were also, famously, the CIO of General Motors for most of the 2000s. During that period, a number of board opportunities were presented to you. How did you choose which ones to join and which not to join?
Szygenda: It was interesting. Clearly, there were a number of boards that wanted me to join, but during my time at General Motors, the company had an overall rule that you could not be on a board of directors. So most of all the boards that I was asked to be on, I had to turn down, just because of that. Handleman Corporation, which was a logistic supply chain company, was an exception. There was a past president of General Motors that was on this Board of Directors of Handleman, and he thought that they needed somebody like me. He asked if they could approve or let me interview for a board position on that company. They thought I could add a lot to it. There was a board level discussion about it at GM, and luckily, they permitted me to go be on that one board, and I was the only member of the officers in the company on any Board of Directors.
Additional topics covered in the article include:
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Carnegie Mellon’s Integrated Innovation Institute’s Vision To Build Innovators Of Tomorrow
05-27-2014
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).
Likewise, many have attributed Apple’s success to bringing together technology and design in ways that were not the norm, even in Silicon Valley.
It should not be surprising that leading universities are starting to train people in a comparable fashion. A recent example of this is the Integrated Innovation Institute at Carnegie Mellon. Jonathan Cagan, the Co-Director of the Institute is a good representation of this trend. In addition to his co-directorship, he is the Director of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Carnegie Institute of Technology and Ladd Professor in Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering. As he notes in my interview with him, the Integrated Innovation Institute operates at the intersection of business, engineering, and design in the hopes of providing depth and breadth to the next generation of entrepreneurs and business leaders.
(This is the twelfth article in the Education Technology Innovation series. To read the prior eleven, please visit this link.
Peter High: What is the charter of the Integrated Innovation Institute?
Jonathan Cagan: The Integrated Innovation Institute focuses on the intersection of business, engineering and design to advance fundamental knowledge and practice in product and service innovation. The Institute cross-trains students in the three disciplines to become elite innovators, which enhances the effectiveness of thinking and generating results. In addition to Masters level professional degrees, the Institute offers corporate training and pursues research to advance the state of the art.
High: How were the three disciplines that make up the program – engineering, design, and business – chosen?
Cagan: These are the three core disciplines necessary for product and service innovation: business, because the product/service needs to be viable in the marketplace; engineering, because it has to work and provide functional benefit; and design, because it needs to connect to people’s work and lifestyles in an aesthetic, interactive and emotional way. Carnegie Mellon is unique in having top programs in each of these fields and a long history of collaborating across disciplines.
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Jamie Miller’s Journey From Chief Accounting Officer To CIO Of GE
05-19-2014
Jamie Miller runs information technology for one of the most complex and admired companies in the world: General Electric. One would think that the CIO of such a company would have a deep technical background, perhaps having an advanced degree in an engineering discipline along with multiple stints as CIO previously. Miller’s resume may not have these items on it, but she has something that IT departments increasingly need: financial expertise.
IT used to be a part of Finance in many companies, as some of the earliest technologies developed at big companies was technology applied to the general ledger, accounting systems more generally, and the like. Likewise, when technology was taught at business schools, it was often a sub-set of the accounting department. It is perhaps ironic that a growing number of CIOs have grown up through the Finance function. Miller has leveraged her background to make IT more transparent and accountable, and ever more cognizant of the value that it delivers to the enterprise. CIOs with or without financial backgrounds should follow her lead.
(To listen to an extended audio version of this interview, please click on this link. This article is both a part of the “CIO’s First 100 Days” series and the “Business CIO” series. To receive additional articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Well Jamie, yours is a very interesting path to CIO. In fact you, as I understand it from our past conversations, don’t have any prior formal experience in IT – it’s not as though you grew up from programmer to your current post – and I wonder actually, as a relative outsider to the function, what advantages you found to approaching IT with a different set of sensibilities and witth a different set of experiences?
Jamie Miller: I grew up in Finance. I was GE’s Controller and Chief Accounting Officer and in that and other Finance roles I really learned a lot about how companies are put together, you know the product, the market, the processes, the systems and really we a company does very well, and where we have got some issues and I think having that type of insight is really critical coming into the CIO role. As a relative outsider to IT, I am able to view technology and our solutions from a business perspective, first and foremost. I believe I have helped challenge our thinking around how we drive business outcomes or how we can be better aligned with the company’s goals. So, it sort of gives you this outside in view.
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CIOs Are Increasingly Being Plucked From Other Functions
Peter High
Except from the article:
Information Technology is becoming much more of the business by the business and for the business than ever before. This is true because almost all business trends have deep technology components to them. Not only every industry, but practically every function within every company needs IT to run its most strategic processes and platforms. Lastly, customers are becoming ever more technology savvy. As a result, companies are demanding that IT leadership reflect this business-centricity.
It used to be commonplace that the chief information officer would grow up in the IT department, often from the level of programmer, working his or her way up the hierarchy until reaching the highest point. It also used to be that this was the end of the journey, by and large. This level of grassroots knowledge of IT was all the more important in an era where IT’s infrastructure was all on premises, and largely homegrown.
Now that substantial swathes of IT are managed in the cloud, and as more systems are leveraged in their “vanilla” state off-the-shelf, and as more of the actual IT work is done by vendors, a growing number of CIOs are taking on this role after having spent most of their careers in other functions.
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The advantages of doing so can be tremendous. As IT becomes the business (rather than something separate from it or a support function to it), it is essential that IT leaders have greater business and financial acumen. This can come from an IT executive who has an MBA, or from a CIO who had a stint in a function other than IT while spending most of his or her career in IT. More companies are finding that it makes sense to have IT leaders who have walked a mile in the shoes of other functions.
An Interview with the Godfather of Data Analytics, SAS’s Jim Goodnight
05-12-2014
Jim Goodnight is one of the great technology entrepreneurs of the past fifty years. His emphasis on data analytics as a business model starting over 40 years ago with the development of Statistical Analysis System (SAS) while he was an academic at North Carolina State was quite prescient, presaging the analytics boom that has taken over so many industries by multiple decades. Over the years, SAS has been used by pharmaceuticals companies to help them analyze their drug pipelines better, by banks to help them assess who to give credit cards to, and to an increasing extent by a wide array of companies to assess fraudulent activity and risk management, which Goodnight suggests will be a significant area of growth for SAS.
Goodnight has built a multi-billion dollar software company without going public or seeking suitors to buy the company. He points to the advantage that he had in receiving early funding from government and academic sources rather than from venture capital, which meant there was no pressure to create a financial event for his investors. As a result, he has been able to successfully steer his company through many business cycles while avoiding significant layoffs that are de rigeur among so many major companies. This has been a cultural differentiator, and is one of the reasons that SAS is regularly chosen among the best places to work in the United States.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the fifth article in the IT Influencers series. Past interviews with Salman Khan, David Pogue, James Dyson, and Walt Mossberg can be accessed through this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: You began SAS while you were an academic at North Carolina State. What was the genesis of Statistical Analysis System?
Jim Goodnight: When I was a sophomore, I took the only course in programming offered at NC State. The summer of my sophomore year, I had two jobs in programming. In the fall, I went to work for the department of statistics and it had a group of statisticians that were referred to as experiment stations. The experiment stations helped design and analyze all the agricultural experiments that went on on-campus.
NC State is a land grant university – there’s one in every state and the entire Southeast association of experiment stations sent one or two people each year to an annual meeting where they’d discuss computational methods and experiments that they’d been doing. NC State was sort of out in the front of developing analytical software and in the entire Southeast experiment station people decided just to use what was coming out of NC State at the time. Back in late 1966, early 1967, after the IBM 360 came out, everybody at all these universities was buying these IBM machines. They again looked to us to develop software for those machines.
Tony Barr started some of the first parts of SAS and then I joined him once it was stable enough to start writing additional procedures. We announced SAS in 1969 to the experiment station users – they were the group of university statisticians of the southern experiment station and they all liked what they saw and they started using it and we went on developing SAS. I was finishing up my Masters and working on a PhD at the time so I was working about 30 hours a week on the project. Back in 1972, I finished my PhD and we lost all of our funding from the NIH. The NIH, up until ’72, was providing funds for almost every computing facility at all the different universities around the country. Nixon decided he wanted to only spend money on universities that had hospitals, cancer research and things like that so you had to have a medical center from then on for NIH to provide funding. So we went back to our university statisticians group and said “how about supporting us?” They each chipped in $5000 a year to support us and they insisted that we also start licensing our software to other companies and other government agencies so we started doing that to become self-sufficient.
That went on until about 1976 at which time we had a user conference down in Florida. Our users actually put the conference together, but we went down and there were 350 users there. We were most impressed – they really liked some of the stuff we were working on, so when we finished with it and came back we decided to get out of the university. We were not able to grow anymore, there was clearly a lot of interest and we could support ourselves without needing the university. Of course the university, at the time, was not supposed to be a business anyway so they thought it was a good idea that we move off-campus as well – so we moved across the street and that’s how SAS was founded. It had a long development history at NC State before we left – I think we left with about 300,000 lines of code; it’s probably 10 million lines of code now.
AmerisourceBergen’s CIO Creates Value Through Greater Centralized Influence In The First 100 Days
05-05-2014
When Dale Danilewitz became the Global CIO of $88 billion revenue AmerisourceBergen, he had a mandate to exert greater influence from the center in an organization that had traditionally allowed the business units to operate autonomously. This was part of a greater “Power of One” initiative that CEO Steve Collis introduced, but it still would be a tremendous undertaking for the new technology chief. Danilewitz had an advantage, however in that he was once one of the business unit IT leaders, and as such understood the likely angst that such a cultural change would cause. Therefore, in his first 100 days on the job, Danilewitz had discussions with each of his former peer business unit CIOs, explained the rationale for the change, the value that they should derive, while also drawing lessons from each of them to ensure that the needs of each business unit were not ignored in a rush to do things more commonly across the enterprise. As a result, he has helped spearhead the greater unity across the company, identified areas where it was possible to achieve economies of scale, whether from vendors or in leveraging processes more fully, and generally leveraged pockets of excellence more broadly across the organization, as he describes in this interview that I recently conducted with him.
(This is the 14th article in the “CIO’s First 100 Days” series. To read the prior 13, including interviews with the CIOs of Intel, Caterpillar, Time Warner, Johnson & Johnson, and J. Crew, please click this link. To receive notifications regarding future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Dale, can you speak a little to your rise to the role of corporate or enterprise CIO of AmerisourceBergen and the scope of the transformation you were to lead upon commencing that role?
Dale Danilewitz: Prior to my promotion to CIO for all of AmerisourceBergen in 2012, I was the CIO of AmerisourceBergen’s Specialty Group. As an internal promotion, I was already familiar with the role, the business, processes and people.. As the new CIO, I had to quickly understand the current state of the IT department – decentralized and fragmented as we had four different business units, each with their own operating model. Two very large, one mid-size and one small, each with its own IT department that ran autonomously and had separate networks. Part of our transformation plan was to centralize and integrate this fragmented departments into a cohesive IT unit.
Our current CEO, Steve Collis, also an internal promotion rising to the role from President of the Specialty Group, worked with the outgoing CEO to affect a change model they termed the Power of One. The sentiment across the organization was that divisions were growing further apart and the executive team needed a solution that would help deal with the oncoming challenges in the industry. Faced with minimal margins, the goal was to drive as up the margin and integrate the organization, not just IT, through communication and/or a shared services model.
During Tom Murphy’s era, AmerisourceBergen IT had four different CIOs – Tom as the corporate and Drug Company CIO, me as the Specialty CIO and two other divisional CIOs. Part of the IT centralization effort was to transform the structure to just one CIO for all of IT.
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Lessons From The Board-Level Businesswoman With The Biggest IT Job In Healthcare
04-29-2014
As the chief information officer of a $101 billion colossus Cardinal Health, Patty Morrison has the biggest IT role in healthcare. This is fitting for an executive who has been a successful CIO at five major corporations. She was so successful in her CIO role, in fact, that she now also serves as executive vice president of customer shared services for the company, focusing increasingly on top-line as well as bottom line opportunities for the company through the creative use of technology. Morrison has also served on the board of two companies, Splunk and JoAnn Fabrics and Crafts.
As she notes in my interview with her below, the role of CIO is ideal for the executive who wishes to understand how a business truly works, and it increasingly is a role that is becoming customer-centric, as customers in all industries are becoming more technology savvy. Lastly, she notes that the CIO’s perspective should be one that more companies seek on their boards. With this in mind, Morrison advises CIOs to weave themselves more solidly into the fabric of the businesses that they are a part of, learning how value is created, and the role that technology can play in achieving value faster.
(To listen to an unabridged podcast version of this conversation, please click this link. This is the fifth article in Board Level CIO series. To read the other articles in the series, including an interviews with the CIOs of FedEx and Lincoln Trust, please click this link. To read future articles in the series, including interviews with the CIOs of Intel and BDP International, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: You have an interesting “CIO-plus” role. In addition to being the chief information officer for Cardinal Health, you are also the head of Customer Care Shared Services. Please describe each of these roles.
Patty Morrison: I have been global CIO for Cardinal Health for five years. I have responsibility from a systems standpoint for all of the infrastructure and applications that run our enterprises around the world. We operate in China, Puerto Rico, Canada and the US. Primarily, our commercial business is in the US but we also manufacture in Thailand and Mexico. I’m also responsible for the commercial technology platforms: the technologies that are embedded in many of our healthcare services that are actually deployed to our external customers, so I have a Chief Technology Officer that also reports to me. As head of Customer Care Shared Services, I have the responsibility for our call center operations that support our retail and our acute and ambulatory customers, and I also have the responsibility for our contract and pricing administration back offices.
To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Patty, click here.
The Path To Success For Deutsche Bank’s CIO And Global Co-Head Of Technology And Operations
04-21-2014
The chief information officer role is a complicated one for anyone who holds the title. It is even more complicated for an executive who is new to an industry, as he or she needs to learn a new company and industry, while also learning about the people, processes, and technologies that the IT department are responsible for. When she joined Deutsche Bank in November 2013, Kim Hammonds added to this complexity, as she not only joined financial behemoth, Deutsche Bank, her first foray in financial services, but she also added the responsibilities as Co-Head of Technology and Operations for the bank while also moving to the UK from the United States.
Hammonds has the killer combination of engineering degree as an undergraduate, as well as an MBA. Many of those executives featured in the CIO-plus and Beyond CIO series have had this combination, and these two sets of disciplines have served her well through the variety of roles she has had in companies as diverse as Ford, Dell, and Boeing prior to her current appointment, and she has never thought of the role of CIO merely as a technology role. Rather, she has always run IT as a business discipline, making the transition to the broader set of responsibilities that she currently has more logical for her to entertain.
(This is the 13th article in the “CIO’s First 100 Days” series. To read the prior 12, including interviews with the CIOs of Intel, Caterpillar, Time Warner, Johnson & Johnson, and J. Crew, please click this link. To receive notifications regarding future articles in the series, including interviews with the CIOs of AmerisourceBergen and Viacom, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Kim, you now have a role that I have referred to as “CIO-plus”, as you are the Global CIO and Global Co-Head of Technology & Operations at Deutsche Bank DB -0.32%. Can you describe your responsibilities?
Kim Hammonds: I am the Global CIO for Deutsche Bank. This includes running all aspects of IT, including applications, data centers, content in the data centers, end-user computing – all traditional content that a Global CIO would be responsible for. In addition to being in charge of the traditional aspects of IT, I am also responsible for the bank’s technical innovation – such as mobile capability and applications for our customers – helping us understand how customers use mobile banking and ultimately becoming a more digital bank so that we can take advantage of the latest developments in digital technology.
My other responsibilities relating to the Global Co-Head of Technology & Operations role cover the operational side of the business. This encompasses various processes, including global trade execution, facilitating customer payments and operations for the running of the bank.
IT Leader or IT Manager? How to Be the Best of Both
The best leaders aren’t necessarily great managers and great managers aren’t always the best leaders. A company needs both types of personalities to be competitive. Here’s a look at the separate skills and traits associated with each, so you can be the best leader and/or manager for your IT team.
Rich Hein
04-17-2014
Leaders Have Vision and the Ability to Articulate It
“What’s really important in motivating people or truly leading people is having an appropriate vision. A lot of it comes back to strategy,” says Peter High, author of “World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs.”
Leaders often have to be willing to forego the standard path, instead blazing their own trail towards their vision of the business’ future. They need a vision and a way of communicating that vision that make people feel included, useful and that they are working towards something bigger.
To read the remainder of the article, please visit CIO Magazine.
