Why Your Company Should Consider Adding a CIO to the Board
by Peter High, published on Forbes.com
03-03-2014
When you look up the boards of prominent companies, they are typically littered with CEOs of other businesses. The reasons are obvious. The experience of CEOs of other businesses are relevant, and the advice that they can offer is likely to be the kind that will help augment revenue and/or cut costs as appropriate because no executive in any company thinks as much about these considerations as do the CEOs. The roles that have been the breeding grounds of CEOs, namely CFOs, COOs, and business unit heads have also been board members for the same reasons.
One “c-level” role that has not done nearly as well historically in gaining access to boards is the chief information officer. It is not as though CIOs have not had the ambition to become board members. In fact, of the many CIOs that I advise, over half have articulated their desire to join the boards of companies to me. Historically, there are a variety of reasons why this has been a difficult goal for CIOs to achieve, including the following:
A lack of P&L experience Historically, CIOs have managed cost-centers. The greatest value they could think to contribute to their companies was typically to develop technologies to reduce costs. As a result, CIOs have not thought enough about the broader mechanics of profit and loss. They have been distant from sources of new value to the corporation. These are often the topics of greatest interest to boards.
A lack of true operating experience Unlike, say, a business unit head, CIOs have not run true businesses. Again, they have not had ample interaction with customers. In fact,<ahref=”http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterhigh/2013/08/19/three-ways-for-cios-to-overcome-subservience-to-the-rest-of-the-organization/”> as I’ve mentioned previously, more often than not, if you hear a CIO mention “customers”, they will be speaking of internal users of IT – that is colleagues of theirs, highlighting the disconnect between what IT does on a day-to-day basis, and where the true value of a company is derived.
Narrowness of experience Historically, IT leaders have grown up in IT departments, often from programmer up to the top of the division, without much time spent in other functions. As a result, their perspectives are limited to a single slice of the company.
The lack of CEOs who were once CIOs As aforementioned, CEOs often come from the ranks of CFOs, COOs, and business unit heads of various kinds. CIOs have not traditionally been the breeding ground for CEOs. As a result, boards’ bias against including CIOs has been partially based on the fact that it is a function that they do not understand from having once led the function….
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A Conversation With The President Of World’s First Non-Profit, Tuition-Free, Accredited, Online University
Shai Reshef is an Israeli-born entrepreneur who now lives in Pasadena, California. Although his master’s degree is in Chinese politics, he has made his name professionally in private education. He served as chairman and CEO of the Kidum Group, an Israeli test preparation which he sold to Kaplan, Inc. in 2005. He also led KIT eLearning, a subsidiary of Kidum and the eLearning partner of the University of Liverpool. KIT provided MBAs and Master in IT degrees, and was eventually acquired by Laureate Online Education.
In 2009, Reshef founded the University of the People, which in February 2014 received accreditation from the Distance and Education Training Council, a U.S. Department of Education authorized accrediting agency. This made it the world’s first non-profit, tuition-Free, accredited, online university.
In speaking with Reshef, I was curious about his mission, the hurdles the company had to go over in order to achieve its unique distinction, and his plans for the future. As one would expect with a serial entrepreneur, he believes that now that the foundation is in place, the University of the People is well positioned to rapidly grow its business, creating new opportunities for many of the world’s least fortunate people in the process.
(To read the prior nine articles in this series including interviews with the heads of Khan Academy, Udacity, Coursera, and edX, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Shai, what is the University of the People’s mission?
Shai Reshef: The mission of UoPeople is to offer affordable, quality, online, higher education to any qualified student. We believe that access to higher education is a key ingredient in the promotion of world peace and global economic development. We view higher education as a basic right, and believe that it can both transform the lives of individuals and can be a powerful force for societal change. We believe that education plays a fundamental role in strengthening respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and in promoting understanding and tolerance. We also hope that in the future, other institutions will replicate our model in order to open the gates of higher education to as many students as possible around the world.
Peter High: You have an elite group of partners, including the Clinton Global Initiative, Yale Law School, HP, and the UN among others. How did you go about establishing partners in this mission and what role do they play?
Shai Reshef: Many corporations believe, as we do, that education should be a right and not a privilege, and would like to take part in revolutionizing higher education. Since so many people identify with UoPeople’s mission, more often than not our partners seek us out without any solicitation from our part. By joining us, they also create their future potential employees. Our agreement with Microsoft is the very example of this. Launched in September 2013, the UoPeople Microsoft4Afrika scholarship program will support a total of 1,000 African students to graduate with a world-class academic degree from UoPeople in either Computer Science or Business Administration. The scholarship not only includes financial support to cover all costs associated with studies, but also extra-curricular opportunities including professional training from Microsoft, being mentored by Microsoft employees and internship and job opportunities with Microsoft and their affiliates in Africa upon their graduation. This comprehensive program is providing students with a degree, experience in their industry, a professional network and important life skills and competencies. The program is fostering a new generation of leaders equipped to succeed in the global business and technology world, to enhance their country and region’s social and economic development and help improve the lives of people across Africa.
Additional topics covered in the article include:
Why were these chosen?
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02-25-2014
When Stuart McGuigan began his tenure at Johnson & Johnson, he had already been the CIO at CVS Caremark and at Liberty Mutual. A leader with a master’s degree in cognitive sciences from Yale, McGuigan thinks more than the average leader about how the mind works, and thus how to motivate people. As he notes in my interview with him, learning the culture of an organization is the first order of business for a new leader. Only then can the appropriate changes be made during the window of change afforded a new executive during the early days of his tenure.
McGuigan found that Johnson & Johnson’s culture was neatly codified, and that people truly lived the values set forth more than 70 years ago. Moreover, the focus on accountability and transparency of staff, even encouraging employees to “complain” when there are needs that are unmet worked well with McGuigan’s own leadership style, which is to have anyone, anywhere put their hands up when help is needed or where an issue has been identified so that the fastest path to resolving that issue can be identified. Although McGuigan has roughly 4,000 IT staff around the world, he has stimulated a greater degree of collaboration, and has continued to improve the operation during his tenure. He offers thoughts here on the thing she did in his first 100 days to set the stage for this success.
(To hear an unabridged podcast version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the tenth article in this series. To read interviews from CIOs of companies like Intel, Caterpillar, Time Warner, and J. Crew, please visit this link. To read future interviews in the series with the CIOs of companies like AmerisourceBergen, Amtrak, and Viacom, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Stuart, Johnson & Johnson is a behemoth of a business, with many divisions across most countries on earth. How is IT organized?
Stuart McGuigan: IT is divided into two categories. There are what we refer to as Group CIOs. These executives and their teams align with our different businesses. They are intimately knowledgeable about the strategies and needs of the divisions they align with, just as they have deep knowledge of our technology capabilities and architecture.
We also have a shared services organization. This includes functions such as infrastructure, application development, IT Risk and support.
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Innovator Sir James Dyson Turns Everyday Products Into Gold
02-24-2014
Sir James Dyson is a modern day Edison. In a world where products are typically released to the public as quickly as possible, Dyson and his team work through hundreds and sometimes even thousands of prototypes of a product before the public sees them. With an estimated net worth of $4.5 billion, Dyson has the wherewithal to operate in such a manner, but I was curious how he developed his methods, and how he influenced his teams before he was considered perhaps the UK’s greatest living innovator.
Despite his vast wealth and resources, that was not the measuring stick that he used in the early days of his career. Instead, he had an obsession to make elegant and easy-to-use products that people wanted to use on a daily basis. As he has explained it, if you look at the design of a ski, you will see the passion of the person who created it. They designed it to use themselves. The same care and passion has not traditionally been put into products like the vacuum cleaner, however. Who has a passion for vacuuming, especially when it is a loud messy process? Dyson was frustrated by these factors when he created a better vacuum cleaner. In the process, Dyson has influenced others who have chosen to innovate in categories of products that had long been thought of as difficult to improve upon. He has also unintentionally spawned a number of imitators along the way. Through it all, Dyson has remained singular in his focus on perfection, realizing that business success would follow. In the process his influence has been felt much further than he might have thought early in his career.
Peter High: Who inspired you to become an inventor and an entrepreneur?
Sir James Dyson: It all happened rather late… I studied classics at school, but I had a love of painting on the side. It was only at London’s Royal College of Art that I stumbled across engineering, accidentally attending a lecture on architecture and structural engineering. After graduating, I was hired by my first mentor, Jeremy Fry. Under him, I worked on a high speed landing craft – the Seatruck. Starting with a plank of wood as a hull, I had to turn the concept into an actual working boat. It wasn’t easy! But Jeremy taught me an Edisonian approach to design: making prototype after prototype until I got it just right.
Peter High: An inventor is only as good as the team that he has around him. In the early days, how did you attract talent?
Sir James Dyson: At the beginning, it’s safe to say I didn’t have a plan. I just tried to get clever people to join me by being belligerent; believing in my idea so strongly that I convinced others to do so too (they were penniless engineering graduates, so perhaps it wasn’t too hard!). I started out in a coach house at the end of the garden with a handful of engineers. Now we have 3,000 so I must be doing something right!
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Meet Ricoh Americas CIO Turned COO, Tracey Rothenberger
02-18-2014
Tracey Rothenberger joined Ricoh Americas Corporation by virtue of the company’s acquisition of IKON Office Solutions. He was Chief Information Officer of IKON at the time of the acquisition, and he maintained the position upon joining Ricoh. An open communicator, Rothenberger prides himself on his ability to draw insights about the plans and needs of his colleagues to advise them on how to bring their plans to life through technology and the better use of information. This tendency led to him becoming a CIO-plus, adding the responsibilities of Chief Process Officer, as it was evident that he could drive significant process change for the entire company.
As his perspective grew, the value he contributed to Ricoh Americas grew with it and he was promoted in March of last year to become Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Ricoh Americas. As has been the case with other executives who have been profiled in the “Beyond CIO” series, leveraging the unique vantage point that the CIO has in the corporate structure to synchronize efforts, and identify innovative ideas that add value in multiple divisions of the company lends itself well to the aggrandizing of responsibilities. In this interview with Rothenberger, he speaks about the advantage of his time as CIO and how the experiences lent themselves well to his current role as COO.
(To listen to an unabridged audio interview with Rothenberger, please visit this link. This is the 17th article in the “Beyond CIO” series. To read prior interviews with executives from companies like TD Ameritrade, Marsh & McLennan, American Express, Hewlett-Packard, and Aetna, among others, please visit this link . To receive updates on future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: What was the benefit assumed in bringing together the diverse array of competencies that make up your team?
Tracey Rothenberger: IT and Process Improvement were probably the first step in this evolution, and we combined those two roles four years ago. We looked across the organization to try to drive improvements in all aspects of the business. The Enterprise Services team was created about a year and a half ago. Most of the advanced solutions are more in line with the approaches and methodologies IT leaders and CIOs would think about as they’re trying to implement workflow efficiencies, document improvements, and better use of information inside the environment.
Peter High: What was it about your time as CIO that prepared you for your current responsibilities as COO?
Tracey Rothenberger: I think one of the things that all CIOs have in common is that they are asked to have a fairly broad visibility across the organization. Both roles tend to see the things that are working well and the areas that have a challenge from an unbiased viewpoint typically. The IT organization that serves the business functions and members of the IT team have a unique perspective about opportunities in those functions to make things better. I think most CIOs operate from that vantage point which is an advantage when you look at the career paths for any CIO that wants to go and do something beyond the IT organization. Whether a CIO makes it to the next level is determined by whether they act on the information that they can garner from the broad view they have for the greater good of the company. When you find a CIO who is willing to put his or her neck out and make tough recommendations that involve not just IT systems but also business change or business transformation, that’s when you identify a CIO who is ready to go the next level.
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To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Tracey, click here.
Forbes 30-Under-30 Honoree, Nic Borg, On Technology Enabled Education
02-10-2014
This is the tenth article in the Education Technology Innovation series, and it is fair to say that Nic Borg’s background is unlike any of the other entrepreneurs featured in the series. Like others, he comes from academe, but rather than being a former Stanford professor like Sebastian Thrun or Daphne Koller, or an MIT professor like Anant Agarwal, Borg spent seven years at Kaneland High School in Maple Park, Illinois building web-based tools and learning management solutions. The small-scale innovation that he introduced proved to be a pilot for something bigger to come.
Armed with his practical experience at a Kaneland High School, Borg co-founded Edmodo five and a half years ago. Edmodo is the largest K-12 social learning network, which provides teachers and students a safe and easy way to connect and collaborate; it has been called “the Facebook of education.” It is used heavily in the classroom, but also extends that classroom environment. The mission of the organization is to help all learners reach their full potential, and he believes that by connecting them to the resources and concepts they need, they achieve that goal. It has already had profound implications on students, teachers, parents, and content providers, as he explains herein. He was recently honored by this publication as “30 Under 30” winner.
(To listen to an unabridged audio interview with Nic Borg, please visit this link. To read the prior nine articles in this series including interviews with the heads of Khan Academy, Udacity, Coursera, and edX, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Why was there a need for more of a digital platform and a means of communication with students in new ways? Was there something there saw as lacking in the traditional means of educating their students that was particularly stark to you?
Nic Borg: New ideas developed so rapidly outside the classroom that to really capture students’ attention, teachers had to be just as dynamic and even have to do a bit of a catch-up. Without those tools, without simple ways to get their classrooms online, it just wasn’t possible to get the attention needed from their students to drive that learning process.
To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Nic, click here.
A Professor With A Western Past Remakes Pakistan’s Entrepreneurial Future
02-03-2014
Umar Saif has done a lot in his 35 years. A Pakistani, he earned his PhD in computer science from the University of Cambridge at 22. He began a post doctorate degree at MIT at an age when most of his peers – age wise – had not completed their bachelor’s degrees. He worked at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory where he was part of the core team that developed system technologies for the $50 million Project Oxygen. He collaborated with Anant Agarwal, now the president of edX, among other legendary computer science and artificial intelligence professors. After spending years away from his native Pakistan, he found that he enjoyed the entrepreneurial spirit of MIT and of the US more generally. However, it was a conversation with a colleague about what he wanted to achieve in his life that got him to rethink his plans for the future. He decided that he wanted to help establish a comparable entrepreneurial hot-bed like the one he found at MIT back in Pakistan.
He returned to the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), where he found that his top students were the equivalent of the top students at MIT, but they did not realize the potential they had. His own story became an inspiration for a series of entrepreneurs, many of whom he has started businesses with. He was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2010, selected as one of top 35 young innovators in the world by MIT Technology Review in 2011 and received a Google faculty research award in 2011.
In 2011, Saif became the Chairman of the Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB), heading all public-sector IT projects in the province of Punjab province. In 2013, Saif was appointed the founding vice-chancellor of the Information Technology University (ITU). At the age of 34, he became the youngest vice-chancellor of a university in Pakistan. Saif has accomplished a lot, but, as he explains it, he has only just gotten started.
(To listen to an unabridged audio interview with Umar Saif, please visit this link. This is the ninth article in the education technology innovation series. To read the prior eight articles including interviews with the heads of Khan Academy, Udacity, Coursera, and edX, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Umar, you recently joined the Information Technology University as the founding vice chancellor. What is the charter of the new university and what role do you plan to play there?
Umar Saif: ITU is focused on cross-disciplinary teaching and research to solve locally relevant problems. It is a publicly chartered university, but run like a private-sector university, much like the land-grant universities in the US. We are focused on research with real-world impact. One of the keystone courses at the university is the Design Lab, where students work with grassroots organizations to build solutions to problems like clean drinking water, maternal healthcare and off-grid energy solutions. The curriculum philosophy is inspired by Olin’s design-oriented learning.
To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Umar, click here.
Cornell NYC Tech’s Dean On The Future Of Entrepreneurship In New York
01-27-2014
In late 2010, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration put out a request for proposal for a new kind of university program. Recognizing the importance of establishing New York City as a technology hub, he hoped to attract a leading university to establish a graduate school in engineering and computer science in Manhattan, and proposed that it be built on Roosevelt Island.
The proposal submitted by Cornell University was the winner, and though the permanent campus will not be ready until 2017, Cornell NYC Tech has set up shop in Google’s Manhattan offices in Chelsea. Daniel Huttenlocher is dean of the program, and he has an ambitious vision that befits an academic who has experience in the business world. He has hired a Chief Entrepreneurial Officer, and the school has already established deep ties with the start-up community in New York. Huttenlocher measures the success of his program on the number of people who start and who join high growth organizations. Establishing a program with ready access to major corporations, start-ups, and even City Hall means that Cornell NYC Tech is in an enviable position, and will likely be a key player in pushing New York to be the tech start-up hub that has longed to be for some time.
(To listen to an unabridged audio interview with Dean Daniel Huttenlocher, please visit this link. This is the eighth article in the education technology innovation series. To read the prior seven articles including interviews with the heads of Khan Academy, Udacity, Coursera, and edX, please visitthis link . To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Dan, what is Cornell NYC Tech’s mission?
Daniel Huttenlocher: Our mission is to increase the amount of technology talent in the New York area and in the nation with a particular kind of twist or take on technology talent both in terms of the students and faculty that we are attracting. It is people who have a passion for really deep technological invention and innovation, and at the same time the breadth to engage with real world problems and bring that technology out of the laboratory and classroom into the real world.
We are a new graduate school in New York City in tech disciplines, and we are focused on the disciplines related to the digital information age and the tech sector more generally. We have masters and doctoral students and programs in New York City. We are roughly a year in, as we commenced our beta class in January 2013 with a Masters of Engineering in Computer Science as the first-degree program that we’re offering.
To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Daniel, click here.
01-20-2014
If it seems like M&A activity in the technology, media, and telecommunications (TMT) sectors has been reaching a fever pitch, the data backs up the hypothesis. Mergermarket has released a 2013 Global M&A roundup report for the sector, and the conclusions are interesting:
For The Largest Not-For-Profit MOOC, edX, Experimentation Is The Path To Innovation
MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Professor Anant Agarwal has personified the educator-entrepreneur, as he has had a foot in academe and a foot in new ventures for more than a decade. He has led CSAIL, MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, just as he was a founder of Tilera Corporation, which created the Tile multicore processor. He led the development of Raw, an early tiled multicore processor, Sparcle, an early multi-threaded microprocessor, and Alewife, a scalable multiprocessor. He also led the VirtualWires project at MIT and was the founder of Virtual Machine Works. His start-ups have largely been focused on his areas of research and areas of interest, but he had not focused on the education space itself until late 2011.
It was at that point that Agarwal taught what would become MITX’s first massive open online course (MOOC) on circuits and electronics, which drew 155,000 students from 162 countries. This overwhelming response showed the promise of having his academic and his entrepreneurial pursuits coincide. Agarwal developed a partnership between MIT and nearby Harvard to establish edX. Unlike rivals Coursera and Udacity, edX is a not-for-profit. Therefore, when Agarwal thinks about the competitive landscape among the MOOCs, his perspective is “the more the merrier.” In fact, in June of last year, edX became open sourced, and the source code, OpenedX, has led to interesting collaborations with Google, Stanford University, and even with countries such as France and China.
I spoke with Agarwal multiple times in recent months to ask him how edX is evolving, and what he foresees for the future of edX and for the academic institutions that they draw from.
(To hear an extended audio interview with Anant Agarwal, please visit this link. This is the seventh article in the Education Technology Innovation series. To read past interviews including interviews with the CEOs of Udacity, Coursera, and Khan Academy, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: As edX enters its third year in existence, what key lessons have you drawn thus far?
Anant Argawal: The power of edX and of MOOCs more generally is to democratize education. People want to learn no matter their circumstance or their age, and the experience of our students shows definitively that this is the case. We have many people who are in the workforce who use edX to develop new skills to employ in their jobs. Therefore, we are thinking more broadly.
A related example is our partnership with global steel manufacturer Tenaris. Through their adoption of the Open edX platform, Tenaris will enhance their existing training programs delivered through Tenaris University to nearly 27,000 employees worldwide. We have established a comparable relationship with the IMF.
We also have announced a partnership with Davidson College and the College Board to host Advanced Placement (AP) course modules for high school students, as well. So what began as university-centric idea is migrating to the pre and post university settings.
To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Anant, click here.
