by Peter High, published on Forbes.com
09-30-2013
Kim Stevenson has one of the biggest jobs in information technology. As CIO of Intel, she leads a diverse team of technologists within a company that is historically known to be a paragon of technology innovation. When she took her current post nearly two years ago, she had been part of the IT leadership team already. Yet, as a new CIO she needed to develop a new relationship with her peers among the division heads and the broader leadership team. She found that leaders outside of IT were quite happy with IT, but she came to a surprising conclusion: they were not expecting enough of the IT department. As Stevenson notes herein, she realized that if Intel was going to succeed in increasing the pace of innovation, IT needed to be more of a contributor to that innovation. Her first 100 days in her job were critical in setting a new tone and culture within IT; it is a path that is not for the faint of heart, but the accomplishments of her team are evidence enough that it is a path worth emulating.
(To listen to an extended podcast interview with Kim Stevenson, please visit this link. To read the other five articles in the CIO’s First 100 Days series, including interviews with the CIOs of Time Warner, Caterpillar, and Global Partners, please visit this link. To read future contributions in this series with the CIOs of companies like J.Crew, Johnson & Johnson, SpaceX, AmerisourceBergen, and Viacom, please click the “Follow” button above.)
Peter High: Kim, you were promoted to CIO of Intel in January of 2012, having spent two and one half years at the organization previously. Unlike other CIOs who are hired into the role from outside of their companies, you had some ideas about what was going well, and where there was room for improvement. How did this impact the development of your plans in the first 100 days at the helm of IT?
Kim Stevenson: Thankfully, it meant that I had a built-in network within the company. I reached out to our business unit leaders to ensure we were aligned with them, to the IT employees to hear first-hand their views of the good, bad, and ugly and to a number of external peers / mentors to calibrate my plans. All of this up-front input and advice was very helpful in shaping the direction.
Additional topics covered in the article include:
To read the full article, please visit Forbes.com
To explore the full collection of The CIO’s First 100 Days Series articles, please click here.
To explore the Technovation Column library, please click here.
To explore the recent CIO’s First 100 Days Series articles, please click here.
To listen to a previous Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Kim, click here.
09-23-2013
When Kevin Hart joined Cox Communications as its CTO in April 2011, he had the ideal profile for an IT executive. He earned an undergraduate degree in engineering, and later got an MBA. He spent considerable time as a consultant, solving problems for a wide array of businesses and executives, and then was a CIO multiple times over at companies like Clearwire Corporation and Level 3. Ever the problem solver, Hart viewed his new challenge with Cox Communications as a series of opportunities to harvest, and he took a methodical approach to acquiring knowledge about his new company and its industry, built solid relationships with his fellow business executives, assessed and made relevant changes to his team to ensure that it was built for speed, and then set up metrics to prove progress was being made. The approach that Hart details herein is a recipe for success, and it is no wonder that he has achieved it in the two and one half years since he started.
(To hear the full audio version of this interview, visit the Forum on World Class IT site. This is the fifth article in the “CIOs First 100 Days Series.” The series kicked off with this article. To read each of the preceding articles with the CIOs of companies like Time Warner and Global Partners, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series with the CIOs of companies like Intel, J. Crew, Johnson & Johnson, SpaceX, and AmerisourceBergen, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Kevin, you have been the senior IT executive at multiple companies. Are there certain things that you have found are most important to focus on in the first 100 days of your tenure in your role?
Kevin Hart: I had the good fortune of spending a healthy chunk of time as a consultant, and in that role, I worked with and advised a number of CIOs, COOs , and CEOs in their early days in their roles. I learned a great deal from that experience in terms of what to focus on, and I have boiled it down to five things:
First, you have to understand the company’s goals, and ultimately how it creates value; literally, asking “how does my new company make its revenue?” It is important to understand the business drivers. All too often, IT leaders do not focus enough attention on that.
Second, it is important to understand the customer, and his or her needs. This means speaking with customers and getting their feedback where possible. I did so both with commercial and residential customers. This is great fodder for determining how IT can better serve these customers.
Third, it is critical to understand the competitive landscape. What are the trends in product portfolios and the market more generally? Use this to help craft plans that differentiate one’s new company technologically and beyond.
Fourth, take a hard look at the core team. A leader will only be as successful as his or her team. It is important to evaluate competencies that they have compared to the competencies that we will need. The latter should be clearer after the first three steps. It is also important to take stakeholders’ evaluations of the team into consideration.
Fifth, it is important to boil all of that material together to outline and articulate a multi-year transformation plan. There will be unique attributes of each plan, but there should be people components, process improvements, platform investments for growth and to build out products and services. There should also be a delivery plan. Last, it is important to sell that vision so that a coalition can be mobilized to help achieve these plans.
To listen to a previous Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Kevin, click here.
09-16-2013
When Ken Piddington joined Global Partners as the firm’s first-ever chief information officer four years ago, the Waltham, MA-based energy supply business was already a major corporation with revenues of roughly $6 billion, yet the company had thrived without the benefit of a CIO. Leadership realized that it had reached a tipping point in its business where information technology needed to be managed much more strategically than it had been previously. In the years since, revenues have tripled to nearly $18 billion. Recognizing that the company’s growth would be fueled by acquisitions, he built a playbook to ensure that IT could respond efficiently to support those acquisitions. He also variabilized the cost structure of IT to a much greater extent using cloud technologies and an ecosystem of vendor partners so that he could support the growth of the company seamlessly. Where many IT departments can become victims of a company’s success, with systems and hardware that is not flexible enough to grow quickly in an efficient manner, this was an objective of Piddington’s from the outset.
(This is the fourth article in the “CIO’s First 100 Days” series. For a link to each of the prior three articles, please visit this link. For updates on future articles in the series with CIOs from companies like Intel, Johnson & Johnson, J. Crew, AmerisourceBergen, Cox Communications, and Amtrak, please click the Follow link above.)
Peter High: Ken, you were the first ever CIO of Global Partners. How did you prepare in light of the lack of a predecessor?
Ken Piddington: I did have an advantage of having already been a consultant for Global so I already knew a lot of the inner workings of the organization. That being said I approached the preparation for the new role as if I had not. My initial preparation was about the collection of information necessary to successfully perform the responsibilities of the CIO and specifically achieve the goals set for me. I needed to be able to hit the ground running. There were eight areas of information I collected a part of my preparation;
To listen to a previous Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Ken, click here.
by Peter High, published on Forbes.com 09-09-2013
I recently caught up with Aaron Levie, the Box CEO, as he and his team prepared for BoxWorks, the company’s user conference, which will kick off this Sunday in San Francisco. (To listen to an extended podcast interview that I conducted with Levie, please use this link.) I asked him for a preview of what he plans on sharing with the thousands of gathered technology executives and enthusiasts. He offered an overview of Box’s strategy going forward, advice he would offer technology executives who are still in the early stages of adopting the cloud, and he could not help but mention how delighted that he was to have his favorite band, Blink 182, playing the after party on September 17. In many ways, Box has been the very epitome of consumerization of technology. Box began as a consumer service, helping individuals share data securely across many devices. Consumers liked the service so much that it quickly penetrated the commercial space as these individuals began to use it at work just as they did at home. In Box’s continued evolution from consumer to commercial player, now that it has penetrated the overwhelming majority of multi-billion dollar companies in the U.S., Levie has been focused on developing industry verticals to focus its services on. When I asked him how he has chosen the verticals that Box has focused on to date, he indicated that he looks for “the best mix of a complex, highly regulated industry that is benefiting from much cheaper, much simpler technology like Box.” Levie’s recipe for success has been a combination of luring leading technology talent with depth of experience in the relevant industry verticals to join Box for this journey, partnering with leading technology companies whose focus is squarely on each of these verticals, and he the company has made a number of key investments to broaden Box’s offering in each of these spaces….
To explore the full collection of Beyond CIO Series articles, please click here.
To explore the recent CIO-plus Series articles, please click here.
To listen to an older Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Aaron, click here.
09-02-2013
Bill Krivoshik has been a CIO since the mid-1990s, with stints at such esteemed companies as GE Capital, AIG,Citigroup, Thomson Financial, and Marsh & McLennan. He has been the global chief information officer multiple times over, and has been the first to hold that title at multiple companies to boot. He has each of those distinctions at Time Warner, a company he joined just over two years ago.
Krivoshik says that the key to a successful first 100 days and beyond is to focus on building relationships at the new company, develop quick-wins for the rest of the organization, and to contemplate people, process, and technologies changes early in one’s tenure, among other insights he shares herein.
(To listen to an extended interview with Bill Krivoshik from the Forum on World Class IT podcast series, visit this link. This is the third article in this series in Forbes. To read the first two articles, please visit this link. To read future interviews with CIOs of companies such as Intel, Viacom, AmerisourceBergen, Amtrak, the American Cancer Society, Cox Communications, and J.Crew, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Bill, you joined Time Warner as the CIO in July of 2011. What key priorities did you set in your first 100 days in the role?
Bill Krivoshik: There were several areas that I had to work on when I joined Time Warner in July of 2011. First, the enterprise CIO role was a new role for Time Warner, so I had to make sure that there was agreement among our senior executives about the scope and focus of the role, particularly in our goals for the first twelve to eighteen months. Second, being new to Time Warner, I made the rounds to our various business divisions – HBO, Time Inc., Turner, and Warner Bros. – so that I could learn about their businesses and how to best leverage their expertise and provide them with business benefit from our enterprise initiatives. And third, not only was I new to Time Warner, but I was also new to the industry. So I had to find ways to get myself smart on the issues and opportunities that our industry is facing.
To listen to a recent Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Bill, click here.
Randy Krotowski, CIO at Caterpillar, discusses his plan to make his first days as CIO count.
08-27-2013
When Randy Krotowski learned that Caterpillar was looking for a new CIO, he had just come to the conclusion with his wife that he would end his career with Chevron, a company that he had been gainfully employed by for 29 years. He had had a diverse array of experiences at the energy giant, and thoroughly enjoyed the work. He listened to the details of the new opportunity not thinking that he really could be convinced. The more he listened, the more interested he became, until he ultimately joined the company in February of 2012.
It had been a while since his first 100 days with a new company, but Krotowski recognized that his newness meant that he needed to get out and meet other leaders, learn more about the supply chain of the company, draw parallels between his old employer and his new one in order to generate creative insights, and to get some quick wins under his belt. In this interview I recently conducted with Krotowski, he talks about what he has done well, as well as what he would do differently if he had the chance to do things over.
(“The CIO’s First 100 Days” series kicked off with this article. This is the first interview in the series, and an extended audio version of this interview can be found here as part of the Forum on World Class IT podcast series. To read future interviews with the CIOs of companies like Time Warner, Intel, J. Crew, AmerisourceBergen, Cox Communications, Viacom, Amtrak, and the American Cancer Society, please click the “Follow” button above.)
Peter High: You joined Caterpillar a year ago after three decades and several senior roles at Chevron, and had some time to think about your new plans in terms of the first 100 days of operation in those new roles. This however, was your first opportunity to do so in a brand new company. How did you develop those initial plans at a new company, in a new industry, and within a new culture?
Randy Krotowski: It wasn’t a whole lot different from the job changes at Chevron. Being in a new industry and with new people, however, I did have a great deal to learn in those areas. In any role, I try to answer the question, “What does the company need from me?” Given where Caterpillar is going, given where we want to be in the future, and given the companies we are competing against, what does the company need from IT? These are the same questions I would ask in any role at any different company.
The hard part was that here at Caterpillar, I initially did not know anyone. I did not understand manufacturing, and I did not know the culture and the history of the company. My 100 day plan included the normal things; I placed a huge emphasis on getting out and meeting people, to learn their business, to develop those relationships, to help them explain Caterpillar to me and to help them explain their strategy.
Caterpillar is an iconic company; the culture here is one that captured me quickly. If I want to do anything, make any changes, or move us to a better place through the use of technology, it has to be built on what this company already is and what the culture is. Learning the culture was probably the trickiest part. When you look at Caterpillar, the quality of the leadership, the quality of the business focus, and the quality of the people and culture are all very powerful.
To listen to a recent Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Randy, click here.
The CIO’s Reputation Is Cemented In The First 100 Days
We have one chance to make a first impression. This axiom applies best in the professional arena where one’s reputation can be cemented within a few short weeks of joining a company.
The Chief Information Officer was once a rather transient position. For years, it was among the “c-level” executive with the shortest or near shortest average tenure. The reasons for this were manifold including the fact that the average c-level executive (almost all of whom outranked the CIO) did not clearly understand technology, and it was easy to choose the CIO as a scapegoat if things were amiss within the company generally or within IT more specifically. Given the fact that so much that is managed by the IT leader can be esoteric in the minds of other business executives within the company, it is essential to push hard in one’s first 100 days to build relationships, to communicate a plan, and to track progress against that plan.
This is the first article in a series titled, “The CIO’s First 100 Days.” The first interview in the series is with Randy Krotowski, the CIO of Caterpillar, which can be found here. Other IT executives who will be profiled hail from companies like Time Warner, Intel, J.Crew, AmerisourceBergen, Cox Communications, Viacom, Amtrak, and the American Cancer Society. Each of these executives went through their first 100 days recently enough that their insights are fresh, but enough time has passed that it can be deciphered that their first 100 days did, in fact, lay the groundwork for a successful tenure. (To receive updates on this series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
There are a number of different lessons that will be highlighted, some of them common, and others unique. Some of the common ones include, though are not limited to:
Assess the Current State of IT, Beginning with People
A leader is only as good as his or her team. It is important to get an understanding early on of how strong one’s team is. It is important not only to assess one’s reports, but also the reports of the reports. It is at that second level where we often see issues, and this is the level where a lot of work gets done or does not.
It is also key to assess the organization structure to understand whether it is set up for maximum productivity, and to ensure that it reflects the corporation appropriately. A growing number of CIOs are aligning their organizations to business processes as opposed to the old structures of applications development, support, maintenance, and the like. Others are instituting business information officers (BIOs) who have dual reporting to the CIOs and to the heads of various business units.
Ultimately understanding the strengths, weaknesses, and maturity levels of the department is of the utmost importance. This was a big part of the message of my book World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs. The idea is to evaluate the five principle of World Class IT:
As aforementioned, it must begin with people, but should include an assessment of the incumbent infrastructure and architecture, the governance processes and methods (project and portfolio management, for instance), the relationship between IT and the rest of the organization (or ROTO), as well as the health and efficacy of the relationship with vendor partners. Without knowing where one starts the journey, it will be difficult to determine how to prioritize.
It is also important to evaluate this early because in the early stages of one’s tenure, one can call upon the issues that one found and the corrective action to take. If a new CIO does not identify these issues from the get go, then when they are identified past the 100 day mark, they may well be considered issues that arose under the new CIO’s watch.
As changing multiple jobs becomes the norm rather than exception, millenials need to pay attention to not burning bridges with ex-employers.
08-13-2013
It once was the aim of many people to work for 30 to 40 years with the same company, and then to retire with a pension and a gold watch. Pensions are mostly a thing of the past, and for many young people, watches are as well. Retiring from one’s first employer will be rarer still. Talented people in the technology field are more likely than most to hop from job to job with greater frequency than many others. In fact, this analysis of how Yahoo! has made a practice of acquiring less than stellar performing companies with grade-A talent in order to secure them en-masse and lock them in for multiple years underscores the point.
Unfortunately, as the millenials hop from job to job, it appears not enough time and attention is put toward ensuring that the bridge that has been built with an employer remains strong even after one’s departure. Carelessly burning bridges or even simply ending one’s tenure with a company on a sour note needlessly can have negative ramifications. When one needs a recommendation for yet another job or for a graduate program down the line, these slights will be remembered. In order to make a great last impression, it is important to follow these seven steps.
Create a plan to hand-off all outstanding work and responsibilities before tendering a resignation
Nothing is more frustrating for an employer than to have many loose ends to tie, without ample time to tie them prior to a colleague’s departure. Even before announcing the intent to leave, an employee should prepare a plan on who can logically take over his or her responsibilities. Having an actionable plan that can be implemented immediately after announcing the intent to depart will go a long way toward easing the minds of one’s soon to be ex-employer.
Meet with each of the people who you have proposed to take over responsibilities, and agree to spend time with each to ensure that each activity is in good hands post departure, and to give each person ample time to ask questions wherever necessary.
Peter High was recently featured in an article published by CIO, a business-IT leadership publication, that covered strategies to excel in an IT executive interview.
Published August 2013 by CIO.com
Excerpts from the Article:
This preparation should include knowing what products and services a company offers; reading through press releases and company’s websites to see what they are putting out; and visiting there social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ to see what type of presence they have. “Research into the company’s performance, and any news one can get through one’s CIO network as to the performance of the preceding CIO will be an aid in developing hypotheses about what one should accentuate when talking about past experiences,” says Peter High, author of World Class IT.
(…)
“Optimally, the characteristics that the company seeks in a CIO will be conveyed in the job spec. If those have been made available, lining up one’s past experiences to those specs and addressing the points one-by-one will be important,” says High.
“An honest answer should be provided, though clearly not one that will leave the interviewer wondering if the candidate is competent. Answers like ‘I work too hard’ are too obvious and disingenuous,” says High.
What would you do in the first three months? “The bottom line throughout the interview is to be sure that a plan is conveyed so that the interlocutors have an understanding that the candidate knows what he or she will do, and the road toward improved performance of the department,” says High.
“A suit and a tie should always be the default, as it conveys respect. The last thing you want to be is under-dressed for the occasion, as it makes the candidate look less than serious or at worst disrespectful or clueless,” says High.
“Always send a thank you note and raise points that were discussed in the interview as a means of reconnecting. If there were any loose ends from the interview, address those in the follow up email,” says High.
To read full descriptoins and other tips in the remainder of the article, please visit CIO.com
Meg McCarthy, EVP of Operations and Technology at Aetna, discusses her career trajectory and leadership experiences in managing business-IT alignment.
08-05-2013
Meg McCarthy has many of the common characteristics of other executives who have been featured in the Beyond CIO series. She has a non-technical graduate degree in the field that she has long been linked to (the degree is a master of public health with a concentration in hospital administration); she spent time as a partner in a major consulting firm, Ernst & Young, and a senior manager at another one, Accenture; she has been an IT executive at multiple major companies, including at CIGNA. Despite having a focus on technology for most of her career, McCarthy has focused on business outcomes first and foremost and technology secondarily. The former defines the ends, and the latter is simply the means.
Soon after McCarthy joined Aetna a decade ago, she climbed the rungs from CIO to head of Business Solutions Delivery, which brought together all IT project management, development, quality engineering, and IT-related business-process reengineering functions, necessary to create, develop and deliver end-to-end business solutions. She then became senior vice president of Innovation, Technology, and Service Operations. Finally, near the end of 2010, McCarthy took on her current role as executive vice president of Operations and Technology. In that role, she continues to have responsibility for clinical innovation, technology and service operations, but she has added responsibility for process and performance improvement, procurement, and real estate services for Aetna.
As McCarthy describes herein, the key has been to continue to push the envelope on value creation, and to demonstrate that value in ways that the rest of the organization can understand. Considering the lofty position she has achieved since beginning her time as CIO, this is a path worth emulating.
(The “Beyond CIO” series kicked off with this article, and the all past interviews in the series can be found here, including interviews with executives at companies such as HP, American Express, Marsh & McLennan, Fifth Third Bank, Symantec, and T.D. Ameritrade, among others. If you are interested in future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Meg, you are a business leader with an IT background, and evidence that IT leaders are business leaders. Can you begin by sharing your perspectives on the role of IT in the insurance industry generally and at Aetna more specifically?
Meg McCarthy: Technology is powering the future of the healthcare and insurance industries. The role of the consumer, the impact of mobile technology and social media require the industry to constantly reinvent itself.
Aetna is more than a health care company, we are a health care information technology company and we’re constantly investing in technology to revolutionize the health care system. Aetna is focused on bringing innovative new ideas to the market.
Over the past several years, Aetna has made a few key acquisitions in this space. Medicity is the largest provider of health information exchange technology in the country. Aetna’s iTriage application provides consumers with fingertip access to the latest technology and medical information by allowing users to research their symptoms, find a medical provider that best serves their personal needs, and book an appointment – all from their smartphone. iTriage is approaching 10 million downloads already. ActiveHealth’s integrated population health management solutions are designed to help customers improve health outcomes and lower medical costs, through data analytics, evidence-based clinical decision support and targeted health and wellness programs.
Our technology stack, under the Healthagen brand, supports our Accountable Care Solutions strategy by bringing together our integrated suite of payer-neutral solutions and technologies that are designed to improve care quality, control health care costs and enable consumers to better participate with their health care professionals in making choices about their health and their care.
Aetna CarePass features more than 20 market-leading consumer app partners, and enables consumers, with a single secure sign-on, to share information across some of the most popular health and fitness apps, and create a personalized health experience. CarePass also now offers a developer portal, featuring 11 API (application programming interface) partners, that includes access to unique data and services from both Aetna and third-party partners via APIs. Aetna is creating IT platforms and applications for public and private health exchange offerings that will become available later this year…..
