Big data, process automation, multidisciplinary R&D: Gary Wimberly, the CIO of this $94 billion enterprise, thinks of the company as a technology firm that happens to be active in the pharmacy benefit management (PBM) space.
by Peter High, published on Forbes.com
07/29/2013
I recently had the opportunity to tour Express Scripts Technology and Innovation Center in St. Louis. Express Scripts is a $94 billion pharmacy benefit management company (PBM), and as the company’s chief information officer, Gary Wimberly, likes to point out, it is a technology business that happens to be focused on the PBM space. The tour reflected that statement, as I had a chance to observe two key components of the company’s Technology and Innovation Center.
At the Express Scripts Pharmacy, one is struck not only be the size of the operation, but the relatively few people who are involved in fulfilling prescriptions. Computers and machines sort drugs into vials, label them, and pack them seamlessly. As Wimberly notes below, the Express Scripts Pharmacy is substantially more efficient and accurate in that fulfillment than traditional pharmaceutical retailers.
In the Research & New Solutions Lab, one witnesses a digital war room of sorts, as a diverse team drawing upon various scientific and business disciplines collaborates to help optimize patient care while reducing costs at the same time. Their insights ensure that this healthcare behemoth can still turn on a dime.
(This is a condensed and edited version of a Forum on World Class IT interview I conducted with Gary. To listen to it, please click on this link.)
Peter High: Gary, let’s start with a bit of background on Express Scripts, and IT’s role in the operation.
Gary Wimberly: Peter, we are a business-to-business company, and we manage the prescription spend for over 100 million Americans. The typical prescription fulfillment process is for customers to visit a pharmacy. In many cases, the pharmacy sends Express Scripts an electronic transaction, and we do 150 safety and eligibility checks on the transaction. Information is sent back to the pharmacy so that the pharmacist knows whether the patient will have an issue with a drug interaction, whether it is OK to fill the prescription ,and what the cost will be, and how much will be reimbursed for that transaction. That is done in about 0.6 seconds between eight and ten million times per day or about 1.4 billion times per year.
To do this, we have to focus on healthcare more generally. We think about behavioral sciences, focusing on actionable data, and how we focus on being able to manage the prescription spend. Technology is integral to this business. I like to say that we are a technology business that happens to focus on the PBM space.
Additional topics covered in the article include:
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Ben Fried, CIO of Google, discusses the challenges and opportunities of being the CIO at one of the most successful technology companies of our time.
07-22-2013
One might think that being the CIO of a legendary technology company would be like aTale of Two Cities: the best of times and the worst of times. On the one hand, one need not ever make the case that technology needs to be thought of as a strategic weapon in the arsenal of the company, as many IT executives still must do in their companies. On the other hand, there are many people throughout the business who feel they can do the job of CIO better than the actual CIO can. For many of the company’s engineers, CIO seems like the easiest of the executive positions.
Google’s CIO Ben Fried’s job is far from easy, but he focuses more on the best of times scenario, recognizing that by being surrounded by some of the best technology talent in the world inside and outside the IT department, there is no dearth of opportunities to pursue. In fact, even the issues turn out to be opportunities. As he says, “At Google, we are programmed to think that if you see an opportunity or a problem, we need to do something about it.”
When Fried joined Google roughly five years ago after more than 13 years at Morgan Stanley, there were a great number of opportunities to chase down and a reasonable amount of issues to resolve. This is typical for an organization that has been through such tremendous growth as has been the case for Google. The company’s core services such as search, Gmail, YouTube, and Maps have grown tremendously, and the company continues to grow through acquisition. The complexity is exacerbated and the opportunities multiplied by the company’s continued desire to strive for moonshot ideas such as Google Glass or the driverless cars emerging out of Google X. Fried’s team’s ability to react quickly to these opportunities earned it a reputation for being experts with the tactics. They could seize upon an opportunity or squelch a problem as soon as either was identified.
A couple of years ago, Fried wanted to plant a flag figuratively to declare what IT stood for, however. As the company continued its tremendous growth, the demands on IT would grow accordingly, and without a filter to judge certain kinds of ideas so that some would be de-prioritized would mean the department might be crushed under the weight of growing needs and expectations of the rest of the organization.
IT missions typically sit above the strategy of the organization and they should not change as often as a strategy will, and therefore should offer a lasting initial screen to help determine whether a given idea is worthy of pursuing or not. The IT strategy and the portfolio of projects connected to that strategy will get to the next level of granularity closer to the transactional level of the business.
As a result, Fried and his leadership team defined Google IT’s mission as “To Empower Googlers with World Leading Technology.” This is a bold mission, and it clearly states that average is not good enough. Fried and his team embraced this mission because it complemented the company’s mission as a whole, which is “To Organize the World’s Information and Make It Universally Accessible and Useful.” One ambitious mission deserves another to support it.
There are a few things that are noteworthy about this plan:
First, it requires that IT develop tight collaborations with colleagues outside of IT, so that the IT department truly knows what “Googlers” need to be successful. Fried had a valuable arrow in his quiver: he had some of the deepest engineering talent in the world, and in many case his team could seek the counsel of colleagues who invented significant aspects of the Internet, technology infrastructure, and computer languages. IT needed to develop stronger ties with these experts earlier on in the development of new technologies…
To listen to an older Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Ben, click here.
No stranger to executive roles at some of America’s most recognizable brands – Starbucks, Best Buy, and now, Symantec, Stephen Gillett admits: once a CIO, always a CIO.
07-15-2013
Stephen Gillett first became a chief information officer in his early 30s. He rose to become a CIO-plus at Starbucks, holding the CIO role in addition to being the executive vice president of Digital Ventures. After a brief stint as president of Digital, Global Marketing & Strategy at Best Buy, he took on his current role as chief operating officer of Symantec. Still in his mid-30s, Gillett embodies the characteristics of that rare but growing number of executives who have risen beyond CIO. Not so typical to the group, however, he was an offensive guard on the University of Oregon football team. During his time as an undergrad, he started a business that provided technology support and consulting. The ambition and drive that were apparent during his time as an undergraduate have served him well, and provided some insight into the meteoric rise through the corporate world that would follow.
(To hear an extended audio version of this interview, please visit this link. 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, and T.D. Ameritrade, among others. If you are interested in future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Stephen, you are an example of two trends I have been covering of late. You were a CIO-plus at Starbucks, and your positions at Best Buy and now at Symantec are beyond the CIO role. I want to go back to the earlier part of your career. At what point in your career did you decide you wanted to be a CIO, and why?
Stephen Gillett: My first job in IT was the equivalent of the Geek Squad at Best Buy in the 1990s. From there, I had a range of IT positions from working in the help desk to network operator to applications development to engineering to Director of Information Technology. This experience was key for me because I got to know most of the traditional functions of an IT operation. I exposed myself to these diverse areas out of technical curiosity and progressed naturally to the CIO role.
To explore the full collection of Beyond CIO Series articles, please click here.
To listen to a recent Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Stephen, click here.
Peter High
7-12-2013
Excerpt from the Article:
When Ken Piddington joined Global Partners as the firm’s first-ever CIO five years ago, the energy supply business was already a Fortune 500 company. In the four years since, revenues have tripled, but his IT department remains lean. A key to his success has been better vendor management in general, and better software vendor management more specifically.
IN SUMMARY WHO: Ken Piddington WHAT: An overview of his approach to software license management and the company’s Strategic Partner Program and Strategic Partner Summit WHERE: Waltham, Mass.
CIO Insight: You were the first-ever CIO of Global Partners, a large company that has grown astronomically during your tenure. Naturally, as Global Partners has prospered, you’ve had to creatively leverage external partners. Can you talk about the way in which you have thought about vendor engagement?
You are right. When I joined Global Partners in 2009, our revenues were $5.8 billion. Last year, with the rapid growth we’ve experienced, primarily through acquisition and commodity diversification, we stood at $17.6 billion. We do not have any intention to slow down either.
We run lean, and with so many growth initiatives going on at the same time we had to better leverage our vendor partners in order to be successful. In my opinion, an organization receives the most value from its vendor partners when a real effort is made to build true partnerships. These are partnerships and relationships that are mutually beneficial. If you expect to always take from your vendor partners and never give anything back, the partnership and relationship will fail and the organization won’t receive the expected value. This is the basis for our vendor management initiative that we call our Strategic Partner Program.
How did you develop the concept of the Strategic Partner Summit?
When we developed the concept for our Strategic Partner Program I didn’t want to have to explain the details of the program to each and every vendor one at a time, plus I wanted our vendors to know that they had to compete and earn Global Partners’ continued business. So I created the Strategic Partner Summit, which is a dinner hosted by me in which we invite all our vendor partners, and which is an opportunity for Global Partners to give back to them and at the same time lay out and reinforce the ground rules and expectations for being a partner of ours.
As we increasingly rely on our vendors to deliver key components of our technology, it is important that we be open with them about where we see the company going. Therefore, our CEO speaks at these events, providing insights about our corporate strategy, and then I speak to provide insights about our IT strategy. The key is to ensure that as they suggest solutions for us, that they do so with our plans in mind, not theirs. Companies that keep secrets from their vendor partners are developing a relationship that is all tree and no forest, so to speak.
Do you engage software vendors differently than you do hardware vendors?
To read the full article, please visit CIO Insight
After leading ADP’s Global HR and Payroll Outsourcing divisions, Mike Capone, the current CIO and a Corporate Vice President, understands the importance of business-IT synergy and IT-led innovation at the firm.
07-08-2013
It is an exciting time to be tapped into the chief information officer community by virtue of the top-tier leaders who are doing extraordinary things from that post. I have extensively covered the topic of the CIO-plus in a series in Forbes that can be found here.
Mike Capone has many attributes that are common among executives who have been asked to take on additional responsibilities to their CIO roles, a phenomenon that I refer to as the CIO-plus. Capone’s undergraduate degree is in computer science. He has an MBA. He spent time in IT early in his career, but also had experience outside of IT prior to returning as the first-ever Global CIO of ADP.
The nature and seniority of that experience clearly sets him apart. He made a name for himself at ADP as the general manager of the company’s Global Human Resources and Payroll Outsourcing Business, a division that serves large multinational corporations. It is this operating experience and profit and loss responsibility that is often missing among CIOs, and it often proves detrimental to those who would like to add responsibilities to their CIO responsibilities, or for those who might be interested in risking beyond CIO. (For more articles in my series on CIOs who have risen beyond that role, visit this link)
Asked why he thought to make the move to the CIO post after running a division of the company, Capone noted that he recognized the power of the role from an early age, as his father was once the CIO of J.C. Penney. Therefore, Mike is one of the only father/son CIO-pairs.
It should come as no surprise that Capone has thought of the CIO role differently as a result of having been a leader of one of ADP’s businesses. He fostered synergies and reduced the cost of IT across the business units by identifying more that could be done commonly. He also created an imperative for IT to be a source of innovation for the company. On that front, he invested significantly in innovation activities during the depths of the economic malaise, recognizing that it was important to continue to build the IT organization’s innovation capabilities to prepare for sunnier days ahead. He created an innovation lab in IT, and holds an annual conference of ADP’s top IT executives from around the world where new ideas are showcased, and the next generation of innovations is developed…
To watch the interview video, please click here.
David Pogue describes his journey from studying music at Yale to becoming one of the most prolific and influential technology critics in the world.
07-01-2013
David Pogue is as well known a technology critic as you’ll find in the world. He is a master of both old and new media. He is best known for his technology column in the New York Times, but he also has a column in Scientific American. He’s the host of “NOVA ScienceNow” and other science shows on PBS, and he’s been a correspondent for “CBS Sunday Morning” since 2002. Pogue has nearly one and a half million followers on Twitter and writes four to five books per year, with over three million of his books in print. He’s won an Emmy, a Loeb award for journalism, and an honorary doctorate in music.
What may be most remarkable for someone who has among the strongest personal brands that you will find is how little planning he has put to developing that brand. Rather, he has largely been reactive as opposed to proactive in his career. When he arrived at the New York Times in 2000, others saw in him an ability to make the esoteric accessible, and thus offers arrived to get involved in other media to continue to pontificate about technology as well as to explain other adjacent fields, such as science. As he mentions below, he has simply continued to answer the phone and say, “yes.”
(An extended video and podcast version of the interview is available at this link.)
Peter High: David, you have quite a non-traditional path to the perch you currently occupy. You were a music major at Yale who dreamt of a career in music. What was your relationship to technology during your formative years?
David Pogue: The key to understanding my career is that I was never into technology. From the beginning, I brought an outsider’s point of view, which is why I write for a layman’s publication. My interest was magic, believe it or not. I became an amateur magician and did something like 400 magic shows through my teen years. My little self-analysis is that consumer technology is the closest thing we have to magic. You push a button and something happens at your command. The things that get me fired up the most have always been the things that seem the most magical. For example, take Siri, handwriting recognition, and Microsoft Kinect.
To listen to a recent Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with David, click here.
Bob Willett, former Best Buy CIO turned Global Chairman and Board Member, asserts that CIOs are better suited than some other “C”-level leaders to take greater executive roles at their companies.
06-24-2013
Bob Willett is an example of an executive who started on the shop floor and worked his way up to the top positions in the retail industry. He began at Marks & Spencer in his native United Kingdom in 1968 and would leave that company a decade later as a store executive. Before taking on the role of chief information officer of Best Buy, he had been the CEO of one company, head of Merchandise Operations for another, and then global managing partner of the Retail Practice and a member of the executive committee at Accenture. He advised many of the best retail operations around the world about matters of strategy.
It was during his time with Accenture starting in the early 1990s that Willett realized how essential IT had become and would continue to be to the industry that he knew so well. He leveraged the many smart colleagues he had at Accenture to learn, having had no formal training in IT. He learned enough to be asked to be CIO of Best Buy in 2001. He would become a CIO-plus by virtue of also being CEO of Best Buy International and the executive vice president of Operations. As Willett details below, he offers insights into what he learned during his successful run as an IT executive has served him well now that he is on a number of companies’ boards.
(The “Beyond CIO” series kicked off with this article, and the all past interviews in the series can be found here. If you are interested in future articles in the series with executives from companies like Symantec and Aetna among others, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Bob, you had an unusual path to the CIO role. You do not have a traditional IT background either by virtue of education or experience. You began in store management at Marks & Spencer in the UK. How did you find your way to the CIO role?
Bob Willett: It was an unusual path, I suppose, but one that was invaluable. At Marks & Spencer, I learned the retail business from the ground up. In those early days, technology did not have much of a role beyond point of sale systems and to some degree loyalty programs. Through the 1970s, I had a number of roles in leading European retailers, and with each transition, it forced me to learn a new business, a new culture, a new client set, and so forth. A big inflection point for me in terms of my career in IT was joining Accenture. I rose to the role of global managing partner for Accenture’s retail practice. Naturally, my exposure to retailers of various kinds in many countries exploded. I learned more about what separated the best companies from the also-rans. The number differentiator and source of competitive advantage has been people, of course. The best companies have inquisitive leaders who are willing to have their hypotheses tested, and in turn are willing to test hypotheses. For me, the worst kind of colleague was the know-it-all. That is the person who will be acting upon inherited logic, and not changing with the times. I always wanted to surround myself with people who would be stretching, reading trade journals, attending conferences, investigating new technologies and new ways of thinking. I also looked for leaders who were at least as good at listening as they were at speaking. The know-it-all pontificates. The listener seeks out the knowledge from others, and looks to collaborate. They also tend to approach problems with the humility to acknowledge that they do not and will not have all the answers. This is the path to sustainable competitive advantage.
The second differentiator increasingly became the organization’s ability to incorporate technology into the organization. So much is brought to life through the creative use of technology. This became readily apparent, and thankfully I had a number of colleagues who were among the brightest IT minds in the business. I learned from them, frankly, and was able to operate at the intersection where business acumen meets technology. That is where so much value can be created. From supply chain to brand review to gaining customer insight to strategy; it all involves technology and the harnessing of data to draw insights.
As we have discussed before, today all businesses are technology businesses to one degree or another. Some companies will recognize this and seize the opportunity. Others will stick their heads in the sand, and the competition will pass them by as a result. People are the secret sauce of any company, and technology has the ability to release people from the mundane to exercise and optimize points of difference. Which ones will leverage technology most creatively so that people can collaborate, and so that those collaborations begin with better data available real-time and faster, better, and more well informed decisions can be made
As Managing Director of executive search firm Korn/Ferry’s North American IT officers practice, Mark Polansky has unique insight into what it takes to rise to, and beyond, CIO.
06-17-2013
The Beyond CIO series has featured 11 executives to date who have made the leap from CIO to larger roles in major corporations from Hewlett-Packard to T.D. Ameritrade to Marsh & McLennan to Fifth Third Bancorp to Schneider National, to name just a few. I recently had a chance to speak with Mark Polansky about this topic to get a different point-of-view on this trend. Polansky is the Managing Director of Korn/Ferry’s North America Information Technology Officers practice, and has been involved in search for over 25 years. He has placed many of the best CIOs of the past three decades. As such, I was curious if he saw the trend of CIOs advancing “beyond” as a trend that would pick up steam, and what he saw as the differentiating factors for those who have succeeded with such opportunities.
(The “Beyond CIO” series kicked off with this article, and the all past interviews in the series can be found here. If you are interested in future articles in the series with executives from companies like Symantec and Aetna, among others, please return to the Technovation column in the coming weeks.)
Peter High: Mark, you have been placing CIOs for a long time, and have among the largest CIO networks in the world. How has the role changed in recent years in your estimation?
Mark Polansky: I’m pleased to say that it has become a more essential role. It used to be that CEOs did not know enough about technology to even ask the right questions about the role. As I would probe what kind of leader they wanted, all too often it was a list of things they did not want, often a description of the CIO they just fired, rather than what they did want.
Among the searches that I am involved in now, more often than not, the CIO will be a report of the CEO. This is a sea change that ensures that the CIO will receive information about corporate plans and strategy unfiltered. When a CIO reports to the CFO, which was for a long time the most prominent reporting relationship, and is now number two, there was a translation that was necessary, as the CFO needed to convey the CEO’s vision to the CIO. Some CFOs can effectively do so, but many cannot. Of course, a number of CIOs have thrived in these scenarios because they are natural networkers, who will find the information they need by building relationships with all members of the c-suite, whether these are reporting relationships or not.
As generation X inherits the earth, and people who have a much more fundamental appreciation of IT become CEOs, I believe that even more CIOs will report directly to CEOs. In fact, many more of those CIOs will become CEOs.
How John Boushy, one of the first great CIOs, became CEO of Ameristar Casino after leading IT at Harrah’s.
06-10-2013
John Boushy was one of the first truly strategic chief information officers in corporate America. At a time when most CIOs were leaders of support organizations that were more akin to order takers than proactive thinkers on behalf of the companies they served, Boushy was developing ideas that would help propel Harrah’s Entertainment to new heights in the casino gaming industry.
As Boushy highlights in my interview with him below, he took a different approach to the CIO role because he had held positions in a wide array of areas, not only in IT. He was the right hand-man to a CEO at a young age, had leadership positions in Marketing and Operations, and had profit and loss responsibility all prior to become CIO. Given the extraordinary reputation he earned at Harrah’s Entertainment is not surprising that he went on to become CEO of Ameristar Casinos. Here’s how he did it.
Peter High: John, even before you were a CIO you had held positions in various functions within the companies that you worked. Why did it occur to you take a non-traditional path, climbing multiple ladders rather than a single one?
John Boushy: I was fortunate that I worked for companies that had a “promote-from-within” culture. There are many advantages to such a culture: leaders take succession planning and career planning seriously; evaluations have real meaning, and there is a give and take between what the company expects of you, and what you hope to do; you are exposed to a broader set of opportunities than at companies that have a tendency to hire solely on past functional experience or from outside the company.
I was naturally curious and enjoyed a challenge, learning about different parts of our business, and thinking about how the function I was previously in could better interact with the one I was now in. I became a “bridge builder” or integrator of sorts.
I had spent the early stages of my career in IT for the first five years, and a major turning point for me was at Holiday Corporation when the CEO at the time, Mike Rose posted an executive assistant position. The role supported the CEO through analysis, special projects, and communication while allowing the person to see the world through the CEO’s eyes, to be present and involved when making key decisions. 37 people applied, and I was fortunate to have been chosen. That opened up a whole new world for me, and it really gave me special insights into growth strategy development, board governance, the importance of talent and how value is created. Three of Mike’s executive assistants went on to become CEO’s.
Early in this role, I realized that at the end of my tenure, one of the leaders that I interacted with on a daily basis would need to hire me. That taught me to develop communication and influencing skills, rather than rely on the implied power that comes from a position close to the CEO.
To listen to a recent Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with John, click here.
After executive IT positions with Verizon Wireless and Boeing, it is no wonder that John Hinshaw’s career took him beyond CIO at this $120 billion company.
06-03-2013
John Hinshaw has been an IT executive at three iconic corporations and with each successive position, the company and the role has increased in size. He was the senior vice president and chief information officer of Verizon Wireless, the head of the Information Solutions business unit and CIO at Boeing, and he is now the executive vice president of Technology and Operations at Hewlett-Packard. In his current role, the CIO and IT report to him, as do several other business units.
Hinshaw has overseen a radical restructuring of HP’s cost structure, rendering a significant portion of the company’s infrastructure into the cloud, developing more common processes, and fostering collaboration across his organization and across the company more generally. Hinshaw’s is an organization that provides the glue to the diverse $120 billion behemoth.
As Hinshaw describes, his knowledge of technology combined with a head for broader business concepts began at an early age.
(The “Beyond CIO” series kicked off with this article, and the all past interviews in the series can be found here. If you are interested in future articles in the series with executives from companies like Symantec, Ameristar Casinos, and Aetna, among others, please return to the Technovation column in the coming weeks.)
Peter High: John, when you joined HP in late 2011, you did so as the executive vice president of Technology and Operations. You are a rare person who has been hired into a “beyond CIO” role from a CIO-plus role (you accomplished the latter by running the Information Solutions business unit while also being the CIO of The Boeing Company). Can you describe your current responsibilities?
John Hinshaw: In my current role, I oversee company operations including global information technology, global sales operations, global procurement, global business shared services, global real estate, and global security. It is a broad set of responsibilities, but it is actually quite an advantage to have the tech functions and the business functions mentioned reporting into the same group.
This was a new role created when I joined. It was an attempt by Meg [Whitman, HP’s CEO] to reduce the number of direct reports that she had, but also to increase the sphere of influence and enhance collaboration across these functions. It has been an important set of changes.
