Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal describes his personal journey as a technology journalist and what excites him about the future.
by Peter High, published on Forbes.com
05-27-2013
Walt Mossberg has been called the most influential technology critic in the world. As I prepared for our interview, I was interested in the similarities between Mossberg and the famous wine critic, Robert Parker. Each is a powerful commentator whose opinions can make or break product launches, whose field of criticism is dominated in this country by activities in Northern California. Yet each chooses to live in Maryland, each refuses to accept gifts or perform advisory roles to those companies whose products he critiques, and each relishes the role of criticism even if greater remuneration would follow from joining such companies. Mossberg made quite clear that the mantle of “most influential technology critic” was not one that he chose.
Mossberg’s office is adorned with articles he has written, articles about him in various languages, and a healthy dose of memorabilia from his beloved Boston Red Sox. As I sat down, he graciously walked me through a book that was produced a year ago to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the D:All Things Digital conference. There were photos of people from each of the ten events, and it would have been difficult for me to come up with a technology luminary of great import in the U.S. who has not spoken or at least attended the conference.
This was also the first interview I have ever done where I felt self-conscious about pulling out my personal technology, curious what he might think of the technology choices I have made. As a means of expanding upon an opinion about how he evaluates personal technology products, he used my PC as an example. He said that if one judged by technical specifications alone, my PC would seem no different from a variety of other PCs on the market. Since he had spent significant time with my PC and with its equivalents, however, he indicated that mine was among the most rugged, had a good screen, and also had the best keyboard. That put my mind at rest.
I began our conversation by asking how someone who had made a name for himself as a journalist covering national and international affairs, with a Rolodex filled with a who’s who in those fields would be audacious enough to make a dramatic change in his 40s into a field where he had no educational or professional background. What followed was an interesting conversation about his own professional evolution, as well as some thoughts on what excites him as he looks to the future.
Peter High: Walt, I wanted to begin with the genesis of your journey. Your educational training is in journalism. You were at the Wall Street Journal for 18 years covering national and international affairs before you made a major change professionally and elected to focus on consumer technology with the commencement of your “Personal Technology” column in 1991. How did it occur to you to make this change?
Walt Mossberg: It dates back to 1981 and the purchase of my first computer, a Timex Sinclair. From an early stage, I was hooked. I spent more of my personal time as a tinkerer, training myself. What I found as I looked for technology advice was a dearth of technology writing that spoke to average users, not just hobbyists like me. Most of the writing was geared to people who were much more sophisticated, and it tended to use jargon that was foreign. I saw the need for something for a broader audience.
PH: Was it controversial when you proposed the idea?
WM: I originally proposed the column in 1990, when I was covering national security. With the end of the cold war, and a lot of the changes that were afoot in Eastern Europe, the idea was accepted; the timing was not right given my focus at the time. A year later, however, the timing was better, and “Personal Technology” was born.
Even more interesting was the reaction from friends and government leaders with whom I was regularly in touch at the time. I recall telling then-Secretary of State James Baker about this change, and he could not fathom why I would want to do it.
The prevailing reaction was either that I had been demoted, or that I was sick in the head. Washington, then even more than now, was not a tech-centric community. When the major focus is government, people can’t understand why one would wish to get out of that game and into something so foreign. Fortunately, I was neither demoted nor ill, and I am quite pleased with how things have gone ever since.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes.com
To explore the recent Beyond CIO Series articles, please click here.
To explore the recent CIO-plus Series articles, please click here.
To explore the Technovation Column library, please click here.
Peter High was recently featured in an article published by Canadian Business, a business news trade publication that covered innovative ideas on how to “kick-start” the Canadian economy.
Published May 2013 by Canadian Business
Excerpt from the Article:
Corporate innovation can sometimes seem like a contradiction in terms. Maybe that’s why so many have long scoffed at the idea of a “chief innovation officer.” A single C-suite executive guiding innovation from the top down, after all, just seems to go against so much of what we know about how creativity works. But when you break “innovation” down to what it really means in a corporate setting—essentially, finding new ways to make money—it can start to seem like a much better idea to have someone in charge of that process.
Worldwide, the number of companies with CIOs is growing fast. The percentage of those surveyed for the annual Capgemini Consulting Innovation Leadership Study with an executive in charge of innovation climbed from 33% to 43% between 2011 and 2012. And all those CIOs are getting results. The Capgemini survey ranks corporations on an innovation scale from “laggard” to “leader.” Fully 59% of those in the leader category in 2012 had a formally accountable executive for innovation; only 28% of those in the laggards did.
So how does Canada stack up? It’s hard to say. No one keeps track of how many Canadian companies have adopted CIOs. But anecdotally, Canadians seem to be well behind the United States in that regard. And according to those who study the field, we’re likely missing out.
Peter High, the president of Metis Strategy, a U.S. consultancy, believes there is genuine value in vesting responsibility for innovation in a single executive. High understands the argument that innovation should be everyone’s job. But in his experience, when everyone is supposed to innovate, what usually happens is that nobody does. “If you don’t have somebody who is keeping score, it is very easy for all of those people who have it as one of many goals to do the easy stuff first,” he says.
That’s where the CIO can come in. Terry Stuart became Deloitte Canada’s first CIO just over a year ago. Since then, he’s worked on both driving new processes and new products within Deloitte, as well as helping external customers do the same. He sees his job as part cheerleader, part instigator and part facilitator. At the same time, he knows his work can’t be just slogans and pep talks. “It has to be real and market-relevant,” he says. “I have a real target of creating $100 million in incremental revenue by 2015—per year.”
Stuart doesn’t think every company necessarily needs a chief innovation officer, at least not full-time. (He has other duties at Deloitte.) “You have to fit the organizational construct.…So what might make sense for a large bank might not make sense for the government or for a larger retailer.” The important thing, he believes, is to have a formal innovation plan and to have one person accountable for it. In the end, what matters more is how that person does the job—not what the title is. – Richard Warnica
To read the remaining 35 “Radical Ideas” in the remainder of the article, please visit CanadianBusiness.com
Greg Carmichael managed to first change industries, and then change roles as he climbed from CIO to President at Fifth Third Bank.
05-20-2013
Greg Carmichael was the chief information officer at multiple industrial behemoths before joining Fifth Third Bancorp as CIO in 2003. Although Fifth Third was smaller, revenue-wise, than was his prior employer, Emerson Electric, Carmichael was attracted to the challenge of learning a new industry that was very information dependent. He wove himself deeply into the operations of the business, and was able to drive significant business value from IT. Carmichael’s accomplishments have been rewarded as he has risen to the role of president and chief operation officer of Fifth Third Bancorp. In this interview, Carmichael provides advice for others who might wish to follow in his footsteps.
(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 HP, Symantec, Ameristar Casinos, and Aetna, among others, please return to the Technovation column in the coming weeks.)
Peter High: Greg, you were a long-time IT executive at major industrial companies like General Electric GE +0.17% and Emerson. You then joined your first financial services company when you became the CIO of Fifth Third Bancorp in 2003. How did you approach this new experience in a new industry?
Greg Carmichael: Truth be told, GE and Emerson are each such diverse businesses that I had a series of new businesses to learn about within each company. Therefore, I came to Fifth Third with a pretty solid ability to learn about business drivers quickly, and to establish trusted relationships with new colleagues early on.
The key to any executive’s success is an understanding of the business that they are in. I dove right in when I joined Fifth Third and got to know the executives around the business, and talked to them about their plans, the opportunities they foresaw in the future, and I went to work translating the relevant points into solutions that IT could offer to bring those business plans and opportunities to life.
I have always focused on the creative use of technology to help meet needs. Technology for technology’s sake is pretty useless. Technology that helps the top and bottom lines is a recipe for success. It requires understanding the business drivers, as well as getting to know your colleagues well enough to help fix issues that they’ve identified.
Additional topics covered in the article include:
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 Greg, click here.
Express Scripts CIO Gary Wimberly talks about his approach to vendor management and having a few large vendors as trusted strategic partners.
by Peter High, published on CIOInsight.com
05-17-2013
Gary Wimberly is the CIO of Express Scripts, one of the largest pharmacy benefit management organizations in the U.S. As dramatically as the company has grown, Wimberly has found that selecting better vendors and driving them to become trusted advisors has been a path toward better throughput and innovation. It also has allowed him to populate his own team with a higher concentration of subject matter experts and to lower the cost of IT across the board.
IN SUMMARY
WHO: Gary Wimberly, CIO, Express Scripts
WHAT: Detailing his approach to vendor management and the value he has derived from a more robust vendor management process
WHERE: St. Louis, Missouri
Gary Wimberly has managed IT at Express Scripts through an astonishing era of growth. The company has gone from a $40 billion company to a nearly $100 billion company in just a few years. He has led major activities through the merger with Medco, and ensured that the cost structure of IT has decreased while its capacity to innovate has increased. One of the key weapons in his arsenal has been a better vendor management process than most other companies have. In this interview with CIO Insight contributor Peter High, Wimberly explains how he and his team have accomplished all of these feats.
CIO Insight: Your organization was among the earliest to establish a vendor management office. Clearly, your team has thought about the management of vendor partners. First, I would to know what has driven your use of external partners.
Express Scripts has gone through a period of extraordinary growth. When I joined the company our revenues were one-fifth of what they are now, as we close in on $100 billion in revenues. We operate in an ever-changing environment as well, as health care is as dynamic an industry as you can find. As we have expanded, IT’s responsibilities have grown accordingly. We need to do the traditional technical jobs that IT departments have done for years—the so-called “keeping the lights on.” In this category of work, we are expected to reduce costs to operate base functions each year. Frankly, it’s a constant struggle to do more for the same budget or less.
The bigger challenge and opportunity is that we are increasingly a part of the innovation puzzle at Express Scripts. So much of what we do, from an innovation perspective, has IT at its core, whether it is with our virtual pharmacy or data analytics teams. In order for us to meet these demands while we grow exponentially, vendor partners need to be a big part of the story. Vendors provide critical flexibility to scale our workforce in the face of client and regulatory demands.
To read the full article, please visit CIOInsight.com
Vivek Kundra leveraged his experience as the first ever CIO of the federal government to launch his career into business development for emerging markets.
05-13-2013
Vivek Kundra has had the kind of career that befits someone approaching retirement. He has been a CIO at the city, county, state, and federal levels. He was already established himself as a technology innovator as the chief technology officer of the District of Columbia, a role he took on at the age of 32. Then, at the age of 34, he was appointed by President Obama as the first ever federal chief information officer. He would institute programs that ushered in unprecedented transparency and cost savings in technology. Now, at the ripe old age of 38, Kundra is the executive vice president of Emerging Markets at salesforce.com. As he describes in the interview herein, each stop has built upon the steps prior, and his government service has offered deep insights which he has taken with him to the private sector.
(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 HP, Symantec, Fifth Third Bancorp, Ameristar Casinos, and Aetna, among others, please return to the Technovation column in the coming weeks.)
Peter High: Vivek, you have had quite an interesting career path that has included city, county, state, and federal government IT executive roles. The federal position was as the first ever federal CIO position. You are now in the private sector, holding the title of executive vice president of Emerging Markets for salesforce.com. What did you gain from your experience in government that has prepared you for a role in the private sector?
Vivek Kundra: There are those who may think of government CIO positions are somehow less than equivalent roles in the private sector. I must say that I treasure my time as a government CIO, and I would not trade that experience for anything.
It was an incredible experience as the first ever federal CIO. I came in with a mandate for change, and I was fortunate that the economic malaise that greeted the Obama Administration motivated everyone to tighten their belts. Throughout my career in government, a key driving principle has been to put the citizen first, and to put him or her at the center of all government activities. We hoped to simplify access to government services, and crack down on wasteful spending.
I had an $80 billion budget under my control, but a lot of the thinking and use of technology was decades old. In some ways, my having been a young leader helped in that I was able to ask the classic “ignorant questions”, like “why do we do things that way?”, and “isn’t there a better or more efficient way of doing things?” This led to such initiatives as the Data.gov platform, which provided the public access to the raw data of the executive branch in order to foster public participation and private sector innovation, as well as the Federal IT Dashboard, tracking $80 billion in IT spending, identifying waste, and generating considerable savings.
Peter High conducts a video interview with Ben Allen, an executive that has gone from being a business unit president, to a global CIO, and back to being president of Marsh & McLennan Agency (MMA). Ben explains why all ambitious executives should spend time as a CIO.
05-06-2013
There’s a saying that it’s better to have multiple roles in the same company than having the same role at many companies. The former lets you diversify your experiences, the latter can limit your professional growth. Given how central technology is to business today, it’s all the more important that rising executives consider a tour as a chief information officer along the path of their careers. The experience can really turbocharge their professional growth. I have written quite a bit about CIOs who have been asked to take on greater responsibilities, people I call the CIO-Plus. I am in the throes of writing another series, Beyond CIO, about technology executives who have risen to take on broader responsibilities. Ben Allen of Marsh & McLennan represents both trends. He joined Marsh & McLennan through Kroll, a global risk mitigation services organization that was part of the Marsh portfolio of companies. Allen was CEO of Kroll when Marsh sold it to Altegrity in 2010, but Brian Duperreault, the Marsh & McLennan CEO at the time, did not forget about Allen. The company created a new position in order to bring him back into the fold in May of 2011, that of chief innovation officer. When the company’s chief information officer left later that year, Allen took over those responsibilities, too.
Holding both titles proved to be very beneficial. He was able to develop ideas that instilled more common practices across an operating company in which the IT departments that had traditionally acted autonomously.
When highlighting innovation activities driven by his team, Allen focuses on three broad areas. Allen’s team brings disciplined research capability to help identify unmet needs in the marketplace. This requires deep collaboration with the four operating companies (Marsh, Mercer, Guy Carpenter, and Oliver Wyman) and with customers, as well in order to draw these insights. His team has implemented an enterprise collaboration platform. In the past, people were often stuck in their silos, whether those were the operating companies or the geographies that they operate in. Now, leveraging the tools that Allen has implemented, employees from all over the world can choose to engage literally the entire company, or slices of the company depending on the topic. Allen has developed an action learning program. Members of the product management or service delivery roles are ripe for identifying opportunities for innovation. Allen’s team facilitates sessions with them, and then connects the dots between different parts of the organization.
As a reward for his great work, Allen was promoted to president of Marsh & McLennan Agency (MMA), a wholly owned subsidiary of Marsh, dedicated to serving the insurance needs of middle market companies in the United States.
To listen to Ben Allen’s Forum on World Class IT podcast interview, please click here.
Filippo Passerini provides an overview of the steps that P&G took to improve its analytic capabilities and harness the power of big data in real-time.
by Peter High, published in CIO Insight
05-03-2013
Filippo Passerini, CIO and Group President of Global Business Services of Procter & Gamble, discusses the approach he and his team have taken to get better, more accurate data analysis into the right executives’ hands in a timely fashion. The result is a remarkable track record of innovation.
WHO: Filippo Passerini, CIO and Group President of Global Business Services of Procter & Gamble
WHAT: Sharing his approach to data analytics, brought to life with the better use of big data and collaboration technology
WHERE: Cincinnati, Ohio and 75 countries worldwide
Filippo Passerini has as broad a purview as any CIO in the world. In fact, he is not just the CIO of P&G, but is also the Group President of Global Business Services. In his role as CIO, he understands the power of IT to deliver insights to the organization. In his role as head of Global Business Services, he has taken this a step further, making a multi-national consumer packaged goods behemoth feel a bit smaller. In the past, it was an assumption that good practices on one continent would not be enacted on another continent for months. This thinking reinforces the traditional geographic and product silos of a huge company like P&G. Passerini realized that if he could get the right information as close to real-time as possible, while packaging it in a way that executives around the world could view together, down to having meeting spaces that facilitated such global collaboration, a cultural change could be fostered. What emerged is one of the most impressive examples of leveraging corporate data with business intelligence and analytics.
In this Q&A, Passerini tells CIO Insight contributor Peter High about the steps he took to launch this real-time, data-based revolution in business practices.
CIO Insight: You have developed one of the most sophisticated examples of data analytics in the world. What was the genesis of this? How did you determine that this was necessary?
We are big on anticipating what’s coming, and saw that being able to run the business in real-time was going to be essential for growth. So, we have been focused on analytics for a few years now. We want to create an environment where we turn data into knowledge, and knowledge into insights and actions. As the world’s largest consumer packaged goods company—with nearly $84 billion in sales, operations in 75 countries, and reaching 4.4 billion consumers—we have a lot of data. The ability to analyze this massive amount of data is critical to running the business in real-time and being responsive to changes in the marketplace.
It is not about what happened last month or last year; it is about being able to move the business from a rear-view to a forward-looking view. To move the business to a forward-looking view, we realized we needed one version of the truth. In the past, decision-makers spent time determining sources of the data or who had the most accurate data. This led to a lot of debate before real decisions could be made. We’ve elevated their discussions from the “what” to “why” and “how.” Meaning, why things are happening and how we can make interventions to change the outcome, if needed. We believe analytics will get us to the “why” as fast as possible.
We recognized the value in having access to the right data, at the right time, and with actionable insights. We also realized the power of visualizing that real-time data in an immersive environment. I believe in a complex world where there is an incredible amount of information, visualization helps distill what really matters, and the results have proven the value of our investment.
To read an additional profile on Filippo Passerini in Forbes, please click here.
Bruce Parker believes “running IT like a business” at United Airlines allowed him to take on multiple board positions and ultimately the role of CEO at a small package express cargo airline.
04-29-2013
Bruce Parker has had a remarkable career for someone so humble and unassuming. I have not met many CIOs or CEOs (and he has been both) who are so comfortable in their skin and who have understood their strengths and exploited them while also analyzing gaps in their personal toolkits and filled them, as Parker has done.
Parker spent much of his time at two major airlines, American Airlines and United Airlines, as well as at Ryder. He was the CIO of the last two. While at United Airlines, he was asked by Sapient to join its board. So began a successful career as a member of multiple boards of directors. He finally ascended the corporate ladder beyond CIO to the CEO role of AirNet Systems, a small package express cargo airline.
Perhaps Parker’s greatest legacy has been the number of IT leaders he groomed. He not only left strong successors in place at Ryder and at United, but members of his team have become CIOs or CTOs at companies like ADP, Northern Trust Bank, A&P, Sabre, and Ecolab. Parker describes his path in our interview herein.
(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 HP, Symantec, Schneider National, Fifth Third Bancorp, Ameristar Casinos, and Aetna, among others, please return to the Technovation column in the coming weeks.)
Peter High: Bruce, you were the CIO of Ryder and of United Airlines. You then went on to become a board member of companies, including Sapient. How did you make the transition from IT executive to board member, and what advice would you offer to other IT leaders looking to make the same jump?
Bruce Parker: When I began my career, I did not set off to become a CEO or a member of a board of directors, but I also did not want to limit myself to be just the internal IT person either. I wanted to be in management in a progressive business. Early on, one of the things I did was to get an MBA so that I would be more familiar with business disciplines and have the credibility that comes with that degree. I wanted to know as much about the P&L as I did about ones and zeros.
As a result, when I rose up the IT chain, I did so not just thinking about my role as an order taker or as just an internal service provider, but also as a business leader and change agent. This continued when I became a CIO. I wanted my staff to innovate and to think about and to create business value in what we were doing. I pushed and led my colleagues in other divisions to develop and articulate their strategic plans jointly with us so that we could more definitively provide that value and weave technology through investments that would bring those plans to life. I also pushed my colleagues inside and out of IT to develop success metrics so that we all knew how we defined success.
One other factor that is important to note is that you have to like people. CIOs have not been a social bunch historically. Many prefer to work and think alone. This has limited the careers of some really talented folks, in my mind. It is always important to remember that you are in this business with your peers, and that you are partners in joint success. They and the business need your leadership. I always made a point of getting to know my peers and superiors socially, which helped our interactions professionally and actually made business fun.
As for the topic of boards, there are many companies that serve and sell their services and products to the CIO community and to IT departments generally. They are hungry for insights into how the CIO thinks and works, and how he or she makes decisions. Of course, it is important that you not join boards just to do so; you should only do it if you believe in the company, its leaders, its ethics, and the products or services that they sell. Your involvement should also not be read as an agreement by anyone that you will necessarily use their products or services. As a CIO, one needs to be flexible and unbiased and as a board member, one needs to be independent.
To listen to Bruce Parker’s podcast interview, please visit the Forum on World Class IT.
Tan Chee Hong, Chief Operating Officer of Hactl, the world’s busiest air cargo terminal, explains why he believes this is the “decade of the CIO”
04-22-2013
“The decade of the CIO is here.” So says Tan Chee Hong, a CIO multiple times over who is now a COO. As he explains in my interview herein, the CIO is primed to be the path to the COO and CEO roles. Tan has the ideal background for the IT executive who would rise to a larger role. He has an MBA, he was educated on multiple continents, and he has worked on multiple continents, both as a consultant and as a CIO multiple times over. He was CIO of Jardine Cycle & Carriage when he was plucked by Hong Kong Air Cargo Terminals Limited (Hactl), one of the largest and most sophisticated air cargo terminals in the world, which operates as a gateway for air cargo to and from China. He joined Hactl as Executive Director of Information Services (CIO equivalent) & Operation Development. He was hired as a CIO-plus at the outset of his time with the company, which is a rare feat. No one had ever had that role simultaneously, but in Tan, Hactl had found a rare leader who could connect the dots between creative use of technology to stabilize the operation, and to delight an intricate web of customers and partners.
In March 2012, Tan was elevated to chief operating officer of Hactl, acknowledging his accomplishments in his prior role, and highlighting how deep the operations part of his role had become. He is yet another example of an executive who has moved “Beyond CIO.”
Peter High: Chee Hong, having toured your facility, one really must see it to understand the scale and complexity of the operation. It is a colossus on an edge of Hong Kong International Airport and as one walks around and in the facility, one sees some of the largest planes on earth, a variety of machines used to carefully move freight into and out of those planes, and a particularly sophisticated web of technology used to sort out the cargo to ensure that it gets to the right place as efficiently as possible. Can you provide an insider’s overview of the operation, as well as your role in it?
Tan Chee-Hong: Hactl is the world’s busiest air cargo terminal. We have been in business since 1976, and in 1998, we built SuperTerminal 1 – one of the most advanced air cargo facilities in the world, which we own and operate. Representing an initial investment of $1 billion, and capable of handling 3.5 million tons of cargo per annum, this massive six story facility covers an area of 390,943 square meters.
SuperTerminal 1 was designed and built to do one thing: manage our customers’ cargo in the smartest way. Employing state-of-the-art logistics technology and automated handling systems to control cargo precisely, efficiently, reliably and securely.
Hactl provides seamless, integrated logistics services throughout Southern China – enabling our customers to capitalize on the highly-attractive commercial opportunities presented by the vibrant Chinese market. We partner with more than 100 international airlines and over 1,000 freight forwarders.
As for my role, I am the chief operating officer of Hactl, and my primary role is to work and lead what we refer to as the “One Operation Team” of over 2,000 professionals from service delivery, information services, and operation services. Leverage the best of our people, technology, as well as the facility to serve our customers.
Asiff Hirji, now a Partner at TPG Capital, shares his journey from application developer, to CIO, to President of T.D. Ameritrade
04-15-2013
Where a lot of IT executives think of their careers as a game of checkers, planning one move at a time, Asiff Hirji has thought about his career as a game of chess, planning several moves in advance. He was an engineer by training, and realized he needed a more formal business education, so he got an MBA. He was a CIO multiple times over, most prominently at T.D. Ameritrade, but each time, he took on responsibilities beyond that role, eventually becoming president and COO of T.D. Ameritrade. In this interview, which is drawn from the Forum on World Class IT interview that I conducted with Hirji, he described the way in which he has managed his career, managed his colleagues, and now manages his portfolio of companies as a venture capitalist at TPG.
Peter High: Asiff, I was very interested in reading about your background; you were a CIO for quite some time, in fact, you were the President and CIO of a company called Netfolio in the late 90s. At an early stage in your career, therefore, you saw the connection between the duties of the CIO and the broader responsibilities within the firm. Back in that time, it was not necessarily as common as it is today for people to have ‘CIO-plus’ roles. Could you speak about those early insights that lead to the birth of a hybrid CIO role?
Asiff Hirji: I began life as a developer. I got my undergraduate degree in computer science. I was in the IBM R&D program, but it was there that I realized I was not an exceptional developer. This was back when the coolest technology that IBM had was all in the lab. I joined a group that was supposed to help commercialize the technology, and for me, that’s where the linkage between technology and business began. I realized that while I understood the technology, I really didn’t have a grasp of the business side of things, so I went off and got my MBA.
My big insight is going to sound simplistic, but I think there is a very big difference between companies where technology is the product, an e-commerce company for example, and a company where technology is an important part of delivering the product – manufacturing, retail, etc. It is very hard for someone as a technology leader to move to running the business if they are a technology leader, in a company where technology is not the core product. I don’t think it is impossible, I just think it is a lot harder.
I’ve always been in industries where technology was the product. I started first in financial services where products are entirely virtual and financial services is an industry entirely composed of technology. From there I moved into e-commerce and now to private equity. The theme is that I was always a leader in a business where the technology was integral to the product or service that was being delivered because I was driving the composition of the technology, I was driving, to a great extent, the nature and the strategy of the business.
I think it may be overly simplistic, but I think you have to start there. What role does technology play in the company or the sector you’re in? I think the roles of the technology leader will be very different in those two different environments and will evolve very differently. I think in technology companies, it is more than natural that the technology leader becomes a business leader.
In other companies, the tech leader is a very important part of the leadership team, but is more of an orchestrator of third party capabilities to help keep the place running and keep the product rolling off the assembly line, and not a part of how the business makes money.
To listen to Asiff Hirji’s recent Forum on World Class IT podcast interview, please click here.
