Five Steps to become a successful IT Executive
by Peter High, published on Forbes.com
02-05-2013
I recently caught up with Piyush Singh, the senior vice president and chief information officer of Great American Insurance Group’s Property and Casualty Operations. He was excited to share with me five lessons he has distilled from his almost ten years as a CIO – nearly seven of them at his current company – that he believes are lessons to follow for CIOs to be successful. He refers to them as “Piyush’s Big Five”.
1. CIOs can ensure that a higher percentage of IT budget is spent on development than on maintenance Many IT departments spend too much on maintenance and not enough on developing new and innovative capabilities for the companies within which they operate. Singh quotes the standard metric in the insurance industry of 80/20 (80% spent on maintenance and 20% spent on development). Getting to parity in maintenance and development and driving for a higher percentage on development can be a daunting task. He makes the point that too many CIOs wait for the business to change the agenda or expect them to concede on maintenance issues to achieve the flip. However CIOs need to do the heavy-lifting to right-size the intellectual capital /workforce plan, optimize and eliminate redundancies and operate more efficiently. This heavy lifting, something they prefer to avoid, is required to achieve a better balance.
A business-oriented CIO realizes that he or she needs to be a partner to support the business environment. In fact, to wait is to wait for the issue to become even more difficult to solve. CIOs who display creativity and ingenuity to focus on development will be respected for being responsible custodians of the limited people and financial resources that are available to them.
The remaining four of the “Big Five” are:
2. A CIO’s accessibility to other business executives is directly correlated with the degree to which he/she is integrated into the business strategy
3. Develop solutions, not just automation
4. A CIO’s longevity in his or her job (more than the average tenure) can be inversely correlated to his/her ability to develop game-changing ideas and take risks.
5. On-time and on-budget is not the only criteria for project success. Sustainable competitive value proposition should be a critical metric.
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To read the full article, please visit Forbes.com
To explore the Technovation Column library, please click here.
To listen to Piyush Singh’s Forum on World Class IT podcast interview, please click here.
As CIO of the San Francisco Giants and San Jose Giants Chairman, Bill Schlough represents a unique example of how CIOs are adopting business leadership roles of entire organizations.
02-04-2013
Upon meeting him, you would not necessarily guess that Bill Schlough collects jewelry, but he is the proud owner of two of the most coveted rings in America: World Series Championship rings that he earned as CIO of the San Francisco Giants, garnered after the 2010 and 2012 teams won it all.
For our baseball fan readers, please try to push past the jealousy to understand the many interesting aspects of Schlough’s story. He graduated from Duke with an engineering degree and has an MBA from Wharton, and has been working in sports since World Cup USA 1994, the biggest soccer tournament in the world. He worked at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, and landed as the CIO of the San Francisco Giants in 1999, giving him an impressively long tenure in that role.
Schlough’s “plus” came as he and his colleagues with the Giants saw an opportunity to increase the synergies between the Major League team and the Class-A affiliate San Jose Giants. He first joined San Jose as interim-CEO on a six month stint starting in August of 2011. He has continued on as Chairman of that club, identifying more opportunities to collaborate, grow the business and leverage technology for player development purposes along the way, as he mentions in my interview with him below.
(This is the tenth in the CIO-plus series. To read the prior eight interviews with the CIO-pluses from Waste Management, McKesson, Merck, Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, Ameristar Casinos, Owens Corning, Marsh & McLennan, ADP, and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, please click this link. To receive notice about future interviews in the series with CIO-pluses of P&G and others, please click visit the column’s page. in the weeks to come.)
Peter High: Bill, you have a unique CIO-plus role. For a time you were not only CIO of the Giants as you are now and have been for 14 years, but you were also the interim-CEO of the Giants’ minor league affiliate, the Class A San Jose Giants. You now serve as the Chairman of that team. Let’s begin with the business’s rationale in purchasing the minor league affiliate, as I know that is not a common practice in Major League Baseball.
Bill Schlough: The San Francisco Giants acquired a majority interest in the San Jose Giants a few years ago, and you are right – it is not a common practice in Major League Baseball. Most team’s minor league affiliates run independently. The San Francisco Giants made this decision and it’s a strategic decision particularly at the single-A level, because that’s where a lot of player development takes place. Player development is a key priority for us, and it really makes sense to have those incentives aligned. We feel that if the club remained independent with independent ownership, they may favor profitability over developing and winning and that really is what it’s all about for us at the minor league level is developing and winning. And the reason we want to win is not because it drives revenues, we want to win because we want our players to grow accustomed to that winning culture.
We’re both in the same business, of course. The San Jose Giants draw a few thousand fans per game whereas we draw forty plus thousand fans a game, but we’re both in the business of baseball. The San Jose Giants host 70 games, we host 81 in San Francisco and we all have similar functions like Marketing and Accounting (to name only two), but they actually have some similar IT needs that cut across the entire organization. We felt it made a lot of sense to create linkages between those different business units and the minor league level and the major league level.
Additional topics covered in the article include:
To explore other CIO-plus Series articles, please click here.
To listen to Bill Schlough’s Forum on World Class IT podcast interview, please click here.
Jo-ann Olsovsky discusses how BNSF Railway supports its widespread and increasingly mobile workforce of 40,000 employees with unified communications.
by Peter High, published on CIOInsight.com
Excerpt from the Article
Jo-ann Olsovsky, the vice president and CIO of BNSF Railway, shares her experiences with implementing unified communications, the benefits BNSF has gained, and the company’s immediate IT challenges.
IN SUMMARY
WHO: Jo-ann Olsovsky, VP and CIO of BNSF Railway WHAT: Sharing her experiences about BNSF Railway’s approach to unified communications WHERE: Fort Worth, Texas WHY: To provide CIOs and other IT leaders with actionable advice and insights about how to implement unified communications.
Jo-ann Olsovsky knows a thing or two about telecommunications. Prior to becoming CIO of BNSF Railway in June 2008, she was the assistant vice president of telecommunications at BNSF, and previously, she was the director of enterprise network services and technology support services at Verizon Communications. Soon after joining BNSF, Olsovsky recognized that unified communications would be an important area to invest in as the workforce that she supported was increasingly mobile.
In this Q&A, Olsovsky tells CIO Insight contributor Peter High about the steps she has taken relative to unified communications, the value her company has derived, and her future plans.
CIO Insight: How did the idea to pursue unified communications become a strategic imperative for BNSF Railway?
There was a combination of factors that led us to pursue that strategy. First, our workforce is very mobile. We have 40,000 employees all over the United States, and many of them are not in traditional office settings or spend a significant portion of their work day on the go. As a result, we needed to tailor communications tools that fit their needs.
Second, our voicemail system was no longer adequately supported. With our focus on being good stewards of the technology investments that we deploy, we jokingly say that “We will replace no asset before its time.” Well, our voicemail system had clearly reached its time. This added an additional reason to understand what the marketplace offered when it came to advanced communications solutions.
As CIO and Chief Supply Chain Officer, Praveen Chopra realized that to succeed in supply chain, succeeding in IT would be a must.
01-29-2013
Praveen Chopra worked in supply chain in consulting for Accenture, and at The Home Depot for a number of years before early 2005 when he took over that function for Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, a nearly $2 billion pediatric healthcare group with three hospitals and 17 neighborhood locations in Greater Atlanta. As he recognized that the success of supply chain was increasingly dependent on system integration, data integrity, and other key aspects typically run by the IT department, he determined that tight integration between IT and supply chain was a must. After a series of conversations with the CFO of the company, Chopra took over responsibility of IT as CIO in early 2006 while keeping his supply chain responsibilities. He had a deep foundation in technology dating back to his undergraduate degree in computer science and engineering, but continuing through to his deep collaborations with CIOs over the years. As a result, Chopra was able to transition successfully to the CIO-plus role, and to garner tremendous value at the nexus between IT and supply chain, as he highlights in my interview below.
(This is the ninth in the CIO-plus series. To read the prior eight interviews with the CIO-pluses from Waste Management, McKesson, Merck, Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, Ameristar Casinos, Owens Corning, Marsh & McLennan, and ADP, please click this link. To receive notice about future interviews in the series with CIO-pluses of the San Francisco Giants, and P&G, please click visit the column’s page. in the weeks to come.)
Peter High: Let’s start with a little history, Praveen. Since 2000, you have been a supply chain executive. How did you find your way into supply chain, and what are the differences between managing the supply chain for a major retailer (The Home Depot) versus a healthcare organization (your current employer, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta)?
Praveen Chopra: When I was consulting, I became curious about supply chain. What attracted me was the ability to look beyond functional boundaries in an organization to improve the flow of products and information. I took a chance and with a little bit of luck, got involved with supply chain engagements at major corporations. I loved it and never looked back after that. Interestingly, I find the supply chain discipline to be similar across industries. It’s the drivers that make it different and complex. At The Home Depot, the focus was on product assortment, product volume, and distribution of the vendors and stores. At Children’s the focus is on the time sensitivity, availability and expiration of supplies which are necessary to help kids, and to make their lives better.
As CIO and Corporate VP of Product Development, Mike Capone of ADP drives business innovation through IT.
01-28-2013
Automatic Data Processing’s Mike Capone is someone who has long had a foot in information technology and a foot in the business. He has a bachelor’s degree in computer science, but he also has an MBA. He spent time as a vice president of IT at ADP, but he went on to be a General Manager of a global HR & payroll outsourcing business within the company. In July 2008, he became ADP’s first ever global Chief Information Officer. When he took on that role, he did so as a business executive would, however. He pushed IT ever closer to the rest of the organization. He developed a mandate for innovation during the heart of the economic malaise. He also accompanied sales executives on sales calls with customers, and pushed his team to do the same. In so doing, IT’s value to the company grew. Therefore, in the second half of 2012, Capone added the role of Corporate Vice President of Product Development to his CIO title, adding a very business-centric role to his one in IT. His is an example of an IT executive who successfully amplifies the value of IT to the point where it is only logical that he take over a key business role. As Capone points out in my interview with him, nearly all ADP products have IT components to them, so having an executive who oversees both worlds provides tremendous synergy and efficiency.
(This is the eighth in the CIO-plus series. To read the prior seven interviews with the CIO-pluses from Waste Management, McKesson, Merck, Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, Ameristar Casinos, Owens Corning, and Marsh & McLennan, please click this link. To receive notice about future interviews in the series with CIO-pluses of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, the San Francisco Giants, and P&G, please click visit the column’s page. in the weeks to come.)
Peter High: Mike, you took an interesting path to become the first ever CIO of ADP, as you were the general manager of an GlobalView, a multilingual, multicurrency human resources outsourcing solution, prior to running technology. What did you do differently given that path than you would have done as someone promoted from within IT?
Mike Capone: Quite honestly, I cannot imagine ascending into the CIO role without having the line operating experience. The role of IT is always the same – driving business success while delivering the best possible user experience. But as a staff function, IT does not always get measured the way a client facing operation would – particularly in the areas of client satisfaction and market acceptance of your solutions. Having come from a business where many of my clients were Fortune 50 companies, including many top technology organizations, I knew that the key to success was to get very close to your clients and exceed their expectations. Driving this culture through the organization was priority one.
Also having come from a line operation role, I had some built-in credibility with the senior operating executives. I spoke their language and had walked many miles in their shoes. This was very helpful as we set out to develop our strategic plans.
To listen to Mike Capone’s Forum on World Class IT podcast interview, please click here.
As CIO and Chief Innovation Officer, Ben Allen of Mash & McLennan strives to drive collaboration and synergies across four multi-billion dollar operating companies.
01-21-2013
Ben Allen has had an unusual path to his current role as chief information officer and chief innovation officer at Marsh & McLennan. He rose to the role of president and chief executive officer of Kroll, Inc., which was an operating company within Marsh & McLennan until it was sold by that company to Altegrity, Inc. in August 2010. Soon after the divestiture, Allen re-joined Marsh & McLennan with the first of his CIO titles, that of chief innovation officer. He was the first person to hold that title in the company. A large portion of his responsibilities were centered on facilitating greater collaboration and value creation from across the company. Interestingly enough, that is a role the best chief information officers play, as they have reason to collaborate with leaders of each business unit and division of a company often in ways that those leaders do not with each other. These similarities were not lost on Allen, who assumed his second CIO role, that of chief information officer, less than a year after his return to Marsh & McLennan.
(This is the seventh in the CIO-plus series. To read the prior six interviews with the CIO-pluses from Waste Management, McKesson, Merck, Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, Ameristar Casinos, and Owens Corning, please click this link. To receive notice about future interviews in the series with CIO-pluses of ADP, the San Francisco Giants, and P&G, please click visit the column’s page. in the weeks to come. To listen to a podcast interview I recently conducted with Ben Allen, please visit this link.)
Peter High: Ben, let’s begin with your path to the CIO-squared role that you have, as chief information officer and chief innovation officer. You used to be the CEO of one of Marsh & McLennan’s operating companies, Kroll. After that business was divested, you rejoined Marsh & McLennan as chief innovation officer first, and then as chief information officer second. Now that you provide services to your former peers, what advantages have you seen by having walked a mile in their shoes?
Ben Allen: It’s always easier to be successful serving a customer/client when you’ve walked in their shoes. You more fully appreciate what they are trying to accomplish and the difficult trade-off decisions that need to be made. The Marsh & McLennan business leaders know that I’ve run a global P&L and carried the pressures associated with that responsibility. We speak the same language and want the same outcome, and there is no doubt that makes a big difference.
Frankly, I also was a tough customer of the IT function when I was on the other side of the fence. I recall what I liked about it, and where I saw room for improvement. That has given me different perspective and rationale in approaching the second of my CIO roles, that of chief information officer.
To listen to Ben Allen’s Forum on World Class IT podcast interview, please click here.
As CIO and Chief Shared Services Officer, David Johns has yielded valued for Owens Corning through Centers of Excellence.
01-14-2013
David Johns has been CIO of Owens Corning since 1994, which is extraordinary considering the average tenure of CIOs today is roughly four years. In that time, he has had multiple “pluses” to his CIO role. He is currently the Senior Vice President, Chief Information Officer, and Chief Shared Services Officer. Prior to his current role, he was Senior Vice President, Chief Information Officer and Chief Supply Chain Officer. He also led the Owens Corning Technology Center as Chief Technology Officer for a time. Johns’ experience at Owens Corning highlights how solid work done in transforming IT, developing shared services or centers of excellence can yield value that translates to other parts of the organization quite well. Especially since the economic malaise began in earnest in 2008, a number of leading CIOs have seized the opportunity to develop shared services have have yielded more efficiencies and value for their companies in the process. There is no reason why this should not be done in other parts of the organization as well. The best CIOs, like Johns, realize that they are ideally equipped to lead this in other parts of the organization, as is highlighted in my interview with him below.
(This is the sixth in the CIO-plus series. To read the prior five interviews with the CIO-pluses from Waste Management, McKesson, Merck, Red Robin Gourmet Burgers and Ameristar Casinos, please click this link.)
Peter High: David, you led a transformation in Owens Corning’s IT department that seems to have been the model for the transformation of other parts of the organization. What is the common theme among these transformations?
David Johns: Peter, you are right that there have been multiple transformations. The common theme between what we have done in IT and what we are now doing well beyond IT is transforming into a services model. What was Global Information Technology is now referred to as Global Information Services. The idea of developing standard services for our diverse set of businesses to leverage makes a lot of sense in our minds. IT was simply the first of these services, but as we have extended the service philosophy to other parts of the organization, I have had the opportunity to lead other areas in transformation. In some cases, we have turned over responsibilities for a function to a business leader elsewhere in the company, and in others, they have remained in my organization.
Peter High: Can you talk a little bit about your time in having responsibility for supply chain and the rationale for moving it back in the business?
David Johns: Supply chain is a relatively new science, and when we first implemented our global ERP instance of SAP, and built the integration across the phases of plan, source, make, and deliver, it made sense to pull supply chain as a function out and try and build new set of capabilities and new processes and really try to leverage the technology we were able to deploy across the corporation. Once we did that and we made good progress in setting out some of the basic principles. We felt it made sense to move back the supply chain strategy and execution into the business first once we set up those processes and got them operating. We then kept customer service and logistics within the organization, probably for four or five more years.
A lot of this had to do with the fact that we had a different number of businesses reporting into the CEO, and then we made an organizational change within the business where the building materials business moved under one group president. At that point, it made sense to move it out of a centralized organization; so we moved logistics and customer service into different areas such as Composites and Building Materials.
We took shared services out of some of the business and moved it into IT to focus on building additional platforms. We reached a point where it made sense to move supply chain back into the business. The continuum we traveled was from strategy to execution to stable organization.
To listen to David John’s Forum on World Class IT podcast interview, please click here.
As the SVP of IT and HR, Shellen Quish provides leadership over two functions that not all business leaders would see as logical pairings.
01-07-2013
Information Technology and Human Resources are corporate divisions that have been quite different historically. When Ameristar Casinos CIO Sheleen Quish was asked to take over Human Resources as well, it might have seemed to be a strange combination, but always an autodidact, she threw herself into her new role, and uncovered many similarities between these traditionally disparate departments. In the process, she transformed each to be more proactive, more consultative, and more cognizant of its contribution to the overall value to the company. As it turns out, Quish has long looked to have a broad set of responsibilities, and has constantly sought opportunities to broaden the value she could offer to each company for which she has worked. In the process, she has become a model CIO-plus.
(This is the fifth in the CIO-plus series. To read the prior four interviews with the CIO-pluses from Waste Management, McKesson, Merck, and Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, please click this link.)
Peter High: Sheleen, having started your career in business roles of various kinds, how did you find yourself in IT leadership roles?
Sheleen Quish: After working for several years in marketing for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kentucky, I had the opportunity to transition into operations which gave me a new understanding of the company’s day to day challenges and our customers’ frustrations. I was immediately motivated to look for ways to drive improvements, lower costs and reduce the layers of management. Since I lacked operations experience, my approach was to go to the people who did the work and ask them for advice on how to make things better. Eight out of ten of the problems brought to my attention were rooted in how systems or processes worked. We tackled a number of these process failures together with very effective results. What I learned through this experience was how critical IT was to the internal operations of the organization. I also discovered that the IT department was the least motivated to work with the business; furthermore, this department was the most poorly managed, which meant its team members had negative attitudes, poor morale and were not working to their fullest potential.
My solution was to go to the CEO and offer to manage IT along with the other operational departments. The CFO in charge of IT happily relinquished IT to focus on other projects. First I hired a successful CIO from another industry. As an Executive Vice President, I was now managing Human Resources, Facilities, Claims Processing, Customer Service, Billing, Medicare Operations and IT. All departments were working together, making things happen and making them happen quickly. We became known as a high performance, agile and low-cost operation. The reputation I earned in Kentucky, led to my recruitment to CIO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois, an organization four times larger. They saw that I could align IT with operations, which 20 years ago was a new concept. Beginning my first role in IT as the CIO seemed like career suicide, but I just did it. I stuck to the same driving principles that made me successful: build relationships and deliver good project management so that things get done and internal customers’ expectations are met or exceeded. The trick is having an outstanding cadre of team members who are committed to that same goal.
To listen to Sheleen Quish’s Forum on World Class IT podcast interview, please click here.
CTO David Fike discusses security issues at Marsh & McLennan, including automation, the policing aspect of security and the importance of tracking metrics.
12-13-2012
WHO: David Fike, Chief Technology Officer, Marsh & McLennan Companies, Inc.
WHAT: Sharing his perspectives on how best to secure corporate networks
WHERE: New York, NY
WHY: To provide CIOs and other IT leaders with actionable advice and insights about how best to secure the corporate network during increasingly complex times
David Fike, Chief Technology Officer of Marsh & McLennan Companies, Inc., shares his perspectives on the steps he has taken to secure his company’s corporate network and the methods he uses to stay a step ahead of those who would try to compromise his corporate systems. Upon arrival as CTO at Marsh & McLennan in 2006, Fike formed MMC Global Technology Infrastructure, which was the first significant attempt to centralize infrastructure across the company. Among other reasons, part of Fike’s logic in so doing was to develop a more secure corporate network.
Describe your approach to securing the corporate network at Marsh & McLennan Companies.
The most important thing to realize is that our security posture and what we’re defending against changes rapidly and in real time. The biggest challenge is that what you do today to protect your network isn’t going to protect you tomorrow.
The security landscape and types of threats are changing faster than ever. The bad guys are getting smarter and their “time to market” is getting shorter. As I think back to the security challenges we faced in 2006, it is like we are living in a completely different world today.
The starting point is building a strong, knowledgeable team. It is important to hire a seasoned chief information security officer to lead the change and ultimately take responsibility for security. You can spend all the money in the world, but if you have the wrong people it won’t matter, so people are really essential.
As your program evolves, a natural conflict will arise between colleagues wanting to access new technologies and services and your need to mitigate the security risks behind those new things. Some examples include:
Additional topics covered in this article include:
A reflection on technology thought leadership in 2012.
As 2012 draws to a close, I have gathered what I believe to be the best technology writing and interviews from the year. I have divided the articles into the categories of people, organizations, and ideas. As you put your feet up in front of the fire this holiday season, consider giving these articles and interviews a look and listen.
People:
Elon Musk has been called the reincarnation of Thomas Edison. One of his companies is shooting for the stars (or at least for Mars), and another hopes to revolutionize the auto industry. In this Bloomberg Businessweek profile entitled “Elon Musk, the 21st Century Industrialist“, Ashlee Vance provides a solid snapshot of this dynamic leader. (To get an insider’s perspective on Tesla Motors, listen to my interview with Tesla IT head, Jay Vijayan.)
I am admittedly a devotee of Charlie Rose, and there are three tech-centric interviews of his from the past year that are worth watching:
Mary Meeker was an early advocate for and investor in the dot-com companies of the late ‘90s. She is back, and this Forbes profile by Eric Savitz entitled “Meeker: new Job, But Still Queen of the Net” provides interesting insights into where she sees the next big things emerging from her perch at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
Organizations:
With all of the articles written about big data, Charles Duhigg’s New York Times Magazine article “How Companies Learn Your Secrets” does an outstanding job at digging deep into the methods used by Target regarding its approach to data analytics to make better decisions.
Ideas:
I have been interested to see a number of business and IT executives who I counsel gaining a better appreciation for culture. This is not a technology piece per se, but is especially relevant for the department of the company that is most vulnerable to having great people leave for greener pastures. In this Fast Company article, Shawn Parr argues that “Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch.”
