As we enter 2023, many technology executives are preparing their organizations for a possible economic downturn. In addition to pursuing growth and transformation initiatives (though perhaps with a tighter budget than before), they are exploring ways in which technology can deliver efficiency and resilience.
In a recent episode of “Forbes Talks”, Peter High joins Diane Brady to discuss the growing role of the CIO and technology in the workplace, as well as the evolving technology landscape in 2023 and beyond.
Watch the Forbes interview with Peter High below:
12/18/2018
By Peter High. Published in Forbes.
Matt Harris has been investing in FinTech companies since before the term was coined. He was initially drawn to the field partially due to the lack of attention it was getting 20 years ago. As he notes, “In the beginning, the incumbents ignored the startups because they thought they were insignificant, and then once the financial crisis hit, they ignored them because they had far bigger problems to deal with.” This was to his advantage.
Now, with a great number of winning investments to his credit, Harris has developed deep perspectives in and made investments to follow those insights into the core four segments of FinTech are payments, lending, investing, and insurance. He also argues in this this interview that real estate is worthy for consideration as a fifth segment. This interview is a remarkable overview of FinTech.
(To listen to an unabridged podcast version of this interview, please click this link. This is the 30th interview in the Tech Influencers series. To listen to past interviews with the likes of former Mexican President Vicente Fox, Sal Khan, Sebastian Thrun, Steve Case, Craig Newmark, Stewart Butterfield, and Meg Whitman, please visit this link. To read future articles in this series, please follow me on on Twitter @PeterAHigh.)
Peter High: You are a Managing Director at Bain Capital Ventures where your area of focus is Financial Technology [FinTech]. Could you define some of the discrete segments that have emerged in FinTech?
Matt Harris: While I had invested in FinTech companies since before the early 2000s, it did not become my sole focus until roughly 17 years ago. At the time, there were not many VC firms that were similarly focused exclusively on FinTech, so I saw an opportunity to get involved. Back then, FinTech was mostly around vendors and about companies’ ability to build technology and sell it to financial services organizations. I called the buyers the incumbents, which were the existing banks, broker-dealers, and insurance carriers. From my view, these companies typically preferred to buy technology from other large organizations, such as Fiserv, FIS, Jack Henry, Accenture, and IBM. Because of this, the opportunity to build new vendors to help the incumbents be more successful was not there.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
12/17/2018
By Peter High. Published on Forbes.
Matt Harris has been investing in FinTech companies since before the term was coined. He was initially drawn to the field partially due to the lack of attention it was getting 20 years ago. I recently caught up with him, and we covered the core four segments of FinTech: payments, lending, investing, and insurance. (He also argues in this this interview that real estate is worthy for consideration as a fifth segment.) The broader interview will be published shortly. Of interest in this segment of our interview was his contrarian perspective on blockchain. He is an investor in crypto-currencies, which he personally invests in, and shares the reasons why he believes blockchain is a hammer in search of nails.
Peter High: You are on the investment committee of a digital currency group, which you have referred to as a firm that provides a front-row seat to cryptocurrencies and blockchain. Cryptocurrencies, specifically Bitcoin, have been in the news quite a bit over the past few years as fortunes have been made and lost because of cryptocurrencies’ extraordinary volatility. What is your thought process on the evolution of cryptocurrencies, and how bullish are you in that space?
Matt Harris: I have been referred to as a Bitcoin maximalist because as it relates to crypto assets, I tend to be dramatically more bullish on Bitcoin than any of the other currencies or assets that have been developed. While I believe fixing prices is all inherently speculative, I get the use case for Bitcoin, and I have spent hundreds of hours speaking to owners of Bitcoin. While there are unfortunately no users of Bitcoin, the owners of Bitcoin tend to believe in it the same way people have believed in gold as a store of value for millennia. This store of value is not necessarily seen as stable on a short-term basis, but it is seen as a store of value that is divorced from the whims of governments and the inflationary tendencies of fiat currencies. It is instinct, rather than universal. Similar to many people, I have never owned gold in my life, but roughly five percent of people with means end up owning gold, and they view it as a hedge against inflation and chaos. For this new generation of mostly young people, the idea that gold has inherent value makes little sense. Frankly, other than the fact that gold has been valued that way for hundreds of years, there is no inherent logic in gold being valuable, so Bitcoin is far more appealing to this demographic.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes.
10/22/2018
Gartner Symposium was last week, and as they do each year at the event, the company has identified a top ten strategic technology trends for the year ahead. Gartner defines “strategic” as those technologies that will have significant disruptive potential over the next five years.” Here is a summary of the trends:
4.30.18
By Peter High, published on Forbes
Halsey Minor was one of the digital media pioneers, having CNET, the first comprehensive consumer-facing technology content publisher, in 1993. The company grew, and, remarkably for the time, grew profitably. He would run the company for eight years, and it would eventually be sold to CBS in 2008 for $1.8 billion.
Halsey would go on to be one of the original investors in Salesforce, and he would be an active advisor to the company in its early days.
He continues to have his hand in a number of companies, including crypto currency company Bitreserve, and Live Planet, an end-to-end virtual reality video system that captures and distributes live and recorded stereoscopic VR and 360 degree video. We discuss all of the above in this interview.
Peter High: Please provide an overview of Bitreserve, and of why you are so excited about crypto currency.
Halsey Minor: Bitreserve was one of the first companies in the crypto space. I realized that bitcoin created a new monetary system, and the problem Bitreserve is looking to solve is getting money from the old monetary system into this new one.
The company was difficult to start because banks would not open bank accounts for companies with “bit” in the name. It was very prejudicial. We bought part of a New Jersey bank and after about two and a half years, we were in the same situation as Coinbase. Coinbase’s success is predicated on their access to US and European banking. Bitreserve is thriving and profitable, but the regulatory aspect was a headache. I thought there were others who were better suited to running the company, so I left and started Live Planet.
High: Could you provide an overview of Live Planet? What are the problems it is trying to solve, and how does this differ than existing solutions?
To read the full interview, please visit Forbes
2/26/18
Gill Haus is the Senior Vice President, Retail and Direct Bank Chief Information Officer at Capital One. In that role, he has overseen many of the changes that have made the Bank synonymous with digital innovation. He believes in having his team regularly experiment with the latest technology to judge applicability to the Bank and its objectives. He has overseen the development of innovation labs that further this mission.
Haus is familiar with the difficult work that companies that are larger and that have been in business for a generation or more must undertake in order to become digital ready. These include cultural changes, process changes, and technology changes. Haus has played a critical role in all three. In this interview, he highlights his excitement for artificial intelligence and blockchain, discusses the value that Capital One has gotten out of developing innovation labs, and more.
Peter High: Yours is a bank that is synonymous with innovation and the move towards digital technologies. Could you provide a bird’s eye view of the transformation that you have helped lead?
Gill Haus: It is like the common saying which is, “Technology changes everything.” If you think about Capital One and who we are, for us to be competitive and provide the services we want to our customers, we must keep up with emerging technologies.
Technologies like the cloud and machine learning are more commonly available than they have ever been in the past. The cost of entry for someone to compete with us is small and our competitive moat only helps to a certain point.
Our focus has been on systematically modernizing everything we do. That means we upgrade our legacy systems and go to the cloud. We have approached this in a few ways. One is making sure that we have the right talent on the ground and making sure that the talent has the tools and systems that they need and want to use.
It is one thing for us to say, “Come work at the bank,” which is already not that appetizing to a technologist.” It is another to say, “Come work in the bank, and you will be able to make your own projects if you have an idea.” “Come work in a bank. You will be the first to move the bank’s platform on to the cloud.” “Come to the bank. You will be able to explore different ways of using data, machine learning, etc.”
Denis Robitaille has does not consider himself a technologist despite being the Global Chief Information Officer of the World Bank Group. He came to IT after a career in Operations at the Bank. When he ascended to his current role, first as acting CIO in November 2016 and then as the permanent CIO in June of 2017, he had profound understanding of how the World Bank operated.
He sees a profound connection between technology and the Bank’s mission to end extreme poverty by 2030 and boost prosperity for the bottom 40 percent of populations in every country. He also believes that Blockchain and artificial intelligence will have enormous impacts on the people who the World Bank serves. We cover all of the above and much more in this conversation.
Peter High: You are the second ever Global CIO of the World Bank. While you are not a technologist, you have tremendous operational experience and have done the “actual work” of the World Bank. The Bank’s mission is to end extreme poverty by 2030 and boost prosperity for the bottom 40 percent of populations in every country. What role does technology play in accomplishing these big goals?
Denis Robitaille: Technology is part of our daily life, and I think we are at the beginning of a big transformation in IT. The role of emerging technologies for development is important. There is a big movement at the World Bank Group to explore how disruptive emerging technologies can help development.
We are looking at how we can use technology in a positive way. The entire organization is mobilized behind this goal. For us in ITS, our focus is to support internal clients and operations and to partner with different parts of the World Bank Group to make sure that we can leverage emerging technology.
High: Yours is an organization that has also been going through a cloud transformation. Can you talk about the work going into building a more sustainable technology stack to support the work of the World Bank?
Robitaille: We are a little bit behind, but our objectives are the same. We have a large scale of legacy applications. Last year, we prepared a new three-year strategy. Part of this strategy is to bring some agility and move to the cloud.
We used to be a traditional IT shop of waterfall, and now I am introducing agile and DevOps combined. We want to enable our lines of business and deliver faster for our clients. When we look at our strategies and solutions for the business, we want to triage faster and deliver more flexibly.
2/19/18
Larry Sanger founded Wikipedia with Jimmy Wales in January 2001. He set many of the early policies of Wikipedia. He ended up leaving the organization the following year, and has been a critic of it for, among other reasons, its narrow definitions of credible sources, and the fact that so few people ultimately are responsible for the creation and editing of content on Wikipedia.
In the years since, Sanger has been involved in a number of encyclopedia projects, including Citizendium, which he founded in 2006.
Roughly two years ago, Sanger began to informally advise a new startup called Everipedia, a for-profit wiki-based encyclopedia. Theodor Forselius is a co-founder of the company and its chief executive officer. The core of its content is that of Wikipedia, but it has built more content on top of that base, making it the largest English language encyclopedia. Sanger officially joined the company as chief information officer in December of 2017, lured in part due to the company’s commitment to blockchain technology, which was announced on December 6. They indicated it would convert to using blockchain and a cryptocurrency token called IQ to encourage content creation. The IQ tokens are intended to be exchangeable for Bitcoin. Forselius believes this model will create incentives for broader content creation while also fostering access in countries that currently block Wikipedia such as Iran and Turkey.
I recently spoke with Forselius and Sanger about all of the above and more.
Peter High: Theodor, could you talk about the genesis of Everipedia as well as an overview of the business model and the company’s mission?
Theodor Forselius: Everipedia started a little over two years ago as a project between my co-founder Sam Kazemian and myself while he was still studying at UCLA. Originally, we wanted to build a more modern and inclusive version of Wikipedia because we were both editors and huge fans of Wikipedia. However, we felt like there was a lot that was outdated and that we could do better.
For example, their editing interface, talk pages for discussions, citations, their community guidelines and policies were all things that we liked but that we wanted to improve. That is why we started Everipedia.
We decided to implement blockchain technology because we are a for-profit startup, not a non-profit like Wikipedia, so we had to find ways to monetize. Originally, we partnered with companies and we started running adds on the site. However, it didn’t feel right saying that we were better than Wikipedia while we were running ads, so we started looking at other monetization models. Wikipedia’s model of running massive donation banners did not feel like an innovative solution either. We started looking at other venues of monetization and my co-founder Sam came up with the idea of tokenizing the entire knowledge base and decentralizing it. That way, there is no central entity that needs to run ads to be able to monetize because the whole system will be completely peer-to-peer.
High: Larry, in 2001 you co-founded Wikipedia. As of a few months ago, you joined Everipedia as the Chief Information Officer. Could you share your thoughts about the differences between the two businesses?
Larry Sanger: The co-founders of the company contacted me and told me that Everipedia was moving to blockchain, which is a major difference in its own right. This shift to the blockchain got me interested because the blockchain enables something that I have been wanting to do for a long time.
2/12/18
To say that Dow CIO Melanie Kalmar has a lot on her plate is an understatement. She has helped integrate two major acquisitions (Dow Corning and Dupont), is in the process of planning their divestiture, leads digital initiatives across the enterprise, runs Corporate Facilities, helped establish and runs Dow Services Business, all on top of running cybersecurity and infrastructure. Hers is a role that has all traditional aspects of IT, but also encompasses revenue-generating business and helps drive both customer and employee experience, as well. She covers this vast purview, the implications of the acquisitions and divestitures, the role that technologies like artificial intelligence and blockchain will play at Dow, among many other topics.
Peter High: Can you provide a brief overview of your purview at Dow?
Melanie Kalmer: I am Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Dow Chemical, and my role is a great example of how the responsibilities of a CIO continue to evolve. I have responsibilities for both global IT as well as for our Corporate Facilities and Dow Services Business. In terms of traditional IT accountability, I have responsibilities on a global scale including delivering the typical broad set of IT services. The fun part of that is the unique services that our business units need. I also have other corporate infrastructure responsibilities focused on our end-to-end processes and other stuff we do with our business units.
I also have accountability for cybersecurity and analytics, and I have a fun role in leading the digital transformation for the company. Even though I lead that, I want to be clear it is a collaborative effort that engages all facets of the company. That is how I like to operate, by engaging with the other executives and being extremely transparent about what we are doing. We hit the mark and we can deliver the expected business outcomes.
The other half is Corporate Facilities. What I focus on there is the offices and labs around the globe and creating modern capabilities. We want the spaces where people work to be vibrant and allow for greater collaboration. We are building new facilities and remodeling others to bring in more technology and create more opportunities for people to collide. The buzz word in the industry is collision space.
We just opened a new headquarters late last summer, and it is a beautiful building. There is a lot of buzz around the building about how it is driving more collaboration and a better flow of information. People can hear what others are talking about. We have open environments across most of our buildings.
As we embark on the huge set of activities that are coming out of our big M&A around Dow Corning and DuPont, we are working on what we call our rooftop strategy. This involves us deciding what facilities will go with which company, and how we get better space utilization in the buildings that we do occupy.
Under Corporate Facilities, we also manage real estate, which will help drive financial assessments on the real estate and sell assets. Much of this, be it land or buildings, we have acquired through many acquisitions over the years.
Finally, I run Dow Services Business [DSP]. The business was formed to support our joint ventures and our divestiture activities. The team that I lead manages contracts to provide services such as IT services, procurement services, and site services, to name a few examples. Those services are provided to our joint venture partners or to buyers of businesses that we divest.
The team focuses on ensuring we have those contracts in place but also acts as a liaison between those DSP customers and the groups within Dow that are providing the services. That has allowed us to leverage Dow’s capabilities on both a transitional basis and on a long-term basis and allows the joint ventures or the buyers of a divested business from Dow to focus on meeting their business objectives instead of having to figure out how to run the day-to-day business. We can provide those services for them while they are starting up.
Those are the three key areas I focus on. Additionally, I sit on the board for a reinsurance company [Dorinco Reinsurance Company] and participate in a lot of external activities such as around STEM. This is my role in a nutshell.
High: You spoke about the digital responsibilities that you have. Can you share how you define digital, as well as the ways in which you lead that from a transformation perspective?
2/5/18
Dover Corporation is a diverse $7 billion revenue company, with businesses in Energy, Engineered Systems, Fluids, and Refrigeration, and Food Equipment. Given this diversity, across the company’s 60 years, it had never had an enterprise chief information officer. That changed roughly two years ago when Dinu Parel was named to that post. In the time since, he has provided strategy, governance, and shared services to the traditionally decentralized IT function.
In this interview, Parel notes that his vision continues to be to allow the business units to have some latitude in selecting strategic technology, but two areas of focus on standardization have been security and infrastructure. He is currently focused on transforming IT from a traditional, back-office support function to an advisory function that helps drive business growth and innovative technologies such as Blockchain.
Peter High: You are the CIO of Dover Corporation, a diversified company with $7 billion in revenue. Could you provide an overview of the operations?
Dinu Parel: We are a diversified global manufacturer that provides product innovation. We are headquartered right outside of Chicago and have 29,000 employees around the world. We have a customer-focused business model. We are currently structured and organized into four segments.
Each of these segments has multiple operating companies that roll up under them and work directly with our end customers.Making decisions close to the customer while working on thousands of products enables and empowers an ownership mindset in the operating companies.
High: Dover Corporation is a very diverse set of businesses. How is IT organized?
Parel: Each operating company has an IT team that is responsible for providing the end-to-end IT function for the business. Each of the four segments has an IT leader, and a few key roles are consolidated at the segment level. Since I joined the company as the CIO, we have been on a transformation journey of establishing the enterprise organization from the ground up. For the enterprise organization, the vision is working with the operating companies and working with each of the segments to drive the enterprise strategy for IT, the governance, and providing centralized services.
It has been exciting for all of us who have been involved in this transformation because it is changing the historically decentralized IT operating model.
High: You were the first ever CIO at Dover Corporation. When you rose to the role two years ago, the organization had not had one in its 60 plus years of operation. What was the genesis of the role? How did the company conclude that time was right for a CIO?
