09/11/17
By Peter High, published on Forbes
When Cynthia Stoddard joined Adobe as chief information officer in June of 2016, she admits she joined an information technology division that was running reasonably well. She is a good judge of such things, having been a CIO multiple times over, most recently at NetApp for over four years. At Adobe, she joined a company in the throes of transforming itself into a cloud company, and an IT department that operated as “customer zero” for the company’s products. She took the game plan that was in place and added her own aspects to the plan.
She indicates in my interview with her that the first step of the IT transformation was making back-office systems real-time, responsive and highly available. Next, she facilitated a customer-experience-centric strategy for IT. A major component of that was leveraging the seven characteristics of the cloud. She explains all of the above while reflecting on her own career in IT, and the steps she has taken to encourage other women to walk in her footsteps, among other topics covered.
Peter High: You have been the CIO for about a year at Adobe, an organization that has been transforming itself into a cloud business. Please provide a brief overview of this journey and the role IT plays.
Cynthia Stoddard: Adobe began the transition to software as a service, away from box software, a number of years ago. It has been a successful transformation and we continue to be leaders in the market. We have three clouds: Document Cloud, Creative Cloud, and Experience Cloud. I am proud to be a part of the organization and to have a great IT team that enables the business, the organization’s journey, and the tremendous amount of growth Adobe has achieved. Since IT was solid when I joined the organization, I have been able to focus my strategy on the future.
Adobe did a fantastic job when they moved from box software to software as a service. When you enter the real-time online software as a service world, all of the back-office systems that were previously hidden, are exposed to the world.
High: How did the Adobe IT team manage that?
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8-28-2017
Jeff Pashalides is the Head of Corporate at Sequoia Capital, one of the most prestigious venture capital firms in the world. As such, he operates at the intersection between those who are shaping the technology landscape (investors and entrepreneurs) and the CEOs, COOs, and CIOs who would invest in those companies or who would articulate needs unmet by current technologies. As such, he has an unusually strong network and an unusually deep reservoir of insights into the future of technology.
Pashalides has had entrepreneurial experiences of his own, having run Finance and Corporate Development at TrueCar. He also led Blackstone’s software as a service advisory practice for a time.
In this interview, he provides insights into the symbiotic relationship between practitioners, the venture community, and the founding community, how to engage this ecosystem more effectively, and the biggest pain points and opportunities for the executives for whom he has served as a guide on all things Silicon Valley.
ADP has been referred to as one of the original cloud companies, as it has long run other companies’ payroll off-premises as a service. Now, the $12 billion human capital management company has become colossus in the industry. It does not lack for competition, however, both among traditional players like Paychex, and among digital native companies like Workday and Zenefits. ADP still enjoys the advantages of scale, producing one in every six paychecks for all non-governmental employees in the United States.
Stuart Sackman has spent the past 25 years at ADP, running various businesses within the company. He has spent nearly two and a half years running Global Product and Technology for the company. In that role, he has enormous influence over the company’s products, but also the methods of delivering them to an increasingly technology savvy customer base.
Sackman also leads an innovation lab that has been branded Lifion. The lab was founded in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, 15 miles east of the company’s Roseland, New Jersey headquarters. Sackman explains the rationale behind the branding of the division, the advantages of its geography, its path forward, and a variety of other topics in this interview.
08/14/2017
As a gifted athlete who was also six feet and five inches tall, all Fortinet founder and CEO Ken Xie wanted to do was to become a professional volleyball player in his native China when he grew up. His parents who were academics at Tsinghua University had other plans for him: to get a PhD at Stanford University and then to return to China to become an academic like them. Xie’s life was transformed at Stanford, as he met fellow students who aspired to start businesses. He notes that the entrepreneurial culture was not something he had ever experienced growing up in China.
He started a company while he was a student to help small companies get online and do so securely. That company would become SIS. He founded a second company, NetScreen, which he would eventually sell to Juniper for $4 billion.
As Xie defines it, these two companies represented the first generation of network security. In 2000, he founded Fortinet to offer the next generation security platform. As the company has grown, it has evolved along with the threat landscape. Fortinet now boasts revenue in excess of $1 billion. In this interview, Xie describes his entrepreneurial path, the culture of innovation that he has fostered at Fortinet, the advantages of having started businesses with his brother Michael Xie, and a variety of other topics.
Peter High: Please describe Fortinet’s business.
Ken Xie: Fortinet was founded in 2000 with the goal of making an impactful change in the network security space. Fortinet is our third company in the same space. Our previous two companies, NetScreen and SIS, dealt with the first generation of network security. However, starting in 2000, this was no longer good enough. It is like air travel, where with the first generation, all you needed was a ticket to get on the airplane, but today, they x-ray your luggage. It is the same thing with the second generation of network security, we need to look inside the connection because most malware comes from permitted connections, whether it comes from the user, the partner, the customer, or from inside. That is how Fortinet started. Seventeen years later, we are nearly 5,000 people strong with over $1 billion in revenue, and growing quickly.
High: You work in a field where you must think proactively, but also where an element of reactiveness is necessary because you need to adapt as the threat landscape evolves. How do you and the company remain current?
08/07/2017
Julia Davis began her career in information technology at the Air Force. She had attended college on a ROTC scholarship, and worked as a software engineer, rising to the rank of captain in the process. For the past 16 years, Davis has been a chief information officer beginning as a divisional CIO at General Electric and eventually becoming CIO of American Safety Insurance a decade ago. For the past four years, she has been the CIO of AFLAC. That depth and diversity of experience has served her well as she has helped transform that $22 billion supplemental health and life insurance company.
AFLAC is based in Columbus, Georgia, a location that can be challenging for hiring millennials. Recognizing that Atlanta is in driving distance, and a more attractive spot for recent college graduates to join, she has developed a robust intern program while also developing an innovation lab of sorts in the company’s Atlanta satellite office. She has also used the opportunity of rethinking that office in creating an “office of the future” concept there. She describes all of the above and more in this interview.
Peter High: Julia, you have been the Chief Information Officer of Aflac for four years. Before that, you were with American Safety Insurance for almost six years. Based on your decade of experience, what role does technology play in the insurance market, particularly from a customer experience perspective and what are some of the strategic ways your IT team brings value to Aflac?
Julia Davis: Insurance was one of the last holdouts to recognize the need to approach the customer in a different way. Historically, we relied heavily on our agent channels and direct customer interaction, which was either face-to-face or phone-to-phone. However, customers began to want to interact with us differently. Property & casualty was the first company in the insurance sector to embrace automation and to leverage technology to expand the opportunities for the customer. Currently, the health and life space is exploring how technology can improve the customer experience. We recognize that folks expect an Amazon-like experience; they want an easy way to do business with us. For Aflac, this means our customers expect their claims to be paid quickly, and want it to happen with limited direct interaction with a person. This is the basis of our One Day Pay initiative. Finding the best way to deliver claim money quickly to our clients drives our technology investment strategy.
High: From our past conversations, I know you put a lot of thought into developing your team. Please describe the apprenticeship program you developed at Aflac and the benefits it has provided the organization.
7/31/2017
A retired four-star general, Stanley McChrystal is the former commander of US and International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) Afghanistan and the former commander of the nation’s premier military counter-terrorism force, Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). He is best known for developing and implementing a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, and for creating a cohesive counter-terrorism organization that revolutionized the interagency operating culture. He will be the first to admit that his retirement did not transpire as planned, but the impact that he has had as a private citizen has also been profound.
In 2001, McChrystal founded the McChrystal Group, a consultancy that provides “innovative leadership solutions to American businesses in order to help them transform and succeed in challenging, dynamic environments,” as his site notes. In that role, he has spent considerable time with CEOs across the private sector, helping them understand that the changes he enacted in the military are quite similar to the changes necessary in the business world: silos need to be eliminated, information must flow more freely across the enterprise, ecosystems must be curated carefully and cared for, and companies must strive to innovate while remaining cognizant of an ever expanding threat landscape.
In 2013, McChrystal published his memoir, My Share of the Task, detailing his years in the military, and in 2015, he published Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, describing how the lessons of his military experience apply more broadly. Both books were New York Times bestsellers. He has also joined the boards of JetBlue and Navistar International.
McChrystal describes all of the above and more in this far ranging interview.
07/03/17
Ann Kono wears a lot of hats at Ares Management, the $1.2 billion alternative asset manager. She is a Partner and Chief Information and Risk Officer of the company, and she is a member of the Management Committee of Ares Management. She also serves as Vice President of Ares Dynamic Credit Allocation Fund, Inc. and CION Ares Diversified Credit Fund. She additionally serves as a member of the Ares Operations Management Group and the Ares Enterprise Risk Committee.
Kono’s ability to push to other areas beyond IT can be traced to her roots in Finance (she has a BA and an MBA both with Finance as the areas of focus), and in consulting, where she became passionate about solving difficult and varied problems for clients. Her financial acumen and customer focus have served her well in building an IT team that adds to both the top and bottom lines of the company. By having responsibility for innovation activities while also serving as the company’s first ever risk officer, she helps ensure the company balances both perspectives well.
During her more than ten years with Ares, she has helped usher in remarkable growth, moving the company an order of magnitude forward from a revenue perspective, and ensuring that technology remains modern, reliable, and flexible. She shares her perspectives on her journey, the many hats she wears, and more in this interview.
Peter High: Ann, you are a Partner, the Chief Information Officer, and the Chief Risk Officer at Ares Management. Please describe your responsibilities.
Ann Kono: My responsibilities have evolved over my last ten years at Ares. I started off managing technology and then quickly took over the investment operations functions. My risk responsibilities began about seven or eight years ago, when we developed an enterprise risk function during the financial crisis. We started with operational risk to create the business resilience that was needed for a large-scale multinational firm. Then, we added information risk, which encapsulates information security and cybersecurity. Finally, we added investment risk, which is core to our offering.
In the last three years, I have also taken on responsibility for what we call the “middle office,” which is the bridge between our investment professionals and our operations professionals. Within our industry, the role of the middle office is to enable the transition of assets between the two parties that are buying and selling transactions and assets within the marketplace.
My most recent set of responsibilities resulted from us brainstorming how to optimize high scale, high volume, operational processes. We developed a group called Global Shared Services. The first function within that is Accounts Payable. As we begin to talk, you will see how technology enables all the functions within this group and how we leverage technology to make these functions more efficient.
High: What is the rationale of having IT and risk together?
By Peter High, published on Forbes 5/22/17
Terry Bradwell is not only an executive at AARP, he is a member. He has risen from chief information officer to chief enterprise strategy and innovation officer at the $1.5 billion, Washington, DC based non-profit that advocates for Americans who are over 50. He notes that though he is 54 years old, he is not the same 54 that his father was, and, in turn, in a few years, a 54 year old at that time will have a different makeup than he does. This notion drives his ambition toward continuous innovation.
This orientation toward innovation began when Bradwell was the company’s chief information officer. Having spent time as a consultant in IBM’s Media and Entertainment practice, he developed a strong business acumen that meant that as he joined IT departments, he did not accept that the department should be relegated to a supporting role.
Bradwell established innovation labs for AARP while he was CIO, but through a series of conversations with AARP CEO Jo Ann Jenkins, he realized there was value in carving off his CIO duties, responsibilities that would go to his key deputy, Amy Doherty, the current AARP CIO. This allowed him to focus more on innovation. His time in IT helped foster relationships across the entire enterprise, and a cognizance of the strategic needs of each. His impact on innovation and strategy made is move beyond CIO logical.
Peter High: Terry, you are the Chief Enterprise Strategy and Innovation Officer at AARP, quite an interesting title. Could you unwind that and provide an overview of your purview?
Terry Bradwell: Providing some context will help explain my role. AARP is arguably the leading voice of and advocate for the 50-plus population. Our purpose is to empower this population to live their best lives. AARP started out as an innovative organization almost 60 years ago, and has continued along that path. The 50-plus population has continued to evolve; I am 54 years old now, but I am not the same 54 year old that my father was, and a few years from now a 54 year old will not be the same 54 year old that I am today. This evolution means that AARP has to innovate to stay relevant and to be able to continue to drive our social mission and advocacy. We are a social mission organization, but it takes revenue to power that.
My role as chief enterprise strategy and innovation officer is to address opportunities and risk for the organization. From a strategy perspective, I am responsible for the creation of a multiyear plan that encompasses our opportunities, threats, and risks. It is my responsibility to develop a strategy that is outcome-focused that the organization can rally around, but is also flexible enough to change as the conditions on the ground change. We use innovation as a primary lever to deliver outcomes that ensure that we strengthen our value proposition for the people who we serve. We are a strong organization, and our strategy aims to keep AARP that way by addressing potential long-term relevancy and revenue risks.
When they are doing well and feeling secure, many companies become complacent. We are fortunate to have a dynamic CEO who recognizes that simply being in a successful position creates a risk. At AARP, we double down and push twice as hard when we are comfortable. That is why my function was created. At the highest level, I am responsible for shaping a strategy that ensures the outcome is a strengthened value proposition through innovation.
High: Innovation can be hard to define. Can you define innovation for AARP and how you measure progress?
Bradwell: At AARP, innovation is strategy-driven and focused in areas that we call health, wealth, and self; these are health security, financial resilience, and personal fulfillment. Let me provide a few examples. In the financial resilience zone, we looked at the trends and recognized that work and jobs are a huge concern for the 50-plus population because jobs are being transformed due to disruption and new categories of jobs created by the sharing and gig economies. Gone are the days when you worked 20 or 30 years for a company and had a pension and a retirement package. We are exploring these trends and innovating around financial resilience. With health security, we are innovating around a huge area within caregiving; which includes bringing products, services, content, and information to individuals who have caregiving challenges. We know from our insights and data that caregiving is a growing challenge. Over the next five to 10 years, there will be 117 million people in this country that will need some form of care, but only about 43 million unpaid caregivers available to provide that care. Likewise, there are only about 4 million paid caregivers. We are innovating around these caregiving shortages and other trends.
High: You run AARP’s innovation lab. Please share examples of the motivations behind setting up the lab, how it was developed and set up, and its place within the larger organization.
By Peter High, published on Forbes 5/15/17
There is a common misconception that Airbnb has disrupted the major hospitality companies in a comparable fashion to the disruption that Uber has wrought upon the taxi industry. In fact, last year was a record year for multiple of the major players. Marriott International earned $17 billion in revenue, and 30 percent of that was earned through digital channels according to the company’s senior vice president of Digital, George Corbin.
Corbin has been a digital leader at Marriott for nearly 15 years, which is to say longer than the term “digital” has been in vogue. As such, he has a lot to say about the so-called disadvantages of the digital immigrant companies relative to their digital native counterparts. Corbin notes that “different operating realities require different operating models and mindsets to enable both the core legacy business and the digital subsidiary to succeed.” Few companies have succeeded as Marriott has in this transformation.
Much of the innovation that has been the focus of Corbin’s recent efforts center around re-thinking the customer experience from searching for a hotel room, to booking, to the period before the stay, through and then after the stay itself. That customer journey is being re-thought with digital channels enhancing each step, as he describes in detail herein. Corbin also offers advice on what sets apart successful chief digital officers from their average to middling counterparts.
Peter High: George, can you describe your purview as the Senior Vice President of Digital at Marriott?
George Corbin: Digital has grown to be a major part of Marriott’s business. Our digital channels, Marriott.com and Marriott Mobile, now make up about 30 percent of the company’s gross revenue. This substantial growth represents a huge shift in the customer and how they buy, and in the business overall. Marriott.com, Marriott mobile, all aspects of the digital component of the customer booking experience, and the parts of a guest’s stay that digital powers, all fall under my umbrella.
High: Digital has grown to be a major part of Marriott’s business. Our digital channels, Marriott.com and Marriott Mobile, now make up about 30 percent of the company’s gross revenue. This substantial growth represents a huge shift in the customer and how they buy, and in the business overall. Marriott.com, Marriott mobile, all aspects of the digital component of the customer booking experience, and the parts of a guest’s stay that digital powers, all fall under my umbrella.
Corbin: We are. Last year our gross revenue via our digital channels, not third party, was over $13 billion gross. It is a material number. For comparison purposes, it is not far behind what Walmart.com does. It often surprises people to find out that we are a big player among consumer facing sites.
High: In our past conversations, I have found your thoughts about the challenges that incumbent companies face as they head toward digital intriguing. In particular, the idea that in some ways companies are operating two businesses in different places on the maturity, or S-curve. Whereas some of the rising digital native organizations only have to deal with the realities of being lower on the S-curve. Please describe some of these challenges and the ways that you have managed through them.
By Peter High, published on Forbes 4/24/17
NetApp is in the throes of a major transformation from a data storage company to a data management company. The implications are profound, and the company’s chief information officer Bill Miller is at the center of a lot of the change. As the CIO of a company that serves many IT departments, he and his team have multiple programs that impact and influence product and service design, from being customer one to running the NetApp-on-NetApp program to helping evolve what the company refers to as the Data Fabric, which is a set of solutions that allow NetApp’s customers “to gracefully, securely, intelligently, and quickly move information across their on-prem and off-prem environments,” as Miller notes in our interview. His IT team tests the new utilities and provides feedback on NetApp’s tools and partner solutions. Miller also notes that his team operates as a bit of a talent factory for the product development organization, for as his team develops insights into the product, some of them are logical candidates to fill needs of that team, either temporarily or permanently.
Peter High: For the past six months, you have been the senior vice president and chief information officer at NetApp. What is in purview of your role?
Bill Miller: I was attracted to this position because it provides me with the opportunity to contribute at the strategic level as NetApp continues to evolve. The reshaping involves functional organizations such as information technology, as well as product lines, product offerings, and how we offer solutions to our customers.
I play two integral roles as the CIO of NetApp. First, I am helping to retool the business as we move toward more cloud offerings and software enabled solutions around data. While the first 24 years of the company were focused on data storage, we are shifting to data management and helping our customers do more with their information. The opportunity to help transform the company and its systems, particularly in the go-to- market space and how we bring those solutions to our customers, appealed to me because it would not be business as usual as a CIO.
The second aspect of the position that intrigued me is that NetApp can utilize its own systems and run its own solutions in its own IT shop to leverage increased productivity, performance, uptime, and a variety of other desirable characteristics. NetApp shares these outcomes not only across the business, but also with customers.
High:Part of the retooling at NetApp includes the programs NetApp-on-NetApp and Customer-1. What role does your team play in these initiatives?
Miller: The two programs that you mentioned and a third that we are spinning up align with our core mission in IT. We relish our roles in all three. In the Customer-1 program, the IT team beta tests our solutions, our products, our software, and the workflows before we introduce them to our customers. The process starts when the Engineering and Product Development teams envision and develop new technologies. The IT team then deploys the product or solution in our hand-crafted, exquisite, global data centers using the latest technologies and NetApp platforms. We provide early feedback to the Product Development and Engineering organizations about how to tune and optimize the products and solutions. IT’s role with the Customer-1 program, however, is not only to be the pre-release customer, but also the early post-release customer. It is a valuable internal feedback loop that optimizes the products by utilizing the partnership, or handshake, that NetApp has between Engineering and IT, which is not the case in every organization.
The second initiative is NetApp-on-NetApp. We run our new products and capabilities in our own operations for a period of time and gather statistics and information such as uptime, availability, change control, and restoration processes. Then, we share what we have learned about best practices both within the company and with our customers through executive briefing visits, roadshows, and through collegial relationships with our peers. We enjoy it because while we are trying to sell a solution to our customers, we also bring information technology and real world experiences to the table which allow us to share the true flavor of what it takes to run the equipment, the platforms, and the software, as well as to discuss the benefits gained by running those solutions.
Our third initiative, the Data Fabric, has evolved from our shift toward becoming a high end, data management solutions company and away from our legacy as a superb storage company. The Data Fabric is a set of solutions that allow our customers to gracefully, securely, intelligently, and quickly move information across their on-prem and off-prem environments. The IT team’s role in this initiative is to test drive the new utilities and provide real time feedback on NetApp’s tools and partner solutions.
High: Are there organizational adaptations that are necessary for accomplishing these new initiatives and having IT more involved in the strategic planning process? Or, is success dependent on the culture and the expectation that this is part of everyone’s job?
