By Peter High, published on Forbes 3/27/17
Yvonne Wassenaar has been the Chief Information Officer of digital intelligence platform company, New Relic, for a bit more than two and a half years. She represents a rising trend among fast growing, Silicon Valley technology companies who reach a certain size after nearly a decade in business, and determine they need a CIO for the first time. (Recent interviewee, Mark Settle of Okta is another example of this.)
In choosing Wassenaar, New Relic’s executive team brought on someone with the killer combination of a technical background as an undergraduate coupled with an MBA followed by an extended period as a partner at Accenture. She brings equal measure of technical and business acumen together with deep problem solving skills. Not surprisingly, she has also gained board access, serving on the boards of multiple organizations, as well. We cover all of the above and more herein.
Peter High: For a little more than two and a half years, you have been the Chief Information Officer of New Relic, a software analytics company founded in 2008. In your own terms, please describe the business and the roles that IT and the CIO position play within the organization.
Yvonne Wassenaar: New Relic is what I call a digital intelligence platform, which in this age of every business becoming a software business, is vitally important. New Relic technology provides a company with insight into what people are doing with their software. For example, because most people bank on their phone or maybe on their laptop, but less at the retail branch, a digital intelligence platform is critical because what matters then, is not how long the teller lines are or how warm the coffee is, but rather, questions like: “How quickly did the app load? How many people were trying to do what type of transaction? Where are people spending their time?” The insight offered by New Relic’s technology is valuable from a developer-operator perspective for designing and running great software. Furthermore, this type of technology is increasingly important from a business perspective because, if done effectively, it offers us new eyes into consumer behavior which will provide us with more insight than we have ever had.
My role as CIO is an interesting one because New Relic is a technology company that was “born in the cloud.” As such, there is some question as to why New Relic even needs a CIO. However, more companies like Octa, DocuSign, and other similar companies “born in the cloud,” have been adding a CIO role to their docket. The reason being, as amazing as technology is, it does not quite run itself yet. The way that I look at my role within New Relic is to, internally, help the company take advantage of the technology that is available to run the business services of the company; things like sales, billing, and so forth. Even more importantly, externally, to get insights into customers; into how we can better serve those customers and to ensure that we are providing the ultimate digitized customer experience. My role is founded on those two principles of ensuring that internally we can leverage the technology well in a decentralized way but with guardrails, and then externally, that we are bringing the best of our insight from technology to bear in partnering with the CTO in thinking about the products we develop and offer to customers.
High: Do you foresee a time, and if so how soon, where the technology will “run itself” to a degree where the CIO will become obsolete?
Wassenaar: I would say if we turn the clock back five to eight years ago, there were some that believed that the CIO role would become extinct because you had data centers in the cloud, you had SaaS applications, you could credit card swipe your way to nirvana in technology. Now I see a resurgence in the role of the CIO for two reasons. The first is that companies today are structured in a functional fashion. This creates a tendency for them to see things only from one angle. That works fine if you are doing a point solution or something that is working in isolation, but few things in a public company fit that mold. For example, technology such as Salesforce, which may have been fine when they were a small company just supporting a sales organization, however, now it is not just a SaaS application, it is a SaaS platform –and it impacts the value chain across the company. First and foremost, you need someone who has a horizontal viewpoint across functions that is geared toward outcomes. The CIO is a perfect role for that because we have cross-function visibility for large applications, for large investments in AWS and Azure, and elsewhere.
The second reason is there is a lot of work to be done around “basic hygiene” when it comes to running technology at scale. There are certain principles that are important to think about whether you are designing for velocity, or for different use cases, or for size and dispersion of transaction; all of these factor into how you might want to structure your enterprise architecture. I have found that the basic functionality of a SaaS app or AWS is easy to get your arms around, but as you augment, and you build on it over the years, unless you have some understanding of how technology runs most effectively, you will start to create a lot of technical debt. You might be blind to this debt, or you may not necessarily understand or appreciate the investments, or the value of things like staging an environment, or how you actually do agile development in a robust, quality, and effective way. I believe the need for both a horizontal viewpoint and the need to bring a technological mindset to how you architect the ecosystem of solutions that is increasingly not just running your business but serving your customers is going to put increased focus on what people call the CIO role, the CTO role, or the chief digitization role. Somebody has got to play that role, and I think for the next five to ten years, it is going to become more important.
High: You began the description of New Relic as a digital intelligence platform. Digital and intelligence are increasingly the domain of other organizations as well, either in concert with IT, or in some cases superseding IT’s involvement. Given your network and your knowledge of the kinds of companies where the CIO leads the conversation on digital intelligence, versus those where they are reacting to it, what differentiates the former versus the latter category in your mind?
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
By Peter High, published on Forbes 2/27/17
Keith Collins has been with SAS Institute for most of the time it has been in existence. He rose through the ranks to be an early leader of research and development, and was a long time chief technology officer of the company. As such he became a leading influencer, not only at SAS, but more generally in the emerging field of what would be known later as big data and analytics. This was a field that SAS founder Jim Goodnight pioneered.
Across Collins’ time in SAS, he has taken on new responsibilities roughly every half decade. When he helped lead the search for a new chief information officer for the company a little less than four years ago, he realized that the challenges and opportunities present in that role would be an interesting step in his career journey. Since taking on those responsibilities, Collins has helped IT become a driver of revenue and efficiency-centric value, helped develop a mentality on his team of being “customer zero” to the company, and led a major shift to the cloud, all of which we cover in depth in this interview.
Peter High: Keith, you have been the Chief Information Officer at SAS for three and a half years, though you have been with the organization for thirty-three years. Before becoming CIO, you were the CTO, and you have run R&D within the organization. How did those roles color your experience as a CIO?
Keith Collins: I am of this new generation of CIO that comes from the line of business. My perspective is not understanding the business of IT. I came into it knowing the business of SAS. Running R&D has a strong technology bent, but it was about the business of SAS not running SAS from a technology standpoint.
High: There are a lot of CIOs and a lot of IT teams that have a distance from where value is created for the enterprise. One of the significant advantages you have from leading a line of business is that you were deeply enmeshed in the products that the organization offers. How have you oriented IT towards how the company develops value for its customers?
Collins: When I was CTO, we always wanted to make sure that we were first movers with SAS products. The CIO reported to me. When she retired, I interviewed CIO candidates. I have a habit of changing roles every four or five years. I started to realize that being CIO was something I had not done. I got a chance to hire myself and fire myself. It was a fantastic journey. I brought knowledge of our customers to the team, how to integrate the customer, and how to work with the different business units. What I bring to the team is that connection. What they bring is their expertise about bringing IT value to that connection.
High: The big challenge for a lot of IT organizations within companies where technology is the business, is finding some form of unique value that can be contributed. There is a joke that in a technology company, everyone believes they can do the CIO’s job better than he or she can. How do you think IT organizations within a technology company can contribute that unique value?
By Peter High, published on Forbes 2/14/17
When Mike Giresi joined Royal Caribbean Cruises as its chief information officer 18 months ago, he did so after having been a CIO three times over, at Tory Burch, Direct Brands, and Godiva Chocolatier. He had depth of knowledge in retail, but not as much depth of experience in travel and hospitality, except as a customer of that industry. That said, he had been exposed to and even driven digital innovations in his prior experiences, especially at Tory Burch, where he saw first hand as the eponymous founder and CEO of the company mastered social media as a driver of growth.
Royal Caribbean introduced its “smart ship,” Quantum of the Seas prior to Giresi’s arrival, but it set a template that he and his team could use as a launching point for further innovation. A key hypothesis of his is that digital is a team sport, touching each part of the company. The CIO and the IT team is well positioned to be a driver of the change given its many touch-points across the enterprise. Giresi shares more specifics on this topic among others in this interview.
Peter High: I thought we would begin with the digital transformation that Royal Caribbean introduced a couple of years ago, with the inception of the Quantum of the Sea as the world’s first “smart ship” with features like faster than ever Wi-Fi, robotic bartenders, virtual balconies, and RFID luggage tags, just to name a few. I am curious to know about where the journey stands now and as you continue to build upon this platform that you created.
Mike Giresi: We are incredibly proud of the progress we made on the Quantum class of ships, where we introduced several technologies that were groundbreaking in the cruise industry. To be completely transparent, I was not part of the company at that point. This was a challenge put forth by our chairman and CEO to the organization to come out with a class of ships that would enable the guest to experience a more immersive and frictionless type of vacation, and that would change the whole aspect of what being on a ship is.
The lessons learned from that are invaluable. We have understood what technologies worked well, which were less well received, and what it means to continuously evolve. Much like anything that is digitally led, there is constant iteration; there should be a consistent learning feedback loop. The entire organization must properly understand how to take the organization forward. Unfortunately, a lot of organizations look at digital as one and done. They think they now have a mobile app, so they are now digital.
I think that Quantum enables this organization to learn where we had digital capabilities, where we were lacking some capabilities, and how we build that into the DNA of the organization. As we evolve it and continue to iterate our solutions forward, it becomes more meaningful to our guests and hopefully productive for our business.
High: Digital, as you mentioned, is a comprehensive topic, and it is a team sport. How is the topic organized within the organization? Who are your primary interlocuters as you think about topics related to digital both internally and externally?
Giresi: Within our organization it starts with our Chairman and CEO. He is completely committed to us being a digital-first business. I think for a lot of organizations, if the senior leadership team is not committed, digital becomes much like other enterprise transformation programs. It either becomes an IT project, which means it is probably going to be sub-optimal at best, or it becomes a bright shiny object that shines bright for a brief period and then disappears into the recesses when something else takes the mantle.
When I joined the company in September 2015, I found an organization that was hungry and had a tremendous passion for technology. If you think about our business, we are a shipbuilding business along with being a hospitality business. We create products that are engineering marvels, and we can put things on ships other companies have not considered or did not think was possible. Because of that, we have tremendous aspirations for what technology should be and how it should work within our organization.
My focus was on harnessing that passion and interconnecting with all the different aspects of the business so that we are starting to talk a common language and think strategically and cross-functionally. Digital here is not an IT project. This is a program led out of the office of our CEO. We have multiple partners throughout the organization to drive it. I think that is the only way it could be successful. When you look at an organization that is undergoing a digital transformation, in most cases the IT function is either not part of the normal business cadence or, if they are, they are not able to transform the organization by themselves.
We have a Digital group. We have a Marketing group. We have multiple Operations groups that work both on the ship and on the shore. All those groups together must work in complete concert. If they do not they will not deliver a solution that is capable of scaling, iterative, and delivering the expected results.
I look at my role as being the inter-connector. It is not for me to own, I do not think anybody owns digital. We must be able to adapt as a cross-functional team to be able to work through the strategies that exist and iterate on those strategies. There is a lot of conflict as you would expect, but that is healthy if you are working towards a common objective. Once you get that objective defined you go after it.
One of the biggest challenges has been creating the DevOps/agile model within the IT organization for a team that was not working that way. It is a huge transformation, and I do not think people understand how impactful it is to the team and the business. Everyone is used to working in a certain way, and now it is completely turned upside down. If you do not put effort into change management and working with people, communicating why we are doing it, and helping to buy their hearts and minds, it is highly unlikely to be successful.
High: This is your fourth role as CIO after turns at Tory Burch, Direct Brands, and Godiva. This is a new industry for you relative to those. In the early days, either in preparation for this role or in the first hundred days upon taking on role, how did you prepare yourself? How did you orient yourself? How did you put yourself in the customer’s shoes? How did you educate yourself as to how technology creates value in this setting?
By Peter High, published on Forbes 2/6/17
Perhaps no one has as many chief information officer roles at as many big, brand-name organizations as Mark Settle. He has been the CIO of Oxy, Arrow Electronics, Corporate Express, BMC Software, IHS, and now Okta. Settle also has a PhD (in Geological Studies from Brown University), and at his roots has an analytical mind that strives to understand the essence of disciplines. It should be no surprise that he has memorialized all that he has learned, passing along important lessons to his peers in his book The Truth from the Trenches: A Practical Guide to the Art of IT Management.
The book does an effective job of articulating the yin and yang nature of the CIO role. For instance, he talks about the need for CIOs to be good managers but that it is even more important that they be great leaders, defining the differences in each attribute. He also indicates that financial acumen is a building block to getting the invitation to take responsibility for innovation. He worries that CIOs often believe that strong technical understanding and management is sufficient, not realizing that developing social bonds with one’s colleagues inside and outside of IT can make or break one’s experience. He shares these details and many others in this interview.
Peter High: Congratulations on a terrific book – The Truth from the Trenches: A Practical Guide to the Art of IT Management. You have an unusual amount of experience with big companies, and multiple companies, as a chief information officer. What was your inspiration for taking time out to think about the important lessons that you would advise other CIOs to live and learn?
Mark Settle: Not only have I done this job in many different industries and companies, but I have an extensive network of contacts and peers who have done the job as well. It is kind of shocking how many mistakes are made repeatedly. It does not have anything to do with what the current technology of the day is – whether we are talking about cloud computing or ERP systems. It does not have to do with the size of the company or the extent of its international operations. The chronic failings of most IT organizations are almost always systemic or endemic. They shoot themselves in the foot in so many common ways repeatedly. Part of [my motivation] was to tell some stories and have an oral tradition of things to watch out for and to avoid, and trying to pass the lessons learned to the next generations of leaders. There is an element of personal therapy as well. This is not me stepping back objectively and critiquing what others have done wrong. It is, in part, a confession of some of the mistakes I have made. It is stunning how many ways we can create problems for ourselves that are predictable in nature. We hide behind a lot of jargon. If other functions in a company were privy to some of the failings in process and leadership and talent management and accountability that are pervasive in many organizations, they would be shocked because they think of IT as being a very sophisticated functional area.
High: One of the things I really liked was your discussion about the dichotomy between leadership versus management. What are your own thoughts about leadership versus management and the role that each one plays?
By Peter High, published on CIO Insight.
02-02-2017
Capital Power is a growth-oriented North American power producer headquartered in Edmonton, Alberta. The company develops, acquires, operates and optimizes power generation from a variety of energy sources. Capital Power owns more than 3,200 megawatts of power generation capacity at 18 facilities across North America. More than 700 megawatts of owned generation capacity is in advanced development in Alberta and Kansas.
Darryl Vleeming is the company’s vice president of information services and CIO. As such, he is responsible for all information services spend, excluding technology, connected directly to the company’s plant control systems. As he tells CIO Insight contributor Peter High, he also has to be a big contributor of the company’s bottom line.
Peter High: How have you organized your team in terms of direct reports and roles?
Darryl Vleeming: I have five direct reports. They are responsible for the following:
High: Please provide some examples of the strategic use of technology in the context of Capital Power.
Vleeming: Our team implemented energy management operations center software and a business intelligence solution that was so successful that we now offer it as a service to multiple other participants in the Alberta Power market. We also developed a custom business intelligence solution used to manage our wind farms in real time, and [another one] used to manage our long-term forecasts (everything from economic indicators to power prices) and analysis as it relates to acquisitions, divestures and new construction around North America.
Click here to read the full article on CIO Insight
By Peter High, published on Forbes
1/24/17
Imagine Pittsburgh in 1979. The Steelers won the Super Bowl, the Pirates won the World Series, and the city nearly went bankrupt. Given the passage of time, it is easy to forget how deeply depressed the city was. Unemployment was nearly at 20 percent.
That same year, a seed was planted that would portend a great renaissance for the city. Carnegie Mellon University started its robotics program that same year. Additionally, a string of forward thinking city leaders were able to see past the end of Pittsburgh’s dominance as a steel town toward a brighter future as a technology-centric economy.
I recently spoke with Mayor William Peduto about this, and he offered many examples of the current administration’s progressive thinking about the union between city government, universities, and private industry. In September, Uber announced that they would pilot their driverless car initiative in Pittsburgh, for instance. Also, last year, Peduto’s chief innovation officer (a rare role in city government) announced the formation of PGH Lab, which provides government assistance to entrepreneurs. Additionally, in 2014, the city government signed an agreement with Carnegie Mellon to utilize that university as Pittsburgh’s own research and development department, while Carnegie Mellon can use the city as its own urban lab. Through it all, Pittsburgh has become a model city for others to learn from.
Peter High: In September of this year there was quite a splash made when Uber began its pilot driverless car initiative in Pittsburgh. How has it gone so far and what are the plans for the foreseeable future?
Bill Peduto: It was about two years in the making. The Uber team came to Pittsburgh with the intent to kick the tires to see if our city could become a global center for their autonomous vehicle research and development. There were not looking for government money or any type of subsidy. They were looking for a partner who was willing to create an urban lab. We had had a couple of decades of experience working with Carnegie Mellon [CMU] on autonomous vehicles in the city and had CMU’s cars already on our streets. It was not a big leap for us to be able to accommodate Uber.
Over the course of the past year and a half, Uber has employed over six-hundred employees in the city, and I expect that number to be over a thousand by the end of 2017. They are committed to spending up to one billion dollars within the city. Almost any time of the day, on numerous occasions, you can see the vehicles downtown within prescribed areas of the city. I expect that over the course of the next few years that geographical footprint will be expanding as well.
High: There are a lot of people who are pontificating as to how quickly driverless cars will become a reality. Given the city’s history with driverless cars, how has this informed your thoughts about how rapidly this might take off more generally for the public?
Peduto: I think if you asked anybody two years ago, “Do you anticipate driverless cars on the streets of an American city in the next 20 months?” there would have been few people who would have thought that that would be a reality. The technology has been there for over a decade, but the culture has not. We could have driverless planes. The technology exists, but the moment somebody would walk onto a plane and there would not be a pilot in the cabin, they would walk off the plane. I do not think the culture has caught up to the technology yet. The way that major automobile manufacturers are promoting their new lines of vehicles, they are doing it through increased autonomous technology. I think that within the next five years you will see a streamlining of different functions of the car which will contain autonomous ability. The sensors that will be utilized will allow the cars to talk to each other. It is not simply having an autonomous vehicle, but a series of vehicles that know exactly how far away to stay from each other, can anticipate what a car three cars ahead is doing and how to react to it before the human eye can even catch it, and then building that network into the public right of way with sensor detectors and cameras that can collect all this data and make our roads much more safe and efficient.
We are already rolling out the next phase of the smartest traffic signals in the world. Our partnership with Carnegie Mellon over a system called SureTrack allows us to capture information in real time and through a network of traffic signals and change the timing of the green lights and the red lights to increase efficiency by 31 percent. You do not have to add a new turning lane or build another roadway, you can use the existing roadways that you have, and through automation and sensors be able to make the system much more efficient and safe for bicyclists and pedestrians as well.
High: You have referenced the partnership the city of Pittsburgh has formed with Carnegie Mellon University. How do you see the lessons of the partnership between city governments, academia, and private business working together?
by Peter High, published on Forbes
5-16-2016
When one thinks about the companies that laid the foundation of the commercial internet, one thinks of companies like Cisco, AOL, IBM, and Sun Microsystems, among others. Sun was co-founded by Scott McNealy, who did not have a technical background, and yet ran one of the most successful tech-centric companies of ‘80s and ‘90s. The company created Java , Solaris Unix, and the Network File System to name three of many products designed by the company. Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems in 2010 for $7.4 billion, and since then, McNealy has invested in and advised a number of technology companies from his home-base in Silicon Valley.
In 2010, he co-founded Wayin, a social intelligence company that integrates social content into new experiences for consumers and delivers greater value and control for brands. The company recently merged with EngageSciences, a British social media firm that McNealy suggests will give Wayin a dominant position in his space.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 16th article in the IT Influencers series. To read past interviews with Meg Whitman, Walt Mossberg, Jim Goodnight, Sir James Dyson, and former Mexican President Vicente Fox, among others, please visit this link.)
Peter High: Steve Case recently wrote a book called The Third Wave in which he describes the three waves of the internet: the first wave from 1985 to 1999 of building the internet, laying the foundation, and organizations like AOL, Sun Microsystems, Cisco would typify that; the second wave from, 2000 to maybe 2015, which was exemplified by the app economy, the mobile revolution, certain social and e-commerce startups. Leaders of the second wave include Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Now, he defines this third wave as involving the Internet of Everything—this ubiquitous connectivity that allows entrepreneurs to transform major, real world sectors.
I would love your thoughts as someone who has been a leader across each of these “waves.” Case posits that this third wave is going to look a lot more like the first one than the second one. He highlights that the second required people, products and platforms, but the first added to that the need for greater partnership and an understanding of the nuances of policy and working with the government. I am curious about your own perspectives on that analysis, as well as your own thoughts about the evolution of the internet as you see it.
Scott McNealy: We talked about all this stuff back in the ‘80s and the ‘90s—the Internet of Things. I was on the cover of Fortune with a Java ring on, and it might have been back in the ‘80s, early ‘90s, and I always used to talk about how price lists would go away and everything will be a bid ask, and I said eventually people will bid out their time by the hour and that will be the last frontier unless government can regulate us back into the dark ages again. The second our company saw the browser and the web and threw Java on it, we started talking about the Internet of Things. I used to say everything with a digital, electrical or biological heartbeat would get connected to the Internet, and people looked at me like “what are you talking about?” We said the network was the computer in the ‘80s; now we call it the cloud. That is smarter: it is only one word instead of a few. But all of these concepts were out there. And no price list or bid ask system. But the biggest challenge we have is the meddling of government bureaucrats getting paid off by big companies to prevent the new stuff from happening. Have you ever met anybody who got in an Uber and thought it needed to be regulated? I am talking about a basic consumer, not somebody with a vested interest in a cab company or city revenues. And even cabs now are getting better because Uber came along and just destroyed them, so why do we need to regulate that stuff? So my biggest concern for the future of the internet and the written and spoken language of computing is government intervention. There is so much, massive, government scope creep that they are getting involved in everything now, whether it be net neutrality, whether somebody is an employee or not, healthcare, we have ignorant voters because they are being trained by the government. The government is a monopoly. We know monopolies are inefficient, not innovative, and corrupt. We know that. That is why we have anti-trust laws. Well, the government is a monopoly. Why do we let them do healthcare and education, or even get near banking? It is stunning to me.
High: In 2010 you founded Wayin, a real-time digital marketing software company. Can you describe the original inspiration for the idea? Since it was founded relatively soon after Sun’s acquisition by Oracle, was this something that had been in your head for a while, or was it something you began to think about in earnest upon breaking away from the company?
3-28-2016
Anne Margulies is the Chief Information Officer of perhaps the best known university on earth, Harvard University. She has been an education technology pioneer for much longer, however. She was the founding Executive Director of MIT OpenCourseWare, the internationally acclaimed initiative to publish the teaching materials for their entire curriculum openly and freely over the Internet. As such, she was involved in some of the earliest precursors of today’s MOOCs.
It should come as no surprise that Marguilies was intricately involved in HarvardX, Harvard’s contribution to edX. For her own team, she has developed what she calls the IT Academy, aggregating training materials to provide common IT skills across her entire department. Therefore, Margulies is a remarkably innovative CIO, especially when it comes to training and education.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. To read future articles like this one, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Anne Margulies, you are the Chief Information Officer of Harvard University, one of the biggest brands in the world. Could you could give a definition of what is within your purview?
Anne Margulies: Harvard is a large, complex, decentralized university. As the University CIO I am responsible for information technology strategies, plans, and policies, as well as all of the University-wide infrastructure and applications that serve all of our schools. In addition, I am directly responsible for end-to-end technology for the central administration and for the faculty of Arts and Sciences, the largest of our schools. It includes our undergraduate, college, as well as our graduate school of Arts and Sciences. It is a large portfolio.
High: You mentioned that strategy is one of those areas that is under your watch. Can you talk about your method of crafting strategic plans and maybe share some of the details of your latest plan?
Margulies: Absolutely. We have an important leadership group here at Harvard called the CIO Council, which I chair. It is comprised of the CIO councils of our professional schools, as well as our Chief Technology Officer and our Chief Information Security Officer. This leadership group is responsible for developing Harvard’s IT strategic plan. The way that we do that is we focus much on those things that make sense and are most important for us to work on together as a university, as opposed to those technologies that should be done separately school by school. Five years ago we developed a strategic plan with key strategic initiatives for the University, and the CIO Council has now also been responsible for overseeing the implementation of the strategic plan. Since then, we have updated and revised the strategic plan because we finished some initiatives and we have added some new ones. It is a process that I think is actually working quite well for Harvard.
3-21-2016
Cars.com is a web 1.0 company, having launched in 1998. It receives roughly thirty million visits per month, and it focuses on the merchandising of new and used vehicles. Kevin Steele leads IT and product for the company, and as such has typical CIO responsibilities, but also is responsible for the Cars.com website, the products the company sells to dealers, the features the company presents to consumers. Therefore, he has an unusually strategic set of responsibilities. Within the past three and a half years, Steele has shepherded in the rise of Cars.com’s mobile presence to reflect the fact that customers increasingly wish to access the site on their smartphones.
In being a customer-centric IT executive, Steele and his team must bear in mind two sets of constituents, both dealers and those who purchase cars. In this interview, Steele describes the methods he uses to stay on top of the needs of each, the sanctity of having a solid strategic planning process, and the need to develop in an agile fashion, among other topics.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. To read more stories like this one, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Kevin, you are the Vice President of Technology at Cars.com, and I wonder if we could begin with a description of Cars.com’s business. I know you are one of the older of the dot com companies, actually having emerged during the internet 1.0 period. This is an organization I would imagine that has gone through a variety of iterations, changes, evolutions, perhaps some pivots through time. I would love to get your high level overview of the business itself as it stands today.
Kevin Steele: Cars.com is essentially a web platform that enables the connection of consumers that are looking to buy vehicles, both new and used, with dealers that are looking to sell vehicles, both new and used. We are a website that gets approximately thirty million visits per month and we focus on the merchandising of new and used vehicles.
High: When you think about the website and your customer you are in between a couple of different parties— both the dealers and the people who are purchasing cars. How do you think about the experience for each of those sets of constituents? And as you are iterating around the development of products, for instance, when you are reaching out to customers does it tend to be a cross-section between those two different sets of constituents?
Steele: Yes, it is. Our objective is to try to strike a balance between the two. Certainly our site is structured and focused on being a consumer-centric site. We look to create features and content and search capabilities that favor the ways that consumers want to engage with vehicle shopping, in particular engage with dealers from a connections standpoint—whether that be viewing a map and how to reach a dealer through a mobile device, or sending a dealer an email and seeking a quote on a vehicle they are interested in. On the dealer side, we look to make sure that we are leveraging our large audience to the best of our abilities to merchandise dealers in a positive light, make sure that they have the largest exposure to consumers for their inventory, and provide them with products to merchandise, attract, and build brand for their dealerships.
3-15-2016
As I have interviewed IT leaders at many companies, there are a handful of companies that seem to have the biggest family trees in producing CIO talent. Few can match Ford Motor Company’s family tree. The CIOs at Boeing and Nike and executives above the CIO rank at Biogen and Deutsche Bank have each spent time in the IT department at Ford. I was curious about this phenomenon, but especially curious to hear from Marcy Klevorn, who for some time had been groomed to become the global CIO of Ford. Her highly regarded predecessor, Nick Smither identified her as a successor and then provided the kinds of opportunities for her in multiple units and geographies to ensure she would have depth and breadth of experience.
Since ascending to the top role in IT a bit more than a year ago, Klevorn has bolstered the IT strategy process and content, she has helped weave IT further into the narrative of customer experience and IoT trends that are important to the industry. All the while, she has used her love of cars as inspiration for new ideas on how IT can make Ford continue to improve.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 34th article in the CIO’s First 100 Days series. To read the prior 33 with the CIOs of companies like Intel, GE, P&G, Kaiser Permanente, and AARP, among many others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: You have spent a little more than a year in role as Chief Information Officer of Ford. You followed a leader who was deemed successful and was retiring. You had been with the organization for a while. I do not imagine it was a surprise as you transitioned to the role of CIO. I imagine this was a smoother transition than coming in from the outside. I would love to understand how you prepared yourself for the role prior to assuming the position, and the sorts of things you did in the early stages of your tenure to set you and your team up for success.
Marcy Klevorn: One thing that we think about at Ford is succession planning, and making sure we have a smooth transition to provide a stable environment for our team to continue to operate. The company continues to change and evolve, so we all need to change and evolve as well. I was conscious of making sure that we had a smooth transition in the handoff.
I worked with Nick Smither, my predecessor, and I did a live interview about the transition, and he offered feedback on why he thought I would be a good candidate and then asked me about what was important to me going forward in the role. Then that was broadcast to the entire company. That was one thing that set this was going to be a smooth handoff. We were aligned on the succession, and we were going to continue to work together until the final days. That was the public way we did that.
The transition happened at a time where Ford was changing, and disrupting itself, going from an automotive manufacturing company to a technology-led company, and a mobility/transportation company. Obviously, IT plays a big part in that. At the same time that this was happening, IT had to re-invent itself as well in response to the direction the company was taking.
Before Nick left, I asked him to participate in a video with me and my IT leadership team that we sent to the employees their first day back at work in 2015 – my first official day in the job – to talk about this transformation. I wanted to include Nick because I thought it was important to give that signal that we were not going to flip the switch and everything was going to change. It is a journey and evolution, and we were going to continue to support Ford as we change the company. Nick was involved in those conversations, so it was going to be orderly and smooth.
