by Peter High, published on Forbes
2-22-2016
Quest Diagnostics is a $7.5 billion provider of diagnostic testing information services. It collects vast amounts of data: twenty billion test results, one hundred fifty million medical test requisitions in 2014, and testing services that touch about one third of the adults in the US. It is up to Lidia Fonseca, Quest Diagnostics’ CIO to organize, tag, and structure the data so that the company can turn information into insights and insights into actions. By effectively categorizing and partitioning the data, the big data conundrum has turned into a massive opportunity for the company, and it has also made that data much more secure.
Fonseca’s depth of experience in data analytics, security, and developing innovations that are leading to revenue augmentation have brought her to the attention of those who need that experience at the board level. In July of 2014, she joined the board of Gannett, a $2.9 billion international media and marketing solutions company. In this interview, she discusses all the above and more, and toward the end of the interview, provides insights into how she successfully became a board-level CIO.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 16th interview in the “Board-Level CIO” series. To read past interviews with CIOs from P&G, Biogen, Kroger, Cardinal Health, and the World Bank Group, among others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: I thought we would begin with your role. You are the Chief Information Officer of Quest Diagnostics. I wonder if you could provide a description of the organization as well as your role within the organization.
Lidia Fonseca: We are a leading provider of diagnostic information services. That is both clinical laboratory services as well as diagnostic information services. 2014 revenues were $7.4 Billion, and we are growing at four percent. Interestingly for us, we see about one third of US adults, and we connect with half of all physicians and hospitals in the country. We are touching the samples of five hundred thousand patients per day. We have an expansive test menu, and thousands of tests ranging from ones for cholesterol and diabetic testing, to advanced genetic, cancer, and neurology testing. We run the full gamut of medical testing.
We count on the services of forty-five thousand employees. We have about seven hundred PhDs and MDs across the company, which is great because harvesting and leveraging that knowledge is pretty significant, as we think about leveraging innovation, both on the medical side, but also on the diagnostic and data side. We operate two thousand two hundred patient service centers around the country. That is a little bit of the scale and scope of Quest.
On the data and technology front, we have the largest private clinical database. We have over twenty billion laboratory testing data points. We have more than fifty thousand providers and hospitals that are leveraging our Care360 connectivity platform. From an interaction and reach standpoint, it has been phenomenal coming here. We integrate with more than four hundred EMR providers. We are integrated with pretty much any EMR that you can think of. If our customer is using it, we are connected with them. We have a patient portal so that patients can access our services directly. We have had more than two million patients access our MyQuest patient portal. We have a significant Big Data and analytics platform that enables population health and gaps in care types of analytics. It is leveraged by partners, including the CDC and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, to name a few.
We have partnered with Inovalon, and we will talk more about that later. By bringing that together, we have a rich data backbone and dataset brought together with what Inovalon has. It is enriching what is already one of the most expansive clinical databases around.
As CIO, in addition to the typical things you would expect a CIO to be responsible for, I have a couple of other responsibilities. One of the things I am responsible for is all of our client-facing products. It is my team that develops those. We also develop the analytics products, whether it is sophisticated reporting or population health tools. Now that is in partnership with other providers as well, bringing a new capability that maybe neither of us could bring on our own. That is a key part of our thinking is that by combining datasets, can you offer something novel to the marketplace.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
1-4-2016
Tom Reilly has had an illustrious career of joining high growth companies and putting them on a path to continued growth and significant events such as an initial public offering (ArcSight) and acquisition (ArcSight by HP and Trigo Technologies by IBM). For a little less than three years, Reilly has been the CEO of Cloudera. Reilly describes Cloudera’s business as developing “open-source software for a world dependent on Big Data. With Cloudera, businesses and other organizations can now interact with the world’s largest data sets at the speed of thought — and ask bigger questions in the pursuit of discovering something incredible.” With investments from the likes of Greylock Partners, Ignition Partners, and Google Ventures, Cloudera has achieved a valuation of over $4 billion, allowing it to join the upper ranks of the so-called unicorns.
Among the largest unicorns, the CEO is typically a founder of the company. Tom is an exception to that rule, though co-founder and former CEO Mike Olson remains with the company as chief strategy officer. Reilly describes a productive relationship with the co-founders, and his goal of continuing their success. In this conversation, he also describes the future plans of the company, including speculation on the company’s public offering, the sectors they focus on, the methods he has used to attract and retain talent, and how he thinks about strategic planning in such a dynamic environment.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this podcast, please visit this link. This is the third interview with CEOs of the so-called “unicorns.” Past interviewees have included Sebastian Thrun of Udacity and Marc Lore of Jet.com. To read future interviews in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Cloudera is an organization that allows others to store, process, and analyze all their data all in one place, which has been a challenge that a lot of organizations have had in recent years. Could you talk a little bit about where the company stands now, its current iteration and evolution, and your current priorities and strategic plan.
Tom Reilly: Let’s talk about the initial value proposition. Traditionally, enterprises have always had a lot of data to grapple with and liked to have it all in one place, but it has become exacerbated in recent years because the world has become interconnected. There is a whole new set of data in volume and complexity that enterprises have not seen before. So our value proposition is to help enterprises and corporations capitalize on all this new data that is coming from the connected world. If they can get this new data they are going to have better understanding of their customers and will be able to service them better, they will be able to introduce new data-driven products and services, and increasingly we are seeing that they will leverage platforms such as ours in gathering more data to mitigate risk and address regulatory pressures. So the theme of that statement there is that our value proposition is to help enterprises transition and transform to this new, interconnected world, which is different in the last ten to fifteen years. That is why technology such as ours is of great interest to these enterprises.
Now what is different today than if you and I talked two years ago is that enterprises now understand the use cases they need to work on to maintain a competitive advantage in this connected world. We are seeing high value business applications come to market at a feverish pace, and that is what is exciting. Two years ago, I think people were still trying to understand: What does this connected world mean? How is it going to affect my industry? What are the technologies I have available to me? And we have seen a fast shift in the last two years to industries transforming.
High: I cannot help but thinking as you say that, Tom, that the path towards developing and combining all of one’s data in a single place is going to be much more complex for an older organization that has been gathering data for years – versus those newer organizations, digital native organizations, for instance, or those created in more recent times, where that complexity is not quite the same. Having collaborated with companies in both of those buckets, can you talk about the path towards success for one versus the other?
Reilly: I will frame it this way. There are what traditionally are called the Web 2.0 companies: the new, modern companies like Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, and Facebook. These enterprises are gathering data and using data to their competitive advantage and the core part of the services is why they are so successful. I think that a lot of what we are doing in this market that we call Big Data, or we like to think of ourselves as delivering the modern data management analytics platform, is to help traditional enterprises become more like those modern enterprises. The challenge traditional enterprises have is the different silos of systems. When they were doing automation twenty years ago, it was all process-centric, application-centric. Today we are helping them become more data-centric and more information-driven than more process-driven. That is our role in this. I often say we are helping traditional enterprises transition and look more like Google. If we can help them do that – whether it is an insurance company, retailer, bank, telecommunications company, or healthcare provider – and make them operate more like Google, Yahoo, or Facebook, they are going to be servicing their customers better, and are going to have more competitive products and services. There are just tremendous advantages.
12-8-2015
Brian Lesser is the CEO of Xaxis, a billion dollar division within $16 billion WPP, a British multinational advertising and public relations company. Lesser has reached this revenue hurdle in less than five years, which has positioned Xaxis among the largest global digital media platforms. The company programmatically connects advertisers and publishers to audiences across all addressable channels. The company’s mission is to “make advertising welcome.” As Lesser notes, this involves advertising reaching the right customer at the right point in a transaction through the right medium with a compelling message. This is easier said than done, but the key to successfully execute this involves better leveraging data and technology.
Lesser highlights the many advantages and the challenges of starting a business within a much larger enterprise as opposed to doing so as a more traditional, venture-backed organization. It has required some cultural changes, but he has been blessed with a CEO who is progressive enough to understand that digital transformation that is necessary. As a result of Lesser’s success, in January he will be promoted to become North American CEO of WPP’s advertising media company, GroupM. This appears to be an acknowledgement that the things Lesser has done well at Xaxis should be embedded more broadly in the company as a whole.
Peter High: Brian, Xaxis is the biggest programmatic media company representing the demand side of the advertising marketplace. Please provide an overview of the business.
Brian Lesser: We started Xaxis about five years ago and the mission was to use data and technology to help advertisers reach and engage with their audiences across all channels and devices. Xaxis is a company that helps advertisers effectively engage with their audiences through the programmatic buying of media. What that means is that we can collect anonymous information about a consumer’s browsing behaviors – what content they like to read, what products they are shopping for, what ads they typically engage with. We gather that information and we build up profiles of users. Once we have those profiles, it means we can go into a marketplace for advertising impressions and enact those profiles in real time. When we see a user in one of these marketplaces or within inventory that we have forward traded or inventory that we own, we can evaluate how valuable that user is to one of our clients and then serve them an advertising impression—whether that be a banner ad, or a video ad, or a social media ad—in real time.
What programmatic advertising allows us to do is disconnect the audience from the context. In traditional media buying, you would define an audience based on the context they are in. So if I am looking for sports fans, I am going to buy sports programming on television or sports websites. Now, because I know so much about the user, I can disconnect that and I can serve relevant advertising to an audience wherever they may be regardless of the context that they are in. Today it is almost a $1 billion revenue business. We have 1,100 people around the world and over 2,000 clients that we service.
High: I was fascinated to learn that a mission of the organization is to make advertising welcome. How does one accomplish that?
Lesser: We fundamentally believe that technology and data can, over time, improve advertising—not just how ads are targeted to a person, but we think that, in general, people do not like interruptive advertising. But in many cases they are very happy to watch a 30 second television commercial if it is a beautiful piece of film and it is engaging and it is for a brand they are interested in. We think that using data and technology we can actually make advertising better for consumers and make advertising welcome for consumers. Because good advertising ceases to become an interruptive message and, in fact, becomes a relevant piece of content.
12-1-2015
Roger Gurnani has been with a Verizon since its inception, and worked for one of the predecessor companies for a while prior to that. As such, he has had a front-row seat in the development of the internet practically since its popular inception. He has been involved in dial-up connectivity through to the fastest wifi connections; he has helped evolve from 1G through 4G phone connectivity, and he and his colleagues are working on 5G at the moment. He has also been involved in digital business in a variety of meaningful ways, including digital streaming of content through practically all functional forms of consumption. Gurnani is now involved in leading one of the biggest Internet of Things implementations in the world, and Verizon is already among the largest revenue companies when it comes to IoT.
Earlier this year, Gurnani was promoted from Global CIO to Chief Information and Technology Architect, a role which essentially encompasses both the CIO and the CTO role. As such, the breadth of his purview is massive. He spoke about all of the above in great depth in this interview.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview in podcast form, please visit this link. This is the 27th interview in the CIO-plus series. To read the prior 26 with CIO-pluses from Nissan-Renault, P&G, Mondelez International, Dunkin’ Brands, McKesson, and EMC, among many others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Roger, I thought we would begin with your role. You are currently the Chief Information and Technology Architect at Verizon. Could you talk a little bit about that role, that new title?
Roger Gurnani: My role encompasses all of technology. Traditionally, we have had two groups: a CTO organization that is focused on our networks – our wireless networks and telecom networks – and then a CIO role that is focused on other information technology and digital technologies to drive customer engagement and run the factory – the business processes. About a year ago, my boss, our CEO, and a few others, and I realized it was time to look at technology more holistically. The world is getting more programmable; everything is becoming software-driven.
My role entails developing our technology strategy, guiding our technology investments, technology planning, which includes technical architecture and roadmaps. I also provide oversight to all our CIOs and CTOs across the organization, across different business units; manage key technology supplier partnerships/relationships; look at various technology shifts that are occurring and marry those into our overall business strategy. That is what I have been doing for the last ten months and it is a new way to leverage technology within our business.
High: Can you talk a bit about some of the things that have made the top of the list of your strategy – some of the imperatives that you and your team are pursuing?
Gurnani: One key area is to look at technology advancements and shifts and figure out how we can leverage those. As we know, no matter which part of technology you look at, you always see performance improving and economics – the price points – keep coming down. For example, in our wireless business, we were the first ones to lead the industry with 4G. We, in fact, deployed our LTE networks a couple of years ahead of the rest of the industry. We are doing the same thing with 5G – the fifth generation of wireless technology. So while others think it is still a few years out, we have started working on 5G in our labs and expect to be conducting field trials in the next several months. The goal is to have a first mover’s advantage and create that competitive edge.
11-30-2015
When Jack Clare joined Dunkin’ Brands, holding company of Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin-Robbins in 2012, he did so after a stint as CIO of Yum! Restaurants International. He took over a traditional IT function, but two and a half years into his time at Dunkin, there was a need for someone to lead corporate strategy for the company. The leadership team called upon Clare to take on these added responsibilities. The leadership team was impressed with the job he had done as CIO, but also were pleased that he had management consulting experience, and had worked on matters of strategy in his past. The fact that so much of business strategy is enabled by information and technology was an added reason. As such, Clare, now the Chief Information and Strategy Officer of Dunkin’ Brands, is part of a small but growing group of CIOs who have taken over the strategy function. In this interview, he describes the reasons why he feels he got the combined role, the reasons why CEOs he spoke with were not surprised, and his thoughts about whether other CIOs will increasingly follow in his footsteps.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 26th interview in the CIO-plus series. To read the prior 25 articles in the series with CIO-pluses from companies like Waste Management, Marsh & McLennan, Walgreen’s, the San Francisco Giants, P&G, and Nissan-Renault, among many others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above and to the left.)
Peter High: You are the Chief Information and Strategy Officer of Dunkin’ Brands. I thought we would begin with the two sides of your role, starting with the CIO role, as that is the role you have had longer. Can you talk a bit about what the Chief Information Officer role entails within Dunkin’ Brands?
Jack Clare: I was hired as the CIO, and it is a somewhat typical enterprise role – global IT for the organization. Being a franchise restaurant retailer though, the nuances here at Dunkin’ are that we have all the traditional corporate IT function that everyone might expect, but we are also focused on the retail systems in our stores and that face our consumers. We have a number of mobile applications and other systems that we support that have become, or evolved in the last few years to, mission critical. Additionally, I handle anything that is directly revenue-driving for our franchisees in store. Those are the two focus areas for us, but I still provision client devices, phones, etc. for our enterprise employees as well as handling all the traditional infrastructure functions.
High: You have the advantage of having IT employees who are presumably customers of your business. As a result, do you find that your employees have the ability to suggest new innovations and new technologies that might enhance the customer experience, as differentiated from an aerospace and defense company, for instance?
Clare: That is true not just in our IT function, but with our peers and colleagues in Marketing, Operations, or any of the functions. We are a broad-based consumer brand, and everyone in the company is also part of the target consumer base. As it has turned out, I have been in branded consumer businesses, on both the consumer packaged goods side and now restaurant retailing, for a number of years. I have always been in the target user base of the particular businesses that I have worked for.
Peter High
11-12-2015
Excerpt from the Article:
Catalent Pharma Solutions is a global provider of advanced delivery technologies and development solutions for drugs, biologics and consumer health products. With more than 80 years of experience, Catalent has proven expertise in bringing more customer products to market faster, enhancing product performance and ensuring reliable clinical and commercial product supply.
Catalent employs approximately 8,700 people, including more than 1,000 scientists, at 31 facilities across five continents, and in 2015 generated more than $1.8 billion in revenue. The company’s brand promise is “More products. Better treatments. Reliably supplied.” In partnership with the company’s customers, including companies of all sizes, Catalent develops, formulates and supplies many life-saving therapies. Catalent’s CIO, Michael Del Priore, shares with CIO Insight how IT plays a role in mergers and acquisitions, the benefits of engaging key strategic vendors and some exciting trends in the pharma industry.
CIO Insight: This is not your first stint as an IT executive at a pharmaceutical company, as you were once the vice president and global head of Commercial Operations IT at Roche. You spent more than three years as CIO of consumer packaged goods company Church & Dwight in between, however. When you returned to the industry, what struck you as having changed during that period from an IT perspective?
Del Priore: Personalized medicine, an emerging practice of medicine that uses an individual’s genetic profile to guide decisions made in regard to the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of disease, was in its early stages when I was at Roche and has progressed significantly since. This requires new ways of analyzing data to develop and deliver better medicines to patients in a more targeted way. Also, the implementation of product serialization, the means by which drugs can be tracked throughout the supply chain to counter threats such as counterfeiting, adulteration and diversion has progressed. The regulatory frameworks were just being developed when I was at Roche and now they are in effect in certain countries. Therefore, we have invested at Catalent to be in position to service customers who have serialization requirements.
CIO Insight: You have been a member of the mergers & acquisitions team at Catalent. What role do you play as IT leader relative to M&A?
Del Priore: I am part of the team that evaluates potential acquisition targets during the due diligence process to determine whether the target company fits with our strategy, assess how it is run and what it would take to integrate it into Catalent. From an IT perspective, we evaluate their current IT landscape and identify integration costs as well as potential synergies. Of course, if we should acquire a company, we execute the integration using our M&A playbook.
To read the full article, please visit CIO Insight
10-27-15
Timothy Kasbe has been a chief information officer at three major companies, Reliance Industries, Sears, and Intrexon. For the past three and a half years, he has been the Chief Operating Officer of Gloria Jeans, a Russian retailer that is among the fastest growing retailers in the world. Kasbe credits his rise to being a business leader first and a technologist second. He also spent a decade as a consultant to the retail industry, and as such advised executives across the industry. He believes that CIOs who are oriented as he is will increasingly find opportunities to rise to the role of COO among others.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 26th article in the Beyond CIO series. To read past interviews with executives from American Express, Biogen, BMO Financial Group, and Allstate, among others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above and to the left.)
Peter High: For those who might not be familiar with it, please provide an overview of Gloria Jeans.
Timothy Kasbe: Gloria Jeans is an apparel retailer based in Russia. We operate over seven hundred stores in eleven time zones of Russia and the Ukraine. Until the recent geopolitical turmoil that is unfolding in our backyard, we had enjoyed solid growth. We are among the fastest growing apparel retailer in the world with 56.4 percent CAGR for the preceding five years. To sustain this growth, we have our own production and we import garments from around the world. We market to all ages and sexes across the fashion spectrum. In Russia, especially, we are number one in the kids and ladies jean segment. It is an exciting company with constant change of the fashion trends and tastes of our customers.
In my role, I have responsibility of technology, supply chain, company strategy, and global expansion of our business. In a role like this, there are no strict boundary lines, as such. At times, I have led HR and recruiting and, last spring, some of our ad campaign. I had a major role to play in that, including writing some lyrics to songs, for instance. It is a matter of taking care of business, no matter what a given trading day throws at you. That is how I would explain my role.
High: That sounds exciting and far-reaching. Can you talk a bit about your strategic priorities for the foreseeable future? What is on your roadmap?
Kasbe: Winston Churchill once said “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Our strategic priority right now is to make sure that this crisis that we are going through is not wasted. We are taking care of all the internal operations and fine-tuning business practices based on some deep learnings which we are gaining, both through the slowdown as well as through some technology that we have been able to afford to get those insights. The constant refining of our business operations is a key priority while we are enjoying such a crisis.
The other part is hedging the risks of where we operate. Our definite priority is to expand in other countries. We have stores opening in Georgia and other places in a couple weeks. A lot of our competition is vanishing, but we keep sharp focus on both our operations and our profit engineering. That is a strategic priority for us. At the same time, we make fashion affordable to all segments of Russia. We look to the next three or five years, when the boom returns to the country, to be ready with the capability and the capacity we need for the product, talent, supply chain, etc. Those are our priorities right now.
11-5-2014
Jay Vijayan, CIO for Tesla Motors, is responsible for the company’s business applications, infrastructure, network, systems operations and security. Learn how he helped IT evolve into a global organization that is a key enabler supporting the growth and success of the company’s business.
CIO Insight: Jay, you’ve been the CIO of Tesla for two years, and you’ve been with the company for nearly three. Can you please highlight the evolution of the IT function during that time?
Jay Vijayan: The IT function in Tesla has been evolving extremely fast with the evolution of the company. The company had quarterly revenue of $39.5M in Q4 2011, but in the last quarter (Q2 2014), we reported quarterly revenue of $769.35M. Our exponential growth is not in revenue alone, but in all areas—from production volume to global sales.
We have produced a car [Tesla Model S] that won all the prestigious awards in the automotive industry in its first year of production. We are continuing to grow and move faster than ever to achieve our goal of accelerating the world’s transition to electric mobility, with a full range of increasingly affordable electric cars.
As part of this exciting and continuing journey, the IT team built Tesla’s entire global systems network and data center infrastructure; software applications for the factory, corporate and retail network; and the necessary information security infrastructure and tools. We continue to ensure that everything we do in IT is aligned with a larger business goal. IT has evolved to a global organization and a key enabler to the global growth and success of our growing business.
CIO Insight: I’ve been fascinated by the fact that during a time when most IT departments chose to buy technology rather than build it, you have a bias toward building your solutions. Why is that?
10-12-15
In early 2015, when Dick Daniels took on the role of Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Kaiser Permanente, he did so on an interim basis. He had been a senior vice president with the company since 2008, and as such, was a known commodity. As he notes in the interview herein, he did not feel pressure as such to focus on quick-wins, or to make dramatic changes to the IT strategy or priorities. Things were not broken, but there were strengths to continue to leverage. One of those is innovation. Kaiser Permanente has a center for innovation, and IT plays a significant role in all aspects of the Center, referred to as the Garfield Center. Daniels highlights the role IT plays, along with the other disciplines that come together to make the Garfield Center effective.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 27th article in the CIO’s First 100 Days series. To read the prior 26 articles with executives from Etihad Aviation Group, Intel, J. Crew, Johnson & Johnson, Deutsche Bank, and General Electric among others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above and to the left of this article.)
Peter High: Dick, you are the Chief Information Officer of Kaiser Permanente, a health care organization that, no doubt, most are familiar with. Your own rise to that role was an interesting one: You had been with Kaiser Permanente, were offered the role on an interim basis, and ultimately, at the conclusion of the period, were given the permanent job. I wonder, especially in light of that interim period, how you set yourself up – how you organized the work in the first one hundred days of your time in role and whether or not that was impacted by the fact that you were there on an interim basis.
Dick Daniels: Well, certainly I came into the interim role from being the leader of shared services for Kaiser Permanente. Since I had been in IT before, I certainly had an understanding of the organization, and I also understood how IT related to other parts at Kaiser Permanente. When I came into the role, the first thing I wanted to do was just keep a steady hand because the IT organization was already on a good trajectory. I knew all my direct reports already and my intent from the start was just to keep the organization moving forward, look at the strategy that was being implemented, and determine what else needed to get done. The way that I went about doing that was I engaged with my direct reports in getting their perspective, and also doing some “voice of the client” interviews—talking with different business partners and getting their perspective. And once I took all that information in, I sat with my direct reports and we came up with some priorities for the IT organization. I made sure I communicated those priorities to both our business partners as well as the IT staff. Frankly, I think the way I went about that would be consistent with the way I would have approached any new job. It worked out well.
High: Dick, it is interesting that, as you point out, this was not a major transformation. You were not entering into a situation that was a disaster that needed to be fixed. In fact, you had been part of the leadership team that made sure that the IT department was on a solid footing. But, as with any change of leadership, it was an opportunity to fine tune some things, and it is interesting that you went about this “listening tour”, if I can paraphrase what you just described. What were some of the changes, some of the fine tunings that you elected to undertake as a result of what you were hearing?
Daniels: It was not a big change agenda that I needed to instill. As I went about talking with our business partners, it was clear that they wanted us to build on top of some of the successful accomplishments that we already had. The fact is that the world is changing around us and they wanted to see us get even better, and certainly they wanted to see us deliver solutions even faster. I think it was a recognition that IT is core to the delivery of the mission at Kaiser Permanente. I had a fairly simple strategy at an overall level and that was to strip in production system performance which, by the way, should never be taken for granted. We have seen this week where there were problems with production systems and the impact they can have. I wanted to make sure that we continued to look and see if there were any opportunities to continue to strengthen that.
And then I wanted to focus on delivering new projects because those new projects provide more functionality to our employees internally, as well as our members externally. We look for opportunities to strengthen that and increase our velocity so that we can deliver solutions faster.
Automatic Data Processing (ADP) has long had a history of being a conservative company, and that conservatism has served it well since its founding in 1949. As the company grew beyond $10 billion in revenue in recent years, it recognized that it needed to reinvigorate the company with a new sense of purpose relative to innovation.
The result was the establishment of the ADP Innovation Lab in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. Some 15 miles east of ADP headquarters in Roseland, New Jersey, the Innovation Lab would be staffed differently, encouraged to used different processes, and have a different style of work environment.
Keith Fulton is the Chief Technology Officer of ADP, and the head of the ADP Innovation Lab. In this interview, he discusses the mission of the Lab, the results it has garnered, the impact it has had back at ADP headquarters, and a variety of other topics.
Peter High: Keith Fulton, I thought we would begin with the charter of the ADP Innovation Lab. If you can take a moment and talk about the genesis of the idea: why was it determined that ADP needed one, and why here in New York City?
Keith Fulton: For some time now, we have been focusing on innovation as a company and pushing it in a broad way. But, the management team felt that we needed to accelerate our efforts. So, we set out to create an environment that fosters creativity, is more collaborative and open, and facilitates us bringing innovative products and features to market faster. We actually started our first lab at our headquarters in Roseland, NJ. In order to attract more top talent, we “doubled down” and built our second lab in an area [Chelsea, in the heart of Midtown] where the right skill sets were in a higher concentration. The top media companies are here; it’s an amazing venture capital and startup scene; and the top visual design and creative firms are a subway ride away. Recently, we opened another location in the growing tech corridor in Pasadena, CA.
High: Let’s talk about those special skill sets, special mindsets and even differences in terms of processes they are using relative to the traditional product development (or IT) organization in Roseland. Can you talk a bit about some of those differences?
Fulton: Sure, we will start with skill sets. By interpreting our mission as saying “we want to build consumer-grade applications with best-in-class user experiences,” we arenot thinking about building just another ERP [Enterprise Resource Planning] system. Our users are consumers. They expect a high-quality experience, like they get from leading technology companies. So, we set out to hire a different kind of developer, from the very beginning.
