by Peter High, published on Forbes
9-29-15
For the past 18 years, Mark Brewer has been the CIO of Seagate the $14 billion provider of electronic data storage products. That is an unusually long tenure, and it means that he has been present for a dramatic evolution, as the company has gone from a manufacturer of disk drives to a cloud-centric company, as well. When Brewer began at Seagate, there were 150 companies making disk drives. Now Seagate is among the last in the field. In that time, the company has diversified into solid state products, cloud services and technology, with plans to diversify further. In addition to traditional IT functions, Brewer also has responsibility for manufacturing execution systems in the factories, which is typically under the purview of Engineering or Operations functions.
(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 to the upper left of this page.)
Peter High: I thought we would begin with a description of Seagate’s business. No doubt many of our listeners would know of Seagate, but would love to hear in your own world, especially as a veteran of the organization, what it is that Seagate does and also your role in IT.
Mark Brewer: Seagate Technology is one of the long-term tech companies. We have been making disk drives for a long time. There used to be hundred fifty companies doing that; it is down to just a handful now. So we are in the traditional disk drive space. We also have solid state products, some cloud services and technology that we are now selling, and so we are diversifying a little bit. But we are essentially located in the storage space. That is who we are at Seagate. I am the CIO here. I have been the CIO for a long time. I have the traditional IT functions and then I also have responsibility for the manufacturing execution systems in our factories, which typically is in engineering or operations, but here it is in IT.
High: And speaking of your role as CIO, you have an unusually long tenure as the IT lead for Seagate—nearly 18 years—which is really extraordinary at a time when the average tenure is still between four and five years for Chief Information Officers. One of the things that really intrigued me as I thought about that, Mark, is no doubt you have introduced—perhaps even your team built– technologies that you have had to replace; that you have had to transition from the pre-cloud computing period to now more of a software-as-a-service type model solution. You became CIO at a time when offshoring was not necessarily as much a lever that IT leaders were choosing to pull. Now that is much more part of the bailiwick of IT, and again a lever IT leaders choose to pull, and in fact create an IT operation that is more efficient, just to mention a couple of trends. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that evolution over the 18 years, and how IT has changed and how IT specifically at Seagate has.
Brewer: It is interesting to be at a place and see things come in and go out, and we have definitely been here long enough to do that. I tell people that fundamentally I am responsible for everything: everything that is a problem is my fault because I have been here so long. We have had large turnovers in technology. We certainly went through the Y2K era here, and then the dot com era, and then all the supply chain optimization that people did for a while, and then the downturns in 2008/2009. So it has been an interesting journey along the way.
We have done all of the things you mentioned. We have big cloud plays with OpenStack, and we use Google’s applications and Salesforce in the cloud. We have done offshoring. We have big operations in Asia. We have a bit of an advantage in that a lot of our footprint is sitting in Asia, so I have a majority of the IT staff sitting in Malaysia and Thailand and China and Singapore. So we are a global organization IT-wise and leverage really great talent around the world to do the things that we have to do. And then we have third party partners in India and elsewhere that we use at times for projects and for support. We have gone through that whole role. One of the dangers of being a place so long is that you could have made a decision seven or eight years ago on a particular item and in your mind that decision has been made, but the world has changed in seven or eight years, and you need to make a different decision. I think that is one of the risks I have, and I talk about it here, and I talk about it with my staff and with others, that I have to be careful, and my staff has to be careful, that we are not locked into a decision that we made years ago just because I have been here a long time and a some of my IT players have been here long time.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
9-28-15
Mike Capone is the chief operating officer of the largest technology company founded in New York by market capitalization – Medidata Solutions, which is a $400 million revenue company that provides cloud-based solutions for life sciences companies. Though new to the industry when he joined the company a year ago, he joined with a deep background in technology, having been the first ever Global CIO of ADP, in product development, having run that function at the global human capital management company. He also has a passion for health issues both personally and professionally, both of which led him to Medidata Solutions, where, as he notes in this interview, he felt he could change the world. This opportunity also put him squarely in the middle of the growing technology scene in New York City.
(This is the 25th article in the “Beyond CIO” series. To read past interviews with executives at Biogen, American Express, Marsh & McLennan, Aetna, Allstate, and Waste Management, please click this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above and to the left.)
Peter High: Please describe Medidata Solutions’ business.
Mike Capone: Medidata Solutions is the world’s leading provider of cloud software for clinical trials. More than half the clinical trials in the world are powered by Medidata’s platform today.The whole value proposition for Medidata is that we make clinical trials run better.
In today’s world, as you can imagine, there are diseases waiting for cures. There are people with rare diseases who really do not have a lot of hope unless we can come up with new compounds and solutions to help cure these diseases. We help biotech companies and pharmaceutical companies bring drugs to market faster, ensure their trials are run the correct way, and provide for a solution to help them get better submissions to the FDA so there are no data quality problems with things that could derail it.
Conversely, we actually help bad drugs fail faster. You do not want to keep making investments in compounds that are not going to make it. Our technology helps pharmaceutical companies get better insight into how their drugs perform in a trial and make faster decisions.
High: Can you talk about the role that information and data analytics play in all of this?
Capone: Like most companies, we started out as a transaction company, a data capture for clinical trials. We made a horrible paper process a lot better. As the technology has gotten better, as our platform has picked up more clients and we have gotten more and more information, we have transformed into much more of an analytics company. So now, not only are we able to help facilitate clinical trials by making sure that all of the data capture and all of the technology is there to make the trial run smoothly. Now we are able to build out analytics to actually support better decision making in trials, as well as benchmark.
9-21-15
When I last spoke with Andi Karaboutis a little over a year ago, she was the CIO of Dell. Shortly after we spoke, she moved to $10 billion, Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotechnology firm, Biogen as the Executive Vice President of Technology and Business Solutions, a role definitively above the CIO role. She also joined the board of Advance Auto Parts, the $10 billion provider of automotive aftermarket parts based in Roanoke, Virginia.
I was interested to learn how Karaboutis managed the transition to a new, dynamic industry, to a broader set of responsibilities, what those responsibilities entailed, and how she pursued the path to board membership. Exemplifying the best characteristics of curious and humble autodidact, Karaboutis realized that she needed to learn the language of biotechnology so that she could speak lucidly with her new colleagues about the opportunities they hoped to seize and the issues they hoped to resolve. She also recognized that with her growing responsibilities coupled with her being on the audit committee of the Advance Auto Parts board both required a greater familiarity with finance, so she took a course on the topic. This training has served her well, as she notes herein, and has allowed her to achieve level of what she refers to as “professional athleticism.”
Our conversation also covered technical innovation in the biotechnology setting, including the topic of the “Internet of Me.”
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the 23rd interview in the CIO’s First 100 Days series, and the 14th interview in the Board Level CIO series. To read past interviews with executives in either of these series, click this link for the CIO’s First 100 Days, and this link for the Board Level CIO. To read future articles in either series, please click the “Follow” link to the upper left part of this page.)
Peter High: You are the Executive Vice President of Technology and Business Solutions at Biogen. Could you take a moment to describe the areas under your purview in that role?
Andi Karaboutis: I have been in the role for about a year. It is made up of several areas, but the key three areas are around the core technology of IT and enterprise IT that you find in most companies, which is technology for the capabilities of the company – everything to operate the company from telecommunications all the way through to systems of records and systems of engagement.
The second big component is around scientific computing, which you will find in biotechnology/bio-pharma companies, and it is computing that will help us with more insights, more biological targets, and marrying data sets together that are interesting to our scientists. For example, if you think about genomics and genetics, longitudinal data, phenotypical data and things like that, to help with what is a very big goal now in the life sciences/healthcare industry around personalized medicine and better targeting molecules to help with therapeutics. So it is a very focus, in a nutshell, Peter.
The third component is to meaningfully disrupt the business with technology very akin to some of the internal capabilities, but, again, focused around the external environment of our business. And these could be wearables, consumables, ingestables, and things like that. So there is Internet of Things, “Internet of Me” as we call it here where, again back to personalized medicine, but the second component focusing heavily on data and analytics and informatics and scientific computing. There are a few other components of which I am responsible for, but those are the key three areas of the role. So, as you can see, it is beyond the internal enterprise IT capabilities.
High: Having gotten to know, advise, study, and interview a great number of people now who have made this transition from CIO to something definitively beyond CIO, this is the first example, that I know of, of somebody who went from CIO within one company to a beyond-CIO set of responsibilities at a new company and a new industry. How did it occur to you and to Biogen to pursue this broader set of responsibilities in this new organization and in a new industry?
Karaboutis: Great question. Interestingly enough, Biogen’s CEO, George Scangos, and the board had gone out to Silicon Valley and one of the board meetings that we do every year is beyond typical board material (though that is done at every meeting). They looked at some of the areas that can help take Biogen into the next generation and help disrupt the business in a positive way, as well as potentially the whole biotech industry. They recognized that technology is not a long pole in the tent, but something that has progressed to the point where it can help this industry through some of the data, Big Data, analytics, and technology as we talked about earlier. And that is where they said we need a senior leader to come in and go beyond the CIO role and try to disrupt, again, in the three ways that I talked about before. So it is to the credit of the vision of the CEO and the board that the role was created. Finding somebody outside of biotech was viewed as an opportunity to bring someone in, and obviously, being from Dell, I brought technology with me from a capability perspective of the industry, to bring somebody in with different thinking, fresh thinking, etc., and help be unencumbered in how do we apply certain capabilities to this business.
9-8-15
When David Bray joined the Federal Communications Commission in 2013, it had had roughly nine CIOs in eight years. Clearly something new needed to happen. Though Bray was still in his 30s, he had been in government for more than half his life, as his government service began at the age of 15. The IT department had a significant need to modernize. Bray recognized that cloud computing and “as-a-service” technology represented a significant opportunity to modernize the FCC’s technology portfolio.
At the same time, in less than two years, he has gone from zero to more than 142,000 Twitter followers. He has creatively leveraged that and other networks he has created for inspiration for new ideas, to test ideas, and to help others. In this interview, he shares the details of his career journey, the transformation he has led at the FCC, the way in which he sees his job as part venture capitalist, the benefits of being social, and a variety of other topics.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the 27th article in the CIO’s First 100 Days series. To listen to the prior 26 with the CIOs of Intel, J. Crew, GE, CVS Caremark, and Ecolab among many others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link to the upper left-hand part of this page.)
Peter High: Most people are probably familiar with the FCC, but perhaps not the inner workings of it, and certainly not the inner workings of the CIO’s role. Could you take a few moments to introduce your role within the organization?
David Bray: Sure. I parachuted into my role as CIO of the FCC about 20 months ago. When I arrived, there had been about nine CIOs in eight years prior to my arrival. The FCC itself is about 18 different bureaus and offices with about 1,750 government employees. Our scope is anything involving wired or wireless across the United States.
My role as CIO was focused on the fact that when I arrived, I assessed that they had about 207 different IT systems – again, for only 1,750 people. I sometimes joke that I’m Oprah Winfrey – “Look under your chair, everyone is going to go home today and you get an IT system. Take it, it’s free!” I think we got there because over the last 20 years, whenever there was a new request, either from the administration, or from Congress, or whether it was a new law, the FCC would roll out a new IT system. That works for the first five or ten years, but over time you accumulate so many different IT systems that at least 80% of our IT budget was spent merely sustaining what we already had. That limited what I could do in terms of new development. While I am sure I could spend the next five or ten years updating each one of those 207 systems – and I should note that more than half of them are over ten years old – I think by the time I did that I would have to do it all over again.
We decided to do a new shift technology-wise to move to a common data platform that would be cloud based. We take the data from legacy systems and build a thin user interface with reusable code because there may be elements that are common across these different systems like user authentication, export to PDF, and map production that we do not have to produce 207 different times. Instead, we could reuse that code as part of a service catalog and that way we can be more effective and efficient in what we are doing. We have had some early successes.
We have also addressed the human element. The team was at half strength and while we are probably not going to bring it back to historical strength size-wise, we are trying to bring in new people and integrate them with the existing staff.
CIO.com discusses how many CIOs find it exhilarating to take on business functions outside of IT. But CIO-plus roles require a new mindset and trusted deputies.
Julia King
08-31-15
Excerpt from the article:
…This expansion of duties has its benefits and practical challenges. IT already is tied to every single part of a business. As a result, technology executives have a keen horizontal perspective of all of a company’s business processes. From that unique perch, they can more readily identify business stumbling blocks and innovate process improvements that increase business value.
“The CIO is one of the few people in an organization who sees all the processes from cradle to grave and truly has an expansive point of view. That lends itself to leading other parts of the organization,” says Peter High, president of CIO advisory firm Metis Strategy and author of the book Implementing World Class IT.
It’s also economically advantageous, especially for small and midsize companies. “Having people do two jobs and not paying them double seems like a good idea to a lot of organizations,” High says.
…
But at the same time, dual-role IT executives need to deeply immerse themselves in additional parts of the business where a whole new set of challenges lie in wait. Incumbent managers and staffers may resist the insertion of an outsider who didn’t grow up in that business function. CIO-plus executives also need to adapt their management and leadership styles to their broader, non-IT constituency.
Not all CIOs are up to these challenges. “Only an executive who is ambitious takes this on,” says High. “This is such a complex set of responsibilities. If they don’t have a desire for additional responsibilities, or haven’t been active enough to suggest that they could do it, it’s not likely that [expanded titles and duties] will be suggested to a passive CIO.”
To read the remainder of the article, please visit CIO.com
Peter High
08-18-2015
Excerpt from the Article:
The Georgia Technology Authority (GTA) manages the delivery of IT infrastructure and managed network services to 1,300 state and local government entities across the state of Georgia. GTA promotes an enterprise approach to managing technology services by establishing statewide policies, standards and guidelines based on industry best practices and federal requirements. GTA develops and manages the state’s official website, which provides information and services from more than 115 state agencies and links to city and county government Websites.
Dean Johnson is the Chief Operating Officer for the GTA. Johnson has co-led the move to privatize infrastructure and managed network services for the state of Georgia since 2008. He is currently leading an effort to evolve the current operating and service delivery models to take full advantage of the strong foundation built over the past six years and apply lessons learned along with today’s industry best practices in outsourcing. CIO Insight contributor Peter High discusses with Johnson how he helped save the state $181 million, how he assisted in laying the groundwork for privatizing certain IT services and his take on big data initiatives.
CIO Insight: How do you work with the CIOs in various jurisdictions across the state?
Dean Johnson: GTA has established several councils and forums, structured specifically to invite CIOs’ input, engage in discussion about solutions and offer information about available services. We meet regularly with agency CIOs and have found that building and maintaining positive working relationships with the customers we serve and understanding their business needs to be one of the keys to our success.
CIO Insight: You also helped spearhead the creation of Georgia Enterprise Technology Services, saving the state $181 million in the process. What was the idea behind this?
Johnson: A comprehensive assessment by an independent third party in 2007 documented alarming shortcomings in the state’s ability to comply with IT best practices, refresh aging equipment and software, and address growing threats from hackers and cyber-criminals. In addition, GTA and other state agencies found themselves unable to compete with the private sector in recruiting and retaining knowledgeable and experienced technicians. The third-party assessment recommended outsourcing daily operations to private-sector service providers.
GTA went to the market in 2008 to source IT infrastructure services and managed network services on behalf of the state of Georgia. The Georgia Enterprise Technology Services (GETS) program sought to transform the state’s IT operations into a modern day, well-run IT enterprise by turning to private-sector leaders in technology service delivery.
To read the remainder of the article, please visit CIO Insight
8-3-2015
Mark Sunday has been the CIO of Oracle for ten years, and in that role, he has been the company’s first and best customer. As the CIO of a $38 billion company, his technology needs are quite complex, and he has been the first to use most of the company’s products and services over the past decade. As such, his team offers invaluable counsel to colleagues as to what works well, and what requires further refinement. Also Sunday has been an invaluable advisor to the company’s customers, many of whom are also CIOs. He speaks not as a sales person, but as a peer, and can offer a special depth of knowledge tying together CIOs’ needs with Oracle’s solutions.
Sunday has also joined the ranks of board-level CIOs, having been on the boards of multiple companies over the past decade and a half. He has found the experience invaluable, as it has pushed him to build skills as an advisor in addition to those as an operator in his day-job. He also has drawn insights from each board-level experience to develop innovations he can leverage within Oracle itself.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 14th article in the Board-Level CIO series. To read interviews with the CIOs of Cardinal Health, P&G, Kroger, and FedEx, among others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Mark, you are the Chief Information Officer of Oracle, a company that needs very little introduction, certainly. But for those who may not be so familiar with the role that you specifically play within the organization, I wondered if you could talk about those areas that are under your purview within Oracle.
Mark Sunday: I am responsible for the global competing infrastructure and networking infrastructure and how we service our end users in nearly 100 countries. My team is about 50 strong, supporting those folks around the world. Everything from end user services up through a variety of different things necessary for them to communicate, collaborate, and execute their jobs.
I am complemented by our Oracle’s development organization that also contributes to automating processes across the company as they deploy applications. They have the responsibility to be the first implementer of many of the new products. So between what we do within my organization and my counterparts in development, we serve all of our 140,000+ end users.
High: Oracle is fundamentally a technology company. I can imagine that being the CIO of a technology company has its blessings and its challenges. On the one hand you never have to make the argument to your colleagues that technology ought to be thought of as strategic, but then, on the other hand, you are surrounded by engineers and people with deep technical expertise. Can you talk a bit about culturally what that is like to be within the milieu of a major technology organization running IT?
Sunday: Well, first of all I think it makes it very exciting for the team. So beyond the normal mission IT organizations have of making their organization function, whether it be public or private sector more effective and delivering value to their customers, we take on some additional roles.
I would like to introduce a new series, which I refer to as “Education Technology Innovation.” It will includes interviews and strategy discussions with some of the leading names in the field:
In the kick-off article to the series, I set the stage for some of the questions that will be explored in the interviews in the series:
“What does the future hold for these innovative companies, and how will it change the way in which our children and their children are educated? Will it serve to lower the costs of education? Will it create pressure on high cost private universities with less prestigious brands, as one can spend much less and learn from the top professors from Ivy Leagues schools?“
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Mike Feerick leads a company that has been credited as being the first ever massive open online course or MOOC. He founded ALISON in 2007. Unlike other prominent MOOCs such as Udacity, Coursera, and edX, ALISON’s content is not drawn from elite US-based universities. Rather, the Galway, Ireland based company focuses on practical workplace skills that can be tested by employers to gauge growing competencies. Since I last spoke with Feerick, the company registered its five millionth user, and much of the growth has been in the developing world. India, for instance, is the company’s fastest growing market. ALISON has thrived on serving traditionally underserved education marketplaces.
As Feerick probed for opportunity to serve additional groups of people that have been underserved, perhaps the most marginalized group of all became a target: the population of formerly incarcerated people. In the US alone, 20 million people are among the formerly incarcerated, and one of the triggers of recidivism is a lack of solid job opportunity. As Feerick describes in this interview, he believes ALISON is perfectly suited to serve this often marginalized population while reducing the rates of recidivism in the process.
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Stanford and MIT receive well deserved recognition as hotbeds of entrepreneurship, but neither of those is as singularly influential in the US as the Israel Insitute of Technology, better known as the Technion. Since the university’s founding over one hundred years ago, a quarter of the university’s graduates have started businesses. Since 2004, graduates of the Technion have won four Nobel Prizes, and a remarkable two-thirds of Israeli companies listed on NASDAQ have been founded by graduates of the Technion. Israel is often referred to as “start-up nation”, and the Technion has contributed more than any other institution to that reputation.
Since 2009, Peretz Lavie has served as President of the Technion. During that time, he has hired faculty who are experts across traditional academic silos, encouraged more professors and students to get involved in starting businesses, and in the process has bolstered the university’s reputation as a hot-house for new businesses.
In decades past, companies derived value from deep knowledge and discipline within specific functional areas. They were strong at operations or in finance or in service, etc. Companies were often strong at multiple of those, but the organization structure that owes tremendously to Alfred Sloan and General Motors was almost militaristic in its hierarchy and in its silos. Just as the military has had to think creatively about how breaking down these silos, promoting people who have breadth of experience as well as depth, companies too have derived great value at thinking about value derived at the nexus of disciplines.
Harrah’s Entertainment (now Caesars Entertainment) leap-frogged the competition in the casino gaming industry by virtue of the insights derived by Gary Loveman, a Harvard Business School professor whose specialty was at the intersection of marketing and technology, together with an extremely talented team in his Marketing and IT departments at Harrah’s, the company was an early winner with customer relationship management (CRM).
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Shai Reshef is an Israeli-born entrepreneur who now lives in Pasadena, California. Although his master’s degree is in Chinese politics, he has made his name professionally in private education. He served as chairman and CEO of the Kidum Group, an Israeli test preparation which he sold to Kaplan, Inc. in 2005. He also led KIT eLearning, a subsidiary of Kidum and the eLearning partner of the University of Liverpool. KIT provided MBAs and Master in IT degrees, and was eventually acquired by Laureate Online Education.
In 2009, Reshef founded the University of the People, which in February 2014 received accreditation from the Distance and Education Training Council, a U.S. Department of Education authorized accrediting agency. This made it the world’s first non-profit, tuition-Free, accredited, online university.
This is the tenth article in the Education Technology Innovation series, and it is fair to say that Nic Borg’s background is unlike any of the other entrepreneurs featured in the series. Like others, he comes from academe, but rather than being a former Stanford professor like Sebastian Thrun or Daphne Koller, or an MIT professor like Anant Agarwal, Borg spent seven years at Kaneland High School in Maple Park, Illinois building web-based tools and learning management solutions. The small-scale innovation that he introduced proved to be a pilot for something bigger to come.
Armed with his practical experience at a Kaneland High School, Borg co-founded Edmodo five and a half years ago. Edmodo is the largest K-12 social learning network, which provides teachers and students a safe and easy way to connect and collaborate; it has been called “the Facebook of education.” It is used heavily in the classroom, but also extends that classroom environment. The mission of the organization is to help all learners reach their full potential, and he believes that by connecting them to the resources and concepts they need, they achieve that goal. It has already had profound implications on students, teachers, parents, and content providers, as he explains herein. He was recently honored by this publication as “30 Under 30” winner.
Umar Saif has done a lot in his 35 years. A Pakistani, he earned his PhD in computer science from the University of Cambridge at 22. He began a post doctorate degree at MIT at an age when most of his peers – age wise – had not completed their bachelor’s degrees. He worked at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory where he was part of the core team that developed system technologies for the $50 million Project Oxygen. He collaborated with Anant Agarwal, now the president of edX, among other legendary computer science and artificial intelligence professors. After spending years away from his native Pakistan, he found that he enjoyed the entrepreneurial spirit of MIT and of the US more generally. However, it was a conversation with a colleague about what he wanted to achieve in his life that got him to rethink his plans for the future. He decided that he wanted to help establish a comparable entrepreneurial hot-bed like the one he found at MIT back in Pakistan.
He returned to the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), where he found that his top students were the equivalent of the top students at MIT, but they did not realize the potential they had. His own story became an inspiration for a series of entrepreneurs, many of whom he has started businesses with. He was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2010, selected as one of top 35 young innovators in the world by MIT Technology Review in 2011 and received a Google faculty research award in 2011.
In late 2010, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration put out a request for proposal for a new kind of university program. Recognizing the importance of establishing New York City as a technology hub, he hoped to attract a leading university to establish a graduate school in engineering and computer science in Manhattan, and proposed that it be built on Roosevelt Island.
The proposal submitted by Cornell University was the winner, and though the permanent campus will not be ready until 2017, Cornell NYC Tech has set up shop in Google’s Manhattan offices in Chelsea. Daniel Huttenlocher is dean of the program, and he has an ambitious vision that befits an academic who has experience in the business world. He has hired a Chief Entrepreneurial Officer, and the school has already established deep ties with the start-up community in New York. Huttenlocher measures the success of his program on the number of people who start and who join high growth organizations. Establishing a program with ready access to major corporations, start-ups, and even City Hall means that Cornell NYC Tech is in an enviable position, and will likely be a key player in pushing New York to be the tech start-up hub that has longed to be for some time.
MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Professor Anant Agarwal has personified the educator-entrepreneur, as he has had a foot in academe and a foot in new ventures for more than a decade. He has led CSAIL, MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, just as he was a founder of Tilera Corporation, which created the Tile multicore processor. He led the development of Raw, an early tiled multicore processor, Sparcle, an early multi-threaded microprocessor, and Alewife, a scalable multiprocessor. He also led the VirtualWires project at MIT and was the founder of Virtual Machine Works. His start-ups have largely been focused on his areas of research and areas of interest, but he had not focused on the education space itself until late 2011.
It was at that point that Agarwal taught what would become MITX’s first massive open online course (MOOC) on circuits and electronics, which drew 155,000 students from 162 countries. This overwhelming response showed the promise of having his academic and his entrepreneurial pursuits coincide. Agarwal developed a partnership between MIT and nearby Harvard to establish edX. Unlike rivals Coursera and Udacity, edX is a not-for-profit. Therefore, when Agarwal thinks about the competitive landscape among the MOOCs, his perspective is “the more the merrier.” In fact, in June of last year, edX became open sourced, and the source code, OpenedX, has led to interesting collaborations with Google, Stanford University, and even with countries such as France and China.
Much time and attention has been given to the MOOCs started in the US, but as I have mentioned in my interview with Mike Feerick of ALISON, the phenomenon actually first emerged in Europe. Another more recent entry to the MOOC field out of the United Kingdom is FutureLearn. Unlike other prominent MOOCs like Udacity, Coursera, and edX that feature university content, FutureLearn is not led by a former academic. Simon Nelson is a businessman, but he was a logical choice to head FutureLearn given his experience working in a variety of media fields that have been threatened and transformed by technology. As a result, Nelson has been programmed to see opportunity in the chaos.
FutureLearn also has the advantage of a 44 year old pre-cursor to the MOOCs: Open University. The university has many things in common with the MOOCs — it has an open entry policy, and the majority of courses are taken off-campus anywhere in the world. As such, Nelson has been able to work with Open University Vice Chancellor Martin Bean to learn from the decades of experiences and experiments forged, and many of them have translated well to the new format. Therefore, while FutureLearn is a new entrant to this marketplace, it stands to become a formidable one.
I have had the a good fortune of speaking with good number of the leaders in education technology today. Since so many of these players have emerged from academe, the competition between companies is fierce certainly, but there is also a collegial willingness to acknowledge the successes of other companies. In the case of non-profits like edX, CEO Anant Agarawal says, the more companies that enter this space, the merrier. (Stay tuned for my interview with Agarwal on January 20th.) Several of these leaders acknowledge that the most influential person to the MOOC landscape has been Salman Khan. As Agarwal lists the genesis of the MOOCs, he lists Khan and his Khan Academy first among the major players. Sebastian Thrun acknowledged in my interview with him that “I stumbled into this after listening to a gentleman named Sal Khan of Khan Academy. In his speech he noted that he had tens of millions of students in his classes. I was teaching at Stanford at the time and had tens of dozens of students in my classes, and I felt I should try something different and see if we could do what I do and scale it to many people.” In fact, in my podcast interview with Thrun, as he listed those who had been most influential to him over the course of his career, he listed Khan on the short list.
There has been much press for the massive open online courses or MOOCs, including in my series of interviews to date with Sebastian Thrun and Daphne Koller, CEOs of Udacity and Coursera respectively. If one is new to these companies, one might be under the impression that the MOOC phenomenon is less than two years old. That is not the case. The company that many credit as being the first ever MOOC is Advance Learning Interactive Systems ONline, better known as ALISON. Irish-American entrepreneur, Mike Feerick founded that company in 2007, and whereas many other companies in this industry are still trying to determine the business models, Feerick has nearly seven years of testing, experimenting, and succeeding behind him. In this interview, Feerick talks about the genesis of the idea, his rationale for focusing on vocational training, and his vision for the future of the company.
Last week, I kicked off a series on education technology with an interview with Sebastian Thrun, CEO of Udacity. Daphne Koller who co-founded and is the co-CEO of Coursera, by some measures the largest of the for-profit educational technology companies offering massive open online courses or MOOCs with over five million students across most countries, has much in common with Thrun. They both were foreign-born Stanford professors with backgrounds in artificial intelligence when they started the companies they currently lead. Each has also taken a leave of absence from Stanford in order to pursue their current opportunities.
Though their companies compete, they have chosen very different areas of focus. Udacity, like several other companies that provide MOOCs has chosen to focus on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses. Coursera has chosen a much broader offering, including many disciplines in the humanities. This breadth of offering has been a strength of the company in building a broad student-base, and it has signed up over 60 universities as partners. That said, it has required particularly creative approaches both process and technology-wise in order to facilitate learning, collaboration, and grading.
There are few entrepreneurs who can compete with Sebastian Thrun in terms of creativity and breadth of innovation. He led the development of Stanley, a robotic vehicle on the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. He was a founder of the Google X Lab, and parlayed his earlier success with Stanley into the Google driverless car system. He also was among the leaders who developed Google Glass. All the while he was a professor first at Carnegie Mellon and then at Stanford.
In early 2012, based on inspiration from Salman Khan of Khan Academy, he co-founded Udacity, a for-profit education company offering massive open online courses, or MOOCs. Thrun’s Stanford course “CS 373: Programming a Robotic Car” was among the first couple of courses offered through Udacity, and it attracted 160,000 students in 190 countries. The youngest was ten and the oldest was 70. Moreover, none of the top-400 students were Stanford students. He was so excited about what he learned, that he gave up his post at Stanford to focus on Udacity full-time.
Education Technology is in its Infancy, but it is Growing-up FastMuch has been written of late about the need for healthcare reform in our country. Whether one is a fan of the Affordable Care Act or not, the case for change is quite clear. The fact that healthcare makes up such a high proportion of our gross domestic product (north of 17 percent), and has grown at such a fast clip relative to the consumer-price index (one and a half times) underscores the need for change. However, there is an industry the fundamentals of which have not dramatically changed in hundreds of years, and yet its costs have risen at a rate three times as fast as the consumer-price index. That field is education.
The classroom setting with a professor standing at the head of a class talking at a roomful of students is largely the same model that existed when the first universities were established in the United States. It is no wonder that some creative people have stepped forward with truly innovative ideas in the education space to attempt to turn the traditional model upside down.
6-15-2015
There is perhaps no more iconic brand in India than that of the Tata Group. The company is remarkably diverse, and its leaders have been among the most respected members of the country’s elite since the company’s founding in 1868. Tata Group has been viewed among the most innovative companies in India, but CEO Cyrus Mistry set a goal for the company to viewed among the top ten innovators in the world. The man he has tapped to help lead the efforts behind that is Gopichand Katragadda. Katragadda is Tata Group’s first ever chief technology officer, and he comes to the company after a long and distinguished career at General Electric, where most recently he was the Managing Director of GE’s India Technology Center. In this interview, Katragadda describes the steps he is taking to put Tata Group on the path to being considered among the most innovative companies on earth, the ecosystem he is fostering to do so, and the areas of focus that will be the first entrees in this effort.
(For an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. To read more stories like this one in the future, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Gopichand, you are the first ever Chief Technology Officer of the Tata Group. How was it determined that now was the right time to establish the role?
Gopichand Katragadda: Many of the conglomerates have the parent as the listed company and the subsidiaries all roll up to the parent, whereas in our case, the Tata Group (the parent) is not listed, and it is the subsidiaries which are listed. The parent has partial ownership of the subsidiaries, but it has quite a parental leverage, and hence a parental obligation, if you will, in multiple areas. It has served this application in many ways, which is the brand aspects of the company and the group companies as well. The technology aspect of each company is doing what they are doing well, but also serving the parental obligation and bringing together companies to address some of the needs which no one company can address. That is the thought process in setting up this role at this point in time.
High: As I understand it, from some of your early conversations with the Tata Group chairman, Cyrus Mistry, his goal was to make Tata Group one of the ten most technologically innovative companies in the world, so I suppose in some ways that was a mandate of yours from the early stages. Can you talk a bit about pursuing that goal and the methods you’re using? I know that you’re a few months into your current role. What are some of the things you’ve done in the early stages to begin to shift the organization towards pursuing that goal?
Katragadda: Some rankings have us in the top 50 innovative companies. I do strongly feel that it is the business model and process innovations that have given us that spot. To move from there into the top ten innovative companies, the role technology plays and adding a good amount of intellectual property, differentiation in products in services, would be what will get us there.
06-03-2015
Excerpt from the Article: The Advisory Board Company is a leading provider of insight-driven technology, research and services to more than 230,000 leaders at 5,200 member organizations across health care and higher education. Dan Holohan joined the company nearly three and a half years ago to oversee the Enterprise Technologies organization while setting direction for member-facing product technologies, enterprise data management and the implementation of social, mobile and collaboration solutions to help the firm’s predominantly Millennial workforce work smarter, faster and better. He has led the introduction of employee productivity, business unit and corporate shared application services and infrastructure. Holohan discusses his passion for IT and how he approaches his work with CIO Insight contributor Peter High.
CIO Insight: Dan, when you joined The Advisory Board Company roughly three years and a half years ago, you inherited a relatively small team in need of development and a portfolio of processes and technologies in need of modernization. What were the first things you addressed and why?
Dan Holohan: After I joined, my early assessment revolved around three primary areas: the capability of our internal network, the management of our data and the delivery of internal software.
My initial focus was to ensure that internal traffic flowed reliably and external Internet bandwidth was robust, redundant and fast. Within the first 90 days, the entire DC office network was completely replaced including the core backbone, all switches and wireless access points which, for the ensuing three years, has resulted in eliminating the serious service interruptions that the firm was used to experiencing.
Next, I noticed the emphasis that was being placed on managing the complex datasets and data flows that were being used by our internal tools and member facing products. I created a new group, Enterprise Data Management (EDM), charged with maintaining the quality, reliability and integrity of firmwide data and data technology platforms.
Lastly, internal stakeholders were dependent on our development team for providing solutions which kept the workforce productive and engaged. The challenge was prioritizing the intake and making sure that we were working on the most important things. I was able to convince six of the most senior leaders in the firm that we needed their input and the Prioritization Steering Committee was born. As a result, investments were made on this development team and we delivered a plethora of upgrades and enhancements in support of our growing business including cloud-based tools for HR, Finance and Member Support functions. One notable achievement was delivering the “360 Degree View of the Member” where nine disparate client systems were migrated to our Salesforce platform enabling staff to interact with all aspects of the member relationship from one place. My development team won the “2013 Breaking the Mold Award” at Dreamforce for their innovative uses of the Salesforce platform.
