Peter High
05-28-2015
Excerpt from the Article:
Hogan Lovells is a global legal practice that helps corporations, financial institutions and government entities with their critical business and legal issues both globally and locally. It is among the top 10 largest law firms in the world, with more than 2,500 attorneys operating out of more than 40 offices in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and the United States.
Yet until three years ago, the firm had never had a global CIO. Mike Lucas was elevated to that role from the position of CTO, and in the process has helped drive tremendous change through better use of technology for purposes of collaboration, knowledge sharing and management, among other initiatives. Here, he describes his journey to CIO Insight contributor, Peter High.
CIO Insight: You are the first ever Global CIO of Hogan Lovells. What spurred the need to develop this role?
Mike Lucas: It started with the need for a global strategy. A natural outflow from developing that strategy was recognizing the need for a global realignment of the technology function. That work required a global leader; hence the global CIO role was born. The primary mission at the time was to streamline decision-making and unify the technology function globally.
CIO Insight: When you were named Global CIO, you needed to pull together a very diverse team that resides across multiple countries. What steps did you to take to be sure the right people were in the right roles, and ensure they were motivated to stay?
Lucas: It was most important to strive for balance in team composition, to recognize previous accomplishments, and to form a diverse team with global scope and responsibility. Reinforcing an already present focus on ‘customer first’ service, and establishing good IT governance were key drivers.
We place a great deal of emphasis on proper governance and transparency to the business. The next step was to permeate this approach down the organizational stack so that everyone understood and aligned with our global mission to deliver the very best service to our lawyers.
To read the remainder of the article, please visit CIO Insight
by Peter High, published on Forbes
5-26-2015
Celso Guiotoko’s background is quite diverse. He is half Brazilian and half Japanese. Having a foot in multiple cultures has served him well, especially in his current role as the Alliance Global Vice President, Corporate Vice President, and Chief Information Officer of Global Corporate IS/IT for Renault-Nissan. Guiotoko must balance a number of responsibilities, but he also has to juggle a diverse travel schedule. One of the keys to making this work is to have a solid team in place in each geography, and in each area of responsibility.
Guiotoko and his team have also tapped into Silicon Valley, setting up shop there along side the Engineering function’s team there. This innovation lab has helped spur creative thinking around investments into the Internet of Things, and driverless cars, as Guiotoko notes herein .
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 22nd article in the CIO-plus series. To read the prior 21 articles, featuring interviews with the CIOs of ADP, P&G, McKesson, the San Francisco Giants, and Walgreens among others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: I thought we’d begin with your responsibilities, which are quite varied. You are the Alliance Global Vice President, a Corporate Vice President, and Chief Information Officer of Global Corporate IS/IT. You have responsibilities within Nissan and across the relationship between Nissan and Renault. Could you talk a bit about your various areas of responsibility?
Celso Guiotoko: In 2004, I joined Nissan, as the CIO, and I was responsible for the global IS/IT for the company. Since 2009, I have also had the mission of creating synergies between the two companies, and I was appointed the IS/IT managing director for Renault-Nissan. Since then I have also become responsible for the Renault IT organization. It’s been almost six years since that time.
In the beginning of 2014, we announced the creation of four additional converged functions. One is on the engineering side, the second is in supply chain manufacturing, the third is in purchasing, and the fourth is HR. I think we’ve had a good contribution in those areas because the board members of both companies (Renault and Nissan) felt comfortable that with the many benefits to having a single leader driving some of the functions there. I believe the IS/IT functions in Renault-Nissan are very proud of the fact that our experiences since 2009 have been very successful.
We have several initiatives to support the conversion functions. This is one part of the job where we need to make sure that the business strategies in Renault and Nissan are fulfilled by the organization in each of the companies. At the same time that we need to fill the needs of the individual companies, we also need to make sure that we are going to generate synergies so that we can communalize the solutions that can be deployed in both companies. It’s quite the exercise in terms of communicating and making sure that everybody is aligned and has great teamwork because it is so important to make this alliance successful. Independent of the fact that there is an alliance, Renault and Nissan have independent boards and executive committees, so it is a little tricky. My job is a little different from most CIOs because you need to keep the independence of the two companies, but at the same time you need to bring them together.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
4-20-2015
Emerson Spartz started his first company at the age of 12, when he founded MuggleNet, which became the number one Harry Potter fan site. In his early teens, he managed a team that grew into the hundreds. He wrote best selling books, hosted the most listened to podcast, and dreamed of additional businesses to develop. To make his schedule more flexible, he suggested to his parents that he be home-schooled.
At a time, when many influential technologists (Peter Thiel most prominent among them) eschew the value of university education for those with an entrepreneurial bent, Spartz attended the business school at Notre Dame as an undergraduate, and used the time to strengthen his ability to learn while seeking the next new idea to pursue.
Soon after graduation, he founded Spartz Media, the organization he still runs now. His area of expertise is virality, a topic that he and his team have distilled into a science of sorts. He describes his methods herein. At 27, he has been an entrepreneur for 15 years, and speaks with the authority of a seasoned veteran.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the tenth article in the IT Influencers series. To read the prior nine articles with people such as Sir James Dyson, Salman Khan, former Mexican President Vicente Fox, Walt Mossberg, David Pogue, and Jim Goodnight, please click this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: You were bitten by the entrepreneurial bug very early in life. As I understand it, your first business venture was at the age of 12. And I wonder if you could talk about that precocity, and how it occurred to you at such a young age to want to develop a new venture and devote your energy to that at a time when your peers were doing very different things to say the least.
Emerson Spartz: When I was 12, I convinced my parents to let me drop out of school, so I could homeschool myself, and I had a very non-traditional education where I designed and developed my own curriculum. That’s another way of saying that I built things, for fun. I did not intent to be an adventurer; I just came across a free web page maker, and I thought it would be fun to make a web site, and I was really into Harry Potter, so I decided to make a Harry Potter website, and then I kind of just got bitten by the bug. The more time I spent on it, the more fun that I had with it. It eventually became the number one Harry potter site, but I didn’t start off on day one intending to turn it into this thing. It was just an outlet for me to express my creativity and desire to build things.
High: You mentioned that you became home-schooled, and you proposed to your parents to school yourself, which meant that again, at a time when your peers were learning together and playing together in the school setting, you were more independent. To an increasing degree between then and now, you have had to collaborate a great deal in your business ventures. Was it difficult to go from independent study to group collaboration?
Spartz: I spent a tremendous amount of time interacting with other people, because I had to. So even though I wasn’t in school, and I was missing out on some social situations that would have occurred there, the nature of the business meant that I was interacting with people constantly and having to adopt a much more mature perspective on things. I remember thinking for a time that if my team found out that I was only 12, that they would quit en masse because of the shame of working for a 12 year old.
4-15-2015
Increasingly, a key differentiator among chief information officers is how well they communicate. This is not a historical strength of CIOs, who in the past, traditionally led support organizations who awaited “orders” from their colleagues. Today, IT’s must be supreme networkers, collaborating with their colleagues in IT, their colleagues outside of it, establishing partnerships with vendors that will generate new value for the enterprise, and increasingly engaging customers, who are much more tech savvy today no matter the industry. A proxy for one’s ability to do each of these well is one’s engagement in social media.
Most CIOs have some combination of accounts on Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook, but these channels are used to varying degrees of success. There are many layers to the value a CIO can derive from better social media engagement, including:
Developing a personal brand and enhancing the brand of the company’s IT department: Social media is a wonderful opportunity to establish one’s voice and personal brand. This is something that was not deeply contemplated in the past, but now is increasingly a foundation that every executive needs to develop. As one establishes a strong personal brand, it should also shine a light on the good work of the IT team as a whole. Therefore, when one leverages social media to talk about IT’s successes, better to use the pronoun “we” than “I”
Networking: This has become a primary way for leaders to connect. If you are not active on social media, chances are you are missing opportunities to collaborate in way small and large with peers. This means that there are insights that could be gained that are not accessible.
4-6-2015
Stephanie von Friedeburg is the CIO and Vice President of Information Technology Solutions at the World Bank Group. In that capacity, she has overseen a tremendous transformation of IT across the Group throughout the 186 countries in which it operates. A primary weapon in her arsenal has been better use of cloud technology. This has increased the flexibility of IT, while also enhancing the Bank’s information security around the globe.
Additionally, she has joined a small but growing group of CIOs who have been asked to join the boards of companies. In addition to being a part of the Bank-Fund Staff Federal Credit Union, von Friedeburg is on the board of Box.org. Part of the reason she has been board-ready has been the fact that she has a non-traditional background. With foreign policy degrees and an MBA from the Wharton School, von Friedeburg began her career at the Bank in non-technical roles. She has an auto-didact’s talent to learn quickly, while surrounding herself with a talented team with complementary strengths. She covers all the above and more in this interview.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the ninth article in the Board-Level CIO series. To read the prior eight articles, please click this link. This is also the 13th article in the “Leading Women in Technology Series.” To read the prior 12 articles, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: I thought we’d begin with your role as CIO and VP of Information Technology Solutions at the World Bank Group. Can you describe your responsibilities within the bank?
High: As you mentioned, you have quite a diverse set of constituents. You have employees all over the world, in places with differing quality of technology and Wi-Fi access, for instance. You even have people in Washington who travel to all over the world, as well. Can you talk about he challenges and the ways in which you facilitate collaboration and communication in such a diverse employee set?
Von Friedeburg: When I came to this job almost four years ago, we were a Lotus Notes shop. We had mobile devices that were not owned by the corporation, but were owned by individuals. There were all kinds of different smartphones where people could use smartphone applications and telephone applications, and we paid tremendous roaming costs.
We have 186 country offices, and we had servers in 186 country offices, so to put it in perspective, we have a very big WAN, a big VPN, so I might be an investment officer based in Johannesburg, and I’m going to travel to DRC, and I’m going to try to access my e-mail from that server that sits in Johannesburg. My communications goes either through Paris, Chennai or Washington, all the way back to South Africa, and then back to me. We were very antiquated. So our intention as a team was to ask, “How do we get to a point where we can give access to anyone anywhere from any device to all of the information that we have at our fingertips?” We really set about trying to do that differently and thinking about our 186 country offices, and how are they connected, and that was one of the first places we started. So, we used to spend $12 million a year on connectivity and we have upped that very substantially.
3-23-2015
Most people think of Adobe as a software product company. The company has been in business for over 30 years, and the legacy of Adobe is around desktop software products like Photoshop, Acrobat, PDF, InDesign. Several years ago, Adobe moved into the digital marketing area with their acquisition of Omniture, and starting at that time, the organization began a journey to become a services company, delivering SaaS based online offerings, as opposed to products in boxes. Everything in the last three years has been focused on how to move from traditional desktop software to a subscription service where people subscribe to various Adobe capabilities, and then are on a renewing or upgrading path to continue to leverage those services.
Adobe’s CIO Gerri Martin-Flickinger has been well positioned to help in these efforts. As a CIO, she has been a user of cloud-based services for years, and has understood the evolution of the technology that enables this business model, what good services look like versus average or below-average services, and she has been able to lend this experience and those perspectives to her colleagues throughout the enterprise.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit the Forum on World Class IT at this link. To read future articles like this one, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Gerri, you have helped lead a significant transformation of Adobe’s business to the cloud. Can you please describe that transformation, the rationale behind it, and some of the steps the organization has taken to become more cloud-centric?
Gerri Martin-Flickinger: It has been an exciting time to be at Adobe. As a CIO, the move from a product company to a cloud-based company changes everything about your back office. If you’re a product company, you think about things like material masters, SKU’s, and physical goods. When you’re in the SaaS, software, cloud business, you think about entitlements, and subscription pricing, and the product itself being highly configurable with add-ons you can tweak each month. When you think about what that means to a company, it changes everything from how they build product to how they sell product. It requires different financial back office systems, and very different way of doing business.
In terms of how products are actually built, we used to have product release cycles of maybe a year or 18 months. Today, we have products release cycles continuously. Every month, new products become available to our customers and are immediately consumed. We used to build a CD, a golden master that was sent to distribution, boxed up and sold in stores. It might take months or quarters before real customers would get that installed and start using it. Today it happens in minutes. Our customers are passionately positive about the transformation. What it means to them is they get to use Adobe technology sooner, and they’re getting to see innovation in those products faster, which helps them build their businesses at a more rapid rate
Author and adviser Peter High discusses the role of today’s CIO, where that role has been and where it’s going.
Patrick K Burke
02-18-2015
CIO Insight recently had the opportunity to chat with author, podcast moderator and adviser Peter High in New York City. High, an all-around busy man who was about to embark on an overseas business trip when we spoke, provided CIO Insight with a look at the role of today’s CIO, where that role has been and where it’s going. High kept an upbeat tempo as he settled into a chair by the fireplace in the sedate and cozy library of the Penn Club in New York. And the U Penn grad has plenty to be upbeat about. His latest book, Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation, touches on the seismic shift CIOs are experiencing and maps out what’s to be expected of today’s stewards of all things technology. Aside from penning a book, High moderates The Forum on World Class IT, a popular podcast, and he’s already turned his attention to beginning another work focused on the first 100 days of a CIO’s tenure. The following is a condensed version of CIO Insight’s conversation with Peter High.
CIO Insight: How long did you work on your book, Implementing World Class IT Strategy–and the book has a subtitle–?
High: It does–How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation. A little bit more than a year. It came out of a body of work that I had been doing with a variety of CIOs and helping them formulate strategies. One of the hypothesis that the book is based upon is many CIOs are phenomenal at execution, great at tactics, not necessarily as comfortable in creating strategy. So a lot of it comes from counseling CIOs who are looking to become more strategic, more part of the strategic conversation in the broader part of the enterprise.
CIO Insight: And that almost leads right into my next question. The role of the CIO is changing, they’re involved in more strategic initiatives, they’re more aligned with business decisions. What can CIOs do to prepare for this shift?
High: No. 1 is to become much more cognizant of how value is created in their enterprises. Traditional CIOs and IT teams have been focused on metrics like uptime and delivering projects on time and on budget and to the value specified. Which are still very important. But they’re table stakes. They’re the foundation. And to build above you need to understand what are the metrics that the CEO has on his or her dashboard. How does one grow revenue while also maintaining a good cost base or even becoming more efficient.
To read the remainder of the article, please visit CIO Insight.
Tom Murphy on bringing his for-profit experience to the non-profit world
University of Pennsylvania Vice President of IT and University Chief Information Officer Tom Murphy has held the CIO role at a number of leading companies, including AmerisourceBergen, Royal Caribbean Cruises, Omni Hotels, and Davita Healthcare Partners. He has been elected to CIOMagazine’s prestigious CIO Hall of Fame in 2010. The move to become a university CIO was unusual, as many CIOs of universities grow up in the university setting. Having been an influential executive at a number of massive corporations, he has needed his skills as an influencer all the more at Penn, where different schools such as the Medical School, the Wharton School of Business, and the Law School each have CIOs with their own imperatives and budgets. Murphy’s background is unusual in that he was an English major as an undergraduate, and has no formal training in engineering or IT disciplines other than what he has learned on the job. As a result, his ability to communicate in written form in addition to his strong oral communications skills have proven to be a recipe for success. Herein, Murphy shares the steps he undertook in the first 100 days of his time at Penn. (This is the 20th article in the CIO’s First 100 Days series. To read interviews with other in the series, including the CIOs of GE, Time Warner, Caterpillar, Intel, and Johnson & Johnson, among many others, please visit: this link . To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.) Peter High: Can you describe your purview in your current role as CIO of the University of Pennsylvania? Tom Murphy: I am the Vice President of Information Technology and University CIO. My responsibility is providing central IT services, so think of all of the utilities that are provided to support the school—the network, the telephony, and the wireless— we also run the primary data centers and administrative systems essential to Penn.
We provide all of the foundational support necessary, then the schools and centers all have their own IT organizations that run very proximate to the faculty and the students. Our local service providers are hyper-vigilant to the needs of the school.
We are a little different here, in that we charge back everything. So we literally sell our services, which requires reliability and consistency as well as us constantly looking for ways to do more with less. There is an expectation that we will continue to develop opportunities that support growth on campus while maintaining the same price—which is not that dissimilar from being the CIO of a Fortune 500. We use a budget model called Responsibility Center Management, which is a model that essentially allows each school to operate as its own business. It is a different model, but it has worked for many years. I just have to get very good at how to use it…
To read the full article, please visit Forbes.com To explore the Technovation Column library, please click here. To explore the CIO’s first 100 days series, please click here.
Keeping Conversations with Divisional Heads Focused on Strategy, Not Tactics
by Peter High, published on CIO.com
12-16-2014
CIOs that meet with divisional heads on a regular basis have a better chance of shaping demand and ensuring that IT is a strategic enabler and source of innovation.
But the problem is that IT leaders too often waste these opportunities, asking narrow questions about the specific technology needs of divisional leaders when they should be helping set technology strategy for the company. This narrow approach puts the burden of IT expertise on leaders who are not the company’s experts on technology. A sales executive may have a profound appreciation of technology, but conversations of this sort quickly become one about tactics rather than strategy. A classic example from sales would be “we need iPads.” That may be, but to what end? What is the business need that will be addressed through greater dissemination of iPads? If the company has a hardware contract with a supplier that makes a competing tablet, why wouldn’t that company’s tablet work just as well? Jumping straight into specific solutions limits the conversation, and may mean the company will make a rash decision that IT will have to deal with for many years, as the supporter and maintainer of the technology chosen.
To prevent this from happening CIO should encourage conversations centered on business needs. Although this may mean that items arise that have nothing to do with technology, these conversations that provide both a “forest and trees” perspective of plans are invaluable for IT. From these conversations, IT should have some of the earliest indication of where there are common needs and opportunities across the organization that can be pursued with greater collaboration, leading to single investments in technology as opposed to a series of one-off solutions.
To read the full article, please visit CIO.com
Dell CIO Andi Karaboutis Helps Dell Put The Customer First
by Peter High, published on Forbes.com
09-02-2014
Much has been written about the benefits and risks of the rise of prominence of the CMO to the CIO. Some have pontificated that it will mean the death of or at least the diminution of influence of the CIO, as CMOs have more authority over technology. Dell Global CIO Andi Karaboutis scratches her head at this notion. She describes Dell’s strategy to put the customer first, and the role that each functional and business unit head must bring in order to realize that vision. It means that IT must shape its unique perspective and apply its unique lens to opportunities and issues. It also means that emerging leaders in IT work in other regions and functions to round out their perspectives on Dell’s business to be able to contribute more value to IT, a practice she learned from a successful tenure in the automotive industry. It also requires IT to have an R&D and innovation role, constantly monitoring trends to choose the best ones to bring to life the needs of Dell and of Dell’s customers. Lastly, it means spending time with external customers, as IT must have a role in developing value for them.
(To listen to an unabridged version of this interview, please click this link. To read more stories about innovative IT leaders, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Andi, Dell has been going through quite a transformation in recent months, not the least of which was the organization going private after having been a public company for some time. I wonder, in your time as global CIO how these changes have manifested themselves in the IT department, if at all.
Andi Karaboutis: One of the things that Michael Dell says – and we’ve all held very strongly to his strategy at Dell – is that our focus is on continuing to be a world-class end-to-end solutions company. Similarly, the strategy and goals of IT and our focus continue to be the same, which is: the customer is at the center of everything that we do and developing our roadmaps, plans, strategies, and instrumentation of disruptive technology around that, continues to be core.
I think the big difference is the intensified focus and speed with which we’re actually pursuing those goals and objectives. Obviously as a public company you have different and added burdens around Wall Street, quarterly earnings, focus on sales in shorter time periods, whereas as a private company our focus is on short, medium, and longer term methods and objectives of how we want to execute things. So it just lets us be that much more intense around our strategy.
Additional topics covered in the article include:
To read the full article, please visit Forbes.com
To explore the Technovation Column library, please click here.
To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Andi, click here.
