AmerisourceBergen’s CIO Creates Value Through Greater Centralized Influence In The First 100 Days
by Peter High, published on Forbes.com
05-05-2014
When Dale Danilewitz became the Global CIO of $88 billion revenue AmerisourceBergen, he had a mandate to exert greater influence from the center in an organization that had traditionally allowed the business units to operate autonomously. This was part of a greater “Power of One” initiative that CEO Steve Collis introduced, but it still would be a tremendous undertaking for the new technology chief. Danilewitz had an advantage, however in that he was once one of the business unit IT leaders, and as such understood the likely angst that such a cultural change would cause. Therefore, in his first 100 days on the job, Danilewitz had discussions with each of his former peer business unit CIOs, explained the rationale for the change, the value that they should derive, while also drawing lessons from each of them to ensure that the needs of each business unit were not ignored in a rush to do things more commonly across the enterprise. As a result, he has helped spearhead the greater unity across the company, identified areas where it was possible to achieve economies of scale, whether from vendors or in leveraging processes more fully, and generally leveraged pockets of excellence more broadly across the organization, as he describes in this interview that I recently conducted with him.
(This is the 14th article in the “CIO’s First 100 Days” series. To read the prior 13, including interviews with the CIOs of Intel, Caterpillar, Time Warner, Johnson & Johnson, and J. Crew, please click this link. To receive notifications regarding future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Dale, can you speak a little to your rise to the role of corporate or enterprise CIO of AmerisourceBergen and the scope of the transformation you were to lead upon commencing that role?
Dale Danilewitz: Prior to my promotion to CIO for all of AmerisourceBergen in 2012, I was the CIO of AmerisourceBergen’s Specialty Group. As an internal promotion, I was already familiar with the role, the business, processes and people.. As the new CIO, I had to quickly understand the current state of the IT department – decentralized and fragmented as we had four different business units, each with their own operating model. Two very large, one mid-size and one small, each with its own IT department that ran autonomously and had separate networks. Part of our transformation plan was to centralize and integrate this fragmented departments into a cohesive IT unit.
Our current CEO, Steve Collis, also an internal promotion rising to the role from President of the Specialty Group, worked with the outgoing CEO to affect a change model they termed the Power of One. The sentiment across the organization was that divisions were growing further apart and the executive team needed a solution that would help deal with the oncoming challenges in the industry. Faced with minimal margins, the goal was to drive as up the margin and integrate the organization, not just IT, through communication and/or a shared services model.
During Tom Murphy’s era, AmerisourceBergen IT had four different CIOs – Tom as the corporate and Drug Company CIO, me as the Specialty CIO and two other divisional CIOs. Part of the IT centralization effort was to transform the structure to just one CIO for all of IT.
Additional topics covered in the article include:
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12-31-2013
2013 was a great year for information technology generally. Several technology stalwarts went public, most prominent among them being Twitter. Though less glamorous in the mind of the average person, business-to-business technology companies like WorkDay and Tableau Software continued to shake up older adversaries, as well. There was plenty of great coverage of information technology in 2013, as well. I have assembled my personal favorite pieces both in written form and in video. They are divided into executive profiles,company profiles, and general topics. As the year draws to a close, and the promise of a new one is before us, I hope you’ll enjoy these selections.
11-19-2013
Cathy Bessant has one of the biggest technology roles on the planet. She runs Global Technology and Operations at Bank of America, and in that role has nearly 100,000 people on her team in 35 counties. She first joined the company in 1982 as a corporate banker in Texas. Since then she has been the President of Bank of America Florida, the National Small Business Segment executive, the President of Consumer Real Estate and Community Development Banking, the chief marketing officer, the President of Global Treasury Services and Global Product Solutions, and the President of Global Corporate Banking. Therefore, she has had an extraordinary breadth of experiences at the Bank, but she did not grow up in IT per se.
The prudent use of data and information is as important in the financial services industry as any other industry. It touches everything that a bank does. In many ways, having someone who has had such a wide variety of executive positions in the company is the ideal candidate for the Technology and Operations role that Bessant occupies. As she notes below, the key to filling in any gaps she might have on the technology side, is having a skilled team, while learning from the various companies whose boards she sits on.
(To listen to an extended podcast version of this interview, please visit this link. To have more stories like this one delivered to you, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Cathy, I thought we would begin with your role. You run what is referred to as Global Technology and Operations at Bank of America. What is your purview in that role, and what functions report to you?
Cathy Bessant: I have CIOs who are responsible for each of our lines of business, as well as for risk and finance, who report into me. For their respective businesses, each CIO manages his or her business’s technology and operations. All told, I have a team of nearly 100,000 employees and contractors in 35 countries. Global Technology and Operations provides the platforms and fulfillment services that sustain the company’s consumer banking, wealth management, commercial banking, treasury services, sales and trading, and investment banking businesses – as well as risk management, finance and other critical support functions. I also have responsibility, of course, for infrastructure, for information security and for business continuity.
To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Cathy, click here.
The CIO Takes Over Multichannel Commerce
11-18-2013
Red Wing Shoes has been a well-known brand for over a century especially among those who require the highest quality work boots. For those who do not conduct the sort of work that requires work boots, however, the brand may be more familiar due to the oxfords, chukkas, and the like that are sold as the Red Wing Heritage Collection in partnership with retailers such as Brooks Brothers, Nordstrom, and J. Crew.
Joe Topinka brought his size 15 feet to the Minnesota-based shoe company in May of 2008 as the company’s first ever chief information officer. (Foot size is listed on employees’ business cards.) Recognizing the opportunity to leverage technology more creatively to market and sell Red Wing Shoes’ products, Topinka pushed the organization to develop a more creative multichannel commerce strategy. He made the case so effectively that in recent months, he was given responsibility for multichannel commerce for the entire company, taking on a rare but quite logical CIO-plus role that other business-to-consumer companies will likely adopt in the future.
(This is the 16th interview in the CIO-plus series. To be apprised of future articles in the series, click the “Follow” link above. To read past interviews with CIO-pluses from companies like ADP, P&G, Waste Management, McKesson, and Walgreens, please visit this link.)
Peter High: Joe, can you describe Red Wing Shoes’ business?
Joe Topinka: Red Wing Shoes is an iconic, 108 year old footwear manufacturer and retailer. The company has maintained its roots in the city by the same name where it was founded in 1905. Red Wing Shoes operates in over 100 countries, with global manufacturing anchored in Red Wing, MN. For over a century, Red Wing’s purpose-built footwear has been at the spearhead of innovation and the standard of excellence for work footwear.
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11-11-2013
So much is written about how digital retail is supplanting traditional retail, and there is much data to prove this. However, consumers still spend more time in physical stores than they do on individual websites, they purchase more often, and the opportunity to get to know a customer in a physical setting is better in many ways, potentially forging a stronger and longer-lasting bond with customers.
I recently spoke at an IT conference in Hong Kong. One of my fellow keynote speakers was a Spanish businessman named Ion Cuervas-Mons, who is the CEO of Think Big Factory, a Madrid-based product and strategic design consultancy that creates opportunities at the intersection between digital and physical realities. In his presentation, and in a detailed conversation he and I had later, he described what he refers to as “programmable retail” as a key to unlocking the power of the physical retail experience.
Cuervas-Mons indicates that the term “programmable retail” is “meant to incorporate the characteristics of e-commerce – convenience, efficiency, and personalization – into physical stores, while maintaining certain aspects found in a traditional shop – the ability to generate surprise, discovery and the possibility of touching the products.” Comparable to the changes made in the physical retail format in the 1960s and 1970s with the ascension of big-box retail that was compelling for a couple of decades hence, this represents a great leap forward. The magnitude of change in the physical store space has not been so great since then, and at a time when formidable online competition has arrived in the form of Amazon.com, and other innovative e-channel retailers, it is important for stores with a physical presence to think differently to establish a source of competitive advantage.
Cuervas-Mons describes five steps in the process of developing programmable retail:
1. Identification
Traditionally, it has been difficult to identify customers before payment. As a result, they meander anonymously through the store without any indication of who the biggest potential customer is, who the most loyal customer is, or who proverbial window-shopper is. There is an opportunity to treat the best customers with the best service, but if one only finds out who each person is after he or she has selected what to purchase, an opportunity has been lost.
There are three technologies that are making it easier for customers to gain these essential insights earlier:….
09-23-2013
When Kevin Hart joined Cox Communications as its CTO in April 2011, he had the ideal profile for an IT executive. He earned an undergraduate degree in engineering, and later got an MBA. He spent considerable time as a consultant, solving problems for a wide array of businesses and executives, and then was a CIO multiple times over at companies like Clearwire Corporation and Level 3. Ever the problem solver, Hart viewed his new challenge with Cox Communications as a series of opportunities to harvest, and he took a methodical approach to acquiring knowledge about his new company and its industry, built solid relationships with his fellow business executives, assessed and made relevant changes to his team to ensure that it was built for speed, and then set up metrics to prove progress was being made. The approach that Hart details herein is a recipe for success, and it is no wonder that he has achieved it in the two and one half years since he started.
(To hear the full audio version of this interview, visit the Forum on World Class IT site. This is the fifth article in the “CIOs First 100 Days Series.” The series kicked off with this article. To read each of the preceding articles with the CIOs of companies like Time Warner and Global Partners, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series with the CIOs of companies like Intel, J. Crew, Johnson & Johnson, SpaceX, and AmerisourceBergen, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Kevin, you have been the senior IT executive at multiple companies. Are there certain things that you have found are most important to focus on in the first 100 days of your tenure in your role?
Kevin Hart: I had the good fortune of spending a healthy chunk of time as a consultant, and in that role, I worked with and advised a number of CIOs, COOs , and CEOs in their early days in their roles. I learned a great deal from that experience in terms of what to focus on, and I have boiled it down to five things:
First, you have to understand the company’s goals, and ultimately how it creates value; literally, asking “how does my new company make its revenue?” It is important to understand the business drivers. All too often, IT leaders do not focus enough attention on that.
Second, it is important to understand the customer, and his or her needs. This means speaking with customers and getting their feedback where possible. I did so both with commercial and residential customers. This is great fodder for determining how IT can better serve these customers.
Third, it is critical to understand the competitive landscape. What are the trends in product portfolios and the market more generally? Use this to help craft plans that differentiate one’s new company technologically and beyond.
Fourth, take a hard look at the core team. A leader will only be as successful as his or her team. It is important to evaluate competencies that they have compared to the competencies that we will need. The latter should be clearer after the first three steps. It is also important to take stakeholders’ evaluations of the team into consideration.
Fifth, it is important to boil all of that material together to outline and articulate a multi-year transformation plan. There will be unique attributes of each plan, but there should be people components, process improvements, platform investments for growth and to build out products and services. There should also be a delivery plan. Last, it is important to sell that vision so that a coalition can be mobilized to help achieve these plans.
To listen to a previous Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Kevin, click here.
by Peter High, published on Forbes.com 09-09-2013
I recently caught up with Aaron Levie, the Box CEO, as he and his team prepared for BoxWorks, the company’s user conference, which will kick off this Sunday in San Francisco. (To listen to an extended podcast interview that I conducted with Levie, please use this link.) I asked him for a preview of what he plans on sharing with the thousands of gathered technology executives and enthusiasts. He offered an overview of Box’s strategy going forward, advice he would offer technology executives who are still in the early stages of adopting the cloud, and he could not help but mention how delighted that he was to have his favorite band, Blink 182, playing the after party on September 17. In many ways, Box has been the very epitome of consumerization of technology. Box began as a consumer service, helping individuals share data securely across many devices. Consumers liked the service so much that it quickly penetrated the commercial space as these individuals began to use it at work just as they did at home. In Box’s continued evolution from consumer to commercial player, now that it has penetrated the overwhelming majority of multi-billion dollar companies in the U.S., Levie has been focused on developing industry verticals to focus its services on. When I asked him how he has chosen the verticals that Box has focused on to date, he indicated that he looks for “the best mix of a complex, highly regulated industry that is benefiting from much cheaper, much simpler technology like Box.” Levie’s recipe for success has been a combination of luring leading technology talent with depth of experience in the relevant industry verticals to join Box for this journey, partnering with leading technology companies whose focus is squarely on each of these verticals, and he the company has made a number of key investments to broaden Box’s offering in each of these spaces….
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To listen to an older Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Aaron, click here.
Ben Fried, CIO of Google, discusses the challenges and opportunities of being the CIO at one of the most successful technology companies of our time.
07-22-2013
One might think that being the CIO of a legendary technology company would be like aTale of Two Cities: the best of times and the worst of times. On the one hand, one need not ever make the case that technology needs to be thought of as a strategic weapon in the arsenal of the company, as many IT executives still must do in their companies. On the other hand, there are many people throughout the business who feel they can do the job of CIO better than the actual CIO can. For many of the company’s engineers, CIO seems like the easiest of the executive positions.
Google’s CIO Ben Fried’s job is far from easy, but he focuses more on the best of times scenario, recognizing that by being surrounded by some of the best technology talent in the world inside and outside the IT department, there is no dearth of opportunities to pursue. In fact, even the issues turn out to be opportunities. As he says, “At Google, we are programmed to think that if you see an opportunity or a problem, we need to do something about it.”
When Fried joined Google roughly five years ago after more than 13 years at Morgan Stanley, there were a great number of opportunities to chase down and a reasonable amount of issues to resolve. This is typical for an organization that has been through such tremendous growth as has been the case for Google. The company’s core services such as search, Gmail, YouTube, and Maps have grown tremendously, and the company continues to grow through acquisition. The complexity is exacerbated and the opportunities multiplied by the company’s continued desire to strive for moonshot ideas such as Google Glass or the driverless cars emerging out of Google X. Fried’s team’s ability to react quickly to these opportunities earned it a reputation for being experts with the tactics. They could seize upon an opportunity or squelch a problem as soon as either was identified.
A couple of years ago, Fried wanted to plant a flag figuratively to declare what IT stood for, however. As the company continued its tremendous growth, the demands on IT would grow accordingly, and without a filter to judge certain kinds of ideas so that some would be de-prioritized would mean the department might be crushed under the weight of growing needs and expectations of the rest of the organization.
IT missions typically sit above the strategy of the organization and they should not change as often as a strategy will, and therefore should offer a lasting initial screen to help determine whether a given idea is worthy of pursuing or not. The IT strategy and the portfolio of projects connected to that strategy will get to the next level of granularity closer to the transactional level of the business.
As a result, Fried and his leadership team defined Google IT’s mission as “To Empower Googlers with World Leading Technology.” This is a bold mission, and it clearly states that average is not good enough. Fried and his team embraced this mission because it complemented the company’s mission as a whole, which is “To Organize the World’s Information and Make It Universally Accessible and Useful.” One ambitious mission deserves another to support it.
There are a few things that are noteworthy about this plan:
First, it requires that IT develop tight collaborations with colleagues outside of IT, so that the IT department truly knows what “Googlers” need to be successful. Fried had a valuable arrow in his quiver: he had some of the deepest engineering talent in the world, and in many case his team could seek the counsel of colleagues who invented significant aspects of the Internet, technology infrastructure, and computer languages. IT needed to develop stronger ties with these experts earlier on in the development of new technologies…
To explore the recent Beyond CIO Series articles, please click here.
To listen to an older Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Ben, click here.
Jo-ann Olsovsky discusses how BNSF Railway supports its widespread and increasingly mobile workforce of 40,000 employees with unified communications.
by Peter High, published on CIOInsight.com
Excerpt from the Article
Jo-ann Olsovsky, the vice president and CIO of BNSF Railway, shares her experiences with implementing unified communications, the benefits BNSF has gained, and the company’s immediate IT challenges.
IN SUMMARY
WHO: Jo-ann Olsovsky, VP and CIO of BNSF Railway WHAT: Sharing her experiences about BNSF Railway’s approach to unified communications WHERE: Fort Worth, Texas WHY: To provide CIOs and other IT leaders with actionable advice and insights about how to implement unified communications.
Jo-ann Olsovsky knows a thing or two about telecommunications. Prior to becoming CIO of BNSF Railway in June 2008, she was the assistant vice president of telecommunications at BNSF, and previously, she was the director of enterprise network services and technology support services at Verizon Communications. Soon after joining BNSF, Olsovsky recognized that unified communications would be an important area to invest in as the workforce that she supported was increasingly mobile.
In this Q&A, Olsovsky tells CIO Insight contributor Peter High about the steps she has taken relative to unified communications, the value her company has derived, and her future plans.
CIO Insight: How did the idea to pursue unified communications become a strategic imperative for BNSF Railway?
There was a combination of factors that led us to pursue that strategy. First, our workforce is very mobile. We have 40,000 employees all over the United States, and many of them are not in traditional office settings or spend a significant portion of their work day on the go. As a result, we needed to tailor communications tools that fit their needs.
Second, our voicemail system was no longer adequately supported. With our focus on being good stewards of the technology investments that we deploy, we jokingly say that “We will replace no asset before its time.” Well, our voicemail system had clearly reached its time. This added an additional reason to understand what the marketplace offered when it came to advanced communications solutions.
As CIO and Chief Supply Chain Officer, Praveen Chopra realized that to succeed in supply chain, succeeding in IT would be a must.
01-29-2013
Praveen Chopra worked in supply chain in consulting for Accenture, and at The Home Depot for a number of years before early 2005 when he took over that function for Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, a nearly $2 billion pediatric healthcare group with three hospitals and 17 neighborhood locations in Greater Atlanta. As he recognized that the success of supply chain was increasingly dependent on system integration, data integrity, and other key aspects typically run by the IT department, he determined that tight integration between IT and supply chain was a must. After a series of conversations with the CFO of the company, Chopra took over responsibility of IT as CIO in early 2006 while keeping his supply chain responsibilities. He had a deep foundation in technology dating back to his undergraduate degree in computer science and engineering, but continuing through to his deep collaborations with CIOs over the years. As a result, Chopra was able to transition successfully to the CIO-plus role, and to garner tremendous value at the nexus between IT and supply chain, as he highlights in my interview below.
(This is the ninth in the CIO-plus series. To read the prior eight interviews with the CIO-pluses from Waste Management, McKesson, Merck, Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, Ameristar Casinos, Owens Corning, Marsh & McLennan, and ADP, please click this link. To receive notice about future interviews in the series with CIO-pluses of the San Francisco Giants, and P&G, please click visit the column’s page. in the weeks to come.)
Peter High: Let’s start with a little history, Praveen. Since 2000, you have been a supply chain executive. How did you find your way into supply chain, and what are the differences between managing the supply chain for a major retailer (The Home Depot) versus a healthcare organization (your current employer, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta)?
Praveen Chopra: When I was consulting, I became curious about supply chain. What attracted me was the ability to look beyond functional boundaries in an organization to improve the flow of products and information. I took a chance and with a little bit of luck, got involved with supply chain engagements at major corporations. I loved it and never looked back after that. Interestingly, I find the supply chain discipline to be similar across industries. It’s the drivers that make it different and complex. At The Home Depot, the focus was on product assortment, product volume, and distribution of the vendors and stores. At Children’s the focus is on the time sensitivity, availability and expiration of supplies which are necessary to help kids, and to make their lives better.
