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Hyatt Hotels Corporation announced the appointment of Eben Hewitt as Hyatt’s Chief Information Officer, effective July 18. Hewitt will oversee Technology, Enterprise Applications and Cybersecurity for Hyatt. He will report to Mark Vondrasek, Hyatt’s Chief Commercial Officer.
“Eben’s tenacity and drive will bring a fresh perspective to Hyatt and play a critical role in scaling our IT platform to grow and diversify our brand and guest offerings,” said Vondrasek. “Our guest-centered IT is grounded in active listening to the needs of our guests, colleagues and owners, and designed to enhance every part of the hospitality experience.”
Hewitt previously served as Chief Technology Officer at Sabre Hospitality, a leading technology provider for the hospitality industry, serving more than 40,000 hotels and resorts spanning 160 countries. He also brings experience from prior technology leadership roles at Choice Hotels and O’Reilly Media.
Hewitt hopes to continue to drive innovation building on progress the team has made with such offerings as the Digital Key in the World of Hyatt app, which utilizes Bluetooth technology allowing guests to use their iPhone or Android phone as a digital key and two-way hotel chat, which allows for personalized communication between guests and hotel colleagues.
“I couldn’t be more thrilled to join Hyatt at this transformational moment,” said Hewitt. “It’s an honor to support and advance Hyatt’s vision of a world of understanding and care. As Hyatt grows, this outstanding technology team is ready to create meaningful personal connections and delight our stakeholders, with empathy at the heart of everything we do.”
In addition to Hewitt’s decade of hospitality industry experience, he is also a recognized thought leader in technology, with published books on enterprise architecture, software design and database management systems, including the international bestseller Technology Strategy Patterns.
Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. He has written two bestselling books, and his third, Getting to Nimble, was recently released. He also moderates the Technovation podcast series and speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @PeterAHigh.
General Motors today named two new technology leaders and said it would split its information technology organization into two groups, one focused on global IT and the other on software product development for customers.
Fred Killeen was named VP of global information technology and Chief Information Officer, reporting to CEO Mary Barra. He will lead the Global IT team, which is responsible for back-office IT support and using software to support growth across the company. Killeen most recently was GM’s Chief Information Security Officer and CTO, where he oversaw the automaker’s global information security and IT risk management programs.
Stacy Lynett will run the Digital Business Software group. Reporting to newly appointed Chief Digital Officer Edward Kummer, her team will be responsible for technology strategy and software product development that is geared toward delivering enhanced products and experiences for customers. She will also support global customer and dealer systems.
Lynett most recently was executive director and CIO of Global Product Development and Quality for GM IT, as well as CIO for Global Corporate Functions. In that role, she focused on the company’s Workday solution and supporting IT for the legal and communications functions.
Both Killeen and Lynett previously reported to CIO Randy Mott, who last week announced plans to retire.
The Global IT and Digital Business Software groups will be a critical part of GM’s plan to deliver $20 billion to $25 billion in software-enabled services revenue annually by 2030. In a press release, GM noted that both groups “will continue to collaborate on driving innovation, providing the best software and technology solutions to support the company, attracting and retaining talent, professional development, and more.”
“The new structure and dual operating model will enable GM to fully leverage its strong foundation in IT capability, talent and resources, as well as reduce complexity and improve speed,” Barra said in the statement. “Stacy and Fred bring unique backgrounds and experiences to help us seize the opportunities software plays in our business as we move from automaker to platform innovator.”
Vinny Hoxha, deputy CISO at GM, will take over as Chief Information Security Officer, reporting to Killeen.
PSteven Norton is co-head of CIO networks, research and media at Metis Strategy, a business and IT strategy firm. He previously was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal’s CIO Journal, where he covered the changing role of the chief information officer and the rise of emerging technologies including artificial intelligence and blockchain. At Forbes, he covers new CIO appointments as well as the ways in which technology executives are developing the workforce of the future.
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Most companies of consequence have a chief information officer. Many others have chief technology officers, who might be the heads of product and engineering for a tech-centric company, or, for some non-tech sector companies, might be the heads of infrastructure or tech-savvy leaders reporting to less technical chief information officers. A growing number of companies have chief digital officers, as well, often signaling the need to have an executive oversee digital transformation efforts exclusively. There are examples where the top tech and digital chief has one or a combination of these titles. The combination of all three roles for three separate executives occurs less frequently, needless to say, but less frequent still are examples of companies with execs with these three titles each of whom report to the chief executive officer. One such company is Johnson Controls.
Johnson Controls is a 136-year-old, Milwaukee-based company that develops products and services that enhance the intelligence of buildings to the tune of nearly $30 billion in annual revenue. Mike Ellis is the company’s chief customer and digital officer, adding customer responsibilities to the CDO title. He joined Johnson Controls in October 2019. Diane Schwarz is the company’s chief information officer, who joined the company in August of 2020. Finally, Vijay Sankaran is the company’s chief technology officer, and he joined the company in May 2021.
Ellis describes his role as chief customer and digital officer as deciphering the impact of the company’s efforts on customers, engaging them to understand what is most important to them. The goal is to innovate in collaboration with them, identifying ideas that will make a difference in their operations. Additionally, Ellis is responsible for digital product innovation and enterprise marketing, as the CMO reports through to him.
Schwarz has been a CIO multiple times over at companies like Hunt Consolidated and Textron. She has what she refers to as the traditional CIO purview of infrastructure, applications, and websites. Beyond that, she owns the customer experience, including “how our employee operates with all of our applications, how they get the day-to-day job done,” she noted. Schwarz added, “Mike owns the customer’s experience with our products, but then when you have the overlap of the Venn diagram, as the customers interact with portals, billing and how to schedule a ticket for field service; that’s where it goes back into the CIO responsibilities. It’s not, black and white to say that everything the customer interacts with Johnson Controls is under Mike’s umbrella. We have to navigate what really is the product experience versus the application experience.”
Sankaran has also been a CIO previously at TD Ameritrade, where he also ran an innovation program for the company. He oversees products for Johnson Controls. “When we think about product, it’s really the game-changing part of what’s going on in our industry right now – the software part of that product,” he said. “[We work on building] the right thing and build the thing right. My focus is all around building the thing right and building out a world-class digital software engineering organization at Johnson Controls.” His team’s focus is on edge Internet of Things (IoT) through a software and data platform called Open Blue. It is a platform that allows Johnson Controls’ customers to drive energy efficiency and sustainability by managing their spaces, smart buildings and then applying artificial intelligence [AI] and machine learning [ML] to be able to generate those insights. This creates a closed-loop so that we fully get to the smart autonomous buildings.
“We’re building the software and all the connectors and the data structures and the AI models in my new organization to support that and work closely with Mike around the customer needs and experiences, and closely with Diane’s organization around the broader ecosystem of service and support and infrastructure and cybersecurity to make sure that the pieces that overlap in that Venn diagram come together seamlessly,” noted Sankaran.
The group that now reports to Sankaran to bring this to life used to partially report to Ellis, who recognized the value in unifying the edge software engineering capabilities together with the integrated Open Blue platform. This has proven to be a strategic differentiator for the company. Sankaran has accelerated Ellis’ vision by implementing the scaled agile framework across the group to accelerate speed to market.
Schwarz noted that a key to determining where one’s responsibilities begin and the next one’s ends boils down to solid communications both informal and formal. “We absolutely get that we need to work productively on figuring out the handoffs and providing clarity to our teams,” said Schwarz. “[We are] a company going through a huge transformational shift to become digital to the core. The kinds of problems that we’re solving are new to the organization.”
When asked about the formal structures in place to facilitate the forging of strong bonds across the company, Schwarz offered the example of cybersecurity. There is an enterprise cybersecurity group, which reports to her, and there is a product cybersecurity team that reports to Sankaran. Though there is some overlap between what they do, they are distinct disciplines. Schwarz and her enterprise chief information security officer (CISO) attend Sankaran’s product cybersecurity briefings, and likewise, Sankaran and his CISO attend Schwarz’s enterprise cybersecurity briefings. This is indicative of a broader desire to keep each other informed especially in the areas where roles overlap.
Ellis notes that the approach Johnson Controls has taken in defining these roles and responsibilities has facilitated the 136-year-old company moving from industrial speed to the speed of a software company. It speaks volumes as to the company’s commitment to a digital future that it has three leaders of such consequence reporting to the CEO of the company. To have that degree of digital sophistication represented at the executive level bodes well for the company to accomplish its goal of becoming digital to the core.
When Sweetgreen CEO Jonathan Neman co-founded Sweetgreen 14 years ago, he and the founding team saw a remarkable opportunity to embrace technology both as a means to enhance customer experience, but to do the same for employee experience. The fast-casual restaurant was founded in 2007 in Washington, DC by Neman, and two friends who were fellow undergraduates at Georgetown University: Nicolas Jammet and Nathaniel Ru. (The company moved to Los Angeles in 2016.) Neman referred to how the company became a pioneer in online ordering, which would serve them well during the pandemic, as well as in helping manage the company’s supply chain, since most of the produce used in the company’s salads are procured in partnership with local and regional producers.
Neman underscored that the way technology has aided customer experience is through speed, choice, and personalization. “We want to lower the barriers to entry and make it more accessible to eat healthy food in line with our mission,” he said.
Neman quickly added that the company is in the early stages of its transformation. “While we’re probably a decade into the digital transformation, we’re still in the very early days in terms of how technology is going to disrupt the restaurant business and the food business. As a business gets to over 50% digitized, you can start to re-imagine the business model in a lot of ways.”
Neman sees tremendous advantages derived by the digital penetration of Sweetgreen’s business pre-pandemic that served it well during trying times for the industry across the past 17 months. “Where the rest of the world was playing catch up in terms of technology integration into the [customer] experience, we were built upon that idea, those ideals, and it was native to the experience already.” As a result, customers did not need to pivot too dramatically in order to eat at Sweetgreen during the pandemic.
As Sweetgreen has scaled, the business has grown in complexity. Therefore, the time was right to identify a seasoned leader to act as a steward for what is to come as the company continues to scale. Thus, Sweetgreen has hired Wouleta Ayele to be the company’s new chief technology officer effective August 17. She joins the company from Starbucks where she spent nearly 16 years, ending her tenure there as the senior vice president of technology. “When we met Wouleta, we were blown away by her leadership, her experience, and her perspective,” said Neman. “We thought she’d be the perfect partner to lead us through this next stage of our growth.”
For her part, Ayele was drawn to Sweetgreen based on the company’s mission. “It’s an innovative company that’s leading the way to a healthier future, and I wanted to be part of it,” she said. “The kind of talent that they’ve hired excited me and energized me, as well.”
Having been in food retail for so long, Ayele recognized that her experience will be helpful for a company that wishes to develop the reach and influence of the company she just left. Thus, she counts understanding what it takes to scale from roughly 130 stores the company currently has to an order of magnitude more than that. “Having a clear vision and strategy for [technology and its evolution], I take full, clear accountability for leading the charge on that,” noted Ayele. “[Another] area of focus will be delivering brand-differentiating capabilities. Also, leading with next-generation capabilities, data, and analytics while fostering efficiency will be a focus, as well.” She hastened to add that she views the work ahead as building upon the great work her new team has already done rather than a need to reinvent the technology function within Sweetgreen.
Neman underscored that the pandemic has taught us all to expect the unexpected and to ensure that the company fosters nimbleness as it plans for the future. “Instead of trying to predict the future in terms of what our customers or team members are going to want from a technology perspective, one of the ways in which we think about it is building and architecting a system that allows us to move at the speed of culture,” he said. “As the customer changes and as the business changes, we’re able to continuously stay ahead of those changes.”
Ultimately, Neman believes the pandemic has increased scrutiny on health. This has been an added advantage to the company as it has grown. “Sweetgreen has what I call the trifecta of healthy food, which [is that it] makes you feel good, [it has] an addictive quality and [we have] a customized and personalized [menu], which means you can eat Sweetgreen in every single day and eat something different every day for the rest of your life.”
Barbara Lavernos has had a storied 30-year career at L’Oreal. She has had multiple promotions in recent months going from Chief Technology and Operations Officer of the company to President of Research, Innovation, and Technology in February 2021 to Deputy Chief Executive Officer in charge of Research, Innovation and Technology in May 2021. She indicated that her background and passion for tech-enabled innovation aligns with the company’s focus on science and innovation, which she noted: “have been at the foundation of our pioneering spirit and the success with our consumers as the L’Oréal DNA.”
Lavernos’ has driven a remarkable digital transformation at the company at the intersection of science and technology to create a powerful platform to develop advanced, personalized, innovative beauty products, services, and devices. “The science; agronomy and biotechnology allow us to renew completely our portfolio of raw materials,” noted Lavernos. “Green sciences are at the heart of the exploration of our innovation when it comes to product. Then with the exponential advance of tech, we think we are unlocking new breakthrough algorithm-based services and products. That is the idea of combining research and innovation—our roots, our DNA—with this revolution of technology. We look forward to developing innovation that pushes the boundaries of science and reinvents beauty rituals thanks to technology.”
Lavernos is passionate about what she refers to as BeautyTech. She defined the term as, “exponentially augmenting L’Oréal’s science that we have rooted [in] cutting-edge technology at scale.” She added that the company has the advantage of 112 years of knowledge and data about beauty rituals related to skin and hair. One of the biggest changes in recent years has been the focus on personalization. “In the past, most of the companies provided global products that [were believed to] suit everyone,” Lavernos said. “Today, we [have the capacity to know consumers] in real-time, to know their expectations, to know their environment, to know their skin because with virtual reality, with virtual try-on, we can have this dialogue with our consumers.”
By way of example, Lavernos highlighted an offering that was introduced at CES 2021 with the company’s Yves Saint Laurent brand. It is called Rouge Sur Measure, and it is a smart at-home method for consumers to create their own personalized lipstick, choosing from thousands of shades with one single touch. It is done through an app that can be installed on a smartphone or on a tablet. The app leverages artificial intelligence to allow the consumer to explore and try the color or the looks they want. Also, a consumer can take a picture of a pair of shoes or a handbag and match a lipstick color to them.
A second example that Lavernos offered is Lancôme Custom Made Foundation, which offers Le Teint Particulier, meaning a unique tint. It is a patented technology that creates a foundation that matches the skin tone of each individual. “The experience starts with taking a scan of the consumer’s skin, and it is done at the point-of-sale with three different places to have the perfect skin tone,” Lavernos explained. “Then this data is interpreted by the highly sophisticated algorithm, which predicts the ideal color using those three measurements taken from your skin. The algorithm goes on to determine the correct amount of each ingredient required. Then you have the mix of those ingredients. 20 minutes after, you have the perfect foundation you are dreaming of!”
Lavernos also highlighted that consumers today are much more interested that in the past about the ingredients in the products they use but also where they come from and how they are sourced and manufactured. L’Oreal now provides QR codes that provide product origin, production, manufacturing conditions, sourcing, supplier details, and the like.
Customers are also more interested in the environmental impact of the products they use. L’Oreal has established a partnership with Gjosa, a Swiss innovation and environmental company that integrates technology into everyday products to make them more environmentally friendly. The partnership has developed a multi-channel showerhead that integrates Gjosa patented In-Flow technology, that will make it possible for beauty salons to use 80% less water when washing customers’ hair. Lavernos indicated that a version for consumers to use at home is in the offing, as well.
The pandemic has pushed some consumers who had little or no experience with virtual try-ons for make-up, for example, to use the latest technology to do so. Many have enjoyed the experience so much that Lavernos believes many will continue to interact with the company virtually for try-ons even when the health crisis subsides. In 2020, more than 25% of L’Oreal’s revenue was derived via digitally via e-commerce. That represented an increase of 70% over the prior year. “Here again, there will be no way back,” said Lavernos. “Not to say that people will not come back to physical shops, but they will go to physical shops for other experiences [than in the past]. Here again, technology will play a key role for entertainment, for precision advice, for our professionals taking care of them [personally].” She believes that e-commerce sales will eventually behalf of the company’s overall sales.
Lavernos believes that her ascent to the Deputy Chief Executive Officer role at L’Oreal was aided by her background in technology. “Technology is business today,” she underscored. “My appointment in this position is really only the translation of this belief…. [technology] became fully, completely strategic, let’s say, eight years ago when we transformed into Industry 4.0, when we entered this digital shift and more and more IT came into everything. When you speak about advertising…it is tech-based today. When it comes to innovation…it is about technology. When it comes to supply chain e-commerce, it is about technology. Finance? If you are not real-time, at scale, capable [of leveraging] AI, how can you properly manage your Finance [function]?”
Therefore, Lavernos believes that her journey will be replicated many times over, as technology and digital leaders increasingly are seen as ideal candidates for the top ranks within companies. She provides a remarkable case-in-point for others to ponder and emulate.
Yasir Anwar is the Chief Technology Officer and Chief Digital Officer of Williams-Sonoma. He refers to the company as a house of brands, which include Williams-Sonoma, Williams-Sonoma Home, West Elm, Pottery Barn, Pottery Barn Teen, Pottery Barn Kids, Mark & Graham, and Rejuvenation. Technology and digital are the central nervous system of the company, Anwar notes. “We are the world’s largest digital-first, design-led and sustainable home retailer. For that, you have to bring the whole world together to serve the customer needs.”
Anwar sees the evolution of the head of technology role as key in this transformation. He notes that “traditional” CIOs have an internal operational focus. The merging of technology and digital in his title and responsibilities implies a focus on technology projects but also on outcomes. What value is being driven? “It always has to start with the customer experience,” Anwar says. “This is the merger of the technology strength, powered and coupled by customer experience, digital experiences, and the power of digital that has been unleashing in the world as we speak.”
The results speak for themselves. Williams-Sonoma has a 70% e-commerce revenue penetration, Anwar said, up from 58% prior to the pandemic. Achieving that from a technical perspective begins with a global multi-tenant platform and a modern e-commerce platform. “We are building on top of not just microservices, but micro front-end, which would allow us to have more nimble, small, modular services,” noted Anwar. This allows the company to go to market much more rapidly. The platform is used across all of the company’s brands, which gives the company an edge when it comes to innovation. The platform allows the company to test a new idea or feature on a single brand, gather data, and quickly roll it out to others if it is successful.
As with many other companies, the pandemic accelerated digital innovation. For example, Williams-Sonoma associates use a tool called Room Planner to help advise clients on what furniture fits best in which rooms. The pandemic pushed for a faster release of a customer-facing version of the tool, which enables a customer to use the measurements of a room in their house, and then fill the space with furniture from across Williams-Sonoma’s brands. This proved to be a game changer at a time when so many people focused on updating and upgrading their homes to make them more conducive to both work and personal life. The tool also provides a connection to a professional when a customer wishes to get advice or ask questions.
When asked for Williams-Sonoma’s points of differentiation, Anwar believes one of the biggest examples is the company’s in-house design. “Many other marketplaces…sell home furnishing items,” he said. “They [typically procure] those items. They’re sourcing those items from different vendors across the world, but they do not own the design of those products.” By contrast, each of the Williams-Sonoma brands have high-performing, passionate and inspirational designers. “We own and we design everything and then we work with our in-house manufacturing locations, which we have here in the U.S.,” said Anwar, “We make in America, and then we also go to our partners, wherever we need to get the quality and diversity of design manufacturing…. I don’t think there is a company that could claim that they have such a deep ownership of the design, freshness of the design, and then the quality of the design.”
Anwar and his team have focused on two key cultural pillars in their transformation. First was moving a culture of “managers managing managers” to “experts leading experts.” This entails upskilling the team dramatically to greater levels of depth of knowledge. The second was going from a focus on output to a focus on outcomes. The result has been a transformation from a traditional retailer to a true hybrid between traditional retail and retail tech. “Our business is completely running on the rails of technology,” Anwar said. “Our goal in the next few years is to [reach a point where] tech front-loads the business propulsion and growth.”
The “house of brands” approach works for Williams-Sonoma because each brand serves different phases of an individual or a family’s life. The stores, themselves, reflect those nuances. A Pottery Barn Kids will have a different look and feel from Williams-Sonoma. That said, there are many commonalities and best practices that the unified Stores team can apply across the brands. Technology reflects a similar strategy. “If you have brands which are running on different platforms, different versions, there is a ton of costs,” he said. “If you have tested something great in one brand, you cannot go live [with] another brand because there are so many nuances.” Anwar noted that at least 85% of the company’s technology stack is common for all the brands.
Each of these trends served Williams-Sonoma well, and the stock price of the company bears this out, as it has risen more than 450% since March 20, 2020, from roughly $36 per share to the current price north of $164 per share.
Anwar is proud of the degree to which the tech and digital team fostered nimbleness in the company. “The teams were ready, the infrastructure was ready, the websites were ready, the supply chain fulfillment operational teams were ready,” noted Anwar. “It is a unique situation for all [retailers]. As they say, everybody is going through the same storm, but on different types of ships.” Anwar and his team have helped Williams-Sonoma build a ship to withstand the storm, steering more readily toward opportunity and away from danger.
LoanDepot has named George Brady Chief Digital Officer, effective July 6. LoanDepot has funded more than $300 billion in loans since its founding in 2010 and currently ranks as the second-largest retail nonbank lender and one of the leading retail mortgage lenders in the United States. LoanDepot is an approved seller and servicer for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae.
Brady will oversee all of loanDepot’s technology capabilities, including the leading proprietary platform, mello, with a specific focus on spearheading loanDepot’s technological innovation. Brady will report directly to loanDepot Founder and CEO Anthony Hsieh. LoanDepot’s technology team, led by Chief Information Officer Sudhir Nair, will report to Brady.
“Pushing the technology envelope is in loanDepot’s DNA,” said loanDepot founder and chief executive officer Anthony Hsiea. “Since our launch in 2010, our technology-powered products and services have changed the game for both customers and originators by providing an exceptional experience they can’t get anywhere else.”
In describing Brady’s hire, Hsiea went on to note, “George is a world-class talent whose unmatched knowledge, skills and leadership adds incredible horsepower to an already exceptional team. Under George’s leadership, I’m confident we’ll drive our world-class platform, mello, to new heights and continue to cultivate a culture of innovation and technical excellence. We have a tremendous opportunity to not only continue our innovation path as a category leader, but to shape and change the entire industry.”
“LoanDepot has a deep understanding of how technology can push the boundaries to enable both consumers and originators to seamlessly and successfully navigate the lending process,” noted Brady. “Between its remarkable track record of digital innovation, the talent and passion of its outstanding team, and the commitment of a visionary CEO to stay on the cutting edge, loanDepot is in a unique market position. The time is right to set the new standard for technological excellence and expand our capacity to meet the changing expectations of our customers.”
Brady has spent most of his career in financial services at companies like Goldman Sachs, Fidelity Investments, and Deutsche Bank. He was most recently the Chief Technology Officer at Capital One.
Johnson Controls has appointed Vijay Sankaran as vice president and chief technology officer, a new role aimed at accelerating product software engineering development and expanding customer solutions. This will expand upon the company’s OpenBlue digital platform, which allows the company to connect all building systems and to optimize interior environments by learning from the data the systems share. Johnson Controles is a global leader for smart, healthy and sustainable buildings. Sankaran was most recently chief information officer and head of innovation at TD Ameritrade, with responsibility for digital strategy, customer platforms, software engineering, technology operations, cybersecurity, data management and analytics, and enterprise innovation.
“Vijay brings a wealth of strategic software experience to Johnson Controls and is ideally positioned to strengthen our solutions and market competitiveness through world class software engineering,” said Johnson Controls chairman and chief executive officer George Oliver to whom Sankaran reports. “In this new, enterprise-wide chief technology officer role, Vijay and the software engineering team will accelerate our innovation, solve for unique customer outcomes and deliver for our customers on the key secular trends of sustainability, energy efficiency, and healthy, safe and connected smart buildings.”
Sankaran’s is a newly created organization, with software engineering team members from across Johnson Controls global portfolio reporting into it. His team will accelerate and unify the product software engineering development efforts creating common software architecture to further drive the enterprise software technology strategy.
“Vijay’s role as CTO will be pivotal in driving continued growth and expansion for our OpenBlue digital platform as all of the elements of a building’s operational technology become connected,” said Johnson Controls Chief Customer and Digital Officer Mike Ellis. “Through OpenBlue, that connectivity enables us to leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence, as well as edge computing technologies, to predict patterns and trends, and provide positive customer outcomes for sustainability, energy efficiency, security and healthy building environments.”
“I couldn’t be more excited to have this opportunity to lead customer facing engineering as no other company has the breadth of capabilities to provide healthy, smart, sustainable building environments,” said Sankaran upon reflecting on this new opportunity. “The Johnson Controls team already successfully developed and rolled out an outstanding platform, OpenBlue.”
Sankaran’s role is to integrate software engineering across the company in a holistic way so that we can further expand the capabilities of OpenBlue and leverage the breadth of the company’s building systems portfolio. When asked about the technologies that will be most important to this journey, he noted, artificial intelligence, machine learning, data analytics and connectivity, each of which he referred to as “game changers” to help customers meet their goals on sustainability, energy efficiency and healthy, smart buildings.
Prior to working at TD Ameritrade, Sankaran held executive roles at Ford Motor Company from 2001 to 2013, including IT Chief Technology Officer, Director of Application Development, as well as leadership roles in architecture, emerging technologies, data and analytics, and enterprise transformation programs.
Sankaan has a B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an M.B.A. at Duke University Fuqua School of Business.
Xerox recently announced the appointment of Naresh Shanker as senior vice president, chief technology officer, effective May 6. He will report to John Visentin, vice chairman and CEO of Xerox, and will serve as a member of the company’s Executive Committee.
“Naresh is a proven innovator with an impressive record of leading large-scale, digital transformations that help business growth and profitability,” said Visentin. “His experience and expertise will be essential as we execute on our innovation roadmap and reposition Xerox for long-term, sustainable growth.”
Shanker, who joined Xerox in January, will succeed Steve Hoover and will be responsible for research and product development and an increasingly digital information technology operation.
