By Peter High, published on Forbes
1/24/17
Imagine Pittsburgh in 1979. The Steelers won the Super Bowl, the Pirates won the World Series, and the city nearly went bankrupt. Given the passage of time, it is easy to forget how deeply depressed the city was. Unemployment was nearly at 20 percent.
That same year, a seed was planted that would portend a great renaissance for the city. Carnegie Mellon University started its robotics program that same year. Additionally, a string of forward thinking city leaders were able to see past the end of Pittsburgh’s dominance as a steel town toward a brighter future as a technology-centric economy.
I recently spoke with Mayor William Peduto about this, and he offered many examples of the current administration’s progressive thinking about the union between city government, universities, and private industry. In September, Uber announced that they would pilot their driverless car initiative in Pittsburgh, for instance. Also, last year, Peduto’s chief innovation officer (a rare role in city government) announced the formation of PGH Lab, which provides government assistance to entrepreneurs. Additionally, in 2014, the city government signed an agreement with Carnegie Mellon to utilize that university as Pittsburgh’s own research and development department, while Carnegie Mellon can use the city as its own urban lab. Through it all, Pittsburgh has become a model city for others to learn from.
Peter High: In September of this year there was quite a splash made when Uber began its pilot driverless car initiative in Pittsburgh. How has it gone so far and what are the plans for the foreseeable future?
Bill Peduto: It was about two years in the making. The Uber team came to Pittsburgh with the intent to kick the tires to see if our city could become a global center for their autonomous vehicle research and development. There were not looking for government money or any type of subsidy. They were looking for a partner who was willing to create an urban lab. We had had a couple of decades of experience working with Carnegie Mellon [CMU] on autonomous vehicles in the city and had CMU’s cars already on our streets. It was not a big leap for us to be able to accommodate Uber.
Over the course of the past year and a half, Uber has employed over six-hundred employees in the city, and I expect that number to be over a thousand by the end of 2017. They are committed to spending up to one billion dollars within the city. Almost any time of the day, on numerous occasions, you can see the vehicles downtown within prescribed areas of the city. I expect that over the course of the next few years that geographical footprint will be expanding as well.
High: There are a lot of people who are pontificating as to how quickly driverless cars will become a reality. Given the city’s history with driverless cars, how has this informed your thoughts about how rapidly this might take off more generally for the public?
Peduto: I think if you asked anybody two years ago, “Do you anticipate driverless cars on the streets of an American city in the next 20 months?” there would have been few people who would have thought that that would be a reality. The technology has been there for over a decade, but the culture has not. We could have driverless planes. The technology exists, but the moment somebody would walk onto a plane and there would not be a pilot in the cabin, they would walk off the plane. I do not think the culture has caught up to the technology yet. The way that major automobile manufacturers are promoting their new lines of vehicles, they are doing it through increased autonomous technology. I think that within the next five years you will see a streamlining of different functions of the car which will contain autonomous ability. The sensors that will be utilized will allow the cars to talk to each other. It is not simply having an autonomous vehicle, but a series of vehicles that know exactly how far away to stay from each other, can anticipate what a car three cars ahead is doing and how to react to it before the human eye can even catch it, and then building that network into the public right of way with sensor detectors and cameras that can collect all this data and make our roads much more safe and efficient.
We are already rolling out the next phase of the smartest traffic signals in the world. Our partnership with Carnegie Mellon over a system called SureTrack allows us to capture information in real time and through a network of traffic signals and change the timing of the green lights and the red lights to increase efficiency by 31 percent. You do not have to add a new turning lane or build another roadway, you can use the existing roadways that you have, and through automation and sensors be able to make the system much more efficient and safe for bicyclists and pedestrians as well.
High: You have referenced the partnership the city of Pittsburgh has formed with Carnegie Mellon University. How do you see the lessons of the partnership between city governments, academia, and private business working together?
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
Peter High
8/15/2016
Earlier this year at Facebook’s F8 conference, the company revealed three innovation pillars that make up the company’s ten-year vision: connectivity, artificial intelligence (AI), and virtual reality (VR). Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer is responsible for leading each of them. Despite the fact that the vision is ten-years in duration, the company has made significant progress in each.
Facebook’s progress in AI can been seen in everything from the company’s news feed to the way in which people are tagged. The virtual reality innovations are best demonstrated through the Oculus Rift, which I demo’d last Thursday. More recently, the company made a great flight forward on the connectivity pillar as Acquila, a long-endurance plane that will fly above commercial aircraft and the weather, took flight in Arizona. The goal is for this v-shaped aircraft that has a wingspan longer than a Boeing 737, but weighs under 1,000 pounds to bring basic internet access to the developing world.
I met with Schroepfer at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, and we discussed these three pillars and a variety of other topics, including the company’s recruiting methods, how the company maintains its innovative edge, and the logic behind its headquarters – one of the largest open-space offices in the world.
Peter High: Earlier this year at F8 2016, Facebook’s developer’s conference, you introduced three innovation pillars. Could you take a moment to highlight each of them?
Mike Schroepfer:We have been, I think pretty uniquely in the industry, very public about our ten-year vision and roadmap, and we have broken it down into three core areas:
High: With the abundant resources and brain power at Facebook, how did you choose those three as opposed to others?
Schroepfer: A lot of this derives directly from [Facebook CEO] Mark [Zuckerberg], and comes from the mission, which is to make the world more open and connected. I think of this simply as using technology to connect people. We sit down and say, “OK, if that is our goal, the thing we are uniquely suited for, what are the big problems of the world?” As you start breaking it down, these fall out quite naturally. The first problem is if a bunch of the world does not even have basic connectivity to the internet, that is a fundamental problem. Then you break it down and realize there are technological solutions to problems; there are things that can happen to dramatically reduce the cost of deploying infrastructure, which is the big limiting factor. It is just an economics problem. Once people are connected, you run into the problem you and I have, which is almost information overload. There is so much information out there, but I have limited time and so I may not be getting the best information. Then there is the realization that the only way to scale that is to start building intelligent systems in AI that can be my real-time assistant all the time, making sure that I do not miss anything that is critical to me and that I do not spend my time on stuff that is less important. The only way we know how to do that at the scale we operate at is artificial intelligence.
So there is connectivity and I am getting the right information, but most of us have friends or family who are not physically next to us all the time, and we cannot always be there for the most important moments in life. The state of the art technology we have for that right now is the video camera. If I want to capture a moment with my kids and remember it forever, that is the best we can do right now. The question is, ‘What if I want to be there live and record those moments in a way that I can relive them twenty years from now as if I was there?’ That is where virtual reality comes in. It gives you the capability of putting a headset on and experiencing it today, and you feel like you are in a real world somewhere else, wherever you want to be.
High: How do you think about those longer term goals, the things that are going to take a lot of stair steps to get to, versus the near-term exhaust of ideas that are going to be commercialized and commercial-ready?
Click here to read the full article
11/7/16
Slack is the fastest growing workplace software ever. The company’s CEO Stewart Butterfield co-founded the company in August of 2013, as a cloud-based team collaboration tool.
As fast as the organization has grown, interestingly enough, Butterfield underestimated the true opportunity for the idea that he and his co-founders developed. Originally, when he first pitched Slack, he believed the market for this software was $100 million, which they recently exceeded in revenue in roughly three years.
As the organization has grown at such an impressive clip, Butterfield has been forced to grow the team substantially in parallel. He has done so with a laser focus on certain cultural attributes, aligning recruiting practices to his established mission in order to ensure the continued addition of high quality employees. As Butterfield notes below, the mission is: “to make people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive.”
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the 20th interview in the IT Influencers series. To listen to past interviews with the likes of former Mexican President Vicente Fox, Sal Khan, Sebastian Thrun, Steve Case, Craig Newmark and Meg Whitman, please visit this link).
Peter High: I thought we would begin with the beginning of Slack itself. It was the result of a pivot when you were running a company called Tiny Speck, and it was a component to a game called Glitch, as I understand it. Can you talk a little bit about the genesis of that, the original intent of it, and how this became the idea itself?
Stewart Butterfield: Sure. It was not part of the game, but a tool that we used internally to communicate. The company was started by myself and three other members of the original team. At the time we started it, we had one person in New York, one person in San Francisco, and two in Vancouver, British Columbia, so the natural thing for us to use was IRC. As you know, IRC is now twenty-seven years old and predates the web by a couple of years. By modern standards, it is a clunky and ancient technology. For example, if you and I are using IRC to communicate and you are not connected to the server at a given moment, I cannot send you a message. We built a system to log messages so people could catch up when they got back online. Once we had those messages in a database, we wanted to be able to search, so we added search. I could keep going for a long time with the features we added.
I think one of the critical things was that we were doing this in a subconscious or pre-conscious way, which is not the normal method of software development. There was no ego and no speculation. Whenever a problem got so irritating that we couldn’t stand it or whenever an opportunity for improvement was so obvious that we could not help but take advantage of it, we would do it, and then go back to what we were supposed to be working on. The result of that after three and a half years was this system for internal communications that all of us agreed we would never work without again. We decided to see what else was out there in the market, and there wasn’t anything good, so we made a product at the moment we decided to shut down the game.
High: In those early days, what were the ambitions for it? Clearly, as you say, there was a need that wasn’t being met, even after seeking out something that might be more readily available. How big was the ambition in those early days? There are so many different areas now that Slack covers and so many different products and product categories that it now competes with. Did you see a broader enterprise use in those early days? Did you see this as something that would be taking on the likes of e-mail as well as the Skypes of the world? How did that all occur to you and how quickly did the broader implications of it grow?
Butterfield: It was a little bit of a slow boil in terms of how big it could be. We had taken a bunch of venture capital funding, and when we decided to sit down again, we had five million dollars left. Investors didn’t want their money back, they wanted us to try something else, so when we were putting together the pitch deck for Slack and explaining what we were going to do, we had sized the market at $100 million in revenue.
9-8-2016
Excerpt from the Article:
Novelis is a leading producer of rolled aluminum, and a global leader in aluminum recycling. The company’s aluminum is used in everything from automobiles to architecture to beverage cans to consumer electronics. Much of the company’s aluminum is re-created from material already in the world today, saving natural resources and allowing for the creation of consumer products that have a lower environmental footprint. Through its recycling leadership, what would have otherwise been discarded becomes the material for new creation.
Despite attaining more than $10 billion in revenue with more than 10,000 employees, the company never had a CIO prior to the incumbent, Karen Renner, who joined nearly five years ago. Renner had been a CIO at multiple units within General Electric, and as such was used to process excellence. What she found at Novelis was an IT department in need of new, standardized processes. As she discusses with CIO Insight contributor, Peter High, the journey has been a fruitful one.
CIO Insight: You are the first CIO in the company’s history. The company grew to a tremendous size before hiring a CIO. Why was that, and what led to the conclusion that one was needed?
Renner: In order to deliver on many of Novelis’ transformation strategies, an overhaul of the information technology and data was required. The information infrastructure was unable to meet the aggressive expansions required to enter and provide the data streams required for the automotive market. We also needed modern technology to support our employees working across geographies and to meet growing demands for mobility and collaboration technologies. In order to develop and execute a global IT strategy taking into account the varying regional requirements, the CIO role was created.
CIO Insight: How would you describe the culture of the IT team when you joined, and what have you done to change it?
Renner: We have an excellent team of IT professionals at Novelis with a great mix of technical business process knowledge and program management skills. We act as one team and trusted advisors to deliver best-fit information technology solutions that people value and enjoy using. The biggest cultural shift was to broaden the reach of the team to think bigger and broader–how technology can influence outside of a local requirement to our regions or globally.
CIO Insight: I imagine there was a good deal of foundational investments that were necessary in the early days. How did you prioritize and what did you prioritize to do first?
To read the full article, please visit CIO Insight
by Peter High, published on Forbes
5-31-2016
When one thinks of Motorola, one might think of the consumer brand, but $6 billion Motorola Solutions no longer includes the consumer brand, which was sold to Lenovo in October of 2014. Currently, the $6 billion company is a leader in public safety, providing two-way radios and for providing some of the most reliable voice communication networks around the world. It is focused on the areas of public safety, such as police, fire, and EMS. The company is also focused on smart public safety, which is how first responders use advanced technologies to help communities be safer and work more efficiently.
Technology has always been at the center of what made Motorola an iconic brand, but ironically the IT department was until recent times viewed as a support organization rather than a driver of innovation and efficiency. When Greg Meyers joined Motorola Solutions nearly two years ago, he did so after spending the prior dozen years in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries. He was attracted to history of the firm, now dating back eighty-eight years, but also to the transformation that he would lead. In the period since, he has led IT to become much more customer-centric, deriving ideas directly from those who Motorola Solutions serves. He has also rethought the hiring and training methods to ensure that his team has the make-up to drive higher levels of value. He has also ushered in a “cloud-first” strategy to ensure that IT is more nimble, agile, and flexible.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 36th article in the CIO’s First 100 Days series. To read the prior 34 with the CIOs of companies like Ford, Intel, GE, P&G, Kaiser Permanente, and AARP, among many others, please visit this link.)
Peter High: Can you provide an overview of what is within your purview as chief information officer of Motorola Solutions?
Greg Meyers: It is a pretty simple structure. We are one business unit, one division, and I am the head of IT for the whole company. We are a global company in about one hundred and fifty locations around the world. I am responsible for all the IT that you would expect, which would include the typical systems around G&A, so the ERP environment, the HR systems, legal systems, and supply chain systems, but also play an important role in the front office. A large part of our business is done over e-commerce. My organization is responsible for all the digital interfaces that we have with our customers, both pre-sales marketing, actual commerce of product services and software, as well as post-sales support. Increasingly we are moving into areas that are helping our business evolve into a company that is focused on cloud, Big Data, and those areas. So we incubate a number of those core technologies as well.
High: Can you talk a bit about some of the things that are on your roadmap for the year ahead?
Meyers: Absolutely. For us, there are three things that we are primarily focused on as a department. We are seeing increased revenue around managed services, but also smart public safety. We are seeking to transform from an IT perspective how we interact and engage our customers to drive top line, but also simplify and make it easier for us to do business with them. That obviously helps us improve our bottom line, but also helps improve the customer experience.
The second thing is helping to reimagine our culture. By adopting what we call a cloud-first, mobile-first, wireless-first philosophy, we are looking to untether our workforce from cubicles and wires in their offices to allow them to collaborate wherever they need at any time. We had a pretty well-publicized change last year. We moved 22,000 users from the Microsoft stack to Google stack in one day. We have the largest PBX to cloud transition ever made in the world. We have over five thousand seats that are purely voiceover IP. No hardware. The phone closets are gone.
The third thing is around rethinking what IT means to the company. Rather than it being a back office function, that is, keeping support systems alive, how do we help the company and our customers capitalize on some of the shifts that are caused by the move to mobile, to cloud? And then there is this complicated environment around security, digital mobile. That helps us have the best talent we can ultimately export to our business to create future products and services, and also to incubate a number of those services that will eventually make their way into the products and services that we commercialize.
5-23-2016
Angela Duckworth was an outstanding student growing up, so much so that she was admitted to Harvard University. All the while, however, she was reminded often by her beloved father that she was “no genius.” Many years later, with degrees from Harvard, Oxford, and the University of Pennsylvania under her belt, she was selected as a MacArthur Fellow. Rather ironically, given her father’s reminder, she was officially a genius, as the MacArthur Foundation confers “genius grants.”
To make this story yet a bit more ironic, Duckworth, who is a professor of psychology at Penn, studies grit, which she defines as a combination of perseverance and passion for especially challenging long-term goals. She believes grit is a better predictor for long-term success than our traditional understanding of genius as traits or talents that we are born with. In other words, though she was ordained as a genius, she lets us know there is no reason why we cannot be equally successful in our chosen areas of passion.
This month, Duckworth’s book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance was published. It offers invaluable lessons to business leaders, parents, recruiters, and almost anyone who wishes to have a roadmap to achieve greater levels of success personally, as well as methods to use to instill grit into our kids and our work teams.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link.)
Peter High: How did you determine that this would be at least a significant portion of your life work?
Angela Duckworth: I would date back to my first year of graduate school when I knew that I wanted to understand the psychology of high achievers. I basically believed then, and I do now, that almost anything can be studied, almost anything can be reverse engineered, so if we could put these high achievers under the microscope then we would be able to emulate, or imitate at least, their habits, their beliefs, and maybe replicate their experiences.
I started interviewing these high achievers in business, but also in sports; any high achiever that I could lay my hands on through connections of my advisor or myself. And two themes emerged from the conversations. One was “Wow, the people who are successful are relentlessly dedicated to what they do.” They have a kind of endurance in their effort; they do not get disappointed for long. It is not that they do not get disappointed, but they get back up again, and they are tirelessly working to get better. Perseverance. But there is also stamina in their interest: they are just never bored with what they do. They find it interesting and meaningful, and so they do not switch course a lot. They do not work hard at different things. They work hard at one thing.
High: It seems like every commencement address has a version of “follow your passion”, as though your passion is half a block ahead of you. You make the point that in some ways that is not the most productive way to think about this. You write that it is essential to try a variety of things and quit those things that do not create a spark of passion inside of you, until you find that one thing or series of things that will inspire grit. Can you talk about that?
5-12-2016
Renner: We had three transformation work streams that we started simultaneously: 1. infrastructure, 2. business process automation and simplification and 3. collaboration and workforce mobility.
As many of the programs were interconnected, we built a high level, integrated plan that enabled us to understand the dependencies. The demand for new systems, processes and tools was incredible—our prioritization strategy was completely aligned to the overall Novelis strategy.
3-15-2016
As I have interviewed IT leaders at many companies, there are a handful of companies that seem to have the biggest family trees in producing CIO talent. Few can match Ford Motor Company’s family tree. The CIOs at Boeing and Nike and executives above the CIO rank at Biogen and Deutsche Bank have each spent time in the IT department at Ford. I was curious about this phenomenon, but especially curious to hear from Marcy Klevorn, who for some time had been groomed to become the global CIO of Ford. Her highly regarded predecessor, Nick Smither identified her as a successor and then provided the kinds of opportunities for her in multiple units and geographies to ensure she would have depth and breadth of experience.
Since ascending to the top role in IT a bit more than a year ago, Klevorn has bolstered the IT strategy process and content, she has helped weave IT further into the narrative of customer experience and IoT trends that are important to the industry. All the while, she has used her love of cars as inspiration for new ideas on how IT can make Ford continue to improve.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 34th article in the CIO’s First 100 Days series. To read the prior 33 with the CIOs of companies like Intel, GE, P&G, Kaiser Permanente, and AARP, among many others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: You have spent a little more than a year in role as Chief Information Officer of Ford. You followed a leader who was deemed successful and was retiring. You had been with the organization for a while. I do not imagine it was a surprise as you transitioned to the role of CIO. I imagine this was a smoother transition than coming in from the outside. I would love to understand how you prepared yourself for the role prior to assuming the position, and the sorts of things you did in the early stages of your tenure to set you and your team up for success.
Marcy Klevorn: One thing that we think about at Ford is succession planning, and making sure we have a smooth transition to provide a stable environment for our team to continue to operate. The company continues to change and evolve, so we all need to change and evolve as well. I was conscious of making sure that we had a smooth transition in the handoff.
I worked with Nick Smither, my predecessor, and I did a live interview about the transition, and he offered feedback on why he thought I would be a good candidate and then asked me about what was important to me going forward in the role. Then that was broadcast to the entire company. That was one thing that set this was going to be a smooth handoff. We were aligned on the succession, and we were going to continue to work together until the final days. That was the public way we did that.
The transition happened at a time where Ford was changing, and disrupting itself, going from an automotive manufacturing company to a technology-led company, and a mobility/transportation company. Obviously, IT plays a big part in that. At the same time that this was happening, IT had to re-invent itself as well in response to the direction the company was taking.
Before Nick left, I asked him to participate in a video with me and my IT leadership team that we sent to the employees their first day back at work in 2015 – my first official day in the job – to talk about this transformation. I wanted to include Nick because I thought it was important to give that signal that we were not going to flip the switch and everything was going to change. It is a journey and evolution, and we were going to continue to support Ford as we change the company. Nick was involved in those conversations, so it was going to be orderly and smooth.
3-8-2016
Kim Stevenson has been the CIO of Intel for the past four years. As I have noted in the past, she has dramatically increased the value derived from IT by adopting the practices of the more traditional revenue centers of the company. One of the best examples of this is the development of an IT annual report that mirrors that of the company as a whole. (Check out her latest IT annual report here.) The theme of her latest annual report is “Intel: From the Backroom to the Boardroom.” This refers to IT’s becoming more relevant to the board of the company, but it is also a good summation of her own career in recent years.
Since becoming CIO, Stevenson has been on the boards of multiple companies including her current appointment to the board of Cloudera. Many CIOs wish to join boards these days, and Stevenson offers sage advice on way sin which others might follow in her footsteps. It begins by performing well internally, being transparent, and, if you truly wish to be a board-level CIO, making that known with anyone who might aid you in that process.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 17th interview in the “Board-Level CIO” series. To read past interviews with CIOs from P&G, Biogen, Kroger, Cardinal Health, and the World Bank Group, among others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: I thought we would talk a bit about some of your priorities in the year ahead, which I know include adoption of Big Data analytics to find opportunities and to solve challenges faster. Could you explain some of the ways in which IT is going to do that, and also some of the other priorities that are on your roadmap for the year ahead?
Kim Stevenson: Analytics is at the top of my pyramid because it is a transformational initiative around Intel. I have shifted from a technology view for 2016 to a leadership problem. We are bringing our entire Intel leadership team forward to think about shifting using Big Data predicative analytics versus traditional statistical methods. The reason I say it is a leadership problem is because often you will find in a predictive model that you will get answers that are inconsistent with your historical experience. We use regression analysis a lot here at Intel. If you look at a regression analysis line, you effectively get a mean and you drive towards that regression line. If you use an isobar analysis, what you get is the personalization of hot spots and you would maybe take three or four different actions than what a regression line would tell you. You get good results with traditional statistics. You can get outstanding results if you switch to the more predictive models. And that takes a shift in a leadership mindset as much as it does a technology mindset. We have been working on that with our most senior leaders at Intel. The receptivity is really high, but the cultural shift is also really difficult.
High: I know you have talked about the need for IT to be an advocate driving this change. What are the methods you are using to communicate this and provide a vision of the value that the organization will garner for this journey?
2-24-2016
Gary Wimberly is the CIO and a senior vice president at Express Scripts, a $94 billion pharmacy benefit management company. CIO Insight contributor Peter High recently had the opportunity to tour Express Scripts Technology and Innovation Center in St. Louis with the company’s CIO. In this CIO Insight Q&A, Wimberly explains how data is captured and analyzed, how technology can detect when a potential prescription conflict arises and how to reconcile risk taking with security practices.
Peter High: Gary, we have just done a quick tour of the Technology and Innovation Center and I wonder if you can take a moment to describe the center, but then also peel back the onion a little bit to describe IT’s role in all this?
Gary Wimberly: Here at Express Scripts we have a Technology and Innovation Center and it is really focused around data analytics. We bring resources from teams across all disciplines within IT, so not only IT for the technology we utilize, but our economists, our clinicians, our physicians that really are focused on analyzing all of the data that we capture at Express Scripts—and we have an enormous amount of data. I think we are close to up to 20 petabytes at this point. We utilize that data to identify opportunities to improve health outcomes and eliminate waste in the healthcare space.
High: Can you talk a little bit about the variety of disciplines that are brought together in this effort?
Wimberly: We have IT people, obviously. We have a lot of technology in here: not only from an infrastructure perspective with all the servers, but the amount of software, the tools that we use to do this analytics, to ensure that those are operating and that we are developing the right solutions. A lot of them are self-serve kinds of applications, so our responsibility on those is to make sure that they are available and that they are performing to what the user experience should be.
