by Peter High, published on Forbes
2-16-2016
Amy Doherty was a four year veteran and right hand woman of the CIO of AARP when she was tapped to become interim-CIO in March of 2015. Her predecessor, Terry Bradwell, was elevated to a newly created role of Chief Enterprise Strategy & Innovation Officer of the membership organization for people age 50 and over that operates as a non-profit advocate for its members and is one of the most powerful lobbying groups in the United States. Following a highly regarded leader who would remain at the firm meant that there was not a mandate for tremendous change, but nevertheless, Doherty got to work at creating her own vision and leadership style.
She has focused continuing the evolution of IT into a value creator and innovator within AARP. She has creatively built bonds and lines of communications with her team through regular meetings with everyone on the team to better understand how things are progressing. Year over year delivery of projects is up ninety-six percent , and there have been thirty-four percent fewer outages. As Doherty notes in this interview, it is the cultural work that has been the secret weapon in her arsenal by driving engagement, accountability, and fun in the department. AARP leadership was sufficiently impressed by the progress to remove the “interim” title in October.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 33rd article in the CIO’s First 100 Days series. To read interviews with CIOs from GE, P&G, Microsoft, CVS Caremark, and Ecolab, please visit this link. To read future interviews like this one, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: I thought we would begin with your tenure as Chief Information Officer at AARP. You began as interim CIO in March of 2015, and in October removed the interim title. You are now the incumbent of the role. Could you talk about that period when your rose to the role on an interim basis and then took it over permanently? What were some of the things you did during that period?
Amy Doherty: I think the most immediate action I needed to take was to settle the staff. They have a great affection for Terry [Bradwell], and a lot of loyalty. He is an engaging leader, and they needed to see me as personable, approachable, and invigorating in the way that he is. They were big shoes to fill. I needed to take some action immediately, so I amped up my personal engagement with the staff, and then I went on a tour with our business leaders talking about what my focus would be. Which was to be not the external AARP market and constituency, as Terry was taking that one, but I wanted to focus my effort on how I could make an AARP employee as effective as they could be, by providing the right technology, frameworks, etc. That was warmly welcomed.
I listened a lot, and I learned a lot about what expectations were of the role, and where they wanted the focus for now. I believe that served me well. I was able to make a few tweaks in the overall execution strategy to focus on the fundamentals and get things like workforce productivity on track. There was a focused and concerted effort to make sure that it stayed on track.
High: You were in an unusual situation. Many Chief Information Officers come in to replace somebody – even somebody who was asked to leave – and there is a mandate for change as a result of that. You not only followed somebody who was loved, but also followed somebody who moved onto a different role within the organization. As you were putting your fingerprints on a new IT plan, how much of it was continuity of what was already going on versus some new things?
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1-11-2016
Seven months ago, Trevor Schulze joined $16 billion Micron Technology, a global provider of semiconductor devices, as the company’s first ever chief information officer. After spending time as a technology leader at other technology-centric companies like Broadcom, AMD, and Cisco, Schulze found an opportunity that it seemed he had been preparing for throughout his career. He had been an IT executive who had worked well in companies where even members of the Finance or HR teams had technology backgrounds, and was able to make the case for the value that IT could create on behalf of the enterprise.
Prior to starting his job, he delved deeply into all strategic collateral he could, and got to know more about the company and its culture. Once on the job, he spent time with his new colleagues across the enterprise. Since then, he has changed the organization structure such that IT is closer to the other business functions, and has developed a dedicated business intelligence and data team, as he believe these are areas of substantial opportunity for IT and for Micron Technology more generally. He also notes security as an area of increased investment, as he hopes to develop true thought leadership on his team in this critical area.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 31st interview in the CIO’s First 100 Days series. To read past articles with the CIOs of Johnson & Johnson, AmerisourceBergn, Deutsche Bank, General Electric, and Procter & Gamble, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Please begin with a description of Micron Technology’s business.
Trevor Schulze: Micron has been around for more than 35 years. It is a global leader in advanced semi-conductor systems. As a company, we design and manufacture an incredibly broad portfolio of high-performance memory technologies. These include DRAM, Flash Memory, SSDs (Solid State Drives), and emerging technologies like 3D Xpoint, which we announced recently. In a short period of time, I have been exposed to this internal innovation as a company. I am blown away by how strategic it is. In the world’s innovation engines – compute, storage, networking, mobile, and embedded – if it has a computer in it, it most likely has Micron memory associated to it.
High: I was also curious to find that you are the first CIO of the organization, despite its long history. Why did the organization feel the time was right, and why did it wait so long, in your estimation?
Schulze: We went through the interview process we were discussing what the first CIO would be responsible for. The company is evolving from an operations perspective. If you step back and look across all industries, there is a core infrastructure renaissance underway. The demand for innovations in memory solutions is unprecedented. Micron’s business model is pivoting. It has done from a demand fulfillment model, where we would make parts, put them on the market, and people would buy them by the pound.
We are evolving to this “demand-creation” model. What this means is that we have an expanded set of customers that we have never had before. There are more diversified end-markets, and new operational scale and speed demands. The industry has a voracious appetite for memory solutions. As the first CIO, they recognized that there needed to be somebody with industry experience to support this business transformation that we have underway. They needed someone to sit at the metaphorical table and help drive the new and changing processes. There are new demands for data and insights. There is a new speed of delivery required. Information technology inside of Micron is poised to grow significantly in importance and opportunity. That is where they felt the opportunity was to bring in a CIO and drive this opportunity forward.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
1-4-2016
Tom Reilly has had an illustrious career of joining high growth companies and putting them on a path to continued growth and significant events such as an initial public offering (ArcSight) and acquisition (ArcSight by HP and Trigo Technologies by IBM). For a little less than three years, Reilly has been the CEO of Cloudera. Reilly describes Cloudera’s business as developing “open-source software for a world dependent on Big Data. With Cloudera, businesses and other organizations can now interact with the world’s largest data sets at the speed of thought — and ask bigger questions in the pursuit of discovering something incredible.” With investments from the likes of Greylock Partners, Ignition Partners, and Google Ventures, Cloudera has achieved a valuation of over $4 billion, allowing it to join the upper ranks of the so-called unicorns.
Among the largest unicorns, the CEO is typically a founder of the company. Tom is an exception to that rule, though co-founder and former CEO Mike Olson remains with the company as chief strategy officer. Reilly describes a productive relationship with the co-founders, and his goal of continuing their success. In this conversation, he also describes the future plans of the company, including speculation on the company’s public offering, the sectors they focus on, the methods he has used to attract and retain talent, and how he thinks about strategic planning in such a dynamic environment.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this podcast, please visit this link. This is the third interview with CEOs of the so-called “unicorns.” Past interviewees have included Sebastian Thrun of Udacity and Marc Lore of Jet.com. To read future interviews in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Cloudera is an organization that allows others to store, process, and analyze all their data all in one place, which has been a challenge that a lot of organizations have had in recent years. Could you talk a little bit about where the company stands now, its current iteration and evolution, and your current priorities and strategic plan.
Tom Reilly: Let’s talk about the initial value proposition. Traditionally, enterprises have always had a lot of data to grapple with and liked to have it all in one place, but it has become exacerbated in recent years because the world has become interconnected. There is a whole new set of data in volume and complexity that enterprises have not seen before. So our value proposition is to help enterprises and corporations capitalize on all this new data that is coming from the connected world. If they can get this new data they are going to have better understanding of their customers and will be able to service them better, they will be able to introduce new data-driven products and services, and increasingly we are seeing that they will leverage platforms such as ours in gathering more data to mitigate risk and address regulatory pressures. So the theme of that statement there is that our value proposition is to help enterprises transition and transform to this new, interconnected world, which is different in the last ten to fifteen years. That is why technology such as ours is of great interest to these enterprises.
Now what is different today than if you and I talked two years ago is that enterprises now understand the use cases they need to work on to maintain a competitive advantage in this connected world. We are seeing high value business applications come to market at a feverish pace, and that is what is exciting. Two years ago, I think people were still trying to understand: What does this connected world mean? How is it going to affect my industry? What are the technologies I have available to me? And we have seen a fast shift in the last two years to industries transforming.
High: I cannot help but thinking as you say that, Tom, that the path towards developing and combining all of one’s data in a single place is going to be much more complex for an older organization that has been gathering data for years – versus those newer organizations, digital native organizations, for instance, or those created in more recent times, where that complexity is not quite the same. Having collaborated with companies in both of those buckets, can you talk about the path towards success for one versus the other?
Reilly: I will frame it this way. There are what traditionally are called the Web 2.0 companies: the new, modern companies like Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, and Facebook. These enterprises are gathering data and using data to their competitive advantage and the core part of the services is why they are so successful. I think that a lot of what we are doing in this market that we call Big Data, or we like to think of ourselves as delivering the modern data management analytics platform, is to help traditional enterprises become more like those modern enterprises. The challenge traditional enterprises have is the different silos of systems. When they were doing automation twenty years ago, it was all process-centric, application-centric. Today we are helping them become more data-centric and more information-driven than more process-driven. That is our role in this. I often say we are helping traditional enterprises transition and look more like Google. If we can help them do that – whether it is an insurance company, retailer, bank, telecommunications company, or healthcare provider – and make them operate more like Google, Yahoo, or Facebook, they are going to be servicing their customers better, and are going to have more competitive products and services. There are just tremendous advantages.
Peter High
12-18-2015
Excerpt from the Article:
Chobani is the No. 1 Greek yogurt in the United States. Founded in 2005 by Turkish immigrant Hamdi Ulukaya, the company now has more than 1,200 employees. One year ago, Jindra Zitek was promoted to the position of interim-CIO at the company. He had been vice president of sales, marketing, business analytics and employee solutions within IT. Within a few months, he dropped the interim part of his title. As he discusses with CIO Insight contributor, Peter High, as CIO, he is responsible for Chobani’s global IT strategy, delivery and support—namely technical services including network operations, help desk and cyber-security; applications, starting with the company’s ERP and other functional tools, as well as company-wide collaboration and productivity tools.
CIO Insight: You do not have a traditional educational background for a CIO, as you studied finance and economics as an undergraduate at the London School of Economics, and you received an MBA from Columbia University. You then worked as a consultant with McKinsey. How did your background in finance and as a consultant help you in your current role and how did you develop your technical skills?
Jindra Zitek: I believe my non-technical background in finance and consulting and project implementation experience from McKinsey actually helps me be an effective IT leader and partner for the business. At McKinsey, I specialized in business transformations, turnarounds and growth strategies. Across a number of industries (automotive, energy, health care, telecommunications), I experienced how technology and applications help businesses and individual functions unlock value—for example through increasing efficiency and consistency of business processes, or delivering insights and functionality that would otherwise not be possible (or with significant manual effort only). Being a business leader first enables me to identify where IT can deliver value and effectively communicate it to my business partners and then align on joint business/IT strategy and funding. My finance and McKinsey background drives me to look for clear benefits in each IT project at Chobani, and once we kick off a new project I ensure that we have clear accountability on both the IT and business side and measurable benefits milestones. As a rule, all of our projects have business sponsors to make sure we work on initiatives that matter to the business.
I am able to focus on the value to the business and prioritization thanks to our very strong IT leadership team who I focus on technical and applications-specific knowledge and skills. While I have not worked in IT directly previously, my relationship with IT and hardware goes back to my early teenage years when I started working part time at my dad’s business back in the Czech Republic-reverse logistics and repairs for end-user devices (printers, PCs, cell phones, cameras etc). In my current role, I am making sure that I leverage both McKinsey and TPG [private equity investor into Chobani] network of IT professionals.
CIO Insight: When you first took on the role of CIO, how did you organize yourself in the early days of this period? Were there changes to the IT strategy, to the organization structure, to processes, or to technologies that you implemented?
To read the full article, please visit CIO Insight
11-5-2014
Jay Vijayan, CIO for Tesla Motors, is responsible for the company’s business applications, infrastructure, network, systems operations and security. Learn how he helped IT evolve into a global organization that is a key enabler supporting the growth and success of the company’s business.
CIO Insight: Jay, you’ve been the CIO of Tesla for two years, and you’ve been with the company for nearly three. Can you please highlight the evolution of the IT function during that time?
Jay Vijayan: The IT function in Tesla has been evolving extremely fast with the evolution of the company. The company had quarterly revenue of $39.5M in Q4 2011, but in the last quarter (Q2 2014), we reported quarterly revenue of $769.35M. Our exponential growth is not in revenue alone, but in all areas—from production volume to global sales.
We have produced a car [Tesla Model S] that won all the prestigious awards in the automotive industry in its first year of production. We are continuing to grow and move faster than ever to achieve our goal of accelerating the world’s transition to electric mobility, with a full range of increasingly affordable electric cars.
As part of this exciting and continuing journey, the IT team built Tesla’s entire global systems network and data center infrastructure; software applications for the factory, corporate and retail network; and the necessary information security infrastructure and tools. We continue to ensure that everything we do in IT is aligned with a larger business goal. IT has evolved to a global organization and a key enabler to the global growth and success of our growing business.
CIO Insight: I’ve been fascinated by the fact that during a time when most IT departments chose to buy technology rather than build it, you have a bias toward building your solutions. Why is that?
9-29-15
For the past 18 years, Mark Brewer has been the CIO of Seagate the $14 billion provider of electronic data storage products. That is an unusually long tenure, and it means that he has been present for a dramatic evolution, as the company has gone from a manufacturer of disk drives to a cloud-centric company, as well. When Brewer began at Seagate, there were 150 companies making disk drives. Now Seagate is among the last in the field. In that time, the company has diversified into solid state products, cloud services and technology, with plans to diversify further. In addition to traditional IT functions, Brewer also has responsibility for manufacturing execution systems in the factories, which is typically under the purview of Engineering or Operations functions.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link . To read future articles like this one, please click the “Follow” link to the upper left of this page.)
Peter High: I thought we would begin with a description of Seagate’s business. No doubt many of our listeners would know of Seagate, but would love to hear in your own world, especially as a veteran of the organization, what it is that Seagate does and also your role in IT.
Mark Brewer: Seagate Technology is one of the long-term tech companies. We have been making disk drives for a long time. There used to be hundred fifty companies doing that; it is down to just a handful now. So we are in the traditional disk drive space. We also have solid state products, some cloud services and technology that we are now selling, and so we are diversifying a little bit. But we are essentially located in the storage space. That is who we are at Seagate. I am the CIO here. I have been the CIO for a long time. I have the traditional IT functions and then I also have responsibility for the manufacturing execution systems in our factories, which typically is in engineering or operations, but here it is in IT.
High: And speaking of your role as CIO, you have an unusually long tenure as the IT lead for Seagate—nearly 18 years—which is really extraordinary at a time when the average tenure is still between four and five years for Chief Information Officers. One of the things that really intrigued me as I thought about that, Mark, is no doubt you have introduced—perhaps even your team built– technologies that you have had to replace; that you have had to transition from the pre-cloud computing period to now more of a software-as-a-service type model solution. You became CIO at a time when offshoring was not necessarily as much a lever that IT leaders were choosing to pull. Now that is much more part of the bailiwick of IT, and again a lever IT leaders choose to pull, and in fact create an IT operation that is more efficient, just to mention a couple of trends. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that evolution over the 18 years, and how IT has changed and how IT specifically at Seagate has.
Brewer: It is interesting to be at a place and see things come in and go out, and we have definitely been here long enough to do that. I tell people that fundamentally I am responsible for everything: everything that is a problem is my fault because I have been here so long. We have had large turnovers in technology. We certainly went through the Y2K era here, and then the dot com era, and then all the supply chain optimization that people did for a while, and then the downturns in 2008/2009. So it has been an interesting journey along the way.
We have done all of the things you mentioned. We have big cloud plays with OpenStack, and we use Google’s applications and Salesforce in the cloud. We have done offshoring. We have big operations in Asia. We have a bit of an advantage in that a lot of our footprint is sitting in Asia, so I have a majority of the IT staff sitting in Malaysia and Thailand and China and Singapore. So we are a global organization IT-wise and leverage really great talent around the world to do the things that we have to do. And then we have third party partners in India and elsewhere that we use at times for projects and for support. We have gone through that whole role. One of the dangers of being a place so long is that you could have made a decision seven or eight years ago on a particular item and in your mind that decision has been made, but the world has changed in seven or eight years, and you need to make a different decision. I think that is one of the risks I have, and I talk about it here, and I talk about it with my staff and with others, that I have to be careful, and my staff has to be careful, that we are not locked into a decision that we made years ago just because I have been here a long time and a some of my IT players have been here long time.
9-8-2015
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.
To read the remainder of the article, please visit CIO Insight
9-8-15
When David Bray joined the Federal Communications Commission in 2013, it had had roughly nine CIOs in eight years. Clearly something new needed to happen. Though Bray was still in his 30s, he had been in government for more than half his life, as his government service began at the age of 15. The IT department had a significant need to modernize. Bray recognized that cloud computing and “as-a-service” technology represented a significant opportunity to modernize the FCC’s technology portfolio.
At the same time, in less than two years, he has gone from zero to more than 142,000 Twitter followers. He has creatively leveraged that and other networks he has created for inspiration for new ideas, to test ideas, and to help others. In this interview, he shares the details of his career journey, the transformation he has led at the FCC, the way in which he sees his job as part venture capitalist, the benefits of being social, and a variety of other topics.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the 27th article in the CIO’s First 100 Days series. To listen to the prior 26 with the CIOs of Intel, J. Crew, GE, CVS Caremark, and Ecolab among many others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link to the upper left-hand part of this page.)
Peter High: Most people are probably familiar with the FCC, but perhaps not the inner workings of it, and certainly not the inner workings of the CIO’s role. Could you take a few moments to introduce your role within the organization?
David Bray: Sure. I parachuted into my role as CIO of the FCC about 20 months ago. When I arrived, there had been about nine CIOs in eight years prior to my arrival. The FCC itself is about 18 different bureaus and offices with about 1,750 government employees. Our scope is anything involving wired or wireless across the United States.
My role as CIO was focused on the fact that when I arrived, I assessed that they had about 207 different IT systems – again, for only 1,750 people. I sometimes joke that I’m Oprah Winfrey – “Look under your chair, everyone is going to go home today and you get an IT system. Take it, it’s free!” I think we got there because over the last 20 years, whenever there was a new request, either from the administration, or from Congress, or whether it was a new law, the FCC would roll out a new IT system. That works for the first five or ten years, but over time you accumulate so many different IT systems that at least 80% of our IT budget was spent merely sustaining what we already had. That limited what I could do in terms of new development. While I am sure I could spend the next five or ten years updating each one of those 207 systems – and I should note that more than half of them are over ten years old – I think by the time I did that I would have to do it all over again.
We decided to do a new shift technology-wise to move to a common data platform that would be cloud based. We take the data from legacy systems and build a thin user interface with reusable code because there may be elements that are common across these different systems like user authentication, export to PDF, and map production that we do not have to produce 207 different times. Instead, we could reuse that code as part of a service catalog and that way we can be more effective and efficient in what we are doing. We have had some early successes.
We have also addressed the human element. The team was at half strength and while we are probably not going to bring it back to historical strength size-wise, we are trying to bring in new people and integrate them with the existing staff.
8-31-15
Meg Whitman has led HP as CEO since September of 2011. In October of last year, she and her fellow board members announced their intent to split the PC and printers business from its enterprise products and services business. The former would be known as HP Inc., and the latter would be known as Hewlett Packard Enterprise. This would amount to the largest technology firm break-up of all time, creating two companies with revenues in excess of $55 billion.
The date of the split (November 1) is fast approaching, and I was curious about her thoughts about how things had progressed between the time of the announcement and now. Our interview was one of the first after the company’s most recent earnings release. Though she acknowledged that the news was mixed, she indicated that enormous progress has been made in breaking up the two companies, and that she is as confident as ever that the breakup is the right move.
We also spoke at length about her career path, her thoughts about increasing the number of women in executive positions at technology firms, what she learned from her time running for governor of California, and a variety of other topics.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 14th interview in the IT Influencers series. To read the prior 13 interviews with Sal Khan, former Mexican President Vicente Fox, Jim Goodnight, Sir James Dyson, and Walt Mossberg, among others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above and to the left.)
Peter High: Meg, you recently reported earnings to Wall Street. I wonder, if you could reflect for a moment, were there aspects of what was reported that you feel validate the splitting of HP into Hewlett Packard Enterprise and HP Inc.?
Meg Whitman: I think what has been born out is that these are two very different businesses. The printing and PC business has quite a different customer set, different cost structure, and different industry dynamics than the Enterprise business which is more around how customers take their IT infrastructure to the next level, and how they secure their digital assets, and empower a data-driven enterprise. So they are very different businesses, and you can see that borne out in the results of the company this quarter. The Enterprise side of the house did very well. EG [Enterprise Group] had probably the best quarter I have seen since I have been here. Enterprise Services turned the corner, and the printing and PC market did well in a very tough market. I think the focus and the capital structure that each company will have will just allow these two companies to be more nimble, more focused, defining the industry trends, and have better responsiveness and be better partners for our customers. I think it will be borne out that this was the right thing to do.
High: Can you provide a brief overview of the progress made in splitting up the companies? So how have things progressed, and what is left between now and that date?
Whitman: This has been an enormous undertaking as you can imagine, because this is not a typical carve-out of a small company being carved out of a big one. This is the creation of two new Global 50 companies. We announced the separation last October, and starting August 1st we’ve been operating as two separate companies – two IT systems, two separate supply chains, finance systems, sales operations. We are invoicing, receiving payment, and have all the goods flowing through two separate supply chains. And this was a big undertaking. I have to say I am incredibly proud of the HP team because we have to work with more than 3,500 customers and partners to make sure that they were ready, in many countries around the world. I have to say it has gone almost flawlessly. I have not heard any issues at all from partners and customers that have not been resolved in a matter of minutes or hours. Our sales teams have a lot of confidence that this did not disrupt their partners or customers. So we are feeling really good about it.
8-24-15
Etihad Aviation Group is the fastest growing airline company on earth. Etihad Airways has grown into a multi-billion dollar behemoth, and the Aviation Group has grown tremendously through its equity investments into the likes of Alitalia, Jet Airways, Air Berlin, Air Serbia, and a host of other airlines.
Robert Webb is the Chief Information Technology Officer of Etihad Aviation Group, and many of the synergies that are believed to be at the heart of making the equity partnerships work will happen through better use of shared systems, technology vendors, and the like. At the same time, Webb has a large vision for enhancing the Group’s guests’ experience through better data analytics among other things.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 26th article in the CIO’s First 100 Days series. To read interviews with CIOs from Microsoft, Starwood, GE, Ecolab, CVS Caremark, and Intel, among many others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: For those who may not be familiar with Etihad Airways as well as Etihad Aviation Group, please give an overview of each.
Robert Webb: Etihad Airways is the national carrier of the United Arab Emirates, headquartered here in Abu Dhabi, and is the fastest growing airline in the world. It is also a broader business: we have an aviation services company, a catering company, a loyalty company, ground handling, and many additional businesses that are part of the core Etihad Aviation Group business.
Additionally, Etihad Aviation Group has invested in airlines around the world. Recently we made a 49 percent investment in Alitalia, the Italian carrier. We are a 36 percent investor in Air Berlin. We are investors in Jet Airways, Air Seychelles, Air Serbia, Virgin Australia, and Air Lingus, as well as Etihad Regional in Switzerland. So we are an airline group that is made up of a number of different airlines.
High: I know that part of the logic of the equity partnership is a desire to get deeper in terms of what is shared, and I know that technology plays a large role in that. Can you talk a bit about the vision for the relationship in creating stronger ties across this group?
