by Peter High, published on Forbes
8-04-15
DNA sequencing has been an area of focus of many of the biggest brains in science for multiple decades. The National Institutes of Health, among others, invested billions of dollars in this area of scientific discovery. As a result, the first genome – DNA – has become less mysterious and better understood. The importance of the second genome, which is the bacteria that each of us has throughout our bodies is less well publicized, but a growing number of companies have chosen this as a domain of focus as the impact of the microbiome (the term that describes the trillions of bacteria each of us has in and on our bodies) on our health becomes clearer.
A leader in this growing field is a Bay Area-based company called Second Genome, suitably enough. Peter DiLaura is the CEO of the company. In this interview, DiLaura, who is a veteran in the healthcare space, defines the microbiome, its impact on our health, how issues with it can lead to disease, and the mission of his company to help develop cures for those diseases. DiLaura and his team are leveraging data science combined with traditional science in order to develop remedies. As he notes, the key to such discovery is to create an environment where people with various areas of expertise (hard science, computer science, data science, traditional business, etc.) can come together to more rapidly develop effective remedies.
Peter High: Could you define the microbiome, as it is a term gaining some traction, but is still quite foreign to most people, just as it is essential for all people?
Peter DiLaura: The microbiome is the term that is used to describe the estimated 100 trillion bacteria that we have living in and on our bodies. We now understand that nearly every biological system in our body is in some way influenced by this bacterial community. It represents three to five pounds of our mass. The hundred trillion bacteria is a huge community that is a connective tissue on most surfaces of our body: It includes our skin; it includes our airway; and it includes our gastrointestinal system, among others.
What we now appreciate is that this bacterial community plays an important part in regulating our health: the way we deal with infections, the way we process our nutrition, the way our immune system develops. We have been conditioned to think of bacteria as bad for us, we think about it in a pathogenic way. For many of us, thinking about a hundred trillion bacteria living in our bodies kind of grosses us out. We generally have been focused on antibacterial wipes and taking antibiotics and getting rid of bacteria, but we now are beginning to realize that our bacterial community, our microbiome, plays a critical role in our health and wellness.
We are essentially (although probably not completely) sterile in utero, and we are colonized by bacteria when we travel through the vaginal canal. And then our nutritional sources give us another bacterial community, and our contact with people and the environment around us further develops this bacterial community. Over the course of our first three or four years of our lives, we build this ecology that is a part of our bodies. This is a developmental path that has evolved with us since the dawn of humanity. We require our microbiome to survive, and it is essential for our health.
However, if you take the roughly last 70 years of Western society, we have changed the way that we are colonized. Kids delivered via C-section have a different bacterial community than those delivered vaginally. We have also changed our nutritional sources: breast-fed infants have a different microbiome than formula-fed infants, and a high fat diet produces a different microbiome than a low fat diet. When you take antibiotics, which we do all the time both through medicine and through our food supply, there is a huge impact on the microbiome. We are just now discovering that these changes are having a pretty profound effect on our health and wellness.
High: How much overlap is there between any two individuals microbiome? Is it above 50 percent? Is it below? How diverse would you say the individual microbiome is from individual to individual?
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
7-27-2015
Jenny Craig and Curves came together as part of a private equity buy-out in late 2013. The businesses complement each other in that one (Jenny Craig) focuses on nutrition and diet, and the other (Curves) focuses on exercise. Tying the value proposition together requires leaders who develop enterprise-wide perspectives on customers and how to serve them better.
From his post as chief information officer, Abe Lietz has proven to be one such leader. He joined Jenny Craig three years ago. As he explains in my interview with him, as an IT leader, he has pushed to be more customer-facing and cognizant of customer experience than the average CIO. By thinking about business and customer outcomes first, he has pursued technology investments always in support of those needs. In so doing, IT (along with Operations and Marketing) has become a primary driver of customer experience.
By demonstrating that he is an executive who can apply glue across this diverse enterprise, Lietz’s responsibilities have grown. He was asked to take on Service Operations, which provides service to customers and to colleagues. In so doing, Lietz and his team are delivering higher value to the combined company and its customers.
(If you don’t have time to read this, consider downloading it in audio form to listen to later. You can do so at this link. This is the 23rd article in the CIO-plus series. To read the prior 22 articles with CIO-pluses from organizations like ADP, P&G, Marsh & McLennan, EMC, and Walgreen’s, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Jenny Craig and Curves are two organizations that came together under your watch while you have been in the organization. Could you take a minute to describe those two businesses and the synergies they have drawn from coming together? What are your thoughts on IT’s role in these organizations.
Abe Lietz: The thesis behind bringing these two companies together is that they both serve very similar customer demographics. They both ultimately have one goal of driving a healthy lifestyle and getting our customers fitter and healthier. They do it in different ways, but a truly healthy lifestyle is a mixture of diet and fitness. Jenny Craig is a 30 plus year old business, historically with a distributed retail model. We have over 500 locations throughout the US and Australia and we are a food based diet program. Curves has a different model of a 100% franchised business throughout the world. We have Curves locations in Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America.
The goal of bringing those two businesses together was first to synergize the back-end and the administrative components of the business like finance. The second goal was to drive some of that synergy around a healthy lifestyle and to bring both the diet and weight-loss component of a healthy lifestyle and fitness together.
High: What role does IT play in an organization like this one?
7-21-2015
Mike Feerick leads a company that has been credited as being the first ever massive open online course or MOOC. He founded ALISON in 2007. Unlike other prominent MOOCs such as Udacity, Coursera, and edX, ALISON’s content is not drawn from elite US-based universities. Rather, the Galway, Ireland based company focuses on practical workplace skills that can be tested by employers to gauge growing competencies. Since I last spoke with Feerick, the company registered its five millionth user, and much of the growth has been in the developing world. India, for instance, is the company’s fastest growing market. ALISON has thrived on serving traditionally underserved education marketplaces.
As Feerick probed for opportunity to serve additional groups of people that have been underserved, perhaps the most marginalized group of all became a target: the population of formerly incarcerated people. In the US alone, 20 million people are among the formerly incarcerated, and one of the triggers of recidivism is solid job opportunity. As Feerick describes in this interview, he believes ALISON is perfectly suited to serve this often marginalized population while reducing the rates of recidivism in the process.
(This is the 14th article in the Education Technology series. To read past articles with such luminaries as the CEOs of Khan Academy, Udacity, Coursera, and edX, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Mike, I was intrigued to hear this announcement about ALISON getting involved with the formerly incarcerated to provide training to make them both more employable and presumably less inclined to recidivism. The data is actually quite stark. There has been a lot written recently on the incarcerated population in the United States. The data indicates that 2.3 million people are currently incarcerated in the United States, there are up to 20 million ex-offenders, and that up to six million people are still under supervision of one kind or another. There certainly is a big population you might serve. Could you talk about the genesis of this idea?
Mike Feerick: I enjoy using new technologies and business systems to organize solutions to address social issues. With ALISON, we are making education more accessible the world over, but some marginalized groups have greater challenges than others in accessing what we provide – incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people among them. The need is huge, not just in the USA, but globally. For instance, there was one article in the Guardian yesterday that said that 92 percent of those being released from UK prisons feel unprepared for the world outside the penitentiary. These people have some of the greatest educational need in society.
The percentage of the US population in prison is just extraordinary. You have 25 percent of the world’s prison population, and yet America has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. Something is seriously wrong. For the 20 million people you mentioned who are already out of prison—if you have a felony, it is hard to get on with life as there are so many roadblocks. The one thing a formerly incarcerated person can do however is educate themselves, and the beauty of ALISON providing a massive number of free courses at many different levels is that the starting point can vary to suit every potential student.
As we have been leading this education revolution, I have had an eye on this social group and I thought, “OK, there are very few education dollars left for these people when they get out, yet it costs $100,000 on average per year to keep prisoners in jail. But when they get out, the government pays very little money to keep them out.”
Peter High
06-17-2015
Excerpt from the Article: Mentor Graphics is a $1.2 billion multinational company, based in Wilsonville, Ore. It is a leader in supporting electronic design automation, which enables companies to develop better electronic products faster and more cost-effectively. The company’s engineers conquer design challenges in the increasingly complex worlds of board and chip design.
When Ananthan Thandri joined the company eight years ago, IT was a regional player in the company, and it largely had an order-taking role. In this interview by CIO Insight contributor Peter High, Thandri discusses the cultural and technical changes that he has made to change IT’s culture, improving user satisfaction and aggrandizing his own portfolio of responsibilities in the process.
CIO Insight: When you joined Mentor Graphics eight and a half years ago, the department was a classic “order-taking” function. What steps did you undertake to change the culture of IT to be proactive and involved in innovation?
Ananthan Thandri: First and foremost, we focused on bringing the IT talent to the forefront. We had abundant IT talent when I started at Mentor and with some changes in middle management that brought talent from the outside, we have encouraged the culture to become more innovative. For example, we changed the organization to be a global function rather than regional, which helped create a global perspective in IT solutions. We also made IT an objective-driven organization, with every IT employee’s objective directly connected to the overall organization’s objective. We increased communication within IT and between IT and the rest of the business and invested in new technologies to help increase productivity, while bringing quantitative (metrics-driven) data into decision making. By empowering our IT leaders and employees, we gave them opportunities to come up with innovative ideas to solve business problems. The overall result has been to transform IT into a partner, not just a naysayer, making customer satisfaction the responsibility of everyone, not just the CIO.
CIO Insight: You are a customer-facing CIO, can you speak about the ways in which you and your team engage external customers?
Thandri: Mentor IT has been involved with external customers for quite some time with Emulation Hardware Field Support and providing a secured collaborative environment between Mentor and its customers.
Emulation Hardware support involves Mentor IT system administrators located around the world who provide first-level support (diagnosis of problem, replacement hardware) at customer locations. As our emulation business grew significantly over the last several years, the need arose for more manpower and expertise around the globe to support our external customers. IT stepped in with the full support and confidence of the president of the company and designed and built a scalable support organization and practice. This model is instrumental in providing support turnaround times quickly for our customers. Mentor IT also helps with emulation benchmark activity with customers and helps qualify new emulation servers and systems.
Customer Collaborative Environment (CCE) is a secure workspace that provides remote access technologies for secure collaboration between Mentor and its customers. Today’s complex designs require the ability for designers to collaborate in secure and easily accessible development environments. Mentor’s secure collaborative workspace allows real-time interaction between Mentor and its customers. This significantly reduces the time for test case development as well as provisioning of same design data while protecting both Mentor and customers’ IP. This also helps Mentor better leverage our key talent around the world to help customers be successful. There are several engagements happening at any given time.
To read the remainder of the article, please visit CIO Insight
5-26-2015
Celso Guiotoko’s background is quite diverse. He is half Brazilian and half Japanese. Having a foot in multiple cultures has served him well, especially in his current role as the Alliance Global Vice President, Corporate Vice President, and Chief Information Officer of Global Corporate IS/IT for Renault-Nissan. Guiotoko must balance a number of responsibilities, but he also has to juggle a diverse travel schedule. One of the keys to making this work is to have a solid team in place in each geography, and in each area of responsibility.
Guiotoko and his team have also tapped into Silicon Valley, setting up shop there along side the Engineering function’s team there. This innovation lab has helped spur creative thinking around investments into the Internet of Things, and driverless cars, as Guiotoko notes herein .
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 22nd article in the CIO-plus series. To read the prior 21 articles, featuring interviews with the CIOs of ADP, P&G, McKesson, the San Francisco Giants, and Walgreens among others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: I thought we’d begin with your responsibilities, which are quite varied. You are the Alliance Global Vice President, a Corporate Vice President, and Chief Information Officer of Global Corporate IS/IT. You have responsibilities within Nissan and across the relationship between Nissan and Renault. Could you talk a bit about your various areas of responsibility?
Celso Guiotoko: In 2004, I joined Nissan, as the CIO, and I was responsible for the global IS/IT for the company. Since 2009, I have also had the mission of creating synergies between the two companies, and I was appointed the IS/IT managing director for Renault-Nissan. Since then I have also become responsible for the Renault IT organization. It’s been almost six years since that time.
In the beginning of 2014, we announced the creation of four additional converged functions. One is on the engineering side, the second is in supply chain manufacturing, the third is in purchasing, and the fourth is HR. I think we’ve had a good contribution in those areas because the board members of both companies (Renault and Nissan) felt comfortable that with the many benefits to having a single leader driving some of the functions there. I believe the IS/IT functions in Renault-Nissan are very proud of the fact that our experiences since 2009 have been very successful.
We have several initiatives to support the conversion functions. This is one part of the job where we need to make sure that the business strategies in Renault and Nissan are fulfilled by the organization in each of the companies. At the same time that we need to fill the needs of the individual companies, we also need to make sure that we are going to generate synergies so that we can communalize the solutions that can be deployed in both companies. It’s quite the exercise in terms of communicating and making sure that everybody is aligned and has great teamwork because it is so important to make this alliance successful. Independent of the fact that there is an alliance, Renault and Nissan have independent boards and executive committees, so it is a little tricky. My job is a little different from most CIOs because you need to keep the independence of the two companies, but at the same time you need to bring them together.
by Peter High, CIO Straight Talk Issue 6
CIO Straight Talk: Why were you interested in learning about CIO’s first 100 days?
Peter High: In our consulting practice, over half of the time, our first engagement with a company will be a collaboration with a CIO at the beginning of his or her journey, as we look at how their new teams compare to what we call “world class IT” organizations. It’s very important to do so at the start of the journey, because after 100 days, any problem that you have not identified up to that point is your problem- even if it results from the actions of your predecessor. It’s really important to have an eyes-wide-open perspective: How do I augment this department’s strengths, where is it weak, where do we have to prioritize funds and people and activities to improve in areas where there have been issues?
Everyone will have the “first 100 days” at some point in their career, and it can happen multiple times in the same company if one is promoted from within. This is a widely shared experience, and I think it’s possible to identify a few universal principles that have made some executives very successful.
CIO Straight Talk: So there is a recurring pattern that you’ve observed in CIO’s first months on the job?
Click here to read the full article
04-06-2015
Excerpt from the Article:
Bill Schlough has been the CIO of the San Francisco Giants since 1999. As an IT executive operating in the Bay area, it is no surprise that the Giants are among the most innovative and tech-savvy teams in baseball. The depth of the use of that technology by the front-office, the players and fans is remarkable, however. As Schlough tells CIO Insight contributor, Peter High, a culture of innovation begins with the Giants’ mission statement, and it imbues everything the team does.
CIO Insight: Congratulations on a third World Series championship for your Giants this decade. What role would you say technology played in the Giants’ success?
Bill Schlough: Well, I’d have to admit that I might be a little bit biased on this topic. But the reality is that innovation has been a fundamental driver, if not the fundamental driver, for our success on and off the field for as long as I’ve been with this franchise. The San Francisco Giants are dedicated to enriching our community through innovation and excellence on and off the field. That’s our mission statement. And technology enables much of this innovation: dynamic ticket pricing, our @Cafe social media hub, free Wi-Fi, contactless payments and Apple Pay, and pitch/hit/player tracking are just a few of the examples. Each and every member of my technology team played a role in ushering in the Golden Age for this franchise, and they each have a ring (or three) to recognize their contributions.
CIO Insight: How do you create a culture that embraces innovation?
Schlough: Well, it helps when it’s one of the most significant words in your organizational mission statement, and a core value for not only your IT division, but the entire company. When you have a budget meeting with the CEO and CFO, and 90% of the meeting is focused on how we can leverage technology to grow the top line as opposed to reducing expenses. When your CEO publicly recognizes the efforts of anyone in the organization, regardless of the department or role, who thinks creatively about how to grow the business. I certainly can’t take credit for creating the Giants’ innovation-friendly culture–that belongs to my boss, Larry Baer. But I certainly look to perpetuate this culture by reinforcing innovation as a core value and recognizing/rewarding innovation whenever I see it, anywhere in our business.
2-23-2015
Mumbai has many architectural symbols that mark its rich history. There are historical religious temples and mosques. There are Portuguese buildings churches from the 16th century from that country’s period of colonization. There are many British colonial buildings from the 19th and early 20th centuries, the most famous of which is the Gateway of India. It was built to commemorate the visit of King George V and Queen Mary of England, but also was the point through which the last battalion of British troops marched on February 28, 1948 to signal the end of British rule of India.
Add to this list of structures that define a period in Mumbai’s history Antilia. The billion dollar residence of India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani in South Mumbai is reported to be the world’s most expensive residence. At 400,000 square feet and 570 feet in height it is one of the largest and tallest on earth, as well. Though 27 stories, it is the equivalent height of a building that is nearly 60 stories. The structure began in 2002, and was completed in early 2010, and it takes its name from a mythical island in the Atlantic Ocean.
Ambani, his wife, and three children reside in the top four floors. Below them are six levels of parking with room for 168 cars, guest rooms, a health club, a swimming pool, a dance studio, a 50-seat cinema, gardens, and a temple. Above them are three helipads. All of this is accessible via 11 elevators.
12-1-2015
Asbury Automotive is a $5.3 billion automotive retailer based in Duluth, Ga. For years, the more than a 90 dealerships that make up the company had very little interaction with IT. Part of the issue was that corporate IT was a relatively immature function at the company.
>Prior to his ascension to the CIO role, Barry Cohen worked to virtualize almost all of IT, rendering it more flexible and more agile. Freeing up talented people and resources, he was able to put IT people in the regions and, in many cases, in the dealerships themselves. That exposed tech workers where and how business was done, enabling them to glean insights from both dealers and customers.
Now as CIO, Cohen has continued to lead with dealers and customers in mind, and has worked to make IT a much broader driver of value to the enterprise.
CIO Insight: You work for a $5 billion automotive sales company. How do you use information and technology within your operation?
Barry Cohen: Technology is used in all aspect of our automotive operations, including dealership Websites, automotive ERP and CRM systems, business analytics, credit card processing, and another hundred or so applications focused on our employees, vendors and customers. There is a tremendous amount of application integration that takes place to make it all work—not to mention a robust infrastructure to support our 7,800 employees.
CIO Insight: Barry, prior to your time as CIO, you worked to introduce cloud computing to Asbury Automotive. What steps did you undertake in order to do that?
Cohen: I’m very happy to say that we have been data center free for nearly two years. We are 100 percent in public and private clouds, with partners that manage all aspects of their data center operations. The reason for doing that was because I wanted IT to spend most of our time with the rest of the business, and not worrying about technology refresh projects, patching and backups.
Getting there wasn’t too difficult, but it did take three years. We started by creating an application inventory and an integration architecture. This enabled us to move everything one piece a time without much disruption.
CIO Insight: IT did not have the best reputation when you started with Asbury. How did you change that?
To read the full article, please visit CIO Insight
Developing an IT Mission Statement
by Peter High, published on CIO Journal
10-27-2014
Of the CIOs that I counsel, I would say that about 50% develop IT mission statements that help clarify the IT organization’s purpose, and another 50% do not. Crafting a mission statement is not necessary if you have a well-articulated strategic plan, but even in those cases, it is good to define one to provide another layer of strategic clarity.
In my new book, Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation, I note the advantages of creating IT mission statements as a first step toward setting an overall IT strategy. They are especially useful in scenarios where no IT strategy yet exists, because it provides the first insight into what is sacred for IT. It provides a discussion point for IT employees, and colleagues outside of IT alike. The more it is made available to colleagues across the company, the more they will realize what IT “stands for.”
To read the full article, please visit CIO Journal
