Dell CIO Andi Karaboutis Helps Dell Put The Customer First

by Peter High, published on Forbes.com

09-02-2014

Much has been written about the benefits and risks of the rise of prominence of the CMO to the CIO.  Some have pontificated that it will mean the death of or at least the diminution of influence of the CIO, as CMOs have more authority over technology. Dell Global CIO Andi Karaboutis scratches her head at this notion. She describes Dell’s strategy to put the customer first, and the role that each functional and business unit head must bring in order to realize that vision. It means that IT must shape its unique perspective and apply its unique lens to opportunities and issues. It also means that emerging leaders in IT work in other regions and functions to round out their perspectives on Dell’s business to be able to contribute more value to IT, a practice she learned from a successful tenure in the automotive industry. It also requires IT to have an R&D and innovation role, constantly monitoring trends to choose the best ones to bring to life the needs of Dell and of Dell’s customers. Lastly, it means spending time with external customers, as IT must have a role in developing value for them.

(To listen to an unabridged version of this interview, please click this link. To read more stories about innovative IT leaders, please click the “Follow” link above.)

Peter High: Andi, Dell has been going through quite a transformation in recent months, not the least of which was the organization going private after having been a public company for some time. I wonder, in your time as global CIO how these changes have manifested themselves in the IT department, if at all.

Andi Karaboutis: One of the things that Michael Dell says – and we’ve all held very strongly to his strategy at Dell – is that our focus is on continuing to be a world-class end-to-end solutions company. Similarly, the strategy and goals of IT and our focus continue to be the same, which is: the customer is at the center of everything that we do and developing our roadmaps, plans, strategies, and instrumentation of disruptive technology around that, continues to be core.

I think the big difference is the intensified focus and speed with which we’re actually pursuing those goals and objectives. Obviously as a public company you have different and added burdens around Wall Street, quarterly earnings, focus on sales in shorter time periods, whereas as a private company our focus is on short, medium, and longer term methods and objectives of how we want to execute things. So it just lets us be that much more intense around our strategy.

Additional topics covered in the article include:

• Dell has determined to become more of a solutions-based business. I was wondering if that also has any bearing on how you manage IT or how you support this change within the rest of this organization.
• You are an IT executive in a sea of IT experts. You are leveraging a lot of important business and IT trends that are on the minds of so many IT executives. A difference, relative to a lot of your peers and, in fact, even relative to your past experiences in organizations that were not really quite as tech-centric, in the case of Dell, the business is technology. How does your role and your team’s role fit into that of the many engineers of the organization, as you were thinking of leveraging trends and translating them back into the needs that they’re articulating?
• What’s also apparent is the degree to which yours is a function that is externally facing, in addition to being internally facing. Historically the Chief Information Officer has been primarily an internal role. It seems very apparent that one of the advantages of the Dell-on-Dell strategy is that you can be an advocate to your peers and talk about the way in which you have used what you would hope that they would think about using as well, as they are purchasing Dell’s services and solutions. As you’ve thought about the implications of that with the rest of your team, have you had to ensure that your reports and the broader team have a clear cognizance of the needs of end customers than perhaps historically the Chief Information or IT role would have?
• You mentioned Karen Quintos, Dell’s Chief Marketing Officer. I know that’s a particularly special relationship for you personally and for the organization, more generally speaking. As I am sure you have seen, there’s so much written on the need for greater collaboration between the CIO and the CMO and their respective organizations. There’s this famous Gartner pontification that by 2017 the CMO and the marketing department will control more of the IT’s spend than will the CIO. I wonder if you have any of your own thoughts on the evolution of that relationship as it applies to Dell in the specifics of yours and Karen’s relationship, but more generally speaking as well.
• You mentioned your emphasis on social media. You have a fairly sophisticated means of managing social media. Please talk a bit about that.
• I also wanted to ask you, and as you mentioned earlier in the interview, you came from the automotive industry earlier in your career. I’ve always been amazed by the number of successful IT executives who have emerged from companies like GM, Ford, and others as you have. What is it about that experience that has lent itself well to such a profound development of leaders who have now spread like seeds across a variety of industries, just as you have?
• So is that something that you brought with you to the culture at Dell IT in trying to get people to work a variety of experiences, so that they are expanding their personal toolbox, so to speak?
• We’ve talked about a few different IT trends and business trends that are fueled by technology and fueled by better use of information. I wanted to circle back and see if there are any others that particularly excite you as you look a few years out, as you think about your own plans for the year or for the foreseeable future. What are some of the trends that particularly excite you?

To read the full article, please visit Forbes.com

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To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Andi, click here.

Forbes Publisher Rich Karlgaard On How Great Companies Find Lasting Success

by Peter High, published on Forbes.com

08-18-2014

Rich Karlgaard is widely known as the publisher of this magazine. What may be lesser known is how diverse and entrepreneurial his career has been.  He started two magazines, Upside and ASAP within the Forbes banner. He has founded a venture capital firm, Garage Technology Ventures, and is an advisor to multiple other VCs. He also founded Silicon Valley’s premier business and technology forum, a 7,500-member strong organization called the Churchill Club. Is there a thread that runs through all of those things? As such, he has become one of the most influential figures in technology and business more generally.

Having had the pleasure to get to know Rich, one of his primary gifts is storytelling, and identifying what is interesting and special in others. This strength is in full-blossom in his new book, The Soft Edge: Where Great Companies Find Lasting Success. Rich has long had a curiosity to determine the factors that have led some companies to endure during good times and bad. Especially in this day-and-age when analytics rule, he focuses on “softer” factors, chief among them being culture. Though he lives and works in the heart of Silicon Valley, he left the bubble of that region to profile companies in places like Milwaukee, Wisconsin (Northwestern Mutual), Rochester, Minnesota (The Mayo Clinic), and Memphis, Tennessee (FedEx).  I spoke with him to find out more about what he learned that other companies should institute to develop a more lasting success.

(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the seventh article in the “IT Influencers” series. To read past articles with Salman Khan, Jim Goodnight, and Walt Mossberg among others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)

Peter High: First of all, I want congratulate you on a terrific book. Can you describe what the Soft Edge is and maybe a bit about how the notion came to mind?

Rich Karlgaard: Next month there is an anniversary related to the economy that nobody is going to take note of: the fifth year of the end of the Great Recession. The US companies went into recovery in June 2009 and yet 70% of Americans still think we are in recession. Now ask yourself why that’s the case? Number one, the economic growth overall hasn’t been that robust, with an average of 2% GDP growth on an annual basis over the last five years. We have seen fits and starts in the economy; there is no growth at all in the first quarter of 2014. We’re looking at 3% growth, if we’re lucky, for the rest of the year and this is just not good. From the end of World War II through the present, the American economy has averaged 3% annual growth, inclusive of 11 recessions including the nasty one we just went through and an equally nasty one in 1973 and 1974, as well as some really sharp ones such as the one in 1982. There have also been some mostly regional recessions, such as the one that Los Angeles went through from 1988 through 1994. The fact that the US economies has grown 3% despite all of those recessions means the 2% growth now is just not robust. But there is another story behind the reason why 70% of the people think we’re still in a recession and that is this economic recovery is incredibly uneven. It’s as if post-recession the entire economy has been put into the centrifuge which is spinning faster and faster, and only 30% of the people are winding up in a pretty good place. So the 70% that say we are still in recession, one of three things is possible:

1) They don’t have a job.

2) They are stuck in their job

3) They’re working for a company that is stuck.

I decided, after seeing these statistics and hearing these stories, that I wanted to get out there and find out what the 30% is doing, what the companies that are unstuck are doing. I lived my whole adult life in Silicon Valley after I arrived here to go to school in the mid-70s. I’ve seen multiple generations of Silicon Valley’s history from personal computers to network computing in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, from Internet 1.0 in the late 90s to everything we have today. I wanted to get outside of Silicon Valley to do the research for the book. I wanted to talk to companies, large and small, publicly traded and privately held across a broad range of industries to see if there were extractable principles from these high-performing companies and what they were doing that was different. I particularly wanted to look at companies that had faced trouble before and made recoveries. I wasn’t looking at superstar companies like Google that have yet to be tested, in my opinion. I looked at companies that have been around for decades such as FedEx, Northwestern Mutual, Mayo Clinic, Specialized and also a couple of Silicon Valley companies such as Nest Labs and NetApp.

Additional topics covered in the article include:

• I’ve covered, both in the podcasts as well as in my writings for Forbes, a number of IT executives who have penetrated the boards of major companies. Companies that, to a greater extent, saw the value of having a strong technology voice at the board level talking about innovation, security, and a number of growth opportunities and threats. As you speak with a lot of CEOs, can you provide the flipside of that perspective as to what you are seeing in companies that have valued that perspective at the board level?
• I know Fred Smith played an inspirational role in your new book. Please explain.
• Given the importance of data analytics and the use of metrics and just data generally speaking to a much more dramatic extent than in past decades perhaps; that side if you will, has been gaining almost religious fervor among a lot of organizations and perhaps in some cases at the expense of the Soft Edge-type characteristics that you are describing. How do you think about the balance or imbalance relative to those topics?
• You mentioned earlier that Google, obviously a fantastic company, has not really been tested and you live in the Bay Area where there are a few organizations that have become talent magnets and are sort of the hot companies of the day. We have Facebook and Google that would fit the bill today just as Microsoft and HP did in years past. But there is a period during the rapid growth especially pre-IPO, where people are very excited about these financial events to come, and it keeps them motivated and locked to the company. Then a combination of the event happening and growth slowing translates into a more difficult place to keep one’s best talents Do you agree with that analysis?
• So we began this conversation with you mentioning that, although you didn’t put it this way, you got out of the bubble of Silicon Valley and got into Midwest to meet with organizations like Northwestern Mutual and Mayo, as opposed to the Facebooks or the Googles of this world. It is interesting that you found companies that are not necessarily the first ones that one thinks about as sexy organizations but in fact that’s partially the secret of why they have never been in style but never out of style, either, right?
• You said that in essence the Soft Edge is the only competitive advantage of lasting companies, which would seem to suggest that if you do this well the other benefits come. If you are going to focus on getting one of these right first, this is an area really to make sure that you are getting right, is that correct?
• I’ve always found it refreshing that SAS is in the business of analytics. Of course, they have a whole variety of analytics tools they use to evaluate how well their team is doing, but just as you say, despite the fact that it is their bread and butter business-wise they pay at least as much attention to the Soft Edge characteristics that you described which have brought great benefit.

To read the full article, please visit Forbes.com

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To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Rich, click here.

The CIO On The Boards Of Southwest Airlines And Fossil Group

by Peter High, published on Forbes.com

06-16-2014

Tom Nealon has achieved some of the highest heights in the IT world without ever having been trained as a technologist.  He studied business at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and he credits his natural tendency to think about business value ahead of technology as a key to his success.  He was the CIO of  Frito-Lay, Southwest Airlines, and J.C. Penney. He added such substantial value in his role as CIO at J.C. Penney that he was asked to take over a variety of other functions, including the company’s digital business and corporate strategy.  It was also during this time that he was asked to join the boards of Southwest Airlines and Fossil Group.

Interestingly, Nealon claims to have never had the ambition to become a board-level CIO. He always focused on the tasks he was given, stretched them to ensure that a higher than expected degree of business value was generated from the IT function, and in the process more opportunities presented themselves.

(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the seventh article in the “Board Level CIO” series. To read the prior  six articles, please visit this link. To be alerted when future articles in the series are released, please click the “Follow” link above.)

Peter High: Tom, you have a deep and rich background as an IT executive and as an advisor to many companies. You were a CIO multiple times over, spending time as CIO of Frito-Lay, the Feld Group, Southwest Airlines, and of J.C. Penney. Please provide an overview of your career journey to date.

Tom Nealon: My career in technology began in 1983. I’ve been in every part of the IT operation, from the help desk to application development to engineering up through leadership. I’ve gathered a really broad perspective of IT can and should work. I was blessed in working for companies early in my career that emphasized providing a broad set of experiences for employees.

I spent several years in the Frito-Lay planning and strategy areas which was such an eye-opener for me, and it was just a huge jump start to my career. It was at that point that I really figured out that I’m not a technology guy. I am a business guy who happens to specialize in technology, just like a Marketing person is a business person specializing in Marketing. So I quickly pushed aside the label that I’m the “IT guy” and I really absorbed and worked on being viewed as and being part of the business team. That seems simple and obvious but it really defined how I worked, behaved and led an organization in terms of the vision.

A nice outcome of this was that I had the deep knowledge of what goes on behind the curtain of IT both in terms of technology and operational decisions. From the other side, I also understood how the business functions. That included understanding of the company’s profit and loss mechanics, and driving profitability for the company.

From there I joined the Feld Group where Charlie Feld and the team focused on IT transformations already solid, large companies. So for about five years, I was a Feld Group member but also the operational CIO for Southwest Airlines starting about a year post-9/11. It was a difficult time for airlines but also an important time for airlines due to the massive shift in the industry with new security requirements, TSA, airlines going bankrupt, airlines merging. The cost advantages Southwest historically enjoyed were diminished as a result. Thankfully, the company found new ways to thrive, as it continues to today.

Then, I went to J.C. Penney to work with Mike Ullman as the EVP and CIO and within a year or so additional responsibilities were added like JCP.com, the corporate strategy planning team, consumer insights and actions, and all things digital. It was a different perspective; it’s one thing to understand how a business works, understand the P&L but it’s another thing to own the P&L and be accountable for the results. With Southwest, with probably around 80% of its revenue generated through online booking, I gained a great appreciation for the online booking engine and strong Digital Marketing capabilities. It was the same for me at J.C. Penney. Part of running a big dot-com business is not just understanding the operational side, but I had to get very close to the Digital Marketing area and the technology associated with that, as well as the analytics of how you actually run a website.

Additional topics covered in the article include:

• Tom I find it very interesting that your degrees, both at the undergraduate and graduate level are in business administration and so you didn’t come to the IT department as a technologist, computer scientist or engineer. In some ways you were rooted in the very disciplines that you were talking about – you saw the world with a business lens. You mentioned at the outset that you had some very technical roles in IT departments before climbing the rungs to the CIO role, what was it like to learn IT without that traditional educational background?
• I want to actually linger on some of the responsibilities you mentioned at J.C. Penney. I think it’s fascinating that, as your role aggrandized there, you took on some of the natural roles for a talented IT executive but you also listed corporate strategy as one of your responsibilities. Can you talk a bit about the rationale for you to take on the responsibility of corporate strategy at J.C. Penney?
• I want to move on to the expansion of your responsibilities outside of the organizations as well. While you were an IT executive you were asked to join the boards of multiple organizations. You joined the board of Southwest Airlines while you were still an executive at J.C. Penney, for instance. Can you talk a bit about that experience; why it was they invited you with your specific background to join the board?
• You also later joined the board of Fossil. Can you talk a bit about your decision to join that Board and again the benefits that you’ve accrued? This time an industry that you’d been involved with but not a company you had been involved with up to that point.
• As you think about your journey and you think about having been both an IT executive and simultaneously a board member, are there aspects of your experience that you would tell others to possibly follow in order to achieve the same things? For those CIOs who are ambitious enough to want to join the boards of organizations, what kind of advice would you have for them?
• What do you think CIOs can lend to boards?
• Having advised a great number of Chief Information Officers, are there different aspects that you think have held back CIOs from being on board positions relative to other C-level officers of companies who’ve been more traditionally those who populate boards?

To read the full article, please visit Forbes.com

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To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Tom, click here.

An Interview with the Godfather of Data Analytics, SAS’s Jim Goodnight

by Peter High, published on Forbes.com

05-12-2014

Jim Goodnight is one of the great technology entrepreneurs of the past fifty years. His emphasis on data analytics as a business model starting over 40 years ago with the development of Statistical Analysis System (SAS) while he was an academic at North Carolina State was quite prescient, presaging the analytics boom that has taken over so many industries by multiple decades. Over the years, SAS has been used by pharmaceuticals companies to help them analyze their drug pipelines better, by banks to help them assess who to give credit cards to, and to an increasing extent by a wide array of companies to assess fraudulent activity and risk management, which Goodnight suggests will be a significant area of growth for SAS.

Goodnight has built a multi-billion dollar software company without going public or seeking suitors to buy the company. He points to the advantage that he had in receiving early funding from government and academic sources rather than from venture capital, which meant there was no pressure to create a financial event for his investors. As a result, he has been able to successfully steer his company through many business cycles while avoiding significant layoffs that are de rigeur among so many major companies. This has been a cultural differentiator, and is one of the reasons that SAS is regularly chosen among the best places to work in the United States.

(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the fifth article in the IT Influencers series.  Past interviews with Salman Khan, David Pogue, James Dyson, and Walt Mossberg can be accessed through this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)

Peter High: You began SAS while you were an academic at North Carolina State. What was the genesis of Statistical Analysis System?

Jim Goodnight: When I was a sophomore, I took the only course in programming offered at NC State. The summer of my sophomore year, I had two jobs in programming. In the fall, I went to work for the department of statistics and it had a group of statisticians that were referred to as experiment stations. The experiment stations helped design and analyze all the agricultural experiments that went on on-campus.

NC State is a land grant university – there’s one in every state and the entire Southeast association of experiment stations sent one or two people each year to an annual meeting where they’d discuss computational methods and experiments that they’d been doing. NC State was sort of out in the front of developing analytical software and in the entire Southeast experiment station people decided just to use what was coming out of NC State at the time. Back in late 1966, early 1967, after the IBM 360 came out, everybody at all these universities was buying these IBM machines. They again looked to us to develop software for those machines.

Tony Barr started some of the first parts of SAS and then I joined him once it was stable enough to start writing additional procedures. We announced SAS in 1969 to the experiment station users – they were the group of university statisticians of the southern experiment station and they all liked what they saw and they started using it and we went on developing SAS. I was finishing up my Masters and working on a PhD at the time so I was working about 30 hours a week on the project.  Back in 1972, I finished my PhD and we lost all of our funding from the NIH. The NIH, up until ’72, was providing funds for almost every computing facility at all the different universities around the country. Nixon decided he wanted to only spend money on universities that had hospitals, cancer research and things like that so you had to have a medical center from then on for NIH to provide funding. So we went back to our university statisticians group and said “how about supporting us?” They each chipped in $5000 a year to support us and they insisted that we also start licensing our software to other companies and other government agencies so we started doing that to become self-sufficient.

That went on until about 1976 at which time we had a user conference down in Florida. Our users actually put the conference together, but we went down and there were 350 users there. We were most impressed – they really liked some of the stuff we were working on, so when we finished with it and came back we decided to get out of the university. We were not able to grow anymore, there was clearly a lot of interest and we could support ourselves without needing the university. Of course the university, at the time, was not supposed to be a business anyway so they thought it was a good idea that we move off-campus as well – so we moved across the street and that’s how SAS was founded. It had a long development history at NC State before we left – I think we left with about 300,000 lines of code; it’s probably 10 million lines of code now.

Additional topics covered in the article include:

• SAS has a unique culture that has been lauded frequently, and considered a source of competitive advantage. How did that culture evolve over the years?
• You have rejected opportunities to be acquired. You’ve not elected not to go public either, whereas many of the technology companies that are peers of yours, in terms of size at least, have elected to do so. Can you talk a bit about why you’ve elected to stay private and the advantages of doing so?
• You echoed in your sentiment there that you can take a much longer term approach as a private company than a public company might otherwise do. You’re not a slave to quarterly earnings, you don’t have to worry too much about the natural ebbs and flows that the business cycles will exert on a company like this. This may not mean as dramatic a response as your peers among public companies might take. Is that fair?
• I also wonder how your responsibilities have evolved as the company has grown. What are you doing today that may be different from what you did years ago?
• As a former academic and as somebody who taps into the wonderful universities in this area and others you mentioned, could you comment a bit about the state of computer science in the academic realm. There are some who lament the fact that the areas that SAS, for instance, is strongest – analytics – isn’t necessarily a discipline that is taught very well at the university level.
• So given the number of universities you’ve mentioned that you’ve sponsored or others still who’ve probably elected to go your direction, are you generally optimistic about the quality of engineering or computer science degrees from here forward?
• If one has the pleasure of driving through this really beautiful campus that you have here, one of the first things, at least I noticed on doing so this morning, were the number of flags flying with the word analytics on them and clearly for some time that has been a very big priority for this organization needless to say. It’s now, over the past few years, become perhaps the hottest trend on the minds of CIOs at a minimum and to a greater extent, CMOs, CEOs in fact as well. I wonder as an organization and as an individual who has been thinking about this since long before this was such a hot topic crossing industries, what advantages SAS has relative to others who are newer to the game?
• As your business has evolved and as the users of SAS have changed from some of those early adopters among the pharmaceutical companies and financial services organizations and now to a much broader set of companies, how has the customer within those companies changed? Is the average customer now a Chief Information Officer or a Chief Marketing Officer or some sort of analytics role within the organization? Is there any way to sort of typify that and how that has evolved?
• Given the diversity of executives, just among the things you just mentioned, that could be a Chief Information Security Officer or it could be a Chief Risk Officer, you mentioned the Chief Marketing Officer as a user of data processing tool. Now as data has implications and there’s a recognition of the value of it across such a broad set of executives, does it make the sales process more complicated that there’s not a specific individual within the company that you can target or does it actually make it easier since there are so many people who are cognizant of the need to use data in a better way?
• You’ve also built a web of technology partners: Teradata, EMC Greenplum, Oracle, Accenture; as you think about developing an ecosystem of partners to help you do what you do, what’s the criteria that you use?
• You’ve always advocated investing a significant percentage of profit back into R&D. Where have you focused your R&D spend?

To read the full article, please visit Forbes.com

To explore the full collection of IT Influencers Series articles, please click here.

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To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Jim, click here.

Amtrak’s CIO Changes The IT Culture In First 100 Days

by Peter High, published on Forbes.com

03-31-2014

In 2012, Jason Molfetas joined the Amtrak family as the Chief Information Officer (CIO). Prior to joining Amtrak, Mr. Molfetas had no direct experience in this particular industry, but he was very much familiar with the complexities of running IT in a diverse business environment.  Mr. Molfetas’ was able to quickly get up to speed by reviewing the company’s corporate strategy, studying the Amtrak organization charts, reviewing information about his staff and more importantly, meeting with key business leader to learn the Amtrak business practices. In his first 100 days, he did as much listening as he did talking; recognizing that the path to a new strategy would come through insights garnered from his colleagues both within and outside of IT as well as from vendor partners and Amtrak customers. He has made transparent communications the hallmark of his leadership, and has since changed the IT culture to one that is more empowered, accountable, and transparent, while also ensuring that it is closely aligned to the needs of Amtrak customers.

(This is the 12th article in the “CIO’s First 100 Days” series. To read the prior 11, including interviews with the CIOs of Intel, Caterpillar, Time Warner, Johnson & Johnson, and J. Crew, please click this link. To receive notifications regarding future articles in the series, including interviews with the CIOs of AmerisourceBergen and Viacom, please click the “Follow” link above.)

Additional topics covered in the article include:

• What were the artifacts that you sought in the early stages?
• Were there any special events that you planned on day one of your time at Amtrak?
• How did you spend your first 30 days?
• What was the substance of that first plan that you made?
• How have you maintained momentum as the months have passed?

To read the full article, please visit Forbes.com

To explore the full collection of The CIO’s First 100 Days Series articles, please click here.

To explore the Technovation Column library, please click here.

To explore the recent CIO’s First 100 Days Series articles, please click here.

How Helen Cousins Became CIO And Board Member Of Lincoln Trust

by Peter High, published on Forbes.com

03-24-2014

Helen Cousins represents the quintessential curious networker that a chief information officer ought to be. Until recently, she was the Executive Vice President and CIO of Lincoln Trust Company. She was also a board member of the company.  Prior to that, she was CIO both of Dex Media and of Cendant Corporation. She was also in the 2012 class of CIO magazine’s prestigious CIO Hall of Fame. You would think then that she was destined to be a CIO from the outset of her career. Far from it.

After Cousins graduated from high school, she became the receptionist for a bank. Realizing she could do those duties pretty easily, her curiosity led her to other departments of the company, slowly learning how each department fit with others. She began filling in for people if they were away on a temporary basis.  She eventually received a bachelor’s degree and then an MBA, but it was this curiosity to understand businesses that began when she was the most junior person at a bank that has served her well as she has risen. Upon becoming CIO, she realized that an ability to network through the organization, and to find common needs or opportunities articulated in multiple parts of the organization, tying them together before the leaders who articulated them realized they could be that set her apart as an extraordinary leader. She is a rare CIO to become a board member of her own company, but that was the role she played at Lincoln Trust. Although Cousins has many skills that are innate, and therefore tough to teach, she nevertheless imparts a great many insights in my interview with her for IT executives who wish to follow in her footsteps.

(To listen to my unabridged interview with Helen Cousins in podcast form, please visit this link. This is the third in the Board-Level CIO’s series. To read the first two, please follow this link. To read future interviews in this series with the CIOs of companies like Cardinal Health, Texas Instruments, and Capital One, please click the “Follow” link above.)

Peter High: Helen, you have a non-traditional path: You don’t have an engineering degree, you didn’t grow up in the IT department and you didn’t have a lot of female IT leaders to look up to. Can you tell us a bit about your path to the CIO role?

Helen Cousins: I do have a pretty non-traditional path. My first job was right out of high school as a receptionist for a small international branch of a domestic bank. I always volunteered to learn what other departments were doing. We were very small – only about 30 people – so there was always somebody I could fill in for. I really learned how all of the departments interact together, how important it is as a task flows from one department to another department and to look at the end-to-end process.

As I started moving up, I decided to get my BS in Accounting & Economics and an MBA in computer science. I got involved in IT as a Project Manager for a System Implementation in one of the largest global banks because of my knowledge of the different areas in banking. Once that was successfully implemented, I found myself getting more responsibility until eventually I was running all the development for the bank within the US as the only female VP before leaving. My career in IT was really cast from there and I have since held three CIO positions: Corporate CIO of a large New York holding company, then a large yellow page company in Denver and lastly, Lincoln Trust.

Additional topics covered in the article include:

• Historically, many people have risen from programmer all the way to the top chair in IT. I imagine coming with a broader perspective on the financial services industry and how the business actually operates gave you a more well-rounded perspective on that role?
• When you began your current role of CIO of Lincoln Trust, the IT department had a contentious relationship with the rest of the organization. Can you share some of the processes or methods that you used in order to turn IT’s reputation around in the business?
• I know you are passionate about and cognizant of the fact that IT leaders and IT teams tend not to be very good marketers of their accomplishments. You believe successes should be celebrated/marketed across the organization so the reputation heads in the right direction. Can you talk a bit about your methods?
• CIOs who are on boards of their own company or outside boards are still a rare, although growing, phenomenon. Can you reflect on your journey to becoming a board member and some of the things you lend your company as an IT Executive that rounds out the perspectives of the board?
• Do you have any thoughts, especially now that you are counseling other CIOs, as to what sorts of things CIOs might do in order to increase their chances of becoming board level CIOs?
• It strikes me the degree to which you have a clear and deep understanding of business operations and marketing basics and can translate that to terms both IT and the rest of the organization will understand. Perhaps, a reason why other IT executives tend not to rise to board level is that they speak a different language, have a different skill set or simply don’t understand what it is like to run a P&L and translate those things from an IT lens back to that of the business.  Is that a fair assessment?
• In light of the divestiture of many sides of Lincoln Trust, you advise other CIOs. Obviously the nature of those conversations are confidential, but now that you have a great network of IT leaders, are getting into the knitting of specific plans and strategies and assisting and consulting to CIOs, what perspectives do you have about the evolution of the role, where it stands now and where it is going?
• Are there any technology or business trends that you find particularly exciting and remaining abreast of in terms of their adoption into companies or even pushing for their adoption yourself?

To read the full article, please visit Forbes.com

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To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Helen, click here.

Meet Ricoh Americas CIO Turned COO, Tracey Rothenberger

by Peter High, published on Forbes.com

02-18-2014

Tracey Rothenberger joined Ricoh Americas Corporation by virtue of the company’s acquisition of IKON Office Solutions. He was Chief Information Officer of IKON at the time of the acquisition, and he maintained the position upon joining Ricoh.  An open communicator, Rothenberger prides himself on his ability to draw insights about the plans and needs of his colleagues to advise them on how to bring their plans to life through technology and the better use of information.  This tendency led to him becoming a CIO-plus, adding the responsibilities of Chief Process Officer, as it was evident that he could drive significant process change for the entire company.

As his perspective grew, the value he contributed to Ricoh Americas grew with it and he was promoted in March of last year to become Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Ricoh Americas. As has been the case with other executives who have been profiled in the “Beyond CIO” series, leveraging the unique vantage point that the CIO has in the corporate structure to synchronize efforts, and identify innovative ideas that add value in multiple divisions of the company lends itself well to the aggrandizing of responsibilities. In this interview with Rothenberger, he speaks about the advantage of his time as CIO and how the experiences lent themselves well to his current role as COO.

(To listen to an unabridged audio interview with Rothenberger, please visit this link. This is the 17th article in the “Beyond CIO” series. To read prior interviews with executives from companies like TD Ameritrade, Marsh & McLennan, American Express, Hewlett-Packard, and Aetna, among others, please visit this link . To receive updates on future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)

Peter High: What was the benefit assumed in bringing together the diverse array of competencies that make up your team?

Tracey Rothenberger: IT and Process Improvement were probably the first step in this evolution, and we combined those two roles four years ago. We looked across the organization to try to drive improvements in all aspects of the business. The Enterprise Services team was created about a year and a half ago. Most of the advanced solutions are more in line with the approaches and methodologies IT leaders and CIOs would think about as they’re trying to implement workflow efficiencies, document improvements, and better use of information inside the environment.

Peter High: What was it about your time as CIO that prepared you for your current responsibilities as COO?

Tracey Rothenberger: I think one of the things that all CIOs have in common is that they are asked to have a fairly broad visibility across the organization. Both roles tend to see the things that are working well and the areas that have a challenge from an unbiased viewpoint typically. The IT organization that serves the business functions and members of the IT team have a unique perspective about opportunities in those functions to make things better. I think most CIOs operate from that vantage point which is an advantage when you look at the career paths for any CIO that wants to go and do something beyond the IT organization. Whether a CIO makes it to the next level is determined by whether they act on the information that they can garner from the broad view they have for the greater good of the company. When you find a CIO who is willing to put his or her neck out and make tough recommendations that involve not just IT systems but also business change or business transformation, that’s when you identify a CIO who is ready to go the next level.

Additional topics covered in the article include:

• As you think back at the point at which it became apparent to you and to perhaps your colleagues that there was more that could be done, do you happen to recall some of those adjacent spaces that you began to get into as you developed recommendations for improvements?
• Can you talk a bit about your relationship with your peers and your bosses as you began the journey to and eventually beyond CIO?
• Unlike many CIOs, you have had customer-facing responsibilities in the past. How has that helped you as a CIO and now as a COO?
• As you reflect on this journey from CIO to COO, do you think that this is a path that more executives are likely to travel?
• Now that you are the boss to IT, what have you taken with you now that you have IT reporting to you as opposed to being the leader of that function exclusively?
• You have said that culture wins over strategy. What do you mean by that?

To read the full article, please visit Forbes.com

To explore the full collection of Beyond CIO Series articles, please click here.

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To explore the recent CIO-plus Series articles, please click here.

To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Tracey, click here.

Cornell NYC Tech’s Dean On The Future Of Entrepreneurship In New York

by Peter High, published on Forbes.com

01-27-2014

In late 2010, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration put out a request for proposal for a new kind of university program. Recognizing the importance of establishing New York City as a technology hub, he hoped to attract a leading university to establish a graduate school in engineering and computer science in Manhattan, and proposed that it be built on Roosevelt Island.

The proposal submitted by Cornell University was the winner, and though the permanent campus will not be ready until 2017, Cornell NYC Tech has set up shop in Google’s Manhattan offices in Chelsea. Daniel Huttenlocher is dean of the program, and he has an ambitious vision that befits an academic who has experience in the business world. He has hired a Chief Entrepreneurial Officer, and the school has already established deep ties with the start-up community in New York. Huttenlocher measures the success of his program on the number of people who start and who join high growth organizations. Establishing a program with ready access to major corporations, start-ups, and even City Hall means that Cornell NYC Tech is in an enviable position, and will likely be a key player in pushing New York to be the tech start-up hub that has longed to be for some time.

(To listen to an unabridged audio interview with Dean Daniel Huttenlocher, please visit this link. This is the eighth article in the education technology innovation series. To read the prior seven articles including interviews with the heads of Khan Academy, Udacity, Coursera, and edX, please visitthis link . To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)

Peter High: Dan, what is Cornell NYC Tech’s mission?

Daniel Huttenlocher: Our mission is to increase the amount of technology talent in the New York area and in the nation with a particular kind of twist or take on technology talent both in terms of the students and faculty that we are attracting. It is people who have a passion for really deep technological invention and innovation, and at the same time the breadth to engage with real world problems and bring that technology out of the laboratory and classroom into the real world.

We are a new graduate school in New York City in tech disciplines, and we are focused on the disciplines related to the digital information age and the tech sector more generally. We have masters and doctoral students and programs in New York City. We are roughly a year in, as we commenced our beta class in January 2013 with a Masters of Engineering in Computer Science as the first-degree program that we’re offering.

Additional topics covered in the article include:

• To what extent did you draw parallels to other academic institutions like Stanford or MIT that have close ties to the venture and the high tech world?
• As you thought about building the resources for the organization, how have you balanced between traditional academics (people who are from the academic world) and people with startup experience?
• How do you define success and what are some examples of a successful outcome for students who go through this program?
•  You have partnered with a variety of companies. How have you gone about selecting and reaching out to them?
• How did you choose New York City and why not the university’s primary campus in Ithaca, New York?

To read the full article, please visit Forbes.com

To explore other Education Technology Innovation Series articles, please click here.

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To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Daniel, click here.

For The Largest Not-For-Profit MOOC, edX, Experimentation Is The Path To Innovation

by Peter High, published on Forbes.com

01-20-2014

MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Professor Anant Agarwal has personified the educator-entrepreneur, as he has had a foot in academe and a foot in new ventures for more than a decade. He has led CSAIL, MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, just as he was a founder of Tilera Corporation, which created the Tile multicore processor. He led the development of Raw, an early tiled multicore processor, Sparcle, an early multi-threaded microprocessor, and Alewife, a scalable multiprocessor. He also led the VirtualWires project at MIT and was the founder of Virtual Machine Works. His start-ups have largely been focused on his areas of research and areas of interest, but he had not focused on the education space itself until late 2011.

Peter High: As edX enters its third year in existence, what key lessons have you drawn thus far?

Anant Argawal: The power of edX and of MOOCs more generally is to democratize education. People want to learn no matter their circumstance or their age, and the experience of our students shows definitively that this is the case. We have many people who are in the workforce who use edX to develop new skills to employ in their jobs. Therefore, we are thinking more broadly.

A related example is our partnership with global steel manufacturer Tenaris. Through their adoption of the Open edX platform, Tenaris will enhance their existing training programs delivered through Tenaris University to nearly 27,000 employees worldwide. We have established a comparable relationship with the IMF.

Additional topics covered in the article include:

• Were there any misgivings, especially in the early stage, about the extent to which this might cannibalize the existing offerings? Naturally these courses do not replicate the experience of being on MIT’s, Harvard’s, Berkeley’s, McGill’s, or Georgetown’s campuses, but at the same time, it is access to some of the professors that make those universities famous. Was the possibility considered that this was a something that was cannibalizing the value of these universities’ educations?
• How does edX change the educational experience for students who were on those campuses? For instance, for your MIT students’ part of this is access to materials and to university professors who are not at MIT but are part of edX. I assume also that part of the value is a foundation that is laid through the use of edX’s material that then can be built upon through the classroom setting. Is that a fair synopsis or at least a portion of the value intended?
• How do you foresee this changing the experience for professors themselves? As a professor, how has it changed the way in which you prepare for classes?
•  Are there certain kinds of courses, or are there certain kinds of professors for that matter that seem to be particularly well received on edX? Are there topics that suffer when transformed onto that platform?
• Your company is very data driven, as you have noted. What metrics do you monitor to gauge the success of edX?

To read the full article, please visit Forbes.com

To explore other Education Technology Innovation Series articles, please click here.

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To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Anant, click here.

by Peter High, published on Forbes.com

1-14-2014

David Pogue has become a household name in tech criticism from his “State of the Art” column in New York Timesalong with multi-media contributions to PBS and CBS among others.  Last week, Pogue launched Yahoo Tech at CES in Las Vegas to much fanfare. The new digital magazine is quite sophisticated in its fit and finish, and it remains as such no matter the device with which it is accessed. Its innovative article tiles allow readers to read articles while all other articles remain on the same page. As Pogue explains below, this should make the site stickier and more psychologically satisfying.

Peter High: David, congratulations on your new role as VP of Editorial at Yahoo Tech. When we last spoke in July of 2013, you described your role at theNew York Times you seemed very happy. What lured you away from your dream job to Yahoo?

David Pogue: Honestly, I never expected to leave the Times. I truly thought it was the greatest job. I thought for sure that I would be there until I died or until they asked me to leave. Yahoo approached me last summer, and indicated that they were going to make some sweeping changes to the company, and they wanted me to join them.

Additional topics covered in the article include:

• Yahoo was noticeably absent from many of the most innovative companies that you covered in your column in the Times, and the company has had a  difficult stretch in recent years. Were you at all worried that you were trading down in leaving the Times for Yahoo?
• How will the content change relative to what you covered for the New York Times?
• Why did you elect to pontificate on ideas that are pre-production?
• As you mentioned earlier one of the things that Yahoo offered in the playground that they built for you was additional team members. As you thought about how to fill out a team, what did you look for?
• Will you be able to continue your work with PBS and CBS among other affiliations you have beyond Yahoo?
• At CES, you made clear that you would not have any banner ads or display ads on the site. What is the rationale, and how will you make up for the lost revenue opportunity?