Sastry Durvasula has an unusual title and remit at TIAA. As Chief Information and Client Services Officer of the Fortune 100 company, with more than $1.2 trillion in assets under management, he manages global technology and client services, including all the front office, middle office, back office functions and shared services of the firm that serve the company’s clients. Thus, Durvasula and team build solutions on the technology side that are used by colleagues on the other sides of his organization that serve the clients across the businesses, including retirement, asset management and wealth management. This responsibility gives him an opportunity to see the positive impact of his team’s work first-hand. The clients represent four constituent groups:
Therefore, Durvasula and his team support customers that include business-to-business, business-to-consumer, and business-to-business-to-consumer models. There is a fintech ecosystem that he helps bring to life: RetireTech, focused on building solutions for retirement participants on the accumulation side, and SilverTech, focused on the decumulating side. Managing through the complexity of different constituent groups, representing different generations together with a century old company that has forged contracts across decades is extremely complex. “The mission statement for my organization is ‘Power the business’ strategic shifts, fuel the innovation, while transforming the core,’” he noted. “The transforming of the core is as important and complex as fueling innovation and powering it. These strategic shifts enable us to provide lifetime income, delighting our clients and strengthening how we operate.”
Given TIAA’s size and breadth of offerings, Global Technology is divided up to reflect that breadth. “We have the unit CIOs that face off to the CEOs across our primary businesses in retirement, asset management and wealth management. Same thing with our client services side of the house where our client services officers are serving these specific business units, ” Durvasula explained. “Then we have global technology shared services like information security, data, AI, infrastructure and architecture, as well as shared client services like fraud and financial crimes management, serving all business units and affiliates. That’s my organizational grid. We have verticals and horizontals.”
Guiding these teams is a six-pillar strategy:
Durvasula notes that client-obsessed products and services refers to products both on the technology side as well as on the client services side of his responsibilities. “Whether it’s 403(b) solutions and products in the Higher Ed and Healthcare markets, or on the 401(k) side that we are getting very active on from a retirement perspective, as well as wealth management and asset management and so forth; that’s where we are focused on building those next-generation products and services,” he offered.
Digital first refers to modernizing a heritage company for the digital age, building the next generation of digital platforms, and providing solutions and client experiences, working closely with the company’s chief digital and client experience officer, Jessica Austin Barker.
To bring to life the integrated data and AI strategy pillar, Durvasula hired a chief data and AI officer, Swatee Singh, who’s focuses on that, to build the next generation of the data foundation and providing AI solutions to create those experiences for plan sponsors and participants.
Building the talent and culture needed to operate effectively includes key hires, like the ones noted already, but also creating a learning culture that strives to build the skills that will bring to life the digital vision he has articulated.
The best-of-breed ecosystem helps rethink the mix of buy versus build versus partners decisions across the technology landscape. “We want to build for differentiation, but we also want to buy and partner for parity,” Durvasula noted. “While I do that, obviously I have to uplift the technology ecosystem which is a big job for our teams.”
Finally, like all CIOs, he must do all the above while being secure by design and be on top of the regulatory and compliance demands. Given the emergence of numerous cyber threats, he must remain vigilant to ensure that the most valuable asset: the company’s data, does not get into the wrong hands.
Durvasula lingered a bit longer on the data piece, given the sanctity of sound data practices in a company that is awash in data. “The advantage we have is, because we have been at this for a long time and we are a highly regulated firm, we do have a number of data assets that actually are within the firewalls of TIAA that we can capitalize on,” he said. “How do we bring all the data from our global data assets and build that platform? While we do that, obviously we want to be cloud-first as we do.” Durvasula and team focus on leveraging open-source tools wherever possible. They have also focused on developing what he referred to as “killer use cases” that are powered by AI for each of the aforementioned constituent groups that TIAA serves. “As an example, we forged a strategic partnership with Google AI that we are now actively deploying solutions starting with our client services area,” he said. “It’s made it easy to deploy at scale.”
Additionally, Durvasula and team use conversational AI solutions to minimize client wait times. He believes this is a major customer enhancement, removing friction from their experience. Many of these new solutions are conceived in TIAA’s client tech labs, which leverage a multi-cloud/hybrid cloud environment to pilot ideas, work with clients to co-innovate and test beta versions of solutions, course correcting some to optimize them while canceling others that prove to be of insufficient value for customers. For those that go into production, Durvasula and team proceed with greater confidence.
Durvasula and TIAA more generally work closely with universities as strategic partners. “We want to have a different level of engagement and conversation with [universities],” he noted. “As an example, we have a partnership with NYU where we have launched programs, and we have over 70 cyber graduates that are going to be graduating from NYU – employees of our own – who are going through this coursework. We have something similar at [the University of North Carolina], but we also have a robust internship program. As an example, at the client tech labs that I mentioned earlier, we’ve had over one hundred interns actively hacking in our client tech labs and coming up with solutions. Some of them are winners of our hackathons and have opted to continue with us during their semesters as well. That’s is representative of the strategic advantage we have to build [a strong] talent pipeline.” By giving interns interesting work, the program has proven to be a rich source of full time recruits. This has developed a solid, long-term talent pipeline for the tech and digital team.
The connection with students and professors at universities are critical for the company given its history in the industry. (TIAA is an acronym for Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America.) “When it comes to client co-innovation on emerging technology and research projects with faculty and their students because that’s what we do for our business,” Durvasula offered. “With client advisory councils that we have, we open doors for our clients where faculty and students can come and conduct research with us and partner with us on a number of ideas. That’s exciting because it not only adds more talent to our pipeline, but it also opens the dialogue with our clients in a differentiated way for impact.”
Finally, Durvasula has taken a much longer-term view in the development of female talent in technology by serving on the board of Girls in Tech, a global nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating the gender gap in tech. “I’ve had the opportunity to learn and benefit from the wisdom of the board as well as the founder, Adriana Gascoigne, who started this several years ago with a few thousand people in the West Coast,” said Durvasula. “Now, it has grown almost 100,000 members across 50 different countries. I’ve had the privilege to work with Adriana and the leadership team and the broader chapters to grow the impact of Girls in Tech.” He notes that the power of the organization is to foster empowerment, learning, communications, networking and especially mentoring. He believes Girls in Tech will be a pathway to building the diverse and inclusive tech workforce the world needs. He also forged strategic partnerships with non-profits including Blacks in Technology Foundation, AfroTech and Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers.
Durvasula has enacted remarkable, long-term change across TIAA in a relatively short amount of time, and he and his team remain ambitious about the future.
Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. He has written three bestselling books, including his latest Getting to Nimble. He also moderates the Technovation podcast series and speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @PeterAHigh.
Thank you to everyone who attended and participated in the 12th Metis Strategy Digital Symposium. As access to AI and other technologies becomes increasingly ubiquitous, CIOs and their peers are working closer than ever with peers across the organization to develop technology-led products and services. Leaders continue to explore emerging technologies like ChatGPT while connecting digital initiatives to clear and measurable business value. Amid a backdrop of cybersecurity challenges and economic uncertainty, leaders remain focused on developing both new and existing talent and leveraging analytics to better serve customers.
Highlights from the event are below. Stay tuned to the Metis Strategy Youtube channel and Technovation podcast in the coming weeks for recordings of individual panel discussions. In the meantime, click here to request an invitation for our next virtual event on May 11, 2023.
Among the discussion topics at February’s Digital Symposium:
Working backward from the customer and proving the value of technology investmentsTechnology leaders balance a portfolio of priorities and initiatives that have the potential to transform their companies. As artificial intelligence and other technologies evolve, executives are finding use cases that deliver value quickly in order to build momentum and secure long-term technology investment.
At clothing company Levi Strauss & Co., Chief Global Strategy & Artificial Intelligence Officer Katia Walsh sees cutting-edge technology as a way to maintain a competitive advantage. The starting point for any AI investment, Walsh said, is improving the customer experience. “If customers do not feel the impact of investment in AI, then it’s not worth doing.” After defining a strategy for AI, she noted that leaders must simultaneously establish the people, process, data, and technology building blocks necessary to execute on that strategy while delivering tangible business value. “It is absolutely essential that anyone embarking on this today delivers value immediately.”
Doing so requires engineers and others in IT to develop a strong business understanding, an increased commitment to customers, and a focus on business outcomes. To drive what he calls the biggest cultural shift at the organization, Goldman Sachs CIO Marco Argenti has implemented practices that require teams to work backwards from the customer when developing new solutions, thinking from both a technology and a product management standpoint to better understand what customers want. “The trick is to measure technology with business KPIs, because at the end of the day it’s all about outcomes,” Argenti said.
Upskilling talent and diversifying employee skill sets
As organizations continue to navigate ongoing social, economic, and geopolitical changes, technology leaders are seeking new opportunities to supercharge their talent strategies and prepare teams for whatever lies ahead. TIAA’s Chief Information and Client Services Officer, Sastry Durvasula, underscored the need to provide cross-functional opportunities for people to apply their strengths across the business while learning new technical and leadership skills. Durvasula launched internal gigs where employees can “major” in their current role, like analytics, and “minor” in a different role, such as cybersecurity. Giving individuals exposure to multiple fields creates a more skilled and flexible talent base and better prepares both individuals and the organization for the future.
As Oshkosh Corporation continued to enhance its data-rich culture, CIO Anupam Khare recognized the critical role talent would play in ensuring a successful pivot. However, like many other technology organizations, Khare had to contend with a shortage of data science talent. He decided to take a homegrown approach, identifying opportunities to develop internal talent within the organization. He recalled a member of Oshkosh’s legal team who was passionate about data, went through training, and is now one of the best data scientists at Oshkosh. Khare also brought data science education to the leadership level and received support from the CEO around creating digitally savvy leaders.
Exploring the potential use cases and threats of ChatGPT and generative AI
Over the past several months, ChatGPT has taken the world by storm, amassing millions of users globally and sparking conversations about how this new phase of generative AI can be used to unlock new business opportunities and create new products and services. It also means the demand for AI applications is growing significantly outside the IT department. George Brady, CIO at loanDepot, said loan officers are “experimenting like crazy with ChatGPT,” using the service to lower barriers for first-time homebuyers and provide more education to customers before they have their first conversation with a mortgage officer, thereby driving better engagement, decisions, and outcomes.
At the same time, this next phase of AI may present a number of risks. “A lot of us are in a position where we can’t get too excited about the positive applications [of ChatGPT] and have to think about guardrails so that bad actors don’t use this technology to cause harm to our companies,” Fannie Mae CIO Ramon Richards said. By putting appropriate guardrails in place, monitoring advancements, and leveraging those advancements safely, Richards is helping to protect the organization while positioning it to take advantage of this emerging technology as it evolves.
Aligning with business partners and strategies
Truly transforming an enterprise requires tight alignment across different organizations to advance business and technology strategies in parallel. Technology leaders play a key role in making connections across teams and using technology tools and new processes to enable business partners.
At Vulcan Materials Company, CIO Krzysztof Soltan is refreshing the company’s data strategy by tying it to the corporate business strategy and connecting it to each business function. By making real-time data accessible and available across the business, Soltan is able to better support Vulcan’s business processes and make more informed strategic decisions. As the needs and desired outcomes of the business change, so too will the data strategy and its success measures.
As Cardinal Health went through a reorganization, CIO Michelle Greene took the opportunity to drive “enterprise thinking” and solidify the organizational change by establishing key roles specifically focused on alignment with the business and its needs. The tight alignment has blurred the traditional lines between technology teams and others in the organization. “When sitting in a room, you might not be able to know who’s business and who’s IT,” she said.
Exploring continued opportunities for professional growth
Technology’s expanding influence across the enterprise is enabling leaders to gain new responsibilities and avenues for professional development that may have not been on their roadmap.
At Cenlar, Rob Lux first held the CIO role before transitioning to the COO role when the former COO departed. He then took on the co-CEO role when the company’s CEO retired earlier than expected. “I’m an accidental COO,” said Lux. “It wasn’t part of my career or succession plan.” He explained that the path from CIO to COO can work because CIOs are one of the few C-suite positions that are able to see across the breadth of the organization. For those that want to move beyond the CIO role, Lux advised getting out of the comfort zone and taking risks, even if just for a period of time. “Don’t be accidental like me,” he said. “Build a career plan so you’re prepared.”
Meanwhile, Intercontinental Exchange Inc.’s Mark Wassersug went through a number of title changes himself, most recently from COO to “accidental CIO.” Through these roles, Wassersug was able to oversee a number of successful acquisitions and ensure early communication, bringing corporate tools together, and solidifying culture throughout the organization. The CIO and COO roles have been particularly useful when overseeing mergers and acquisitions, allowing Wassersug to not only bring the required tools and technologies together, but also to ensure smooth transitions by being transparent about changes and strengthen the culture by having expertised colleagues work side by side with new colleagues across the organization.
Wassersug also discussed the importance of developing a relationship with the company’s board, and finding opportunities to educate on foundational technology and operations. By doing this quarterly, “there was a much deeper understanding during board meetings [that] made conversations much more meaningful and productive.”
Zoetis’ Chief Information & Digital Officer Wafaa Mamilli has been promoted to the post of Executive Vice President, Chief Digital & Technology Officer and Group President for China, Brazil, and Precision Animal Health. Zoetis is the world’s largest manufacturers of animal pharmaceuticals. This post represents a major leap forward in Mamilli’s responsibilities, driving the accelerated growth of two key markets, as well as the company’s precision animal health businesses and advancing our global customer experience programs. Mamilli is a big believer that all tech and digital executives ought to have a profound impact if not primary responsibility for customer experience in the digital age.
“I’ve always thought of my role as a business leader with technology accountability and have been passionate about the role of digital and data in reimagining animal health and powering Zoetis’ business. I am equally excited to fully harness our innovative portfolio, along with my global experience, to deliver the most value to our customers in key growth areas of our business.”
She will continue to oversee Zoetis’ digital and data analytic strategies as well as the Information Technology and cybersecurity teams.
Prior to joining Zoetis in 2020, Mamilli was with Eli Lilly and Company for 20 years. She held a variety of International roles with increasing responsibility, and ultimately served as the Global Chief Information Officer for the company’s business units. She also served as the company’s Chief Information Security Officer, a rare example of a CISO growing into CIO responsibilities, though surely a pathway that may become more frequent in an age when the former is growing in strategic importance.
Mamilli’s profile has grown tremendously in the past two years, including being the recipient of the 2022 MIT Sloan CIO Leadership Award, which honors executives who lead their organizations to deliver exemplary levels of business value through the innovative use of IT. She was also honored as a member of the Forbes CIO Next List, recognized among 50 influential technology leaders who are redefining the CIO role and driving innovation.
In addition to her outsized influence in tech and digital and now beyond within Zoetis, Mamilli is also on the leading edge of CIOs and CDO s who have been asked to serve on the boards of public companies with multiple billions of dollars in revenue. She serves on the board of directors of Fiserv, Inc., a global provider of payments and financial services technology solutions.
Mamilli has also been a champion of women in technology, as a leader of the T200, a group of female technology executives who not only support each other, but also mentor the next generation of female tech and digital execs.
She earned a master’s degree in Computer Science from INSEA in Rabat, Morocco, and a master’s degree in Business Applications of Information and Technology from Université Rennes in Rennes, France.
Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. He has written two bestselling books, and his third, Getting to Nimble, was recently released. He also moderates the Technovation podcast series and speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @PeterAHigh.
Dean Del Vecchio is the Executive Vice President, Chief Information Officer, and Chief of Operations at Guardian Life, roughly 160-year-old mutual company with roughly $10.5 billion in annual revenue. He leads a team of about 4,500 employees. He is a major driver of innovation across the company, but he and his team hoped to open up innovation to the majority of colleagues rather than make it a purview of a single team at Guardian Life. In fact, he has even facilitated a method to engage outside partners and vendors in the process, as well.
Del Vecchio has defined three categories of innovation:
Core innovation entails finding a better, a faster or a simpler way to perform everyday tasks of the company.
Adjacent innovation requires monitoring other companies, including innovative ideas driven in other industries and translating them back to Guardian Life. “If there is somebody else doing something out there, it does not have to be in our industry, our segment or our market,” said Del Vecchio. “If somebody is doing something interesting and differently than we are today, let’s copy it.”
Transformational innovation fosters the development of truly big and new ideas for the company to pursue. “It is rethinking a market segment, [for example],” said Del Vecchio. “It could be rethinking how we do work entirely. We have been quite innovative in the way we thought about operating in the cloud, for example. We have been operating in the cloud since 2018. We shut down our data center in 2018. We no longer have an owned operating data center.”
To foster the development of all three types of innovation, Del Vecchio has developed innovation challenges for the team. It involves posing a challenge question of the team and leveraging the wisdom of the crowd to develop creative answers to the question. “We have employees vote on [the ideas], and we have them do pairwise comparisons on [them],” noted Del Vecchio. “Then the good ideas that bubble up, we do a Shark Tank experience. We have people put forth their idea, present it to a group of people, we vote, and we challenge [them with] questions. If an idea gets thumbs up, we move it forward to a minimum viable product.”
In recognizing that the best ideas will come when the net is cast widely, Del Vecchio recognized that he had to grow more technical talent, which is especially a challenge these days when the war for talent is raging at a level not previously seen. He introduced a program called Code for Good, which identifies employees in non-traditional technology roles and trains them to become developers. “It is a six-month boot camp [including] programming and learning, and then they are out on the floor,” he said. “We make sure that there is a job for them and that they have an opportunity to participate in that.” He has had multiple cohorts go through this program, and the value derived from these newly minted programmers has been profound.
Del Vecchio is building on this success with the development of an Automation for Good program. This is geared at engaging employees who work on transaction-heavy processes and engaging them to help design automation to take the place of some of the most tedious and time-consuming tasks. “Employees could be adding much more value and dealing with much more complex issues if they had the time, but because they are dealing with all these transactional things,” he noted. “Why not allow them to be able to self-automate and identify those tasks that they wish they did not have to do in the first place, and then create a much more fulfilling job for themselves?”
There is a broader vision to this. Del Vecchio and his team are mapping out the customer experience journey to understand where there are opportunities to digitize, and where to introduce self-service capabilities. He and his team hope to automate to the point of facilitating proactive and predictive capabilities. “We are doing that in ways of a digital agent, for example,” said Del Vecchio. “We have installed, using AI and automation, the digital agent capability so you could chat with a digital agent and get claim status or get eligibility of benefits.”
Del Vecchio and his team have also focused on each aspect of the relationship and the journey, whether it is the initial onboarding piece or further along in their relationship with the company. “Can we help customers with decision tools to help them select the right products?” he asked. “Ultimately, when they are on board and they need services, can we provide them with all of those avenues?” A key is to serve clients as they wish to be served. If they want to interact with a chatbot, they can do so through their mobile device. If they prefer the web, they can do that. If they want a mobile app, Guardian Life provides that capability. “We are not there yet but that is how we are looking at it, and we are looking at it across all medium, as well as all segments of that lifecycle engagement,” said Del Vecchio. He and his team have the processes and the ideas to drive continued innovation through Guardian Life on behalf of its customers.
Ather Williams III is the Senior Executive Vice President and Head of Strategy, Digital Platforms, and Innovation at Wells Fargo, a post he has held since October of 2020. In that role, he leads corporate strategic planning, defines and manages digital platforms and capabilities, and oversees innovation priorities, opportunities and company-wide efforts to drive transformation.
Williams strategy role cuts across the five business lines at Wells Fargo, three of which are focused on consumer and two of which are focused on enterprise customers. “We work across those businesses, across all of our range of capabilities, covering our 69 million customers, and all of our functions to put together a coherent strategy to serve those clients in an innovative way,” noted Williams.
One of the key strategic pillars that that Williams and his team has defined and is helping to drive focuses on technology and innovation and having a digital-first, mobile-first, though not mobile only, mindset. “Digital platforms are a natural place to sit with me because it is a transformation of how we bring together a consistent consumer experience that starts with mobile across our deposits and payments business, our consumer lending business and our wealth management business,” said Williams. “[This intersection] will easily migrate across our other channels, be it an ATM, a branch or a financial advisor’s office.”
Williams considers the innovation part of his mandate to be the “fuel for the future.” The inspiration for that innovation often comes from interactions with customers and the needs they articulate, and the innovation is then driven by the team he has at his disposal within Wells Fargo together with a partner ecosystem he has curated. By way of example, Williams noted customers’ desire to rethink how they move their money around the world or new ways of investing their money. He also noted working with customers on how best to decarbonize. Wells Fargo makes its innovation channel accessible to customers and the broader ecosystem can help bring those ideas to life.
Williams noted that the pandemic has been a remarkable accelerant for mobile adoption. “All the metrics I look at weekly on our digital platforms, how we are performing and interacting with our clients, they are all up double digits year-over-year, and it is continual growth,” he said. “On the consumer side of the house, mobile is our number one channel. Between mobile and online, we have about just shy of two billion interactions with our clients every quarter.”
Williams is quick to add that these growth figures are not the death knell to Wells Fargo’s branches, however. He offers coin and currency transactions and mortgage initiation as two of a variety of examples of interactions that customers are often more comfortable doing in the branches. Williams describes the strategic approach the company is taking as mobile first but not mobile only. “Making that transition from being what a lot of banks traditionally have been which is a physical interaction first, technology supporting it, to being a technology led, physical supporting it,” Williams highlighted. “That flip is what we are driving from a strategy perspective.”
The company has also flipped the traditional script on how innovation happens. It used to be that companies like Wells Fargo built products and technology internally without outside partners to speak of. Counterexamples include payment networks for credit cards, or for clearing payments internationally, but these were exceptions rather than the rule. “Increasingly, banks are becoming ecosystem orchestrators where we build some stuff, but we enable you to experience it through APIs,” offered Williams by way of example. “That change, going from a very inwardly focused culture to an outwardly-focused culture, meaning engaged in the broader ecosystem for our clients, has been a big change.” Williams underscored that this trend happens both on the consumer and on the wholesale side of the business. Now enterprises bank through their ERP system in their treasury workstation. Wells Fargo has developed a means of plugging into that.
When asked how he measures innovation, Williams volunteered velocity of ideas through the company’s pipeline. “We run a funnel process and I measure ideas in and ideas we push into production, but it is also how quickly we can churn them through,” he noted. “Anything in the cryptocurrency area for example, is changing so rapidly that, I just need to make sure that we are getting enough reps or enough at-bats on things to see what might stick.” He also indicated that he is mindful of patents filed by the company. He also mentions that it is no longer useful to simply benchmark Wells Fargo against other banks, as had been the primary measuring stick used. “We look at some companies that are traditionally very innovative, mostly in the tech space but not necessarily banks,” said Williams. “I do look at how quickly they are launching new products, and how they are driving the industry.”
Each of the line of lines of business has a strategy and innovation lead. Their main job is to help each business think about how they are going to meet those changing customer needs and how the company will respond to competitive forces. Additionally, these leaders investigate problems Wells Fargo is trying to solve and then tap back into that innovation stream of what is happening in the market. There is also a team that is focused on innovation strategy. That team is “focused on thinking about what is five or ten years out that we need to keep our eyes on,” Williams said, “It can be a technology thing, or it could be an industry trend thing that we can see is going to impact us.”
The leaders of each of these teams come together with some frequency to share insights and to identify points of collaboration. The innovation team drives research and development, as well as the pilot and deliver, test and learn continuum to scaled ideas. “We get an idea such as cross border money movement over the distributed ledger,” said Williams. “Here is the client, here is the business case, here is the client scenario, how do we make that happen? You pull it into the lab, you can stand up a prototype and get it to run. Then once you get to a certain place, you can commercialize it and you flip it back into the business.”
This well thought out innovation engine is already bearing fruit, and Williams is confident that the best is yet to come.
Wesley Story has been named Chief Information Officer of Genesys, a global cloud leader in customer experience orchestration. As CIO, he will balance the day-to-day needs around operational efficiencies and scaling challenges that come from surges of rapid growth with new investments and the build-out of new capabilities that help the company position itself for continued future growth.
The company is going through what it refers to as its “Experience as a Service evolution,” and Story believes that IT has a significant role to play in the transformation to come. “Our Experience as a Service evolution…will be a central area of focus for me,” he said. “That means fostering and supporting our company’s cultural transformation that started a couple of years ago so that it’s genuinely baked into the DNA of our organization. Many companies have ‘values’ that are often printed on the back of their badges, posted on the walls in conference rooms, and perhaps used in annual performance reviews. But that can be a blind spot for an organization when it’s not baked into daily interactions. To me, that’s the goal. Our everyday decisions and behaviors should embody the culture.”
Genesys’ Experience as a Service is a new business model for the company. It was featured prominently in the announcement of the company’s most recent funding round of $580 million for a valuation of $21 billion. The round was led by Salesforce Ventures.
Story also noted the sanctity of data in this transformation, as data drives customer and market insights, providing a deeper understanding of how customers use Genesys’ products, fostering growth through better insights. “It’s one thing to have the data and perform analytics on it,” he said. “It’s another to be able to action the data by presenting it in the appropriate context for our employees, or, in some cases, use the data in a cognitive model to automate decisioning. Actions like this require intimacy with our cross-functional business processes like quote to cash, acquire to retire, and procure to pay, as well as customer experience metrics and business pain points so we can unlock value.” Story underscored that IT is a critical enabler in this regard, and he noted that IT will continue to forge tight relationships with the various functions and business units.
Story will report to Genesys Chief Financial Officer Brian Swartz, who noted in reference to Story, “Wesley is a proven leader with a deep understanding of business process improvements and building high-performing organizations grounded in customer experience and collaboration. As part of his responsibilities, he’ll work closely with product marketing, product engineering and many other functions as we grow and scale our business.”
Most recently, Story was an Enterprise Strategist at Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he was responsible for providing strategy guidance at the Board of Director, C-suite and IT leadership levels to advise clients on their transformation efforts. Prior to AWS, he was the interim global CIO at Sysco Foods, a leader in food distribution.
The automobile is one of the most important innovations of the last century. It has not been an unmitigated blessing, however, as it has led to millions of deaths through accidents, and it is among the biggest sources of pollution.
Mamatha Chamarthi is the Software Business and Product Management Leader at Stellantis, a post that she took on in April of 2021. Stellantis was formed in 2021 on the basis of a merger between the Italian-American conglomerate Fiat Chrysler and the French PSA group. The combined entity has a bit more than $200 billion in annual revenue.
It is refreshing to speak with Chamarthi about the car industry because she does not wear rose-colored glasses when it comes to the issues that the industry has had, just as she is inspired and energized by the role that technology can play in rectifying those issues. “Millions of people are seriously injured every year in car crashes [around the world]. Last year in the U.S., there was a 7% increase [in serious injuries],” she said. She recognizes that autonomous driving is the key to driving down these issues because 95% of the fatalities are due to human error. Her goals is to augment human intelligence to reduce this radically. “There is a bigger, broader purpose and a societal challenge that we are going after with autonomy. That is why the technology industry is also so fascinated with this area of autonomy.”
To solve autonomy requires the development of an ecosystem around Stellantis, and, here again, Chamarthi is part of the solution. “We are creating an ecosystem, partnering with technology companies like Amazon and Waymo,” noted Chamarthi. “We partnered with Waymo for autonomy, and we are also partnering with BMW, another traditional automaker just like us, to create our level two-plus [autonomy, out of five levels ] with enhanced autonomy to level three, which is where your hands are off the steering wheel, your eyes are off the road for some time and your feet are off the accelerator and the brake.” The company has developed adaptive cruise control, emergency braking and Traffic Jam Assist, as three components to help get from level two-plus driving to level three and beyond.
Chamarthi notes the necessity of partnering with pure-play technology companies, as they have technology budgets that dwarf those of automotive companies. A company like Stellantis can offer industry expertise and loyal customers, and technology companies can develop a portfolio of technologies for the Stellantises of the world to leverage as it climbs the rungs toward greater levels of autonomy.
Global warming is another major issue for the automotive industry to solve. Chamarthi admits that transportation is one of the biggest contributor to air pollution. The United States Environmental Protection Agency notes transportation as the third biggest contributing industry to greenhouse gas emissions. Again, she believes digital innovation should drive better outcomes on that front, as well. “We have to find an answer to reducing the carbon footprint because that is part of our responsibility to leave a cleaner, greener planet for future generations,” said Chamarthi. This will be enhanced not only through autonomy, but also through greater levels of electrification and shared mobility.
Chamarthi asked a rhetorical question. “What percentage of the time do we use [a car]? 7% maybe at best. 93% of the time it is sitting on a driveway or in a garage or a parking lot. In our digital economy, what happens with an underutilized asset? We find some creative, innovative ways of using that asset and that is what gave birth to ridehailing shared mobility.” To fill this need, Stellantis launched Free2Move, which provides customers the option to lease or own a mobility experience for a few minutes through to multiple years in duration. This mobility as a service offering will not be limited to Stellantis’ automotive portfolio. The company will provide the products and services to bring this to life for competitors’ portfolios, as well.
Beyond the virtuous aspects of digital innovation, Chamarthi is also excited about the experiences that can be brough to life through the connected automobile. “Can I personalize the driving experience of the customer?,” she asked. By way of example, she noted, “I can provide a Jeep for an off-road trail [for a customer], planning an end-to-end trail experience for my customer.” She likens this to excursions for a cruise line. If a customer signs up for Free2Move, they can have access to multiple vehicles for different kinds of experiences, each with a level of education and curation to make them safe and interesting at the same time.
Prior to her current role, Chamarthi was the Chief Digital Officer and Chief Information Officer of Stellantis. She sees her evolution from CIO and CDO to running a profit center for the company as representative of the ascent of technology and digital across businesses more generally. Increasingly, “Technology is front and center,” she said. “It is exciting to be driving and shaping the automotive industry in these macro trends of autonomy, electrification, connected services and shared mobility. All of them are enabled by software, are all enabled by technology. It only makes complete sense to me that technology leaders are being asked to come lead from the front [rather] than leading from behind.”
Gartner, Inc. announced its top 12 strategic technology trends for 2022 and beyond. Analysts presented their findings at the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2021, held virtually for the second year in a row, due to the pandemic. Gartner Research Vice President David Groombridge emphasized that just as 2020 and parts of 2021 found companies focused on survival, the future will focus on a return to the path toward growth. Just as survival required more creative use of technology, the path to growth will also emphasize creative use of technology, not so surprisingly. Gartner’s strategic technology trends for 2022 and beyond are:
Hyperautomation
Automation is a critical ingredient for digital transformation. Hyperautomation suggests a faster path to identifying, vetting, and automating processes across the enterprise. Gartner noted that areas to focus on in order to best accomplish this include improving work quality, hastening the pace of business processes, and fostering nimbleness in decision making.
Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Gartner notes an increase in interest and investment in generative AI in the past year. Generative AI references algorithms that enable using existing content like audio files, images, or text to create new content. Gartner predicts that in the next three and a half years, generative AI will account for 10% of all data produce compared to less than 1% at present. Case examples offered included supporting software development more generally, assisting companies in finding candidates to fill talent shortfalls, and identifying drug candidates more readily.
Data Fabric
Gartner defines data fabric as a design concept that serves as an integrated layer (fabric) of data and connecting processes. This fosters resilient and flexible integration of data across business users and platforms. The upshot is that it can reduce data management efforts substantially while dramatically improving time to value.
AI Engineering
The staying power and lasting value from AI investments have been mixed across many companies. An issue is that some companies deploy an AI model once and expect that value will accrue in perpetuity, Gartner notes that sustained efforts and model evolution must be driven to gain more from these investments. Groombridge noted that AI engineering adoption should lead to three times more value for AI efforts.
Autonomic Systems
Although it is early days in the life of autonomic systems, the next half-decade should yield increased value from it. “Autonomic systems with in-built self-learning can dynamically optimize performance, protect [companies] in hostile environments, and make sure that they’re constantly dealing with new challenges,” Groombridge noted. This trend anticipates greater levels of self-management of software.
Decision Intelligence (DI)
Decision intelligence aims to model decisions in a repeatable way to make them more efficient and to hasten the speed to value. It anticipates doing so through automation that enhances human intelligence. Gartner predicts that in the next two years, one-third of large enterprises will use DI for better and more structured decision-making.
Composable applications
The idea of composable applications highlights that the functional blocks of an application can be decoupled from the overall applications. The component parts can be more finely tuned to create a new application that is of greater value than its monolithic predecessor. Gartner notes that companies that leverage composable applications can outpace their competition by 80% regarding new feature implementation.
Cloud-native platforms (CNPs)
Gartner believes that cloud-native platforms, which leverage cloud technology’s essence to offer IT-related capabilities as a service for technologists, will provide the foundation for most new digital initiatives by mid-decade.
Privacy-enhancing computation (PEC)
Privacy has been an increasingly important concern and priority across the business landscape. Privacy-enhancing computation can protect a company’s and its customers’ sensitive data, protecting the confidentiality of data. Gartner hypothesizes that this is a pathway to maintain customer loyalty by decreasing privacy-related issues and cybersecurity events, and it believes that roughly 60% of large enterprises will leverage these practices by 2025.
Cybersecurity mesh
Cybersecurity mesh is a form of architecture that provides an integrated approach to security IT assets no matter their location. It provides a more standardized and responsive approach to cybersecurity by redefining the perimeters of cybersecurity to the identity of a person or a thing. This is a pathway to reduce the financial implications of cyber incidents by 90% in less than two years, according to Gartner.
Distributed enterprise
Gartner is a believer in the value of the hybrid approach to work, believing that those who enable it fully will achieve 25% faster revenue growth than peer companies who do not. This model allows employees to work in a geographically distributed fashion, opening up new pathways for talent acquisition.
Total experience (TX)
The pandemic has certainly led to an evolution, and in some cases a revolution in customer and employee experience, especially as it pertains to the digital versions of each. By managing each effectively, enterprises should drive better outcomes. Gartner suggests that natural silos relative to innovating around the customer, employee, and user experiences must be broken down so that a more holistic approach might be achieved.
Toyota Financial Services (TFS) is a 35-year-old, wholly-owned subsidiary of Toyota Motor Corporation and is the largest auto finance company in the U.S. with $125 billion in managed assets. The company’s offering includes lending payments, banking, and fleet financing, as well as insurance and protection products to consumers and dealers of Toyota, Lexus, and through private-label partner brands. The emergence of private-label partnerships has been a new part of the company’s operating model, but it was enabled through a radical transformation led by the company’s CIO, Vipin Gupta.
When Gupta joined TFS nearly three and a half years ago, he found a well-run IT organization, though he recognized that it was quite traditional. He was worried the IT department was not ready for the digital transformation necessary to be a bigger, strategic contributor to the company. Gupta faced a choice as to how best to proceed. “[I could] either fix the IT organization or redesign the next version of Toyota Financial Services in a grander way and use technology as a catalyst to design a new business model for Toyota Financial Services.” He chose the latter. Gupta continued, “The question that I used to ask was, ‘How would we design TFS if we were born today?’ If you were born in this digital world, the version of TFS [would] look very different, and the idea was, instead of trying to fix IT, let’s try to design that version, try to realize that [digital] vision of TFS.”
Gupta saw the opportunity to leapfrog the current standard and to make TFS into a platform for other brands to run their captive financial services on. “To do this, we needed to build a completely new technology chassis from the ground up with a multi-tenant architecture that allows us to run multiple brands on a shared infrastructure, but still keeps the data separate,” noted Gupta. The key in his mind was to transform behaviors before transforming technology. By first changing the way the team worked, the technology modernization pathway was clearer. The change required rethinking the way in which the company collaborated, the way new solutions were designed. “The best of strategies will fail without a culture that complements that aspiration,” said Gupta. “On the technology front, our vision is clear. We will use the cloud, and we will design a multi-tenant platform to deliver mobility finance as a service.”
When asked how the culture change was facilitated, Gupta noted how addressing three main points formed his gameplan, each using speed as the key performance indicator. First, there was a need to change the speed of decision-making. Second, there was a need to increase the speed of collaboration. Third, the team needed to increase the speed of engineering.
Speed of decision-making was the lynchpin according to Gupta. “Decision-making is the biggest barrier to speed and flexibility in an organization,” he noted. “The largest waste in IT projects is not in engineering. It is in decision-making and the lack of clarity. If you make decisions quickly supported by data and communicate decisions clearly, the team will consistently deliver with high quality and efficiency.” The key is to start this change from the top of the organization. Leaders needed to become more agile. Gupta facilitated the creation of new scrum-based routines for TFS’s executive team.
To facilitate the speed of collaboration, the digital organization needed to operate as a single ecosystem rather than separate silos. “Any business is a perpetual machine,” said Gupta. “It’s not a collection of time-bound projects. It needs durable teams led by subject matter experts, not by project managers only. These teams need to follow repeatable routines to maintain a continuous dialogue and prioritization.” Gupta developed a product orientation to the company, bringing together skills and teams from across the company aligned with the products that were defined. This common means of operating across product teams created greater output, but it also created greater levels of understanding and empathy across teams. Team members from across product teams shared information and learnings in ways that had not been the norm previously.
Changing the speed of engineering started with an acknowledgment that software is TFS’s product. As such, the company needed to become masters of its own technology. “We need to be as good at software engineering as [Toyota is] at automotive engineering,” said Gupta. “Inspired by our automotive factories, we built digital factories using the lean manufacturing practices of Toyota that have long been admired [the world over]. Just like automotive factories, the new digital factories were formed. They’re founded on consistency and standardization of behaviors, practices, and routines. We developed a new software engineering methodology that combines Toyota manufacturing practices with agile and scrum practice of software development.”
By increasing speed across these three vectors, the company was able to transform in months when years was the going-in assumption of what was possible. The key was to begin with the behavioral transformation. Gupta underscored that the focus on transforming habits before transforming the platform was a game-changer for TFS.
In order to ensure that the entire company and not just the technology employees raised their digital acumen, two years ago Gupta founded the TFS Digital Academy. “Harnessing the power of software is not just IT’s job; it is everyone’s job in a digital company,” noted Gupta. “The idea was not to just to train IT, but to train everyone across the organization, and whether they are employees or consultants, everyone will be trained in the new practices, new methods, new approaches, new behaviors.” This leveled the playing field and ensured that that level was much higher than in the past.
All of these changes have enabled the IT department to grow its contribution to the company’s success without growing costs. The new way of working has “reduced waste dramatically,” according to Gupta. “We’ve been managing our expenses in a very disciplined way, and we are now open to partner with any automaker, mobility provider or services provider, who wants to offer high quality, captive financial services for their brand to their customers and dealers.” As such IT’s transformation has been critical in developing the new private-label business. Mazda was the first partner to engage through Mazda Financial Services. Mazda gains mightily through the partnership by focusing on its products while leveraging the capabilities, talent, and quality of TFS.
The future will include adding more brands to this model, but Gupta also sees the possibility of additional products and services. These will include insurance and payments in the used car business, for example.
Gupta has achieved a tremendous amount in less than three and a half years in his role. With the digital innovation engine that he has created with speed as the metric, no doubt this is just the beginning of what he and the team can accomplish for TFS.
When Sweetgreen CEO Jonathan Neman co-founded Sweetgreen 14 years ago, he and the founding team saw a remarkable opportunity to embrace technology both as a means to enhance customer experience, but to do the same for employee experience. The fast-casual restaurant was founded in 2007 in Washington, DC by Neman, and two friends who were fellow undergraduates at Georgetown University: Nicolas Jammet and Nathaniel Ru. (The company moved to Los Angeles in 2016.) Neman referred to how the company became a pioneer in online ordering, which would serve them well during the pandemic, as well as in helping manage the company’s supply chain, since most of the produce used in the company’s salads are procured in partnership with local and regional producers.
Neman underscored that the way technology has aided customer experience is through speed, choice, and personalization. “We want to lower the barriers to entry and make it more accessible to eat healthy food in line with our mission,” he said.
Neman quickly added that the company is in the early stages of its transformation. “While we’re probably a decade into the digital transformation, we’re still in the very early days in terms of how technology is going to disrupt the restaurant business and the food business. As a business gets to over 50% digitized, you can start to re-imagine the business model in a lot of ways.”
Neman sees tremendous advantages derived by the digital penetration of Sweetgreen’s business pre-pandemic that served it well during trying times for the industry across the past 17 months. “Where the rest of the world was playing catch up in terms of technology integration into the [customer] experience, we were built upon that idea, those ideals, and it was native to the experience already.” As a result, customers did not need to pivot too dramatically in order to eat at Sweetgreen during the pandemic.
As Sweetgreen has scaled, the business has grown in complexity. Therefore, the time was right to identify a seasoned leader to act as a steward for what is to come as the company continues to scale. Thus, Sweetgreen has hired Wouleta Ayele to be the company’s new chief technology officer effective August 17. She joins the company from Starbucks where she spent nearly 16 years, ending her tenure there as the senior vice president of technology. “When we met Wouleta, we were blown away by her leadership, her experience, and her perspective,” said Neman. “We thought she’d be the perfect partner to lead us through this next stage of our growth.”
For her part, Ayele was drawn to Sweetgreen based on the company’s mission. “It’s an innovative company that’s leading the way to a healthier future, and I wanted to be part of it,” she said. “The kind of talent that they’ve hired excited me and energized me, as well.”
Having been in food retail for so long, Ayele recognized that her experience will be helpful for a company that wishes to develop the reach and influence of the company she just left. Thus, she counts understanding what it takes to scale from roughly 130 stores the company currently has to an order of magnitude more than that. “Having a clear vision and strategy for [technology and its evolution], I take full, clear accountability for leading the charge on that,” noted Ayele. “[Another] area of focus will be delivering brand-differentiating capabilities. Also, leading with next-generation capabilities, data, and analytics while fostering efficiency will be a focus, as well.” She hastened to add that she views the work ahead as building upon the great work her new team has already done rather than a need to reinvent the technology function within Sweetgreen.
Neman underscored that the pandemic has taught us all to expect the unexpected and to ensure that the company fosters nimbleness as it plans for the future. “Instead of trying to predict the future in terms of what our customers or team members are going to want from a technology perspective, one of the ways in which we think about it is building and architecting a system that allows us to move at the speed of culture,” he said. “As the customer changes and as the business changes, we’re able to continuously stay ahead of those changes.”
Ultimately, Neman believes the pandemic has increased scrutiny on health. This has been an added advantage to the company as it has grown. “Sweetgreen has what I call the trifecta of healthy food, which [is that it] makes you feel good, [it has] an addictive quality and [we have] a customized and personalized [menu], which means you can eat Sweetgreen in every single day and eat something different every day for the rest of your life.”
