As someone who released a book over the past year, I have been keenly aware of the great works of others published in 2021. The many great contributions reflecting rising trends in technology, the acceleration of digital transformation, the sancitity of customer-centricity, and the importance of remaining aware of the relevance of various trends to the evolution of one’s business all were represented across numerous tomes of consequence in the year that has passed. Here are ten that stood out.
AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future, by Kai-Fu Lee
Artificial intelligence is perhaps the most important technology of our time. How will it change the world over the next 20 years? In his latest book, Kai-Fu Lee, author of the bestseller “AI Superpowers” and former head of Google China, provides an immersive vision for how AI will transform aspects of our daily lives.
Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire, by Brad Stone
In a follow-up to his 2013 bestseller The Everything Store, Bloomberg News’s Brad Stone offers a perspective on how the company’s innovation and acquisition strategy have propelled it to be the world’s largest e-commerce company.
The Heart of Business: Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism, by Hubert Joly
As Chairman and CEO of Best Buy from 2012 to 2019, Hubert Joly led the immensely successful transformation of the electronics retailer. In his latest book, The Heart of Business, Hubert gives a look into his philosophy of “human magic” to illustrate how the people of Best Buy created a customer-centric company, and competed successfully against some of the most successful digital native competitors in the process.
Play Nice But Win: A CEO’s Journey from Founder to Leader, by Michael Dell
Successfully navigating a firm through a rapidly changing business landscape requires a good dose of grit and a leader ready to face some setbacks. From dorm-room CEO to leader of a global technology giant, Michael Dell charts the evolution of his eponymous computer company and shares his perspectives on the corporate struggles that defined him as a leader.
The Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology is Transforming Business, Politics and Society, by Azeem Azhar
We are living through a period of unprecedented technological change, and the pace of change is only accelerating. Azeem Azhar, creator and host of the popular Exponential View newsletter and podcast, explores the widening gap between the pace of change and our ability to adapt, and offers a new framework for understanding the impact of technology on the economy, politics, and the future.
Risk: A User’s Guide, by General Stanley McChrystal and Anna Butrico
General Stanley McChrystal understands risk at his core, having served at the highest ranks of the American military. In recent years as a business consultant, he has advised executives on how best to apply what he has learned on the topic to the business world. He and his co-author, Anna Butrico, define ten dimensions or controls of risk that we can adjust at any given time. The authors provide the mechanics to develop a healthy Risk Immune System to anticipate, identify, analyze and act upon the possibility that things will not go as planned.
Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know, by Adam Grant
To succeed in today’s fast-changing world, we must not only be continuous learners, but also un-learners and re-learners. We must develop this capacity and inclination in ourselves as well as in our teams. In Think Again, Wharton professor and bestselling author Adam Grant gives us tips and tools to question our assumptions, stay curious and develop nimbler and and more flexible mindsets.
The Age of AI: And Our Human Future, by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher
How will AI transform our society? In this book, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and MIT Schwarzman College of Computing Dean Daniel Huttenlocher explore how economics, politics, security and even knowledge itself is being re-imagined in the age of AI. They draw upon their diverse experiences as a statesman, a CEO, and an academic to highlight the dramatic changes that AI will usher in, ultimately transforming how we all experience reality.
Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation, by Kevin Roose
With the rising influence of AI and algorithms, some fear that automation will threaten jobs. In Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation, New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose presents a hopeful future where humans can successfully thrive in the AI age, shares what skills are necessary in a world increasingly influenced by algorithms, and argues that we should focus on being more human rather than becoming more like machines.
The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and a Roaring 2020s, by Mark P. Mills
There are many pundits who write compellingly about a dystopian future brought on by technology advances run amok, with worries about how companies and the technology they unleash will continue to change our society for the worse. Mark Mills of the Manhattan Institute offers a counter-point to that perspective, positing that we are the cusp of a second “roaring ‘20s” brought on by radical advances in three primary technology domains: microprocessors, materials, and machines. Accelerating and enabling all of this is the Cloud, history’s biggest infrastructure, which is itself based on the building blocks of next-generation microprocessors and artificial intelligence. With a historian’s ability to connect dots across the last century as well futurists pluck to articulate big bets on the future, Mills offers perspectives that are worth contemplating.
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.
Another year has passed, and technology and digital remain on the ascent, as companies focus on each as sources of new revenue streams and resilience. The innovations were represented well in a variety of pieces throughout the year. Though it is impossible to fully represent the breadth of that writing, here are ten noteworthy pieces that provide greater context to advances made and issues faced in 2021.
The Cost of Cloud: A Trillion-Dollar Paradox
By Sarah Wang and Martin Casado, a16z.com, May 2021
Sarah Wang and Martin Casado of the venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, argue that while cloud delivers significant value early in a firm’s growth, the costs it puts on the business may eventually outweigh the benefits. While primarily focused on startups, this article has been a useful thought starter for enterprise technology leaders as they continue to explore the long-term business implications of the cloud.
Why Computers Won’t Make Themselves Smarter
By Ted Chiang, The New Yorker, March 30, 2021
The notion of ‘the singularity’ has been tantalizing the tech community for decades, heralding a future with infinitely powerful artificial intelligence capable of independently improving itself. Even with the phenomenal computing advancements of the 21st century, it seems we are nowhere closer to actualizing this intelligence explosion. Is it truly possible for a computer program to surpass the intelligence of its human creators? Chiang offers an interesting counter-point to those who say yes.
The Technopolar Moment: How Digital Powers Will Reshape the Global Order
By Ian Bremmer, Foreign Affairs, November/December 2021
For centuries, nation states have been the primary actor in global affairs, but that is beginning to change as massive technology companies begin to rival them for geopolitical influence. Technology giants are increasingly shaping the global environment and wield tremendous influence over the technologies and services billions of people interact with daily. This piece explores the sovereignty tech giants wield over the digital space and beyond.
Moore’s Law for Everything,
By Sam Altman, SamAltman.com, March 16, 2021
As the CEO of OpenAI and former President of YCombinator, Sam Altman has a unique perspective on the future of artificial intelligence. In a recent essay, Altman explores the intersection between rapid progress in AI, politics and the economy, including global AI governance, wealth inequality and how AI could change the geopolitical balance of power. He ultimately concludes on an optimistic note, noting that the AI revolution “will generate enough wealth for everyone to have what they need, if we as a society manage it responsibly.”
The Outsider: How CEO-For-Hire Frank Slootman Turned Snowflake Into Software’s Biggest-Ever IPO
By Alex Konrad, Forbes, February 1, 2021
Former ServiceNow CEO Frank Slootman has branded himself as an unstoppable force in the tech industry, leading companies with an iron fist and demanding excellence from his constituents. Taking the reins as Snowflake’s CEO in 2019, Slootman has ignited another aggressive transformation to shift the cloud-based data warehouse to a multifunctional data hub capable of outracing the industry’s largest competitors. In this piece, Alex Konrad unravels Slootman’s playbook for turning Silicon Valley’s next cautionary tale into the fifth largest tech-listing in the United States.
How to Negotiate with Ransomware Hackers
By Rachel Monroe, The New Yorker, June 7, 2021
This piece offers a clear-eyed look at the evolving cyber extortion industry through the eyes of the rare ransomware negotiation specialist. If you’ve ever wondered what happens when a company gets hit with a ransomware attack, this article provides insights into how to fight (or, rather, negotiate).
Students Who Grew Up with Search Engines Might Change STEM Education
By Monica Chin, The Verge, September 2021
A generational divide in how we use computers is showing up in classrooms around the country. In an age where Google-like search interfaces are ubiquitous, many students today have little knowledge of, or seeming need for, file folders and directories. This is a compact but meaningful story about the confusing, though often humorous, situations brought on by technological progress.
What Ever Happened to IBM’s Watson?
By Steve Lohr, New York Times, July 16, 2021
A decade ago, IBM’s Watson supercomputer defeated Ken Jennings, the best human “Jeopardy!” player ever. IBM executives said that their artificial intelligence would transform industries, generate fortunes for the company, and start a technological revolution. In What Ever Happened to IBM’s Watson? New York Times Technology Reporter Steve Lohr traces the company’s missteps with Watson that have led IBM to settle on a far less ambitious AI strategy, suggesting that “the march of artificial intelligence through the mainstream economy, it turns out, will be more step-by-step evolution than cataclysmic revolution.”
For an Agile Transformation, Choose the Right People
By Rob Cross, Heidi K. Gardner, Alia Crocker, Harvard Business Review, April 2021
Researchers from Babson College and Harvard Law School find that while Agile methods can improve processes and increase speed to market, many Agile teams are not organized for long-term success. This piece examines where many Agile efforts go wrong and offers a revised approach to building strong Agile teams.
Epic Games Believes the Internet is Broken. This is Their Blueprint to Fix It.
By Gene Park, The Washington Post, September 28, 2021
The ‘social media era’ of the internet has stifled consumer engagement with commerce, leaving users’ brand exploration limited to the interests of social media moguls. Championing the internet’s freedom from exploitative herd advertising, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney lays out his plan for the metaverse, a revolutionary online ecosystem where users and brands can freely collaborate and seamlessly interact to transform the digital consumer experience.
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.
Another Metis Strategy Digital Symposium is in the books. Thank you to all of you who joined the session and to the global CIOs, CEOs, and entrepreneurs who shared their insights. More than ever, it is critical for leaders to tap into their ecosystem of peers and advisors for information, wisdom, and support as organizations navigate this complex and uncertain environment.
Below are a few takeaways from the event. Check out our YouTube channel and the Technovation podcast in the coming weeks for recordings of individual panel discussions.
Culture is key in the transition to hybrid work. Nearly 60% of attendees noted cultivating a strong culture among teams as the greatest risk to operating in a hybrid work environment. With many return-to-office plans in flux and a new wave of employees joining firms without stepping inside an office, executives continue to place a strong emphasis on employee experience, creating new norms around equity, inclusivity, and productivity, and creating new ways for teams to engage in a hybrid setting. For technology leaders, that also includes managing a growing ecosystem of collaboration tools and emerging technologies to find the mix that works best for their organizations.
Just as CIOs helped pave the way for remote work, they also will have a role to play in helping peers understand the art of the possible regarding the future of work. The road ahead is far from clear, but today’s technology leaders are adapting people, processes, and technologies to help create organizations that can pivot quickly in the face of change and seize new opportunities as they arise.
Innovation comes from empowered teams. The ability to innovate at scale continues to rise in importance as organizations work to future-proof their operations and drive enterprise agility. To do so, a number of executives said they are exploring how to democratize innovation capabilities across their companies and unlock the full potential of their teams. Debra King, SVP, Chief Information Officer and Chief Transformation Officer at Corteva Agriscience, discussed how she and her executive team developed a culture of ownership across the organization in which team members at any level in the company were empowered to come up with an idea and execute it. The leadership team then focused on removing roadblocks and providing resources where needed.
Similarly, Tim Dickson, Chief Information Officer at Generac, discussed how the company’s first hackathon spurred new ideas while revealing pent up demand for employee upskilling. Sixteen teams participated, and over half of the ideas presented have been implemented as production deployments, Dickson said. Generac also launched a digital center of excellence that helped scale the internal capability to bring new ideas to life quickly. These new ways of working made employees feel as if their voices were being heard, while providing an avenue to develop those ideas into new products and services for the company.
Security is critical to creating strong customer experiences. Technology leaders are taking greater responsibility for the ways their organizations’ products and services impact the customer experience, and security is an increasingly critical element of that. Mickey Boodaei, CEO of Transmit Security, which received the largest-ever Series A funding round for a cybersecurity company, shared his perspective on the move toward a passwordless future, the evolution of identity and authentication, and the fine balance between security and user experience.
For consumers, identity is critical to processes such as account opening and credential validation. Too little focus on security and vulnerabilities or compliance risks may arise. Too many security measures and the user experience becomes an obstacle. As authentication technology advances and passwords continue to pose a security threat to consumer accounts, Boodaei anticipates organizations will make a concerted effort to go passwordless.
Companies scale up AI efforts. As companies continue to refine their data strategies and identify opportunities to turn data into actionable insight, significant analytics and AI deployments are only expected to grow. Nearly 40% of respondents said they expect analytics to be their greatest area of investment in the year ahead.
Machine learning and AI, paired with an increasingly sophisticated understanding of customer needs, is powering new waves of innovation across industries. Barbara Lavernos, Deputy CEO for Research, Innovation, and Technology at L’Oréal, described an experience that crunches data to provide customers with personalized advice on their beauty routines. The company is also using AI to mine its extensive store of historical data as well as real-time consumer information to deliver cutting-edge products. For example, L’Oréal has trained an AI algorithm to read the thousands of online customer ratings and reviews of the company’s makeup products. With real-time insight, research and innovation teams can then make relevant product changes and target advertising more effectively.
At Johnson & Johnson, new technologies have enabled the company to reimagine consumer health and deliver care for patients in new ways. Augmented reality and virtual reality, paired with AI, have helped train surgeons eight times faster by combining digital imagery with insights about how to perform the best surgical procedures. AI and digital twins have helped Johnson & Johnson accelerate enrollment in COVID-19 vaccine trials and improve batch production of vaccines, from one batch every two weeks to two batches every half week.
Embracing change and becoming nimble is more important than ever. Of the tips IT leaders shared about sustaining a competitive advantage in the current environment, the most common was the ability to be nimble. That means being able to pivot quickly when the market changes, seize opportunities as they present themselves and stave off issues as they arise. Indeed, more than 75% of attendees said creating a culture that embraces uncertainty, as well as the ability to pivot quickly, would have the greatest business impact over the next six to 12 months.
Companies are making a number of changes to make their organizations more nimble, including transforming their operating model, adopting new technologies, upskilling employees and bringing in new talent, and driving innovation through partnerships.
Nimbleness is at the heart of many of today’s technology transformations, including the shift to embrace cloud, APIs, and other technologies, said Bernadette Nixon, the CEO of Algolia. These modern software architectures ultimately allow organizations to move more quickly and evolve their systems to support market shifts, further empowering teams to become more efficient and nimbler in their processes.
We hope you’ll join us for our next Metis Strategy Digital Symposium on December 9, 2021. Stay tuned to our website for more details.
10/01/2018
By Peter High. Published on Forbes
Steve Randich has been a CIO many times over at organizations like the Chicago Stock Exchange, the NASDAQ, and with Citibank prior to taking on his current post as CIO of Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Inc., better known as FINRA, which is a non-governmental organization that regulates brokerage firms and exchange markets. When asked about the evolution of the CIO role, he indicates that he has not seen much evolution, but that may be because he was a strategic leader, driving innovation from the CIO post long before others were presumptuous enough to think to do so.
At FINRA, Randich’s innovations center around leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to better surveil markets and broker-dealers. He also has led one of the most dramatic implementations of the public cloud. So extensive is the implementation that Amazon Web Services considers FINRA a best case example of the use of its technology. Randich has become an evangelist of the public cloud, citing it as the single technology across his career that actually gets cheaper as you use it more.
In this interview, he offers insights into all of the above and more.
(To listen to a podcast version of this interview, please visit this link. To read future articles like this one, please follow me on Twitter @PeterAHigh.)
Peter High: Could you give a rundown of FINRA’s operation and your role as the Chief Information Officer?
Steve Randich: FINRA goes back to 1937 when it was known as the National Association of Security Dealers. After going through some mergers, other regulatory functions, and stock exchanges, the company became known as FINRA ten years ago. FINRA, which employs roughly 3,500 people, focuses on protecting investors by surveilling both the markets and the broker-dealer activities. As CIO, I run a 1,100-person organization, which focuses on building surveillance systems that assist our staff in examining firms and regulating the markets.
High: How are the new weapons in the IT arsenal implemented into FINRA’s strategy?
Randich: FINRA processes enormous amounts of data as the company handles upwards of fifty billion transactions on a daily basis, including all of the quotes, orders, and trades collectively across the equity markets in the United States. Additionally, the company looks at the historical data to identify trends over time, which exposes market manipulation, insider trading, and fraud in the markets. Several years ago, FINRA decided to use open-source, big data technologies on public cloud platforms to handle the large amounts of data efficiently and with scale. Today, those efforts are largely completed, and we are now moving into machine learning and advanced analytics. This will enable machines to do more of the surveillance, which allows our surveillance analysts to avoid the work that is better suited for the machines.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
6/11/18 By Peter High, Published on Forbes
Mickey Boodaei has been a leading entrepreneur in the security space for years. He co-founded Imperva, which went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011, and he co-founded Trusteer, which was sold to IBM for $1 billion in 2013. Soon after the latter acquisition, he founded Transmit Security.
Interestingly, Boodaei did so without seeking venture capital. He indicated that by putting his own money (and that of co-founder Rakesh Loonkar) into the start-up, it felt more like when he founded his first firms, but in this case, there was no one else to answer to.
Transmit Security provides, “a cross-channel identity platform that is designed to simplify, accelerate, and reduce the cost of identity-related projects,” as Boodaei explains. He also notes that “security and customer experience are the two most important goals of any organization today. We bundle these together and address them as a single challenge.” In this interview, he explains his personal journey as a CEO, the importance of a strong co-founder, and his opinions on the evolving threat landscape.
Peter High: You are the Chief Executive Officer of Transmit Security. Can you provide an overview of the company?
Mickey Boodaei: We founded [the company] four and a half years ago with the goal of building a cross-channel identity platform that is designed to simplify, accelerate, and reduce the cost of identity-related projects. These include projects such as authentication, authorization, fraud prevention, account opening, among others. Our R&D Center is in Tel Aviv, Israel, and the rest of our technical teams are physically close to our customers in the US and Europe.
As a company, we focus on large enterprises with millions of end-user customers. Most of our customers to date have been banks, insurance companies, telcos, and retailers. We have two global financial customers with over 20 million users each, and about 20 customers with more than five million users each. Our customers typically use our platform to consolidate and accelerate multiple initiatives in the identity space. For example; multi-factor authentication in biometrics, behavioral analytics, and advanced fraud detection, attributes-based access control, new data protection regulations, using the mobile device as an authenticator for call centers, branch and web, authorization and authentication around open API’s, and more.
High: Yours is an organization that is experiencing extraordinary growth, and you have been able to do so without venture funding. Could you talk about the way in which you have grown, as well as the advantages of having done so without taking on venture funding in your early stages?
Boodaei: Our goal was to build a big company that is focused on what we enjoy doing around cybersecurity, which is working with large enterprises. We wanted absolutely zero external pressure as to the direction of the company or the speed in which we are growing. Therefore, my co-founder Rakesh Loonkar and I decided to invest our own money in the company.
We have been relatively successful in the past, so we could afford the risk of losing many millions if we failed. Today, Transmit is a profitable company, so the investment paid off. Not taking money from venture capitalists is not something everyone can do, so we consider ourselves lucky to be able to fund ourselves. Personally, I find it uncomfortable taking someone else’s money when I can do this with my own.
I also believe that it made us more focused and got us to work harder. If you look at first-time entrepreneurs, they are eager to secure their future. For us, by using a considerable amount of our own fortune, we created a strong motivation for ourselves to succeed that is not dissimilar from first-time entrepreneurs. This is the idea behind the self-funding concept of our company.
5/21/18 By Peter High. Published on Forbes
Stephen Gillett has had a remarkable career for someone as young as he is. At 42, he has been the CIO and General Manager of Digital Ventures at Starbucks, the President of Digital, Marketing, and Operations at Best Buy, and the Chief Operating Officer of Symantec. In 2015, after Symentec was split into two companies, Gillett exited. Soon thereafter, he joined Google Ventures (now known as GV) as an Executive-in-Residence. He would eventually join Alphabet’s “Moonshot Factory” X (formerly Google X), and it was during his time there that the idea for Chronicle arose.
Chronicle is still largely in stealth mode, but Gillett took time to speak with me about his vision for the company, its progress in garnering customers, the process of graduating from X, and the advantages of growing a business within Alphabet as opposed to seeking funding from more traditional venture capital.
Peter High: When we last spoke, you were transitioning from your role as Chief Operating Officer of Symantec to Executive-in-Residence at GV [formerly Google Ventures]. You transitioned to X [formerly Google X], and in recent months, an idea that you have been pursuing, called Chronicle, was graduated from X. Can you talk about the genesis of Chronicle?
Stephen Gillett: First, let me provide some background. While at GV, as I met with entrepreneurs and talked to various categories that GV was making investments in, my goal was eventually to go to a startup having spent the last few years at bigger companies.
In 2015, while I was learning and understanding everything that Google was working on, Alphabet, the parent company, was taking shape. It gave me an opportunity to meet and talk to several of the now Alphabet leaders, at Google, Google X, and Google Ventures to understand what their future paths were.
In that tour of the new Alphabet, I learned about what X’s mission was, their concept of moonshot thinking, and how the “moonshot factory” worked. Rather than joining a startup that Google Ventures was funding, I pivoted and started to work within the X structure to figure out if there was a startup or a moonshot category that I felt compelled to work on. I realized that X was a great platform to achieve my goals, and I could get the support and the access to the resources I needed. That is how I landed at X.
High: Can you talk about the process as you were searching for that category? What was the process of elimination or inclusion? I would also be interested in the inner workings of X, such as how people work together across the organization.
Gillett: I knew one of the categories would be enterprise security, but I was not sure that this was the right place or the platform. X had been experimenting and looking at cybersecurity as a category before my arrival. When I got here, the question X was asking was, “Is this a problem worthy of the mission of X?” Which is to build moonshots, to create radical new solutions, and to touch a billion lives around the world. That is X’s broad framework.
X is not here to create widgets or a new point product. They are tasked with thinking about big problems facing humanity at large. I have spent over 20 years in IT, starting off on the help desk and working my way up to be CIO. Every year, security became a bigger and more important part of what I was doing in technology. Having spent a few years with Symantec – at the time, the world’s largest cybersecurity company – and dealing with the customer needs globally that they were facing, it quickly became apparent that cybersecurity was worthy of moonshot thinking.
X and Alphabet was a great place for us to focus on that because of the resources, thinking, and capabilities you need are not conducive to a quarterly earnings call or having to raise a round of funding. You can focus on long-term problems and assemble the best teams and the best technology to go after that by getting the permission to be curious and think about it at a huge scale. I do not believe there was a better place to start this than at X.
3/26/18
By Peter High, published on Forbes
Vint Cerf is considered to be one of the fathers of the internet, having been the co-inventor of TCP/IP, having led influential work at DARPA, then at MCI, where he pioneered an email platform called MCI Mail. Now 74, he remains as busy as ever. Since 2005, he has been Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist. It is a role that gives him plenty of freedom. As he notes herein, “I focus on doing whatever I can to create conditions under which more Internet infrastructure can be built. This means I need to go where there is not Internet infrastructure to find ways to get it built. In weaker economies, affordability is a big issue, and the rationale for investing in Internet infrastructure is not necessarily obvious.”
As our conversation continued, however, he shared several concerns about the future of his creation. He indicates that his goal is to determine how to make the internet safer, more secure, and more private. He also co-founded the People-Centered Internet (PCI) with customer relationship management pioneer, Mei Lin Fung, installing former FCC CIO David Bray as the executive director. He notes that, through PCI, he strives to identify projects that could “materially improve people’s use of the Internet.” He sites as examples, “creating information in local languages or providing services that improve people’s ability to find jobs or improve their economic stability or safety or health.”
Peter High: As the co-inventor of TCP/IP, you are famously considered one of the “Fathers of the Internet.” Can you talk about your early work and the genesis of those ideas?
Vint Cerf: Thank you for being careful about that, as Bob Kahn and I had two hands on one pencil. He deserves huge credit, as do tens of thousands of other people since that time. You do not do anything on this scale without a huge amount of willing collaboration and commitment.
When I was a graduate student at UCLA, I worked with others on the ARPANET project, which was a predecessor to the Internet. ARPANET was a packet switching experiment within DARPA to connect a dozen universities that were doing computer science and artificial intelligence research for the Defense Department. The idea was to link all their computers together so they could share their resources, computing capabilities, and results to make progress more quickly.
The challenge was how to connect those machines together since the circuit switching technology at the time would have been too slow for the interactions we needed. Packet switching, on the other hand, is more like electronic postcards. They get lost and they come out of order. You must do a bunch of little things to make a postcard postal service work reliably, and the same is true for packet switching. We got the ARPANET running, and Steve Crocker, who remains one of my best friends, led the network working group to develop the protocols to allow different brands of computers to communicate across this packet switch ARPANET.
After I finished my Ph.D., I went to Stanford to work on computer networking. Bob Kahn, in the meantime, had left Bolt Beranek and Newman and joined DARPA. He came to my lab and said, “We have a problem.” The problem was that we were going to use computers for command and control because it would help us better manage our resources. However, this would require us to put computers in mobile vehicles, ships at sea, and airplanes, in addition to fixed installations. Obviously, these could not be wired connections, and we were going to have to use mobile radio and satellites in addition to the dedicated telephone circuits that we were using to build ARPANET.
The problem was that the packet switch nets differed in terms of sizes, speeds, and delays. We started working on this problem in the spring of 1973. By September, in collaboration with the International Network Working Group, we had a solution. We began detailing the design in January 1974 and published a paper in May of that year. By the end of ’74, we had a fully detailed specification for what was called Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). The next several years involved implementation and testing and discovery of mistakes and their repair, so we iterated several times until we ended up with a final specification in 1978 which we froze.
By that time, we had split the Internet Protocol [IP] off from the Transmission Control Protocol [TCP] to deal with real-time communications that did not require reliability but required timeliness. With radar communication, for example, you do not want to know where the missile was, you want to know where it is now. You do not need to retransmit old information because it is not of any use. We split the protocols into TCP and IP, and we created something called a User Datagram Protocol which gave the users access to this real-time communications channel.
That occupied my time by 1978, at which point I was already in the Washington area working for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). We continued implementation across as many operating systems as we could and on January 1, 1983, we turned the Internet on. At the time, it consisted of approximately three networks: the ARPANET, mobile packet radio net in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a type of satellite net over the Atlantic. This was followed by rapid growth in the academic community, which DARPA supported.
Without going into another 20 years of history, the National Science Foundation (NSF) picked up the idea and funded the creation of the National Science Foundation Backbone Network and about a dozen intermediate elements to connect 3,000 universities around the US into this growing Internet system. They contributed an enormous amount to the absolute growth of the system and made some important decisions that allowed the network to eventually become a commercial service.
High: At what point in that journey did you see the broader commercial and global implications of what you were creating?
To read the full interview, please visit Forbes
1/15/17
Estonia is, perhaps, the most digitally advanced society in the world. This Baltic region country with less than 1.5 million citizens has been occupied frequently through its history, including by the Soviet Union between 1944 and 1991. In the aftermath of independence, particularly progressive leaders decided to leverage advanced technology as a means of simplifying the lives of citizens. As early as the mid-1990s, the government made radical moves to eliminate paper in its interactions with citizens, forming the basis of what would become an almost entirely digital society.
Taavi Kotka was an Estonian CEO of one of the largest software companies in the Baltic States, Nortal. He left the company in late 2012, and he was under a non-compete agreement for two years. He used the time to join the government, and in the process, helped usher in some more remarkable change. The changes he and others enacted would have profound impacts on the efficiency of and value derived from healthcare, banking, education, voting, law enforcement, among other areas. He also spearheaded the Estonian e-Residency program, which has allowed Estonians abroad and non-Estonians, especially so-called digital nomads, to take advantage of these superior services. As Kotka explains, the degree to which Estonia has become digitized actually enhances its security. He describes all of this and more in this far-ranging interview.
Peter High: Estonia is perhaps the most digitally advanced, technically competent country in the world, and for the past four years, you have led much of that work. I wanted to start with the genesis story. Why Estonia? What are the secret ingredients, either in the combination between the government and the citizenry, or other structural advantages that were there that made this change and transformation possible?
Taavi Kotka: That is a good question, but it was not me. It was set up almost 20 years ago after we broke apart from the Soviet Union. It was clear, especially for the private sector, that Estonia is a huge country geographically – we are bigger than the Netherlands, or Switzerland, or Denmark – but there are only 1.3 million people living here. For the private sector, it was clear that it is impossible to physically serve all the people living in Estonia. It is not economically feasible to have a bank office in every small town, for example.
High: And roughly when was that taking place? How long ago?
Kotka: The internet was born in the 1990s, so the push started 1995 or 1996.
High: Remarkably early.
10/10/17
It has been a remarkably eventful couple of years for Symantec. In early 2016, the company went through one of the largest corporate divestitures when it spun out its Veritas business. In June of 2016 the company acquired Blue Coat, and then followed that up with the acquisition of LifeLock in early 2017. The rationale was to focus on being a pure play cyber security company, with end-to-end solutions. In the process Symantec has built itself into the largest cyber security company in the world by revenue.
Sheila Jordan has been chief information officer of the company throughout the journey. She came to the company nearly four years ago from Cisco. The latter is a legendarily acquisitive company, and Jordan has leveraged her experience to develop a playbook of sorts for the team at Symantec to integrate each of the major companies it has acquired. She also has developed the company’s CustomerONE program, highlighting her team’s use of the company’s products. Jordan discusses all of the above and more in this interview.
Peter High: Symantec recently acquired Blue Coat and LifeLock. What advantages was Symantec trying to garner for the enterprise, your partners, and your customers through those acquisitions?
Sheila Jordan: With the Blue Coat acquisition, we were able to retain Greg Clark, who is our CEO, and Mike Fay, who is our president and COO. They came in and quickly established the vision and overall strategy for the company, which is what we call our Integrated Cyber Defense Platform. An integrated platform is important for CIOs and chief information security officers (CISOs) because fragmentation and lack of integration generate risk by creating white spaces where the bad guys hang out and cause damage. Acquiring Blue Coat gave us the opportunity to improve the security posture of our small, medium, and enterprise customers.
Improving operational efficiencies also reduces costs. Fixing technology sprawl by using an integrated solution, which allows you to remove some products, drives a lot of value. We have been implementing the transformation on cloud products and on-prem. We just had our earnings reports, the positive results tell us it is resonating with our customers across verticals and with small, medium, and enterprise organizations.
From an IT perspective, we want to make sure we are enabling the organization. It is important that CIOs think about run, change, and grow. You have to run the company and be efficient and effective, but that is table stakes. You also want to position yourself with the new technology to be able to help the CEO and the C-suite change and grow. The acquisitions of Blue Coat and LifeLock gave us the opportunity to not only integrate, but also to transform how we do our work and think about the future.
The combination of us moving into cloud products and IT having a stake in driving integration and transformation, allowed us to think about taking our global subscription platform to a new level. One of the things we thought about was: How do we make sure our customers can consume their products the way they want to? We created an end-to-end reference architecture for our global subscription platform. It starts with our engineering products; they have provisioning, metering, and monitoring in the cloud products. Then it goes all the way through to how we quote an order, configure an order, how we do quote-to-cash, and, ultimately, to distribution. We want our products to be widely distributed and our global subscription platform to be frictionless. Our goal is a process that only takes a few clicks. We are accomplishing that through the integration of our cloud products with our subscription platform.
High: Your clients are often IT departments. To what extent do you and your team spend time in the field working with CIOs and learning about issues that you can help solve?
