By Chris Davis, published on CIO Insight
9-12-16
The world is a big place, and despite what you, as an IT leader, think you know about the international digital heavy weights’ control of the market, there is still a lot of runway for your company to make its mark.
The first encouraging point that your digital future is not yet written comes from Dr. Peter Diamandis’ book Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think, in which he estimates that by 2020, 3-5 billion new consumers will come online, adding tens of trillions of dollars to the global economy.
But let’s not oversimplify. The Asia market is multi-lingual, multi-cultural, and comes with digital (double-byte characters), political (Google being blocked) and competitive (Uber selling to Didi) challenges. A “one size fits all” approach didn’t work for Walmart the first go-around, and it is taking a new look at how it re-establishes its presence in China. To compete in the modern marketplace—where digital is or will be the medium of choice for commerce—all companies need to invest heavily in designing their global-local digital strategy.
Dipping your toe in the water won’t be enough.
Click here to read the full article on CIO Insight
Vivek Kundra leveraged his experience as the first ever CIO of the federal government to launch his career into business development for emerging markets.
by Peter High, published on Forbes.com
05-13-2013
Vivek Kundra has had the kind of career that befits someone approaching retirement. He has been a CIO at the city, county, state, and federal levels. He was already established himself as a technology innovator as the chief technology officer of the District of Columbia, a role he took on at the age of 32. Then, at the age of 34, he was appointed by President Obama as the first ever federal chief information officer. He would institute programs that ushered in unprecedented transparency and cost savings in technology. Now, at the ripe old age of 38, Kundra is the executive vice president of Emerging Markets at salesforce.com. As he describes in the interview herein, each stop has built upon the steps prior, and his government service has offered deep insights which he has taken with him to the private sector.
(The “Beyond CIO” series kicked off with this article, and the all past interviews in the series can be found here. If you are interested in future articles in the series with executives from companies like HP, Symantec, Fifth Third Bancorp, Ameristar Casinos, and Aetna, among others, please return to the Technovation column in the coming weeks.)
Peter High: Vivek, you have had quite an interesting career path that has included city, county, state, and federal government IT executive roles. The federal position was as the first ever federal CIO position. You are now in the private sector, holding the title of executive vice president of Emerging Markets for salesforce.com. What did you gain from your experience in government that has prepared you for a role in the private sector?
Vivek Kundra: There are those who may think of government CIO positions are somehow less than equivalent roles in the private sector. I must say that I treasure my time as a government CIO, and I would not trade that experience for anything.
It was an incredible experience as the first ever federal CIO. I came in with a mandate for change, and I was fortunate that the economic malaise that greeted the Obama Administration motivated everyone to tighten their belts. Throughout my career in government, a key driving principle has been to put the citizen first, and to put him or her at the center of all government activities. We hoped to simplify access to government services, and crack down on wasteful spending.
I had an $80 billion budget under my control, but a lot of the thinking and use of technology was decades old. In some ways, my having been a young leader helped in that I was able to ask the classic “ignorant questions”, like “why do we do things that way?”, and “isn’t there a better or more efficient way of doing things?” This led to such initiatives as the Data.gov platform, which provided the public access to the raw data of the executive branch in order to foster public participation and private sector innovation, as well as the Federal IT Dashboard, tracking $80 billion in IT spending, identifying waste, and generating considerable savings.
Additional topics covered in the article include:
To read the full article, please visit Forbes.com
To explore the full collection of Beyond CIO Series articles, please click here.
To explore the Technovation Column library, please click here.
To explore the recent CIO-plus Series articles, please click here.
Peter High tells the story of how Tony Scott, CIO of Microsoft, and Rebecca Jacoby, CIO of Cisco, are transforming their IT departments within their respective technology giants.
by Peter High, article published in The Wall Street Journal
08-02-12
Excerpt from the article:
Larger corporations with multiple operating companies, business units, or brands must confront a debate about the merits of centralized vs. federated organizational structures. The rationale for the former is often the desire to set common standards, create efficiencies, and leverage economies of scale by purchasing software and vendor services globally rather than locally, where possible. The rationale for the latter is often to have IT closest to where the business is done, to increase flexibility, and to efficiently deliver capabilities based on the unique needs of each individual entity.
There are a number of businesses that are taking a hybrid approach that befits major technological transformations that are afoot in the market. In so doing, they are recognizing the role that IT can play in fostering partnerships across the traditional business silos, and in creating efficiencies and fostering innovation.
Microsoft used to operate in the analog world, where its software products were manufactured on discs and sold in boxes. IT reflected the businesses it served, supporting manufacturing applications that were quite different from engineering applications. Over the past few years, given the availability of increased bandwidth and consumers’ comfort with digital products distributed over the web, customers now prefer downloading software to their device or accessing it over the web, as a service. Microsoft CIO Tony Scott, recognized this change and realized that his IT organization needed to adapt, speeding up the company’s processes and focusing on customer satisfaction.
(…)
Rebecca Jacoby, the chief information officer and senior vice president of the IT and Cloud and Systems Management Technology Group at Cisco, is leading a comparable transformation. Like Microsoft, Cisco is an extraordinarily diverse business, and IT had been aligned with the business structure. The company articulated a new vision, based on doing more across business units. Jacoby recognized the opportunity for IT to play a lead role in identifying common business processes that would form areas of potential collaboration. Services were identified to drive greater transparency and alignment. Jacoby told me that she created the Operational Excellence and Service Enablement team, “which sought to change the level of conversation with the business from technology deployments to IT capabilities and value creation, and to create a transparent partnership between IT and the business to bring about more effective management of the strategic goals of the organization.” (…)
To read this article in its entirety, please visit The Wall Street Journal.
If you would like to listen to our recent podcast interview with Tony Scott, CIO of Microsoft, please visit the Forum on World Class IT.