The company now known as Cox Enterprises was founded nearly 120 years ago by James Cox, a man who would become the Governor of Ohio. It began with his first media property, the Dayton Daily News, and developed into a media conglomerate covering many cities. It is now a $20 billion private, family-owned company with 55,000 employees. Cox Enterprises operates across three business categories: Communications, which includes Cox Cable; Automotive, which includes Manheim Auctions, Kelley Blue Book, and Autotrader; and media, which dates back to the company’s founding. Much of the media business was divested in 2020, though the company still owns the Dayton Daily News and a few other properties. Much of that part of the company was divested in 2020, though the company still owns the Dayton Daily News along with a few other properties.
The company’s chief information officer is Richard Cox (no relation to the founder). He joined the company in 2013 as part of the Autotrader.com team and took on the CIO role in October 2019. However in 2018, he took a break from his ascent in Cox Enterprises to join the City of Atlanta as Chief Operations Officer, which proved to be a seminal experience for him. The current mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, was early in her administration and called upon Cox to help her set things up. “We went to high school together,” recalled Cox. “I hadn’t talked to her in 30 years, so it was just this really interesting opportunity. Cox [Enterprises] allowed me to go help her at the City of Atlanta for about a year and a half. I was an executive on loan.”
During his first week in that role, Atlanta experienced the largest ransomware attack in its history. This was a few months before Atlanta was to host the Super Bowl, making the situation all the more impactful and stressful. In retrospect, Cox sees it as a blessing in disguise. “I am absolutely convinced if we had not gone through that, that Super Bowl would have been [all the more] challenging,” remembered Cox. “We were on high alert during the Super Bowl. We were being scammed on a regular basis, but because we were really prepared [due to the earlier cybersecurity attack] it was seamless. We didn’t have any security issues at all, and the city now is in a good posture.”
Cox says his time in government accelerated his progress as a leader. “During those times, you can’t pretend to be a leader, you have to prove it,” he noted. He brought back much of what he learned in taking on the CIO role at his old employer. Cox encouraged open dialogue across the team to understand how the company could improve. That led to a group called Action Speak, which increased Cox Enterprise’s focus on diversity and inclusion. “Now we have paid time off for people to vote,” Cox said by way of example. “Regardless of what your political views may be, you will be supported to vote. We’re being more intentional in terms of making sure that we look across all levels in how people of color are represented across not just our front lines, but (also) middle management and the executive ranks.”
Cox has also focused his team’s attention on reducing the complexity of the company’s diverse set of businesses. “We have worked on making sure we take a step back and build a strategy that is holistic,” he said. “In the past, we just had this tendency to work in silos.”. An early way in which he accomplished this was by conducting numerous interviews and surveys to understand how customers viewed technology. By doing more together, Cox reasoned, the customer’s experience would improve.
This approach extended to the technology that the customer might not immediately notice. For example, Cox focused on creating a comprehensive cloud strategy and incorporating better data and analytics capabilities. These priorities have improved reliability and resiliency and helped Cox identify new ways to improve customer experience.
These priorities were part of a three- to five-year plan that accelerated dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic. For Cox, the pandemic was a chance to improve. “In these times of crisis, you can take a step back and regret what you didn’t do along the way, or you can look at it as an opportunity,” he said. “We have looked at this as an opportunity for sure.”
Communication is the essential element to pursue during these times of great change, Cox said. “What’s non-negotiable: you have to communicate. You have to be proactive, and you have to communicate relentlessly.” There are several formats that have worked best. With groups of 10 to 15 at a time, he met with every member of his team to communicate plans and listen, noting their concerns, hopes, and the like. Additionally, town hall meetings and more impromptu “ask leadership” sessions have added to the frequent opportunity for conversations and learning.
With each challenge and crisis he has faced, Cox has gained lessons and confidence for the next one. Though he hopes he won’t be tested again, Cox knows he and his team have what it takes to guide Cox Enterprises through turbulent times.
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.
1/15/17
By Peter High, published on Forbes
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.
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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:
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