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2/12/18

By Peter High, published on Forbes

To say that Dow CIO Melanie Kalmar has a lot on her plate is an understatement. She has helped integrate two major acquisitions (Dow Corning and Dupont), is in the process of planning their divestiture, leads digital initiatives across the enterprise, runs Corporate Facilities, helped establish and runs Dow Services Business, all on top of running cybersecurity and infrastructure. Hers is a role that has all traditional aspects of IT, but also encompasses revenue-generating business and helps drive both customer and employee experience, as well. She covers this vast purview, the implications of the acquisitions and divestitures, the role that technologies like artificial intelligence and blockchain will play at Dow, among many other topics.

Peter High: Can you provide a brief overview of your purview at Dow?

Melanie Kalmer: I am Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Dow Chemical, and my role is a great example of how the responsibilities of a CIO continue to evolve. I have responsibilities for both global IT as well as for our Corporate Facilities and Dow Services Business.
In terms of traditional IT accountability, I have responsibilities on a global scale including delivering the typical broad set of IT services. The fun part of that is the unique services that our business units need. I also have other corporate infrastructure responsibilities focused on our end-to-end processes and other stuff we do with our business units.

I also have accountability for cybersecurity and analytics, and I have a fun role in leading the digital transformation for the company. Even though I lead that, I want to be clear it is a collaborative effort that engages all facets of the company. That is how I like to operate, by engaging with the other executives and being extremely transparent about what we are doing. We hit the mark and we can deliver the expected business outcomes.

The other half is Corporate Facilities. What I focus on there is the offices and labs around the globe and creating modern capabilities. We want the spaces where people work to be vibrant and allow for greater collaboration. We are building new facilities and remodeling others to bring in more technology and create more opportunities for people to collide. The buzz word in the industry is collision space.

We just opened a new headquarters late last summer, and it is a beautiful building. There is a lot of buzz around the building about how it is driving more collaboration and a better flow of information. People can hear what others are talking about. We have open environments across most of our buildings.

As we embark on the huge set of activities that are coming out of our big M&A around Dow Corning and DuPont, we are working on what we call our rooftop strategy. This involves us deciding what facilities will go with which company, and how we get better space utilization in the buildings that we do occupy.

Under Corporate Facilities, we also manage real estate, which will help drive financial assessments on the real estate and sell assets. Much of this, be it land or buildings, we have acquired through many acquisitions over the years.

Finally, I run Dow Services Business [DSP]. The business was formed to support our joint ventures and our divestiture activities. The team that I lead manages contracts to provide services such as IT services, procurement services, and site services, to name a few examples. Those services are provided to our joint venture partners or to buyers of businesses that we divest.

The team focuses on ensuring we have those contracts in place but also acts as a liaison between those DSP customers and the groups within Dow that are providing the services. That has allowed us to leverage Dow’s capabilities on both a transitional basis and on a long-term basis and allows the joint ventures or the buyers of a divested business from Dow to focus on meeting their business objectives instead of having to figure out how to run the day-to-day business. We can provide those services for them while they are starting up.

Those are the three key areas I focus on. Additionally, I sit on the board for a reinsurance company [Dorinco Reinsurance Company] and participate in a lot of external activities such as around STEM. This is my role in a nutshell.

High: You spoke about the digital responsibilities that you have. Can you share how you define digital, as well as the ways in which you lead that from a transformation perspective?

To read the full article, please visit Forbes

Peter High

08-27-2015

Excerpt from the Article:

The newly formed organization, Jefferson, encompasses Jefferson Health and Thomas Jefferson University, representing both clinical and academic entities. Under the leadership of president and CEO Dr. Stephen K. Klasko and his four-pillar model of Clinical, Innovation, Academic and Philanthropy focus areas, the people of Jefferson (19,000 strong), provide quality, compassionate clinical care for patients, educate the health professionals of tomorrow and discover new treatments and therapies that will define the future of health care.

Praveen Chopra joined the company as executive vice president and CIO in March of 2014. In May of this year, his responsibilities aggrandized, and his new title is EVP and Chief Information and Transformative Innovative Environment Officer. As Chopra explains to CIO Insight contributor, Peter High, he has overarching executive responsibilities for creating innovation-driven ecosystem towards the organization’s “health is all we do.”

CIO Insight: Your title is Executive Vice President, Chief Information and Transformative Innovative Environment Officer. I am quite confident you are the only one in the world with that exact title. What does it mean, and what is within your purview?

Praveen Chopra: You are right, I may be the only one. Frankly, this is a new role, which certainly highlights the boldness in our vision of reimaging and creating unparalleled value in “health is all we do”—and is a direct reflection of the way Jefferson values technology and innovation in health care. I oversee areas such as technology innovation and consumer experience, data sciences, business partnering and portfolio management in addition to traditional information technology functions. In this role, I see us building a health care organization of the future. This forward-thinking organization leverages the power of the digital enterprise in a fundamentally different way and creates an innovation driven ecosystem. For example, instead of a siloed, facility-centric functionality, we are focusing now on a creating consumer centric model through creative use of technology. How about starting the care and learning experience with patients and students in their pajamas at their homes holding a mobile device!

Overall, this role is about reinvention—how do we constantly look beyond traditional IT capabilities and services for our clients and focus on the creation and use of technologies that will help our patients, students, community and other various affiliates.

CIO Insight: What are some examples of innovations that your team has developed or are working on?

Chopra: Our Telehealth program, known as JeffConnect, is accomplishing those things I just talked about. Today, a patient has ongoing health-care needs but they can’t always physically get to us—so we have created an on-demand platform and app, now available in the Apple and Google Play stores, whereby any patient can go and request a physician appointment. That physician will be quickly available through video conferencing capability. We’ve rolled this out to our employees and have gotten an overwhelmingly positive response. We have also created a program for family members of our patients who are not able to be at the hospital to participate in physician rounds. The program, known as Virtual Rounds, allows a patient’s loved ones to join a video conference and listen to the care team so the experience is personal and convenient.

To read the remainder of the article, please visit CIO Insight