4/16/18
By Peter High, published on Forbes
Vince Campisi joined United Technologies (UTC) as the Senior Vice President of Digital and Chief Information Officer in mid 2016 after most of two decades with General Electric. He spent the last year as the Chief Operating Officer of GE Digital, so he was quite familiar with the ideas behind digital transformation of a large, multi-operating company industrial business.
At United Technologies, he found an environment ripe for change. Digital transformation had begun in pockets in the four operating companies: Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Engines, Otis Elevators, Climate Controls & Security [CCS], and UTC Aerospace Systems. That change had not been coordinated globally in a way that Campisi was used to. He embarked on a journey to foster more collaboration across the operating companies and one of the keys to this has been the development of the United Technologies Digital Accelerator in Brooklyn. The Accelerator is less than a year old, but UTC and Campisi have found a great group of digital leaders to drive change. The vision is for this to have multiple hundreds of people in the office in the DUMBO section of Brooklyn in the next year. Campisi describes the work of this team, the digital transformation more generally, and the need for digital leaders to play offense, defense, and special teams in order to win in the marketplace.
Peter High: You are the Chief Information Officer and Senior Vice President of Digital at United Technologies. Can you talk about your purview as it relates to those two aspects of your role?
Vince Campisi: There is a lot of discussion around digital. Sometimes, that conversation happens concurrently with IT. For us, we wanted to make a conscious decision that those two things work hand in glove and not two different facets of the organization. Instead, they need to be driven in a way that takes advantage of what classic IT offers a company like us, as well as the aspirations of digital as it relates to how people think about it in the market today.
We see it on two dimensions. One is reinventing IT. For us, that is about how you would streamline critical business processes, improve sales processes, and improve manufacturing processes to improve inventory. It is also about infrastructure services, and how you enable computing at scale and make sure the employees have the resources they need to be productive. The second part is when we think about reinventing IT more effectively around cybersecurity. I would classify those as defensive capabilities. How do you protect the bottom line, drive productivity, and efficiency?
The second dimension which often gets classified as digital is how do you accelerate business growth? That is where Internet of Things for industry comes up, which goes hand in glove with data and analytics, and how you use those insights and software applications to grow value with your customers and help customers achieve new levels of value. That is the offensive dimension of how we use IT and digital to differentiate the company.
High: United Technologies is itself a diverse business. Could you talk about how IT is organized across the various companies of the organization and ultimately, how it reports up to you?
Campisi: We have four iconic franchises: Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Engines, Otis Elevators, our Climate Controls & Security [CCS] business, and our UTC aerospace systems business, which recently announced a partnership with Rockwell Collins. Those are the four major business units. Within them, they have a variety of P&L’s and other facets because they are Fortune 200 companies in and of themselves. The way we think about it is they need to be in a position to differentiate and compete in their respective markets.
They each have a digital and an IT strategy that enables them to connect with their customers in a new way and differentiate themselves in the market. We then look for places where there is horizontal scale and horizontal leverage. From a technology architecture perspective, this could mean cloud computing. When we think about talent and the breadth of what the company has to offer, it creates a lot of opportunities for people to find new challenges and new ways of working across industries without having to change pay or benefits.
The third part is things like cybersecurity. The business units might decide on the appropriate platform for them or how they are going to develop a smart factory. We will have a reference architecture, but they will select the MES system that is best for what they need to do. There are places where we might have a stronger point of view for horizontal leverage around network, or email, or security tools. That is the balance between what we do centrally versus de-centrally.
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1/2/18
Clay Johnson has worked at a number of iconic brands, from FedEx to Boeing to General Electric. Roughly a year ago, he joined yet another icon in Walmart. In so doing, he joined a company with 2.3 million associates, 5,000 stores in the U.S. alone, and a complex mix of technology. His priorities in the early days were to meet as many people as possible, to learn the business, and to understand the projects that were ongoing.
He has begun to enact a cultural change within the IT department, and he indicates that the four steps he has followed have been to be transparent, to foster open debates, to push everyone to speak up, and to incorporate a fail-fast approach to work.
Now that he has a year under his belt, he sees his big priorities for the year ahead as developing a product model for IT to facilitate end-to-end ownership of different product areas created, as well as process automation, facilitated at least in part through artificial intelligence. He discusses all of the above and more in this far-ranging interview.
Peter High: Can you please describe your purview as Walmart’s Chief Information Officer and Executive Vice President of Global Business Services?
Clay Johnson: When I joined earlier this year, we consolidated the Internal Technology and the Shared Services teams. Technology encompasses anything that runs internally for the company, from server security and corporate systems to machine learning [ML], analytics, and artificial intelligence [AI]. We split out e-commerce and customer-facing staff to Jeremy King, who is our CTO. Everything else that runs inside the company falls under me. A lot of that is supplier facing rather than customer facing.
Combining these two teams has been incredibly powerful because it enables us to drive end-to-end ownership and use technology all the way through a process. I predict you are going to see a trend of more companies doing this.
High: I know part of the intention was to have a unified view of the associate experience. Could you describe how that is enhanced through digital technologies?
Johnson: The key is a relentless focus on the customer, and my customers are the internal associates of the company. Walmart has over two million associates, which is a huge number. At that scale, any time you can help productivity numbers or improve interactions with the different tools and services that we have, that will result in a massive productivity improvement.
If you look back ten years ago, business technology was better than consumer technology. However, that has now flipped. A lot of the technology that employees use in their personal lives is better than what they have at work. People now expect that when they come to work, the technology will be intuitive like social media and smartphones. They want everything on mobile and at the tip of their fingers. The goal of the Internal Technology and Shared Services team is to provide everything associates need when and how they need it, from tools to analytics.
High: Given this mandate, how much have you had to change in terms of the skill mix of your team? To what degree are you adding new employees, retraining existing employees, or creatively using external parties?
12/11/17
Historically, the chief information officer’s primary reporting relationship has been to the chief financial officer of the enterprise. The initial rationale for this included the fact that much of the initial value from IT was in helping save costs by automating financial processes, and likewise the historical perspective that IT departments are primarily cost centers to be driven down. Ironically, though this has historically been the predominant hierarchy, few CIOs have replaced their bosses and become CFOs.
Cynthia Earhart has been one of the few to successfully walk that path. Among the many roles that she has played at Norfolk Southern since joining the company in 1985 has been that of executive vice president and chief information officer of the company. Earhart has a CPA, and had joined the company in the Accounting department. On her path through the CIO role, she continued to ensure that her teams had appropriate financial acumen while continuing to sharpen her own. As such, due to the value she contributed both to the top and bottom lines of the company, this unusual career path became relevant. What is the likelihood of others following in her footsteps? Earhart offers thoughts on her remarkable journey.
Peter High: You recently were promoted at Norfolk Southern from Chief Information Officer to Chief Financial Officer. This is an unusual pathway, and it might be helpful to understand your background prior to IT.
Cynthia Earhart: I graduated from college with a degree in Accounting before going on to get my CPA and working a few years in public accounting. When I came to work for Norfolk Southern, I came into the Accounting department, and I spent the first third of my career there before moving to IT. When I moved from Accounting to IT, I did not anticipate a pathway back to Finance. The CFO job was not on my radar.
Peter High
11/7/16
Slack is the fastest growing workplace software ever. The company’s CEO Stewart Butterfield co-founded the company in August of 2013, as a cloud-based team collaboration tool.
As fast as the organization has grown, interestingly enough, Butterfield underestimated the true opportunity for the idea that he and his co-founders developed. Originally, when he first pitched Slack, he believed the market for this software was $100 million, which they recently exceeded in revenue in roughly three years.
As the organization has grown at such an impressive clip, Butterfield has been forced to grow the team substantially in parallel. He has done so with a laser focus on certain cultural attributes, aligning recruiting practices to his established mission in order to ensure the continued addition of high quality employees. As Butterfield notes below, the mission is: “to make people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive.”
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the 20th interview in the IT Influencers series. To listen to past interviews with the likes of former Mexican President Vicente Fox, Sal Khan, Sebastian Thrun, Steve Case, Craig Newmark and Meg Whitman, please visit this link).
Peter High: I thought we would begin with the beginning of Slack itself. It was the result of a pivot when you were running a company called Tiny Speck, and it was a component to a game called Glitch, as I understand it. Can you talk a little bit about the genesis of that, the original intent of it, and how this became the idea itself?
Stewart Butterfield: Sure. It was not part of the game, but a tool that we used internally to communicate. The company was started by myself and three other members of the original team. At the time we started it, we had one person in New York, one person in San Francisco, and two in Vancouver, British Columbia, so the natural thing for us to use was IRC. As you know, IRC is now twenty-seven years old and predates the web by a couple of years. By modern standards, it is a clunky and ancient technology. For example, if you and I are using IRC to communicate and you are not connected to the server at a given moment, I cannot send you a message. We built a system to log messages so people could catch up when they got back online. Once we had those messages in a database, we wanted to be able to search, so we added search. I could keep going for a long time with the features we added.
I think one of the critical things was that we were doing this in a subconscious or pre-conscious way, which is not the normal method of software development. There was no ego and no speculation. Whenever a problem got so irritating that we couldn’t stand it or whenever an opportunity for improvement was so obvious that we could not help but take advantage of it, we would do it, and then go back to what we were supposed to be working on. The result of that after three and a half years was this system for internal communications that all of us agreed we would never work without again. We decided to see what else was out there in the market, and there wasn’t anything good, so we made a product at the moment we decided to shut down the game.
High: In those early days, what were the ambitions for it? Clearly, as you say, there was a need that wasn’t being met, even after seeking out something that might be more readily available. How big was the ambition in those early days? There are so many different areas now that Slack covers and so many different products and product categories that it now competes with. Did you see a broader enterprise use in those early days? Did you see this as something that would be taking on the likes of e-mail as well as the Skypes of the world? How did that all occur to you and how quickly did the broader implications of it grow?
Butterfield: It was a little bit of a slow boil in terms of how big it could be. We had taken a bunch of venture capital funding, and when we decided to sit down again, we had five million dollars left. Investors didn’t want their money back, they wanted us to try something else, so when we were putting together the pitch deck for Slack and explaining what we were going to do, we had sized the market at $100 million in revenue.
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06-03-2015
Excerpt from the Article: The Advisory Board Company is a leading provider of insight-driven technology, research and services to more than 230,000 leaders at 5,200 member organizations across health care and higher education. Dan Holohan joined the company nearly three and a half years ago to oversee the Enterprise Technologies organization while setting direction for member-facing product technologies, enterprise data management and the implementation of social, mobile and collaboration solutions to help the firm’s predominantly Millennial workforce work smarter, faster and better. He has led the introduction of employee productivity, business unit and corporate shared application services and infrastructure. Holohan discusses his passion for IT and how he approaches his work with CIO Insight contributor Peter High.
CIO Insight: Dan, when you joined The Advisory Board Company roughly three years and a half years ago, you inherited a relatively small team in need of development and a portfolio of processes and technologies in need of modernization. What were the first things you addressed and why?
Dan Holohan: After I joined, my early assessment revolved around three primary areas: the capability of our internal network, the management of our data and the delivery of internal software.
My initial focus was to ensure that internal traffic flowed reliably and external Internet bandwidth was robust, redundant and fast. Within the first 90 days, the entire DC office network was completely replaced including the core backbone, all switches and wireless access points which, for the ensuing three years, has resulted in eliminating the serious service interruptions that the firm was used to experiencing.
Next, I noticed the emphasis that was being placed on managing the complex datasets and data flows that were being used by our internal tools and member facing products. I created a new group, Enterprise Data Management (EDM), charged with maintaining the quality, reliability and integrity of firmwide data and data technology platforms.
Lastly, internal stakeholders were dependent on our development team for providing solutions which kept the workforce productive and engaged. The challenge was prioritizing the intake and making sure that we were working on the most important things. I was able to convince six of the most senior leaders in the firm that we needed their input and the Prioritization Steering Committee was born. As a result, investments were made on this development team and we delivered a plethora of upgrades and enhancements in support of our growing business including cloud-based tools for HR, Finance and Member Support functions. One notable achievement was delivering the “360 Degree View of the Member” where nine disparate client systems were migrated to our Salesforce platform enabling staff to interact with all aspects of the member relationship from one place. My development team won the “2013 Breaking the Mold Award” at Dreamforce for their innovative uses of the Salesforce platform.
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