11/05/2018
By Peter High. Published in Forbes.
On October 28, IBM announced its intent to acquire Red Hat for $34 billion. This marked the largest software acquisition ever. Prior to announcement, I caught up with Red Hat Chief Information Officer Mike Kelly, who offered thoughts on the steps his team had undertaken to continue to improve Red Hat’s product (using a Red Hat-on-Red Hat program), to advise technology executives at various stages of leveraging open source technology, and in improving the overall operation. Clearly these are the sorts of improvements that helped make the company attractive to IBM.
(To listen to an unabridged podcast version of this interview, please click this link. To read future articles like this one, please follow me on Twitter @PeterAHigh.)
Peter High: Could you describe your purview as the Chief Information Officer of Red Hat?
Mike Kelly: I am part of our executive team, and I have a variety of responsibilities relating to IT at Red Hat. The responsibilities are as follows:
To read the full article, please visit Forbes.
4/9/11
By Peter High, published on Forbes
Late last year, David Bray became the first Executive Director of the People-Centered Internet (PCI), an organization that has a vision of creating projects that help improve people’s lives using the Internet. Vint Cerf, the co-creator of the Internet, is a co-founder of PCI.
Bray has a remarkable career in government prior to PCI. He began his career in government as a 15-year-old working at the Energy Department in the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility. Since then his experiences have included stints as an IT Chief for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response program, where he led the program’s technology response to 9/11 and the 2001 anthrax attacks, and as a Senior Strategist at the Institute for Defence Analysis (IDA) and a Defense Researcher at the Science and Technology Policy Institute (STPI), where he deployed to Afghanistan to help “think differently” on military and humanitarian issues. Bray spent the past several years at the Federal Communications Commission.
As he embarks on an entrepreneurial journey of sorts, I was curious how Bray’s government experience has helped prepare him for this role. He indicated that there are two advantages to government experience for an entrepreneur: first, it teaches one how to operate with resource constraints, and second, it provides experience in navigating across multiple constituencies.
Bray was once the most social CIO in the world, with hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. A new path forward, a growing family, and a perception of a lower returns on the investment in social media have him curtailing his efforts in that realm. His vision for the future of the Internet is as ambitious as ever.
Peter High: You recently joined the People-Centered Internet (PCI) as Executive Director. Can you talk about the mission of PCI and your role there?
David Bray: The People-Centered Internet is a coalition founded by Vint Cerf, one of the co-creators of the Internet, and Mei Lin Fung, who we say is the mother of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). The two of them came together with a vision of creating measurable demonstration projects that help improve people’s lives using the Internet. The idea is that if we are not careful, we may lose the hope and the enthusiasm the Internet had in the 1990s.
According to Pew, 20-somethings are less optimistic about the Internet than they used to be. They still say they cannot live without it, but they do not necessarily see it as a source of hope and freedom or as the uplifting force of people’s lives that we saw it as in the early ‘90s. If we can provide demonstration projects that measurably improve people’s lives using the Internet, these will serve as change agent case examples that local communities can then adopt, or policymakers can use. Even private corporations might be able to use these as a model going forward. It is easy to say, “This is not working,” or “This is bad,” and do the negative stories. The positive stories are harder, but we want to beat that and provide the support and expertise.
There is also the hope that we can espouse Doug Engelbart’s original vision. Doug Engelbart, who was the inventor of the mouse and graphical user interface [GUI], had the vision that technology was a way of bringing people together. If we think about our current lives, how many of us think the Internet is bringing people together versus polarizing and being divisive?
High: The emphasis on people is interesting because often when people think of the Internet they often leap to the technology behind it.
Bray: It is. Consider that just one presidential cycle ago, back in 2008, most people still had flip phones, not smartphones. Back in 2001, less than 2% of all households – meaning one family member in the household – had access to a mobile phone. Now, 98% of all households in the world have at least one family member with access to a mobile phone. That is a dramatic change in less than two decades. Not only is the pace of technology accelerating, but the adoption curves are shrinking. In some respects that is good because if something’s out there that can help uplift people and bring communities together, that is great.
However, there is also a challenge because technology is not neutral. It depends on how we use it, and it can be used for good or for bad. Vint and I often talk about how programmers and engineers rarely think about the second, third, and fourth order implications. In fact, it is not part of their training. Their expertise is making sure that devices do what they are supposed to do. Understanding the implications is another skill set, and it is partly a combination of vision, of artist, of sociology, and awareness of human history. We need to consider the unintended consequences that may occur.
To read the full interview, please visit Forbes
Peter High
5-12-2016
Excerpt from the Article:
Novelis is a leading producer of rolled aluminum, and a global leader in aluminum recycling. The company’s aluminum is used in everything from automobiles to architecture to beverage cans to consumer electronics. Much of the company’s aluminum is re-created from material already in the world today, saving natural resources and allowing for the creation of consumer products that have a lower environmental footprint. Through its recycling leadership, what would have otherwise been discarded becomes the material for new creation.
Despite attaining more than $10 billion in revenue with more than 10,000 employees, the company never had a CIO prior to the incumbent, Karen Renner, who joined nearly five years ago. Renner had been a CIO at multiple units within General Electric, and as such was used to process excellence. What she found at Novelis was an IT department in need of new, standardized processes. As she discusses with CIO Insight contributor, Peter High, the journey has been a fruitful one.
CIO Insight: You are the first CIO in the company’s history. The company grew to a tremendous size before hiring a CIO. Why was that, and what led to the conclusion that one was needed?
Renner: In order to deliver on many of Novelis’ transformation strategies, an overhaul of the information technology and data was required. The information infrastructure was unable to meet the aggressive expansions required to enter and provide the data streams required for the automotive market. We also needed modern technology to support our employees working across geographies and to meet growing demands for mobility and collaboration technologies. In order to develop and execute a global IT strategy taking into account the varying regional requirements, the CIO role was created.
CIO Insight: How would you describe the culture of the IT team when you joined, and what have you done to change it?
Renner: We have an excellent team of IT professionals at Novelis with a great mix of technical business process knowledge and program management skills. We act as one team and trusted advisors to deliver best-fit information technology solutions that people value and enjoy using. The biggest cultural shift was to broaden the reach of the team to think bigger and broader–how technology can influence outside of a local requirement to our regions or globally.
CIO Insight: I imagine there was a good deal of foundational investments that were necessary in the early days. How did you prioritize and what did you prioritize to do first?
Renner: We had three transformation work streams that we started simultaneously: 1. infrastructure, 2. business process automation and simplification and 3. collaboration and workforce mobility.
As many of the programs were interconnected, we built a high level, integrated plan that enabled us to understand the dependencies. The demand for new systems, processes and tools was incredible—our prioritization strategy was completely aligned to the overall Novelis strategy.
To read the full article, please visit CIO Insight
