1/2/18
By Peter High, published on Forbes Jody Davids has been the chief information officer of four major companies: Cardinal Health, Best Buy, Agrium, and, since April of 2016, of PepsiCo. She had set the goal to be the CIO of a Fortune 200 company, and now she has done so multiple times over. She also set a goal of becoming a board-level CIO, and she accomplished that in January 2015, when she joined the board of the North Carolina-based healthcare company, Premier, Inc.
All of this is particularly remarkable given the fact that she started her career as an executive assistant at General Electric. It was during her time there when her ambition was awakened. She had an assignment that gave her exposure to the paygrades across the company, and she realized how much more she could pay if she joined the IT department. She would go on to do so, and enjoy stops at Apple and at Nike before accomplishing her goal of becoming a chief information officer. She describes her journey, key points along the way, the advice she has for fellow CIOs who wish to join boards, and much more in this conversation.
Peter High:You have been a CIO multiple times. You are currently at PepsiCo but were previously CIO at Agrium, at Best Buy, and at Cardinal Health. While you have been extraordinarily successful, your origins in IT are rather unconventional, as you began your career as an executive assistant. Could you dive into the details of some of those experiences, as well as your pathway into IT?
Jody Davids: My first office job was working as an executive admin for a group of IT people at General Electric’s nuclear energy business group. I was young at the time and was going to college at night as a music major. One of the tasks my boss assigned me revolved around looking at a page full of salaries and reconciling it with some other piece of paper. In that process, I noticed that all the people on the page were making significantly more money than I was. I began to get curious about what the people around me in IT were doing.
At the time, GE had a phenomenal after-hours training program for its employees. I took a class in Fortran which was taught by the one woman in this group of programmers. Apparently, I did okay, and they hired me for their next entry level Fortran programming position.
I was working in GE’s nuclear energy business group around the time of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident [which took place on March 28, 1979]. Three Mile Island was not our reactor, but you can imagine that the whole industry was sent into a tailspin, and eventually, I was laid off at GE. This turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me because I emerged at Apple Computers as a programmer.
High: Can you talk a bit about Apple in its early days and your experience there?
Davids: I was there for fifteen years, from 1982 to 1997. I started as a programmer working on a product called the Apple III, which was later recalled from the market. I was then placed into an IT group that was supporting Finance and HR systems. It was a wild time to be there.
For me, that period was equivalent to working at three different companies. The early days, the first Steve Jobs days before he left, were the Wild West. We were running all our IT systems on a PDP-11/70, and he did not understand why we could not do it all on a Macintosh. There were no networks ready or anything around it yet. Those were interesting conversations in those early days.
That was the first stage of being there. I was growing in my craft as a programmer and then as a project manager, and then as a young manager. Jobs left in 1985, and we had John Sculley take over. Sculley was a ‘professional’ executive who helped us mature as an organization, get focused on process and on cost management, and generally focus on the things that large companies need to be more focused on.
By Peter High, published on Forbes
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?
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
Peter High
2-24-2016
Excerpt from the Article:
Gary Wimberly is the CIO and a senior vice president at Express Scripts, a $94 billion pharmacy benefit management company. CIO Insight contributor Peter High recently had the opportunity to tour Express Scripts Technology and Innovation Center in St. Louis with the company’s CIO. In this CIO Insight Q&A, Wimberly explains how data is captured and analyzed, how technology can detect when a potential prescription conflict arises and how to reconcile risk taking with security practices.
Peter High: Gary, we have just done a quick tour of the Technology and Innovation Center and I wonder if you can take a moment to describe the center, but then also peel back the onion a little bit to describe IT’s role in all this?
Gary Wimberly: Here at Express Scripts we have a Technology and Innovation Center and it is really focused around data analytics. We bring resources from teams across all disciplines within IT, so not only IT for the technology we utilize, but our economists, our clinicians, our physicians that really are focused on analyzing all of the data that we capture at Express Scripts—and we have an enormous amount of data. I think we are close to up to 20 petabytes at this point. We utilize that data to identify opportunities to improve health outcomes and eliminate waste in the healthcare space.
High: Can you talk a little bit about the variety of disciplines that are brought together in this effort?
Wimberly: We have IT people, obviously. We have a lot of technology in here: not only from an infrastructure perspective with all the servers, but the amount of software, the tools that we use to do this analytics, to ensure that those are operating and that we are developing the right solutions. A lot of them are self-serve kinds of applications, so our responsibility on those is to make sure that they are available and that they are performing to what the user experience should be.
To read the full article, please visit CIO Insight
08-18-2015
The Georgia Technology Authority (GTA) manages the delivery of IT infrastructure and managed network services to 1,300 state and local government entities across the state of Georgia. GTA promotes an enterprise approach to managing technology services by establishing statewide policies, standards and guidelines based on industry best practices and federal requirements. GTA develops and manages the state’s official website, which provides information and services from more than 115 state agencies and links to city and county government Websites.
Dean Johnson is the Chief Operating Officer for the GTA. Johnson has co-led the move to privatize infrastructure and managed network services for the state of Georgia since 2008. He is currently leading an effort to evolve the current operating and service delivery models to take full advantage of the strong foundation built over the past six years and apply lessons learned along with today’s industry best practices in outsourcing. CIO Insight contributor Peter High discusses with Johnson how he helped save the state $181 million, how he assisted in laying the groundwork for privatizing certain IT services and his take on big data initiatives.
CIO Insight: How do you work with the CIOs in various jurisdictions across the state?
Dean Johnson: GTA has established several councils and forums, structured specifically to invite CIOs’ input, engage in discussion about solutions and offer information about available services. We meet regularly with agency CIOs and have found that building and maintaining positive working relationships with the customers we serve and understanding their business needs to be one of the keys to our success.
CIO Insight: You also helped spearhead the creation of Georgia Enterprise Technology Services, saving the state $181 million in the process. What was the idea behind this?
Johnson: A comprehensive assessment by an independent third party in 2007 documented alarming shortcomings in the state’s ability to comply with IT best practices, refresh aging equipment and software, and address growing threats from hackers and cyber-criminals. In addition, GTA and other state agencies found themselves unable to compete with the private sector in recruiting and retaining knowledgeable and experienced technicians. The third-party assessment recommended outsourcing daily operations to private-sector service providers.
GTA went to the market in 2008 to source IT infrastructure services and managed network services on behalf of the state of Georgia. The Georgia Enterprise Technology Services (GETS) program sought to transform the state’s IT operations into a modern day, well-run IT enterprise by turning to private-sector leaders in technology service delivery.
To read the remainder of the article, please visit CIO Insight
Filippo Passerini of Procter & Gamble powers the Global Business Services for an $84 billion company with advanced analytics and diligent strategic planning.
by Peter High, published on Forbes.com
03-18-2013
Filippo Passerini had a circuitous route to the CIO role, both in terms of functional as well as geographic experience. He rose through the ranks from junior to senior-most positions at P&G beginning in his native Italy through his arrival at P&G’s world headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio. He started in IT, but also spent time in marketing and operations roles before becoming CIO.
As Passerini notes herein, P&G has a history of hiring CIOs who have traditional business experience in the hopes of having IT run as a typical business function. Passerini continued this tradition, and in 2005, as CIO, he led the integration of Gillette. In 2008, Passerini was also named the president of Global Business Services, and 2011 he was named Group President of Global Business Services. Now with his cross-functional responsibilities, he has developed digital war-room of sorts, assembling an assortment of leading edge analytics capabilities to enable the $84 billion colossus to make better decisions, drawing insights from across geographies, product segments, business functions and the like. As such, his organization has managed the “big data” conundrum as well as any organization in the world.
(This is the fourteenth piece in the CIO-plus series. To read the prior twelve interviews with the CIO-pluses from Waste Management, McKesson, Merck, Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, Ameristar Casinos, Owens Corning, Marsh & McLennan, ADP, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, the San Francisco Giants, Walgreens, and GSX as well as a partner in the CIO/CTO practice for Heidrick and Struggles, please click this link. To receive notice about future interviews in the series with CIO-pluses of P&G and others, please click visit the column’s page. in the weeks to come.)
Peter High: Filippo, you have a non-traditional path to the CIO role. You joined P&G as a junior IT resource in Italy, and then spent time in a variety of business functions within the company before being named CIO. How have such diverse experiences colored your thought process in what makes a successful IT leader or a successful IT employee?
Filippo Passerini: I don’t see myself as a “stereotypical CIO.” I continue a long-tradition at P&G of CIOs who are not entirely technical. At P&G, we have a few hiring practices that set us apart from IT organizations elsewhere. First, we hire people for who they are, not what they know. The technology can be learned, but you cannot teach curiosity. You cannot teach passion for the business. So, much of our recruiting focuses on finding people who have the right raw ingredients—leadership, business acumen, communication skills, passion for technology—that helps ensure that they will be successful almost no matter where they are staffed.
We are also a promote from within company. It is rare at P&G to find a person in a senior role who did not rise through P&G. We invest heavily in our people. This long-term commitment that we make to our leaders of tomorrow means that we have well-rounded colleagues with deep knowledge of our business. This business knowledge is more important than technical knowledge.
We take the view that technology is almost always a commodity. It is what you do with it, what business priority you solve, what business capability you enable, what process you render more efficient. This is true value. The conversation should never begin with technology, and our recruiting and training reflect this fact. Therefore, the ideal employee for us is a business person who is passionate about technology as opposed to the other way around.
Additional topics covered in the article include:
To read the full article, please visit Forbes.com
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As CIO and Chief Shared Services Officer, David Johns has yielded valued for Owens Corning through Centers of Excellence.
01-14-2013
David Johns has been CIO of Owens Corning since 1994, which is extraordinary considering the average tenure of CIOs today is roughly four years. In that time, he has had multiple “pluses” to his CIO role. He is currently the Senior Vice President, Chief Information Officer, and Chief Shared Services Officer. Prior to his current role, he was Senior Vice President, Chief Information Officer and Chief Supply Chain Officer. He also led the Owens Corning Technology Center as Chief Technology Officer for a time. Johns’ experience at Owens Corning highlights how solid work done in transforming IT, developing shared services or centers of excellence can yield value that translates to other parts of the organization quite well. Especially since the economic malaise began in earnest in 2008, a number of leading CIOs have seized the opportunity to develop shared services have have yielded more efficiencies and value for their companies in the process. There is no reason why this should not be done in other parts of the organization as well. The best CIOs, like Johns, realize that they are ideally equipped to lead this in other parts of the organization, as is highlighted in my interview with him below.
(This is the sixth in the CIO-plus series. To read the prior five interviews with the CIO-pluses from Waste Management, McKesson, Merck, Red Robin Gourmet Burgers and Ameristar Casinos, please click this link.)
Peter High: David, you led a transformation in Owens Corning’s IT department that seems to have been the model for the transformation of other parts of the organization. What is the common theme among these transformations?
David Johns: Peter, you are right that there have been multiple transformations. The common theme between what we have done in IT and what we are now doing well beyond IT is transforming into a services model. What was Global Information Technology is now referred to as Global Information Services. The idea of developing standard services for our diverse set of businesses to leverage makes a lot of sense in our minds. IT was simply the first of these services, but as we have extended the service philosophy to other parts of the organization, I have had the opportunity to lead other areas in transformation. In some cases, we have turned over responsibilities for a function to a business leader elsewhere in the company, and in others, they have remained in my organization.
Peter High: Can you talk a little bit about your time in having responsibility for supply chain and the rationale for moving it back in the business?
David Johns: Supply chain is a relatively new science, and when we first implemented our global ERP instance of SAP, and built the integration across the phases of plan, source, make, and deliver, it made sense to pull supply chain as a function out and try and build new set of capabilities and new processes and really try to leverage the technology we were able to deploy across the corporation. Once we did that and we made good progress in setting out some of the basic principles. We felt it made sense to move back the supply chain strategy and execution into the business first once we set up those processes and got them operating. We then kept customer service and logistics within the organization, probably for four or five more years.
A lot of this had to do with the fact that we had a different number of businesses reporting into the CEO, and then we made an organizational change within the business where the building materials business moved under one group president. At that point, it made sense to move it out of a centralized organization; so we moved logistics and customer service into different areas such as Composites and Building Materials.
We took shared services out of some of the business and moved it into IT to focus on building additional platforms. We reached a point where it made sense to move supply chain back into the business. The continuum we traveled was from strategy to execution to stable organization.
To listen to David John’s Forum on World Class IT podcast interview, please click here.
