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9/17/2018

By Peter High. Published on Forbes

Blackstone Chief Technology Officer Bill Murphy has been a CTO multiple times, but he personifies the diversity of the role. At Capital IQ, he was a co-founder and CTO, where his responsibilities included overseeing all product design, development, infrastructure, and technology support and was involved with all operations of the business. That entrepreneurial experience has served him well now that he works with so many businesses across the Blackstone portfolio, on top of running the technology portfolio within the company. He brings a consultants mindset, as well, having spent the early part of his career with Sapient.

Murphy believes that his role today is to embrace and dream ahead of the broader business with technology, to assemble a team to enable innovation, and to develop and integrate technologies that are, to the greatest extent possible, future proof.

He covers all of the above and more in this conversation.

(To listen to a podcast version of this interview, please visit this link. To read future stories like this one, please follow me on Twitter @PeterAHigh.)

Peter High: Could you describe your current purview as the Chief Technology Officer of Blackstone?

Bill Murphy: Blackstone is an Alternative Asset Manager with over $400 billion in assets under management [AUM] for pension funds and other types of institutional investors across different segments. We invest in a variety of areas, such as private equity where we buy companies, and real estate where we buy buildings. We also invest in a hedge fund called GSO Capital Partners, which manages corporate credit and other types of debt instruments.

I had an interesting migration coming over from Capital IQ, where I was part of the founding team. At Capital IQ, I was responsible for building a product for our customer base, which was made up of hundreds of thousands of financial services employees. We were focused on meeting one need exceptionally well, and while over time we built many use cases, they were inwardly focused. On the flip side, Blackstone must meet the needs of our 2,300 employees, which is a relatively small number given the impact that we have across all of our different businesses. Unlike at Capital IQ where we investigated a few deep use cases, Blackstone is focused on a coordination of many small use cases across an extremely broad spectrum of what we are trying to accomplish as a business. Furthermore, I lead a strategic venture effort that works with our vendors by occasionally investing money off Blackstone’s balance sheet, which has been successful on multiple occasions. Blackstone’s belief is that the better we understand the business, the more likely we are to make the right types of investments in small companies. By doing so, we are able to help them shepherd through such that not only Blackstone gets a great product, but the market does as well. Lastly, across our portfolio, I advise and help create a community across many companies, and we have some specific disciplines of that in our portfolio operations group. We are continually tweaking this to try to make it better because the needs of technology are rapidly evolving. It gives an interesting perspective, and there is never a dull moment with variety.

To read the full article, please visit Forbes.

9/11/2018

By Peter High. Published on Forbes

I have interviewed Mike Capone multiple times in his career. When he was the CIO and head of Product at Automatic Data Processing (ADP), he noted with satisfaction the advantages of having multiple roles in one company rather than the same role in many companies. Across his 26 years at ADP, he had many IT and business unit jobs including running one of ADP’s businesses.

That positioned him well when he joined what was then the largest New York based technology start up, Medidata Solutions as chief operating officer. At the beginning of this year, he took the biggest leap of all to become CEO of analytics software and visualization analytics leader Qlik. When I caught up with him in his office in New York recently, he was enthusiastic about his new opportunity and the space that his company is in. He also offered thoughts about the advantages he currently draws from his time as CIO now that they are among his clients. Finally, he offered suggestions for others who might wish to follow in his footsteps.

Peter High: Congratulations on ascending to your first role as CEO. Could you give an overview of Qlik’s business?

Mike Capone: Qlik is one of the world’s leading providers of analytics software and visualization analytics. We pride ourselves on our ability to solve both simple and complex analytics problems for our customers. Our strengths are working efficiently with end-users, being user-friendly, and building application analytics that benefit the entire enterprise in solving complex problems. Qlik’s vision is to embed analytics into every operational and strategic decision-making process inside every company. We strongly believe that data is the currency of the future, and therefore, organizations must become data literate to compete in the future.

To read the full interview, please visit Forbes

 

 

8/27/2018

By Peter High. Published on Forbes

Understandably, we often read of former business stalwarts that become disrupted by digital native organizations, losing stature and market share along the way. Harvard Business School professor Sunil Gupta has written a book entitled Driving Digital Strategy, A Guide to Reimagining Your Business, providing a framework for businesses to follow to avoid this fate while thriving in the digital economy. Best Buy has gone from showroom for Amazon to a legitimate competitor with it within the realm of consumer electronics. Traditional media company, The New York Times has created a thriving digital product behind a carefully designed paywall. John Deere has formed a data-analysis arm to complement its farm-equipment business, substantially growing its business in the process.

(To listen to this interview in podcast form, please click this link. To read future articles like this one, please follow me on Twitter @PeterAHigh.)

Peter High: I would like to start with your new book, Driving Digital Strategy, A Guide to Reimagining Your Business. This is a topic that is on the minds of many technology executives who lead immigrant organizations as opposed to digital native organizations. The challenge these digital immigrants face is profound given the legacy systems they have in place and the enormous scale on which they need to be transformed. Where do you believe these executives should look to begin this transformation?

Sunil Gupta: For the legacy companies, it is a more significant challenge than for a startup since a startup begins with a clean slate. With these legacy companies, I compare this transformation to changing an engine on a plane that is on fire while it is flying. Established companies must strengthen their core business while simultaneously building for the future, which is a daunting task. In my last ten years of research, which culminated in my book, I have found that there is not a single place that you need to touch for digital transformation. Instead, there are four broad parts that organizations need to look at more closely.

I do not believe that there is one single part of the organization that needs to change, but instead all four of these parts eventually must come together to make that transformation.

Regarding where to start, I would always recommend starting with the end consumer. This allows companies to understand how the consumer trends are changing, how the company’s value proposition is shifting, and if the company can solve the consumer pain points in a different way than what was previously done.

To read the full article, please visit Forbes

7/30/2018

By Peter High. Published on Forbes

Mayank Prakash was a chief information officer multiple times over at private sector companies such as Avaya, Sage UK, and iSOFT. He also was a Managing Director at Morgan Stanley where he was responsible for Global Wealth and Investment Management Technology.

Four years ago, he pivoted dramatically, taking on the role of Chief Information and Digital Officer of the United Kingdom’s Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), which is the largest public sector organization in the country. He has found a motivated workforce up for the challenge of digital transformation in order to enhance the services that the DWP offers. Moreover, he has seen great advantages to being a more mature company inasmuch as there is ample data to run diverse, mature analytics on data sets that span several decades. He has also found that the significant challenges and opportunities that he and his team have been tasked with tackling have been a magnet for talent that is up to the challenge. He indicates that the greatest joy he has taken from this experience has been the opportunity to impact 22 million British citizens’ lives.

Peter High: Could you describe the United Kingdom’s Department for Work and Pensions?

Mayank Prakash: The Department for Work and Pensions is one of the largest organizations in Western Europe, and it is the largest public-sector organization in the United Kingdom. The best way for me to describe the DWP is from the perspective of the 22 million people who drive the change. Everybody in the UK has come across our services in their lives as we touch all citizens. We support children when their parents are separating to ensure that they have a better quality of life. We look after employed people who are of working age to make sure that they have fulfilling lives and that they are working. We look after disabled people to allow them to explore their potential. We look after retired people, who are typically living longer lives. We do all of this in an effort to produce better outcomes for them and for society.

High: Given the diverse array of people sho you deal with, ranging from millennials to older citizens of the United Kingdom, how do you think about the different personas or different experiences in which your citizenry wishes to interact with the DWP?

Prakash: We work with diversity on every dimension, ranging from age and gender to geographical footprint and social background. Like any large organization with a diverse footprint, we do not employ a one size fits all strategy, but instead, we use active segmentation of our customers to make sure we target our services to get the best impact. Additionally, we do not look at these customers as the cohorts. Instead, we ask ourselves what is the problem that we are trying to solve. The purpose is to work with people of working age to ensure that they are, in fact, working. That purpose leads to the need to get more people into work, which leads us to why some people may not be working. This leads to active segmentation and better delivery of targeted services.

To read the full article, please visit Forbes

 

 

 

 

 

7/23/2018

By Peter High. Published on Forbes

General Electric has been in the news quite a bit in recent weeks for the many changes afoot there. A centerpiece of the change in recent years has been the move toward digitizing the business. Bill Ruh leads that transformation as CEO of GE Digital and as the Chief Digital Officer of General Electric. He has been one of the primary architects of a major cultural change that is afoot at the 126 year old company.

Ruh notes that digital transformations often fail due to a lack of focus on  “soft” elements such as culture, leadership, and talent. He notes that it is essential to blend talent by bringing new people into the company who have digital experience while also retraining existing employees.

Ruh has developed three layers to the approach: GE for GE, GE for installed base customers, and GE for the industrial world. This ensures that GE is its own first customer of digital offerings, and then can take those offerings to existing companies and beyond.  He highlights all of the above and more in this interview.

Peter High: Executing a digital transformation is certainly a challenge, and it is almost always a multi-year journey. Could you talk about the digital transformation that you lead at General Electric? Specifically, could you elaborate on where you have been, where you are, and where you are going on that journey?

Bill Ruh: When we started seven years ago, GE was an early mover into the digital space. We dove into it because we could see that our customers were starting to use the data off the machines that GE had. There was a recognition that going forward, you had to be the best at understanding this data, because you do not want your competition to be better. We are entering a world where selling the machine is one element, but anybody can take the information off the machine and provide insight. Because of this, you want to give the best insight to your customers. It was a simple thought process in the beginning, but it turned out to be relatively profound.

Throughout this journey, we have learned a couple of things. One is that from an outside perspective, we have come to believe that the business world is a series of dominoes. Every industry and sector will eventually be transformed by digital. Digital will be the critical cornerstone to providing value. We have seen that in retail, entertainment, telecommunications, among other industries. Specifically, we are now seeing it in the industrial sector. One of the first ones we believe is going to fall in a big way is the automotive industry. Specifically, software for autonomous driving is going to foundationally remake who buys cars, who sells cars, and what the business model is. As I mentioned, I believe this goes beyond automotive and that it is true of every industry that we serve. We believe digital and autonomous systems are going to be the center point of it whether that be for cars, power plants, rail yards, factories, and so on. We are entering a ten year period where the industrial sector is likely going to be the most interesting sector for digital. We were the first in the sector to make this move. We incubated it and we feel incredibly well positioned to be able to win both in the industries we serve as well as in this emerging world as a whole.

To read the full article, please visit Forbes.

7/02/18

By Peter High. Published on Forbes

Cathie Kozik is the Chief Information Officer of PSAV, which is an 81 year old events management company that helps bring to life roughly one million events per year. She was a CIO of Tellabs in the 1990s into the last decade, and went on to become an IT executive at Motorola, as well. In 2001, she became one of the earliest board-level CIOs when she joined the board of an individual hospital that would grow through acquisition to become $5 billion Northwestern Memorial Health. She did not set out to be a trailblazer, but now that she has been for 17 years, she has a variety of lessons to share with other CIOs who’d wish to follow in her footsteps.

Her breadth of experience as a CIO and as a board member have helped her with the current transformation she has led at PSAV for the past three and a half years. She has pushed IT to go from roadblock to strategic enabler for the business. She now leads a digital transformation, which is focused on the technician experience and business insight through data analytics. Her vast experience has earned her a spot in CIO.com’s prestigious CIO Hall of Fame.

Peter High: You are the Chief Information Officer and Senior Vice President at PSAV. Could you provide a background as to PSAV’s business and your role in it?

Cathie Kozik: PSAV is the world’s largest event experiences company. We see our role as connecting with and inspiring our customers, so they can connect with and inspire their audiences. We help our customers around the globe put together different event experiences, then enable them to reach out to their audiences in new and different ways. It is a great and exciting business to be in as we are always doing something different. We put on about 1,500 different shows per day and more than a million over the course of a year.

As CIO, my role has been to help bring the organization into the next generation and prepare us for growth. We have been on a great trajectory as we have acquired a substantial number of companies over the past five to ten years. Despite this, between the acquisitions and organic growth, the business system had not kept up with what the business was trying to accomplish. Therefore, when I joined the company three years ago, my core focus was about stabilizing the environment and then bringing new technology to bear. It has been about bringing the company into the information age where technology is an enabler as opposed to something that was preventing the business from getting its job done. As we continue to grow, digital transformation is impacting us just as it is impacting every other company in the industries that we serve. Because of this, we have to make sure that we are keeping pace and are thinking about new technologies that can not only improve our operational efficiency and our interactions with our customers, but also improve the event experiences that have been part of the innovation cycle that we have been on. For example, we have focused on mobility as approximately 95 percent of our employees are out in the field. We need to make sure that we are communicating with these employees. They need to know what to expect for the day, what customers are coming in, and what these customers past experiences have been with us. We need to communicate with these employees so that we can ensure that today’s experience with PSAV is just as great or even greater than the last experience. Additionally, if something goes wrong, it is important that we know about it. We have to talk to the customer as we know them and support them in the ways they are expecting. For example, we need to ensure that a customer who is expecting a high-resolution projector, gets that high-resolution projector. We need to make certain that they get the right experience that they need for their customers.

To read the full article, please visit Forbes

 

6/25/18

By Peter High. Published on Forbes

Lenovo’s Kim Stevenson Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Data Center Solutions division has had a variety of roles in information technology. At technology behemoths such as IBM, EDS, and HPE, she worked on internal operations, but also gained her first exposure to customers who were technology executives. At Intel, she went from General Manager of IT Operations and Services to Chief Information Officer.

As CIO, she had an strong external customer orientation based on her experience prior to that. As a result, she quickly gained invitations to join boards. (She has served on the boards of Cloudera, Riverbed Technology, and she currently serves on the board of the wealth management and private banking company, Boston Private.) During her time as CIO, she was in the first class of Forbes CIO Innovation Award winners based on her team’s contribution of more than $1 billion in value to the company based on analytics. She would eventually rise to Chief Operating Officer, Client, IoT and System Architecture Group at Intel.

When she joined Lenovo in March of 2017, she did so with a remarkably rich set of experiences across the technology sector. As a result, she is an unusually well connected and highly regarded in the IT community. Now that she serves CIOs as clients again, she sees three things that CEOs and boards expect of CIOs: re imagining customer experience, driving productivity inside the enterprise, and delivering new products and services. She and her team are poised to help CIOs deliver all three, as she notes (among other themes) herein.

To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link.

Peter High: You are now the Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Data Center Solutions division of Lenovo. Could you describe your role and your responsibilities?

Kim Stevenson: At Lenovo, we aligned our Data Center Solutions division with our important customer segments, which is how we run our business. Each of those customer segments then report up into my organization.

We have the classic data center infrastructure segment, which is servers, networks, storage, and the like. We also have a high-performance computing artificial intelligence segment, as well as a hyperscale segment. We have software-defined infrastructure as the emerging business model for enterprises, which is a high growth opportunity for Lenovo. In January, we added two new divisions for IoT and telco, both of which relate to the rollout of 5G.

The telco market is at a fundamental inflection point. We want to help drive a new, efficient infrastructure into the telco space. This plays into IoT, which will be all endpoints that are going to be connected in the world. And of course, there are data center implications for having multiple, new types of endpoints connecting into the network.

High: You were a former buyer of technology as the CIO of Intel. You rose beyond that role and became the Chief Operating Officer of the Client, IoT, and Systems Architecture Group. Now you are on the other side of the table as someone delivering to CIOs among others. How do you engage the customer set, and what was the transition like from one side of the table to the other?

Stevenson: Even before I joined Intel, I was with EDS and HP Enterprise Services running IT for customers and selling IT services to the CIO organization. When I moved to Intel to run internal IT, I felt like I was becoming my customer. Having that 360-degree view served me extraordinarily well. There were days when I thought to myself, “Why would anyone try to sell you this? It is just not practical.” There were also days that I felt I could understand more of what was possible from an innovation vector because I had seen many different types of accounts.

This is the next chapter, which is coming back to the business side. Now more than ever, the voice of the CIO in every company is becoming more strategic and more critical to the raw execution of the company. There is no business process in any company today that executes without some form of IT at its core. When I look at the role of the CIO today, I see three things that the board of directors and the CEO expect.

  1. They expect the CIO to re-imagine and define the customer experience.
  2. They expect extreme productivity inside of their corporation. Every CEO wants 20 percent more to the bottom line than they are getting today.
  3. They expect that they invent and deliver new products and services to allow them to grow in the company.

At Lenovo, I focus on helping the IT organization deliver on those three fundamental strategic priorities that exist in every company.

High: Can you expand on the translation of those general ideas to the way in which you are doing that in concert with the business?

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

Peter High

11-12-2015

Excerpt from the Article:

Catalent Pharma Solutions is a global provider of advanced delivery technologies and development solutions for drugs, biologics and consumer health products. With more than 80 years of experience, Catalent has proven expertise in bringing more customer products to market faster, enhancing product performance and ensuring reliable clinical and commercial product supply.

Catalent employs approximately 8,700 people, including more than 1,000 scientists, at 31 facilities across five continents, and in 2015 generated more than $1.8 billion in revenue. The company’s brand promise is “More products. Better treatments. Reliably supplied.” In partnership with the company’s customers, including companies of all sizes, Catalent develops, formulates and supplies many life-saving therapies. Catalent’s CIO, Michael Del Priore, shares with CIO Insight how IT plays a role in mergers and acquisitions, the benefits of engaging key strategic vendors and some exciting trends in the pharma industry.

CIO Insight: This is not your first stint as an IT executive at a pharmaceutical company, as you were once the vice president and global head of Commercial Operations IT at Roche. You spent more than three years as CIO of consumer packaged goods company Church & Dwight in between, however. When you returned to the industry, what struck you as having changed during that period from an IT perspective?

Del Priore: Personalized medicine, an emerging practice of medicine that uses an individual’s genetic profile to guide decisions made in regard to the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of disease, was in its early stages when I was at Roche and has progressed significantly since. This requires new ways of analyzing data to develop and deliver better medicines to patients in a more targeted way. Also, the implementation of product serialization, the means by which drugs can be tracked throughout the supply chain to counter threats such as counterfeiting, adulteration and diversion has progressed. The regulatory frameworks were just being developed when I was at Roche and now they are in effect in certain countries. Therefore, we have invested at Catalent to be in position to service customers who have serialization requirements.

CIO Insight: You have been a member of the mergers & acquisitions team at Catalent.  What role do you play as IT leader relative to M&A?

Del Priore: I am part of the team that evaluates potential acquisition targets during the due diligence process to determine whether the target company fits with our strategy, assess how it is run and what it would take to integrate it into Catalent. From an IT perspective, we evaluate their current IT landscape and identify integration costs as well as potential synergies. Of course, if we should acquire a company, we execute the integration using our M&A playbook.

To read the full article, please visit CIO Insight

Peter High

10-21-2015

Excerpt from the Article:

NES Rentals is in the business of renting aerial lifts and related high-reach equipment to companies in the commercial and industrial construction businesses. The company is a privately held midsize company with revenues of about $400 million, 1,200 employees and 75 branches operating in the Gulf Coast, South, Southeast, Midwest and the Northeast. NES Rentals buys equipment from OEMs and sells its used equipment at auction every four to five years in order to keep its equipment fresh. The company maintains its own equipment at the branches or dispatches mechanics to job sites to attend to breakdowns.

Ananda Rakhit has been CIO at NES Rentals for more than nine years, after having served as an IT leader at ADP and United Airlines, among other companies. In this interview with CIO Insight contributor Peter High, he shares what he’s learned across his long tenure in IT, his focus on predictive analytics and managing a large, virtual workforce.

CIO Insight: What are some examples of strategic imperatives you are driving for the foreseeable future?

Ananda Rakhit: Pricing, equipment allocation, predictive analytics for maintenance and security of our systems are strategic initiatives for NES IT. After two years of painstaking work, the pricing system has now entered a continuous improvement phase.

The ecosystem for price setting at NES is extensive. A sophisticated analytical engine based on statistical and operations research techniques is at the heart of the system. Past company data including seasonality and industry forecasts are combined with latest data gathered from the field. Utilization data is collected daily by scanning bar codes on each piece of equipment at delivery and pickup. Price sensitivity data is gathered daily via inputs from field sales via a smartphone app. A forecasting model and an optimization model generate prices by branch and by equipment category which are delivered to sales via desktops and iPads. Every morning a newly calculated set of rates based on the latest information shows up in a pricing app to guide sales.

Equipment allocation is another strategic problem we are working on to go beyond spreadsheet analysis. In a nutshell, this problem entails buying the right mix of equipment, allocating them to the branches where it will deliver most to the bottom line, moving them from one branch to another as demand patterns change and identifying the equipment to send to auction. While some modules, such as demand forecasts are common, the mathematical model is more complex than pricing. A decision support system can allow the user to carry out repeated runs by changing input parameters.

We are in the early stages of predictive analytics for maintenance. We are looking at data on mean time between failures of various parts and exploring how we can gather engine performance data via GPS devices. We hope to build a statistical model that could enable our mechanics to make proactive repairs at customer sites before the equipment breaks and customers have to call us. Customer service benefits are obvious but, in addition, managing repairs on a systematic basis instead on-demand basis, would save maintenance dollars.

We have put a large focus to ensure our systems are secure from external threats as well as we have adequate disaster recovery solutions in place. We have upgraded our backup and data retention systems and procedures and are now working towards rapidly recovering our business-critical systems from failure to minimize business impact. We are also developing clear incident response procedures and shielding our systems from potential attacks and breaches which include implementation of secure coding practices

To read the full article, please visit CIO Insight