Category Archives: CIO Focus Interview

CIO, CIO Focus Interview, Featured, Miscellaneous IT

CIO Focus Interviews: A Summary Over the Past Year

A year ago, I started a CIO Focus Interview segment on the blog. I’ve gotten the chance to speak with a handful of thought leading CIOs and CTOs. All have provided great insights and shown why they are on the cutting edge of all things IT. Below is a summary and link to each of the interviews.

CIO Focus Interview: Stuart Appley, Shorenstein

CIO Focus Interview: Stuart AppleyStuart is the CIO at Shorenstein, a San Francisco based real estate investment firm. One of Stuart’s biggest challenges is operating in a company culture that is a little older making it more difficult to get people to adopt technologies and bring them up to speed. Last year, Stuart completed a large cloud ERP project that allowed him to reduce a lot of application sets. Stuart is a strong believer that IT needs to act as an advisor to the business. Read the full interview.

CIO Focus Interview: Isaac Sacolick, Greenwich Associates

CIO Focus InterviewIsaac is Global CIO and a Managing Director at Greenwich Associates. His career began in the start-up world and he has brought that mentality and framework to traditional businesses he has worked at since. Isaac and I discussed self-service BI programs, analytics, and the internet of things. Read the full interview.

CIO Focus Interview: David Chou, CIO at a large academic medical center

CIO focus interviewDavid works at a large academic medical center where he manages day to day operations and an $82 million budget. According to David, the “4 pillars” of cloud, mobile, social, and big data are having the biggest impact on the industry. Earlier this year he was in the process of incorporating a hybrid cloud model. Read the full interview.

CIO Focus Interview: Peter Weis, Matson Navigation

CIO Focus InterviewPeter has an interesting blend of both business and IT knowledge. After receiving his MBA at the Wharton School, he entered his first management role at 26 and was a CIO at age 36 at a global logistics company. Peter recently finished a complete IT transformation that replaced 100% of the company’s enterprise applications, the underlying architecture and governance process. We ended the interview talking about the importance of transforming the enterprise experience to be more like a consumer experience. Read the full interview.

CIO Focus Interview: Kevin Hall, GreenPages-LogicsOne

CIO Focus InterviewKevin is the CIO and Managing Director here at GreenPages-LogicsOne and has a very unique perspective. He runs all aspects of information services internally but also is the Managing Director responsible for our customer facing Professional Services and Managed Services divisions. This unique position allows him to get a better understanding of the challenges and roadblocks GreenPages’ customers are faced with day in and day out. Read the full interview.

CTO Focus Interview: Gunnar Berger, Citrix

CTO Focus InterviewBefore joining Citrix, Gunnar was an Analyst at Gartner. Since joining Citrix, he has been on a mission to make VDI easier and cheaper to deploy. In 2015, Gunnar’s main goals were to double down on applications, review the complexity and cost of VDI, and bridge to the cloud. Read the full interview.

CTO Focus Interview: Rick Blaisdell, Motus

CTO Focus InterviewRick is the CTO at Motus and also serves as an advisor on how companies can become more efficient and scalable. In the interview, Rick and I discuss the Internet of Things, Anything-as-a-Service, and predictions on what will happen in the industry over the next 5-7 years. Read the full interview.

 

[eBook] The Evolution of the Corporate IT Department. Download it here!

 

By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist

CIO, CIO Focus Interview, Miscellaneous IT

CIO Focus Interviews: A Summary Over the Past Year

A year ago, I started a CIO Focus Interview segment on the blog. I’ve gotten the chance to speak with a handful of thought leading CIOs and CTOs. All have provided great insights and shown why they are on the cutting edge of all things IT. Below is a summary and link to each of the interviews.

CIO Focus Interview: Stuart Appley, Shorenstein

CIO Focus Interview: Stuart AppleyStuart is the CIO at Shorenstein, a San Francisco based real estate investment firm. One of Stuart’s biggest challenges is operating in a company culture that is a little older making it more difficult to get people to adopt technologies and bring them up to speed. Last year, Stuart completed a large cloud ERP project that allowed him to reduce a lot of application sets. Stuart is a strong believer that IT needs to act as an advisor to the business. Read the full interview.

CIO Focus Interview: Isaac Sacolick, Greenwich Associates

CIO Focus InterviewIsaac is Global CIO and a Managing Director at Greenwich Associates. His career began in the start-up world and he has brought that mentality and framework to traditional businesses he has worked at since. Isaac and I discussed self-service BI programs, analytics, and the internet of things. Read the full interview.

CIO Focus Interview: David Chou, CIO at a large academic medical center

CIO focus interviewDavid works at a large academic medical center where he manages day to day operations and an $82 million budget. According to David, the “4 pillars” of cloud, mobile, social, and big data are having the biggest impact on the industry. Earlier this year he was in the process of incorporating a hybrid cloud model. Read the full interview.

CIO Focus Interview: Peter Weis, Matson Navigation

CIO Focus InterviewPeter has an interesting blend of both business and IT knowledge. After receiving his MBA at the Wharton School, he entered his first management role at 26 and was a CIO at age 36 at a global logistics company. Peter recently finished a complete IT transformation that replaced 100% of the company’s enterprise applications, the underlying architecture and governance process. We ended the interview talking about the importance of transforming the enterprise experience to be more like a consumer experience. Read the full interview.

CIO Focus Interview: Kevin Hall, GreenPages-LogicsOne

CIO Focus InterviewKevin is the CIO and Managing Director here at GreenPages-LogicsOne and has a very unique perspective. He runs all aspects of information services internally but also is the Managing Director responsible for our customer facing Professional Services and Managed Services divisions. This unique position allows him to get a better understanding of the challenges and roadblocks GreenPages’ customers are faced with day in and day out. Read the full interview.

CTO Focus Interview: Gunnar Berger, Citrix

CTO Focus InterviewBefore joining Citrix, Gunnar was an Analyst at Gartner. Since joining Citrix, he has been on a mission to make VDI easier and cheaper to deploy. In 2015, Gunnar’s main goals were to double down on applications, review the complexity and cost of VDI, and bridge to the cloud. Read the full interview.

CTO Focus Interview: Rick Blaisdell, Motus

CTO Focus InterviewRick is the CTO at Motus and also serves as an advisor on how companies can become more efficient and scalable. In the interview, Rick and I discuss the Internet of Things, Anything-as-a-Service, and predictions on what will happen in the industry over the next 5-7 years. Read the full interview.

 

[eBook] The Evolution of the Corporate IT Department. Download it here!

 

By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist

CIO Focus Interview, cyber security, Featured, IT Transformation

CIO Focus Interview, Peter Weis, Matson Navigation

CIO Focus InterviewFor this CIO Focus Interview, I got to speak with Peter Weis. Peter has over 15 years of global CIO experience, and is currently VP and CIO of Matson Navigation, a $1.7B, publicly traded, global transportation and logistics company. At Matson, Peter leads a global IT organization that is responsible for strategy, software development, infrastructure, high-availability operations and all levels of IT governance. Peter is an experienced speaker on leadership, technology, and supply chain topics, and has lectured at both the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and at San Francisco State University. He holds an M.B.A. with Honors from the Wharton School and a Bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Furthermore, Peter was a 2014 inductee into the CIO Hall of Fame. You can find Peter on Twitter and also hear more from him on cio.com!

Ben: Could you give me some background on your career?

Peter: I did my undergraduate studies at UC Berkeley and followed that up by getting an MBA at the Wharton School. I entered my first management role at age 26 and became a CIO for the first time at 36 at a global 3rd party logistics company. I’ve spent my career at a mix of both start-up and Fortune 500 companies. In late 2003, I was lured out of the start-up world to Matson Navigation. It took me a while to accept the position because I was still happy in the startup world and wasn’t initially convinced that a traditional and successful 125 year-old company was committed to innovation. Ultimately though, I saw it as a unique opportunity to lead a game-changing IT transformation and have now been here for 12 years. I also write and speak at conferences and give guest lectures at UC Berkeley.

Ben: What about a little background on your company?

Peter: Matson is a $2+ billion publicly traded global transportation and logistics company. We were founded in 1882, believe it or not, providing products to Hawaii. Although we’re now far broader in scope and cover much of the Pacific region, Hawaii remains our most important market. Our culture, processes and technology are all built around world-class operations and customer service in what has become an increasingly commoditized industry. As a result, we’ve been ranked as the number one ocean carrier in the world for the past two years, both overall and in information technology.

Ben: What sorts of projects have you been working on?

Peter: We recently finished a complete IT transformation that replaced 100% of our enterprise applications, our underlying architecture and our governance processes. Our legacy mainframe and AS400 systems are gone. We’re now fully virtualized and cloud-enabled and can now run our business in the cloud. By making this shift, we are in a position to reduce our IT managed services costs by over 80%. Most companies of any scale are wrestling with these legacy and obsolescence issues, so it’s gratifying to have completed this transformation. We also recently made a major acquisition that enables Matson to enter the Alaskan market. As a result of completing this IT transformation prior to the acquisition, the integration of this $450M acquisition is now expected to be completed in 5 months.   In a legacy environment, this integration would likely have taken 18 months and cost millions more than it did. This is a big win for Matson.

Ben: What goals do you have for 2015?

Peter: Now that we’ve finished transforming what had been a traditional IT environment, it’s now time to go on offense by leveraging what we already consider to be the best technology stack in our industry.   So, we’re now focusing on further enabling growth, reducing operating costs and responding more quickly to innovation opportunities. In fact, we’ve formed a dedicated innovation team which is led by several of our top performers. Their sole focus is innovation and widening the gap between Matson and our competitors. In order to do that, we need to be faster and more agile. We now think in terms of weeks and months in delivering innovation instead of years.

Ben: Which areas of IT do you think are having the biggest impact on the industry?

Peter: I would say cloud migration and cyber security. With the cloud, there’s a gap between vision and reality, and most companies are constrained by legacy environments that aren’t conducive to cloud technologies. CIO’s are struggling with how to fulfill the promise of better responsiveness at lower costs that cloud solutions offer, but they don’t know how to close this legacy gap. There is no easy solution, but those companies that find their way to the cloud will have real structural advantages over their competitors.

Regarding cyber security, the industry just doesn’t know what to make of the hype versus the reality. Every CIO feels the risks, but most are unsure of the right strategy to pursue, given that solutions today are so young and fragmented. As a result, CIO’s are feeling behind the curve. The problem is real, but the correct vision and necessary skill sets have not yet matured. If you look at the enterprise technology stack, the winners are clear. In cyber security though, the winning solutions are not yet clear. My company isn’t in finance or healthcare, so our risk profile is lower than it is for some. At the same time, in the age of the mobile, digital business, we are all at risk. After a difficult search, we’ve actually just hired a leader to drive our enterprise information security strategy.

Ben: Could you talk about the importance of a strong relationship between the CIO and the business? Has your experience getting degrees in business helped you in this regard?

Peter: Speaking the language of the executive team is very important. Their language isn’t LAN, WAN, or SaaS; it’s largely corporate finance. The traditional IT career path doesn’t teach managers the language of business, which creates a gap that all great IT leaders must close. Yes, my business training has certainly proven to be valuable, as I’ve learned the language of the boardroom. It’s also helped my personal brand as I’ve become more involved in assuming a commercial role at Matson, where I can more directly affect the company’s bottom line.

Ben: On a more personal level, which areas of technology interest you the most?

Peter: I’d say it’s the challenge of transforming the enterprise experience to be more like a consumer experience. I’m talking about customer facing enterprise applications that look and act like consumer apps. The consumer marketplace is teaching us what enterprise users and customers desire, and we need to watch, listen and incorporate these lessons more fully into our business solutions. Nobody gets trained on using an iPhone app, right?   Now, imagine rolling out enterprise software with no training! That’s our goal. The market has told us where to go, and that’s where we’re headed over the next 3 to 5 years.

 

 

By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist

 

 

BI, Big Data, CIO Focus Interview, Featured, Miscellaneous IT

CIO Focus Interview: Isaac Sacolick, Greenwich Associates

CIO Focus InterviewFor this CIO Focus Interview, I got the pleasure of interviewing Isaac Sacolick. Isaac is the Global CIO and a Managing Director at Greenwich Associates and is recognized as an industry leading, innovative CIO. In 2013, he received Tech Target’s CIO award for Technology Advancement. The past two years, he’s been on the Huffington Post’s Top 100 Most Social CIOs list. I would highly recommend reading his blog, Social, Agile and Transformation and also following him on Twitter (@nyike).

Ben: Could you give me some background on your career?

Isaac: My career began in start-ups, and I have never lost that start-up DNA. My past few jobs have been taking the way start-ups work and applying that mentality and framework to traditional businesses that need to transform.

Ben: Could you give me some background on your company and your current role within the company?

Isaac: Greenwich is a provider of global market intelligence and advisory services to the financial services industry. I’m the CIO and am leading our Business Transformation Initiative. I’ve been focused on a couple of key areas in my role. These include creating agile practices and a core competency in software development, as well as building and standardizing our Business Intelligence platforms.

Ben: You recently started at Greenwich. As a CIO in this day and age, what are some of the challenges of starting a new role?

Isaac: When starting a new role, you’re constantly switching hats. You need your learning hat to be able to digest things that you know very little about. You need your listening hat to hear where a pain point or opportunity is so you can understand and apply your forces in the right places. It’s important to look for some quick wins while taking baby steps towards implementing changes and transformations you think are necessary. It’s like a clown picture with 7 or 8 different wheels spinning at the same time. I had to learn how our business operated and to work with the IT team to transition from one way of operating to another way of operating. An important piece is to learn the cultural dynamics of the company. That’s been my first three months here.

Ben: What projects have you been able to work on with all the chaos?

Isaac: I’ve instrumented some tangible results while getting situated. We now have an agile practice. It was one of those things that had been talked about in the past, but now we have four programs running with four different teams, each in different states of maturity. We’ve also changed our approach with our developers. They were operating in support mode and taking requests to address break fix things, etc. Now, we’ve put the brakes on some of the marginal work and have freed some of their time so some of them can be tech leads on agile projects. This has helped us make great progress on building new products. We’re a tech team focused on more strategic initiatives.

I’ve been doing similar work with Dev Ops by getting them an expanded view of support beyond service desk and having them look at considerations that our organization has that need support around applications. We’re trying to get in the mindset that we can respond to application requests in need. We’ve gone from a help desk and infrastructure model to one that adds more focus on supporting applications.

Which areas of IT do you think are having the biggest impact on businesses?

Isaac: I would say self-service BI programs. If you roll the clock back 3-4 years ago, the tools for data analytics most organizations were using could be split into two camps. You were either operate out of do-it-yourself tools like Microsoft Excel and Access or you deployed an enterprise BI solution. The enterprise BI solution cost a lot of money and required extensive training. Over the last 3 years, there has been an emergence of tools that fit in that middle ground. Users can now do more analytics in a much more effective and productive fashion. The business becomes more self-serving, and this changes the role of the IT department in regards to how to store and interpret data. There is also a lot of governance and documentation involved that needs to be accounted for. These new self-service BI programs have taken a specialized skill set and made it much more democratic and scalable so that individual departments can look at data to see how they can do their jobs better.

Ben: What’s the area of IT that interests you the most?

Isaac: I would have to say the Internet of Things. The large volumes of data and the integration of the physical world and virtual world are fascinating. The Internet of Things has capabilities to really enrich our lives by simplifying things and giving us access to data that used to be difficult to capture in real time. Take wearables for example. The Apple Watch came out and then there will be many more things just like it. I’m really interested to see the form and functionality wearables take moving forward, as well as who will adopt them.

Ben: What sorts of predictions did you have coming into 2015?

Isaac: I actually wrote a blog post back in January with my 5 predictions for 2015. One was that big data investments may be the big bubble for some CIOs. To avoid overspending and underachieving on big data promises, CIOs are going to have to close the skills gap and champion analytics programs. Another was that Boards are likely to start requesting their CIOs to formally present security risks, options and a roadmap as companies become more active to address information security issues.

 

By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist

App Dev, CIO Focus Interview, Featured, hybrid cloud, IT Management

CIO Focus Interview: Kevin Hall, GreenPages-LogicsOne

CIO Focus InterviewFor this segment of our CIO Focus Interview Series, I sat down with our CIO and Managing Director, Kevin Hall. Kevin has an extremely unique perspective as he serves as GreenPages’ CIO as well as the Managing Director of our customer facing Professional Services and Managed Services divisions.

 

Ben: Can you give me some background on your IT experience?

Kevin: I’ve been a CIO for 17+ years holding roles in both consulting organizations and roles overseeing internal IT. The position I have at GreenPages is very interesting because I am both a Managing Partner of our services business and the CIO of our organization. This is the first time I have held both jobs at the same time in one company

Ben: What are your primary responsibilities for each part of your role then?

Kevin: As CIO, I’m responsible for all aspects of information services. This includes both traditional data center functions, engineering functions, operations functions, and app dev functions. As Managing Director I am responsible for our Professional Services and Managed Services divisions. These divisions provide help to our customers on the same sorts of projects that I am undertaking as CIO.

Ben: Does it help you being in this unique position? Does it allow you to get a better understanding of what GreenPages’ customers are looking for since you experience the same challenges as CIO?

Kevin: Yes, I think it is definitely an advantage. The CIO role is crucial in this era. It has certainly been a challenging job for a long time, and that has magnified in recent years because of the fundamental shift and explosion of the capabilities available to modern day CIOs. Because I am in this rather crazy position, it does help me understand the needs of our customers better. If I was just on the consulting side of the house, I’m not sure I could fully understand or appreciate how difficult some of the choices CIOs are faced with are. I can relate to that feeling of being blocked or trapped because I’ve experienced it. The good news is our CTO and Architects provide real world lessons right here at home for both myself and our IT Director.

Interestingly enough, on the services side of my role, in both the Professional Services and Managed Services division, we are entering our 3rd year of effort to realign those divisions in a way that helps CIOs solve those same demanding needs that I am facing. We’re currently helping companies with pure cloud, hybrid cloud and traditional approaches to information services. I’m both a provider of our services to other organizations as well as a customer of those services. Our internal IT team is actually a customer of our Professional and Managed Services division. We use our CMaaS platform to manage and operate our computing platforms internally. We also use the same help desk team our customers do. Furthermore, we use various architects and engineers that serve our customers to help us with internal projects. For example, we have recently engaged our client-facing App Dev team to help GreenPages reimagine our internal Business Intelligence systems and are underway on developing our next generation BI tools and capabilities. Another example would be a project we recently completed to look at our networking and security infrastructure in order to be prepared to move workloads from on-prem or colo facilities to the cloud. We had to add additional capabilities to our network and went out and got the SOC 2 Type 2 certification which really speaks to the importance we place on security. What I love about working here is that we don’t just talk about hybrid cloud; we are actively and successfully using those models for our own business.

Ben: What are some of your goals for 2015?

Kevin: On the internal IT side, I’m engaged, like many of my colleagues around the globe, on assessing what the new computing paradigm means for our organization. We’re embarked in looking at every aspect of our environment along with our ability to deliver services to the GreenPages’ organization. Our goal is to figure out a way to do this in a cost effective, scalable, and flexible way that meets the needs of our organization.

Ben: Any interesting projects you have going on right now?

Kevin: As we assess our workloads and start trying to understand what the best execution venues for those workloads are, it’s become pretty clear that we are going to be using more than a single venue. For example, one big execution venue for us is VMware’s vCloud Air. We have some workloads that are excellent candidates for that venue. Other workloads are great fits for Microsoft Azure. We have some initiatives, like the BI project, that are going to be an open source project. We’ll be utilizing things like Docker and Hadoop that are most likely going to be highly optimized around Amazon’s capabilities. This is giving me insight into the notion that there are many different capabilities between clouds. The important thing is to make sure every workload is optimized for the right cloud. This is an important ongoing exercise for us in 2015.

Ben: Which area of IT would you say interests you the most?

Kevin: What interests me most about IT is the organizational aspect. How do you organize in a way that creates value for the company? How do you prioritize in terms of people, process and technology? For me, it’s not about one particular aspect; it’s about the entire program and how it all functions.

Ben: What are you looking forward to in 2015 from a technology perspective?

Kevin: I’m really looking forward to our annual Summit event in August. I think it is going to be the best one yet. If you look back several years ago, very few attendees raised their hand when asked if they thought the cloud was real. Last year, most of the hands in the room went up. What will make it especially interesting this year is that we have many customers deeply involved with these types of projects. Four years ago the only option was to sit and listen to presentations, but now our customers will have the opportunity to talk to their peers about how they are actually going about doing cloud. It will be a great event and a fantastic learning opportunity.

Are you looking for more information around the transformation of corporate IT? Download this eBook from our Director of Cloud Services John Dixon to learn more!

 

By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist