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Category: CIO Sessions
April 24th, 2009
CIO Sessions: Sony Electronics' Drew Martin
Drew Martin, CIO of Sony Electronics, speaks to me about how IT is facilitating product development at the consumer electronics giant. Martin also shares his views on what the company is doing to get an edge on the likes of Nintendo and Apple in the competitive electronics space.
Also see:
2 minute Video Shorts
Check out our summary shorts of the interview.
March 25th, 2009
CIO Sessions: Adobe's Gerri Martin-Flickinger
Gerri Martin-Flickinger, CIO of Adobe, speaks to me about her top priorities at the graphics software maker. Martin-Flickinger shares her views on new ways the company is collaborating internally and the future of Rich Internet Applications for businesses.
2 minute Video Shorts
Short on time? Check out our summary shorts of the interview.
February 25th, 2009
CIO Sessions: Dan Darling, CIO, Turner Broadcasting System
Dan Darling, CIO of Turner Broadcasting System, talks to me about overseeing IT operations for many different brands across a global organization. Darling also discusses how the company is getting results while reducing costs, from new a telepresence implementation, to going green inside the data center.
2 minute Video Shorts
Short on time? Check out our summary shorts of the interview.
February 11th, 2009
CIO Sessions: Verisign CTO on building a new Internet
Ken Silva, CTO of Verisign, recently sat down with me to talk security, building a network, domain names and trying to out-innovate hackers. I also give him a proverbial white board to design a new Internet.
Here’s what Silva would do with a new Internet from scratch (transcript):
I think I would embed some security into the protocols themselves. Today the network itself provides zero security. There is no security in the network, virtually every packet is passed and pushed. So by embedding some security into the protocols—and some of that was thought of when IP version 6 was developed, but trying to retrofit that on top of the existing infrastructure is going to be a challenge—so I think that many of the protocols themselves would have to have some security embedded in them. And the second thing is that passwords as we know them today would not exist. They’ve actually been obsolete for more than a decade.
We also talked about embedding identity management into the Internet too and prodding the private sector with incentives to build out a new Internet. The larger question is how this newfangled Internet would be built. According to Silva you’d develop a new Internet separately and then effectively cut over to it at some future date.
Also see: 2 minute Video Shorts
November 26th, 2008
CIO Sessions: State of California CIO Teri Takai
Teri Takai, the State of California’s CIO, talks to CNET’s Dan Farber about overseeing an IT organization with more than 130 CIOs and 10,000 technology workers. She also discusses California’s e-government initiatives from going green to managing costs during tough economic times.
2 minute Video Shorts
Short on time? Check out our summary shorts of the interview
November 20th, 2008
CIO Sessions: Mozilla CTO: Brendan Eich
Brendan Eich, CTO of Mozilla, talks to CNET News’ Dan Farber about why the company now commands 20 percent of the browser market and what they’re doing to grow. He also discusses the company’s mobile browser strategy, making Firefox faster than the competition, and taking chances with the company’s core brand.
2 minute Video Shorts
Short on time? Check out our summary shorts of the interview.
November 12th, 2008
CIO Sessions: Netflix Chief Product Officer: Neil Hunt
Neil Hunt, Chief Product Officer of Netflix talks to ZDNet correspondent Sumi Das about transforming the company’s movie rental service from DVDs by mail to online delivery. He also discusses how the company is using digital rights management solutions, developing new delivery platforms and bringing its movies to Mac users.
2 minute Video Shorts
Short on time? Check out our summary shorts of the interview.
October 23rd, 2008
CIO Sessions: Qwest's Pieter Poll
Pieter Poll, CTO of Qwest, talks to ZDNet correspondent Sumi Das in this latest edition of CIO Sessions about choosing the innovative technologies to run one of the leading communication companies in the U.S. They also discuss the company’s role as the network infrastructure provider at the 2008 DNC and RNC conventions, and where the company stands on the important issues on the Web, from Net neutrality to putting bandwidth caps on customers.
2 minute Video Shorts
Short on time? Check out our summary shorts of the interview.
October 7th, 2008
CIO Sessions: Visa's Michael Dreyer
Michael Dreyer, CIO of Visa talks to ZDNet correspondent Sumi Das about developing transaction technologies for its financial payment network including new wallet-less and contact-less payment solutions. Dreyer also discusses what it takes to process and handle more than 300 million transactions on a daily basis, and the company’s response to the recent credit crisis rippling through the global economy.
Interview highlights:
September 17th, 2008
CIO Sessions: Cisco CIO on deploying collaboration
Rebecca Jacoby, CIO of Cisco talks to ZDNet correspondent Sumi Das about adding new collaboration tools such as TelePresence and Unified Communications inside the enterprise. She also shares her views on managing IT for more than 50,000 employees worldwide, and why she’s been called one of the most extroverted CIOs in Silicon Valley. Here’s the full transcript.
August 27th, 2008
CIO Sessions: CareerBuilder CTO: Eric Presley
Eric Presley, CTO of CareerBuilder talks to CNET News’ Dan Farber about how the online recruitment site is building new search engine tools to provide more targeted job recommendations. He also discusses technologies to aid the job hunting experience for its users from creating new social networking tools to developing new mobile software for the iPhone.
We also have 2-minute video shorts from this interview as well as the transcript.
December 19th, 2007
Lloyd Taylor: LinkedIn's 'scaling guru' tackles the social graph
Earlier this month I spoke with Lloyd Taylor, vice president of technical operations at LinkedIn and formerly Google’s director of global operations and Keynote Systems’ vice president of technology and operations. He discusses his past experience building and scaling data centers at Google and how it differs from his new role, managing a high value and less trafficked network (17 million members) at LinkedIn:
“The challenge in scaling LinkedIn is really not the number of visits. I mean, this is a high value site as opposed to a super high traffic site. So, the big challenge there is the key value in any kind of social networking or business networking site is the graph or the connectivity map of how people are connected. It is a very complex graph theory problem. And the big challenge here for me and it is very different than my previous companies is not how do I handle a billion queries per second, it’s how do I get the maximum value for my users out of their connectivity.”
We also discuss interoperability among social networking sites and how Google threw out the book on how to build data centers.
Watch the video
Read the transcript
See also:
Google: Rewriting the book on data centers
December 11th, 2007
What CIOs really want
My Between the Lines partner Larry Dignan attended Hewlett-Packard’s analyst meeting in New York today where CEO Mark Hurd stated the obvious–all CIOs want to cut costs and simplify.
It’s an oversimplification, but Hurd excels at reducing problems to their bare essentials, with all the metrics needed to make decisions less about guesswork or intuition. Regarding major IT transformation projects Hurd said, “From our experience this is a CEO decision executed by a team. If our team (CEO, CFO etc) doesn’t support the process it will fail. When you start transforming you will run into problems. As soon as CEO and CFO blink the transformation stops.”
Clearly CIOs don’t make decisions in isolation. Their budgets, ranging from a tens of millions to billions of dollars, obviously aren’t private funds to spend on bleeding edge technology or golf club memberships. The most forward looking CIOs are not just focused about cutting costs and reducing complexity to improve the bottom line–they are also thinking about innovation and applying technology to deliver improved business process, products and services.
In the last few years, I have interviewed a dozens of CIOs, CTOs and other IT executives to get their take on the latest trends that are driving innovation in their organizations and what kind of challenges they face in delivering value to their companies.
Following are some of the latest interviews (available in video and text) from our CIO Sessions series, where CIOs talk about what they really want to achieve:
PG&E CIO Pat Lawicki talks about energizing one of the United States’ largest utilities with new technologies, such as tagging utility poles with RFID, smart meters that will quickly measure customer energy usage and intelligent grids that will allow for better maintenance and service.
Kaiser Permanente CIO Phil Fasano is focused on making information more accessible online to its 9 millions members. He also discusses new technology innovations the company is developing to improve patient care in the areas of Web 2.0, analytics and RFID.
Office Depot CIO Tim Toews discusses new technologies, such as virtualization, wireless and new search services, that the company is deploying to edge out the competition in the competitive office supply space, online and offline.
BT Design Managing Director JP Rangaswami discusses transformation and convergence at one of the world’s largest telecommunication companies. He also discusses his visionary thoughts on enabling new technologies inside the enterprise such as social networking, SaaS and open-source.
Hilton Hotels CIO Tim Harvey talks about the company’s business intelligence software OnQ and his vision for the hotel of the future, including online check-ins, self service kiosks and personalized RFID cards.
Autodesk CIO Billy Hinners spend most of his career creating industry leading creating design software. He talks about transitioning to the role of CIO and making sure Autodesk has the infrastructure to developer and deliver its applications.
Avaya CIO Lorie Buckingham talks about the promise of unified communications for its more than 1 million business customers around the world and her strategy for integrating innovative communication technologies.
Travelocity CTO Barry Vandevier discusses his company’s efforts to deploy Web 2.0 technologies for the next generation of online travel.
Webcor Builders CIO Gregg Davis talks about constructing high profile landmarks using 3D modeling software, collaborative networking tools and the latest “green” technologies. He also discusses the importance of safety on construction sites where workers use PDAs and cell phones to communicate.
University of California, Berkeley, CIO Shelton Waggener talks about meeting the digital demands of its tech-savvy student population, the challenges of protecting data in an open institution, and innovative technologies being developed on campus.
Qualcomm CIO Norm Fjeldheim discusses his “do or die” approach to supporting new technologies within his organization and funding new ideas by rolling back cost savings into IT.
October 30th, 2007
CIO Sessions: BT's JP Rangaswami
In my latest CIO Session I chat with JP Rangaswami, managing director of BT Design about organizational transformation and convergence at one of the world’s largest telecommunication companies. BT employs more than 150,000 people and has a presence in about 190 countries.
Rangaswami, who was formerly global CIO at BT, has been an early adopter of the Web, blogs, wikis and social networking tools. He even eliminated the CIO title as a way to better reflect the roles individuals play at BT. I asked him if that means CIOs are dinosaurs, headed for extinction.
Perhaps not today, although believe it or not, at BT we’ve done away with the CIO title at our levels. We call ourselves MDs [Managing Directors] because we’re fundamentally managing directors of certain businesses and the head of BT design overall is actually called a CEO which reflects what the person does. Part of the reason to get rid of the CIO title was effectively to say that we represent disciplines far beyond just was in IT in the past or in IS, that we represent networks, we represent products, we represent processes. What we represent is design so it made sense for us to come together and converge on that title.
Rangaswami is also a strong advocate of Web 2.0 technologies, with significant internal use of blogs, wikis and instant messaging. He is also an advocate for using Facebook, in contrast to many of his peers who have taken a different approach to the social network upstart, banning it as non-productive use of company time and too far outside the compliance boundaries of corporate information systems.
Rangaswami views Facebook as a way to break the “assembly line mindset”:
In fact if you look at what I’m doing with Facebook, what I’m really achieving, what any of us who wants to use it in an enterprise environment achieves, is to say that you’ve taken what happened at the water cooler or at the coffee shop and made it persistent, made it shareable, made it teachable, made it learnable. That’s a huge win because we’ve spent years talking about the value of the water cooler conversations, of the coffee shops, of the more amorphous softer discussions. Now we have the ability to actually understand what these relationships are, how information and decision making migrates horizontally, laterally through an organization, rather than through the published hierarchies, how people really work, and what people do as part of that work.
Regarding open source, Rangaswami said:
The way we look at open source is simple: if the problem is truly generic, then we use open source to be able to solve it because that’s where the market tends to persist at the highest quality. If the problem is contained to a limited marketplace, we use closed source because the economics of finding such solutions work best for a firm that has N customers, N being a relatively small number. And if the problem is unique to us as BT, that is the place where we put all the focus of our best resources our internal guys, those are scarce, rare resources and we’d like to apply them on to scarce rare problems.
October 4th, 2007
CIO Sessions: 1-800 Flowers blossoms with new technologies
In a CIO Vision Series interview, Steve Bozzo, CIO of 1-800 Flowers talks with me about what it takes to run the company’s daily IT operations, across a network of more than 9,000 florists.
Today, about 75 percent of 1-800 Flowers transactions are Internet-based, Bozzo said, and the user experience is a key factor. “Making the user experience very, very elegant and pleasant for our customers, we’re always looking for that, that’s absolutely paramount in our minds. The company is also exploring Web 2.0 technologies.
The company has built infrastructure to scale up for the few extraordinary days of peak usage during the year. “We need to build our infrastructure to manage the peaks obviously, and then the rest of the year we have that excess capacity. So basically what we do is scale the environment horizontally in three hosting centers around the country,” Bozzo said. “When we don’t need the environment for the peaks, we expand our development environment and start virtualizing so we’re tapping into those resources more and more.”
- Air Force Reserve
- Alcatel-Lucent
- American Red Cross
- BAE Systems
- Boeing
- British Airways
- Campbell Arnott’s
- Charles Schwab
- Churchill Downs
- CIO Panel
- City of Philadelphia
- City of San Francisco
- First Group
- Harrah’s Entertainment
- Harvard Medical School
- Hilton Hotels
- Jetstar
- McKesson
- Millennium Hotels
- Motorola
- Oxfam GB
- Qualcomm
- Reuters
- SF Giants
- SFO
- SurfControl
- Travelocity
- UNICEF
- UC Berkeley
- Vanguard
- Virgin Entertainment Group
- Virgin UK
- Vodafone
- Webcor Builders
- William Hill
- Wotif
- Yahoo!
- Yili Group
August 22nd, 2007
CIO Sessions: John Payne, San Francisco International Airport
In the latest CIO Vision Series interview, I talk with John Payne, CIO of San Francisco International Airport, about the day-to-day security challenges he faces running IT for the airport. He also discusses the airport’s green strategy, disaster recovery scenarios, deploying SOA and tech innovations that will improve the services for travelers, concessionaires and the various government agencies policing one of the world’s busiest airports.
I asked Payne, who took on the San Francisco Airport job a few weeks before 9/11, what the future air travel experience might be like down the road. He compared it to the subway experience, with as few interactions as possible with airport personnel:
You are able to move through security in a way that you are not wanded anymore, you don’t have to take off your clothing or your shoes. You are able to walk through the sensor panel and they will direct you to a place where you need to be padded down, if that’s the case or is needed and you don’t really talk or touch anyone until you board the airplane and that might be the experience in the future, time will tell.
Payne also gives me some insight into why the airport doesn’t have more electrical outlets for those of us who need to charge our laptops while waiting for those delayed flights to commence.
June 6th, 2007
CIO Sessions: Colonel John Hayes of the Air Force Reserve
In this CIO sessions interview, Colonel John Hayes, Chief Information Officer of the Air Force Reserve command, talks about the challenges of managing IT in battlefield situations, deployment of wireless technologies, Web 2.0 and about tapping into the technology expertise of its recruits and ‘citizen warriors’ for the development of innovative ideas, like the new ‘Emergency Notification’ system.
Colonel Hayes is responsible for communications, computer systems,and information management supporting the command headquarters, Air Reserve Personnel Center, and more than 684 Reserve units, which include 43 flying wings and 75,000 personnel. Prior to his current position, he was the Joint Task Force Deputy Director for Communications in Uphold Democracy (invasion of Haiti) and a classified Balkans planning effort. In 2003, Colonel Hayes served as the Central Command Air Forces director of communications, leading the USAF communications forces during Operation Iraqi Freedom.
I asked Colonel Hayes about some of the most successful deployments of technology during the Iraq war.
“…the ability for various organizations to text chat over our secure networks allowed us to basically prosecute and attack time sensitive targets in a way that we never expected to see happen. We had some other collaborative tools out there but frankly they were a little but difficult for the users to get their hands around, but something as simple as having about six different organizations all text chatting in one room would allow us to basically dynamically re-task our intelligence assets so that when forces were involved in ground combat, we could focus the intelligence operations and air power to support those ground forces in combat and that was the biggest thing that surprised me. “
Regarding VoIP, Colonel Hayes said the he can’t yet make a business case to deploy the technology.
Frankly we’re not in a position right now where the business case has made sense. And in our command, resources are pretty lean for Air Force Reserve Command. We like to say that we provide about 20% of the Air Force’s capability with about a 4% of the budget and the way we’re able to do that is a lot of our people are part time, military members, and their full time civilian members, so we provide an awful lot of capability for a very small share of cost.
Air Force Reserve Command CIO Colonel John Hayes
Watch the video
May 15th, 2007
CIO Sessions: San Francisco Giants CIO Bill Schlough
In this CIO Sessions interview, SF Giants CIO Bill Schlough outlines his multiple roles, managing back-end operations for the business of Giants baseball and AT&T Park and applying technology to improve profits and player performance and development with sophisticated digital video systems. He also talks about the free wireless access provided throughout the one million square-foot baseball park and contactless, RF-based concession payment terminals that will pave the way for a wallet-less experience.
He also shows off the new $3 million, high-definition scoreboard that stands 103 feet long and about 21 feet wide, and delivers what he called "eye popping content" to give fans a visual experience similar to what they can get with a high-end home theater system–just in time for the 2007 All Star game.
Other CIO Sessions:
Churchill Downs CIO: Jay Rollins
April 30th, 2007
CIO Sessions: Alcatel-Lucent's Ray Gilbert
In a CIO Sessions interview, Ray Gilbert, assistant vice president for IT Enterprise Collaboration at Alcatel Lucent discusses how the telecom services provider is addressing mobility needs and convergence challenges for the next generation of devices.
Churchill Downs CIO: Jay Rollins
March 26th, 2007
CIO Sessions: Chris Vein, City of San Francisco
San Francisco's CIO Chris Vein calls himself an "accidental CIO." His background includes working in and around the White House during Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations. For the city of San Francisco, Vein's political background has turned out to be an important asset. He is the first CIO of the city and county of San Francisco, which has a 150-year history of having individual departments that don't necessarily work well together, which isn't all that dissimilar from corporations with various fiefdoms…or government agencies.
"What I am trying to do is take 60 different departments within the city, and varying degrees of technology, varying degrees of control, and varying degrees of money and trying to come up with a common plan for the city and then based on that plan, come up with a rational way of identifying what we should be spending our money on and how we are going to spend it," Vein told me during video interview. He is applying his team of 330 people and about a $100 million budget to transform the operations of the city.
During our interview, Vein also shares his plans to upgrade outdated ERP systems, provide e-government for the people of San Francisco, bridge the digital divide and deliver affordable, municipal Wi-Fi Internet access to city residents.
Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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