deal architect

The expansive role of the Chief Digital Officer

Five years ago when I was writing about GE for The New Polymath, one of their executives casually described someone as “analog, not digital ”. It was meant to be unflattering and I knew then the term “digital” would be something to strive for in corporate world.

Three years ago for The New Technology Elite, I interviewed (for me) my first Chief Digital Officer, Vjay Ravindran at the Washington Post Co. He had brought an Amazon background to the entity which was evolving from a media company into a broader technology company which offers cable, online education, social media and other services. He has been described as “sort of like a 39-year-old Don Graham, but capable of speaking code.” Extremely impressive executive and I knew his title would be mimicked across the world.

Sure enough the CDO title has taken off. But as I interviewed customers for the recent book, The Digital Enterprise, I was struck by how wide a swath the role covers. In talking to companies like GE and Nissan, the digital opportunity is in smarter products and services – technology embedded in them. In talking to CPG companies like Coca Cola Enterprises, the emphasis was on digitization of the customer channel. In  talking to banks and insurance companies like Standard Chartered and Allianz, the focus on digital security and privacy came through very clearly. In talking to companies in industries like travel and media which have been ravaged by technology upheaval, the intense focus is on business model innovation for the digital world. In talking to several companies in Germany where the term Industrie 4.0 is a watchword, the digitization of the shop floor and logistics via robotics, telematics and other technologies came out strong.

I see many marketing executives covet the CDO title. That’s healthy as social marketing, mobile advertising and digital displays and catalogs take off.  But the CDO opportunity is way past just a customer focus. If they do not have or are willing  to also adopt the  digital product, security, shop floor mindset  as well, I am afraid their peers will soon be calling them “analog”.

Only the paranoid thrive

The EU may be upset with the Russians these days. But European – and US -executives are more worried about Russian cyber criminals especially as details of the Target data breach emerge. A growing number of CIOs continue to invest in anti-virus and malware software only because their auditors and regulators require them even as they see decreasing payback from that investment. US DoD is increasingly worried about “spectrum warfare”   It is a infosec market in massive transition.

And it offers a massive opportunity.

I  was talking to a services executive recently and he sees a significant practice opportunity in enterprise security. If he can find the people who have themselves made that transition.

Where do you find them? In Israel, where PM Netanyahu has been talking about the cyber security assets he can offer the world.  In Estonia, where NATO has its cyber security center (and which has endured other cyber attacks in past). In other parts of E. Europe if you can trust the backgrounds of those active in hacker communities. In various telcos around the world. In various banks. In various intelligence agencies.

Sure you can hire individuals or small teams. But where do you build them at scale? We need a new type of paranoid IT professional. Who’s also good at pattern recognition. And good at investigation and rapid follow through. 

In time  we will have enough of them. But we need them sooner. Much sooner.

Smart–and Dumb –Big Data

The Software AG theme at CeBIT was “smart big data” – using analytics and processes much more intelligently

I have been thinking on the trip about two very smart set of services and two shockingly inefficient ones.

1a) I called American Express before I left the US to notify them of my travels. The agent says I need not have called. My ticket and past travels would have allowed them to make the appropriate risk assessment. Nice!

1b) Probably lulled by that experience with Amex and the fact that there are plenty of European transactions on the bank account I did not notify Bank of America of my travels. Withdraw some money at an ATM in Germany and 24 hours later they leave me a message they have locked the account and I should call.  So I sign into our account on-line and chat with an agent. Even though I have gone through the on-line authentication he asks more questions and I assure him the withdrawal was legit. After 20 minutes he decides I need to call in, not chat. He gives me a toll free number. I tell him that will not work from Germany so he gives me a 602 area code number and says I call collect. The AT&T operator tells me that number will not accept charges so we try the number at back of card. They accept the charge but after 5 transfers I cannot get to a human and hang up. I tweet BofA and they insist they need to speak with me. I send them my Irish mobile number and they call me 48 hours later. Three times I am told the call is being recorded, then ask more authentication  questions (tell us a landmark building near your US address and when I tell him about a well known local school he fumbles to find it on his Google Maps)  and the usual spiel of you should have notified us before leaving the country. I ask him if he had bothered to check how many international transactions show on the account.   He asks if he can call me again at my US number and I nearly lost it saying you just reached me in Germany. It was so poorly done I asked for a audio file of the call. “We have no way of doing that” – seriously after telling me 3 times it was being recorded. Think of the wasted BofA employee time and customer aggravation if they do this every time some one travels. 

2a) I book train travel on DB Bahn in the US. The ticket shows detail of train, platform where we can board it, our compartment and seat numbers. At the platform they have a Wagenstandanzeiger chart which tells you the approximate zone your compartment will stop at, and the zones are clearly marked on the platform so everyone can board smoothly, without too much rushing around. On board the train, the attendant scans the code on your printout and swipes your credit card to confirm it is you. The process is remarkably efficient – I went into a DB Bahn office to check if my printout was all we needed but even that was unnecessary. Considering the languages and currencies involved it is impressive how little human assistance is needed in the whole process.

2b) On a Delta ticket, we get to fly from Frankfurt to Dublin on Air France. That involves a stop in Paris. No big deal. All 3 terminals seem recently constructed or renovated. Very high quality and in every one of them Air Frances buses us to/from a plane parked away from the terminal. In Paris and in Dublin we have to get our passports stamped ( whatever happened to one stamp while entering the Union?). Our boarding passes go through 3 scanners and six sets of agents during the journey. All in the name of “security”  and I am thinking they are actually driving us within 50 yards of countless 747s and A320s and A340s worth billions?  The travel time on DB Bahn was longer than the flight time on Air France. Yet we probably interfaced with 10X more airline ground staff, airport bus drivers, immigration officials than on the train. Ok, so you say airlines need more security? Well digest this - as news focuses on stolen passports on the missing Malaysian Airlines 777 it is becoming known that Interpol has a database of 40 million stolen passports but that only few consulates/airlines in countries like the US, UK and UAE bother to check against it.

Two highly efficient, smart processes and smart uses of Big Data – two highly inefficient ones masquerading as needed to protect us from who knows what.

Harmonize this!

At CeBIT, two of the keynoters were David Cameron who announced a 5G initiative  (he also talked about progress in UK rural broadband in another session) and Neelie Kroes who had negotiated roaming charge limitations within the EU.

Seriously, I wish one of their staff had been with us for the last ten days as we tried to get broadband at multiple European locations for my laptop and my wife’s iPad. Next time, I will get an European MiFi (from a provider like Tep) but this was a good sample of inconsistent set of mobile data and pricing across the Continent:

a) Marriott, Frankfurt – via MyCloud. Complimentary with my Marriott membership level. Nice that it supported multiple devices and the speeds were acceptable – 5 mbps down, 4 up.  We did have to repeatedly sign in

b) ICE train, Frankfurt to Hannover – by Telekom for EU 4.95 for day. Somewhat intermittent especially through tunnels (but much better than on Amsterdam-Brussels line I had taken a few years ago)

c) CeBIT, Hannover – none of their reps seemed to know their hotspot password so I tried the Telekom credentials I had paid for on train earlier in day. Would not work. So, I paid a premium rate on my US Boingo plan – about EU7 for an hour.

d) Fora Hotel, Hannover  - they gave us complimentary access to a Swisscom hotspot. Poor speeds and frequent need to sign back  in

e) WorldCoffee, Hannover – paid EU 1 for an hour for each of us. Dropped 3-4 times and not available at all the last 20 minutes

f) DB Bahn, Hannover station – offered 30 minutes free with access code sent to your mobile number with Telekom. Unbelievably the menu which recognizes all kinds of remote locations did not allow us to enter an EU country, Ireland. We are using Irish SIM cards during our travels.

g)  ICE train,  Hannover to Frankfurt – Telekom would not accept ATT email addresses (something competitive? ) and the set up took 10 minutes. Service much poorer than on way down at EU 4.95.

h) Hilton Garden Inn, Frankfurt Airport – complimentary via iBAHN. Supported 3 devices simultaneously. 5 mbps down, 16 up.  Viber call from our daughter was pretty clear. Overall best service while in Germany only tempered by fact that the wired iBAHN terminal in business center seemed to be on a 14.4 modem. Took ten minutes to print boarding passes – should have taken 2.

i) Air France A 319 Frankfurt to Paris CDG – no service. On longer flights, Air France has started to offer a service via Panasonic Avionics.

j) CDG Airport, Paris – the airport offers 15 minutes free. Don’t laugh at the stinginess. I could barely use for 5 minutes  given the walking and bussing that has become the CDG experience. And it asks for your email address which if you are not careful to opt out of can get you on marketing lists

k) Dublin airport – Free wifi from Eircom. No email, no phone info required.  But poor speeds – less than 1MBPS up and down.

l) O2 Clear Broadband – at my sister-in-laws near Longford – 4mb down, 1 up first evening. Second evening ( a Friday), the service was mostly down.  She pays EU 20 a month for a 15GB data allowance.  O2 allows consumers to test service for 7 days, then you are stuck with a 18 month commitment without a real SLA.

m) Herterich Food Hall, Longford  – free with my cappuccino. Four mornings in row about  30 mbps down, 5 up service from Crossan CableComm. Best service anywhere on my travels. 

n) UPC Galway – at the place of my wife’s niece who goes to university there. 27 mbps down, 3 up

0) Radisson Dublin Airport – Swisscom wifi – 12 mbps down, 4 up.

Who would have thought a little store in little Longford on the edge of the continent would have the best service on the trip? That nicely summarized the wide diversity in broadband EU citizens and visitors enjoy.

Vibrant Frankfurt

I have been to Frankfurt countless times, but I have an unfair, bland view of the city possibly because so much of the time has been spent at the sprawling city that is FRA airport.

Spending a beautiful spring day and a half in the city with my wife showed me  aspects of the city’s many interesting and innovative sides

Städel Museum

Skyline Plaza

Samsung at Ziel Center

Other interesting sights and sounds

I will never call it a boring city again!

Ubiquitous Technology

At New Florence, the coverage covers a wide swatch including health tech, greentech, nanotech so end up researching obscure journals and magazines for stories.

But you have to scan today’s USA Today, a mainstream newspaper, to see how tech coverage is showing up everywhere

• Cover story on a Russian cyber criminal
• Coverage on next week’s SXSW and focus on digital privacy
• Net Neutrality and information superhighway
• Target’s data breach
• Infant sleep machines
• Comment trolls on the Web
• Review of tech enabled cameras and appliances 

1+ Microsoft

One of the most exciting takeaways from the Microsoft Fall Analyst session was a focus on One Microsoft as I wrote here.

Coming to their Convergence event in Atlanta this week especially with the backdrop of executive transitions happening in Redmond,  I expected a bit of a regress to tactical messages. I expected more localized, VAR channel comfort zone talk and a bit of Magic Quadrant messaging and bashing of ERP and CRM competitors. 

I was wrong.

Mike Erhenberg kicked off a pre-event analyst briefing spending nearly 30 minutes on the evolving Microsoft mission statement

Create a family of devices and services for individuals and businesses that empower people around the globe at home, at work and on the go, for the activities they value most.

In a one-on-one he spent some time on the evolving matrix organization and how different Microsoft units decide who takes  the lead across various initiatives and the cross-unit meetings that are much more common than he has seen in his long Microsoft career.

The terms “devices and services” came up quite often during the event. That’s a crisp distillation of the 7 competencies Microsoft had identified in the Fall event (operating systems, machine learning, natural UI etc.)

Kirill Tatarinov‘s keynote (transcript here, I will add video later when it is available) had many subtle and not so subtle hints of a Microsoft in transition. He highlighted Microsoft’s infrastructure role at the Sochi Olympics. Customers like Delta Air Lines and New Belgium Brewing talked about mobile devices in their flight crew and “Rangers” workforces. The Lotus F1 team discussed sensory analytics from the race track and the use of the Azure cloud. In a customer panel which followed the analyst questions ranged from BYOD and mobile devices to Azure usage. Accenture , not one of  the traditional VARs, was on stage during the Kirill keynote discussing digital enterprises. Judson Althoff, who heads Microsoft’s  North American sales was on stage describing how Microsoft internally uses its CRM in another indicator of the changing Microsoft go-to- market. The core in each segment was about Microsoft apps, and yet so many other devices and services were prominent. In a later one on one with Trek bikes I heard about their use of Azure for Infrastructure and Platform –as-a-service and their device strategy.

In a conversation with Wayne Morris, Corp VP of the MBS unit, he talked about how many MBS VARs were evolving to also offer Office365 and other Azure cloud services. He mentioned collaboration between the Advertising and Online unit with the CRM unit as they work with digital agencies. 

Probably the most reassuring aspect of the move to a more unified Microsoft is the new CEO, Satya Nadella who has rotated through several roles at Microsoft Cloud (Azure, Office365 etc.), Online Services (including Bing) and Dynamics units.

In my 2009 book, The New Polymath, I described examples of companies which were blending infotech, healthtech, cleantecth, nanotech to come up with a brand new set of solutions. The book had sections on Bill Gates’ various health charities. It had a section on Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft’s former CTO, a modern day polymath with his wide range of scientific, gastronomical, archeological and other achievements. It had a section on Microsoft’s’ growing Azure data center investments and innovations.

Microsoft has for a while had on its board, Ford CEO Alan Mulally who is credited with turning around the car maker with its One Ford strategy.

So, all the building blocks have been in place to see Microsoft act like a New Polymath. One Microsoft, its own unique manifestation of the concept, is starting to gather steam.

Learning from Alpha and other Dogs

Who says you cannot learn from airline magazines?

Reading Spirit magazine on a Southwest flight I saw quote below from canine expert Cesar Millan

I think it is also a good way to think of innovation.

Too many back office and infrastructure vendors talk innovation when at the back of the pack they should be cautious and focused on threats – managing risks, on economics, on compliance. Their innovation should come in the form of cloud economics for the back office, analysis of newer business models, staying on top of changing cyber threats, privacy, compliance etc. They should be all over managing cost of IT. And vendors in this space should quit pretending they can deliver what the front of the pack can deliver.

The middle comes from many operational systems which should keep things running smoothly. Easy to say in our fast changing world it means looking at same day deliveries (maybe even same hour with drone deliveries?) , green computing demands on data centers, constantly shifting supply chains and a wide range of industry specific operational changes.

The front has to come from product and customer facing groups. My recent books have shown there is no industry or country where you can survive without ever smarter, IP enabled products and services.  As younger consumers influence more buying decisions, there is intense demand to reengineer sales, marketing and customer service. As more machines enter the workplace, customer service has to evolve to support them.

Each part of the pack has a role to play. Problem is too many forget their roles, get too enamored with their roles and many analysts and partners in their spaces do them a disservice by not pointing that out and in fact encouraging them to be distracted.

“It’s just a website. We’re not going to the moon”

Time (sub required) has a detailed story on the elite team that rescued the HealthCare.gov site. You can feel the intensity of the salvage project, the apolitical results-oriented approach while the mood all around the project was hostile, the relentless use of “stand up” meetings, the brainpower of A+ technicians many of who have helped many Silicon Valley companies scale and scale big. In a few weeks they offset the disaster that teams many times larger and at the job much longer had brewed.

You wonder what if the team had been there a few weeks earlier, how we would not have even heard about the complexity of the project. On the flip side you wonder what if the President had decided to scrap the project and start over – a very real scenario described in the article.

But the critical point the article makes is

“But one lesson of the fall and rise of HealthCare.gov has to be that the practice of awarding high-tech, high-stakes contracts to companies whose primary skill seems to be getting those contracts rather than delivering on them has to change”

The problem is its not just an issue in Washington. Most IT projects have mostly B and C players, many from outsourcers, when they promise the A+ players. And it is not just during implementation projects – it actually gets worse post-live. You have to look at costs of hosting and on-going support of most enterprise apps to see how bad the problem is. Bring an elite team in, and within days they could easily identify ways to cut costs by 50-90%. Trust me that is even less like going to the moon.

But we don’t and in fact encourage such behavior to continue. An example comes from Business Solutions Magazine about the massive Target data breach

“If you haven’t spoken to your retail customers about the Target breach, I recommend you do so immediately. You can bet that they’re reading up on the breach, have all sorts of questions and concerns, and are probably getting solicitations from other solutions providers promising to make them safe and feel secure. Next, offer to improve their data security by using antivirus tools, firewalls, and smart network design.”

Seriously, how many VARs know about the specific variant of the POS virus that is speculated to have been involved, especially since Target has been tightlipped and how many can deliver the A+ quality that could have prevented or quickly limited damage to the tens of millions of cards compromised?

We have to quit encouraging firms whose “primary skill seems to be getting those contracts rather than delivering on them”. As buyers, as industry observers, as vendors.

HealthCare.gov is a wake up call for all of us.

Amazingly diverse industry we live in

When I restarted the Tech and my passion series this January (after over 60 guest columns in 2009) I expected the columns to feature more tech that is ubiquitous in our daily lives.

What is even more impressive is the much wider range of interests people have these days. Enjoy the diversity in the 20 columns so far:

Artisanal Baking – Bill Hewitt

Ironman Triathlons – Bertrand Dussert

Art – Don Berk

Landscape Gardening – Katie Nittler

Digital Art – Jim Sinur

Live to Air Broadcasting – Robert Lavigne

Urban Walks – Giovanni Rodriguez

Working Out - Ben Pring

White-Collar Rock – Krishnan Chatterjee

Target Shooting  - Scott Schenker

Genealogy – Catherine Marenghi

Classic Rock - David Deal

Museums  - Jeanne Achille

Music - Brad Callahan

Environmental Conservation - Mark Crofton

Birding – Margaret Newman

Ham Radio – Peter Coffee

Fitness – Jarret Pazahanick

Hockey – Eric Dirst

Cycling – Nick Hortovanyi