Some chief digital officers (CDOs) have a marketing background, and some come from the start-up world. At Principal Financial Group, where “digital” is a business strategy that uses specific technologies, the CDO has a background in strategy and in IT. Gary Scholten, CIO and CDO at the firm, discusses his dual role and how the…
If you’re an Oracle customer, you’ve probably been invited to move some of your spending with them to a subscription model. Now Oracle wants to make it easier for you to move your own customers to subscription-based pricing too. Oracle Subscription Management is a new cloud application the company unveiled at its OpenWorld event in…
In Sunil Gupta’s book “Driving Digital Strategy,” he explains why incumbents are increasingly struggled as new and nimble players enter their established markets. Disruptors or challengers offer customers new, innovative business models and in many cases redefine long established market boundaries. This poses a significant threat to the old guard especially if they are found…
Cutting-edge companies are turning to artificial intelligence and machine learning to transform how they interact with customers, strengthening those relationships, distinguishing themselves from competitors, and increasing revenues. At the center of this transformation are technologies such as chatbots, recommendation engines, personalized communications, intelligent ad targeting, and image recognition. Gartner analyst John-David Lovelock predicts that AI-derived…
CIOs would love to centralize technology purchasing decisions with a handful of strategic partners, but the reality is that incumbent technology providers can’t always address all of IT’s needs, especially when it comes to emerging technologies. That is why enterprise startups have always played a crucial role in IT portfolios. These days many CIOs regularly…
If you’re looking to beef up your developer teams, don’t discount talent from coding bootcamps. Many bootcamp graduates are eager to make a career change, get back into the workforce after a leave or simply add to their existing coding skills. But how can you gauge the quality of coding bootcamps to ensure you are…
I had the pleasure of speaking with Joe Hayes and Jim Brusnahan on the topic of business relationship management (BRM). Hayes is the CIO at Prudential’s Group Insurance business unit, and Brusnahan is the Director of IT Business Partners at Johnson Controls. Both of these individuals are extremely knowledgeable and supportive of the BRM as…
Most CIOs who have integrated IT systems in a merger of two large enterprises will tell you they’d rather spend an afternoon getting root canals. The challenge, which some CIOs have likened to changing the engine on an airplane while it’s in flight, is to ensure that business doesn’t miss a beat amid complex systems…
It’s a hiring worst-case scenario: A job candidate aces every aspect of the interview process, but after joining the company, they can’t get the job done. Or perhaps worse, the new coworker is capable but so disruptive the rest of the team suffers. It happens. Even when resumes and references check out, the hiring process…
“History is written by the victors,” Winston Churchill famously said. (The irony, I’m sure, was unintentional; Churchill himself being one of those ‘victors’ who, while best known for leading Western Europe through WWII, was a white, straight, cis-het man with violent imperialist ambitions and was unabashedly racist.) In artificial intelligence (AI), too, it seems, future…