CIO Talk Radio

Guest: Todd Coombes Title: Senior Vice President, Chief Information Officer, CNO Financial Group, Inc. Each day that passes, we see a more volatile, uncertain, and complex business world, evolving. While we struggle mightily to sustain our current existence, and perhaps eke out some incremental growth as we travel along, what is our plan to handle the road farther ahead? How are CEOs, CIOs, and other members of business leadership planning to handle a future of possibilities and challenges?

Guest: Chris Patrick Title: Global CIO Practice Leader, Egon Zehnder Guest: Dr. Salvatore R. Maddi Title: Professor of Psychology & Social Behavior, School of Social Ecology, UC Irvine We expect any career path to show increasing responsibility and acknowledgement by peers, but in a chaotic and uncertain business environment, careers can go wrong for any number of reasons. If adversity is a test of character, what about the trauma of losing one's title as CIO? When an IT leader falls from grace, how does he or she re-establish a career and regain lost ground?

Guest: Brenda Decker Title: Chief Information Officer, State of Nebraska Guest: J. Stephen Fletcher Title: Chief Information Officer and Executive Director of the Department of Technology Services, State of Utah, and President of NASCIO Right sizing IT staffing starts with a strategy roadmap for achieving business goals. Both IT and HR must identify and agree on the GAP between on-hand resources versus anticipated needs. Essentially there needs to be a plan and a process to maintain ideal staffing levels for business continuity, but how do you keep this on-going? Is that even possible?

Guest: Tom Coleman Title: Chief Information (CIO) and Process Officer (CPO), Sloan Valve Guest: V.S. Parthasarathy Title: Group CIO, Executive Vice President, Finance, M&A, Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd. It’s been suggested that the role of the CIO is ready for a shift from “managing” information to optimizing the processes that uses the information. This defines a real a paradigm shift, one that drives change throughout the organization and could potential reduce costs company-wide, not just in IT. But how does a CIO make this shift and what changes and accommodations are required to make this change?

Guest: Dr. Melodie Mayberry-Stewart, Ph.D. Title: New York State Chief Information Officer, Director of the Office For Technology Guest: John Baldoni Title: Executive Coach, Leadership Educator/Author Guest: Stephen J. Laster Title: Chief Information Officer, Harvard Business School For the CIO to deliver real business growth, handle sensitive business/IT partnerships, and make complex technology decisions, he or she needs to be backed by a high performance IT team. What do you need and how do you go about building, training, and motivating a high performance IT team?

Guest: Dale Langley Title: Chief Information Officer, US Xpress Guest: Jagdish Belwal Title: CIO, Tata Motors There is a huge positive impact to the business if a new capability or product is introduced sooner rather than later. Referred to as "time to value," how can IT make a measurable contribution to reducing the length of this time?

Guest: Frank. Wander Title: SVP and Chief Information Officer, The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America Guest: Zahid Afzal Title: EVP and Chief Information Officer, Huntington Bank The optimal IT program/project portfolio is one that delivers the most value at the least cost that can be successfully exploited as long there is enough agility and flexibility to capitalize on the opportunities in a timely manner that avoids market volatility. Is this an achievable goal? If not...how close can we get to it?

Guest: Arun Rajan Title: Chief Technology Officer, Zappos.com Guest: Joe Eng Title: Chief Information Officer, JetBlue Airways Guest: Robert Webb Title: Chief Information Officer, Hilton Worldwide The increasing technical complexity of support today demands teamwork spanning not only the whole corporation but outside as well. To reach the highest service/support goals it may be necessary to reach out to external partners, developers, and even other customers. How can IT pull all these people from so many different business constituencies together into a virtual "village" to really resolve customer problems?

Guest: Randall N. Spratt Title: Executive Vice President, Chief Information Officer and Chief Technology Officer, McKesson Corporation Guest: Tony Bender Title: VP and Chief Information Officer, Alberto Culver BPI initiatives can significantly benefit organizations, by improving customer acquisition and retention, by improved worker productivity, by cost optimization, and improved risk management. So, should improving business processes be among the most important priorities for IT leaders? Are they interested and/or empowered enough to drive/lead such initiatives or are they better off working as enablers?

Guest: Emily Ashworth Title: Vice President and Chief Information Officer, American Water Works Guest: Nasser Farshchian Title: SVP and Chief Information Officer at McJunkin Red Man Holding Corporation Many CIO’s are passionate, talented, and motivated but feel limited in effectiveness, by organizational politics, policy and culture. What if they were given full, unrestricted freedom to think, act, and perform as they thought fit? That is, to act as if they were an unbiased outsider with full authority and a mandate to make the necessary changes they see, as needed? How could we enable this kind of freedom to transform an organization and bring unprecedented growth and profitability! Is this truly unrealistic?

Guest: Steven Rubinow Title: Executive Vice President & Chief Information Officer, NYSE EURONEXT Guest: Tom Fountain Title: Chief Information Officer, Bunge Ltd. Collective Intelligence is a mix of cloud computing and crowd computing where both infrastructures are working optimally. However, cloud computing has issues related to security and privacy, while crowd computing solutions still need improvement in the way they moderate opinion, resolve conflict, and check facts. If we could just get past these issues, we could create a powerful collective intelligence out of a symbiotic relationship of computers, software, and humans. Is this possible? What would it take to make it happen?

Guest: John Goodman Title: Author of Strategic Customer Service, Co-founder Tarp Worldwide Guest: Matthew Lampe Title: Chief Information Officer, Los Angeles Department of Water & Power Selling is tough and keeping buyers/students/patients happy is even tougher. Today's consumers are demanding. They want support anytime, anywhere, including diagnostics and fast problem resolution. In the age of 24/7 customer tweeting what does it take to keep buyers happy? How do we measure the ROI of our investments in support people, processes, and technologies? What can we do to continually enhance the ROI of such investments?

Guest: Fernando Martinez, MS, CHCIO, FHIMSS Title: Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Jackson Health System, Miami Florida Guest: Sandra Palumbo Title: Research Fellow, The Yankee Group Guest: Scott Lundstrom Title: Group Vice President, IDC Health Insights We value Cloud computing because it offers significant scalability and cost savings, but is that motivation enough for Healthcare to move to cloud? If money were not a constraint, what would be the best roadmap? What are some of the obvious and hidden challenges that we need to overcome? What has been tried and worked (or failed) so far?

Guest: Gerald W. Shields Title: Senior Vice President, Chief Information Officer, Aflac Incorporated Guest: Peter Ostrow Title: Research Director for Sales Effectiveness, Aberdeen Group How can IT help sales to inform, interact with, and impress customers? What tools can it provide, and how can it enable sales to use these tools more effectively? Some sales departments might value more sales. How can IT facilitate this goal?  Another sales department might prefer bigger margins on the sales in hand. How could IT facilitate this goal?  How can IT help sales’ bottom line?

Guest: Gene Leganza Title: Vice President, Principal Analyst, Forrester Guest: Sheila Jordan Title: VP of Communication & Collaboration IT, CISCO Social media is changing how we communicate, live our lives, and do business. So, how hard is it for an IT leader to rewire enterprise architecture and embed social media at business process and technology levels? You can’t just slap these tools onto what’s there. If these tools are to become integral to business process, people, and technology, they have to be built-in. How do you do that? How big an investment is this likely to be, and what are the risks? Are the challenges and costs worth it?