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IBM's CIO Helps Enable The Cognitive Enterprise

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Fletcher Previn is the youngest chief information officer in the history of IBM. He rose to the role in May after having spent 11 years at the company. He sees his role as helping to make his colleagues productive, to attract top talent, to be the digital front-end of the cultural transformation that IBM is ushering in, and to do all of this in a secure manner.

It is a fifth area that may be the source of highest value, however. Previn notes that his department has a role to play in ushering in the cognitive enterprise. This dovetails with the company's focus on artificial intelligence through its Watson unit, but Previn notes that his team is working on artificial intelligence and machine learning initiatives independently, as well.

(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this linkThis is the 44th interview in the CIO’s First 100 Days seriesTo read future articles in the series, please follow me on Twitter @PeterAHigh.) 

Peter High: You have been the Chief Information Officer of IBM since May of this year. How did you find out that you were going to be selected as the CIO of IBM? Likewise, what sort of preparations did you go through before taking on the role?

Credit: IBM

Fletcher Previn: I had worked in the IT Department at IBM for some time and had supported two previous CIOs in various capacities. One was a kind of Chief of Staff role, and the other was an executive capacity running the workplace and service and back-office functions. I had a pretty good sense of what the job would entail. That allowed me to hit the ground running and have less lead time in terms of getting up to speed and being able to execute our strategy.

High: Once you took the role, to what extent was it a case of continuing with the strategy versus refashioning it in various ways?

Previn: I would say it is a combination. In terms of changes that I am implementing and strategies that we are continuing, I am a hundred percent committed to continuing to embrace agile ways of working. Similarly, we committed to continuing to strive to provide a productive environment to our roughly 380,000 employees around the globe. Anytime you take a new job like that, it is a good opportunity to take stock of what our purpose and mission are.

As it pertains to IT at IBM or the Office of the CIO, we have a deceptively simple purpose. It is difficult to execute but it is easy to articulate. First and foremost, we must create a productive environment for IBMers. Second, to enhance IBM's ability to attract and retain top talent. Third, to be the digital front-end of the culture transformation that our chairman is trying to effect throughout the company. Fourth, to enable the cognitive enterprise and everything that goes with that; Watson technology, AI, machine learning and otherwise. Last but certainly not least, to protect IBM's information as well as that of our customers.

We spend a lot of time in IBM thinking about IT as a driver of culture change. In a lot of ways, culture is the new currency. Said more simply, our mission in IT is to empower every person at IBM. Every person in the CIO office understands that they are working in service of the IBMer and our clients. IBM is a company of purpose, and if you look at the breadth of the types of work that IBM is involved in with our clients, it is inspiring. We know that is one of the main reasons people come to work at IBM.

High: Could you talk a bit more about culture. Peter Drucker had the famous quote, that culture eats strategy for breakfast. It is certainly the important part of what you are enabling and as you say, part of the chairman's broader mission. Could you define IBM’s cultural transformation, and also talk about IT’s role in that?

Previn: IT's role is supporting and unlocking the creativity inside the organization and helping everybody achieve their potential. What is a company? It is ultimately a collection of people. Companies succeed or fail on the basis of their people. Culture is a function of how work gets done. We focus on making sure that we are working towards achieving the right kind of culture. Over time, people try to steal your technology, but it is difficult to steal someone else's culture.

For all the reasons you mentioned, we are intensely focused on that as we think about IT as equal parts technology and culture. It is critically important that we are building teams of people who are passionate about their craft and curious. This is not a transactional arrangement, it is important that there is a higher purpose of being here. At the end of the day, we are looking to hire people who are kind, passionate about their craft and committed to IBM's purpose of being a company of innovation that matters and that provides value to clients.

High: You mentioned enabling cognitive, and there has certainly been a lot written about IBM's focus on AI and more specifically Watson. Can you talk about what IT is doing to enable that?

Previn: What we call cognitive is AI and machine learning combined with industry knowledge and security running on our cloud. Cognitive is not just another feature of technology, but may in fact be the ultimate technology. You have a situation today where Moore's Law has been true since 1965. I think the first computer had a few thousand transistors in it, and a current video game in a console in your living room has somewhere around seven billion. When you start to compound on a large base, you start to get some interesting capabilities.

The ability for us to leverage Watson to reason over large data sets and assist humans in making better decisions is going to completely change every aspect of our work lives and our personal lives in a positive way. We have been heavily invested in blockchain solutions as well as using Watson to help us with large data sets such as helping our help desk agents sift through the records on every call to get to the right answer more quickly. We also use Watson technology to improve the search effectiveness of our internal Internet as well as ibm.com.

On the blockchain front, we have a lot of projects underway internally and externally. For example, we have a global financing group that provides financing to thousands of IBM business partners and suppliers. Occasionally, you have disputes or goods not received and partners cannot pay their invoices. Typically, they would file a dispute and then settle once the issue is resolved. Further complicating that process, business partners sometimes use different systems which might not be compatible with each other. There is a long labor-intensive process that at any given time can have north of a hundred million dollars tied up in the system. Our team used agile methods and launched the MVP of a blockchain solution and treatment using the Hyperledger Fabric running on the IBM cloud. We created a trusted network which allows only members to share information with each other. Those are the sorts of technologies we are bringing to bear. Over time, every part of the IT portfolio will be enhanced with cognitive technologies in some way.

High: I am always fascinated by CIOs of companies that are tech-centric themselves. Typically, CIOs lead departments that have the preponderance of IT talent within the corporation. Yours is an organization that has a great deal of technical talent outside of IT, and I wonder how you see IT adding special value in light of that.

Previn: There are several parts to that answer. Our mission is to create a productive environment for people. In a company like IBM, that includes a lot of people in research, technical people, people building products, and people engaged in delivery of service to our customers. I benefit from being at a company like that because it means I have access to things like IBM research, IBM's managed security services, IBM's teams that build products and software and then having the IBM cloud as a platform to deliver those. That is certainly a force multiplier on our ability to execute against the mission.

We also partner with all parts of the business that I just mentioned. We partner with IBM Security to help keep IBM safe. We partner with IBM's GBS and GTS Services. We partner with the product teams. We provide input back into things that are being developed for commercial use. When you have an environment with a lot of knowledge workers, it does require some different approaches to how we think about delivering IT services. At a high level, it is a strategy of giving people the right devices and services that are fit for purpose for the job they are trying to do, manage those assets in a modern way and drive self-sufficiency in the environment or self-service. Can I leverage new technologies, new techniques, new ways to provision those services, or activate over the cloud or app stores? Think about the way you manage mobile devices today. Can you manage other assets a similar way. If I do those first two things correctly then I can afford to create world-class support experiences for people and provide the same support experience that is informed from where your consumer life is going.

We still want to provide all of the traditional mechanisms to get help. But increasingly, if things are just simple to use and simple to resolve, a lot of people like the option to be able to self-serve and self-resolve those kinds of problems. I would say this is another big focus for me. We are finding that when we take the time to do the engineering work properly, and infuse the right level of design and UX into the services that we deliver, that people will pull things from us, we do not have to push it on them. When that happens, we create advocates not just for IT, but for our products and services. A lot of the traditional OCM and advocacy and adoption enablement requirements melt away because the service is just easy to consume. In support of that, one of the changes that I did make in the makeup of my direct reports is the addition of a visual design and user experience team.

Going forward, for anything that we build in IT that will be experienced by a lot of people, whether that is a web page, a mobile app, or a desktop application Even an e-mail that we send out to the company, we make sure that it has gone through this design and user experience team to ensure it comes out the other end looking like something from your consumer life, and not like something that you might have expected out of a large enterprise IT shop many years ago. This has a lot to do with the consumerization of IT, or what things look like and how easy they are to consume. There is a famous quote from Thomas Watson, Jr., "Good design is good business." If you look back at some of those products from IBM, the Thinkpad, the Selectric, the mainframe, the system 360, those were stalwarts of industrial design and they are still in books about great design. Translating that into building similarly great software that is easy to use in IT services is a huge focus for me.

High: One of the purposes or missions that you noted was protecting IBM’s Information. I am curious how you organize security and the topics related to that, in light of the fact that yours is an organization that is pushing so much innovation as well.

Previn: We are in every business in every industry, a lot of which are regulated spaces, US federal, public sector, healthcare financial services, or otherwise. We do have a tremendous focus on security. The Internet is increasingly a hostile place and becoming a domain of warfare. I am lucky in that IBM has a world-class managed security services under Marc van Zadelhoff. If you look at the Gartner quadrant, we are a leading provider of managed security services, which I also get to take advantage of internally. We do of course also have a CISO function.

Philosophically, one of the things we have been pursuing is embedding security into everyone's job. If you are involved in the delivery of any kind of IT function, in that squad or group of people that are performing in the function, there is also a focus on security. So, security is part of everybody's job, and people with delivery responsibility cannot be off-boarded to some abstracted third party that is auditing. It has got to be embedded into the day-to-day thinking in the way that we work.

High: IBM has a great number of clients in a variety of different segments; public sector, private sector, various industries. A common client of IBM are your fellow chief information officers. How do you engage CIOs as the CIO of IBM, either as an advocate for what IBM is developing and highlighting your own use, or perhaps other sort of advice that you provide CIOs?

Previn: I always enjoy having the opportunity to hear from IBM clients, and as you know the CIO community tends to have a lot of overlap with IBM’s customer base. Without exception I always learn something new anytime I sit down with a customer, or a CIO or otherwise. In general, I would say even if a customer works in a different industry than I do, in particular when I meet with CIO's there is always a lot of common ground on challenges and goals. Typically, I would say they all want to move all appropriate workloads to the cloud, embrace agile practices, innovate at speed, and bring cognitive technologies to bear in their environments. Within the community of CIO's of large enterprises, from an IT perspective, there is a lot of common ground.

Another big focus for us internally as it pertains to culture is to embrace a culture of listening and learning from others. There is always something high value to be learned in talking to anybody. We need to be focused on what best practices can we bring back into IBM. Do we have our antenna up all the time? Are people connected to what is going on in the industry and what is going on in their community as a focus for us?

I hold myself to the same standard anytime I meet with another CIO or one of our customers, without exception, I get something that is valuable that I can bring back into IBM, and I try to synthesize that into our own environment.

High: A lot was made of your youth when you took on the role. While you are a big older than the millennials, you are not far from them. What perspective do you bring in making IBM a more attractive place to the millennial workforce?

Previn: We know that one of the main reasons people come to IBM is to work at a company of impact and purpose. Whether you are booking travel, using a credit card, buying something at retail, or working in financial services, you are using IBM technology. Some of the more recent work of IBM is involved around Watson oncology and blockchain and there is a lot of exciting technology that is going to impact people's lives, that I think motivates millennials, in particular, to want to work at IBM.

I take seriously my role in helping create a productive environment for IBMers and I care deeply about the company's mission. A lot of that has to do with providing great tooling, creating challenging work for people, solving difficult problems, being made better by the smart people who you work with, and then also having choice. I do not have a formula for creativity, everybody likes to work differently. I do have a formula for no creativity, though, and it looks like locked down, disablement, turning things off, and being prescriptive about how work has to get done. To the extent that we can, we like to pursue an IT strategy of enablement versus enforcement. If you think about it, it is a competitive advantage to be able to have people come to your company and decide what device they want to use or what tools they think are most effective for them. It would be a little bit like if you hired a musician and a person came in and said, “Well I had spent the last 14 years learning how to play the piano.” And you said, “That’s great. Do you mind playing the trumpet while you're here?” They would mind, and a talented person would probably get a job somewhere else. Being in a position to create the environment necessary to attract great talent is a big focus for us.

High: We talked about a number of rising trends, such as aspects of cognitive (AI/ML), blockchain, among others.  I am curious, are there any other sort of rising technology trends that are particularly intriguing to you?

Previn: IoT is certainly interesting, as is everything that is going to come with the collection of massive amounts of sensor data, and how you leverage that data to improve people's lives and work more effectively. Self-driving cars are interesting as well. I do not think it is a huge stretch to say that within our lifetime, it might become illegal to manually drive cars on certain roadways. If you think about it, the human body is engineered to go 10 to 15 miles an hour, maximum. I think there will be a time where people will look back on driving and think it was kind of like a crazy thing people used to do. You would get in a 5,000-pound steel box, go 80 miles an hour down the road, and on an annual basis, 1.4 million people would die doing that. Autonomous vehicles are a technology that has the potential to save millions of lives.

Democratizing access to world-class healthcare will also be transformative, and I briefly mentioned it earlier. If you look at the work that IBM is involved in with Watson for Oncology, it is not possible for every doctor in every local town to be aware of every single drug trial going on and what particular medical treatment is going to have the greatest outcome for your particular genomic makeup and your particular disease. That is going to be a huge contribution to society. Those kinds of things are exciting, and we are right on the cusp of some revolutionary technology. If you are in IT and you are bored, you are just not paying attention to what is going on.

Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. His latest book is Implementing World Class IT Strategy. He is also the author of World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs. Peter moderates the Forum on World Class IT podcast series. He speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @PeterAHigh.