Cio Talk Network Podcast

There is a rapid change in customer expectations, business models, and how work gets done. Yet, from planning demand to building operational capability to establishing a robust partner ecosystem support, many businesses still depend on principles enshrined as best practices decades ago. How can we rethink and shift our business planning and delivery efforts to more realistic scenario-driven models that are continually refined based on actual outputs? What is holding organizations back from taking this leap? What can business and IT leaders do collaboratively to enable this shift? Guest 1: Nick Giannakakis Title: Group Chief Information Officer, Motor Oil Guest 2: Jennifer Greenman Title: Chief Information Officer, Cancer Treatment Centers of America For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/shifting-from-a-principle-dependent-to-a-scenario-driven-business/

Supporting the scaling and accelerating digitalization efforts requires rethinking and converging business and IT teams. From cross-training workers for homogenization, integrating workflows, learning and adopting emerging technologies, to navigating through uncertainties together. Where are organizations in this journey? What are the related challenges and remedies that are helping build one cohesive force to deliver Digital? Guest 1: Dennis Hodges Title: Chief Information Officer, Inteva Products, LLC Guest 2: Ronald Blahnik Title: Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Hibbett For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/bringing-business-and-it-together-to-deliver-digital/

An emerging trend may be missed or shunned as speculation when it emanates weak signals or looks like an anomaly. But, waiting for it to become a conspicuous trend could cost you the race with your proactive competitors. So, how can organizations build heightened sensing capabilities to discern promising trends even if the signals are weak and stay ready to execute timely to gain a significant competitive advantage? Guest 1: Nashira Layade Title: Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Realogy Guest 2: Borre Ulrichsen Title: Chief Information Officer, Gonzaga University For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/turning-weak-signals-into-strong-competitive-advantage/

With management looking to find ways to optimize operating costs leveraging digitalization while expecting clear and positive ROI from such technology investments, where should an organization invest in IT vs. scale back? What if investing in digital transformation is the only way left to desirable cost optimization? Guest: Robert Ford Title: Chief Information Officer, Northwest University For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/funding-it-when-digital-is-the-default/

What if you could assemble your organization like LEGO® puzzles, where each product or service as a business block could be coupled with a compatible IT block. And do it in a way where you could build, buy, or lease these blocks to achieve a lean and on-demand setup that is scalable and extensible without compromising the quality of business operation and customer experience. What does it take to build such capability? Guest: Daniel Blanchard Title: Chief Technology Officer, IHG Hotels & Resorts For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/assembling-business-and-it-capabilities-like-a-lego-puzzle/

In light of recent global disruption, you are asked to step up, leaving your comfort zone. How well have you adapted to adversity without any judgment or avoidance? With the spotlight on you to deliver, have you stayed empathetic? Did you admit mistakes, took criticism, and did it all in stride, recognizing the risk and emotional exposure? If not, what held you back? Where do you need help? Guest 1: Lungile Mginqi Title: Group Chief Information Officer, Sasol Guest 2: Michael Ruttledge Title: Chief Information Officer, Citizens Bank For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/are-you-a-daring-leader/

The pharma companies are juggling multiple priorities like improving R&D, establishing a presence in global markets, and investing in digital transformation initiatives to move beyond the pill, find new revenue streams, and handle changing customer’s expectations for personalization. Pandemic further complicated the issues with delayed product launches, reduced in-person sales visit potential, supply chain disruption, and delays in drug commercialization. So how are the pharma industry players dealing with this perfect storm? What’s the road to relevant, profitable, and future-ready pharma? Guest: Minori Hara Title: Chief Information Officer and Head of Digital & IT Division, Santen Pharmaceutical For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/road-to-relevant-profitable-and-future-ready-pharma/

A hybrid work environment is here to stay. How did you motivate and engage people and lead a team you can’t see face-to-face all the time? How did you ensure effective communication, collaboration, trust-building, and ensuring accountability? What current leadership approaches and skills you used helped or hurt as you lead your troops in the hybrid work environment? How should we develop future leaders for this new paradigm? Guest 1: Rajeev Ravindran Title: Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Ryder System Guest 2: John Kolb Title: Vice President for Information Services and Technology & Chief Information Officer, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/building-future-leaders-for-hybrid-work-environment/

Your business needs to be resilient that bounces back from disruptions and adversity. You also want to make sure that you are relevant now since the future is uncertain. Should you focus on automation, go remote, digitalize your offerings, promote self-service, and discard any people, processes, and technology that don’t fit your current agenda? How to build an elastic, people-centric business that’s focused on what’s vital now while getting future-ready? Guest 1: Bhavana Devulapally Title: Senior Vice President & Chief Information Office, Ventas Guest 2: Maurice Ferrell Title: Assistant Dean & CIO, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill- School of Government For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/building-an-elastic-people-centric-business-focused-on-now

Is your organization ensuring data security and privacy sufficiently and practicing race and gender diversity and inclusion effectively? Are your business practices ethical and transparent? Is worker health and safety getting the same focus and investment as product safety and quality? If such social and environmental issues are supported by a business properly, customers are willing to help, and employees are more likely to stay engaged. What is your organization doing to fulfill this increasing demand to become a more environmentally and socially conscious enterprise? How can IT help? Guest 1: Todd Britton Title: Chief Information Officer and Associate Vice President, IT, University of La Verne Guest 2: Helen Norris Title: Chief Information Officer, Chapman University For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/enabling-an-environmentally-and-socially-conscious-enterprise

As an IT leader, you strive to create an environment where people can learn, grow, inspire, and innovate. But to deliver on this promise, how are you building and sustaining a bottom-up culture, where each member of your team has a voice, empowered to make decisions, and motivated to create innovative and practical solutions to solve challenges and exploit business growth opportunities? And, how are you embedding resilience, so it stands the tests of business and life-changing disruptions like the pandemic? Guest 1: Faith Burn Title: Chief Information Officer, Eskom Holdings Guest 2: Michael Hites Title: Chief Information Officer, Southern Methodist University Guest 3: Kevin Gray Title: Chief Information Officer, City of Burbank For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/building-a-disruption-proof-bottom-up-it-culture

Business leaders are looking to lessen the impact of current global disruption while fortifying against future ones. They want to acquire new capabilities quickly through mergers and acquisitions, reimagine customer relationship building, and improve their cybersecurity posture to minimize risk while controlling costs. How well are IT and Security leaders supporting this business reinvention effort? Guest: Ketan Pandit Title: Chief Information Officer, QBE North America For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/supporting-business-reinvention-to-alleviate-global-disruptions

It is one thing to envision an AI concept, develop a prototype, and take it to production. It is another to scale such efforts to build and manage a robust enterprise-grade AI pipeline. How can organizations adopt product engineering, lifecycle management, and governance disciplines to scale AI efforts ensuring performance and reliability? Guest 1: Mark Miller Title: Chief Information Officer, Party City Guest 2: Prasanna Kumar Burri Title: Group Chief Information Officer, Dangote Industries For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/steps-to-scaling-ai

From timely patient diagnostics, proper treatment to reliable recovery, vision can play a critical role in enhancing patient care, which requires reliable, compatible, cost-effective, energy-efficient, and high-performing vision technology solutions. Whether it is diagnostic imaging, medical carts, or pill dispensers, embedded vision can change the game. However, due to inadequate knowledge in camera technology, lack of technical and engineering expertise, supply chain fragmentation, and improper device support, medical device companies struggle to incorporate vision in their products timely and confidently. Starting from defining a vision playbook to establishing camera integration standards, how can we shape this much-needed, rapidly growing vision ecosystem to drive the best outcomes for the patients, providers, and medical device companies? Guest: Maharajan Veerbahu Title: Co-Founder & Vice President of Embedded Services, e-con Systems For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.c

If appropriately harnessed, even the small ideas can lead to a big impact on the way we acquire, serve, and retain our customers. But how to keep those ideas coming, testing them, and operationalizing the ones that show promise timely? But, how to do so despite the constraints posed by significant disruptions like the pandemic? Guest 1: Miao Song Title: Global Chief Information Officer - Petcare, MARS Guest 2: Byron Clymer Title: Chief Information Officer, Lockton Companies For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/from-small-ideas-to-big-impact

From fighting health care inequality to expanding access to medicines, from stopping infectious diseases to keeping healthcare clean, and from preparing for future epidemics to gaining public trust, the World Health Organization and the public health departments worldwide have a critical task at hand. The recent pandemic showed us that there is a complex journey ahead into an unpredictable future. How are the World Health Organization (WHO) and the national public health departments worldwide working together to harness available resources and innovative technologies to deliver on their promises? Guest: Bernardo Mariano Junior Title: Chief Information Officer and Director of the Department of Digital Health & Innovation, World Health Organization For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/delivering-on-the-world-health-promise

How well is your organization able to support its workers as they ride an emotional roller coaster due to losses in the family, disrupted life conditions, and burnout at work? How are you balancing your efforts and investments toward employee wellbeing with the task or reenergizing and realigning your organization’s priorities to stay sustainable and profitable as a business? Guest 1: Kathleen Larkin Title: Senior Vice President & Chief Human Resources Officer, South Jersey Industries Guest 2: Samuel Sudhakar Title: Chief Information Officer and Vice President for Information Technology Services, California State University, San Bernardino For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/balancing-employee-and-business-wellbeing

While IT is always seen as enabling business transformation and related initiatives, but not always does it elevate its status as a partner. Is there a playbook one can use to effectively enable the transformation journey to earn that stripe. Guest: Leonard Brinson Title: Vice President and Chief Information Officer, South Jersey Industries For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/steps-to-effectively-enabling-business-transformation-to-earn-a-partner-status-for-it

The often shifting sales tax rules and regulations in over 14,000 state and local tax jurisdictions in the USA make sales tax compliance management a daunting task. Supporting ongoing manual changes to 3rd party on-premise business applications increases the burden on IT teams already juggling multiple priorities. Sovos claims its technology solution eliminates this burden on IT and grants the tax and finance departments complete autonomy to handle indirect tax processes, timely and valid sales and use tax self-assessments, accurate reporting, and exemption certification across jurisdictions. Is this claim too good to be true? Can the Sovos solution hold up to scrutiny and deliver on the sales taxation agility promise? Guest 1: John Landy Title: Chief Technology Officer, Sovos Guest 2: Terry Melnik Title: General Manager, Sales and Use Tax, Sovos For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/can-sovos-enable-it-to-streamline-sales-tax-controls-and-future-proof-your-tax-compliance

Running a relevant business with a competitive edge today requires a scalable, reliable, and secure operation ready to support the future of work. One where remote and on-the-go employees, powered by seamless digital collaboration and secure access to data and applications, have the clarity and confidence to meet your customer demands. One that simplifies and consolidates productivity platforms and solutions that helps them discover the freedom to work and create value, any time and anywhere, and enjoy the work-life balance they want at the same time. And one that allows you to respond to market changes quickly and effectively. How can you build such a resilient and future-fit business that grows at the speed of change? Guest: Sireesha Mandava Title: Chief Information Officer and VP of Innovation, GreenPath Financial Wellness For more details and related content: https://www.ciotalknetwork.com/remote-work-is-here-to-stay-how-to-make-it-scalable-and-secure