Get to know the Premier 100 Class of 2017

Meet the 2017 class of Premier 100 Technology Leaders! Our annual awards program recognizes 100 women and men who have raised the stakes in IT. And this year’s honorees are proof that, more often than ever before, today’s tech leaders are orchestrating a wide variety of complex integration projects, cutting-edge technology rollouts and new business strategies — all while building highly skilled teams that can pivot with shifting business needs.

Read short profiles of each leader, where they answer questions on everything from their boldest predictions about the future of IT to the most innovative new staff idea. Many also discuss their coolest projects, or the initiative that delivered the fastest return on investment. The interests and expertise of this year’s honorees run the gamut from artificial intelligence to mobile apps to data visualization, but they have at least one thing in common: A natural curiosity about technology.

Dimitris K. Agrafiotis

Title Chief data officer and head of technology products

Employer Covance

Location Princeton, N.J.

What emerging tech has captured your interest? Biosensors and wearable technologies that enable continuous capture and monitoring of patient data. We have several ongoing initiatives exploring the scientific, operational and regulatory implications of using mobile health technologies in clinical trials.

An innovative staff idea: A novel self-organizing fragment assembly algorithm for next-generation sequencing. Innovation comes from hiring, nurturing and inspiring elite talent, which I consider my highest priority as a leader.

How are you using reverse-mentoring? Our team makes extensive use of internal social media such as Yammer and Confluence, where we post everything from the latest developments in software technology to science articles and relevant business news. We hire people with exceptional academic training and diverse experiences, interests and skills, who keep pace with technology and share their knowledge freely with one another.

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: Enterprise IT will be fully outsourced and every system will move entirely to the cloud.

New titles in your IT organization: Data scientist, data engineer and software engineer.

Peter L. Ambs

Title CIO

Employer City of Albuquerque

Location Albuquerque, N.M.

Career highlight: Acting as a turnaround CIO for the city of Albuquerque.

An innovative staff idea: Continuing to add open data sets to our open data catalog. Recently we’ve added the ability to request and publish Freedom of Information Act requests online.

New titles in your IT organization: Digital engagement manager responsible for the digital content on city websites and social media.

Personal leadership style? Participative and inclusive, while maintaining accountability of budget, staff and myself.

How do you evaluate emerging technologies? We will prototype and pilot good ideas that show promise of value and return on investment.

How are you working with startups? We partnered with a local civic tech company, APPCityLife, by creating a portfolio of civic apps for Albuquerque. One example is ABQ RIDE, which provides real-time bus location and route schedule information and has transformed how our citizens receive information about our public transportation system.

Peter K. Anderson

Title CIO

Employer Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority

Location Cleveland

Coolest current project: We’ve launched an array of mobile apps, including a mobile ticketing app; an Apple Watch app for the public to submit anonymous tips, complaints or pictures; a robust travel app where customers choose their mode of transportation; and a community app in collaboration with the county.

New titles in your IT organization: IT security engineer and user support architect. We need full-time support to fully establish our IT cybersecurity program and someone to develop and manage a standard architecture for user support for the entire organization since both of these areas are rapidly changing.

Personal leadership style? Supportive and collaborative, with an open door, willing to listen and consider options and suggestions. I don’t assign work that I’m not willing to do if needed. I’m not worried about who gets the credit; I believe employees are responsible for our success.

How has your vendor management strategy changed in the past few years? As technology design, implementation and management have changed, our contracting and vendor management had to change. My government procurements changed from no indemnity clauses to a partnership with vendors; they’re investing much more upfront and it makes sense to share that risk.

Read Anderson’s full profile.

Matthew B. Arvay

Title CIO

Employer City of Phoenix

Location Phoenix (formerly CIO for the city of Virginia Beach, Va.)

Personal leadership style? I strive to cultivate a learning and collaborative environment throughout the department by utilizing an academic and pragmatic approach. Staffers are encouraged to share personal experiences, ideas and knowledge with peers through various channels of communication, workgroups and Centers of Excellence. This builds relationships throughout the department and develops conversations between staff members with various skillsets.

How have you created work/life balance? It’s difficult at times to create a work/life balance when there are so many projects and needs of the organization. But I have been fortunate to work for some great leaders who constantly remind me that we become less productive when we don’t balance our life between the two. So I really make an effort to plan ahead to do things like spending time with my family and dog, playing sports and doing various outdoor activities. With my recent move to Phoenix, I am picking up trail running and hiking as a new activity and I am thoroughly enjoying it!

Sami Ben Jamaa

Title Senior executive officer and CIO

Employer Coca-Cola East Japan

Location Tokyo

What emerging tech has captured your interest? Augmented reality. Though it isn’t classified as emerging technology, per se, AR rightly integrated with business data and cognitive algorithms would deliver on-the-fly simulated and relevant information of the environment without changing “real data.” It’s a way to link a physical element with a transactional system.

An innovative staff idea: A device, built using cheap commodity hardware, to be placed inside vending machines and use public transportation (trains, taxis and buses) or consumers’ smartphones to transmit vending data to the cloud.

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: The industry will be evaluated more for its intangible capital rather than its physical assets and for its economic knowledge rather than its monetary economics. IT technology will capture these untapped thought processes and map them against complex physical algorithms. The computational power (quantum computing) will be unlimited, with virtual brains running every aspect of human life and solving biomedical problems, and a semi-sentient “intelligence as a service” will be an available commodity.

Timothy C. Birdsall

Title Senior vice president of information services and chief medical information officer

Employer Cancer Treatment Centers of America

Location Goodyear, Ariz.

Career highlight: The opportunity to become chief medical information officer at Cancer Treatment Centers of America came at a time when we knew that technology would have a big impact on healthcare. But the medical and technology breakthroughs in the past five years have been both impressive and overwhelming. We are now at a point when routine care requires technology because of the amount of information available and the rate of change. It has been an honor to lead what has become a paradigm shift in oncology for the benefit of our medical staff and our patients.

Biggest tech disappointment? Wearable technology is both a disappointment and an area of great opportunity. The technology isn’t ready to be applied to acute healthcare issues yet. But I do believe that many patients want to integrate real-time application intelligence derived from wearable devices for their health and chronic disease management, rather than relying exclusively on information obtained during periodic physician visits.

Skills you’ll hire for: Data visualization — understanding how to express terabytes of data in a way that can be understood by clinicians and patients is both science and art. We will be looking to hire new talent and train internal staff in this area of growing demand.

Fast ROI project: Our company implemented a payer contract management system to identify billing and payment discrepancies. It integrates denials management, underpayment identification and payer contract management in one platform. Within one month, the system delivered on its investment, and after 10 months, it’s exceeding revenue expectations.

Douglas E. Blackwell

Title Senior vice president and CIO

Employer Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey

Location Newark, N.J.

What emerging tech has captured your interest? The internet of things holds great promise for the healthcare industry. With internet-enabled medication dispensaries, we can monitor adherence, for example. Blood pressure monitors, glucose levels, weight management are all now internet-accessible and can connect patients, doctors and health insurers.

Personal leadership style? I see myself as a collaborative leader, which probably stems from my days working for technology companies. At Horizon, I’ve had to adapt my style to some degree, as is common in any new situation, because each company’s culture is unique.

How has your vendor management strategy changed in the past few years? We migrated from a staff augmentation model to a managed services model, where we hold vendors accountable for the implementation and delivery of products and services. Service-level agreements are established, with financial penalties for nonperformance and the quality of the services, which has resulted in a significant decrease in our vendor costs.

How do you evaluate emerging technologies? I serve on an investment advisory board, and I’m a board member for a private startup that Horizon invested in. Both positions allow me to watch what’s happening in the technology space in general and healthcare specifically.

Brett B. Bonner

Title Vice president, IT Research and Development

Employer Kroger

Location Cincinnati

Career highlight: Working in IT, I have acquired 24 U.S. patents, which along with their inventions contribute nearly $1 billion per year in profit.

What emerging tech has captured your interest? We have completely deployed a foundational internet of things system and heavily utilize 3D printing. I’m always interested in options, computer vision and image understanding.

Coolest current project: EDGE is a full-color digital shelf edge for retailers. The shelf features ultra-high-definition resolution and displays contextual information for shoppers and store associates.

An innovative staff idea: EDGE was additionally enabled as a cloud-capable system.

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: Automated programming systems based on artificial intelligence techniques will become an emergent method of programming enterprise systems and will be featured in large, critical deployments.

New titles in your IT organization: Chief data munger

Daniel Bosman

Title Managing director and associate vice president

Employer TD Securities

Location New York

Career highlight: Prior to moving to America, during a business trip to the U.S. from the U.K., British Airways canceled my return flight. As an apology they booked me on the Concorde, which started my love affair with aviation and led to my getting a private pilot’s license.

What emerging tech has captured your interest? 3D printing fascinates me, and I think it opens up a lot of opportunities as we think about fantastical things like colonizing Mars over the next century.

Coolest current project: We are working on a proof-of-concept project that leverages cloud and cognitive technology to help traders better predict and manage their risk during times of market instability in response to developments such as economic announcements, earnings reports and so on.

An innovative staff idea: TD Securities recently ran an internal Shark Tank-like competition. More than 125 innovative ideas were submitted, including some from our technology teams. I was on the executive advisory team and helped a group of finalists with their pitches. This competition led to many great ideas and highlighted opportunities for innovation.

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: Containers and microservices everywhere. As we see Docker grow with support for Windows in upcoming versions, we’ll see a push to the containerization of systems across the enterprise and certainly in financial services.

Gary L. Brantley

Title CIO

Employer DeKalb County School District

Location Decatur, Ga.

Which emerging technologies have captured your interest? Next-generation batteries. Our schools are demanding more and more technology every day. As the demands increase, we will be challenged to provide reliable energy to power these devices. Charging mobile technology shouldn’t interrupt the learning day.

Coolest current project: We are currently implementing a new ERP solution. I am excited to provide better processing, accurate data and a friendly GUI to the employees of the district. They have been working with an antiquated system, and I want to deliver the best to them.

Your personal leadership style? I consider myself both a servant and a transformational leader. As a servant/leader, I’m able to look at things from the eyes of my customers and staff. I also consider the lessons of the past and realities of the present and the future when making decisions. I am equally a transformational leader. I have the ability to set a vision and motivate my staff to deliver quality and excellence while taking ownership and pride in their work.

What title do you aspire to? CEO

Michal Cenkl

Title Director of innovation and technology, Center for Information and Technology

Employer Mitre

Location Bedford, Mass.

What emerging tech has captured your interest? Second Machine Age (2MA) factors. The confluence of data, computational capability, artificial intelligence and sophisticated user experience (voice and virtual reality, for example). We are developing predictive knowledge capabilities that serve as intelligent assistance. Our focus is mostly on possibilities of artificial intelligence for the business environment.

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: Cognitive assistance coupled with analytics applied to internal business and customer data.

Biggest tech disappointment? Most things cyber. The focus is still on endpoint protection, which is a losing game, as compared to information protection.

New titles in your IT organization: Applied futurist — someone who can imagine a disruptive capability and describe what impact it will have and how to get there from where we are now.

Personal leadership style? Visionary. I see my role as defining a future state, describing a path to get there and empowering people to achieve it.

How do you evaluate emerging technologies? We’re adopting a “build, try, break, fix” strategy. If you’re not exposing users to emerging technologies to assess their value, then you’re not learning enough about them to make a judgment.

Christopher Chang

Title Senior vice president and CIO

Employer Darden Restaurants

Location Orlando, Fla.

What emerging tech has captured your interest? Chatbots and artificial intelligence present an interesting opportunity to provide “smart service” capabilities for our guests who want real-time interactions and value convenience in areas such as menu ordering and repeat commerce orders.

Coolest current project: Our CRM initiatives represent an exciting opportunity for us as we deliver increasingly relevant messaging to individual guests. As we learn more about our guests, we are able to communicate with them in more relevant channels, at more relevant times and with more meaningful content.

Biggest tech disappointment? The various mobile payment technologies still don’t offer a compelling reason for most people to use their phones for payment. It’s far easier to swipe or insert a credit card than to guess which merchant can accept a phone for payment.

Personal leadership style? Participative and leading by example. I enjoy being in the trenches with the team and learning from those around me.

How do you evaluate emerging technologies? We have a separate innovation team that evaluates new technologies and assesses them via pilots and proofs of concept. This team has the opportunity to explore technology without being tied to a specific project or ROI initiative.

Samuel J. Chesterman

Title Worldwide CIO

Employer IPG Mediabrands

Location San Francisco

Coolest current project: We are building a number of cutting-edge applications available exclusively to our client base.

An innovative staff idea: We distributed a Raspberry Pi microcomputer to each staff member and challenged them to build something unique. Those challenges ensure the teams are learning and having fun at the same time. It spurs a tremendous amount of creativity and engineering.

How are you using reverse-mentoring? We have a significant number of staffers who are fresh out of college, and we continuously look to them for trends — ranging from mobile applications or back-office technologies. We strive to make sure everyone has a voice and can be empowered to share with the rest of the staff.

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: A lot more new technology will require higher processor speeds, creating a need for liquid-cooled devices. This is already evident with high-end video cards such as those needed to power Oculus technologies and 3D rendering at high frame rates.

Biggest tech disappointment? The Apple Watch. I’m disappointed that it has to be charged every night and doesn’t have many stand-alone features.

Abhishek Choudhary

Title Manager, Information Systems

Employer Indian Oil

Location Mumbai, India

What emerging tech has captured your interest? I work in the internet of things technology space by developing frameworks to source data directly from devices in gas stations and remotely control them. This supports data transfers to central servers where data would go through business rule engines and the framework would be able to trigger actions.

Coolest current project: A retail automation project that focuses on remote device management and real-time data streaming from gas stations.

Skills you’ll hire for: We focus on capturing secondary sales data and believe that processing the primary data from these systems in real time or batch would be a great challenge. We want to get into the space of big data management and staff a team to manage this environment.

William D. Confalonieri

Title Chief digital officer, CIO and vice president

Employer Deakin University

Location Geelong, Australia

Career highlight: Being nominated as a finalist for the Australian CIO of the Year award four years in a row, and winning twice.

What emerging tech has captured your interest? We have been working intensely with cognitive computing, internet of things (proximity and location services), and virtual and augmented reality.

Coolest current project: Genie, a smart proactive student assistant using chatbots, artificial intelligence and predictive personal analytics.

An innovative staff idea: A chatbot programatic framework.

How do you evaluate emerging technologies? I have what I call a “digital future lab,” which is both a place and a conceptual framework, where all new technologies are played with and tested, and prototypes are created.

How do you find time to innovate? It is simply the most important priority for keeping ourselves relevant. We are organized in a way that fire-fighting doesn’t jeopardize bleeding-edge experimentation and development.

Paul Czarapata

Title Vice president and CIO

Employer Kentucky Community and Technical College System

Location Versailles, Ky.

What emerging tech has captured your interest? I am a big fan of wearable technology. I have a lot of gadgets around the office, everything from Amazon cardboard VR glasses to the traditional fitness wristbands with step counters and heart monitors. I love to tinker and find things that might translate into the classroom to facilitate learning.

Coolest current project: Definitely our predictive analytics platform to identify at-risk students. We keep feeding it with more and more data and have been able to home in on at-risk student populations, which our strategic enrollment management teams can then use for outreach campaigns.

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: Artificial intelligence will take over 90% of our server and database administration needs through real-time monitoring and proactive actions based on predictive analytics built on historical load trends.

New titles in your IT organization: Chief network and infrastructure officer. This position and the accompanying team are responsible for core network and infrastructure architecture across the state, as well as management of our cloud services.

Personal leadership style? I am a strong advocate of the servant leadership style, which has served me well for building trust amongst students, faculty and staff for myriad projects over the years. I feel strongly that the ability to listen and empathize with someone opens the door for collaboration and progress.

Paul Daugherty

Title Chief technology and innovation officer

Employer Accenture

Location Florham Park, N.J.

What emerging tech has captured your interest? Three technologies are poised to take off: artificial intelligence (A.I.), virtual experiences and blockchain. I’ve created R&D programs in all three areas, formed practices to train and hire talent, and am pursuing investments in key emerging leaders. I’ve also launched a quantum computing R&D program.

Coolest current project: I sponsor several Accenture programs to address the gender and diversity gap in technology, including Girls Who Code. I had the privilege of meeting almost 500 high school girls at the New York Girls Who Code event and gave a keynote speech, with founder Reshma Saujani, to congratulate them.

An innovative staff idea: My Accenture Labs team has been doing R&D in crowdsourcing for several years, and this year that group combined with our application testing team to launch an innovative and disruptive crowdsourced testing service using our own technology as well as that of a leading crowdsourcing startup.

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: A.I. and related technologies are ushering in a new era in the relationship between people and machines. Machines will communicate in a more human fashion, and keyboards will join tools like the slide rule on the way to obsolescence.

New titles in your IT organization: Managing director of ecosystem and ventures. This is a new senior role in our organization, reporting to me, responsible globally for all relationships with partners in our ecosystem — from leaders through startups — recognizing the strategic importance of ecosystem partners to our business.

Lesley A. Dickie

Title Vice president, Global Business Services, IT

Employer Raytheon

Location Billerica, Mass.

New titles in your IT organization: We are adding new roles in our Business Analytics Center of Excellence, such as data scientist, to support our capabilities with predictive analysis, and user experience experts to ensure we design and build our applications and systems with end-user productivity and ease of use in mind.

Personal leadership style? I’d describe my personal leadership style as collaborative and teaming. I continuously listen and look for ideas to make things better and simplify the way people work while also encouraging the organization to do the same. Through enterprise teaming and collaboration, I seek the best way to implement change and transform the organization.

What’s the most important task you’ve delegated this year? We needed to assign a thought leader to the very large export/import global trade initiative to help shape, influence and inform us about approaches, investments, risks and opportunities. I delegated this responsibility to our director of engineering solutions and IT compliance.

How has your vendor management strategy changed in the past few years? It’s shifted to a more aggressive stance in terms of leveraging vendors and strategic partners to perform managed or outsourced services, accelerating our knowledge of new technologies and innovation, and filling resource gaps and needs in countries where IT doesn’t have a local footprint.

Read Dickie’s full profile.

Jim Dye

Title Director, global IT infrastructure

Employer Pittsburgh Glass Works

Location Pittsburgh

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: Business will be in the cloud. And the internet of things, made exponentially more powerful by the emergence of the algorithmic economy, will change the face of manufacturing and services forever. Businesses will need to pivot quickly, otherwise they’ll be playing catch-up with those that have strategically shifted to driving industry disruption through a data-driven, digital-first approach.

Personal leadership style? I prefer to constantly look to identify opportunities for mentoring and coaching, setting vision and direction, building trust and harmony throughout the team and ultimately establishing a strong team identity. But when needed, I’ll act as a pacesetter and/or provide more rigid structure and directives.

Your spare time? I build and race first-person view (FPV) drones — quadcopters equipped with cameras at the nose that are controlled by pilots wearing FPV goggles that display live-streaming footage. The goal is to race other drones and their pilots on set indoor or outdoor courses (speeds vary from 50 to 100-plus mph).

How do you evaluate emerging technologies? We partner with the business to form a pilot with defined key performance indicators. Emphasis is placed on failing fast and quantifying all perceived value and risks. If successful, we scale. If unsuccessful, we evaluate whether it was the technology or the idea that was bad and then define the next steps.

Saman Michael Far

Title Senior vice president, technology

Employer FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority)

Location New York

Career highlight: A Nasdaq IPO in the late 1990s when I was employee No. 4 at Open Text.

Coolest current project: The use of graph analysis and link analysis to integrate disparate data so conclusions across data sets can be inferred from facts in the data.

Skills you’ll hire for: Deep programming skills, data structure and algorithm knowledge, and machine learning skills. I am hiring people for key positions and training existing staff. The training model has employees learning on their own in the evening and on weekends and then vying for projects on which they can use their new skills.

How do you evaluate emerging technologies? I use a startup model where technology staffers are encouraged to follow technology areas and bring key ideas forward. Interesting ideas, regardless of their source, are implemented as quick proof-of-concept projects in conjunction with a business unit.

How do you find time to innovate? I host internal hackathons, spending the time alongside the teams and reviewing the team projects, taking time to talk to the developers and understand their thinking. I also spend significant time with startups to define proof-of-concept projects that they can participate in with our staff.

How are you working with startups? I seek out startups working on core technologies that we may be able to use.

Kim Felix

Title Vice president, IT

Employer UPS

Location Louisville, Ky.

Career highlight: Working as a developer on the creation of the cellular network at the start of my career and now leading an organization in developing strategies and solutions leveraging mobile technologies. It’s amazing to reflect on what we’ve accomplished in the industry and how fast we’ve evolved.

What emerging tech has captured your interest? Wearables. From the time I joined the transportation function and started spending time in our operations, the potential use cases became apparent. We’re working now on the required infrastructure with mobile interfaces. Managing cost for our scale and securing regulatory approval are key.

An innovative staff idea: It’s an application that models the ESPN draft process to dynamically manage staff load-balancing in the operation. It’s a simple and cost-effective way to better utilize resources, and it creates a more positive work experience for the staff.

How are you using reverse-mentoring? We’ve been increasing our internship/co-op programs to bring more students in to work as part of our teams. The project assignments are geared to look at new technologies and how they can be incorporated into the projects. Our target is to convert the students to full-time staffers. During the internships and after conversion, they provide feedback on work preferences and serve on our engagement committees to implement their ideas.

Jeff L. Fields

Title CIO

Employer Servpro

Location Gallatin, Tenn.

Career highlight: I spent time in Jerusalem and Haifa working on financial and inventory systems for Intel. I enjoyed both the challenge and the culture.

What emerging tech has captured your interest? In our organization, the internet of things is starting to play a big role in all of our technology offerings, including mobile applications and WorkCenter.

Coolest current project: We are working on a machine-learning product that captures leads from social media, internet news feeds and other websites; this will bring in new business for our franchises.

How are you using reverse-mentoring? We hire many new IT people who share fresh ideas and participate in our architecture and development process.

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: All of our processes are moving to the cloud, and the internet of things will become more prominent in our technology offerings, ensuring that all areas of business are seamlessly connected in real time.

What’s the most important task you’ve delegated this year? I’ve hired a chief information security officer and delegated some of the infrastructure security responsibilities to him.

How are you working with startups? I am involved with the Nashville Technology Council, a group that works with multiple startups.

Harry Folloder

Title CIO

Employer Advantage Waypoint

Location Tampa, Fla.

New title in your IT organization: Data visualization specialist

What’s the most important task you’ve delegated this year? Intercompany communication and project transparency — the role is IS&T coordinator.

Your spare time? I take my blind twins to different experiences and relearn through them what the world is like and the pure joy that most people take for granted.

How do you find time to innovate? I dedicate one day per month to spend with a person in the business, on the street, representing our clients to always understand the pulse of our culture and clients.

What title do you aspire to? Chief innovation officer

Read Folloder’s full profile.

Michael Garcia

Title Vice president, development services

Employer Fannie Mae

Location Washington

What emerging tech has captured your interest? Blockchain definitely holds opportunity for a Version 2 of the internet; one that offers true anonymity and cuts out middlemen everywhere. In my organization, I will be looking at how blockchain might replace databases as trusted sources and facilitate transactions with our financial services partners.

Coolest current project: An enterprise conversion to lean agile with full engagement from the business. We have reached a critical mass in the organization, and watching the culture change has been exhilarating. We went from pushing the ideas uphill to having them pulled from us across every team.

New titles in your IT organization: Tribe leader, agile coach, software development engineer test, DevOps engineer and scrum master.

Personal leadership style? I believe in servant leadership. I try to empower the team by removing impediments but fully authorizing them to make decisions and do the work. I also believe in developing a continuous learning environment where we are invigorated and inspired to constantly experiment with new ideas.

Rodell A. Garcia

Title Chief technology adviser

Employer Manila Water

Location Quezon City, Philippines

Career highlight: During my 12-year stint in GlobeTelecom, where I was CIO for 10 years and CTO for two, I was given the opportunity to lead the implementation of one of the first mobile money projects, Globe’s GCash product. GCash launched in 2004 and won the GSMA’s Best Mobile Messaging Service in 2005.

What emerging tech has captured your interest? We have the beginnings of the internet of things in our enterprise asset management system, where we have interconnected sensors in our plant and equipment, and have mapped these into our geographical information system, thus making the status of our facilities visible to our frontliners. We are expanding these capabilities in our IT/OT convergence project, wherein we will be deploying more sensors and collecting data that will be fed into an analytics engine.

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: The internet of things will become ubiquitous in both the corporate and consumer environments.

How has your vendor management strategy changed in the past few years? In the past, vendor relationships have mainly been project by project and maintenance mode. This year, we have identified vendor-partners whom we have looped into the early stages of our strategic planning process, resulting in a mutually beneficial relationship.

Gint Grabauskas

Title CTO

Employer Vixxo

Location Scottsdale, Ariz.

Career highlight: While at GoDaddy (where I worked before joining Vixxo), I performed a rap on stage — about our development of an OpenStack cloud platform.

Coolest current project: Taking a vertical scaled platform and reworking it as microservices in the cloud.

How are you using reverse-mentoring? One example are weekly “lightning rounds,” where I ask my staff to research and briefly discuss a new technology in five minutes.

Personal leadership style? Servant leadership is a passion of mine, and my natural style. It works great with really smart folks (who are also humble and fun to work with). My job is to help my folks be the best they can be (servant leadership isn’t weakness).

How do you find time to innovate? Every Friday, I carve out four hours to research, prototype, code and otherwise look at new technology. This time is booked on my calendar and can’t be calendar-stomped.

José A. Güereque

Title IT and innovation director

Employer Arca Continental

Location Monterrey Nuevo Leon, Mexico

What emerging tech has captured your interest? Big data is transforming our approach to decision-making. We can no longer rely on instinct or individual experience — we need to leverage multiple data sources for insight. The new winners will be the ones able to fulfill customer needs at a personal level.

New titles in your IT organization: Data scientists. These individuals bring new skills, models and ways of thinking to gain new insights from the information we see daily.

How has your vendor management strategy changed in the past few years? We now demand innovation from every vendor — even those in operational roles — and expect them to be part of our innovation ecosystem. They need to be fully engaged in the transformation of our company and the improvement of our products and services.

How do you find time to innovate? It’s a matter of priorities. We’re always very busy, so I have to make the conscious decision to spend time during the week on innovation, such as reading, attending seminars and networking with entrepreneurs. The only way to ensure innovation is to make it a firm requirement for myself.

Saravanan Gurumurthy

Title CTO

Employer ForwardLine

Location Woodland Hills, Calif.

Career highlight: While studying for my engineering degree in India, I read a book about Japanese culture and its unique management style that prompted me to move to Japan. That moment changed my career and life and resulted in a unique, amazing experience both professionally and personally.

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: Social internet of things — an IoT where things are capable of establishing social relationships with other objects autonomously with respect to humans. Rather than making decisions by analyzing just the data collected from machines, devices will rely on feedback from humans, thereby creating a more simplified connected ecosystem.

Biggest tech disappointment? Smartphone technology, in how quickly it matured as a product and market, and seems to have lost the ability to surprise us with any significant new features.

Personal leadership style? Firm and fair. I strongly believe in creating a service-oriented technology organization. I have an open-door policy and am as serious about other people’s careers as I am about my own.

Greg Hart

Title Vice president, cloud services

Employer McKesson

Location Alpharetta, Ga.

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: A turning-point event — nation-state cyberattack on critical infrastructure or an unprecedented large-scale cloud breach — will cause a change in our cybersecurity approach at a national level (some good changes and some reactionary). Private and public cooperation for monitoring and defense, and increased hard regulations will result.

Biggest tech disappointment? The password. Data breaches and ransomware are doing more to harm technology progress than anything else. Much of the headline focus is on the wrong areas, with debates on the safety of cloud or mobile when the biggest security issue remains people and compromised credentials. The death of the password is long overdue.

Personal leadership style? Leaders really have two primary jobs: Point in a strategic direction and develop people. What I do differently is to dedicate and formalize career plan discussions and to focus on people’s strengths rather than the traditional performance management, which focuses on improving weaknesses.

How has your vendor management strategy changed in the past few years? Strategic technologies require fewer strategic partners, and traditional vendor management approaches don’t work anymore. For areas like cloud and analytics, I look for partners with an understanding of the enterprise who are driving successful adoption and open platforms and making other strategic partners better when working together.

Joseph C. Haskell

Title CTO

Employer Planned Systems International

Location Arlington, Va.

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: Smaller, faster and cheaper hardware will continue to make strides forward, but the real innovation in technology will depend on augmenting human interactions. Identity management and data security will make the quantum leaps to allow trusted human interactions and increased big data analysis.

Biggest tech disappointment? All technology and processes around information security. Many significant data breaches around the world are the result of a combination of inadequate focus on security combined with ineffective software. The cost of these breaches continues to escalate rapidly.

New titles in your IT organization: Recently our IT group added a quality management division. We have added a director of quality management and several quality managers.

Your personal leadership style? My leadership style and the environment of PSI is based on empowerment and trust. By assuming positive intent in all interactions and enabling people with the authority and tools to succeed, it is possible to have staffers who are always motivated to do the right thing for their customers.

Chong P. Huan

Title CIO

Employer The Inland Real Estate Group

Location Oak Brook, Ill.

What emerging tech has captured your interest? Our data is growing at an exponential rate. The internet of things, social network interactions and automation will only add to this big data pool. I believe that the next digital disruption will be convergence of big data and artificial intelligence (big data intelligence) to provide faster and smarter decisions. To this end, we are focused on piloting A.I. projects that quickly identify and predict actionable trends or patterns.

An innovative staff idea: Recently, our technology team started using Amazon Echo as a data analytics platform, providing a central source from which executives across the organization can review and execute on accurate, real-time operational data in any location, at any time to make better strategic, tactical and effective decisions.

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: With A.I. rapidly coming of age, businesses will increasingly grasp the immense potential of smart machines and other innovations as catalysts for greater efficiency and competitiveness. A.I. and bots will elevate decision-making precision to a whole new level, creating efficiencies and cutting costs while providing new solutions to critical problems faced by many industries.

How has your vendor management strategy changed in the past few years? It focuses on building relationships with vendors and finding win-win partnering opportunities that can deliver results in key business areas. We are collaborating and working closely with many vendors to brainstorm ideas and pilot projects, wherein they have become an extension of our technology team. This has led to better quality of service and has helped cut costs and reduce risk.

Kosta Kalpos

Title Senior adviser, cybersecurity

Employer U.S. Department of Homeland Security

Location Washington

Career highlight: Giving a speech on cybersecurity and national security initiatives in the Ronald Reagan Building amphitheater days after the Office of Personnel Management breach occurred. I was humbled and honored to represent my department and my country, while fielding questions associated with arguably the largest breach in U.S. history.

What emerging tech has captured your interest? Mobile devices and wearable tech. Devices you’d see only in James Bond movies are now readily available at your local convenience store. How do we better understand challenges associated with rapidly evolving mobile technologies and properly secure our organization against insider threats? Too aggressive of a program can cause adverse effects, portray lack of trust among users or even indirectly aid in the development of an insider threat. A healthy balance between security and respect for civil liberties is key.

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: Current norms in multifactor authentication will move beyond our memory, unique characters and even physical credentials. In five years, if you’re not multi-authenticating, you’ll inherit unrecoverable risk and quickly exit the market.

Biggest tech disappointment? Low-cost to no-cost energy. Right now, if you want to start being green, you have to have some green. It’s disappointing to think that we haven’t innovated to an equally competitive price point to help everyone.

Mohit Kapoor

Title Chief information and technology officer

Employer TransUnion

Location Chicago

An innovative staff idea: For the market in India, our team created a biometric product for mobile devices and tablets that reads and authenticates fingerprints. Based on that fingerprint, it automatically populates a loan application with everything the bank needs to quickly approve or deny a loan. It’s truly a game-changer in India.

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: IT departments as we know them will no longer exist. In the next five years, there will be no traditional IT departments because entire companies will be technology-driven and tech-focused. There will be no difference between products and technology, and technology will drive everything.

How has your vendor management strategy changed in the past few years? We used to think of vendors as simply providers, but now it’s more of a partner strategy. We pick a few based on the value they bring and develop deep relationships instead of just choosing the lowest-cost provider.

How do you find time to innovate? I formed an innovation committee that meets regularly to discuss future projects. We visit venture capital firms, think tanks and other innovative companies. We spend time on-site learning about their challenges, successes, the next wave of innovation and more. This gets us out of our environment and focused on what’s next and what’s possible.

Hakan Karamanli

Title Executive vice president and CIO

Employer Tam Faktoring

Location Istanbul, Turkey

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: In the future, an IT background and technical skills won’t be necessary — a people and business orientation will be required for IT leadership. The CIO role will stand out as a CEO candidate, and we will see business- and people-oriented CIOs appointed as CEOs.

How do you find time to innovate? I believe we don’t need dedicated time for innovation, but I must confess that reading business books is my main source of inspiration, along with listening to employees and customers.

How have you created work/life balance? I believe a great working environment is the only solution for work/life balance. If you have satisfaction in your job, this brings happiness to your home, and if you’re happy, time isn’t a boundary.

Jeffrey Keisling

Title Senior vice president and CIO, business technology

Employer Pfizer

Location New York

What emerging tech has captured your interest? Pfizer has begun using actigraphy data — data generated from sensors — to understand patient response to medicines. In effect, the internet of things becomes the “internet of patients” as Fitbit-like sensors are used in our trials to continuously monitor patients to understand if Pfizer’s medicine is, for example, controlling their tremors or helping them sleep at night. This type of data allows Pfizer to demonstrate an improvement in a patient’s quality of life in a way that wasn’t possible with traditional measurement models.

Coolest current project: Through the application of multiple cognitive computing disciplines, including natural language processing, artificial intelligence and machine learning, we can dramatically improve the speed and efficiency of information referenced by healthcare providers, with the ultimate goal of improving patient safety.

An innovative staff idea: Newton is Pfizer’s own cloud-based, multitenant solution providing the mobile back-end services that connect our application users’ information for authentication, information storage and syncing, and social connections. Built to enable behavior modification and patient support needs, Newton’s APIs allow for flexibly storing data such as people, events, assets and business rules.

Sajed Khan

Title Senior vice president and CIO

Employer United Solutions Co.

Location Tallahassee, Fla.

Personal leadership style? My personal leadership style is to have the courage, confidence and commitment to connect with and inspire my team to achieve extraordinary results through teamwork. Leading a team by example almost always returns better results and establishes trust. I strive to gain the trust of my employees by providing them with significant and involved roles in projects from inception to end. To achieve creative success, I have always empowered my team to create 12-month objectives rather than chase long-term goals. These short strides build competencies to deliver on promised performance and inspire future leaders.

What’s the most important task you’ve delegated this year? I’ve always had a passion for effective project management. Managing technology projects is difficult under the best of circumstances. When the team clearly understands the scope from the onset, we eliminate any ambiguity. Weekly project status meetings helped set baselines for a few rising stars on my team. With collaboration, I was excited to delegate the meetings to a young talented group. Setting the right baseline from inception, while allowing them breathing room to work, helped deliver a closure rate of over 90% of projects last year.

Your spare time? What spare time? I have four kids!

Akash Khurana

Title Vice president and CIO

Employer McDermott International

Location Houston

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: Technology venture capitalist will replace CIO and chief digital officer titles once the digital maturity peaks across certain trend-setting industry verticals.

Biggest tech disappointment? VoIP infrastructure in the cloud. We had high hopes for the efficiency that it provides, but we see reliability challenges globally that have impacted our organization. Because of their performance and availability, traditional copper lines have proven to have better sustained results. But I do think VoIP in the cloud will improve over time.

Skills you’ll hire for: We’ll look to add software development, data engineering and product engineering capabilities in the future. Some of those capabilities will be groomed internally on the product engineering side, others will be sourced externally with people who have a background in the discipline.

Fast ROI project: In 2015, we led an initiative to provide global financial planning and analysis visibility in a single platform. Prior to this project, the global financial planning and analysis process was managed manually. Digitizing the capability has enabled faster financial closing and cash flow management processes.

How have you adjusted your risk management strategy to align with the evolving technology landscape? We made a conscious decision to move to a few proven and trusted cloud providers, which allows us to combine the knowledge and scale they bring with our experts to ensure we are managing infrastructure and application obsolescence risks more proactively.

Georgette D. Kiser

Title CIO and managing director, Global Technology and Solutions

Employer The Carlyle Group

Location Washington

An innovative staff idea: My staff assisted in the implementation of our full “desktop of the future” strategy, which decreased costs, helped to enhance productivity and collaboration for all Carlyle employees and has helped to drive innovation across the organization. 

How are you using reverse-mentoring: We are using the service desk staffers to educate the more seasoned staffers. 

 New titles in your IT organization: Chief operating officer of Global Technology and Solutions, who handles budgeting, forecasting and many day-to-day operational items, which affords me the opportunity to focus more on the organization’s overall strategy.

 How are you working with startups?  We attend sessions by firms such as Andreessen Horowitz to better understand what new technologies are being developed and implemented. We also study what is happening globally. I will soon be traveling to Israel to better understand how they have enhanced technology and increased the number of startups across the country. 

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Wolfgang Krips

Title Executive vice president, global operations, and general manager

Employer Amadeus Data Processing

Location Erding, Germany

What emerging tech has captured your interest? Machine learning and artificial intelligence (applied to the data center). Current plans and activities include a proof of concept project for predictive analytics/machine learning for fault detection and isolation, and a pilot on artificial intelligence to support automated incident resolution.

How are you using reverse-mentoring? Twice a month, three-hour briefings with the operations’ architecture team, regular attendance at startup gatherings (such as TechCrunch Disrupt) and Silicon Valley study tours. Also, attending frequent vendor briefings and key conferences, such as Gartner ITExpo and VMworld.

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: Automation of software development (auto-coding). With the advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence, it should be possible to have systems writing software within five years.

Skills you’ll hire for: Automation specialists and data scientists.

George Labelle

Title CIO

Employer Independent Purchasing Cooperative

Location Miami

Coolest current project: We’re working on a data science center of excellence. When you dig into data science, you realize it has incredible applicability and upside everywhere in our brand. Intelligent algorithms will enable smart machines to transform and disrupt our industry in ways we can’t imagine.

Skills you’ll hire for: Data scientists — people who see the world in different and unique ways and who love to solve big problems. They identify patterns and anomalies in data that can lead to big profits. It’s a unique and emerging discipline, so we’re looking primarily to hire fresh.

How have you adjusted your risk management strategy to align with the evolving technology landscape? We have a dedicated enterprise risk management team. I’m making an effort to talk more about risk with my teams. When I talk about it more, they talk about it more. And when they talk about it, it becomes something they have to consider.

Jason Lei

Title General manager, Intelligence Product

Employer MediaMath

Location New York

Coolest current project: Hands down the MediaMath Brain, the patent-pending, proprietary bid optimization algorithm that takes full advantage of sophisticated machine-learning, built here at MediaMath. It has optimized marketing results for thousands of advertisers, billions of dollars in marketing and trillions of ad impressions, and properly measures impact on the advertiser’s business.

How are you using reverse-mentoring: We aren’t surprised that many innovative ideas come from talented engineers who aren’t yet in leadership positions. We encourage and cultivate this with the biannual 24-hour hackathon, where our employees of all teams and levels build applications and systems for a variety of problems — many of which make it into MediaMath products.

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: The IoT will transform our lives, and as a result of being connected, it will present a tremendous opportunity for marketers. The challenge at that point will be to balance innovation into the mesh of IoT with assurance and standards for consumer privacy and choice.

Biggest tech disappointment? The speed of advancement in wearable tech isn’t quite as I had hoped. As one example, I had high hopes that the mobile phone would be replaced with devices such as Google Glass and connected watches to eliminate the need to carry an extra mobile phone, but that hasn’t materialized just yet, but I’m still hopeful we’ll see wearable innovations that will render the mobile phones unnecessary.

Paul Lough

Title Vice president, technology strategy and planning, and CTO

Employer Navy Federal Credit Union

Location Vienna, Va.

Coolest current project: The selection and implementation of a digital banking platform and the anticipation of transforming a number of siloed delivery channels into a more intelligent, effective and cost-efficient means of delivering an exceptional member and employee experience.

An innovative staff idea: Recently, one of my staffers took the initiative to demonstrate voice-based banking and integration with the Amazon Echo device. There’s still some perfecting to do, but it’s great to see us thinking ahead and being positioned to support new service delivery models should they become desirable or mainstream.

Biggest tech disappointment? Blockchain technology. There’s been so much hype surrounding everything it was going to solve. But now that reality is setting in, the use cases for my industry are perhaps more limited or further out than originally perceived.

Personal leadership style? I strive to be trustworthy, knowledgeable, fair, caring and decisive. I value the perspectives of my employees and always carefully consider what they have to offer.

Ryan Loy

Title Vice president, IT

Employer Adtran

Location Huntsville, Ala.

Coolest current project: We are developing an enterprise user standard built around full mobility and cloud sharing, with enhanced data loss prevention. This offers the business a better way to share information and communicate, while providing protection of our core intellectual property.

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: That the physical ownership of data centers will be a thing of the past. We are focused on moving everything to the cloud, enabling us to focus more resources on developing business services.

Personal leadership style? Servant-style leadership, focused on developing others and cultivating an organization of trust. I rely on my directors to do the right thing and make decisions based on the best interests of the company. I believe in creating a culture focused on the business with the mindset that we are businesspeople who happen to have responsibility within IT. This mindset change has enabled us to further evangelize the value IT can deliver to the organization.

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Nandu Mahadevan

Title Vice president, SaaS operations

Employer BMC Software

Location Santa Clara, Calif.

Coolest current project: As a SaaS provider, the ability to spin services up and down and apply patches in seconds, along with the huge compute and storage savings, make Docker one of our biggest game-changers. Its value stretches from ongoing migrations to deploying high-availability, high-performance data centers.

Personal leadership style? Hire smart people and enable them. Be an innovation “visionary” and sponsor. Allow for mistakes to happen and help navigate political battles to bring new ideas to fruition. Leverage partnerships and technologies that contribute new value.

Skills you’ll hire for: We need both business and technical skills — all in one person. A technical account manager who knows business practices, who is the first line of contact to users in a support scenario and can give the customer the best service experience, often without pulling in additional expertise.

Charles Mance

Title Director, Communications &and Technology Support Services

Employer George Washington University

Location Washington

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: I believe we will see a sea change in networking and applications, where more applications will live outside of the physical infrastructure and the network will just provide connectivity. IT departments will continue to standardize, automate and consolidate as services become more appliance- and cloud-based. Virtual 3D and holographic imaging will become more commonplace. Mobility will continue to drive services and offerings. The “network” will be wireless with cellular and Wi-Fi converging to provide connectivity.

Personal leadership style? I tend to lead by example with a hands-off approach. I let my staff work on their own and take ownership of their successes and mistakes. I am approachable and fair when needed.

Skills you’ll hire for: I will focus on skills related to software-defined networking. I plan to train current employees and augment the staff as needed.

How has your vendor management strategy changed in the past few years? As we look to partner and outsource commodity services, we will require more vendor management skills. This will become a necessary skill for subject-matter experts who will need to help establish service-level agreements and hold the vendors accountable.

Saran S. Mandair

Title Vice president, Production Operations and Global IT

Employer Yapstone

Location Walnut Creek, Calif.

What emerging tech has captured your interest? Unikernels and container orchestration. Unikernels are minimal, specialized operating systems that offer improved security, a smaller footprint and fine-grained optimization, which can be particularly relevant to microservices. Container orchestration tools simplify management and provide a framework not only for defining initial container deployment, but also for managing multiple containers as one entity.

An innovative staff idea: We are moving everything to the public cloud to enable rapid business agility and developer/employee productivity. The move to the public cloud also mitigates risks related to natural or man-made disasters. Our company won’t own or operate physical data centers but will instead focus on more value-added services for our customers.

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: Intra-public cloud workload migration will be the norm, and private cloud setups won’t be relevant. The concerns about security, networking and more will be minimized further. All IT and engineering services will be consumed via APIs from multiple clouds.

What’s the most important task you’ve delegated this year? Having my administrative assistant completely manage my calendar.

What title do you aspire to? CIO/CTO for an innovative company.

Dave McCandless

Title Vice president, IT

Employer Navis

Location Oakland, Calif.

What emerging tech has captured your interest? Driverless, autonomous vehicles of all kinds — land, sea, air and space. Managing vehicle automation is a Navis core competency — we will continue to acquire companies and technologies that advance our leadership in the global cargo management industry.

Coolest current project: IT operational analytics for full IT resource usage visibility reflected back across all lines of business. Simple yet comprehensive 360-degree utilization insights on demand via dashboards for executives.

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: Chatbots will enable explosive value for corporate knowledge consumption, bringing true self-service to internal and external customers. Chat interface designers will replace UI designers as the hot talent workers. Chatbot virtual centers will replace human call centers, displacing the human workforce across the entire industry.

How do you find time to innovate? The innovation spark ignites when a time-tested solution is contrasted with a disruptive insight. I try to find downtime to ponder how to improve existing solutions with an insightful twist — give the aha moments a chance to bloom. I set aside recurring times for team members to develop insights into ideas and then business concepts.

Trevor McDougall

Title CIO

Employer Open Colleges

Location Sydney, Australia

What emerging tech has captured your interest? Virtual reality is very exciting for education — the potential for this technology is amazing. We are looking at working with providers who are testing this technology — the challenge is it must work without expensive equipment needed from the student.

Coolest current project: We are looking at using machine-learning engines to predict which students will be at risk to drop out and require a proactive intervention. We have hired some data scientists who are helping us with the data we have.

An innovative staff idea: The team came up with a learning platform feature called a “study planner” where students input their goals and plans for study. We now have the ability to track students against their own plans and provide interventions when needed, constantly reminding the students of their reasons for studying.

How are you using reverse-mentoring? People are encouraged to stay on top of the latest trends, and we use specific team meetings to share information and ideas with the rest of the team. With technology changing so quickly, everyone has an opportunity to bring something to that table.

What title do you aspire to? Chief operating officer, and then CEO.

Scott McIsaac

Title Chief infrastructure officer

Employer Secure-24

Location Southfield, Mich.

How do you find time to innovate? Innovation is ingrained in our organization. We have highly skilled technical experts, with more than 1,800 technical certifications throughout the organization, and our teams constantly evaluate and recommend new technologies. We also have several industry-leading partnerships. I serve on the customer advisory boards for many of our partners, so we are plugged into vendor road maps and are often asked to test and run proofs of concept on many new technologies.

How have you created work/life balance? Secure-24 provides flexible schedules, unlimited vacation days, 100% paid benefits for employees and their families, and a follow-the-sun support model, meaning our senior engineers aren’t required to be on-call 24/7.

How have you adjusted your risk management strategy to align with the evolving technology landscape? We are constantly evaluating bleeding-edge technologies, but we deploy cutting-edge technologies — meaning those for which processes are in place, automation is available and risks are reduced because we follow best practices and learn from the mistakes of our predecessors. We also work closely with our vendors on technologies and best practices for deployment and architecture.

Matthew A. Minetola

Title Executive vice president of technology, CIO

Employer Travelport

Location Atlanta

What emerging tech has captured your interest? Virtual reality. If you think about providing a traveler insight into their experience, what better way than to provide them a virtual reality trip to the actual destination?

Coolest current project: The “macro project” of migrating one of the largest Transaction Processing Facility mainframe environments left on the planet to a microservices cloud-based solution. There are probably four to five technology generations that took place in between and we are moving across them all in one transformation.

New titles in your IT organization: Strategic vendor relationship manager

How do you evaluate emerging technologies? We have a formal incubation program that allows us to move the ideas through to viability evaluation. If they are seen as viable, they are picked up by the business partners and funded to become minimum viable products and capabilities.

How do you find time to innovate? How do you not? That is what will differentiate us tomorrow. It is in everything we do from how we manage our time and people to where we spend leadership time to ensure we are constantly looking at the what if?

What title do you aspire to? CEO of a technology-based company.

How are you working with startups? We have a formal incubation program where we work directly with startups and provide seed money for those that can provide a viable proposal.

Sumit Nagpal

Title Co-founder and chief architect, LumiraDx Holdings

Employer Co-founder and CEO, LumiraDx USA

Location Waltham, Mass.

Career highlight: I worked with Steve Jobs, and he was my mentor and colleague. He helped me define my passion to make a difference in the lives I touch.

What emerging tech has captured your interest? Wearable and diagnostic devices and home monitoring technology — they’re the next wave of healthcare delivery.

How are you using reverse-mentoring? I have an open-door policy. I welcome ideas, novel approaches, innovations and disruptors who think outside the box.

Skills you’ll hire for: Coding and analytic graphing.

How do you find time to innovate? Innovation is my passion. It is in my everyday life, my existence, my being.

How are you working with startups? We encourage them to bring us their ideas and solutions. They are often worth the risk.

Robert Napoli

Title CIO and senior vice president

Employer Planned Parenthood of the Great Northwest and the Hawaiian Islands

Location Seattle

What emerging tech has captured your interest? Within my primary industry, there are several technologies that have great potential, such as mobile health, the internet of medical things and blockchain, among others. However, it is my belief that the triumvirate of artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data have the greatest potential to improve patient outcomes and truly be transformative.

Personal leadership style? I am a flexible, situational leader with many different styles based on the business objective, the individuals I’m working with and the challenge we’re facing. Regardless of the ways in which I communicate with or motivate my groups, I am accountable for creating a people-first culture within my organizations, and that is the basis for all my interactions.

How do you find time to innovate? I am fortunate that my CEO recognizes the value of innovation and that she challenges me to find ways that we can transform the business through technology. It takes discipline, but I set aside time each week to focus on innovation and process improvement opportunities, using this time to research the latest trends and generate ideas.

Rafat Naqvi

Title Vice president, IT Services

Employer Avanade

Location Seattle

Skills you’ll hire for: I see adding to our skill set in the areas of communication, marketing, campaign management, brand awareness and adoption, primarily through some combination of training current team members and hiring from outside.

How has your vendor management strategy changed in the past few years? Vendor management has become an important focus, especially within the past year. There’s been increasing recognition of its value, and we have strong leadership engagement in putting effective systems in place that make vendor management a cross-functional capability rather than the responsibility of a particular person.

How do you find time to innovate? We regard innovation as an ongoing perspective rather than independent activity, so I don’t struggle to make time for it. From my perspective, the biggest challenge with innovation is creating a culture that celebrates failure along with success.

How have you created work/life balance? I prefer the term “integration” to “balance” because the real challenge is bringing together important parts of our lives into a whole. For working parents and members of a global workforce like myself, the key factor is a flexible work environment like the one my staff and I enjoy.

Sarah Naqvi

Title Executive vice president, CIO

Employer HMSHost

Location Bethesda, Md.

What emerging tech has captured your interest? The connected experience (internet of things) has been an area of interest for our company. Our plan is to drive business transformation through the use of various technologies (wearables, self-service tools, electronic wallets, tabletop systems, scanning, inventory management, optimization technology support, exception-based reporting and applications) all driving speed and excellence of service for customers.

Personal leadership style? A more dominant style is participative, where I seek to build consensus and make sure the team is engaged so they can drive decision-making. If there is a need, I’m not afraid to get into the mix and support the team through challenges.

Fast ROI project: A heat map that puts the pulse of the business in managers’ hands. It sources sales, labor and air-traffic information and presents it in an actionable way. If an area is understaffed, resources can be shifted to accommodate demand. This tool has created the freedom to nurture sales from the floor.

How do you evaluate emerging technologies? In a facility we call the ImagineIT lab, associates and technology providers can test and demonstrate new technology tools in a replica airport terminal. As an incubator of ideas, the lab delivers a critical opportunity to work with technology partners in generating innovative solutions for restaurants.

Steven Narvaez

Title IT director

Employer City of Deltona

Location Deltona, Fla.

Career highlight: Being invited to join Thornton May’s Value Studio. This is an exclusive invitation-only event held quarterly. Attendees include corporate Fortune 50 and Fortune 100 CIOs and select government CIOs. I’ve had the honor of being invited to this event for the past 10 years.

How are you using reverse-mentoring? Working as a mentor to Daytona State College students. I teach about corporate life, and in return, they teach me patience and a new perspective to situations to which I have developed a patterned response, allowing me to adjust and adapt my behavior.

How do you find time to innovate? Innovation opportunities come to everyone; you don’t have to chase them. You just have to be open and not afraid to be creative in your approach to solving problems. Try a new approach, take something designed for one thing and apply it to another. What have you got to lose? And the upside can be tremendously satisfying.

Timothy Newman

Title Associate deputy assistant secretary, HR Automation, Systems and Analytics

Employer U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs

Location Washington

Coolest current project: Establishing an HR IT strategy through fiscal year 2022 that links the acquisition process, employee life cycle and emerging technologies.

How are you using reverse-mentoring? My younger generation often mentors me on the use of social media as it relates to data, information access and using apps for business process and communication.

Personal leadership style? I have an open leadership style that creates a positive, professional environment that rewards staff for focusing on mission completion as opposed to micromanagement and task completion. I achieve accountability of deliverables because the team believes in what we’re doing.

How do you find time to innovate? One must make time to think and innovate. I incorporate strategy sessions, block out meetings to see new technologies and collaborate with peers, and have quarterly off-site meetings to ensure we stay innovative in our direction, solutions and problem-solving.

Niel R. Nickolaisen

Title Senior vice president and CTO

Employer O.C. Tanner

Location Salt Lake City, Utah

What emerging tech has captured your interest? Cognitive systems. We are exploring using them to provide smart recommendations to our clients for things such as personal and employee well-being.

An innovative staff idea: To access an IBM Watson service in the cloud for personality analytics.

What’s the most important task you’ve delegated this year? To take on the deployment of our recently redone, standardized ERP system.

How do you evaluate emerging technologies? We have an incubator centered around the goal of employee engagement for ideas, products and technology.

How have you adjusted your risk management strategy to align with the evolving technology landscape? We have embraced agile principles and methods and do everything in increments. After each increment, we stop and evaluate (and possibly stop or pivot) before moving forward.

Jim Noel

Title Vice president, software services

Employer Veterans United Home Loans

Location Columbia, Mo.

Coolest current project: The continual improvement through developing additional features for our flagship online/mobile application, called MyVU. This one innovative product will enhance the lives of our borrowers and employees by improving and simplifying the VA mortgage loan process.

Personal leadership style? Servant leadership — collaborating within and across all of our teams and departments to set a vision and goals for excellence in product delivery and teamwork. Then working together as a team in our journey to be the best we can possibly be in executing our vision and achieving our goals. As a whole, we are better than any one member of the team.

How do you evaluate emerging technologies? We set aside 10% of our time each week to allow our team members to look at technologies, improve skills and innovate.

Anthony F. Norris

Title Senior vice president, IT

Employer FedEx Services

Location Collierville, Tenn.

Personal leadership style? I love working with business partners on strategy development for their respective areas and ensuring alignment within the IT organization. I provide my vice presidents with full autonomy to run their business and trust them to bring me into important or sensitive matters. They appreciate this empowering approach.

How do you find time to innovate? FedEx has formal and informal innovation processes that produce amazing concepts for us to incubate. Personally, I spend a fair amount of time with business partners solving problems that lead to incremental improvements or breakthrough ideas. I also spend time meeting with customers, attending conferences and benchmarking with other companies.

How have you created work/life balance? We all live in a continuously connected world, so it’s easy to fall into the trap of not being in the moment whether at work or at home. Different ringtones for different contacts, turning on phone notifications, relying solely on phone calls at night for important issues, and keeping sacred time with my children makes all the difference for me.

Read Norris’ full profile.

Ken Piddington

Title CIO and executive adviser

Employer MRE Consulting

Location Houston

What emerging tech has captured your interest? The internet of everything. I believe the possibilities are limitless and the ability to create unique value for an organization and its customers is tremendous. We implemented IoT in our Audix Insights product, an IT infrastructure solution that designed to help organizations discover valuable data insights about their IT environments.

An innovative staff idea: Incorporating machine learning into Audix Insights. The idea was to utilize machine learning to analyze data collected from monitored devices and determine what good and bad results looked like. With this approach, Audix Insights should provide more accurate results with the available data.

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: Passwords will be obsolete. Through a combination of biometrics and some form of personal device (wearable or implanted), passwords will become a thing of the past. Access will be granted based on retina scans, facial recognition and/or through some form of unique personal ID.

Personal leadership style? A servant leader, which stresses the importance of the role a leader plays as the steward of business resources and teaches leaders to serve others while still achieving business goals. My role is to facilitate and help both the people and the organization be successful.

How has your vendor management strategy changed in the past few years? It is focused on relationships and not transactions. I have created a strategic partner program focused on developing strong relationships with our vendor community to achieve maximum value for our organization.

Prabhakar Sahadeo Posam

Title Head of IT, digital and process

Employer Transworld Group (formerly Head of IT and business process at PAE)

Location Mumbai, India

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: Cloud vendors will take over infrastructure management and CIOs will be redefined as chief innovation officers.

Skills you’ll hire for: I would like to add internet of things skills to my team by training existing staffers.

What’s the most important task you’ve delegated this year? Research on new technologies to my innovation team members.

How has your vendor management strategy changed? Vendor payments are now linked to a project’s ROI.

How do you evaluate emerging technologies? I read research document, watch videos and study case studies.

How do you find time to innovate? I always keep 25% of my work time for innovation.

What title do you aspire to? CEO

How have you created work/life balance? I don’t like my team to work late, so I insist they plan their schedules in advance.

Phil Potloff

Title Chief digital officer

Employer Edmunds

Location Santa Monica, Calif.

What emerging tech has captured your interest? Blockchain has the potential to transform industries. The technology underpinning bitcoin currency could be a game-changer in maintaining transactional records over time. Last May, we hosted a blockchain hackathon and identified three or four applications that could ultimately transform vehicle records and transactions, including DMV records.

An innovative staff idea: We’re exploring ways to place a vehicle in your range of sight and allow you to interact with it. At a recent hackathon, we asked participants to determine how to insert a car into a defined space (a garage or parking space, for example).

Fast ROI project: We formed a unit called the ad technology group in one year, and it developed the fastest-growing product (Edmunds Ad Solutions) in the history of the company — a digital agency that we’ve already added to our core product portfolio. This was a business initiative that came directly out of IT.

How do you find time to innovate? Be deliberate about creating events and thought opportunities around new ideas that are relevant to company priorities. Then utilize hackathons, contests (both internal and external), accelerators and other means to explore new ideas.

Kaushik Ray

Title Vice president, Global Architecture and Customer Engineering

Employer Sungard Availability Services

Location Great Falls, Va.

Biggest tech disappointment? The fad-driven hype cycle in the industry. Take big data. It’s not the technology that disappoints me, but the way it was oversold. Few companies have seen any return on their projects. They thought it was as simple as buying the right product. It’s not.

Personal leadership style? The cliché of “undercommit and overdeliver” is wrong. If you aim high, you land high. My people know that I have high standards, and I don’t accept anything less than their best efforts. I also believe in treating people like adults. Work should be fun, and the work environment flexible.

Skills you’ll hire for: I manage a group of architects, so excellent technical skills are the price of entry. The big thing for me is communication — presentation, writing and verbal communication skills. The ability to engage with a customer is critical. Technology skills are easy to acquire; good communication takes training and practice.

How do you find time to innovate? If you have to find time to innovate, you have the wrong mindset. Innovation is a style of thinking — it’s not a point-in-time activity. If you don’t naturally think innovatively, if that’s not in your DNA, I don’t think you can innovate.

Jamshid Rezaei

Title CIO

Employer Mitel

Location Kanata, Ontario

What emerging tech has captured your interest? 5G and IoT, as mobile and cloud technologies continue to intersect, the opportunities will be endless. Users will benefit from 5G’s higher speed and wider coverage, which will create expanded service levels and mobile cloud experiences.

An innovative staff idea: The Mitel Connect customer portal, a single global access point for Mitel customers. In addition to single sign-on, identity management and self-service tools, Mitel Connect is an enabler of our acquisition strategy, providing quick onboarding of newly acquired customers. Prebuilt APIs allow integration of third-party applications, reducing systems migration time.

How are you using reverse-mentoring? We’re adopting student apprentice programs from various countries (in line with Mitel’s global culture) and engaging them in innovative projects such as e-business, business applications and infrastructure transformations. This gives us a perfect opportunity to build a bridge between technologies of the new generation and experienced technology professionals.

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: Digitalization and microservices on the cloud will change the face of traditional IT organizations to the point that most will end up being dissolved within the functional business areas.

Fast ROI project: Over the past 12 months, we launched a major ERP consolidation project. By consolidating four separate ERP systems into one unified program, we brought business processes and resources together and created millions of dollars in savings and operational efficiencies.

 

Olaf Romer

Title Head of corporate IT and group CIO

Employer Baloise Group

Location Basel, Switzerland

Coolest current project: The implementation of a new Baloise Digital Workplace and changing the mindset of collaboration in our group and with our external partners.

How has your vendor management strategy changed in the past few years? Previously, I viewed vendors simply as suppliers that could be easily replaced. Today, I seek a closer partnership and organizational integration so they can learn from us, understand our needs and thinking, and help us more efficiently. It’s a relationship, not simply a contractual transaction.

How do you find time to innovate? Each Monday, I gather with my management team in a café where employees can pitch innovative ideas. We provide promising proposals with funding and staff hours, have them return in a few weeks to show their progress and continue to support those with the most potential.

How have you adjusted your risk management strategy to align with the evolving technology landscape? I speak regularly with other CIOs to gather their impressions and experiences with new technologies, sourcing partners and service models. A technology that’s new to us might already be used in another industry, so their experiences can help us better evaluate our own risk.

Read Romer’s full profile.

Douglas P. Rousso

Title Senior vice president and CTO

Employer CBS

Location New York

New titles in your IT organization: I created a department specifically for user experience, but not with the traditional user interface positions found on product management teams, but specifically focused on the entire end-to-end user experience from chair to screen. The function designs from the customer viewpoint and works across functional and technical teams to put the user experience at the front of the process.

Skills you’ll hire for: Expanding training in information security and security engineering practices across the department. The CISO will largely be a policy-making function. Prevention and defense must be engineered into solutions from the start, therefore, I’m combining engineering and security architecture skills to enable our staff to design, build, deploy and manage securely.

How have you adjusted your risk management strategy to align with the evolving technology landscape? I’ve become more risk averse and security conscious as a result of the pace and nature of hacking and exploits, the frequency of which exploits are exposed, and the dynamic nature of how my customers want to collaborate and share. We take more time in vendor and product analysis to ensure solid security foundations.

Theresa Rowe

Title CIO

Employer Oakland University

Location Rochester, Mich.

Career highlight: Receiving the 2014 Community Leadership Award from Educause.

Coolest current project: The portal and app built using the Apereo uPortal open-source framework. The project provides development opportunities for student employees, led by a strong professional staff member.

An innovative staff idea: Changing our storage architecture. It may not sound glamorous, but as a university we store a lot of data.

How are you using reverse-mentoring? We involve students in key projects on every IT team. They see things from a completely different perspective.

Biggest tech disappointment? On-premises data analytics systems. Data analytics without extensive investment in analysts and without peer comparisons isn’t very useful.

Skills you’ll hire for: Security, procurement and vendor relationship specialists.

What’s the most important task you’ve delegated this year? Facility and network disaster recovery improvement projects, which I assigned to the director of network communications.

How have you created work/life balance? I try to keep regular hours and encourage staffers to do the same. I insist that vacation time get used.

Sanjay Saraf

Title Senior vice president and CTO, Western Union Digital

Employer Western Union

Location Englewood, Colo.

What emerging tech has captured your interest?  Machine learning and adaptive “intelligent” systems are already making huge impacts in our daily lives and in next few years will change the way companies do business. We have already designed systems for predictive analysis, propensity modelling, fraud prevention and advanced personalization leveraging big data and linked analysis with cluster mapping. All of that is intended to drive a great experience with the least friction, resulting in more lifetime value and loyalty.

Coolest current project: We focused on improving the customer experience by putting our customers in the center. As we embraced this philosophy, we immediately came to the conclusion that we needed an omni-channel strategy to deliver a truly memorable experience. We initiated a digital technology transformation program and invested in next-generation technologies. This tech transformation has enabled us to rapidly expand our digital touchpoints and provide a truly connected experience for customers. Our customers for the first time can engage in one channel and fulfill on another.

How are you using reverse-mentoring: Every year, we hire interns from top universities, such as Berkeley and Cornell, and engage them in innovative projects. Toward the end of the internships, the students present their work. It helps us in understanding their perspective and tailor our products for the newer generation. Several promising former interns are now our employees engaged in critical projects or implementing ideas that they proposed while interns.

Robin Sarkar

Title CIO

Employer Lakeland Health

Location St. Joseph, Mich.

Coolest current project: We are working on a device integration project (combining medical devices, networking, IT and analytics capability) in our main hospital that we expect will significantly impact patient safety and save lives.

How has your vendor management strategy changed in the past few years? We have moved from a transactional vendor approach to a strategic partnership with our technology suppliers. We collaborate with our partners to understand their road maps and the new products they plan to bring to market and to outline our health system strategy and the enabling technologies.

Fast ROI project: A radiology IT system for ultrasound integration and billing, developed in collaboration with one of our emergency room physicians. The project paid for itself within a few months.

How have you created work/life balance? We try to keep an informal work atmosphere in our IT facility — flexible work hours, casual dress, telecommuting options, a reboot room with a pool table and monthly game competitions. That all helps to relieve the stress of supporting clinical teams 24/7.

Sorabh Saxena

Title CIO, Network and Shared Services

Employer AT&T

Location Dallas

An innovative staff idea: A staff member developed and applied machine-learning technology to detect root causes of defects, thus saving precious delivery cycle time. He applied the ensemble method, letting multiple algorithms compete, and naive Bayes was selected because its “root mean square error” was lower. The model has improved from 10% success rate automatically to 27% over five months.

How are you using reverse-mentoring? I purposefully have recent college hires on my direct support staff and am an executive sponsor for our new hire program. Engaging daily with them gives me an opportunity to continually adapt work preferences and learn new technologies and, more importantly, to get insights into their expectations of technology and their leaders.

Skills you’ll hire for: As is the case in much of the industry, all software skills — especially combined with networking, extreme automation and machine learning — will be critical. AT&T has invested heavily in retooling its workforce for the past few years. Not only have there been internal programs created, but we also collaborate with universities such as Georgia Tech, the University of Oklahoma and Notre Dame in advanced technical degrees, one of which is in machine learning.

Julie Schlabach

Title Senior director, Emerging Technology Services

Employer Cerner

Location North Kansas City, Mo.

How are you using reverse-mentoring? We invited our summer interns to present to the leadership team on their accomplishments and provide feedback for future internships. We are making improvements based on their guidance.

Personal leadership style? My focus is on making an investment in people. Everyone matters to the organization, and their work is appreciated. I encourage a focus on education and mentoring. For example, when I was at a recent population health conference, I took notes for my team and shared them with associates working at all levels when I returned.

How do you evaluate emerging technologies? It’s about needs and gaps — and we base it on evaluations, then prepare a proof of concept. If the POC works, we write a business case for leadership review.

How have you created work/life balance? When I am at home, I am at home. When I am at work, I am at work. I try to be present wherever I am. We also have a rotation for being on-call, which helps everyone. I encourage my teams to take time to find balance.

Glenn Schneider

Title Executive vice president and CIO

Employer Discover Financial Services

Location Riverwoods, Ill.

Coolest current project: Using real-time operational analytics combined with streaming and historical data to derive actionable insights such as timely fraud decisions. The project is using next-generation machine-learning tools and data streaming architecture and incorporates customer, transactional, social and external data.

An innovative staff idea: An employee suggested developing a credit card feature to allow customers to freeze and unfreeze their accounts in seconds using an on/off switch in our mobile app or website. Thus, Freeze It was born, giving customers more control over their accounts and another tool to help reduce fraud.

How are you using reverse-mentoring? We have found that paired programming has helped to transfer specialized skills across developers while delivering code efficiently and at a higher quality.

New titles in your IT organization: Chief data officer and technology risk officer.

Personal leadership style? We are looking to expand our advanced analytics talent (data scientists), cloud developer skills and agile coaching capabilities through a combination of training and external hires.

How do you find time to innovate? Our company was founded on the principle of innovation; it’s in our DNA. Our leadership cultivates and nurtures the environment to focus on “progress over perfection” and provide the option to “fail fast” — encouraging an agile and test-driven approach to innovation.

Lori S. Scott

Title CIO

Employer NatureServe

Location Arlington, Va.

Coolest current project: Developing a global dashboard for monitoring the status and trends of biodiversity to guide new conservation investments.

An innovative staff idea: A team took a one-off product and turned it into a new software-as-a-service product line by creating a configurable Drupal module with integrated GIS for online environmental reviews.

New titles in your IT organization: Enterprise architect

Skills you’ll hire for: We’ll train existing staffers in cybersecurity, SharePoint, user interface and responsive design.

Carlos Selonke

Title Head of platform strategy and enterprise architecture

Employer Santander US

Location Dorchester, Mass.

Career highlight: We’re all part of a global economy, and it’s been a fascinating experience for me to work for a global financial services company. Santander US is part of Santander Group, which serves more than 100 million customers in the U.K., Latin America, Europe and the U.S. This gives me an opportunity to work on local and global projects with people from different cultures and with different ways of working.

What emerging tech has captured your interest? Digital currencies, or cryptocurrencies, are of utmost importance to nations and the entire global banking system. So in that light, I have to mention bitcoin and similar efforts. But possibly even more important is blockchain, the underlying technology for managing a secure distributed ledger.

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: Technology will be so pervasive that the role of IT will change profoundly, and the role of CIO as we know it will be obsolete.

Biggest tech disappointment? Battery technology still has a long way to go. We need to do better — an order of magnitude better. There has been lots of great progress to be sure, especially in visible areas like electric cars. But across the board, the need is palpable.

John W. Showalter

Title Chief health information officer

Employer University of Mississippi Medical Center

Location Jackson, Miss.

Coolest current project: Combining real-time natural language process with predictive analytics to encourage clinicians to take actions that will prevent illness. We are working with two cloud vendors to combine their technology inside our electronic health records system.

Personal leadership style? I have high expectations for my teams. I encourage independence and accountability while creating a greenfield environment for them to execute our vision. Failure is tolerated, because it is needed for innovative ideas to flourish.

How has your vendor management strategy changed in the past few years? We are moving increasingly to cloud-based partners. The most advanced analytics are coming from startups and young companies, so we are beginning to participate in development relationships and have started working with Silicon Valley incubators.

How do you find time to innovate? Innovation is core to our work. Tolerating failure and finding new ways to apply technology is necessary for health systems to remain financially viable and improve outcomes. I encourage my team members to bring new ideas forward.

How are you working with startups? We have partnered with Plug and Play to identify startups to work with. We then mentor the companies while they are in the incubator. The companies that best meet our needs are offered development deals. We are starting a 24-month health IT accelerator program.

Read Showalter’s full profile.

Shane Snider

Title Executive vice president, IT and customer care

Employer SkillPath Seminars

Location Mission, Kan.

How are you using reverse-mentoring? Staying connected to younger workers offers insights into our future customer base. Scheduling and location (work-from-anywhere) flexibility, using personal devices and interacting via social media apps in addition to face-to-face meetings are all standard fare to them and can be for others.

What’s the most important task you’ve delegated this year? I tasked my vice president of IT with our Salesforce implementation and ongoing support. He has led a cross-department oversight team and end-user adoption testing and worked with our consulting company for customizations.

Fast ROI project: The acquisition of National Seminars changed that organization into a profitable brand in a few months because of the economies of scale and cost savings that the combined, larger company created.

Scott Spradley

Title CIO and senior vice president

Employer Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Location Palo Alto, Calif.

How are you using reverse-mentoring? Recent college graduates are using unconventional technologies that are often open source or freeware, and they’re getting the same scalability and stability that many traditional platforms offer. These young people share new models, new use cases and, importantly, new desires and expectations in the use of enabling technologies.

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: CIOs will largely become service brokers, and data centers as we know them are likely to change dramatically due to Moore’s Law, the advancement of cloud technologies and cost scaling.

Personal leadership style? I am true believer in transparency in communications, in empowering our people to take risks and ensuring that leaders and managers are just that — people who remember that they are critical in developing the people that they lead and manage because this is what drives innovation, morale and productivity. Finally, I strive for a high say-to-do ratio; meaning that we achieve the outcomes we said we would.

How has your vendor management strategy changed in the past few years? We’ve become more focused on the consolidated cost and utilization of our purchased services. At the same time, we’ve become more strategically aligned with our business regarding the services we need to evaluate and purchase, which has allowed us to keep pace with the completed divestiture of HP Inc. and the planning and execution of two pending divestitures (HPE Enterprise Services and HPE Software).

Sanjay Srinivasan

Title Vice president and chief architect

Employer Vonage

Location Scottsdale, Ariz.

Career highlight: Learning in 2016, through LinkedIn, that a patent I filed in 2000 was granted in 2005.

Coolest current project: Being a STEM mentor for middle and high school students. I have been a programming mentor for a number of robotics teams and involved with Zero Robotics (think programming mini-satellites floating in the International Space Station).

Personal leadership style? I’m a mentor rather than a boss. I strive to be collaborative rather than dictating edicts.

Suresh Srinivasan

Title CTO

Employer NYU Langone Medical Center

Location New York

‘Coolest current project: MyWall. In each room, patients will have a 75-in. monitor and a companion tablet that will provide educational content, entertainment (including Netflix and Hulu), communication capabilities (like Skype and chat), a meal ordering tool, a special gaming system for pediatric patients, and many more sophisticated features. We have selected a platform vendor and are in the process of innovating on the core. The final implementation is due in January 2018.

Personal leadership style? Servant leadership. My focus is how each person can be successful both professionally and personally, and which coaching and mentoring strategies I can harness to develop my staff and unleash their potential.

How do you find time to innovate? I serve on a few healthcare advisory boards and have periodic meetings with CTOs at large vendors to understand their product strategies, which I leverage for innovation. I also identify small startups through research and referrals to bring in to generate innovative ideas. Every six months, I open up an innovation campaign for 30 days, and anyone within the organization can post ideas and develop a proposal in the area of business process, infrastructure, clinical applications or mobility. A board of governors consisting of clinicians and IT leaders helps select five proposals that receive initial funding up to $10,000. Once funded, these projects are carefully monitored for progress and offered additional help if needed. Currently we have about 20 projects in flight.’

Tom Stafford

Title Vice president and CIO

Employer Halifax Health

Location Daytona Beach, Fla.

An innovative staff idea: A healthcare information system that sends alerts to our Vocera clinical communication system, instantly received by caregivers either on their Vocera badge or the Vocera app on their smartphone.

Personal leadership style? I’m only as effective as my teams. Therefore, I spend a lot of my time talking to them about what they are doing and how it assists IT in meeting our objectives. In addition to this, I’m accessible, visible, approachable and consistent.

How has your vendor management strategy changed in the past few years? IT has vendors and partners. We focus on partners. Partners understand our mission as a community-based, not-for-profit hospital. They assist us in making their applications and systems meet our needs.

How have you created work/life balance? I empower all team members to manage their work and schedules. Everything we do focuses on IT’s objectives and has to provide value to the organization.

Raied N. Stanley

Title Vice president, IT

Employer Metropolitan Utilities District

Location Omaha, Neb.

What emerging tech has captured your interest? Hardware authentication. The inadequacies of usernames and passwords are well known. One method is to bake authentication into a user’s hardware.

Coolest current project: A customer self-service portal. Today’s customers expect 24/7 customer service from our utility, from starting or stopping service, getting a billing question answered or making an enrollment request in any of our energy-efficiency programs. Self-service is the only reliable and cost-effective means of meeting this demand without the active presence of dedicated call-center personnel.

An innovative staff idea: Linking our GPS tracking application to our dispatch application via SAP Process Orchestration as the middleware.

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: Customer experience clouds will become core business engines. A customer experience cloud is a suite of applications that helps businesses manage the customer journey from start to finish. Most customer experience clouds provide integrated functionality for marketing, sales, service and, in some cases, e-commerce.

Biggest tech disappointment? Google Plus

New titles in your IT organization: Director of information security and director of analytics.

Alan A. Stukalsky

Title Chief digital officer

Employer Randstad North America

Location Atlanta

Coolest current project: Our Tech and Touch initiative. The biggest values our employees bring are relationship-building and decision-making, and through this initiative, we use technology to give employees more time to concentrate on these roles. As a result, we’re incorporating new technology innovations and business models that streamline processes for employees, including video interviewing, online referral platforms and online scheduling platforms.

Personal leadership style? I am a passionate, calm and assertive leader who focuses on developing leaders and teams to drive business value.

What’s the most important task you’ve delegated this year? I handed our IT security focus to the senior vice president of IT applications, so we can develop a more comprehensive security practice that includes new strategies for combating cyberthreats, protecting privacy and more.

How do you evaluate emerging technologies? We have a dedicated innovation practice that partners with our business teams to introduce differentiating technologies to our business. There are hundreds of new and disrupting technologies in the HR technology market, so we’ve built a process that quickly evaluates those that will have the most impact on our business and explore only the most innovative.

How are you working with startups? The Randstad Innovation Fund researches and invests in new companies to bring forward the best and brightest new technology companies within each of the primary talent recruitment areas. Each company is evaluated through a formal process that includes financial and product viability, piloting within the marketplace and benefit to end users.

Read Stukalsky’s full profile.

Ramakrishnan Sudarshanam

Title Divisional vice president, IT

Employer United Breweries

Location Bangalore, India

What emerging tech has captured your interest? We are working on the use cases for implementing internet of things technology in our brewery operations and tracking performance of field assets. A pilot project is underway.

Fast ROI project: A keg-tracking project using RFID technology has achieved the fastest ROI. Using this information, the distribution team could improve collection of empty kegs, resulting in faster turnaround time.

How do you find time to innovate? I attend key CIO events and participate in panel discussions and roundtables to stay up to date. I have also empowered my team to handle day-to-day operations so I can devote time to evaluating opportunities where technology can be innovatively deployed for business benefits.

How are you working with startups? I attend startup boot camps whenever possible. We are currently working with two startups.

Mike Sutten

Title Senior vice president and CTO

Employer Kaiser Permanente

Location Oakland, Calif.

Career highlight: Building applications for the nation’s counterterrorism efforts.

What emerging tech has captured your interest? Internet of things technology and the pervasive instrumentation of patients, assets and clinical devices.

Coolest current project: Remote patient monitoring for diabetes. It integrates mobile monitoring and diagnostics devices with our hospital capabilities, extending clinical care to where the patients live and thrive.

How are you using reverse-mentoring? I launched a rotation program for recent computer science and engineering graduates. They learn from us while infusing our organization with fresh thinking. Another example is a video series in which the millennial technologists break down terms like “internet of things” into easy-to-digest videos for IT professionals and nontechnical employees.

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: In the next five years or so, we’ll see a move toward data democratization. Consumers will take control of their own information, and it will be the choice of the customer to consume or share data about his or her personal health.

Biggest tech disappointment? Analytics and visualization tools have consistently underdelivered. These tools are promoted as panaceas and are often thinly veiled service contracts hidden behind a perpetual license. Visualization capabilities that do deliver on their promise, such as 3D and augmented reality, have yet to find effective use cases in our environments.

New titles in your IT organization: Vice president of the cloud services group and chief data officer.

Thomson Thomas

Title Senior vice president, business systems and technology

Employer HDFC Standard Life Insurance

Location Mumbai, India

What emerging tech has captured your interest? We are currently looking at blockchain, which will bring disruption in the insurance and banking sectors.

Skills you’ll hire for: Mobile development, cognitive computing, robotics, robotics process automation and application performance management. We would like to mostly train internal staffers for those roles. We would also like to do some fresh hiring to infuse new ideas into the department.

How has your vendor management strategy changed in the past few years? There is a conscious effort to track not just the large vendors, but also the niche startups. The review rigor for existing partners has increased as we have become more demanding of relationships.

How do you evaluate emerging technologies? We evaluate new technologies that can give us a competitive edge and also help our distributors and customers.

Sean R. Valcamp

Title Chief information security officer

Employer Avnet

Location Phoenix

Personal leadership style? My leadership style focuses on providing an environment for my team to be successful while still being accountable to their commitments. Respect is a two-way street, and together, we can accomplish so much more.

Skills you’ll hire for: Our team is embracing new, collaborative ways of delivering IT solutions in a timely manner. We have begun using bimodal IT or an agile development methodology, with IT and business stakeholders continually engaged. We will be looking to grow and develop our team’s skills in this area.

How have you adjusted your risk management strategy to align with the evolving technology landscape? There is a balance to be maintained between new technology and risk management. The culture of your work environment will dictate this balance. I have steered this culture over the years by listening to what is needed and helping others understand the associated risks. Together, we make good decisions.

How are you working with startups? We have partnered with Arizona State University to create the Avnet Innovation Lab, which aspiring entrepreneurs use to advance their technology innovations. We also take time to visit venture capital firms and participate in a Shark Tank-type event where each startup company has 15 minutes to present to the Avnet team.

Robin W. Veit

Title Director, client engineering and operations

Employer Starz

Location Englewood, Colo.

Career highlight: To improve my public speaking skills, I signed up for a program that requires participants to give “TED Talk”-style speeches to an audience of peers and managers at the end of the program. It made such an impact on my confidence and career that I now lead the program.

Coolest current project: I’m leading the planning of our IT open house. For this event, we invite all Starz employees to visit booths where we describe and demonstrate the services IT provides and discuss technology in general, including consumer technology. We want people to walk away with a better understanding of what technology is available to them, whether in their personal life or at Starz.

An innovative staff idea: We have a program we call the IT Petting Zoo that gives people a chance to get acquainted with corporate and consumer mobile devices and wearables. Employees can check out a device from the zoo for a week and try it. It’s a fun service we provide to all employees. Not only does this help Starz employees, it furthers our goal of being technology advisers.

New titles in your IT organization: An automation engineer responsible for ServiceNow administration and automation of processes. As we try to focus more on the business, it’s important to free up engineers’ time to do so. One way of doing this is by automating operational processes where possible.

Personal leadership style? In addition to managing and motivating my team, it’s also important to help them learn, grow and become more effective in their jobs. Mentoring others is one of the reasons I was drawn to management. I enjoy giving people guidance and opportunities, and I find it rewarding to help them further their capabilities.

Radhika Venkatraman

Title Senior vice president and CIO, network and technology

Employer Verizon

Location Basking Ridge, N.J.

What emerging tech has captured your interest? Internet of things. My team is well positioned to support Verizon’s opportunities in IoT through industry partnerships, strategic hiring and continuous experimentation.

How are you using reverse-mentoring? We recently tested a “cohort-style” internship program, where interns spent 10 weeks learning new technologies and then delivered real-life projects. The interns presented their work to the leadership team. Their candor and feedback yielded key takeaways that enabled future productive engagements in a workplace where four generations of people work together.

Fast ROI project: Working with business and government agencies, my team built a system that eliminated the need for 2 million call-before-you-dig dispatches for Verizon to mark the ground to show the location of its network on pieces of property. My team leveraged geospatial inventory and predictive analytics for this solution, which saved millions of dollars — 40 times our initial investment in the initiative, in fact.

How do you evaluate emerging technologies? My team drives the technology changes necessary to scale our business. Currently, we’re focused on 4G, 5G and SDN by investigating emerging technologies, collaborating with universities and startups, persuading market leaders to invest in promising areas, engaging with standards bodies and partnering with industry leaders around the globe.

How are you working with startups? We work with several early- and midstage startups in new areas of networking, machine learning and computing to take advantage of innovation in the marketplace and leapfrog traditional incremental approaches. Working with startups allows us to be disruptive while still being part of a large ecosystem.

Craig Walker

Title Vice president and global CIO, Shell Downstream

Employer Shell International Petroleum Co.

Location London

Career highlight: My international experience has been invaluable in terms of interacting with people from different cultures around the world. I’ve lived and worked in Europe, Africa, North and South America, and the Middle East. The big learning is actually how much we are all alike, what motivates us and how, when you build the right team, you can achieve business results you didn’t think possible.

What emerging tech has captured your interest? There is no single technology; the perfect storm of mobile, cloud, data analytics, A.I. and IoT is upon us, and things are evolving rapidly. My team’s skill is to derive business value and competitive advantage by bringing these core technologies together in innovative ways. We have to make it easy, enjoyable and rewarding for the consumer to use Shell’s products and services. The possibilities are endless. We have to disrupt or be disrupted; this is vital for our survival as a thriving energy company. It’s an exciting time to be a CIO.

An innovative staff idea: The use of underwater drones in a swarm to inspect and clean the bottom of shipping vessels when they are unloading. That helps ensure that the ships operate more efficiently, and it helps prevent maintenance problems.

How are you using reverse-mentoring? I’m a huge advocate of mentoring and use it widely across the organization. I welcome the nonconstrained outlook of recent college graduates and the insights that new hires offer. I also enjoy fireside chats, lunch-and-learn workshops and other forums that enable people to share ideas and offer opinions in a nonthreatening environment. I have learned to listen and encourage that game-changing idea to come forward.

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: The CIO will take over from the CFO as the accepted right-hand adviser to the CEO. Companies that don’t have a strong CIO driving a transformational agenda will start to fail.

Melissa J. Ward

Title Vice president, IT

Employer Eurpac Service

Location Dallas

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: Augmented reality will become mainstream, used for everything from getting product details while shopping to enhancing exercise programs with scenery and equipment. Conducting business meetings via virtual or augmented reality will greatly reduce the need to travel, because people will truly feel as if they are in the other person’s office — right down to shaking hands. Surgeons will be able to conduct virtual robotic operations from across the country or world.

Biggest tech disappointment? Security tools continue to be challenging. We must strive to find the right balance of privacy and security, and find products that can stay ahead of newly introduced risks. Malware continues to increase in sophistication at a faster rate than security tools evolve. And many companies continue to struggle with cobbled-together security systems rather than a holistic approach.

Personal leadership style? Open and guiding. I learn as much from my team as they learn from me. I treat them as the experts they are and try to help them by removing roadblocks. I set clear expectations and get out of the way.

Skills you’ll hire for: Even though these are common in larger organizations, the skills I must add are security and compliance professionals, change management specialists and cloud architects. I expect to train existing employees in these areas.

How has your vendor management strategy changed in the past few years? We have embraced vendors more fully as partners. Every vendor-client relationship must have a win-win component in order for your company to thrive. Vendors worth having will want to find ways to help your business succeed.

Creighton Warren

Title CIO

Employer USG

Location Chicago

How has your vendor management strategy changed in the past few years? Given our company’s investment portfolio, we intentionally leverage a mix of established large or midsize vendors, boutique vendors and startups or near-startups. Different management approaches are necessary for each. For large, established vendors, we employ proven, established best practices for contract adherence, service-level agreements and quarterly business reviews to align business plans and road maps. For our true vendor partners, we establish executive-level relationships and meet regularly. For our smaller vendors, we dive into their operations a little more. We want their agility and focused knowledge, but at the same time, we need to manage it in a manner that will not put our operations at undue risk.

How do you evaluate emerging technologies? USG has a long history of innovation. Our mature enterprise architecture discipline canvasses the market and populates a framework based on technologies’ applicability to our company. In recent years, those activities have directly and indirectly led to operational investments in targeted analytics and cloud capabilities. We have also incorporated them into our innovation efforts. Recently, we conducted an internal Shark Tank-style competition, in which the winning team developed a proof of concept system around price optimization for our distribution business and leveraged a mix of established and emerging technologies. The concept was so well received that a pilot deployment was fully funded and subsequently executed.

How have you created work/life balance? Our employees work hard, but we recognize that they need to make time for themselves and their families. Therefore, our senior management leaders encourage flexible schedules and other initiatives that create an environment that gives people a chance to be more present for their families. It’s a way of life that’s important to our company.

Florian Wegener

Title Formerly vice president and head of global e-commerce

Employer Qiagen

Location Hilden, Germany

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: Quantum computing will revolutionize the use of the massive amount of data in an internet of things (IoT) world where everything is connected.

Tommy Whitten

Title District technology coordinator

Employer Madison County Schools

Location Huntsville, Ala.

Career highlight: I was asked to serve on the Governor’s Task Force on Distance Learning in Alabama. Over two years, the task force developed a statewide program that now serves approximately 40,000 students and is known nationally as one of the most successful of its kind.

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: I see the local data center going away, with a transition toward more cloud-based storage and processing. This will cut costs by reducing the need for continual equipment upgrades and software updates at the local level. Data protection and security will also be offloaded from the local technical staff, along with tasks relating to data backups, disaster recovery and business continuity.

Personal leadership style? I place a strong emphasis on teamwork, and I try to satisfy my team members’ need to be involved and committed to their work. I prefer to be friendly and approachable, and I treat subordinates as equals and give them respect for their contributions. I do, however, actively challenge team members to work at their highest level.

What’s the most important task you’ve delegated this year? We have built a new building to centralize all our servers and house our data center. The move from the old location was a very complex task that had to be completed over one weekend. I delegated the task to our senior network specialist, who did a wonderful job of planning and supervising the move.

Judd Williams

Title CIO

Employer National Collegiate Athletic Association

Location Indianapolis

Career highlight: Our IT department had the highest scores across NCAA headquarters when an outside firm was hired to conduct a culture survey covering areas such as credibility, trust, fairness and respect.

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: There will be no more laptops. Phones will become a user’s primary machine, and docking stations for phones that connect to monitors, mice and keyboards will be the norm.

Biggest tech disappointment? Hybrid laptop/tablet machines. The products are close, but they’re still missing a few things.

Your spare time? I have three kids under the age of 3, two of whom are identical twins. What spare time?

Richard A. Wilson

Title Colonel, U.S. Army; chief, solution delivery

Employer Defense Health Agency

Location Falls Church, Va.

Career highlight: Leading this organization and reshaping they way we deliver technology, tools and information. We can directly help and even save the lives of our service members and their families through advanced solutions. It is an honor serving the people who give up so much to protect us and our country.

Coolest current project: Patient engagement tools and Tri-Service Workflow template management system used throughout the military health system by providers, nurses and clinical support staff, mainly in primary-care settings.

Personal leadership style? Participative and transformational.

Lisa M. Woodley

Title Vice president, digital experience

Employer NTT Data

Location New York

What emerging tech has captured your interest? The potential to combine A.I., IoT and wearables to create ecosystems of interactions that can sense and respond in a way that eliminates the need for any actual interface. I’m working now within our insurance and healthcare verticals to identify future use cases that could revolutionize industries like life insurance and elder care.

How are you using reverse-mentoring? I teach a graduate UX design class at Rutgers University. Each semester, students bring new ideas and ways of working to the class. I regularly update my curriculum and bring some of the ideas back to my team to help innovate how we work and engage our colleagues.

How do you evaluate emerging technologies? I consider the complexity of the emerging tech vis-a-vis the magnitude of the problem it has the potential to solve. An interesting new technology can quickly become an expensive novelty if it doesn’t actually solve a business problem or is too difficult to implement.

How do you find time to innovate? Lasting and viable innovation solves problems. It eliminates unnecessary steps. It creates new ways of working that allow us to automate the mundane and focus on the strategic. So the real question is, “How do you find time if you don’t innovate?”

Read Woodley’s full profile.

Naoto Yamamoto

Title Chief, business solutions

Employer United Nations Development Programme

Location New York

Coolest current project: Building early-warning systems by detecting signals of global crisis (natural disasters, armed conflicts and political tensions, for example).

An innovative staff idea: Use of shipping containers equipped with communication and network tools powered by solar energy. This allows us to directly interact with project beneficiaries in remote locations of the globe and encourage grassroots participation in our projects.

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: Costly government surveys (for example, the living standard survey) will be replaced by IoT, social media and satellite image analytics.

How do you evaluate emerging technologies? By talking with peers from other organizations, and rapid prototyping.

How have you adjusted your risk management strategy to align with the evolving technology landscape? We have increased our use of data and analytics rather than solely relying on rigid technical control to execute inflexible rules.

Michael E. Young

Title Chief product security officer

Employer Esri

Location Redlands, Calif.

Coolest current project: We are testing the limits of embedding security validation as early as possible in the development life cycle. We are working with a security vendor on a not-yet-released offering that embeds security validation into the integrated development environment, providing on-the-fly static analysis feedback for developers.

Skills you’ll hire for: Software security engineers. These professionals have a core competency of development, but also have a strong security foundation. I welcome new hires for their fresh perspectives, but I also encourage existing staffers to take on new roles, because helping people grow their careers is very fulfilling.

Fast ROI project: With our CEO’s backing, I was honored to lead my team in creating the most secure offering available from Esri. In less than one year after its release, we shifted to a positive ROI and now host numerous commercial organizations and federal agencies.

How have you adjusted your risk management strategy to align with the evolving technology landscape? As cloud-based web services and cybersecurity risks continue to grow exponentially throughout enterprise operations, the importance of third-party/vendor risk management has continued to mature at Esri. For example, we now use tools to validate software components acquired from other organizations for both vulnerabilities and licensing issues.

Michael K. Yzerman

Title Vice president and deputy CIO

Employer Community Health Systems

Location Franklin, Tenn.

Career highlight: I hold a master’s degree in social work and worked for a number of years in child protective services. During that time, I became interested in IT and obtained a healthcare IT position. I use this background to work more effectively with people, lead teams and improve organizational effectiveness.

New titles in your IT organization: Customer resolution center representative was recently added to reflect our organization’s customer-centered and results-focused IT service management approach, which integrates the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework and customer relationship management best practices.

Personal leadership style? Delivering organizational results by sharing power and encouraging, supporting and enabling others to realize their full potential. This leadership style has been described as servant leadership.

What’s the most important task you’ve delegated this year? Primary management accountability for hospital information systems conversions — general financial, patient financial and clinical systems — were delegated to a senior director within my organization. System conversion is the management of large-scale, complex projects that carry substantial financial and operational risks.

How has your vendor management strategy changed in the past few years? Vendor management has moved from individual contractor engagements focused primarily on staff augmentation to more comprehensive service agreements to reduce administrative costs, consolidate services and share risk.

Sigal Zarmi

Title Global CIO

Employer PwC

Location New York

What emerging tech has captured your interest? Artificial intelligence. We’ve launched Halo Data Auditing, our globally branded data extraction, visualization and auditing platform. It’s designed to enhance our risk assessment process and execute automated testing and data validation.

Coolest current project: Our investments in cloud technology (including collaboration, customer relationship management, talent management, engagement and financial management), data analytics and the DevOps model will enable us to save time and deliver more value for our clients.

How are you using reverse-mentoring? In the U.K., employees from the business and technology teams at junior or middle level are coaching other colleagues and senior leaders on social media. Almost 6,000 people have been trained in social media skills — 30% of PwC’s U.K. workforce.

Boldest prediction for the next 5 years: The car is the next big market for IT, on scale with the smartphone. The car will be a place for business, a cash-generating asset for consumers, and a hotbed of A.I.

Skills you’ll hire for: Our new DevOps model will require a more hands-on, in-house approach, combining business and technology specialists working together in small focused teams and automation (where possible). We will be recruiting more business solution architects, developers, automation experts, user interface designers and A.I. experts.