Home › Posts tagged purpose’

Tag: purpose’

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Having celebrated its 100th anniversary last year, Canadian Tire has had to perform some deft manoeuvring in the last couple of years to become more agile. And with his dual titles at the company—CIO and CTO—Rex Lee is in the driver’s seat to support digital transformation and implement shared knowledge across teams and management. No small feat considering he’s responsible for a bursting portfolio that covers a family of companies including Canadian Tire retail, Sport Check, Mark’s, Party City, Pro Hockey Life, and several others.

“I moved from telco to tech, high tech to retail, but didn’t think I’d make that jump, nor thought retail would be invigorating,” he says. “But I was wrong. It’s so exciting. I didn’t realize how embedded technology was in everything in retail. And holding more than one role is a bit of a trend right now. The idea being that technology, whether it’s internal or customer facing, has certain constructs that can be applied more broadly. And if you’re able to unify these things, you can harness the power of economies, longer-term thinking, and greater scalability. So my role isn’t just operations and how things work today, but also what’s next and how do we evolve.”

And naturally with a 100-year-old organization come systems that sometimes aren’t entirely modern. As a result, especially during the pandemic, the complexity of legacy infrastructure held back an ability to achieve new things. Finding a way to evolve through traditional IT was essential, and solutions mostly emerged through available talent.

“It’s amazing what happens when you empower people and trust them,” he says. “We didn’t have to compete with priorities of getting money into the company to keep it running. There was no real IT in business. It was all one team working together toward the same goals. I felt so supported by my peers. Sometimes technology gets blamed for things, but everybody realized that it was the situation. Because we were already down this journey, it helped accelerate the move toward an agile operating model where you combine business and technology teams under a single structure. You need the tone at the top and you need to have that opportunity to be able to bring things together. Without that, it’s really hard to create alignment and communicate.”

CIO Leadership Live Canada’s Rennick recently spoke with Lee about his nonlinear career path, the synergy of digital transformation and retail, and the digital overhaul to the business through, and after, the pandemic. Watch the full video below for more insights.

On following the rules: I started my career at Bell Canada and one of the things I learned there was breaking the rules. I sometimes asked folks when it’s appropriate to break a rule when the rule doesn’t actually achieve what it was intended to achieve. It forces you to rethink the rule and what you’re doing. When I started at Bell, I was in this row of cubicles and at the end was a big pile of old PCs, and I took it upon myself to build a server out of them. I then networked it and created shared capabilities, which we didn’t have readily available back then. It was great for information and document sharing, collaboration, and those kind of things, but I got in a little trouble because I wasn’t supposed to take apart equipment and hook it into the network and create privileged access. But it got me noticed in some positive ways, as well as got me thinking outside the box of what my day-to-day job was, saying there’s a better way of doing this.

On recent lessons learned: During the pandemic, we weren’t deemed an essential service so the government shut all our stores. That meant all traffic, from a retail perspective, went online. We were doing about 5,000 orders a day and we got flooded well beyond anything we could possibly imagine in terms of what we had built the system for, going up to about 120,000 orders a day. If you’re doing 100kpm and want to do 120, just step on gas pedal a little harder. But we’re talking a 2,400% increase. That’s going 2,400kpm, so pushing the gas pedal harder doesn’t get you there. You need a brand-new engine, new tires, new drivers. And it’s not just fixing the car. You have to fix the roads, change the traffic lights. There are so many things that have to be changed and we had to do thousands every week to figure out how to unlock the scale of the problem we had. It was extremely difficult to do. I also felt personally responsible for putting the corporation in such a challenging position where revenues weren’t coming into the organization.

On appreciating limited resources: When I was at Research in Motion, now BlackBerry, whatever you wanted to spend, whoever you wanted to hire, whatever you wanted to buy, you could do it back then. Whatever you needed. I learned a lot being on the inside about the problems of having too much money and not enough governance and control. And when you have unlimited resources, like I did, you’re able to just do stuff. But constraints actually force you to do things differently and force you to think there’s a better, smarter way. When you don’t have those constraints, you tend to make decisions which are fast and easy as opposed to really innovative and creative.

On digital transformation: The definition back then was to implement e-commerce. It’s funny because there was this perception that e-commerce was just a piece of software or something to implement, when really it’s a radical business transformation. Every aspect of your business changes everything as you start to go down that path. So that led to a variety of things. It gave me the chance to do more, and eventually I was given the opportunity to take on the role I have now for everything we do.

On cybersecurity: Cybersecurity is a business issue, a business imperative. And that helps set the tone. What we’ve done is embed objectives across all of the C levels. When we say it’s everyone’s problem, it’s put in everyone’s objectives and it makes sense. From a business perspective, so many cybersecurity programs focus on tasks, metrics, and maturity models that are hard to get people to care about. But when you start to explain it in business terms around residual risk and cyber risk scenarios, that is our North Star. Whatever plan I have, though, if I’m still doing the same one next year, then I’ve failed because I haven’t adapted because things don’t stand still for an entire year in the world of cyber. So agility and agile operating models, and a focus on business risk scenarios, residual risk, and the ability to pivot, are all really important. The mindset, not only across my peers, but also within technology, within the cyber team, has to change as well. There was a time when if you asked people in the cybersecurity team what their job was, they would’ve said to secure the company and make sure things are safe. But that’s not completely their job. It’s actually to help the business in a secure way. Because the first definition could propagate certain behaviors that aren’t consistent with what we need to do as an organization. Shutting down e-commerce would make us a lot safer but that doesn’t help the business.

C-Suite, CIO, Digital Transformation, IT Leadership

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Kidney diseases are a leading cause of death in the US, claiming more than a quarter million lives each year. Roughly 37 million people in the US are inflicted with chronic kidney disease (CKD) although most are undiagnosed. Left untreated, CKD may advance and can lead to more serious medical issues such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and complete kidney failure, or End Stage Renal Disease (ESRD).

The solution for many at that extreme stage is dialysis or a kidney transplant — both of which have a significant impact on the quality of life. Every 24 hours, 360 people in the US begin dialysis treatment for kidney failure, according to the CDC.

One organization at the forefront of clinical care and innovation is DaVita, one of the largest providers of kidney care services, with more than 2,800 outpatient dialysis centers in the US and close to 400 outpatient dialysis centers in 11 countries worldwide. This year alone, the company has served nearly 200,000 patients in the US at its outpatient centers and is actively pushing the kidney care industry to adopt high-quality standards of care for all patients.

While treating ESRD patients through its large network of dialysis centers is the Fortune 200 company’s primary business, the company is also involved in efforts to reduce CKD cases and the need for dialysis treatment and transplants as well. Here, IT is playing a significant role.

“We’ve been working to enable world-class integrated care at scale and transform the delivery of care at each point of a patient’s journey,” says Alan Cullop, SVP & CIO at DaVita.  “Our digital transformation strategy is centered around establishing a consumer-oriented model that helps us customize chronic care management based on the ever-changing conditions of each patient.”

The foundation for DaVita’s digital transformation will be a new technical platform and clinical documentation system that “allows for deeper integration across our applications and improves our ability to capture data throughout the patient’s care,” Cullop says, noting that development has been a multi-year process and deployment is now underway and will be completed in 2023. “We’re providing our physician partners, clinical teams, and patients with digital capabilities that support our efforts to proactively improve the quality of care our patients receive.”  

DaVita also provides millions of dollars in funding to address ancillary issues related to kidney disease sufferers, such as food insecurity and even support to patients impacted by environmental catastrophes such as hurricanes and earthquakes.

In this CIO Executive Council Future Forward podcast, we talk with DaVita’s technology chief about the company’s plan to expand activities from CKD treatment to disease prevention. Cullop also talks about DaVita’s strategies for AI and data analytics, as well as the importance of passion and culture as drivers of technology innovation.

The following are edited excerpts from that discussion. Click on the podcast players below to listen to Parts 1 & 2 of the conversation.

Tim Scannell:  How much of a role do technologies like data analytics and AI play in DaVita’s overall technology and business strategy?

Alan Cullop: We have a very large and very focused effort on AI and data analytics. There’s so much power in data and the insights doctors get early in the care continuum and how we engage with patients even before they are in dialysis. We’re using predictive algorithms to identify signs of undiagnosed kidney disease. We’re also doing a lot with population health management, performing more comprehensive patient assessments, managing our high-risk patients, stabilizing transitions of care, optimizing outpatient care, and really trying to call out things that help us understand disease progression.

We’re looking at a variety of sources of data, putting it in data lakes, and then using that to drive predictive models that really help our doctors and our care teams to stratify our patient’s risk by taking actions at the right time.

A lot of innovation initiatives right now are small and more closely aligned with tangible results. While this may be a great short-term strategy, how might this impact the concept of innovation in general as we move forward?

Alan Cullop: Innovation usually starts with a problem or something we’re trying to solve. And with AI sometimes you stumble on it unexpectantly as a search for the unknown unknown. The trick is to not let the outcomes and particular things we’re trying to solve get in the way of innovative thinking or block our sense of what’s possible.  

Sometimes smaller focused innovation efforts do lead to much bigger ideas. But, ideation sessions, innovation sessions, and hackathons have led to some interesting insights we’ve built upon and can be applied across the board. We encourage our teams to really embrace it, but we’re going to make mistakes. One of the better ways to learn is if you make a mistake, and now you know more than you did before and you know how to perhaps not repeat it.

IT culture is important today, especially in retaining and recruiting talent. As companies shift to a new normal of hybrid working, do you think there’ll be a significant impact on traditional cultural structures?

Alan Cullop: I think there are three fundamental issues or points that help build and sustain a strong culture. First, I am very excited by the increased focus on diversity, inclusion, and belonging in our society. We’ve been very focused on these issues for quite some time and really interested in embracing different perspectives. We’ve made great progress, but it’s one of those things that I would say your work is never done. I’m proud to be a part of the conversation and proud of the engagement level of our teammates.

Second, I think flexibility is crucial. We need to understand how and where our teammates want to work, which roles are conducive with work being done remotely versus hybrid models and find ways to keep our engagement high. For us, that’s a balance. We’re exploring more flexible work arrangements and talking to teammates about how and where they want to work to meet their needs.

Finally, leadership needs to be visible and consistent in terms of demonstrating the importance of culture and engagement. It’s easy to talk about culture, but it’s certainly harder to carve out time to be present and to genuinely engage with teammates on culture. Everyone looks to leadership to be role models and set examples. So, it’s important that we take the time to walk the walk and not just talk the talk.

In earlier conversations, you talked about the ‘power of purpose.’ Can you tell me just what this means to you and how it comes into play at DaVita?

Alan Cullop: I think it’s super important and something we take very seriously. We talk about the power of purpose all the time in healthcare and what it means to stay connected to our patients and their families, and what we can do to really improve their quality of life and in many cases save lives. We bake this into our IT strategy, our team meetings, and our engagement approaches. I love the innovation and enablement that we bring. It personally gives me a lot of energy and passion and a sense of purpose. We’re doing something and we’re giving back to others, which I think for a lot of us helps bring a true sense of purpose.

IT Leadership