CIO goals and IT resolutions for 2018

David Gledhill
CIO, DBS Bank Ltd.

David Gledhill

"It's going to be a fun year. We have quite a few ambitious targets for 2018. We have plans to eliminate 90% of noncloud hardware; achieving a goal of 97% of open systems on hybrid cloud; shrinking our main data center by 75%; hence, delivering massive cost-efficiency and dramatically increasing scalability.

"We will increase our release cadence to well over 10 times, compared to the start of 2017. We already have the world's most extensive banking API platform, and we will continue to extend that to over 200 APIs. By leveraging this extensive API capability, we will be able to push the extension of our ecosystem.

"We will also increase momentum on improving customer centricity, as well as further developing our data-driven culture, analytics-led customer science, instrumentation and experimentation.

"Our employees are the heart of our organization, and we will continue to invest in our people and build on our employees' skill sets, creating a true 22,000-person startup culture."

More IT insights from Gledhill: "Economic models key to DBS Bank's digital transformation strategy"

Antoine Shagoury
Executive vice president and global CIO, State Street Corp. 

Antoine Shagoury

"Servicing more than 10% of the world's assets, State Street has an incredible amount of data at our fingertips. One goal for 2018 will be continuing to digitize, normalize and enrich this data so that we can understand and derive even more insights through advanced analytics from it, driving the next generation of intelligent data services to deliver enhanced solutions to our clients."

More on State Street's transformation path: "Create a better strategy for innovation, move away from a 70/30 model"

Julia Davis
Senior vice president and CIO, Aflac Inc.

"I am always working to cultivate lasting working relationships across all business sectors to demonstrate the value of partnership with IT. In 2018, my goal remains to change any perceptions that IT is just a support function to, in actuality, being an enhanced value creator. 

Julia Davis

"I want to continue cultivating the Aflac Agile framework within the IT organization by strengthening relationships with internal customers and showing IT as a collaborative business partner. I also will continue to push innovation in customer relationship management. At Aflac, we're focused on providing full visibility, control and real-time information to the people who need it, whether it's our customers, sales professionals around the U.S., or employees in Georgia and South Carolina.

"One of my ongoing resolutions is to offset a retiring workforce by facilitating and bringing in new ideas to the organization. A key way to achieve this for 2018 is through attracting and retaining top-level talent through our Aflac IT apprenticeship program. In the past, I have talked about how promoting diversity is not only the right thing to do, but how it also makes good business sense. Within IT organizations, multiple talents and perspectives are as important to daily operations as they are to supporting future advancement, and they can spur imagination in the process. Inspiring growth and innovation are top priorities for 2018."

More from Davis on her Agile initiative: "Aflac CIO seized a CEO imperative to create an agile IT organization"

Brian Laughlin
Technical fellow, strategy planning and IT architecture, Boeing Co.

Brian Laughlin

"My goals for 2018 will be continued progress leveraging XR [extended reality] technologies appropriately, based on good business requirements gathering; continued work toward an integrated platform approach that unifies communications across all emerging technologies into a system of systems; and, finally, continuing to nurture and build the talents, relationships and strengths of my amazing team to help us better leverage our capabilities and propel Boeing into our next 100 years of innovation."

Laughlin discusses the security of wearables: "More potential attack vectors complicate wearable device security"

Gerson Benker
Vice president of global IT operations, Carestream Health

Gerson Benker

"We are full-blown into digital transformation -- and not just in IT, but also in our business. We have been fully concentrating on this, so we are looking at Microsoft Azure for cloud, really aggressively. Any core services that are on-prem are going to the cloud. And while we do this, we are doing the digital transformation of our business; we want to have less human intervention in our processes -- that is really a huge priority for next year, to become more efficient in all of these things.

"[As for AI,] the issue with this is before you can use AI, you really have to have the data lakes, and we're still working on that. We are implementing tools that do data discovery and data categorization around the world. We are also implementing tools that gather data from all of our tools around the world. And when all that is together as a data lake -- when that is ready -- then you need to put AI on top of it for your most important priorities. It can't be in parallel; it can't be before you have a good basis -- before you have good data, know where it is and have collected it. A lot of people become impatient and try to put AI on bad processes and inconsistent data for a quick win, but it ends up leaving a bad taste."

Benker comments on using software robots: "IPSoft's latest robot will process help desk requests from users and automate fixes"

Wendy Cofran
CIO, Natick Visiting Nurse Association

Wendy Cofran

"Our focus for 2018 is the continued and necessary disruptions within the healthcare sector. We will continue to explore interoperability, as data sharing among providers, patients and payers is still way behind other industries. We are excited about the continued developments around remote patient monitoring for chronic disease management, as well as other new disease-specific devices that are entering the market.

"Data analytics and EMR [electronic medical record] enhancements will continue to be major focuses for 2018."

More from Cofran on meeting disruption head on: "CIO: Think business first when facing technological disruption"

Jonathan Reichental
CIO, city of Palo Alto

Jonathan Reichental

"In 2018, my team and I will be focused on selecting a new ERP system for the city that includes finance, human resources and our utilities. We'll also begin the design phase of the rollout. In addition, we'll continue to define and action our smart city efforts working alongside our regional and international partners. We will assist departments in the implementation of our recently council-approved sustainability action plan. Our laser-focus on quality deliverables, service excellence, high performance and skills development will all remain a priority."

Reichental explains why the Apple Watch will have a bigger impact on the enterprise than the iPhone X: "CIOs, ask not what Apple's iPhone X can do today, but what comes next"

Neil Gomes
Senior vice president and chief digital officer, Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health

Neil Gomes

"My Digital Innovation and Consumer Experience Group's (DICE Group) top digital goals [and] resolutions for 2018 are: Deliver frictionless consumer experiences in healthcare and education; deliver value to the consumer and the organization in every innovative endeavor; and leverage new technologies, such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, and blockchain to save and improve lives."

More from Gomes on digital transformation: "Digital transformation roadmap: People before platform"