25 Top Information Managers: 2010
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25 Top Information Managers: 2010
To create our inaugural 25 Top Information Manager list, we asked our staff, our contributors and trusted experts in the field to tell us who they thought were among today's best information managers and people to watch in 2010. The nominations ran the gamut from CIOs to architects to program managers to specialists, and their work crosses many domains of the IM field. We vetted our submissions, cut it to 38 finalists and interviewed each person who appears on the final list below. We found every one to be a savvy leader and a game changer in their organization - truly among the best information managers working today.
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Paul Sikora, VP of IT transformation, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
Sikora is clearly star material for his remarkable virtualization and enterprise transformation project at UPMC, a sprawling $8 billion network of 20 hospitals. From a project that began in 2005, Sikora and his colleagues created a robust private cloud that standardized and shrank UPMC's enterprise platform for applications, databases and analytics from 167 servers to just 14. Those 14 servers run more than 500 virtual UNIX instances.
For Windows and Linux, Sikora runs VMware virtualization to support 1,200 Windows instances on 22 servers, replacing 64 full racks of equipment with two-and-a-quarter racks.
With common monitoring and management, UPMC no longer builds out hardware; it provisions and builds capacity in its virtual "factory."
During the project, as UPMC grew in the number of hospitals, employees and patient visits, UNIX instances grew over 300 percent, Windows seats 238 percent and storage 685 percent. "I have more data center space today than I did five years ago, I use the same amount of power, I have 2 percent fewer employees and my budget has been flat," Sikora says. -
Dave Powers, associate information consultant, Eli Lilly & Co.
It is difficult to overstate the R&D mindset cloud computing has brought to Eli Lilly under Dave Powers. In 2008, Powers was experimenting with Amazon Web Services and touting the possibilities of burstable computing and storage internally and with partners as a way to turn fixed infrastructure costs into variable costs.
The greatest effect was felt among science teams, who discovered that the ability to dial up large-scale computing without budget and time hurdles could change the very way they thought about research. If 2008 was a year of testing algorithms and data against hypotheses in the cloud, 2009 was the year that yielded 10 tangible use cases.
Alongside the elastic cloud approach, Lilly is leveraging RightScale's infrastructure management interface and services against appliance/application stacks in a "vending machine" concept that allows self-service to infrastructure and up to three tiers of applications as needed.
"It's disruptive - and I don't use that term loosely - from a technology standpoint, from a business process standpoint and from a procurement standpoint. We're not making big capital investments; it's pay as you go, which is very different," says Powers.
2010 marks the first strategic use of the "innovation engine." Powers sees the cloud as powering. "It's now a very viable option for us to have something that's now deployed in minutes instead of weeks." -
Joel Vengco, chief information architect, Boston Medical Center
It is hard to top Joel Vengco's work as a remarkable testimony of outcomes. Boston Medical Center, the primary care provider and safety net for Boston's inner city, also works with 15 community health centers that refer patients to BMC.
Vengco's first project at BMC two years ago was to use a federal grant to improve collaboration among physicians and partner facilities with a community order entry and referral system.
"The problem was that CHC physicians would refer a patient to be seen at BMC but only 30 percent of those orders actually got scheduled," Vengco told us. "That means 70 percent of referrals were left on a fax machine or voicemail." Of those 30 percent, 25 to 30 percent were no-shows, leaving BMC with no way to reschedule or help them another way.
Today, referring physicians exchange patient and scheduling data electronically with BMC specialists to coordinate appointments and exchange notes so the specialist knows when and why patients arrive. It has ended redundant testing and treatments. When the specialist is done with a patient, the original provider now knows what was done and what needs follow-up care. -
Suzanne Yoakum-Stover, executive director, Institute for Modern Intelligence
It is very hard to categorize this physics Ph.D. turned data modeler. Or is it data scientist? Ontologist? Engineer? Suzanne Yoakum-Stover hasn't come up with a title herself beyond her small institute and consulting business. But she surely doesn't talk like the CIOs and architects we're used to.
Yoakum-Stover was tapped for bringing ultra large-scale intelligence data to a private cloud computing environment and the use of columnar databases in lab work now used by the government. At the moment, most of her work is for the U.S. Army, but it's not her ultimate goal to work in government intelligence.
Her driving ambition is an ultra-large, Internet scale abstract model for capturing data from any source in any data model without loss or distortion. With her research partner she's come up with a framework she'd like to share openly as a kind of Fermi Lab for scholars and scientists to pursue research.
"We have disciplines like physics, biology and less pure things like economics, that's sort of the closest one I can think of to where we're going," she told us. "I think we are on the brink of discovering something like that for intelligence." -
John Glaser, Ph.D., VP and CIO, Partners HealthCare
Glaser is likely the most storied name on our list due to his high-profile work in the Harvard and Partners HealthCare community and a lifetime of project achievements. These days, Glaser is "on loan" for about 60 percent of his time to work with national health care coordinator David Blumenthal and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on government health care initiatives, but still carries full duty at Partners.
At his day job, "it's always more demand than budget and capacity," Glaser told us. "Some things go really well and other things, you just say 'yoiks.'"
With a huge academic and research core in IS, Glaser is always working hard toward federal grants and industry partnerships. But he also has a close eye on unfolding trends. "We're constantly innovating at the edge, it might be decision support or the guy I just talked to about ways of monitoring your health while you're at work or home, or looking at the IT needed to understand the genetic basis behind disease and treatment variability." -
Andrea Ballinger, assistant vice president for decision support, the University of Illinois
Nominated by a top data analyst as "the person undoubtedly at the top of the business intelligence/data warehousing space in higher education," Ballinger drives the largest integrated system of data warehousing in her field. One of two people credited with creating the decision support program at U of I, she says the timing of an enterprise resource planning consolidation and cradle-to-grave data management led to a true organization-wide information capability. "We're really a large city with fire departments, city works, hospitals, research facilities and every student-related function you can imagine," Ballinger told us. "The reward comes in the thanks we get from people who are always challenging our skills. The tough part is keeping to our budget and keeping our wonderful talent."
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Ed Unrau, CMA, information management, IT Division, Canadian Tire Financial Services
Chosen by our staff for his customer-centric customer data integration work at the Canada retail chain and the requirements case that led to it, Unrau is a consummate case of managing savvy and pragmatism. "There's no master's degree in white space," he says. "Managers all talk about delegating, but you can't just abdicate responsibility for your team's output. In most of the mistakes I've been involved in, if I did one thing differently, it would have been to drill deeper into understanding things that weren't my area to understand."
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Matt Bieri, CIO, A.H. Belo
A.H. Belo owns and operates news properties including the Dallas Morning News and the Providence Journal. Bieri was named to our list for his work to segment and understand readership demographics through a database of captive and third-party information. Understanding the widely varying economics of urban populations allows sales to identify target demographics for advertisers, identify and promote to low-penetration neighborhoods and optimize transportation and delivery costs.
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Michael Linhares, Ph.D. and research fellow, business information systems, business operations, Pharmaceutical Sciences, Pfizer Inc.
Linhares leads Pfizer's BIS team and was a force behind the drugmaker's federated integration strategy to centralize R&D and eliminate "spreadmart" silos of information that were not updated or shared evenly. A newer challenge for Linhares is the implementation of a "scientific workbench" for common data capture that virtualizes lab information management systems, chromatography, eLab notebooks, data warehouse and outside information.
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Nihad Aytaman, director of business applications, Elie Tahari Ltd.
Aytaman is recognized for his work to deliver a near real-time data warehouse for high-end fashion retailer Elie Tahari. The IBM Cognos system runs on DB2 and is heavily used by finance, merchandising and sales. But because of the speed that comes with what Aytaman attributes to dimensional modeling, the same system is used by store personnel for size and location lookups for customers seeking an elusive item.
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Kemal Cetin, director, North America customer services deployment, Coca-Cola Enterprises
Nominated for his lead IT role in CCE's emergent business intelligence and centralized reporting program at the world's largest soft drink bottler, Cetin has consistently led with high visibility - and warned us of the "tyranny of the urgent." His three bits of advice for the next top manager: "Know your subject matter, link with and learn from your team in their own language, and, in whatever term suits you, know the meaning of humility.
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Andy Blumenthal, CTO, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms
Blumenthal was staff-nominated as an information manager who happily shares a contagious passion for furthering information management practices in the public sector.
Blumenthal was previously chief enterprise architect at the U.S. Secret Service and the U.S. Coast Guard, where a visually dynamic and powerful enterprise architecture was awarded by the Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General as best in class.
"It is tempting to be dazzled by the brilliant possibilities of the new technologies," Blumenthal told us. "But the bottom line is that everything we invest in has to be focused on the mission." -
Barbara Latulippe, enterprise data architect, Smith & Nephew
Smith & Nephew is a regulated provider of artificial hips and knees, orthopedic equipment and hospital and consumer wound management supplies. With three global business units operating on separate SAP instances, Latulippe was cited for her work to improve data quality and integration through governance and scorecards in the global MDM practice. While data quality varies across different endeavors and 300 legacy environments, data quality has reached 95 percent overall from an initial 25 percent across all three GBUs. It has also revealed many thousands of inactive SKUs and given new insight to the company's core mission.
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David Vasquez, associate VP application owner, Nationwide Insurance
Following Nationwide's acquisition of Allied Insurance, Vasquez took a major role in integrating the companies' auto policy data in a hybrid model that could report across some 800 attributes and 100 metrics of product performance. Pricing and product departments use the reporting to track retention, minimize customer churn from rate increases and cross-sell across rate decreases. "We are seeing about a 0.1 percent increase in our retention in the places we've rolled this out to, an estimated $14 million savings across various projects and states," Vasquez says.
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Larry Mohr, VP of business services, Havi Global Solutions
Havi provides packaging, promotional and supply chain services for large fast food restaurant chains. On behalf of a large client, Mohr and colleagues built its own large data warehouse to monitor daily sales and provide planning and forecasting proposals to all 13,000 U.S. restaurants and thousands more restaurants in the fast food chain globally.
An early program to track promotional toys in children's meals improved forecasts for stocking and replenishment. Mohr's team is now extending the program to order proposals at each restaurant for all food and promotional items through distribution center receipts, inventories and shipments. -
Rich Pollack, VP and CIO, VCU Health Systems
A 160-year old institution, VCU Health Systems is a dedicated academic medical center for patients that include the most vulnerable in Richmond Virginia. VCU also runs a major cancer center and centers of excellence for transplants and orthopedic surgery.
Pollack was cited for his work to optimize a Cerner platform implementation with more projects that can be described here and he's underpinned VCU's health management with 1 million square feet of wireless access. "It used to be that nurses and physicians were hunter-gatherers of information," he told us. "We're trying to say that's not a value-add task." -
Felix Orzechowski, information management reporting department manager for IT Division, Erie Insurance Group
Chosen for his execution in governance and data quality at Erie, Orzechowski helped establish a three-pronged approach for data quality assessment, data governance and consistent BI and reporting processes. "The goal of the governance work is to have huge high-level measurements that drive our process work. In customer certification, for example, we're only 87 percent confident of how many customers versus policyholders we have and there's a ton of business we could be pursuing. We're kicking off projects to fix six or seven entry points, shut down the 'blob' entry and the old screens that allow that."
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Glenn Schentag, senior client business manager, British Columbia Ministry of Finance
With two startups under his belt and 25 years of work as an IT analyst and systems integrator, Schentag got our nod as the "fixer" brought in by the province government to untangle a large outsourcing deal. With a "blue sky sandy beach" pitch stalled and calling for more money as budgets slowed, Schentag assumed and still finds himself in the unfamiliar role of citizen advocate. "I'm actually more a building inspector than a fixer," Schentag says, "but the incremental value of working in government that's gratifying is that any improvement I make can affect a few million people."
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Kim Fahey, senior IT director, R.R. Donnelley
Credited with driving business intelligence and master data initiatives initially as a consultant, Kim Fahey joined R.R. Donnelley three years ago to carry the vision forward. An early adopter of both BI and master data management, Fahey now evangelizes the spread of a mature BI platform to more use cases at Donnelley and continues to guide and support MDM for governance and data quality teams. "Now we can see the data we have," she says, "and that puts us right back to work."
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Peter Heller, computer specialist, City of New York
Heller analyzed, designed, developed and now supports a utility billing integration system that allows the City of New York to do account integration, catch billing mistakes and run sophisticated point-in-time reports. In an extremely complex business area, Heller leveraged data modeling techniques such as abstraction and domains. The resulting system meets the city's needs to track 40 billing utilities, and is flexible and easy to support.
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Ursuline Foley, CIO, XL Reinsurance
With acquisition and growth, Foley took XL Reinsurance executive management's lead to a strategy that would realign the reinsurance business from 11 systems to a single global system. She and her team are credited with executing a five-year plan in a true business partnership that came in on schedule and within budget in late 2009. Foley calls it more of a business than IT transformation and has found many new points of leverage. "The businesspeople in Bermuda didn't know their colleagues in London or France. We now have governance across claims, cash management, finance, administration etc., and all these businesspeople are talking and telling us where to take the system next."
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Sravan Kasarla, group enterprise architect, MassMutual Insurance
Kasarla was nominated to our list by a top analyst as someone who truly "gets" MDM and data quality. For Kasarla, MDM is neither a technical project nor a customer data hub. "MDM is now positioned to enable the customer servicing strategy and customer centricity at MassMutual, he told us. "And it's only a part of the overall information management plan for the company." Though the usual tools of data governance, integration, quality, BI and metadata management are at hand, the business shift is under way from policy to customer focus.
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Oron Keter, PMP, MDM team leader, Teva Pharmaceutical
Keter was selected for his visionary MDM work managing all current central MDM systems at Teva, and for administering a future project to support MDM data processes. His manager portfolio includes one global language for all item, supplier, manufacturer or customer data across all of Teva's worldwide operations. Says Keter, "We want all of our processes to be the same, and doing this in different cultures can be a challenge. But we do it over and over in different places, and that's something we can be proud of."
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Dorcy Lannigan, program manager, business excellence, Ceridian
Ceridian is a global provider of payment solutions, benefits, tax and U.S. payroll. Lannigan made the list for his lead role in a large Oracle E-Business Suite implementation and integrating Equifax to Ceridian data in an opportunity to order submission process for finance. Ceridian is using cleansed data from Equifax to populate in Oracle r12 to understand customer use of data to track and build relationships.
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Peter Schmidt, director of business intelligence, Centro
Centro, a media services and technology firm, sits in the middle between advertising agencies and online digital publishers. A small company of about 100 employees, Centro swung and missed with early BI attempts but connected with open-source Pentaho software that today answers more than 700 analytic requests per month. "It's not the blinding numbers I saw at larger companies, but it really works," Schmidt told us. "It's all self-service and everything in the system is reprioritized from the day before. At an hourly rate it's saved us $80K of IT requests, and people are asking a lot more questions than they used to."
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How we chose the 25 Top Information Managers
To create the field for our list of 25 Top Information Managers: 2010, we initially sent requests to our top columnists and contributors and to trusted individual sources in the information management analyst and consulting industries. We asked each for the names of up to five individuals they considered to be exemplary managers in our field by acquaintance or observation. We also allowed our editorial staff to nominate names to the list by the same criteria. We allowed nominations to remain anonymous to avoid non-disclosure agreements and other conflicts of interest. We did not solicit or allow nominations for or from technology vendors and kept the field to mainstream businesses.
From the initial field, we selected 38 finalists based on the quality of the nominations and impact we perceived in the work of the nominees. We then attempted to contact and personally interview as many finalists as possible.
Each of the managers eventually selected to our Top 25 was interviewed personally by the editorial director, who asked them to describe their project work or the work experience for which they were nominated. Each finalist was also asked an identical set of five baseline questions. The questions related to their career preparation and work experience, their opinions on team and project leadership, their current priorities and their outlook on business and technology changes yet to come.
Most of the details from the interviews are not mentioned in the thumbnails we created for the article. But based on the nominations, the responses and the baseline questions, we selected and loosely ranked the winners based on our perceived measurement of their organizational impact and managerial skills.
