Q & A with Renée McKaskle, CIO of Hitachi Vantara

I had the opportunity to interview Renée McKaskle, CIO of Hitachi Vantara, at HitachiNEXT, the company’s global customer and partner conference. Renée joined Hitachi three years ago and has led her organization through a successful transformation by leveraging the power of data. I was curious about her journey, best practices she could offer to fellow CIOs, and advice she might provide to encourage more women to reach for the stars.

Q & A with Shawn Rosemarin, SVP & CTO, Global Field and Industry, Hitachi Vantara

I first met Shawn Rosemarin in 2014 at the Hitachi Product Launch World Tour where I was the emcee for its Toronto stop. At the time, Shawn was the CTO of VMware Canada, a Hitachi partner, and spoke about thought leadership and strategy. Shawn joined Hitachi in 2016 with global mandates for solutioning, technical strategy, and enterprise architecture. I had the opportunity to catch up with him recently at HitachiNEXT, the company’s global customer and partner conference. During an executive briefing, I picked his brain about industry trends, practical strategies, frameworks, and steps CIOs need to take in order to monetize their data assets. Shawn also shared what’s important for building talent.

Information technology influenced disruption is impacting most organizations today. It is helping to accelerate globalization, intensify competition and transform markets, business models, ecosystems, products, services and processes. Most leaders understand that rapid advances in technological capabilities provide revolutionary organizational performance opportunities and also introduce threats that may be existential. For many, investing in and successfully applying information technology is now a much greater priority.

I have been extremely fortunate to have enjoyed a stimulating career in high tech sales and leadership. As a woman, the world of technology afforded me a wonderful profession and as I progressed up the ranks, I actively sought to ensure that I developed balanced teams and mentored women into what I saw was an incredibly rewarding field. I had the great fortune to work with some inspiring women along the way, but we were sorely under-represented, particularly in executive ranks. I hope to encourage more young women to take advantage of the opportunities that a career in technology can offer. It is a demanding, lucrative, and constantly evolving field. I hope that my experience and voice can help encourage the upcoming generation to pursue technology careers.

On February 27, more than 120 companies gathered at Activate Digital 2018 in the heart of Ontario’s technology innovation corridor. We were presented with material that explains how digital transformation will fundamentally change our businesses. The conference also allowed us to interact with Canada’s leading IT thought leaders. The event was hosted by Long View Systems and included 15 technology partners.

There are many articles, conferences and general banter about Smart Communities, Smart Cities and IOT. – AND - I am not complaining, because it is an area of great opportunity and a place where North America lags much of the world in implementation. Any attention is good attention, as far as I am concerned, and it is an area where I would love to see flourishing activity.

Technological innovation is viewed as more strategically important to organisations today than it has been in the past. Being able to change products, services and processes in response to higher levels of competition and rapidly advancing technology is a challenge for most organisations in the private, public and not for profit sectors. At the University of Waterloo, we are developing a new online certificate programme that is intended to support the development of organisations’ technology oriented innovation capability. We are looking for feedback from the CIO community on our new programme design.

Globalisation is concentrating the minds of leaders of organisations on innovation. For most, there is a  need to improve or introduce products and processes more quickly in response to increased competition. Whether the desired innovation is disruptive or sustaining the challenge is usually to make it happen – to turn good ideas into improvements in organisational performance.

I watch an inappropriate amount of television.

Whenever I have free time, I am in front of the TV consuming content. It’s not always streaming, as is the dominate form for my kids, but a variety of content across an array of subscription services. My love of television, established and nurtured as a child and enduring over a lifetime, creates a welcome distraction to the media consumption during my working hours.

In this interview, Paul Lewis, Chief Technology Officer, Americas at Hitachi, discusses how organisations will apply data driven strategies to effectively compete in the future. Paul’s background as a leading technology practitioner, considering the needs of consumers and how organisations apply technology to meet those today, strongly influenced his comments.

Click the photo below to watch the interview