Virtual Event Recording
Enabling the Business to Transform the Business
Every business, product, customer, and executive are on a digital journey. Soon everything will be connected – not only people, but also cars, houses, pets, and products we buy and use. This means every business has to become a digital business, and every product has to become a digital product.
CIOs and IT managers are becoming more and more involved in developing direct customer products. The current mandate is to re-invest, re-engineer and re-architect a robust infrastructure while simultaneously digitally enhancing every product, process and service.
View below video to learn how leading CXOs and IT executives are enabling the business to digitally transform the business.
This event is brought to you in partnership with:
About Barbara Cooper:
Barbara Cooper was group vice president and chief information officer for Toyota Motor North America for sixteen years retiring in 2012. She was responsible for the strategy, development and operation of all systems and technology and left a legacy of some of the most innovative and market competitive technology solutions in the industry. In addition to her CIO role, she was also responsible for leading the University of Toyota focusing on professional development for Toyota staff and training programs for Toyota and Lexus dealer technicians.
Prior to Toyota, she was group vice president and CIO for MicroAge Corp., CIO for Maricopa County in Phoenix, AZ and also served as its County Manager. She was the first female promoted to vice president in IT for American Express, and started her career at Miller & Paine department stores, a Midwest department store chain, where she rose from Executive Assistant to the CEO to head all of technology for the company. Barbara remains one of the single most recognized CIO’s in the IT industry having been named to six Top 100 CIO awards globally, in addition to numerous awards from a variety of IT trade associations and industry publications, culminating in being named to the CIO Hall of Fame in 2007. She was also recognized in the automotive industry achieving Automotive News Top 100 Women five times and recently awarded The Legends of IT award from HMG Strategy in 2020.
Barbara gained a reputation in the IT industry as a “turn-around” CIO demonstrating an ability to not only take on significant innovative technology firsts such as one of the first retail bar code technology implementations in the US, the first non-mainframe, PC based system connecting all the American Express operating centers and travel offices together to support end users. The first major implementation of a commercial VPN network tying all Toyota and Lexus dealers to the first factory distribution and sales system utilizing custom built PC software. She was also well known for her work on innovating IT organizational design and was recognized as the first CIO to launch an Office of the CIO function that established the foundation for IT to run as a business inside a corporate entity. Her work in accomplishing one of the most successful leadership transformations of a major technology operation for a top ten global corporation (Toyota) was turned into a business case that is currently used by the Executive MBA programs at William & Mary, Amhurst, and Arizona State University.
Barbara holds a bachelor's degree in education from the University of Nebraska and attended the University of Oslo in Oslo, Norway graduate studies program. She was the founder of three professional women’s networks during her career including the first professional women’s network at Toyota.
She works part time as an executive coach for CIOs, senior IT management, as well as a variety of other “C” suite executives and non-IT executives since her retirement.
About Cheryl Smith:
Cheryl led the IT organizations at Fortune-ranked companies for 20 years. She was the global CIO at McKesson Corporation, KeySpan Energy (now National Grid), and WestJet Airlines, was the VP of Strategic Systems at Verizon, and a Principal at EY. She has been responsible for the successful implementation of strategic technology systems for corporations, non-profits, and governments around the world. Since 2015 she has been an independent consultant working with large corporations on their IT and business digital transformations, and with digital technology vendors on their products and services.
Cheryl is a guest lecturer at George Mason University’s School of Business teaching digital transformation and IT governance courses. She was co-founder of the CIO Institute at UC Berkeley’s Hass School of Business, a program that is now offered at universities across the United States. A frequent speaker at IT conferences, Cheryl also hasserved on a number of Advisory Boards including IBM’s and Oracle’s.
Most recently, Cheryl co-authored a leading book on digital transformation: The Day Before Digital Transformation: Unlocking digital transformation for business leaders. It shares insider knowledge gained by working with leaders of corporations, non-profits, and governments across the globe over the past four decades on how to successfully define and implement a digital vision and strategy for organizations. In plain, clear language it explains the drivers behind the changes needed to transform an organization into being a digital survivor, possibly even a disruptor in the industry. It provides step-by-step guidance on what actions business leaders need to take to develop a strategy and then select and implement the technologies that will digitize its products, services, and ways of doing business.
Cheryl received her undergraduate degree from Penn State, and her Master’s Degree for her thesis Computers in Public Organizations: Past, Present, and Future also from Penn State.