When Norm Fjeldheim joined Illumina as Chief Information Officer and Head of Global Facilities, he did so after one of the longest tenures by a CIO at a single company: 17 years in that role at Qualcomm. Fjeldheim’s tenure at Qualcomm was a success, but he believes now that his tenure was too long. Though he is proud of what he and his team accomplished, he indicates that he could have used more variety to his roles. In the end, though, he is glad that he landed at Illumina, a $2.4 billion provider of sequencing and array-based solutions for genetic analysis.
Fjeldheim has spread his wings beyond the IT leadership to include Facilities Management. As it turns out, this allowed him to return to his roots, as someone who studied architecture for a time as an undergraduate. It also allows him to take a more hands-on role in creating the workspace of the future.
In this interview, we also cover his transition in the first year on the job, adjusting to a new culture. We also covered his thoughts on the value of cloud computing, as one of the earliest adopters of a cloud-first strategy.
Peter High: I thought we would begin with your role in your current company, Illumina. If you could, please provide an overview of the organization, as well as a review of your responsibilities both as Chief Information Officer and Head of Global Facilities.
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Norm Fjeldheim: The first thing I tell people is that we are not a lighting company, despite our name. We are a company focused on improving human health through the power of genomics. That is our mission. It translates into several different products and customers that we create. We have developed various technologies for unlocking DNA, and we make that information available to our customers. Then our customers do various things with it. We have customers that are researchers, we have customers that are using it for agriculture, trying to improve crop yields, and solving world hunger. We also sell into the clinical space: labs and hospitals use our technology to help with diagnosing diseases — rare diseases or genetically based diseases and that varies from the specific test for cystic fibrosis to neonatal genetic testing to supporting undiagnosed diseases. We sell to the FBI and law enforcement for DNA testing. One of our biggest customers is ancestry.com. They use our technology in those commercials in which they ask, “Where are you from? Are you Scottish versus German?” We have a wide variety of customers who are doing amazing things by unlocking human DNA, or virtually any DNA for that matter.
As for my role, IT is traditional IT, such as infrastructure, help desk, data centers and managing our cloud environment. We are one of Amazon’s biggest customers, our machines produce a vast amount of data; unlocking DNA translates to terabytes of data. We store a lot of that at Amazon in the cloud. I am responsible for all of our business systems, and all of our supporting systems with everything that the company does digitally.
I also have responsibility for cybersecurity. The CSO reports to me, which means I get involved with product security, the security of our instruments, the medical devices, as well as Base Space which is a Software as a Service [SaaS] service that we provide for analyzing patient DNA.
I have responsibility for running our facilities. That includes keeping the lights on, and the plumbing, and the electricity, and the air conditioning. I also have responsibility for constructing new buildings as we grow. We have five major campuses around the world with major construction projects going on in each of those right now. We are in 20 locations around the world and I am responsible for the standards, negotiating and establishing contracts, and bringing in the connectivity to tie in with the rest of the company. Lastly, health, safety, and compliance are part of my job as Global Head of Facilities, since we are an FDA regulated company.
High: What was the logic in having these responsibilities combined under one executive?
Fjeldheim: I think it was opportunistic by Illumina. They knew that I was capable of running a large organization. I had done that in my previous role when I was at Qualcomm. It was a 2,000-person IT organization, and I had responsibilities beyond IT there, as well. Illumina felt like I could certainly do more and that facilities would be a good fit. It needed leadership there and operational focus. It turned out that it was a better match than Illumina anticipated because my original major in school was architecture and I grew up in the construction industry. My dad was a general contractor and I had been a carpenter all through high school and college. Facilities was something that I understood to a much greater degree than they realized, we had not talked about that in the interview process. It was a chance for me to get back to my roots.
High: How do you divide your time between the various areas that you have described, and, how do you staff them? Is there anyone else who has dual responsibilities like you do, or are they fully independent staffs?
Fjeldheim: I run them as two separate organizations. I have an IT staff of five individuals that run IT and report to me. On the facilities side, I have three individuals. However, we do have projects that cross over. I create virtual project teams between the two organizations. A lot of that is around the workplace of the future. Our new CEO is interested in the marriage of workplace and technology to enable collaboration between our employees. To shrink our Illumina world, we are geographically spread out as a company, and we have been for a long time. How do we bring that together and make it easier for people to work together? He talks a lot about employee enablement and the digital transformation of Illumina and has put me in charge of much of that, which translates into new ways to work, new workspaces, and bringing technology into those workspaces so that people can work from anywhere, from any device. We emphasize workspaces that are conducive to cooperation and forming up of teams and being able to flex and move around as the organization adapts to day-to-day problems. It has worked out well for me, and it has made the organization more synergistic than I had expected.
High: Can you talk about what is on your strategic roadmaps for each area under your purview.
Fjeldheim: On the IT side, there are three major themes. First, improving our customers’ experience. How do we make it easier for customers to do business with Illumina? We have around three dozen projects in that area. Second, we have “get sand out of the gears,” as my boss calls it. This is about making us more efficient. For this we have another couple dozen projects around process improvement to make life easier for our employees. That is everything from taking a manual process and automating it to taking an automated process and further streamlining it. Lastly, there is a strategy around digital transformation. A lot of that is employee enablement. How do we make it easier for employees to do their jobs? We are approaching that from an IT side with a platform approach. We are putting in place an analytics platform, a search platform in data storage to make it easier to find the right information, an integration platform, and a monitoring platform. We bring together and integrate all the different systems that IT supports so that it serves the employee better.
On the facilities side, in addition to general improvement, we are placing less focus on individual workspaces and investing more on collaborative spaces. There is a technology component to that, more video capability and collaboration from a desktop, laptop, iPad, or a phone. Also, we will focus on spaces that are collaboration enabled, meaning adding [Cisco] TelePresence and video collaboration and conferencing capabilities throughout our infrastructure. Lastly, in the infrastructure space, IT is always about cost reduction and efficiency. We are making a big push to moving more of our on-premises technology to the cloud by enabling more of our applications, our data, and our capabilities to be cloud-enabled; with Amazon being the primary customer or primary supplier for us.
High: You and your team have thought a lot about what has been termed the future of work. How will people today and in the future be most productive, and how do you set up workspaces that will facilitate that to the greatest extent possible. How have you thought about the process of planning for the workplace of the future, and what have been your sources of inspiration?
Fjeldheim: From the employees, themselves, they bring ideas about different ways that they want to work. We are constantly looking at other companies and the latest trends in the industry. There is a lot of thought about what is appropriate for our culture. Then we dream up things on our own, ways that we can work better. For instance, we found that employees like to be able to move around, they do not want to sit all the time. We are now going to have sit-stand stations. Illumina employees can sit at a desk, stand at a desk, and you can change that, you have that choice. It helps with employee morale because you feel better if you are moving around. We also do a lot with color, space and work surfaces, and places that people can collaborate. Not all of our conference rooms look the same. They have different kinds of seating arrangements, different kinds of furniture in them. In one room, it might be conducive to a certain type of meeting, say people are sitting around a table. In another, it’s almost like sitting around at a restaurant and discussing something.
High: You were one of the earliest adopters of cloud technology as a service. Given the duration of your experience with it, could you reflect for a moment on what it is and what it is not.
Fjeldheim: For me, the cloud is not one size fits all. I philosophically object to that type of idea with anything within IT. You can have a heterogeneous environment that works exceedingly well and is efficient, yet has the adaptability to find the right solution for the business problem that you are facing. For us, the cloud is a tool. There are certain business problems where the cloud makes a great deal of sense and we utilize it extensively. That is also true for our customer facing applications. It only works for about half our environment. Half of our customers leverage our cloud service and others do not.
We also provide the service as an on-premises solution that we manage within our data centers, or customers can do it themselves. We offer that type of choice where they can choose to utilize our tools managed by Illumina or they can choose to have their services managed by Illumina but on Amazon’s environment. Flexibility is always the right way to go, and that is how I have always approached the cloud or any new technology. What is the business problem you are trying to solve? Is it the right solution? And it is not necessarily going to be the same thing every single time. The environment here had been a little more homogeneous in its approach, I have broken that up and we are looking at a wide array of technologies and solutions as the business is expanding and we are dealing with different business problems than we have in the past.
High: You have been a CIO for a great number of years at companies where technology was the business, including Illumina. You are surrounded by people who are deeply immersed in technology, who have deep perspectives as to what to use and how to use it. As you speak to your peers at companies where IT is largely the domain of the IT department alone, do you find that the type of value that you and the IT team strive to deliver is different as a result of being surrounded by people who are themselves immersed in technology?
Norm: I do. The way I have approached it. We will work in any environment, but it is a little bit harder. If you have the ability as an IT organization to set standards and say this is what everybody must do, that is an easier approach. However, when you are working in a technology company and most of the company is engineers, they all feel that they could do IT if they were not doing a real job. You cannot tell your engineers that they have to do it this way or they have to let IT do it. You have to show them that you can do it as well or better than they can. You approach IT as a service. I always say, “We cannot tell them that they have to use us, they have to choose to use us.” We have to be better than the Engineering department at what we do, and certainly better than any vendor or any consulting company that they might want to use. We have to do it better, faster, and cheaper.
You set up your IT organization as a service offering organization. In the end, the customers are your internal employees, and if you treat them that way, and if you are good, they choose you. The best thing I have found and the best indicator of success was always when Engineering started pushing things to the IT organization, pushing things to my team. They said, “You do this better than we do it, so you take it.” This is better than my having to go in and pull it from them. I found that never worked anyway. The more I tried to pull it into IT, no matter how good the argument was that it belonged in IT, I could never win.
At Qualcomm, where I had been for several years, each division ran its own customer service organization. After a while, they looked at that point and thought that IT could probably do it better and cheaper. When they moved all the customer service to IT and created one combined customer service organization, it took twenty to forty percent out of the cost structure. That was the biggest vote of confidence. I knew I was on the right track.
High You had an extensive tenure as a CIO at a single company, you were in that role for 17 years at Qualcomm, which is one of the longest tenures as CIO of a single company ever. How do you reflect on your time there?
Fjeldheim: In retrospect, it was probably too long. It made it harder for me to move to another company. When I was interviewing at other companies, once I had decided to leave Qualcomm, there was some concern about whether I could be successful anywhere but Qualcomm. Not having that track record of being successful in multiple places did hurt me a bit. I ended up landing on my feet and with a great company, I am thrilled that I am here with Illumina. If I had to do it again, though, I probably would not have done 17 years, and ultimately 28 years, at Qualcomm.
High: In January, you celebrated your one-year anniversary with Illumina. This was your first time as a CIO at a new company in a long time. How did you go about investigating the company and its culture? How did you spend some of those early portions of the one hundred days to set yourself and your team up for success?
Fjeldheim: One thing that surprised me was that it was not 100 days. It was longer than that. Illumina wanted me to take more time, that is part of the culture. It is a deliberate decision making culture here, and a collaborative one. There were a lot of people to get involved. The first one hundred days were exploratory, trying to get a sense of what the problems were, a lot of talking to the customers — I tend to be customer focused in terms of internal customers. Then, at one hundred days, I wanted to make a bunch of changes, and the antibodies came out a bit. I was moving too fast, I needed to do more work with evangelizing the changes I wanted to make, what made sense for the organization. I adapted my plans from both a process standpoint and fine-tuning them to match Illumina’s culture. I knew that some of the things that worked with Qualcomm would not work here, and there are other things that I would never have tried at Qualcomm, but they do work here. I made a few mistakes.
That was probably my most important lesson last year. I did not have all the answers that I needed, I had to spend more time figuring things out. I had to adapt and be willing to change. I could not change the culture to match the way I wanted it to work, I had to adjust how I worked. I did that and I got some positive feedback from my new boss here. He was pleased to see that I had adopted, it was not that I dropped in and was a perfect match. He respected that I came in and bumped up against the guardrails of the company, and I self-corrected. I learned more from doing that, making a few mistakes, than if I had cruised along on autopilot.
High: Did you also operate with a bias towards taking your time when it came to people, process, technology changes as opposed to moving swiftly and getting any pain over with as quickly as possible?
Fjeldheim: I wanted to move faster, and that was partly where I ran into problems. I was moving too fast for the organization’s ability to absorb those changes. I had to slow down. Once I got everything lined up appropriately, then I pulled the trigger and got it all done at once. Not everybody felt good about it right off the bat, they did not quite get what I was striving for. However, after a few months, people said, “This is great. I have much more clarity about what I am supposed to be doing, it is clear who my customers are.” That was one of the projects I was trying to tackle. People were working on many different projects and for many different customers that none of our customers knew who they should talk to in IT. The IT folks did not have any sense of who their customers were. It was always somebody different every day. I focused teams on specific areas of the business, simplified the organization, and matched the IT organization to the business organization. Everybody then understood it. It looked like the rest of Illumina. It was essential and it provided a lot of clarity both for the organization and for the rest of the business.
High: As you look to the future, what technology trends particularly intrigue you as you look two or three years out?
Fjeldheim: I love the DevOps model. The ability to blend development and operations together. One of the moves I recently made was to combine security and the IT organization, often it is separate and it is a compliance obligation. It should not be, security should be part of what we do as an IT organization. The same thing from an application perspective, if you are designing applications without any thought of how you are going to operate it or how it will fit into the infrastructure, you lose something. Designing for operations and creating a DevOps model is a terrific trend and something I have been trying to do for several years.
The last thing is that it is less about cost. Yes, IT has to be efficient, we have to do things well, but that is almost table stakes. What I am trying to optimize for at Illumina is speed, portability, and growth. We have a lot of projects; the business is growing rapidly. Illumina is getting into new markets both geographically and economically, and that puts a lot of pressure on IT to keep up. We need to be faster and more agile. It is a mindset. We are going to be fast, we are going to be nimble, we are going to change on a dime. We are going to get a lot of stuff done at the same time, it’s not going to be one project at a time. Those are some trends that I’m trying to instill here, and I’m looking at partners and technologies that enable that, the cloud being one of them.
High: Exactly, connecting back to that part of our conversation. It seems like a theme that runs through our conversation is building a team, building a technology, building a set of processes that will allow this organization to be fast, to be a source of speed, to be able to pivot when it is necessary as new opportunities present themselves. Is that a fair recap?
Fjeldheim: Absolutely. The cloud is not always cheaper. Oftentimes it is not if you run a good IT operations function and have it purpose built for what you are doing. For instance, when I was at Qualcomm, we were significantly cheaper at the infrastructure layer than Amazon; it was a difficult business case to say move to Amazon. The reason we would go to Amazon was speed. We could spin up that environment quickly and shut it down. That speed component became a crucial part of our toolbox in the IT organization. It was not the only tool, but when we needed speed, going to the cloud whether it was a SaaS application or something like Amazon, it was important to have that capability. Here, even more so, since we do not have the scale that Qualcomm would operate on, therefore we take advantage of Amazon because it provides us access to that scale and the economics there. Even if it is not always significantly obvious from a cost standpoint, the speed usually wins out.
Date: March 19, 2017