American Red Cross: Steve Cooper

Dan Farber:

Now, it’s the year 2006 I can remember in the past five years when we used to talk about cost cutting and consolidation, and now all of a sudden we’re talking about innovation again. Now, you’ve been at Corning Inc, you were in the Dept. of Homeland security as a CIO, now since May of 2005 you’ve been the CIO of Red Cross. How do you define innovation, especially given the different experiences that you’ve had?

Steve Cooper:

First of all I think that innovation, I’ve adjusted my thinking a little bit. I used to think that innovation represented brand new ideas that nobody had thought up before. Now what I realize is that innovation can take additional forms. It can simply be the application or reuse of other people’s ideas in an environment where that idea has not been introduced before. So, let me give you an example: In the American Red Cross as we began to tackle Katrina, what we realized, what I realized, literally in about the first 72 hours was that while we knew the things that we had to do, we recognized that we didn’t have the resources, or necessarily the toolsets from a technology standpoint to do what we had to do, We didn’t have the ability to kind of communicate and collaborate both on behalf of our staff and volunteers going in to assist people, and in terms of the people coming in. So what did we do? What we did very quickly was we reached out to the private sector. And we invited, about twenty-some-odd companies to come to Washington, DC, to sit down with us to figure out how do we address providing disaster services in that context that we were seeing unfolding in Katrina. How did we then also address providing emergency financial assistance to folks who basically had nothing when they evacuated.

DAN FARBER:

Now at the Red Cross, or at other organizations where you’ve worked as a CIO, I’m sure you’ve run into different dimensions of innovation. For example, we often talk about technology as innovation, but there’s much more than technology, there’s process innovation, organizational innovation, management and leadership. In your experience, especially now at the Red Cross, what do you see as the areas where you need the most work in terms of where you want to innovate?

STEVE COOPER:

What I found particularly in the IT organization in the American Red Cross is that sometimes, sometimes in general, we hide behind technology as opposed to process and people. And what I mean by that is, we have a way of delivering something, delivering services through the use of existing technology. And because of a lot of different factors, cultural, the fact that we don’t do process engineering very well, which I argue is absolutely part of innovation. And the fact that we’ve behaved kind of in a silo in IT, meaning we don’t know our colleagues in other parts of the business. As a result, what we’ve tended to do is, we’ve been a little bit resistant to changing the way we do things, even when there might be technologies that could be brought to bear that are faster, better and cheaper.

Now, that’s aspect number one. Aspect number two is, that we’re not good in the Red Cross, this is an opinion this is not necessarily a statement of fact –

DAN FARBER

Well, it’s an informed opinion.

STEVE COOPER:

It’s an informed opinion that says, we’re learning, we meaning, not just IT but the entire American Red Cross, we’re learning to take a look and rethink how we do things. Now, in our industry that’s process re-engineering. That’s taking a look at, you know, the way that we deliver mass care, or the way we deliver food, or the way that we shelter people or the way that we provide emergency financial assistance, or inquiry services. Those types of things I believe we, the American Red Cross, as a result of Katrina, are beginning to rethink and re-examine.

DAN FARBER:

Now the Red Cross is how big?

STEVE COOPER:

The Red Cross has thirty-five thousand paid staff, we have over a million registered volunteers. We operate in every state and territory of the United States. We’re the American Red Cross therefore, while we do have folks from the Red Cross on the ground in other countries, predominantly we operate in the fifty-six states and territories of the United States.

DAN FARBER:

So, you’re a relatively large company/NGO, and I think what you’ve probably found in your experience is that large companies, to innovate across a company or to create a culture of innovation is really difficult.

STEVE COOPER:

I do. I believe that it is tougher. The larger an organization gets, I think the tougher it gets to work through the bureaucracy. Clearly that was the case, at least in my opinion, in the Dept. of Homeland Security and somewhat in the federal government at large. Not that there aren’t pockets of creativity and innovation in the federal government, I’m not implying that they don’t—

DAN FARBER:

But how do you reach them?

STEVE COOPER:

I don’t know! The tough part of this is that I think, somehow, you’ve got to build on centers of excellence. What I’ve tried to do and how I believe you can create and influence a culture of innovation and, quite frankly, a culture of risk taking – appropriate risk taking – is to leverage a level of what we’ve labeled a “center of excellence.� So you take people who are bright, talented, not afraid to fail, not afraid to take risks, who can think out of the box, so to speak, I know that’s a bit of a cliché phrase, but it really does mean to think differently than the way things are normally done, and to give them really difficult problems. You give that to a couple centers of excellence, and the centers of excellence, by the way, might be uniform skill sets. For example; it might be a telecommunications/network group of individuals armed with that kind of background.

DAN FARBER:

So it’s really a small team…

STEVE COOPER:

It’s a small time. It’s a tiger team.

DAN FARBER:

That gets together and focuses on a single problem

STEVE COOPER:

Right

DAN FARBER:

And then tries to apply it more largely across the organization.

STEVE COOPER:

Yeah. And what we’re trying to do in the Red Cross is to leverage the center of excellence or tiger team approach, take a real problem, apply it in a smaller scale, put a pilot in place, it’s a real pilot not a throwaway, ok? So put a real pilot in place and see whether it works. If it works, then what we want to do is begin to expand that out to more and more geography, more parts of the business, to more business units. If it doesn’t work, we don’t give up. We take a look and say “well, what happened here? How come we expected this to happen, it didn’t happen.� We make adjustments and we kind of go at it again. All the while, keeping very, very focused on the fact that in the American Red Cross we’re not lavishly spending donor dollars on research and development type stuff. We’re doing as much as we can with very small investments of financial means.

DAN FARBER:

Now, for many companies, the area of innovation says “well that’s part of R&D� and we have an R&D budget of X or Y. And, is it the same for the Red Cross?

STEVE COOPER:

No. We have no R&D budget. In fact, out of a restructuring that we’re literally just rolling out now after a first year, the first year was really – and it was interrupted by Katrina - so the first year I was on board I was really just trying to get a handle on how does this place work? How does it operate? We have no research and development budget in information technology or for technology per se. Instead we’ve created a very small, six people, six people, innovation center and it is literally named “innovation center.�

DAN FARBER:

Is that all those people do, is focus on innovation?

STEVE COOPER:

Here’s what those people do. Those people are not focused on pie in the sky over the horizon technology. They work directly with our client account managers, the customer facing folks that work directly with business units and they’re part of the IT organization but they’re business people. They’re requirements analysis people. They understand business first and they may have some, but they’re not in deep technology experts. They figure out what are the business objectives, goals, challenges that are face by our business units. They then sit down with the innovation center staff and they say “hey look, I need to figure out a way to…� and I’ll give you a real example: We need to tackle identity management in the American Red Cross. How do you know when two hundred thousand volunteers show up? How do you know whether all of them are people we, honestly, want to put in a shelter? We do have to screen, I hate to say this, but we have to screen for criminal offenses, for sex offenders, that type of thing. So we’ve got to have rapid background checks on people in real life. We’ve got to identify that individual in a way that, we’ve got to give him some kind of ID card or something so that they can have access to various Red Cross service centers, shelters, whatever. Alright, so, identity management is a real one. And the innovation center, then, is tasked with “don’t go out and find bleeding edge technology. Go find state of the market technology that can be applied right now to solve the business challenges of our various components. In this case, go find real technology that exists and has been used and proven to address identity management of staff, volunteers and disaster victims in the American Red Cross.

DAN FARBER:

So you’re saying that the American Red Cross had no identity management system in place before you got there?

STEVE COOPER:

Not one that would scale to handle Katrina, that’s correct. Now, we have our own, I mean, I’m carrying an ID that says American Red Cross National Headquarters. Now, mind you, the ironic thing, and this is true in the federal government, if I take my Red Cross identity badge and access badge and I go to the San Francisco chapter, I have to sign in as a visitor, ok? Now come on, that’s crazy. So one of the things that I want to do out of identity management is solve it for addressing services provided to any disaster, natural or man made, for purposes of helping disaster clients. But also, I’d like to be able to identify Red Cross staff and volunteers anywhere they show up in the Red Cross environment.

DAN FARBER

Now, speaking of innovation, you had mentioned to me earlier when we were speaking, that currently you can handle about two million cases. And you need to scale that to ten million cases. Do you have any idea about how you’re going to innovate along that edge?

STEVE COOPER:

Okay, just real quick clarification in case folks don’t always know what we mean when we’re saying these two million cases. A case simply represents the Red Cross interaction with a family to provide services. It might be clothing, assistance to provide them in getting back into their home, filing insurance with FEMA or state agencies, that type of thing. So those types of services, we refer to as a case. What we do know is, since Katrina in the past year we’ve added infrastructure capability and application level capability to scale to a maximum potential currently of about two million cases meaning that somewhere in the two million dollar range, I’m sorry, two million cases, a lot more money than two million dollars, we’re going to begin to run into challenges technically in throughput. Not so much data storage, but in throughput because if we have case workers kind of doing all this concurrently, that’s about where we’re going to start running into performance challenges.

DAN FARBER:

Now given the caseworkers are mostly in the field, how do you innovate on the mobile side?

STEVE COOPER:

Well that’s where we begin to hit some of this throughput bottleneck as well as leveraging our private sector partners which is where we’re turning to. Our innovation center, remember, is going to reach the state of the market technology. So, we have talked and we’ve actually invited and participated in some recent exercises like Strong Angel 3 down in San Diego to look at real technologies that we can bring to bear to address hastily formed networks, address infrastructure access and expansion, pretty much in real time so that we could begin to scale from the two million current target to ten million cases for any given disaster. Don’t have perfect answers for you yet, but we’re beginning, at least, to stage the sequencing that we think we can address.

DAN FARBER:

Now just, do you have any recommendations from your experience on innovating within a larger infrastructure?

STEVE COOPER:

First of all, I do believe that the best path for success in large organizations is to think global or think big but start small. The first recommendation is use this tiger team approach, use a small pilot that, then, you can assess ‘does it work? Does it deliver the expected value, business value outcomes, and if it does, scale it up from there. Either phase it geographically, phase it by business units, something like that to serve more and more people. That’s recommendation number one. Recommendation number two: communicate, communicate, communicate. Talk to everybody in your organization because you never know where the good idea will come from. It doesn’t come just from IT folks. And even if we’re looking at technology solutions, we actually had some business people who were involved in our disaster response in Katrina out in the field who came up with good ideas that are now leads for tackling, for example, identity management, or collaboration, or hastily formed networks. Those are the two. I’m sure there are others but those are the two that we’re trying to act upon.

DAN FARBER:

Well finally I’d like you to play along with my CIO buzzword game.

STEVE COOPER:

Alright, I’ll give it a shot.

DAN FARBER:

As a CIO you’ve been in some large organizations and I’m sure you’re familiar with these terms.

STEVE COOPER:

I hope so otherwise it’s going be embarrassing if I kind of go “I don’t know what that is!�

DAN FARBER:

Well, I’m not going score this so you’ll be okay.

STEVE COOPER:

Ok.

DAN FARBER:

First of all, Open Source.

STEVE COOPER:

Okay, I actually am committed to and believe that open source is a very viable direction to go. And it is something that when we get a chance to catch our breath in the American Red Cross, I would like to begin to figure out how do we begin a phased approach to take more advantage of open source. That’s a big deal to the Red Cross because we don’t have a significant amount of money to invest in information technology.

DAN FARBER:

And Service Oriented Architecture.

STEVE COOPER:

We, in fact, are adopting a service-oriented approach. So that’s something, a very small architecture team. We have two full time resources who are working enterprise architecture in the American Red Cross. Our progress has been very slow but we absolutely are moving to adopt a service-oriented architecture.

DAN FARBER:

And does the word Web 2.0, mashups

STEVE COOPER:

Yes, but I haven’t done anything there yet. We’ve been paying attention, we’ve been following it in the trade press, we’ve been talking to our industry partners. But to the best of knowledge we’re not actively doing anything in that space at the moment in the American Red Cross.

DAN FARBER:

And Windows Vista?

STEVE COOPER:

We’re watching it. Listen, I kind of am somewhat embarrassed to admit that we still have Windows 95 operating in some of our chapters. Right now our focus is on upgrading everybody to Windows XP in our Windows Intel environment. Now, we also are a large Linux user, a large Unix user as well. So, Vista, we’re interested, we’re following it, but it’s going to have to wait its turn.

DAN FARBER:

And virtualization.

STEVE COOPER:

The biggest area in virtualization for us is both in, we believe, economies of scale and leverage that we can bring in our data center and in some of the services that we may or may not look to industry to help partner and source with us. Another big aspect of virtualization which is a play on the word a little bit is in the geospatial environment and here I’m applying virtualization and visualization, combined, so that we can actually leverage and make more readily available information data that’s widely available outside the environment of the American Red Cross in the public domain that we can actually bring in and leverage for purposes like damage assessment, satellite imagery, that type of thing into and combined with some of the data center services that we’d like to supply.

DAN FARBER:

And that sounds like a mashup.

STEVE COOPER:

It is, it is. We’re just not there yet.

DAN FARBER:

Well Steve thanks very much for sharing your insights with me.

STEVE COOPER:

Thank you very much for the opportunity to be with you today.

DAN FARBER:

I’ve been speaking with Steve Cooper who is the CIO of the American Red Cross. For CIO Sessions, I’m Dan Farber, thank for watching.