In this interview, Peter High speaks with Dan Olley, Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Product Development at Elsevier. Among the topics they discuss include:

An overview of Elsevier’s business, including its focus on the legal field, the academic and health research fields, the business risk and financial fields, and their exhibitions business

Dan’s responsibilities as CTO, which include customer-facing responsibilities such as overseeing product development, as well as more traditional responsibilities such as applying technology to internal efficiency as well as revenue generation

Dan’s perspective on our rapidly accelerating digital world and the emerging symbiotic era, where intelligent conversational interfaces, mixed reality, and other technologies essentially eliminate the boundary between man and machine

The implications of machine learning at Elsevier, such as how it has enabled the creation of a new generation of products that move beyond providing static information and in to real-time recommendation and decision support

Dan’s perspective on the human element of AI, such as the idea that the human-machine system becomes greater than the sum of its parts, how digital intelligence can augment human decision making, and how Elsevier creates cross-functional teams with the necessary skills

How Dan’s background in agile development prepared him for his current customer-facing responsibilities, and his belief that customers must be embedded in the development process

How Dan aligns the fast moving R&D function with the broader, more traditional organizational strategy