CIOs Going Further in a Post Pandemic World

Delicious ambiguity, according to the American comedian Gilda Radner, is “not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what is going to happen next.”

While it’s debatable how many CIOs you’ll find on stage at your local comedy club, at Workday Rising Europe we heard from technology leaders who, like Radner, relish the opportunity ambiguity provides. And for companies like Absa, Accuride, AstraZeneca and Cushman & Wakefield, embracing the chance to go further and faster is not just an organisational priority, it advances the world around us. Whether that’s Absa reinventing one of Africa’s largest banks, or Accuride putting wheels on the vehicles that transport the goods to the four corners of the world, or in the case of AstraZeneca, supplying 3 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccine at zero profit and by doing so saving more than six million lives.      

Within these companies and many others, there is a growing expectation for IT leaders to remove complexity, continually innovate and capitalise on these uncertain times. 

Simplification as a competitive advantage   

A big part of managing change is the simplification agenda for IT. For Russell Smith, Head of Enabling Units at AstraZeneca, removing complexity has been a priority over the last few years, in which time the company’s market cap has more than doubled.  

“I inherited a landscape of more than 300 applications when I first came into my role. We've taken about a hundred of those out now,” explains Smith. “But there's still a long way to go. I've used standardisation and simplification as a competitive advantage because it allows me to keep the core simple and then really focus all my energy on innovating around the edge.”

For AstraZeneca, Workday has been a key ingredient. “Workday was probably our first platform that we implemented, and it truly became that total workforce platform that allowed us to have a singular view of our 85,000 employees. For me, that's the starting  point: create a centralised platform, standardise, keep the core clean, and focus all your energy around the edges.”

Sal Companieh, Chief Digital and Information Officer for Cushman & Wakefield, tells a similar story. Cushman & Wakefield is more than  100 years-old, but the company has undergone significant transformation as a result of a major merger of three large firms in 2015 and around 35 additional acquisitions, according to Companieh. 

“Using Workday as the central component of our full platform HR and financials, we've gone from about 120 enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems globally to two in the past five years,” she shares. “The simplification of the business processes and the globalisation of them has been central to us creating the new Cushman & Wakefield. And it's really created agility for us as a firm. Long gone are the days where the platform was the reason we couldn't pivot and address new business demands. That is no longer the limiting factor, and we are able to keep pace.”

For Ebrahim Samodien, CIO Group Services at Absa, the efficiencies they are realising internally have a very real impact on their customers. “Previously we had over 20 people applications. If you wanted to book leave, you had to go to one place. If you wanted to look for training, you had to go to another. Trying to bring that data together was costly and time-consuming. We now have a few core applications. That’s the principle which we run across our application landscape: to reduce toil. Reduce the things that distract us from what really matters to the customer.”

Changing Our View of Data

Across many organisations the need for simplification is driven by managing ever-increasing volumes of data. It is one of the greatest challenges facing IT leaders. As Samodien points out, quite often this requires a change in mindset across the organisation that takes time to cultivate.  

“We did really well over the last five years in making cloud a part of our culture. So these days, at senior levels within the organisation, there's no debate around what's cloud, and whether it is necessary. Everyone talks cloud. We want to get data to that same level. We want everybody to be able to understand what data means, talk about data as a language within the organisation. And that's the effort we are focusing on now – driving that cultural change, driving that literacy and the skill level up.”

Companieh faces a similar test at Cushman & Wakefield. “The biggest challenge from a data perspective is change management, not necessarily the data itself. Data is the easy part. Firstly, it's changing the business mindset to understand that it's not technology that owns the data. Secondly, it’s understanding why collecting key data at the source the first time affects the ability to then integrate it across your ecosystem, and overcoming the tendency to drive out individualised assets of data everywhere. So with the Workday platform for us, things like property, location, and employee asset information are really key for us to be able to standardise and then have augmented by service line levels of data.

Paul Wright, CIO at vehicle components-maker Accuride, agrees that centralisation is key. “One source of the truth is probably the most important thing. If you can convince people that, "If you go here, we can answer any of your questions," then you'll get more buy-in”. 

For AstraZeneca, a science-led company, the world is slightly different, explains Smith. “We talk about what science can do. Science is underpinned by evidence. Evidence is underpinned by data, right? So the volume of data that we're dealing with is petabytes upon petabytes of data. So the scale is huge, huge, huge. Provenance and chain of custody is a real challenge in an organisation like ours. Identifying that true golden source, that true owner, for me is one of the biggest challenges that we face.

What advice would Smith give to others who are similarly wrestling with vast volumes of data? “I would say invest in cataloguing early, right? Understand what data you've got. Understand who owns it. Understand what it's being used for. And then everything that comes after that becomes much easier because you don't have to reinvent the wheel.”

The Transformative Power of Data 

Becoming a data driven organisation is having a clear impact on Accuride’s ability to respond to unexpected changes. Much like other companies with complex supply chains, Accuride was recently affected by the closure of the Suez Canal following the grounding of the Ever Given, a 400 metre long container ship. “We have a bunch of products that come from various places all over the world,” shares Wright. “And so we had to very quickly understand, "Okay, what was supposed to go through the Suez Canal? What is currently stuck inside the Suez Canal? What can we reroute? Where can we reroute it? What other suppliers make the same things that could go a different route.””

Taking quick decisions based on accurate data allowed Accuride to continue supplying its customers as well as ramping up its own internal manufacturing capacity in North America to help compensate for shortages, according to Wright.  "And we've come out of it with really good feedback from our customer base in terms of we didn't shut anybody down. I was kind of proud of that because if we didn't make wheels and we didn't make brakes, then Amazon can't deliver anything. FedEx can't deliver anything. And so it was good that we kept the wheels turning.”

Absa faced a similar sudden shock to its business when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. “Like many other organisations, we had to react very quickly,” recollects Samodien. “We had customers who were struggling with their payment commitments. Businesses had to temporarily close but they still had bills to pay. And in a very short space of time we pulled in all the data and insights we needed to make the decision to provide payment holidays for our customers. And that was a big decision for us as an organisation because of the many factors we had to consider. But, by doing that, we could prioritise the best interests of our customers.”

Of course, AstraZeneca has its own COVID-19 story to tell, but Smith chooses to look to the future when recounting how data insights are helping the life-sciences company to embrace ambiguity. “It’s helped us tackle one of the most important challenges that we're going to have to face. And that is sustainability and ESG.

In such a data-rich organisation, Smith has to be very careful about the data that he gathers. “I have to collect it from R&D, from the labs, from operations, from the factories, from commercial sales packaging. It's a very complex supply chain where we have to bring this data together. I couldn't do that if we didn't have an anti-silo mindset that was willing to share the data.” 

The anti-silo mindset is something Smith implores other companies to embrace, before change once again dictates that they have to. “If anyone thinks that sustainability is optional, think again. And it's not just about our children. I'm talking about real business impact. It used to be that the data you gave was on a voluntary basis, and you looked good if you shared all this data. That isn't going to be voluntary much longer. More and more regulations are coming in. So as a result, you're not only going to have to get the right data, you're going to have to prove that it's correct. You're going to have to prove you're not greenwashing.”