Digital transformation: 4 questions CIOs should ask now

One of the things CIOs have learned during the past eighteen months is that when you have the business behind you, the momentum for transformation is turbocharged. Top CIOs are capitalizing on this lesson to further integrate technology strategy with business strategy. And the first place they’re starting is with the people.

How well are you doing on the people front of digital transformation? Here are four questions to ask yourself, based on my recent conversations with the CIOs of CarMax, Dow, and Johnson & Johnson.

“We’ve been using digital to break down organizational walls for the past four years when we first embarked on our digital transformation. Because our view is that we are not just implementing technologies, but changing the way the company works. Technology simply enables these changes,” noted Melanie Kalmar, Dow’s chief digital and information officer. She also says that all 36,000 employees at the chemical material science company are part of her digital organization because digital reaches every corner of the business. “We have to harness the minds and hearts of the whole organization to make this work.”

To do this, Dow has taken a “team of teams” approach to accelerating digital, ensuring the right people are at the strategy and design table. This includes embedding IT leaders into business teams to understand their needs and bringing multi-functional teams together to develop, pilot, and scale solutions known to deliver the most value and designed to transform the employee and customer experience.

“It also requires two-way communication,” adds Kalmar. “We listen to employees and customers so we understand what matters to them, and then make sure we articulate the value of our digital investments back to them. Otherwise, we will lose the opportunity to bring them along on our journey.”

Jim Swanson, EVP and enterprise chief information officer at Johnson & Johnson, talks about technology’s role in shaping the company’s mission and strategy in similar terms: “It’s not just a J&J IT function. It’s the whole enterprise, which is why we’re building the digital acumen of all 135,000 employees so they can take their domain knowledge, coupled with an understanding of technology, and transform human health.”

J&J has taken steps to build digital acumen and other “future-ready skills” beyond just the technology organization to increase the comfort level with them. For example, the company’s leadership determined that data science and intelligent automation were key capabilities for the future and has created enterprise councils focused on these areas to promote greater awareness. The councils have engaged the broader organization through annual events showcasing J&J’s use of these capabilities as well as Hackathons and training on the fundamentals of each.

Shamim Mohammad, executive vice president and chief information and technology officer of CarMax, says it’s part of a necessary mindset shift that has to take place across the organization: “Over the last five-plus years, we’ve built tremendous capability so that today, we operate and think and behave like a technology organization.”

Shifting from a project to a product organization has been key to the evolution of CarMax’s technology organization. “We get most of the work done through these product teams,” Mohammad says. “And these product teams are like a small startup company within a big company. These folks are seven to nine people. They’re highly empowered and they have this mindset of destination and experimentation. And by doing that, we’re able to increase the pace of innovation.”

It’s an example of how a Fortune 100 company can behave more like a scrappy startup and think in new ways.