Thank you to all who attended the 11th Metis Strategy Digital Symposium. As we enter 2023, many organizations are seeking faster pathways to growth and opportunities to boost resilience in anticipation of economic headwinds. Nearly 60% of attendees noted rising inflation and interest rates as the macro issue that will have the biggest impact on their organizations in the year ahead.
Modernization efforts remain a priority as companies seek to drive efficiencies and revenue growth. Chief Information Officers and their peers are also strengthening relationships with business partners as digital technologies play an increasingly greater role in product development, operations, and customer experience.
Below are highlights from the event. Stay tuned to the Metis Strategy YouTube channel and Technovation podcast in the coming weeks for recordings of individual panel discussions. In the meantime, click here to request an invitation for our next virtual event on February 16, 2023.
Poll: Which macro issue do you anticipate will have the biggest impact on your organization in the year ahead?
In preparation for the year ahead, technology leaders noted they are:
As economic pressures add potential challenges to organizations across industries, technology leaders are deepening relationships with business partners to deliver tangible value quickly.
At Magna International, Chief Digital and Information Officer Boris Shulkin is focusing his efforts on identifying use cases and partnering with business teams on execution, adding that “credit can be shared when things go well.” Shulkin noted that his role is rising in importance as cybersecurity and operational efficiency become more critical to the bottom line of the company’s manufacturing facilities.
At supermarket chain Giant Eagle, CIO Kirk Ball brings front line workers into the product development process from the start to ensure it aligns with their needs. Spending time in the shoes of end-users helps eliminate friction and provide them with the necessary tools, data, and capabilities to do their jobs. He also continues to engage with peers and business partners across Giant Eagle on the company’s transformation efforts, which will be executed over the next three to five years. “It’s not my strategy, it’s our strategy,” he said.
The increased collaboration with teams outside IT underscores the need for more customer- and business-centric thinking. Jennifer Hartsock, Chief Information and Digital Officer at Cargill, emphasized the need to think as a business leader first and a technology leader second, working alongside peers to understand the business context, develop strong relationships, and focus on solutions that truly serve the broader organization. “Sometimes we’re not prepared to truly understand what we’re trying to enable,” Hartsock said. She encouraged other leaders to lean into tough conversations, make tradeoffs where necessary, and meet others where they are so that their voices are heard and strategy creation becomes a “together conversation.”
As technology and digital leaders continue to lead cross-functional initiatives, they’re proactively looking at new technologies to create new opportunities and address existing challenges. At Tractor Supply Co., one area Chief Technology, Digital Commerce, and Strategy Officer Rob Mills is focusing his efforts is M&A. At the table with C-suite peers, his purview allows him to articulate not only how to integrate a particular acquisition, but also the impact it will have on the company’s technology platform and architecture years down the road. That strategic focus opens new conversations about how the technology organization can best adapt to ensure any M&A activity has the needed processes and technologies behind it to drive long-term opportunities.
While companies continue to build out internal products and services that support the customized needs of their business, some MSDS speakers have taken the opportunity to commercialize their offerings to customers, using technology as a means to connect to partner ecosystems. At Pilot Company, Chief Technology Officer Michael Rodgers developed a cloud- and API-first strategy that focuses on utility, functionality, and efficiency for drivers and team members. The company has built a platform that allows the company to expose those APIs to other trucking companies. This approach allows Pilot to embed its technology directly into apps like GasBuddy, giving drivers using the app the ability to engage seamlessly with Pilot’s services.
Meta’s rebrand as enterprise engineering meant embracing two broad mindsets: understanding and incorporating internal employees into product building, and making a fundamental shift to a “build” culture that can provide customers with custom tools, technologies, and platforms needed to do their jobs in the most effective and efficient way possible, CIO Atish Banerjea said. “You’re essentially going away from a mindset where your engineers are just taking in a third-party system and configuring it.” Building tools for internal users has also influenced development of commercial products. One product designed to make onboarding information accessible to new Meta employees ultimately became part of the company’s Workplace offering for external customers.
At Toptal, the world’s largest remote working company, CEO and Co-Founder Taso Du Val spoke to the benefits of building platforms, paired with robust data and information architecture, to drive greater agility. Since Toptal built and owns all parts of its customized software platform, it is able to create synergies, scale processes, and make changes more quickly. On the flipside, the customized nature of those internal systems makes it unlikely those technologies could become a commercial product.
At XPO, CIO-turned-CEO Mario Harik is driving a strategy focused on growth and using technology to better serve customers, help goods move through the supply chain, operate more productively, and efficiently expand margins. As XPO grows, there has been more of a focus on financial outcomes and tech stacks contributing to company expansion.
During his time as CIO, Harik learned to prioritize the commercial outcomes of technology solutions, and emphasized the importance of financial acumen. “Knowing the impact on the top line and the bottom line is essential for investments and getting expected outcomes,” Harik said. As MSDS attendees contemplate an expanded role in the C-suite, they are looking to sharpen customer centricity and financial acumen.
Poll: As you contemplate an expanded C-suite role, which skill or focus area are you most looking to sharpen?
Kelly Kent, Chief Transformation Officer at ServiceNow, said her work with a number of organizations on their transformation efforts is surfacing new conversations around metrics. While productivity is still top of mind in any transformation initiative, companies now are asking about the best ways to measure customer and employee experience, as well as measure revenue impact from digital channels. The ability to track and manage those metrics, both financial and not, will be key for CIOs as they look to move at scale and with speed for their companies in 2023.
Today’s emerging technologies are tomorrow’s big disruptors. To make organizations more nimble, technology executives are focused on creating more opportunities for innovation and improving test-and-learn processes. Gail Evans, Chief Digital and Technology Officer for Disney Parks, Experiences, and Products, first listens to customers, cast members and others to better understand the outcomes to chase. She encourages teams to “test before you invest” – to pause and think about what to test, assess the cost of building, and fully consider the value that a new solution would deliver to an end user before investing heavily in a new initiative.
Evans encouraged other executives seeking to expand innovation efforts to pay close attention to and understand mega-trends, have a game plan for responding to major technology and business disruptors, and ensure innovation is open to everyone at the company rather than just one person or one team. “Every employee that is in your company innovates something.”
Poll: How much of your IT budget is currently allocated toward ‘grow/transform’ activities?
At Little Caesars, CIO Anita Klopfenstein helps operationalize innovation through “Area 51,” a group that comes up with a number of potential solutions that haven’t gone into production, such as efforts to reduce waste or automate production lines. Key success metrics are tied to each initiative. If something shows promise, teams will build a prototype and roll it out with a franchisee that is open to new technology. They will develop the technology and measure progress until it reaches the desired success metrics before gradually rolling out successful initiatives systemwide. To drive innovative thinking, Klopfenstein encourages members of the IT team to work in stores a few times a year to understand how the technologies they have built impact everyday workflows. “There have been several cases where just moving a button from one side of the screen to another…really impacted the operations of the store.”
