Introduction
This week I’m joined by Martin Davis, the managing partner at Dunelm Associates and former CIO for multiple companies.
In our discussion, Martin shares his perspective on Industry 4.0 and changes during the pandemic. We discuss the role of data in decision making and opportunities moving forward. Lastly, Martin shares the common threads that apply to companies across industries as they think about transformation and the post-pandemic era.
Speaker Profiles
Martin Davis Twitter: https://twitter.com/mcdavis10
Martin Davis LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mpdavis/
Dunelm Associates: https://dunelmassociates.com
Audio File
Featured Hashtags
#CIO #Leadership #CEO #DigitalTransformation #Industry40 #RemoteWork #Data #CIOitk
Podcast Transcript
Tim Crawford 0:04
The companies are looking for new ways to transform their business to remain relevant and differentiated within their industry. Technology now plays a central role in this transformation. Hello, and welcome to the CIO in the Know podcast, where I take a provocative but pragmatic look at the intersection of business and technology. I’m your host Tim Crawford, a CIO and strategic advisor at Avoa. This week, I’m joined by Martin Davis, the managing partner at Dunelm Associates and former CIO for multiple companies, in our discussion, Martin shares his perspective on industry 4.0 and changes during the pandemic. We discussed the role of data in decision making and opportunities moving forward. Lastly, Martin shares the common threads that apply to companies across industries as they think about transformation and the post-pandemic era. Martin, welcome to the program.
Martin Davis 1:04
It’s great to be here today.
Tim Crawford 1:05
Martin Davis, managing partner at Dun Elm Associates, and you’ve also been a former CIO for multiple companies. So, maybe to get us started, let’s learn a little bit about who you are and your role as CIO, and how you’ve served as CIO in the past.
Martin Davis 1:23
Okay, Tim, as you can tell from the accent, I’m British. Spent my early career, 20 plus years, with Ford Motor Company, mainly in the UK, but a bit of time in Detroit as well. I moved to Canada about 12 or so years ago, and became CIO for a group of about 10 companies, big industrial giants here in Eastern Canada, I had companies such as large producer of tissue products, diapers, fourth biggest maker of frozen French fries in North America, an agribusiness, a large trucking company, a courier company, freight brokerage company, personnel agency, ice hockey team.
Tim Crawford 1:57
Oh my gosh, have we missed anything there?
Martin Davis 2:00
No, that’s so I did that for about eight and a half years, and then I spent about a year as group CIO for a Bermudian insurance company serving Bermuda in the Caribbean. So I did that during the heart of the pandemic, so most of 2020
Tim Crawford 2:17
Yeah, no, that’s great, and I think that that’s very informative in terms of understanding some of the commonality that a lot of companies are going to have to deal with as they think about transformation and kind of the change of things, and so when I think about that, Martin, when we talk about transformation, you know, a lot of folks want to talk about digital transformation, but I want to talk a little bit about business transformation and get your perspective on how does the CIO fit into that.
Martin Davis 2:48
Well, I think you need to start by saying, and I like the way you put it in terms of business transformation, because digital transformation is business transformation. The trouble is, too many people see the word digital and think it, and they couldn’t be more wrong. Yeah, it’s about transforming the business. It’s about how does the business do things differently, customer experience focused, employee focused, and how do all of that come together with the help of technology to make it happen. So that, yeah, the CIO has an absolute core role to play in it, but shouldn’t be leading it, it should be like the CEO and the C suite leading that, so the CIO has got to help the C level understand what this is all about. It’s not something they’re going to throw over the wall to the CIO and expect them to go and do it, because that is just wrong and it’s going to fail. So, yeah, you’ve got to help the C level see the opportunities, and especially how technology can provide new opportunities within new products, new services, new platforms, and as well as the kind of more normal operational efficiencies you’d expect. So it’s, it’s all of those pieces together. Yeah, so I think the it’s the C suite as a whole has to drive that business transformation, and yeah, the CIO is a key member of that C-suite, but it’s also providing some of the foundational pieces to enable it.
Tim Crawford 4:09
But do you think that the CIO then becomes somewhat of the instigator for business transformation, because technology does play such an integral role, regardless of the industry today,
Martin Davis 4:21
I think you’re right. Yeah, and there are too many C suites and boards, for that matter, who are not that technology savvy, and therefore the CIO has a duty to help the board and the C suite understand some of the possibilities, but doing that in a way that they’re talking the language of business, not the language of technology, and I think that’s that’s critical amongst
Tim Crawford 4:44
us. You know, when we talk about business transformation, you have in the same breath, you have to talk about customer engagement. You know, the customer becomes central to that transformation when you do kind of shift the conversation to. Talk specifically about customer engagement. Where does the CIO fit into that from your perspective?
Martin Davis 5:06
Well, I think when you look at digital transformation, you look at business transformation, you have to start and end with the customer. You have to say, what does the customer want? How does the customer interact with us? Whichever channel they use, the term omni-channel has been around for quite a few years. Is however the customer chooses to interact with us, then we need to be able to have a common thread and the way for that customer to be followed, and sort of any information they provide to follow them, so that if they phone us, if they go on the web, if they have some other form of interaction in person with us, or whatever else, that all of those things are a continuity, because then you’re better able to deal with the customer, and the customer’s better able to deal with you, and then it kind of goes from there into your back end, and all your backend process need to connect, and that thread needs to follow through all of your back end administration until it comes back to the customer with the end result, their new product or service has been purchased, or whatever it might be, or it may just be an answer to question the customers, however simple it is, but I think it’s that cohesive customer experience, regardless of the channel, and supported by the right tools, and the CIO’s role in this is to make sure that those threads are joined up and those tools are there, so that the customer has the right portal or the right way of doing things, a quoting tool, or whatever it might be.
Tim Crawford 6:32
You know, when you talk about that, though, what I hear is a holistic approach, whether it’s business transformation or customer engagement, yet many IT organizations are very much focused on a project-centric approach to applications to transformations. If you want to call a transformation, how do you bridge that gap? I guess first thing is, let me not assume that you agree with me, you know, do you still do you agree with that approach, but then how would you bridge that if you do have an organization that is very much project centric,
Martin Davis 7:10
regardless of whether you’re project centric or not, because even if you are entirely project centric or even if you’re entirely process focused from end to end process, I think the absolute critical piece is that making sure you have that thread running through it, because unless you have that thread running through it, you’re not going to get the end result you require. And I think if you look at it from a kind of customer’s perspective, the customer contacts you and requests something in some form. How do you process that request? How do you deal with it? How does it flow, and it may break into multiple pieces, which may actually end up being different initiatives or different projects to fulfill those pieces, but you need to have that solution design from a customer perspective. Yeah, that customer journey, if you prefer. Yeah, we’ve heard talk in the past about customer journey mapping and things like that, which is often a bit of marketing term for how does the customer interact with you, but think of that customer journey mapping from a technology standpoint, from an IT standpoint, is how do you connect the dots so that it flows through properly, and I think that’s that’s kind of quite critical within it, and whether you have a product mindset, or whether you have an individual project mindset or a transformation mindset, that solution view and that customer view, and how you connect it all the way through is all importantly.
Tim Crawford 8:32
So, as we talk about mindsets, I want to shift gears a little bit, and instead of the cut talking about the customer mindset, I want to talk about Martin’s mindset, you know, during the pandemic, it’s, it’s kind of changed a lot for all of us, whether we’re on the recipient side of it or the creator side of it. As a leader, what are some things that you’ve learned about yourself and your leadership, and maybe even some changes you’re thinking about as you go forward,
Martin Davis 9:02
it’s been a learning curve for a lot of us, and yeah, I’ve already worked in a number of situations where I had a lot of remote teams anyway, so having your staff remote from you and you’ve been forced to be remote from everybody, whilst it’s strange is not unusual, but I think what’s been strange and affected me personally in some ways is the lack of human contact on a day-to-day basis, and yeah, whereas even if you’ve got a lot of remote teams, you’ve got some of your team around you, you’re in daily contact, yeah, you get up from your chair, yeah, you walk to get a coffee or something, you interact with people at the coffee machine in the corridor, whatever it is, and I think it’s been that enforced isolation away from everybody, yeah, and the fact that you can end up just sitting in your chair in your office and not moving for hours on end, unless you force yourself to, and I think those types of things have. Really brought home to me is how much I value those interactions, those informal interactions. Yeah, and it’s kind of a little strange. We’ve been, yeah, probably as if not more productive due to this, but it’s some of those other aspects I think are affecting people psychologically.
Tim Crawford 10:19
How do you think that’s going to change, or maybe, how do you, how do you bridge the gap, or rationalize this when you see companies that are moving to a full remote kind of process moving forward? Right, we’ve, we all went home and we worked from home, or worked remotely as part of the pandemic, and now post-pandemic companies are kind of teeing up to say, look, just stay home, work remote. How, how do I kind of still address some of those concerns that you’re bringing up? If, if we work in a permanently or relatively permanently remote scenario,
Martin Davis 10:58
well, I don’t think about the permanently remote, and yes, there’s definitely some companies are going to go permanently remote, but I think there’s a quite a few that are going to come with some hybrid form where maybe certain teams will just be in the office occasionally, or things like that, and so they’ll have pockets of that interaction, which hopefully will alleviate some of that issue, and for those that are working totally remotely, I think they’re going to look for other ways to get some of those that human interaction, you know, meeting somebody for lunch, whatever else outside of their work, because otherwise I think we’re going to see more of those concerns from people,
Tim Crawford 11:35
yeah, and I think, think that’s going to be something we’re going to have to kind of work through as we go through time here,
Martin Davis 11:41
yeah,
Tim Crawford 11:42
you know, one of the things that I know is a passion of yours is Industry 4.0 You know, maybe let’s, let’s try and tee that up in terms of what is it, I mean, we hear the buzzword, but what is it, and what does it mean to you? What’s your perspective on that too?
Martin Davis 11:59
Well, Industry 4.0 the fourth industrial revolution, as it’s sometimes called, is sometimes referred to as the cyber physical world. So, the kind of combination of digital views of manufacturing and other industry and the physical view, and the bring together, yeah, people talk about digital twins, so effectively to mimic what’s going on in physical world in a digital world, so you can experiment and try things and see what happens without any cost, and actually see the impacts of doing that, speeding up a production line, changing a machine, or those types of things, but if you boil it down to what is industry 4.0 and how do you really break it down, most of it behind the scenes is data to drive the right decision making. Yeah, because the different aspects of Industry 4.0 yeah, such as robotics and IoT, and all of these other pieces. When you fundamentally boil a lot of it down, it comes down to data to make decisions, and it could be data that you’re a person going to make a decision, or a machine’s gonna make a decision. The artificial intelligence and machine learning come into that aspect as well, but so many manufacturers we have, and things like that, are not really making the most of what they have at the moment, and there’s a mindset there about getting the data from a piece of machinery on a production line, and making sure you understand what’s going on. Yeah, and I’ll give you, give you a real-life example. A manufacturing plant wanted to increase its capacity. The plant manager immediately said, “Okay, we need some more packaging machines at the cost of x million, or whatever it is, to increase our capacity. They’re about to buy that, and then somebody said, “Go and pull the data about what’s going on with those existing packaging machines. They reluctantly did. When they pulled the data, none of the existing packaging machines were running above 50% capacity. There was bottlenecks elsewhere in the production line.
Tim Crawford 13:54
Interesting.
Martin Davis 13:55
So, when you actually started looking at the data, so their knee-jerk reaction was, “We always have problems in packaging, buy more packaging machinery, but when you actually looked at the data, the problem was elsewhere, and by removing the bottleneck elsewhere, they could increase the flow. Packaging machines could then be better utilized, and effectively they could have wasted millions of dollars to no gain at all. And I think when you look at fundamentals of Industry 4.0 you know that use of data to drive decision making, be it automated or manual, is the fundamental hub of it. Yeah, and you get to really complex things, such as, as I said, digital twins, artificial intelligence, things like that, and there’s lots of other aspects to it. What really excites me is, unlike a lot of other areas of it, this operational technology, OT piece is to be honest underutilized, and the opportunities for gains there are pretty massive.
Tim Crawford 14:49
Do you think that this is, if I were to maybe oversimplify it a bit, do you think this is a scenario or situation where we’re making too many gut decisions? Ins and we need to really tap into that information that we already have. We’re not meaning we’re not using the data and information that we already have to its fullest extent,
Martin Davis 15:11
exactly. Some of it is about data we already have, we’re not using some of it’s even collecting that data, we’re not even collecting it. Most of the modern machinery in a production line has a programmable logic controller, a PLC, and that produces all sorts of data streams, and a lot of them are just not captured. If you plug into them, start looking at the data, analyzing that data, analyzing it up and down the production line, understanding what’s going on, even such a simple thing is understanding downtime properly. How much time is actually that machine working versus not working? Is some of that due to bottlenecks in the process? Is some of it due to breakdowns, plan changeovers, or whatever? And all of these different assets come in, and people understanding that properly, and understanding how they can get more utilization out of what they have, then generates more productivity
Tim Crawford 16:04
if we already have the data. Why do you think that we’re not capitalizing on it? Is it because we’re not going to capture those streams, because that’s a lot of data, and we have to find a place to store it, and there’s a real cost to storing the data? Is it because we don’t understand the value of the data. What’s your take on why that isn’t happening? Because this feels like an opportunity that’s been there for some period of time that hasn’t been capitalized on.
Martin Davis 16:32
Well, yeah, if you look at the time industry 4.0 was really invented in 2012
Tim Crawford 16:38
wow,
Martin Davis 16:38
yeah, we’re still talking about it today as being relatively new, just to give you the perspective of how long. Wow, and I think I think it’s what you said, it’s the people and knee-jerk reactions and set in their ways. It’s the old engineering mindset of I know how it works and I know what the problem
Tim Crawford 16:57
is,
Martin Davis 16:57
as opposed to I have a hunch of what the problem might be, I’ll pull the data to prove or deny that theory, and I think some of those aspects is changing the mindset, and that takes a lot of time, and there’s that kind of engineering mindset there.
Tim Crawford 17:13
If I kind of put this in in the confines of the pandemic for a minute and think about what companies have been doing, and maybe haven’t been doing. What have you seen? Because you’ve had an opportunity to see a lot that’s pretty unique. What are some things that companies have been doing, or have not been doing, over the course of the pandemic, and maybe even things that could be opportunities, or missed opportunities, depending on the choices they’ve made,
Martin Davis 17:42
I think the biggest thing I’ve been seeing is the difference between those companies that are planning for the future versus just trying to survive, and I think that’s been a very much of them and us situation, and even if you look at something like Dish Transformation, there’s been lots of articles from Gartner and Accenture and whoever else saying the pandemic has accelerated digital transformation more in six months than it has moved in the last six years. That was one of the headlines I remember reading. Yet, when you dig into it, what you really find out is the pandemic has accelerated your band aids and e-commerce platform development, because some of these companies have had no other way of doing business. It hasn’t really accelerated proper digital transformation, that that has not accelerated, apart from in some companies that were thinking more about the future, and I think what we’ve seen is these kind of band-aid type approaches, we quickly need this e-commerce platform, etc. but they’ve neglected some of the bigger picture thinking about what’s really required digital transformation. Yeah, making it fully end to end from the customer back to the customer with all the backend processes suitably transformed and connected as well. Yeah, there’s definitely some kind of short-term thinking, some okay, if we just do this change, this change, and this change, we can make it work, as opposed to really transforming, and the companies that have been really continued to think of the future, even through the pandemic, have stayed the course and really been pushing their digital transformation and using the pandemic as an accelerator to push themselves harder, I think that’s a big difference.
Tim Crawford 19:25
So, if I’m so.. let me just play the opposite side of that coin for a minute. Let’s say I was going down the path through the pandemic, and I was just laser focused on survival mode, you know, cut, cut, cut, change things around, just just to get through it, just to survive. I’m not thinking about the future, I’m just thinking about tomorrow, you know, as opposed to next year and the year after, etc. Is it too late now to go back and get started on that kind of more forward thinking process? Have I missed have. I truly miss the opportunity, or can I still kind of dig in and double down and really start making those changes now?
Martin Davis 20:09
No, I think there’s net, it’s never too late to dig in and do it. Yeah, it may depend on how fast your competitors have been and how much they’ve been accelerating away from you. Fair enough, it’s never too late for you to actually start, and if you think about it, digital transformation is not a one and done type thing. It’s a, okay, we’re going to transform this, we’re going to change how we do business, we’re going to move to a more online mindset, fully connected to the customer, and everything else, but there’s always going to be new ways and new opportunities for you to do some things slightly different, and that’s going to be a continuous process, and it, yeah, it’s that, what’s that old phrase, change or die, yeah, unless you continually looking at how you change and transform, you’re going to be left behind, you know, look at like Netflix and Blockbuster, for example, or digital film and Kodak, yeah, there’s plenty of examples around,
Tim Crawford 21:00
yeah,
Martin Davis 21:01
it’s that whole thing around it’s better to be at least moving forward and changing and trying things than not doing anything,
Tim Crawford 21:09
yeah. And that’s actually come up in past episodes too. Sheila Jordan, who was the CIO at Symantec and is now the CIO at Honeywell, said, you know what got you here won’t get you there, and in fact, just a more recent episode, Sharon Mandell, the CIO at Juniper Networks, had said that digital transformation, like you said, is not a one and done, it’s not a project, it’s a continual process, you’ll go through it again and again and again, as the business changes, you will need to change too, and so you’re, you’re echoing some of these, these thoughts that have come up in past conversations with, with some of your colleagues, too. Is I, is I kind of think about your experience and working across a myriad of different industries, which is just so unique amongst CIOs, and I think it brings a very, a very special perspective to the conversation. What are some of those common themes that you’ve seen across industries?
Martin Davis 22:14
I think the, there’s, it’s a very difficult question to answer, because there’s some of these companies are so different, but there’s definitely the use of data and properly used data to drive your thinking, and no matter which industry you’re in, it’s increasingly important, and the foundation of so many other things. If you want to use artificial intelligence, machine learning, you need a good base of data to base that on, so it, that’s critical, that having that good data, having your data properly clean, governed there and available and accessible for all your people, and then if you start looking at the whole world of digital and digital transformation and business transformation, is do you have the right mindset? I think is the right thing as well. Yeah, are you a company that is seeing technology as just email network and a few applications, or are you seeing it as the lifeblood of your business and how you move forward? So, I think that kind of culture and mindset across the seat C-level team and the board is critically important as well, and I think that those are probably areas I would, I would say not worrying so much about where your people are, but worrying more about are they doing the right things and being productive, and those probably common themes I would bring out, so the data and use of data, how you’re digitally transforming and your people and trusting your people.
Tim Crawford 23:49
Love that great words of wisdom. We’re gonna have to leave it right there. Martin, thanks so much for taking part in the episode today.
Martin Davis 23:57
It’s been a real pleasure, Tim. Thanks for ever so much for inviting me.
Tim Crawford 24:02
For more information on the CIO in the Know podcast, visit us online at CIO in the know.com You can also find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcast. Please subscribe, and thank you for listening.
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