Helpful Hints on How to Hyperspecialize in 7 Hot Sectors

Organization: Aviva

Desired Business Outcomes: flexibility, speedy go to market

Investment Areas: cloud solutions

“Digital technologies are fundamentally impacting the types of products we sell,” says Pete Marsden, digital CIO at Aviva, a worldwide provider of insurance, savings and investment products headquartered in London. “To bring new products to market very quickly, our digital systems must be flexible enough for us to change them every day — we can’t wait six to 18 months to respond if the business comes up with a fantastic idea. As a result, I have to build incredible flexibility into our systems to make sure we can react at that kind of speed.”

Organization: Royal Resorts

Desired Business Outcomes: expanded customer base, deeper customer insights, additional business units

Investment Areas: cloud-based CRM, IT infrastructure modernization, business & IT integration

“The all-inclusive project was a huge disruption at our company,” says Carlos Gonzalez Alvarado, CIO. “We now have four distinct business units, each of them very successful, but they’re pursuing different goals, and the [business and IT] operations aren’t well integrated. So, we proposed a way to align the business units in a single process around the customer journey, and that’s the transformation effort we’re working on now.”

Organization: Panera Bread

Desired Business Outcomes: streamlined e-commerce platform, expanded to-go sales operations, digital & mobile solutions

Investment Areas: Infrastructure-as-a-Service, marketing & web analytics, recruiting & payroll solutions

“If we have two sandwich lines running in a café during lunchtime, we use our digital systems to balance the order flow for each line,” Mike Bufano, CFO of Panera Bread, explains. “Once we built out our IT infrastructure, we’ve learned it can open up a wide variety of opportunities for us… We recognized pretty quickly that digital interactions with customers are some of the biggest sales drivers we have, so you have to give it room to grow and develop over time.”

Organization: GE Digital

Desired Business Outcomes: Industrial Internet of Things dominant market share, increased productivity, cost savings in supply chain

Investment Areas: IIoT sensors, big data analytics

“The intersection of business goals and information technology is essential to industrial firms today,” notes Khozema Shipchandler, global CFO for GE Digital, a San Ramon, California, business unit within General Electric that is promulgating the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Shipchandler notes that while productivity gains have plateaued at about 1% for industrial companies in recent years, the IIoT technology used internally has yielded gains of 4%, with related cost savings through more efficient supply chains, manufacturing lines and other corporate-wide activities.

Organization: Federal Communications Commission

Desired Business Outcomes: reduce cost of maintaining legacy IT infrastructure, IT modernization

Investment Areas: migration to the cloud, XaaS platforms

Thus far, the migration is about 40% complete. The result: In the past, 85% of the FCC’s IT budget went to maintaining the legacy infrastructure, a percentage that has now dropped to less than 50%, says David Bray, the CIO who led the project and who was recently named to the new role of chief ventures officer at the U.S. National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. The cloud project achieved a significant reduction in legacy IT spend. Even though IT operations had a flat budget, the savings produced from its digital transformation effort will now help fund the FCC’s continuous modernization efforts to its applications, so that it doesn’t face a similar “legacy IT glut” in the future, Bray says.

Organization: University of California Berkeley

Desired Business Outcomes: increased student engagement, better & more streamlined teacher/student communication & collaboration, modernize teaching methods

Investment Areas: A/V & classroom technology, cloud migration, office application automation, collaboration tools

“Much of higher education still follows an old business model — the ‘sage on the stage’ lecture,” says Kevin Cornish, CIO. “But with digital technology, we have new opportunities to partner with faculty to better engage their students. Methods range from delivering lectures prerecorded in our studio so students can consume information before class and then use the modern classroom resources for interactive discussions and group problem-solving activities to the development of highly engaging online courses that enable students to create a uniquely tailored path through the course content that meets their individualized learning objective.”

Organization: Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex)

Desired Business Outcomes: boost internal efficiency, end losses from oil thieves, enhance customer service

Investment Areas: modern IT platforms, IIoT, data analytics

“Digital transformation is important because it enables us to partner or compete with world-class companies, which themselves are undergoing massive technology changes. We’d better be at the same level, otherwise we are going to lose… [gas theft] has been around for the last 10 years, but now we have analytics and the sensors to give us insights into the behavior of the thieves,” Rodrigo Becerra, corporate director and CIO, explains. “We haven’t fully solved the problem, but we see improvement.”