Digital is no longer just a cool idea or about only marketing and customer experience. From product development, production, service operation, supply chain, and employees’ experience–you must re-imagine all. How should an organization go about defining a digital operating model and put it into action, so it enables consistent, meaningful, and high-quality execution across the enterprise at the speed of business change?

Contributor

• • Sanjay Patel, SVP and Group CIO, Tate and Lyle

Transcript

Sanjog Aul [00:00:00]:
Hello everyone and welcome to this segment on CTN. To learn more, please visit ciotalknetwork.com and the topic for today is a Digital Operating Model That Delivers Results. So the premise is that digital is no longer a cool idea and it’s not just about we doing great things with marketing or having that wow customer experience while those things are also important, but there’s also about building good products, the whole product development process, the production of whatever products and services you offer, the service operations, talk about supply chain, and even internally the experience that our employees have as part of delivering whatever they are delivering. So all of that needs to be reimagined if you want to leverage digital to the fullest extent. Does that mean we just make those 30,000 foot view feet view strategies or should we go about actually digging into the nitty gritties of the way we used to operate our business earlier and now with digital we actually build a specific digital operating model and put it in action. So to discuss all that, I have with me Sanjay Patel. Sanjay is the CIO at Tate and Lyle.

Sanjog Aul [00:01:21]:
Hi Sanjay, how are you?

Sanjay Patel [00:01:23]:
Hi, I’m good, thanks Sanjog and  hi listeners.

Sanjog Aul [00:01:24]:
And thanks so much for joining us. Now let’s dig right in. So when we are looking at digital and yes, we will get into the digital operating model, but then within that we also have to identify the channels which we would be best utilizing for making sure that they get the appropriate customer experience, knowing that our competitors are doing the same or for that matter, we had to evolve so that they we attract new customers and retain them. How do you go about identifying such channels?

Sanjay Patel [00:02:05]:
So I think there’s probably at least two tracks that most companies take. The first one is it depends on what industry that you’re in. So if you’re in retail, which is probably the best known space or business to consumer space, then you have to understand two dimensions. First one is who are your customers and what are their buying habits? They’re called what channels could you use to engage them? We have the traditional bricks and mortar, but then we have E-commerce. We also then have E-commerce going into different channels as we get into social media. So first one is understanding your customers and then leveraging all the channels that your customers intervening with and the second one, for your point about reimagining, is really having a future view that says what technology are going to enable different channels as we go forward. So whether you’re talking about contact lenses that allow you to see things near real time, whether you’re talking about VR or whether you’re talking about through gaming there are technologies that allow new channels to be looked at and that’s one of the areas where digital natives are looking at and that would be my suggestion on the second area to look at is what’s happening in your place.

Sanjay Patel [00:03:12]:
What are your peers and competitors doing and as I indicated a little while ago, your competitors could be your existing competitors or they could be digital native who aren’t encumbered by brisk and mortar that can actually come to market much faster. I’d say those are the two things that you need to look at from a channel perspective. What are your customers doing? What could they do in the future and what are your peers and existing and new competitors today?

Sanjog Aul [00:03:37]:
Could I hash this out in a half an hour discussion among my peers or is there more to it? So what did you do in your organization? What did your who all got together and what all you did you discuss what data points you saw missing which you went outside, which sources did you use to find so that you could get to that discovery or rather that decision on the best channels that are possible for you to engage with your customers.

Sanjay Patel [00:04:04]:
I wish we could just sit in a room for half an hour and a little bit more than that. So we started with a couple of things. Firstly, what was our strategy? What company did we want to be typically in the next five to ten years Al and we’re still continuing that journey to hey, what possible scenarios could exist in the world five to 10 years out because there isn’t just one scenario that would come true and that gives us to thought about the various opportunities for digital different channels or different customers or different business models were exposed to us and then we work back from that to say of those various scenarios which are the ones that we think that we should be placing some bets on putting some money and investment into and making them real intangible. So I’ll give you a real example, we’re a business to business operating model. So we sell between us and other companies who then sell to consumers. So we sell food ingredients into food ingredient into food manufacturing companies be they the pepsicos, Coca Colas or Nestle unilevers of the world and they are then selling through retailers into consumers.

Sanjay Patel [00:05:08]:
So we’re a number of steps away from the end consumer. So we’ve been reimagining what could that world look like in 5 to 10 years time and therefore what are the choices that we need to be making in terms of better collaboration with our customers, so that we’ve got more transparency between what we’re making as ingredients, what they’re making as product, what retailers are selling on their shelves and what consumers are buying and what are those trends and then how do we invest into those trends? As people are more into plant based protein or plant based materials, how are we going to shorten the time it takes us to get into that state and that’s where my earlier point about looking at new technologies and looking at what our digital agents could do comes in. That’s the process we followed, look out into the future, decide what those scenarios could be, pick some that we should be investing in now, and then start on that digital journey.

Sanjog Aul [00:05:56]:
So let’s talk about the underlying processes because a lot of people say, okay, let’s slap digital as a bunch of tools, but they do not rethink or least tweak what business processes should be in order to best leverage digital, or for that matter use the advent of digital as an opportunity to look at many of those processes, which have been running, which may not be the most efficient or might be causing leakage or not allowing you the flexibility you need. How did you go about getting the people who are supposed to be owning those business processes, who may be typically sitting as a business unit leaders or even at business user level, how would you go about influencing and I’m not saying you alone, I’m sure you got blessings as well as support from your business unit leaders. So how did your organization go about uncovering the leakages and then saying, you know what, we’re not going to pause our business, but we might try to figure out a way to change the tires of a moving vehicle and that too at the deep level.

Sanjay Patel [00:07:02]:
That’s the essential conundrum for an organization continuously transforming, which is how do I run business as usual while transforming at the same time? So in our particular case, we started the journey a while ago not necessarily for digital, but in terms of having a joined up set of business processes enabling our business. Typically that’s an ERP solution, an enterprise resource planning solution. We’ve been down the EDHP journey for a number of years and that helps us to embed the core business processes predominantly around financial processes so that we can run our business and over time we’ve then been looking at some of the other business processes that would underpin the changes that we’re making. So if I talk about customer facing processes, what are the processes that we’re going to help with our sales team so that they have information in their hands and be able to go talk to our customers about our value proposition? What are the processes we’re looking at for our supply chain so that we can show our customers that we’re delivering on time in full and the way we’ve organized that from a business and IT perspective is we as dedicated business super users, we have a network around that own those particular business processes, whether that’s report to record or was that order to cash or procure to pay. We have those people in the business and they have a very tight partnership with IoT and between us we define new projects where we’re talking about either automating or enabling or transforming a business process and continuous improvement which we put through an enhancement process. Smaller changes we put through currently on a monthly basis so we can be agile in getting those changes out in the market and then bigger changes we run as projects and we’ll run those cradles to grave in terms of the start discovery, make the change, automate it and then go insist as usual.

Sanjay Patel [00:08:48]:
So we’re running few tracts, continuous improvement on the one hand project on the other hand for the partnership between business process owners, analytics.

Sanjog Aul [00:08:57]:
So I’m sure nothing, at least I’ve seen in my lifetime of almost 50 years that nothing has been a smooth sailing boat. We are lucky at times, but at the same time we have to get through some surprises, some stumbling blocks. Which were what were some of those issues that you did not see coming or what did you know that’s going to come and how did you get over for you to be able to do it? So I know there’s a change management is a huge thing. A lot of things happen, but when you went through your journey but trying to change the business processes, did you somehow sometimes feel that you don’t need to, you might be over engineering it or you felt that even a simplest thing is taking the longest time and the ROI of making that change is not going to be worth it. What are some of your learnings in this process?

Sanjay Patel [00:09:46]:
I think it’s all of the above. So look, we’re still on the journey. I think naive to think that we’re at the end of the journey, but they are things that people know about and some surprises. So let me give you some examples, so things that people know about change is hard when you’re trying to run a business and people are used to running the business a particular way and you’re trying to interview something different. We’ve learned that we’ve had to put a lot of effort into changing and communicating. So we created a sense of expertise. So you should learn about how do you make change happen in take and lot

Sanjay Patel [00:10:18]:
because making change happen in one company is actually on one hand similar to other companies, but it’s also different because it was cultural norms, ways of working, hierarchy, remuneration are all different. So we’ve invested in change management and communications to help people on that change journey. That’s one thing that we didn’t start with and we had to learn and build that capability. The second one is that because we are running information technology, the data is always seen and continues to be a challenge and data is a big topic, but if I give an example, if I want to start looking at my customers through the various channels that, I’m delivering to and I want to look at them through the lens of my regional business, but I also want to look at them through the lens of my product business or the category that my product work in, so beverages. So the category of sweeteners in beverages as a product. So now I have to and I have to rely on that data is clean and maintained.

Sanjay Patel [00:11:13]:
That continues to be a challenge and we’ve worked hard at putting governance in place, tooling in place and education in place while putting time in place on the project, so that we can make sure that data has been clean and maintained and the third one, given that we’re balancing running a business which is growing and it’s committed to that fork and at the same time wanting to reduce lots of changes, how do we prioritize it? How do we make sure that we’re putting the right things on the innovation topic alongside business issue shortcut and that’s about business case, that’s about change load and that’s about time to value. So we’ve had to get more rigorous in our portfolio and project management in terms of where could we make investments and when could we make those investments in line with our business cycle. So three examples there are some of the challenges that we continue to have and some of the investments or changes that we’ve had to mail in building capabilities to address them.

Sanjog Aul [00:12:06]:
Let’s take a quick break listeners. We’ll be right back and let’s look at the possibility of the organizational structure change that we should make in order for it to be optimum utilization of the human resources and also determine what all other resources that we need to have at our disposals at all times. So we need to have human resource working at their best capacity. The reporting and the communication should be most effective and the right type of resources at the right time are available to them so that the digital dream is realized. How do you make that all happen and that too as a smooth sailing boat. Please stay tuned listeners. We’ll be right back and explore.

Sanjog Aul [00:13:58]:
Welcome back. So Sanjay, I met a few leaders very recently and they claim that they have the best people but then they don’t know, if they are being utilized properly. The reporting structure is proper and every day that person comes in, that person doesn’t know whether they are going to be working on things which will help them grow as individuals because everyone is thinking at all times what’s in it for me? And then they have issues with resources which either there’s a feast or famines, either they have got way too many licenses of technology or other resources at their disposal or they have nothing in their stalled and this is not the news which is new for most organizations. So if someone is to literally build their digital operating model where things move at a speed of light almost what would you do to have that organizational structure, the right expectation and the training levels and availability of resources so everything flows as expected or at least we continue to grow in the direction we want to.

Sanjay Patel [00:15:03]:
Look. There’s a few things enjoy and I wish it was an easy question, particularly for those businesses like ours that were 160 years old where we have a legacy, but we also are very people based business with brick and mortar and we have a manufacturing base, and the reason I make that is, if you’re in a business that physical which relies on people then I think there’s a few things that you can help situation. I’m not sure you can solve it to be digital at the speed of light but let me give some examples of things that you can help. The first one is to be very clear what’s the purpose of the company, and we spend a lot of time being very clear from a very high level down to detail why do we the purpose is really about improving lighter generation and the reason for that is it sort of.

Sanjay Patel [00:15:45]:
It paints a picture of what the company is really about and if that’s something that matters to you, it’s a company that you want to belong with, that you’re put out with some of the challenges in the company, whether it’s structure or hierarchy or otherwise, but making it real. Improving life for generations for me is about through food ingredient. Making sure that food ingredients are helping to solve some of the biggest problems on the planet, be that obesity or type 2 diabetes or some of the health problems that people have. Seven billion people, that’s a big proposition that we can be working towards and then my path in that is helping to make sure that technologies are helping the people in Tate and Lyle to work with their customers and consumers to go towards that goal. That I’m also providing improved lives for generators for the people that work at Tate and Lyle, that their working life is good and effective and when they come to work, they don’t complain about the technology, but they’re saying, hey, this is helping me do my job.

Sanjay Patel [00:16:36]:
So I use that as one example of something that really helps to motivate people to come and play and put up with some of the relatively minor, because some people may just accuse how organization structure roles and responsibilities and otherwise and on the second hand, we have also done a lot of work around getting clarity on roles and responsibilities decision. What is it that you’ve got decision rights for in your role? And where do the other decisions get made that people find it easier to navigate the company and get their job done? And the last point is, I would say this is a DIO to make sure that the technology allows people to get things done quickly. So if you’re in sales to have one place where you go to do all of your work. In our case, we’re using a sales cloud solution to do that so that sales people don’t have to go into multiple places to try and do their job and to give them the information that they need to do their job. So there are three examples in a bricks and mortar business.

Sanjay Patel [00:17:30]:
Now, the reason I use that analogy is in some cases you’re a digital native company. It’s easier because you don’t have that encumbrance to create a cult for an environment that is much more nimble and agile. We’re not in that world and some of those companies, they tend to be the tech companies who provide a working environment for the millennials. The calm, flexible working hours, things on disabled tenants, healthcare. Those are the two paradigms, that I would like that sort of help to deal with the people element of the challenge of digital.

Sanjog Aul [00:18:05]:
Now what your response is spot on. Now, one thing I do ask is from your vantage point as a CIO, you are providing the tools and technologies for your people, of course, and for the business users and unit leaders who are trying to make their own decisions but when we talk about a shift for building it as a digital oriented company, which means these changes in organizational structure has to happen across the board. You can have HR go in and support, maybe you get from outside consultants, but if it is so fluid, it cannot be a snapshot approach. I’m not saying you’re going to change the org structure every day. So whether it’s your department or any other department, what is the approach that’s been taken? And yes, technology will have a role in giving the insights, but what was the experience in doing something like this when you tried to change the org structure or realign everything? Given that you mentioned it’s like over 100-year-old company, what challenges did you face and how did you overcome them?

Sanjay Patel [00:19:11]:
Look, a couple of things, while I’m a CIO now, I actually came into technology a few years back to lead the transformation as a head of strategic transformation and I came in because we needed someone inside the company who had transformation experience to do exactly what you thought. We had a strategy. We knew where we needed to get to. We then needed to turn that strategy into tangible things. And one of those tangible things was to change the organizational structure and change the capabilities of people in the organization. So what we did was we set up a program of work. We got armed around all of the initiatives that were pointing in the direction of the strategy that weren’t necessarily being organized and joined up should they all hit the same goal.

Sanjay Patel [00:19:54]:
We spent a lot of time and I spent a lot of time on change in comms, communicate to people. Guys, we’re headed this way. Here’s the rationale for doing that and here’s why these initiatives join up together. To head that way, I created a program structure. We created seven work streams. Each one of those was very clear what the outcome was, what was the target. We had business leaders in each one of them and we had an orchestration. So I created a community of people that were driving those changes across those seven initiatives.

Sanjay Patel [00:20:22]:
So again, that’s the structure we put in place. We then over time added that into the business. Rather than having projects and initiatives, those same seven leaders are running parts of our business and they’re continuing to embed those changes that we talked about as part of our structure, part of which is the organizational changes. We defined what the organizational changes needed to be function by function. We had an integration slash so that we met one function while that’s tripping over another function when they were making their changes and then we orchestrated the change in communication associated with that organizational change. We built competency models. We knew what new capabilities and competencies we needed in which communities of people

Sanjay Patel [00:21:04]:
and then we did retraining for individuals that were capable of going on that capability journey and inevitably we had to change some people that either didn’t fit in the new structure or didn’t have the ability to change their capabilities associated with that. By the way, I did the same in IoT it as well. So that’s only latter but we did that at an enterprise level off of all of the content.

Sanjog Aul [00:21:26]:
So for the listeners who may be trying to do something similar, you came from strategy and transformation background. Of course you knew that there will be some shifts required and you’ll have to put the effort in and then wreck course. Now when I talk to a lot of people and I hear them talk, a lot of people sound like tired warriors or they would say it is still going on. It’s not easy but then there is no confidence or less confidence than I would expect in a leader. So when since you did it from both IT and from business standpoint and you tried to work on the work stream creation and the organizational structure related and change management initiatives, what would be your advice to people who do not feel that they are in control? They’re doing things. Maybe there’s a playbook they have, but results will not come exactly the way they would expect or they will have to keep do keep doing the course correction but the confidence is not at the top level that yes, this is going to eventually I’ll nail it eventually.

Sanjog Aul [00:22:28]:
What’s your message to people like them?

Sanjay Patel [00:22:32]:
I think I can only personalize this. I think there’s a couple of things I would say. One is so the wary warrior you do have to be. In my opinion, a particular type of person can lead and drive people to change by using characteristics right? And more often than not glass half court you have to have that level of optimism and can do attitude and I’m not saying people don’t, but that’s the constructed person you have to be. You also have to be a relationship person. Certainly in larger organizations we would love it that the CEO decides and everything happens. The reality is even if the CEO decides There’s still a lot of heavy lifting and work to do

Sanjay Patel [00:23:11]:
and I found that building relationships and building network is a much better way of going. It is a lonely place being the one person that’s trying to make transformation happen. So I build networks, I build credibility and then the third element is getting quick results. Because if you can demonstrate that going into that direction, you can show people who happen how and free and by taking win, show them that some small things work and usually the small things are solving some of today’s problems. Because strategically, if you want to be a digital business, you’re wanting to be more agile and therefore faster at solving today’s problems, you can actually fake into tomorrow’s opportunity but if you could solve some of the problems early on, which is one of the things that I spent my time doing in the early days and allocating for doing that, every 90 days we’re going to solve a bunch of problems. Every 90 days we’re going to solve a problem.

Sanjay Patel [00:24:02]:
It could be 90 days, it could be 30 days. Depends on the rhythm. In your business I found those three things help you last half. Call me a particular type of person who’s okay with ambiguity, okay with being patient and waiting and okay with just carrying on and being determined. Build a network because then you can build some like minded people and then there’s an army of you rather than just one of you and then get some quick wins under your belt to demonstrate that the journey is worth going on. That would be my advice if others out there that like me have been on the journey for a while.

Sanjog Aul [00:24:33]:
Let’s take a quick break listeners. We’ll be right back and let’s talk about the foundational infrastructure. It could be a physical infrastructure or IT infrastructure that you would need to be established before or rather in parallel to you running this digital journey or to build your digital operating model which will make your company successful. What would that look like? And another question, or rather tweak to that question, is that we almost never have all the resources or rather in terms of dollars to invest in having that infrastructure when we need them. So are there any creative strategies as part of you building that foundation which we knew need but you don’t have all the money to put all the investment up front. Can you keep building the car and riding it at the same time? Please stay tuned listeners. We’ll be right back.

Sanjog Aul [00:26:28]:
So Sanjay, talk about physical and IT infrastructure that one would have to put in place as a foundation and two things come here. One is how does one determine what would be enough given even the definition of digital and the customer expectations and what you would want to put in place keeps shifting and second is the resource constraint. There’s always going to be resource constraint and does it make sense for someone to put all the investment upfront or put something partially and see where it takes you and then you do incremental investment. So thinking about building a foundation itself could be an animal and has to be done creatively and done wisely for it to create the most value. What would the chapter on this in your playbook say?

Sanjay Patel [00:27:22]:
St. John, this is a big topic and maybe if I split it into two parts to address you quick when you say physical, okay, so yeah we’re a manufacturing company so if you’re making things as you can imagine, there’s a significant investment needed to put equipment down on the ground in order to drive growth and drive the propositions for customers and consumers that has to have a very robust capital plan associated with it and there’s a risk appetite. I put a physical plant on the ground today and then in five years time I don’t need it. So it’s got to be a very robust process and it’s determined by clarity on the long term demand for that particular product or set of products, confidence that the market will continue to move that way and all the risk appetite in terms of once you’ve built the equipment there’s not much you can do with it that’s on the physical part and I won’t dwell on that because that’s a world problem path for anyone manufacturing. Let me talk about IT infrastructure not because I’m the CIO, but I think there’s a lot more levers you can pull because as everyone knows as the move to cloud happens, all the layers of IT, it’s a much relatively speaking easier plug and play model and therefore it’s easier to take a foundation at physical data center as an example and move that to a more fungible, a more flexible resource pool that using cloud similarly for an application layer whilst we spent time in the files on premise and building equipment that’s supported by physical infrastructure. Much easier in this day and age to use cloud. Now secondary question was associated with how do you decide because you have a limited resource? That’s a more difficult question but what we’ve done doesn’t make it right, but it’s working for us is we’ve become very structured at ensuring that we have a robust business case and therefore financial return on every investment that we make in technology, whether it’s infrastructure or whether it’s application

Sanjay Patel [00:29:18]:
and that’s been a challenge for IoT function because they’re used to saying this is what the business wanted so I’m going to do it for that reason and this is what IT needs to say, keep the business running. So I’m going to do it that way and I’ve changed that paradigm. So now everything needs a business case and if we have to put some save money in to do the work to build a business case, I’d rather do that. I’d rather spend and I’m making the numbers up 100 bucks figuring out a business case than a million bucks on company that I don’t know has a return. We’ve had to change our IT processes and our IT mindset because everything goes through business case. What helps us at one level is the fact that we’ve gone through a significant cost reduction and that’s even at the mindset change we went through zero based budgeting and that changes the paradigm to well, companies always got money, we just need to decide how to use it. So let me treat it like it was my money. Would I make these decisions about spending this money if I didn’t know what the return was? And just that one example said helps us significantly in terms of being much fitzer about what return we’re getting on the investments that we’re making.

Sanjog Aul [00:30:22]:
So it’s organizations who are working with this constraint and when they tell about their story about requesting investment, especially when IT people come and say okay, we need to invest in IT and they try to make a business case, they sometimes or in many cases they see resistance because IT still is struggling with that problem of not being able to connect an IT investment to a shareholder value or tangible value. How did you crack that problem?

Sanjay Patel [00:30:58]:
Look at one level and that means to be standing tall relative to some of our listeners but I came from the business, I spent a number of years shaping the transformation. So I Had a much better insight as to what the business needed to do but I also then changed my IT function so that there were more people in my IT function that were spending time with the business. Part number one is I don’t believe in the IT coming and ask you for money. I believe in the we jointly between IT and the business understand what things will drive value in the business, whether that’s growth or cost reduction and we jointly are clear what we need to do in terms of investment in order to get there and therefore there’s a joint accountability for coming to the table and asking for investment dollars.

Sanjay Patel [00:31:46]:
That means a massive shift that IT wants to do this technology because it’s sexy or it’s new or cause everyone else is doing it. That’s the biggest shift and then putting some processes in place and discipline could even the business says hey, I saw this great thing for someone else is doing IT, go deliver that for me. There’s some rigid and challenges to say what are you going to do with it? How’s that going to help make lives better? How’s that going to help you generate more value for the shareholders? If you don’t have the discipline to articulating that and working with me to do that, then you know what? We won’t do it. There are some tough yards to go through, but I think a partnership with a business that should it’s a joint opposition and then having the rigor to make sure that it’s based on value and shareholder return. I would say the two biggest levers support for those that are facing the limited resource because we all have limited resource, limited investment.

Sanjog Aul [00:32:40]:
So I like your response that you work with closely with business and always make a business case. Now, are you in a way saying that if you had the credibility that is what is going to get you the money and you are trying to legitimize an investment based on who is pitching and if it is collaboratively figured out as something which we should do, which could still be a leap of faith, but at least there are multiple people taking ownership versus a single person trying to ask for money. Even though you may not have a mathematical formula to say if I spend hundred bucks on it is going to get me a million dollars in return. Is that how we should approach?

Sanjay Patel [00:33:24]:
I was just saying what people should do. I can only give you my counsel based on my lessons learned over 30-40 years in business. So you hit the nail on the head on credibility and I made the point earlier on one of the things I believe works in the Significant changes in transformation or even people in a new role is build credibility. Because if you’re someone that’s coming to the table and say, I’m going to do X, give me some money, I’m going to do X, and you’ve proved that you did what you said you were going to do and gave the return that you said you would return, you’re much more likely to get money the second time round and the third time round and the fourth time round and by the way, you’re much more likely to get more money the second time than the third time and the fourth time and if you’re doing it alongside business colleagues, then yes, I agree that’s more likely.

Sanjay Patel [00:34:07]:
I think there is a third element Sanjog, which is think like a CFO. If you think financially about what would a CFO be interested in? If I was a shareholder or a financial leader, what were the questions I would ask and how would I want them to be answered? Just that you’re making my decision easy and sometimes it’s are there cheaper ways to get you to the same outcome? Sometimes if I didn’t do that, what would I not be able to do that drives growth or shareholder value? And sometimes it’s as simple as if you were going to invest this money and I was asking you for this return, is that really worth doing? So I think it’s worth reiterating the sorts of questions that CFO would ask and making sure that between you and the business, you’ve convinced yourself that’s the right thing to do so that when you stand up, you can answer those questions with indicting.

Sanjog Aul [00:34:56]:
And you’re 100% right on wearing the CFO’s hat. The risk, at least some people have shared, is if we purely play based on CFO or CEO, you would always be looking at what’s in front of us, but when you want to do a blue ocean type innovation, you don’t have any precedence, you don’t have any data but writing on the wall because you see writing on the wall, others don’t and such innovations are becoming commonplace because of digital getting embedded in the very DNA of the business, should we still wear only CFO’s hat for us to evaluate those blue ocean type investments? I’m not sure how many investments we’ll see the daylight then.

Sanjay Patel [00:35:49]:
Okay, so I use a CFO as an example because we were talking about limited funding and resources. Let’s talk about blue sky, blue oaken, you made a comment and again, I’m an engineer, so I like dealing with facts. You made a comment that’s saying that you see the possibility there. If you see the possibility, my opinion is you need to be able to articulate what that possibility is and then you need to be enrolling or convincing other people to also see that possibility and enrolling. In my world, it’s speaking in such a way that you inspire other people to be able to do the thing that you’re talking about. Because my opinion is one person believing that they see a vision that something’s possible for a business and no one else does is going to be a difficult challenge. You’re always going to have to be convincing people.

Sanjay Patel [00:36:35]:
Back to my earlier comment about building a network. If you build a network of people who collectively see that vision, then between you i’m convinced you’ll be able to articulate a value proposition. It is then dependent on the risk appetite of the organization. So we take a risk on something where we don’t have a business data or do we put some seed funding in to do a little piece of work to say hey, that vision I put a small amount of money, no regret but hey, having done that small amount of money in spending, I can now see more tangibly that there is something there that would be my counsel and that’s been my approach, which is rather than spend big on a big vision, spend more, take a decision and move forward. That may for some not come across as the most agile way, but it’s better than spending years and years trying to convince something of a blue sky vision which no one wants to say.

Sanjog Aul [00:37:22]:
Let’s talk about data and analytics function and this is very interesting that a lot of companies don’t rate themselves above 5 from a scale of 1 to 10 when it comes to data and analytics maturity and digital is data and to make digital happen, analytics is critical but then is there something inherently complex in these functions of this data and analytics function which prevents us from going above the number 5 from scale on a scale of 1 to 10? And if that’s the case, what should an organization be doing to get over this hump? Because we are losing money or we are losing effectiveness of our efforts because this data and analytics function seems like an untamable beast.

Sanjay Patel [00:38:17]:
Look, I live in a business that’s old and been around for a long time that survived and thrived because we’ve been able to use our external orientation to change the nature of the company. Now when it comes to data and analytics, it’s a topic that’s very close to my heart, I used to call it information on demand. Once another time we call it informed decision making. People talk about big data, analytic reporting. The challenge to companies have been around for a while is I use the analogy. It’s like having a house. I’ve had my house for a while and it worked. Now I want my house to get better and better data and insights.

Sanjay Patel [00:38:53]:
I want to know when my lights are on. I want to know where the music’s been left on. I want to know the temperature in every room. That’s not a simple thing to do given the way I built my house because my plumbing and wiring wasn’t designed for having that near real time analytics and data and I use that analogy because that’s true for companies. Companies weren’t built the data layers, the infrastructure, the integration layers could give easily near real time. One of the reasons why digital natives as I referred to are able to leverage that. In fact, some digital natives are just about inflation.

Sanjay Patel [00:39:28]:
They’re companies that just use information and that’s how they generate their revenues. We’re not one of those. So we’ve had to step back and look at our whole architecture and over time make some changes and the fastest route was to put a layer on top of the infrastructure that we had that we can collect data from many different places, put it into a repository slide and make that available in a digestible form. They get more significant. We’re also looking at our data and information architecture and to do that I’ve had to bring some new skills in people who have lived in that world because my incumbent grew up with my house. They may know where the flooding and the wiring is, but they’re not necessarily the best skill people to rewire the house while the house is still working.

Sanjay Patel [00:40:15]:
So those are the two lenses we’ve had for businesses that weren’t designed for data analytics. We’ve had to put some layers on top and we then had to re redesign this from the heart and do continuously as well.

Sanjog Aul [00:40:31]:
Let’s take a quick break listeners. We’ll be right back and Sanjay, when we talk and you’ve given a great response to this question. Now one question does come up in addition to what you’ve already, where you’ve already shared your insight is, I’ll take it back to the kind of independence and the organizational structure or rather that construct that you create around data and analytics function because some people say it should belong to IT, other people say it should be independent. Third says it should be embedded in the business for it to be most accurate and most effective. What have you seen based on whatever changes and shifts that you did in your organization? And given that you’re trying to introduce this in the digital realm, where the data, the velocity and the variety and the veracity, all of that are really complex and challenging, what seems to work for you in that realm? Please say to your listeners, we’ll be right back.

Sanjog Aul [00:42:28]:
Welcome back. So Sanjay, while we discussed about how data and analytics function, you went and you went about fixing it or at least it’s in motion, it’s going in the right direction as per your organization’s needs. A lot of companies struggle to give this function a place in the organization and the level of independence that it deserves. What would you say would be a set of variables one should consider when they’re trying to shape this function, give it a place and give the accountability and independence so that it can really add value. Especially when we are looking in the digital realm where data comes, we are drinking from a fire hose and then it comes in the lot of our ID and everything else.

Sanjay Patel [00:43:15]:
As you said, there are multiple different ways of looking at it. I don’t believe in my humble opinion that there’s one right answer, but I think there’s a couple of things that people might want to be considering. The topic are do I have a Chief Data Officer? Data, after all is the most valuable asset that I’ve got. Should I put it in IT? Should I distribute it across the business? Could I have it as a C suite? All of those questions have been buzzing for a while and we all struggle with the right answer but in my opinion, it’s all really depend on the business context that you’re in and I have a point of view for my organization. My point of view is as follows. Data itself marks the data, the ownership of the quality of customer data, the quality of material data needs to be with the visit.

Sanjay Patel [00:43:59]:
Why? Because they’re the ones living and reading that every single day. Opinion number One, I believe that the ownership of data needs to be with the business and they need to understand the value of that bidfest because they can’t do things without that data. They can’t float a financial book at the end of the month, or they can’t ship or they can’t purchase raw materials. They can’t make sales if they don’t know what the customer’s information is. So my view is that should absolutely be owned by the business. The governance of that data and maintaining it and keeping it clean, my opinion is that needs to be a partnership. With whom is the business and IT in my organization, we in IT run that because we tend to be a bit more disciplined in some cases and we can take a holistic view across all of the functions. So as an enterprise function, I can look across customer data, how it may overlap or maps to shipping data, and look at supply chain data and how that may matter pop into product data.

Sanjay Patel [00:44:56]:
The governance and managing and maintaining, I believe it was ionized. Now, how you structure that and what the roles are, that will clearly vary based on where you are in the business and which dimension of data is important for you. Is procurement data more valuable for you than the material data for its customer data more valuable for you? So we put a structure in place where IT partners with the business and we have a governance in place, whether it’s regional or local or global, depending on the domain, where we ensure that the business understands what those data elements are and what their role in accountability is for managing the data and what our role in accountability is for maintaining the data and so the data team sort of puts those data into the data center, looks at the quality of the data, the cleanliness of the data and report that out. Our organization belongs to me and ip, as it was thought, to the business, where I’d hold them accountable for the quality of the data and for making sure that they’ve optioned or keeping it clean and maintaining it.

Sanjog Aul [00:46:00]:
Let’s talk about the enterprise performance management, which is essentially a dashboard somebody would want to keep where you’re creating some certain benchmarks and metrics and you’re going to use that to direct or monitor the business. A lot of companies say we have that, but it’s a little loosey goozy there’s,

Sanjog Aul [00:46:22]:
and it’s not truly an established function with established accountability and responsibility. What did you try to do in this regard? Did you already have it because it was such an old business or did you have to establish it? And then again, talking in the context of digital, what should have shifted in or what should shift in this function? Enterprise performance management for IT to be able to effectively help direct the business forward.

Sanjay Patel [00:46:53]:
Look, we’ve always had enterprise performance management of one form or another. As we continue to transform certain metrics and the KPIs that we need continue to move. Once upon a time it was about when we had the world’s largest shipping fleet. It was about where are the ships and where do they need to be and how do I orchestrate them around the planet. We don’t do that anymore. So now it’s really about which customers, which categories, what the growth in those categories. We still need to issue products and so there continues to be about where is our product, what should we be manufacturing one month versus another month and how is that in sync with our customer devices? Continue to look at performance management.

Sanjay Patel [00:47:31]:
The enterprise part of it continues to shift. The challenge if I talk about that is so much the metric, I think we’re clear as an organization, as a whole what the outcome metric are that we’re looking for, whether that’s market share growth or whether that’s margin or whether that’s cost competitiveness in terms of people and non people parts of running our business, whether it’s the ratios of HR people to employer otherwise those metrics are well known, well defined. So it’s more about how do we make that information available to the right people in a timely fashion. So talk about your digital point. The challenge I think we continue to have is given the system landscape we’ve got and the evolution of the technology, how do we make the right information available for the right person at the right time to allow them to do their job in near real time? And that comes back to the previous summit page we had about data ownership, the data architecture and the fact that if I have a house that was in a particular way, how do I have to rebuild that so I can get technologies to enable me to know where things are near real time? I use the example of are my lights on? Can I control my heating remotely? Can I open my door remotely? Those are the sorts of technologies that we’re having to put in place such that enterprise performance management moves at the table, that digital businesses move because should be released it hasn’t.

Sanjog Aul [00:48:55]:
Talk about governance structure. You did mention in the context of data and analytics, you would have governance but then here we are talking about governance across the board, across business functions and that would drive it. So now, even though you were brick and mortar and you are now introducing digital, are you fundamentally rethinking governance for the whole business and if yes, where are you looking to introduce technology enablement?

Sanjay Patel [00:49:27]:
So I wouldn’t say we’ve changed governance wholesale. We’re still the business that we used to be. Food ingredients go into food products and food products that consume locally. So we still need to be in the region, working with customers in the region to solve the problems that they’ve got around food, self and wellness. So fundamentally we’ve organized by region and then we have a global overlay that we get the economy to scale. That hasn’t changed. While the nature of some of our business changed, we have two divisions, we run the business that way. So structurally that governance is in place.

Sanjay Patel [00:50:01]:
So in terms of your question about to enable clarity, simplicity, quick decision making, we have made a number of changes to that. So we try and get decision making as close to the market as possible. So we’ve done work in terms of clarifying what those decision rights are and moving approval level closer to the market so that people don’t have to sell off the global for every approval and we’ve done that by Tim Gay Function by Thomas Gentlemen decision making, high decision making, funding by funding and saying which of these are we going to allow to be made closest to the market without having people making decisions that break the global model. So that’s one thing on decision models and authorizations and approval, we workload that as much as possible so we’re not able to have emails and documents flowing backwards and forward so we can use workflows. Simple example travel and expense management. Once upon a time you had to take a receipt, you had to fill in a form, ship it off to somewhere. It got approved, it’s all now digitized.

Sanjay Patel [00:51:00]:
You get your receipt, you take a picture of it, you work so it gets approved. Payment goes straight into your account. So the digitization of certain processes allow simplification faster decision making procedure authoritative.

Sanjog Aul [00:51:15]:
On behalf of the show and our listeners, thank you so much Sanjay for sharing in depth details about how you’ve turned around Data Nullisle along of course working with your business leaders and you have worked at this whole idea about digital operating model and which indeed I am hoping it is delivering results for you. So thanks so much for your insights.

Sanjay Patel [00:51:36]:
Thanks, Sanjog. It’s been a pleasure.

Sanjog Aul [00:51:36]:
And listeners hope you enjoyed it. Please like us on Facebook, search for CTN CIO Talk Network and be sure to follow us on Twitter and join our LinkedIn group. Thank you again for listening to this segment on CTN. This is Sanjog Aul, your talk show host till next week. Take care and god bless.

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