Exploring the Impact of Remote Work and Industry 4.0 with Martin Davis

Tim Crawford: 0:05

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 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. Martin, welcome to the program. It's great to be here, tim Martin Davis, managing partner at DUNELM Associates, and you've also been a former CIO for multiple companies. 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. I spent my early career, 20 plus years with 4 Motor Company, mainly in the UK, 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 agri business, a large trucking company, a courier company, freight brokerage company, personnel agency and the nice 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 a group CIO for a Bermudian insurance company serving Bermuda and 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, 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: 2:47

Well, I think you need to start by saying and I like the way you've 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 I see, and they couldn't be more wrong. 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.

Martin Davis: 3:16

So the CIO has an absolute core role to play in it, but shouldn't be leading it. It should be 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 you've got to help the C-level see the opportunities and especially how technology can provide new opportunities within it new products, new services, new platforms and as well as the more normal operational efficiencies you'd expect. So it's all of those pieces together. So I think the C-suite as a whole has to drive that business transformation and 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, and there are too many C-suites and boards, for that matter who are not that technologically 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 critical amongst us.

Tim Crawford: 4:44

You know, when we talk about business transformation, 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.

Martin Davis: 5:12

You have to say you know what does the customer want?

Martin Davis: 5:14

How does the customer interact with us, which ever channel?

Martin Davis: 5:17

They use the term omni-channel, yeah, it's 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 is better able to deal with you.

Martin Davis: 5:49

And then it kind of goes from there into your back end and all your back end 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 a new product or service has been purchased, or whatever it might be, or it may just be an answer to a question to the customer, 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. You, know.

Tim Crawford: 6:33

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 it transformation. How do you bridge that gap? I guess the first thing is let me not assume that you agree with me, do you still 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: 7:09

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 absolutely 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. I think, if you look at it from a 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? It may break into multiple pieces, but it may actually end up being different initiatives or different projects to fulfill those pieces.

Martin Davis: 7:53

But you need to have that solution design from a customer perspective, that customer journey, if you prefer. We've heard talk in the past about customer journey mapping and things like that, which has often been a 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? I think that's quite critical within it, 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 talking about the customer mindset, I want to talk about Martin's mindset. During the pandemic 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: 9:03

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.

Martin Davis: 9:12

So, having your staff remote from you and you've been forced to be remote from everybody, whilst it's strange, it's not unusual, but I think what's been strange and affecting me personally in some ways is the lack of human contact in 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 and we've been, yeah, probably as if not more productive due to this, but it's some of those other aspects, I think, affecting people psychologically.

Tim Crawford: 10:19

How do you think that's going to change? Or maybe 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 do I kind of still address some of those concerns that you're bringing up if we work in a permanently or relatively permanently remote scenario?

Martin Davis: 10:57

Well, I don't know about the permanently remote, and yes, there's definitely some companies that are going to go permanently remote, but I think there's 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 human interaction meeting somebody for lunch wherever 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 that's going to be something we're going to have to kind of work through as we go through time here. Yeah, 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, in industry 4.0, the fourth industrial revolution is. 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 a physical view and the bring together. Yeah, people talk about digital twins, so they 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. Yeah, speedy up a production line, changing 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, thank you very much. The different aspects of Industry 4.0, 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. It could be data that you're a person going to make a decision or a machine's going to make a decision. Your artificial intelligence and machine learning come into that aspect as well. So many manufacturers we have and things like that are not really making the most of what they have at the moment. 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.

Martin Davis: 13:25

I'll 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 their capacity. They're about to buy that. Then somebody said don't 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: 13:56

When you actually started looking at the data. So their knee-jerk reaction was we always have problems in packaging by more packaging machinery. When you actually looked at the data, the problem was elsewhere. If I remove the bottleneck elsewhere, they could increase the flow. Packaging machines could then be better utilized Effectively. They could have wasted millions of dollars to no gain at all. When you look at fundamentals of Industry 4.0, that use of data to drive decision-making, be it automated or manual, is the fundamental hub of it. You get to really complex things such as digital tweens, artificial intelligence, things like that. There's lots of other aspects to it. What really excites me is, unlike a lot of other areas of IT, this operational technology, the 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 and we need to really tap into that information that we already have 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 is even about collecting that data. We're not even collecting it. Most of the modern machinery in a production line has a programmable logic controller, plc, and that produces all sorts of data streams. A lot of them are just not captured If you plug into them, start looking at their 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? Some of that due to bottlenecks in the process is some of it due to breakdowns, plan changes or whatever. All of these different aspects come in. 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? This feels like an opportunity that's been there for some period of time that hasn't been capitalized on.

Martin Davis: 16:33

If you look at the time, Industry 4.0 was really invented in 2012. Wow, we're still talking about it today as being relatively new, just to give you the perspective of how long. Wow, I think it's what you said. It's the people and knee jerk reactions and setting their ways. It's the old engineering mindset of I know how it works and I know what the problem is as opposed to I have a hunch of what the problem might be. I'll pull the data to prove or deny that theory. I think some of those aspects, it's the changing the mindset, and that takes a lot of time. There's that engineering mindset there.

Tim Crawford: 17:13

Hmm, if I kind of put this 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. I think that's been a very much of them and us situation, even if you look at something like digital 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. 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 has not accelerated, apart from the some companies that were thinking more about the future.

Martin Davis: 18:36

I think what we've seen is these 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, making it fully end-to-end from the customer back to the customer, with all the back-end processes suitably transformed and connected as well. There's definitely some short-term thinking. If we just do this change, this change, this change, we can make it work, as opposed to really transforming 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: 19:26

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 Cut, cut, cut, change things around just to get through it, just to survive. I'm not thinking about the future, I'm just thinking about tomorrow, as opposed to next year and the year after, etc. Is it too late now to go back and get started on that more forward-thinking process? Have I truly missed the opportunity or can I still dig in and double down and really start making those changes now?

Martin Davis: 20:09

No, I think it's never too late to dig in and do it. It may depend on how fast your competitors have been and how much they've been accelerating away from you. It's never too late for you to actually start. 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. There's always going to be new ways and new opportunities for you to do some things slightly different. That's going to be a continuous process. It's that. What's that old phrase? Change or die. Unless you continually looking at how you change and transform, you're going to be left behind. Look at Netflix and Blockbusters, for example, or digital film and Kodak. There's plenty of examples around. 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, 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 what got you here won't get you there. In fact, a more recent episode, sharon Mandel, the CIO at Jinnoper 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. You're echoing some of these thoughts that have come up in past conversations with some of your colleagues too, as I kind of think about your experience and working across a myriad of different industries, which is just so unique amongst CIOs. 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: 22:16

I think it's a very difficult question to answer because some of these companies are so different, but there's definitely the use of data and properly used data to drive your thinking and the matter which industry you're in.

Martin Davis: 22:32

It's increasingly important and the foundation of so many other things.

Martin Davis: 22:36

If you want to use artificial intelligence and machine learning, you need a good base of data to base that on. So that's critical having that good data, having your data properly cleaned, 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 it is the right thing as well. 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 C level team and the board is critically important as well, and I think that those are probably areas 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 going to have to leave it right there, Martin. Thanks so much for taking part in the episode today.

Martin Davis: 23:56

It's been a real pleasure. Tim, Thanks for ever so much for inviting.

Tim Crawford: 24:02

For more information on the CIO in the know podcast, visit us online at CIO in the knowcom. You can also find us on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcast. Please subscribe and thank you for listening.