Lead
As the multinational conglomerate transforms to provide customers with advanced digital products and services, its CIO Diane Schwarz needs to ensure that it is also digital within the company.
Schwarz said that as Johnson Controls expands its business focus from manufacturing HVAC, fire detection and building control products to providing predictive analytics and intelligent facilities, Johnson Controls' end-to-end processes must be "digital at its core."
Schwarz has been the CIO of the $22 billion global company since 2020. "Historically, we made, installed, and serviced projects, but now we're transitioning to subscription services to support the products we sell," she says. The shift from one-time sales to subscription services has changed everything that's happening in the company. ”
"Johnson Controls is digital in the marketplace, so we need to digitize every aspect of our internal behavior." "If a customer sees a shiny, red, ripe apple from the outside, the inside has to be just as good as the core," she said. ”
Leverage the cloud and self-service technologies
To provide data analytics to support enterprises' new predictive maintenance and IoT-based service lines, its CTO Vijay Sankaran is driving a shift to a platform architecture with a common set of APIs. For Schwarz and her team, the focus is on delivering the entire process ecosystem to the changing business, including sales, billing, and customer support. "We're reimagining everything we can do in-house to support our clients from contracts to cash," she said. To that end, Schwarz and her team are moving ERP and other critical systems to the cloud and adding as many self-service capabilities as possible.
But as important as modern systems are, it's important to have Johnson Controls digital at its core. Schwarz believes that culture and behavior are more critical changes. "The biggest transformation challenge is humanity." "We encourage our leaders to adopt self-service technology," she said. We want them to experiment with low-code and RPA development models and a culture of rapid failure. We are moving from analyzing new technologies so that they never break the culture of a business to a proof-of-concept approach so that we can anticipate changing markets. ”
For example, one of Johnson Controls' regional business centers uses hundreds of small robots to automate financial processes. "I found out that this group of robots was already using self-service technology, and I was impressed with them. When the new team sees the benefits of RPA and shows interest, I ask my IT team to help them set up these tools. ”
To further highlight business units that use self-service technology, Schwarz invited them to her monthly interview program. "I bring guests to the show, and then we post the show to our intranet so anyone can watch it." "I spoke to the head of RPA automation at one of our companies and the IT partners on her team," she says. I put them together to demonstrate the power of self-service technology. ”
Customer-centric IT
Digitally-centric businesses need IT to adopt a customer-centric culture – starting from the top. "Our CEO wanted all of his leadership teams to be business-minded, so he asked us to be executive sponsors of our top clients." Schwarz said, "In addition to being an executive sponsor, I have a relationship with the CIO of our client's company. ”
And that's not all.
Schwarz said: "The culture we build in the IT space needs to be business-minded, which means understanding what customers want and how we make money as a business. To extend this customer-centric philosophy to her own organization, Schwarz asked her senior leaders to also become executive sponsors." When IT leaders are directly responsible for the success of our customers, they tend to take a 360-degree view of vendor management systems and data analytics. She said.
Diverse talent and a fair environment
Taking a 360-degree perspective starts with fostering a culture of diversity and inclusion. To that end, Johnson Controls has set a goal of doubling the number of women in leadership positions at Johnson Controls and minorities in the United States by 2025. This positive goal means that Schwarz and her peer executives must consciously integrate diversity into all aspects of the business. For example, in their recruitment, make sure that each employee has a diverse interview panel. "But diversity hiring only increases our chances of bringing diverse talent into the company," she said, "and we also need to see what we can do to develop and enhance diverse employees." ”
To maximize the creativity and innovation that comes with the diversity of ideas and backgrounds, Schwarz sees Johnson Controls' current video-enabled hybrid work environment as an advantage. "We used the mantra 'look at the face, listen to the sound, turn on the camera' in video conferences." Schwarz said, "When people meet together in a room, body movements and postures create a dynamic that doesn't always encourage everyone to have a say. But in a video conference, the CEO's thumbnail is the same size as the other person's thumbnail. Remote conferencing can create a level playing field. ”
Author: Martha Heller, columnist
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