A California CIO uses data to help citizens survive earthquakes, landslides, floods, and volcanos; a Dutch executive uses it to visualize solutions to rising sea levels; a Chinese CIO sells the cloud to his culturally risk-averse boss. Data, often hundreds of years old, is the untapped resource for many executives tasked with digitally transforming their organizations.
Moving information systems to the cloud may make great business sense, but it isn’t as easy or quick as uploading your songs to iTunes. It requires CIOs to develop technical plans to ensure the shift from complex, often-antiquated internal systems is seamless, to communicate with business partners to ensure the business is ready to take the utmost advantage of this shift, and to ensure that their own teams are positioned to take advantage of the reduced reliance on rote maintenance work.
We spoke to five CIOs who are on multiyear journeys revamping their companies’ systems for the cloud. Even if you’re not familiar with terms like data gravity, you’ll want to read their thoughts on how to handle data sovereignty, data access, and other human factors related to data. Indeed, the one goal they all had in common was to gain the ability to obtain real-time insights from vast stores of data.
1. Do use virtual reality to make data feel frighteningly real
Digital transformation can help builders complete construction projects in months rather than years—and data can help architects and politicians make wiser decisions, according to Gerard Spans, CIO of Amsterdam-based Acardis, a 128-year-old infrastructure design consultancy running water protection projects in such places as Manhattan and New Orleans.
“We create awareness around flooding with virtual reality, so a property manager can experience what it’s like if your property is under so many meters of water. We had an event in Amsterdam where we showed on iconic buildings what it means if sea levels are rising. What does ‘under sea level’ look like?” Spans says. “We give that information to decision-makers and they are hopefully more proactive. First you make them aware—before you get into a whole lot of analytics.”
2. Don’t ignore data gravity and data access
Data gravity means that as data accumulates in size and number of sources, it “attracts” applications like lint to the sides of your drier, and requires analysis closer to where it is stored. A related concept is that data should be transparent and easily accessed not just by developers, but by the people who need it to make decisions.
Like Spans, California Department of Conservation CIO Catherine Kendall pays close attention to nature—specifically, geology. “We have a century’s worth of data, and it’s complex data on California that is an essential component of our science-based regulatory program for oil and gas. We’re really challenged because about 60% of our data is on paper. Imagine how many trends are captured in that paper,” she says.
Because California is one of the most geologically volatile of the 50 states, regulating oil and gas activities requires examining the entire ecosystem, from land records to atmospheric data—neither set of which is integrated with any other.
“That’s one of our biggest challenges right now. There are insights in that data that are just screaming to get out,” Kendall says.
Similarly, Tom Morgan, Oracle Apps DBA Manager for sustainable bio-nutrient producer Darling Ingredients, hopes that his digital transformation efforts will provide executives with insights into the Irving, Texas company’s processing facilities in multiple countries: “The ability to stream real-time data from the production line into our financial and forecasting systems is an untapped resource. When we start pulling this information into our supply chain, the benefits will be enormous.”
3. Do predict rather than react to disaster
In the wake of Puerto Rico’s devastating hurricane season, Kendall says that insights from data are a warning system: “The problem in government is that we’re reactive and punitive, not proactive and preventative. We come up with regulations and disaster systems as a result of a major tragedy, as is happening in Puerto Rico.”
Disaster preparedness requires advanced information that’s easy to digest, she believes, such as push notifications and visualizations. Further, “With machine learning, we’ll be able to start to evaluate risk factors: This looks like it’s coming, we need to start getting this information out now.”
4. Don’t neglect the human element
Lisa Major is vice president of Business Transformation at ARRIS, a global leader in entertainment and communications technology based in Suwanee, Georgia, where she spearheads a massive digital revamp that is repositioning the IT organization. By moving ARRIS’s back office to the forefront of technology, Major sees an opportunity to transform the company’s IT function into a strategic business partner that’s driving actionable customer insights. While it’s too early to predict exactly how, Major sees an opportunity to upscale employees’ roles in the process. However, with significant transformations of this kind, it’s natural for there to be some initial questions about potential workforce impact. Communicating the importance of everyone’s role and where they’ll fit in is critical from the outset, she says.
Major recommends making transformation relevant by explaining IT’s evolving role, providing examples of progress, and showcasing new opportunities. Clearly communicate how teams will benefit from the new system: “Talking to finance teams dealing with multiple ERP systems, we saw how painful it was. We said, ‘We’re going to automate those journal entries; we’re going to shave three days off your close cycle.’ Those are things we are confident we can deliver. And that’s how we’ve been trying to message this transformation: Make it meaningful to everybody and don’t talk in corporate speak.”
5. Don’t despair of data sovereignty
Culture was the biggest challenge for Steven Chang, CIO of the Kingold Group, a real estate developer based in Guangzhou, China. Chang uses Oracle’s Cloud at Customer, which lets Kingold run Oracle Cloud services on infrastructure that lives inside Kingold’s data center, behind its firewall, but is maintained by Oracle as if it were on Oracle’s infrastructure in the cloud. Despite this bow to security concerns and regulatory sensitivities around keeping data in-country, his CFO still needed convincing. Chang says data sovereignty is a mindset, and the CFO is cautious by nature: “He puts all his savings in the bank, but keeps some cash under the pillow,” he jokes.
“I told my CFO: Look, you have all your money in the bank, and now the bank is installing an ATM in your house.”
6. Do ask bigger questions
With cloud services, not having to worry about data centers, service levels, patching, or operations isn’t just about lowering maintenance effort, it’s about having the power to do more, says Kendall: “The platform that we’re subscribing to from Oracle is able to give us answers to a question that we wouldn’t have even dreamed about asking because it was just too much data reconciliation.”
Now, a vast storage capacity and a hybrid cloud approach mean there are no constraints, she says: “We don’t have to think in terms of ‘Better not ask that because we don’t have the capacity.’ Now it’s about, ‘Imagine the possibilities.’”
7. Don’t just sling code, learn the business
Finally, digital transformation puts technology executives at the center of an organization’s business strategy. As a result, many CIOs note that now is a great time to be a developer.
“As a former programmer, I get it. It’s our responsibility to come further across the table to learn the business, instead of just code slinging,” Kendall says. Comparing developers to roadies at a rock concert, she says, “You don’t see us, but we make the lights and the music come on.”
Alexa Weber Morales is a content strategist and editor for Oracle.
