Jeff Lemmer
CIO
Ford Motor Company
January 2020
As digital technology pervades every corner of the enterprise, CIOs must become great creators and communicators of value. Your peers in the business are quick to see the potential of the digital revolution, but very often, they lack a cogent articulation of exactly what meaningful transformation and value-added tech actually look like. The result? Silos and misalignment, slow and haphazard adoption, and millions lost in redundant, ineffective tools.
But what does it mean to be the standard bearer for value in your organization? Jeff Lemmer and his team at Ford Motor Company provided some interesting insights at the Global CIO Executive Summit.
The Envisioning Value
When Lemmer took over as CIO of Ford in June of 2018, value creation was at the top of his priority list. Lemmer inherited a bloated IT investment portfolio that was overrun with projects from every business unit. This created fragmentation and made Ford’s key strategic choices difficult to execute. The demand for IT value was there, but Lemmer knew they had to tackle the IT portfolio before he could deliver.
In order to reinvent the technology value chain, Lemmer took a comprehensive approach that transformed culture, the structure of the IT organization, and IT demand management. He was committed to two core values: do things right and do the right things.
Doing things right at Ford meant that IT culture had to start with Lemmer himself. He streamlined the organizational decision-making process so that the buck stopped with him and gave business units accountability for their IT spend. He also made sure that the consumer was the compass rose – IT investment would be aligned to products and services that brought the business closer to their customers.
Core values: Do things right and do the right things
Executing the Roadmap
When it came to doing the right things, Lemmer executed by building a robust demand management program. Placing himself at the top of the IT governance structure, he created a five-step program to help his partners across the business realize value – before they put their own tech projects in motion:
- Identify - Articulate value streams, enumerate value stages (process), analyze their current capabilities, and define KPIs
- Evaluate - Place the IT request in the greater context of the organization by evaluating dependencies among departments. What does the project mean for Ford as a whole?
- Elevate - Ideas are formally submitted for review and include a clearly defined business case
- Govern - Seek approval for new initiatives and set the portfolio
- Measure - Align outcomes to established KPIs and continually manage the project to assess overall portfolio fitness
Realize value before technology projects get into motion
Reaping the Benefits
Change at this scale doesn’t happen overnight, but in fewer than 18 months, Lemmer and his colleagues are already seeing incredible results.
By implementing his demand management program, Lemmer has reduced the size of the IT Investment portfolio by 85%, going from some 700 ongoing projects to 100. Far from slowing down the business, this reduction has increased IT’s impact. Furthermore, actual value realized relative to IT spend is projected to increase exponentially over the next five years.
Lemmer attributes much of this success to the cultural change that accompanied the structural change. By forcing business units to become more systematic in their approach to IT, they assumed greater accountability for their own projects. Forcing business leaders to evaluate the context of their requests naturally lead to greater collaboration, which reduced redundancies and waste. Tethering a project to metrics meant that results were easier to see, and thus change was easier to adopt.
Success is attributed to the cultural change that accompanied structural change
Value means something different to each organization, and that makes defining it and sticking to it hard. But Jeff Lemmer and his team at Ford prove it’s not impossible. What will your value story be?
Content adapted from the 2019 Global CIO Executive Summit. Special thanks to Jeff Lemmer and Ford Motor Company.
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