1993-2012
Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table
Present: Rich
Hoffman, David Mann, Sean Brown, William Zauner, Subbu Murthy, Jeff Reid, Keith
Golden, Dave Phillips, Esther Delurgio, Jim Sutter
Thank
you, Rich Hoffman, for an excellent presentation, and to Jim Sutter for taking
over as meeting facilitator and meeting notes generator.
The
following is a list of topics and speakers through September:
6/14/12 IT Service Catalog Joel Manfredo
7/12/12 Mobile Device Security David Mann, Neudesic
8/9/12 Mobile Application Development
9/13/12 CIO Compensation Ken Wechsler, Radford
Topic: Global IT Challenges
Rich Hoffman, Sr. VP and CIO of Avery Dennison, led a
discussion of the challenges CIOs face in providing efficient and responsive IT
products and services for an organization whose operations are spread all over
the world. He began by providing the
context for his experience. Avery
Dennison, a $7B multi-line manufacturer which has grown through 145
acquisitions, and operates out of over 500 locations in 60 countries has 30,000
employees (19K IT users) and has to deal in 14 languages and support sales in
90 countries. It’s products are
organized into 4 major groups. The paper
label business is a cash cow, but revenues are declining, while the other
groups are growing and have established unique, proprietary solutions. The products and applications include: materials for brand labeling and packaging;
apparel and footwear labeling design; high definition graphic embellishments;
price enabled management materials and systems; and specialized adhesives,
coatings, films, and RFID technologies.
Rich showed a selected number of examples. The company has
faced challenges in global pricing, brand consistency, and inventory and cost
management. Its strategy of growth by
acquisition and highly virtual operations, has resulted in significant
diversity in both business process and IT solutions. Rich’s organization has
taken on these issues by establishing a major social network as part of an
overall emphasis on improved communications; restructuring into a centralized
IT group of about 1200, and attacking unnecessary variation in business
process. They use high definition video
to help overcome the geographic dispersion, time zone issues, and the
complexities associated with managing virtual teams. They’ve collapsed call centers from 110 to 3,
and many data centers to 2. Rich
stressed the increasing attractiveness of having data centers in the USA. He believes that every major project needs
dedicated, full-time communications professionals to avoid the “we don’t ever
hear what’s going on” issue across the different locations.
As always, the roundtable members were very active in
serving up questions about approaches to overcoming culture differences, standardizing,
and selecting tools. Rich’s candor and
grasp of the complexity was very much appreciated by the attendees.
