FEATURE

Boeing exec details 6 steps toward transforming its business

IT exec shares lessons learned.

By Paul Duchouquette
Network World | Mar 27, 2015 7:38 AM PT

As the director of Information Technology for CDG, a Boeing subsidiary in

the Digital Aviation business unit, I have responsibility to enable
thousands of professionals with technology on a global basis. After eight
years on the job, Ive learned my share of hard lessons about managing
people and technology.

To stay organized, Ive settled on a purpose-driven model to

inspire my group and keep everyone moving in the same
direction. Our IT unit supports many custom-developed internal
applications and even more consumer products that require
multiple petabytes of big data storage, including commercial
and military contracts with revenue in the billions per year.
Managing such a vast, globally-dispersed team presents many
Paul Duchouquette
challenges and opportunities, so Ive settled on a useful
framework.

Creating purpose to drive IT value and build staff cohesion

First of all, a business should be guided by three simple directives to

grow the business by expanding topline revenue; to grow bottom-line
profits by cutting operational and sales costs; and to mitigate liabilities by
reducing business risks to the brand. These are the cornerstones.

I believe the starting point for any business manager is to establish the
groups identity by defining its essential purpose and how it will drive the
three cornerstones. This process may seem obvious, but its actually quite
subtle. For instance, ones job should involve more than just earning a
paycheck it should reflect a sense of belonging to something larger
than ones self.
+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD Southwest Airlines CTO talks about tech
and business transformation +

This kind of shared purpose is crucial for creating buy-in from team
members. Our IT team defines our central mission as business
technology enablement. To us, this is why IT exists business
technology enablement is our core function, or even our calling if you will.
Everything we do ties back to this specialized purpose of enabling
business technology across our company.

To increase our effectiveness, weve adopted several management goals

which I call the Six Levers of Business Transformation. These levers serve
as shorthand tools to guide the actions of our team:

Increase productivity. The key is streamlining processes,

automating manual functions, or collapsing multiple processes to be
managed by fewer people: reducing waste. Greater efficiency
results in higher productivity, and has the additional effect of
freeing talent to focus on higher-value services.
Increase simplification. Think in terms of designing intuitive user
experiences. This is removing the clutter, focusing on the
meaningful functions and capabilities that really matter and
dropping the rest. Can things be done simpler, or in fewer steps? Is
it worth the time, money, effort? Each business process should be
analyzed to qualify and quantify its relative value for the business.
Find the balance between highly useful vs. other
functions/capabilities that can divert a worker down a rabbit hole
pretty quickly. Then, implement any useful shortcuts accordingly
and hide or eliminate the rest.
Increase convenience. Think mobility, Single Sign-On (SSO) from
anywhere with any device. For instance, decentralizing by adopting
globally hosted cloud services can allow team members to
complete their work more productively from various mobile
devices, around the clock and around the world, rather than being
constrained by location, network latency and hours of operations.
Increase collaboration. Employee engagement depends on
workers being able to easily and securely share information.
Enabling multiple paths for effective collaboration such as
enterprise video conferencing, chat, wikis, blogs, portals and other
 two-way communication platforms can facilitate greater frequency
of cooperation opportunities.
Implement checks and balances to mitigate unforeseen
business risks. Each business unit should develop ironclad systems
to manage service-level agreements and data recovery backups.
Only in this way can managers be sure to protect the organizations
proprietary data.
Ensure ongoing protections for the companys brand. Think of
the many major brands negatively impacted by breaches and all the
recent announcements of security vulnerabilities. Protections
should be a holistic goal across the whole company, because certain
business units may find incentives to take risks to achieve their
business goals. For instance, a sales team may jeopardize
engineering deadlines to meet commitments to certain partners,
creating undue hazards for the companys larger reputation or
competitive standing.

Sometimes the little things make a big difference in IT, just as in life. For
example, Digital Aviation consists of four separate, wholly owned, but
non-integrated subsidiaries and a small portion of Boeing employees
assigned through Commercial Aviation Services. Each has their own
security, their own firewalls and their own RAA (Responsibility,
Accountability and Authority) to protect their entities personally
identifiable information, even from each other. Providing access by each
group using their own security models and yet having a common
capability was a major challenge for IT.

We successfully implemented a new security identity management

platform that allowed each entitys users to leverage their existing single
sign-on for authorization, thus securing access for any employee from any
device. It was a relatively easy fix, but it provided a big lift for our staff
morale and satisfaction.

In addition, we are exploring a new security clearance technology that

uses an employees mobile phone for a second authentication method, an
alternative to security badges and other cumbersome entry systems. This
basic step will allow us to take full advantage of the mobile smartphone
experience, which is highly embraced by our employees.
 Information technology has become an essential business enabler, but
when deployed strategically, it can also create a big competitive
advantage. Thats why IT managers need to continually assess how well
their team is pulling on the Six Levers of Business Transformation, and
what they can do differently to become more efficient.

Paul Duchouquette is Director of Information Technology for CDG, a Boeing

company and part of the Digital Aviation business unit within Boeing
Commercial Aviation Services (CAS). Duchouquette is responsible for
optimizing and transforming IT across four Boeing subsidiaries, including CDG,
Jeppesen, ILS and AeroInfo. He is one of seven members of the senior
leadership team at CDG.

This story, "Boeing exec details 6 steps toward transforming its business" was
originally published by Network World.

Follow everything from CIO

Insider Resume Makeover: Emphasize Your 'X Factor'

YOU MIGHT LIKE A

. PromotedLinks byTaboola

7CommonMistakesJobSeekersMakeonLinkedIn

HowtoUpgradetoWindows10FromWindows8.1

WhySoftSkillsAreKeytoaSuccessfulITCareer

3Windows10FeaturesThatEveryAdminShouldKnow
 Copyright 1994 - 2015 CXO Media Inc. a subsidiary of IDG Enterprise