Marv Adams, SVP and CIO of Ford was recently promoted. Why does this matter and why the promotion?
It matters because Marv Adams is 47 and he hasn’t spent the last 35 years in the car and truck industry. He spent 10 years at IBM (working with Ford during some of those years), then spent 3 years at Xerox, then 6 at Bank One Corporation. He joined Ford in December 2000 as VP and CIO. He was promoted to SVP in September 2004.
On May 27 – Ford added the title of Corporate Strategy to Marv’s title. A copy-paste from the Ford press release says the following:
Effective immediately, Adams, 47, is named Ford Motor Company senior vice president, Corporate Strategy and chief information officer. In this expanded role, he will report to Bill Ford, the company's chairman and CEO, on corporate strategy matters, and as CIO, he will continue to report to Jim Padilla, president and chief operating officer.
The why-does-this-matter answer is that he is responsible for ALL corporate strategy not just IT strategy. It matters because Marv Adams isn’t necessarily a “car guy” insider and it says clearly that what Marv has been up to at Ford is working and it matters to them a lot. Enough so – that Ford expanded his role.
So what’s he been up to? Why the promotion?
He was promoted because Marv Adams sees the power of integrated IT. He sees the power of the Ford becoming a real time enterprise and has a fundamental understanding of what Wal-Mart did to Kmart and what Dell did to Gateway.
Wal-Mart’s regional inventory supply warehouse knows what DVD you bought as you walk out the store because their cash registers are linked to their inventory control systems. Want to hear something really scary? The DVD supply vendor knows real-time too. Because Wal-Mart shares that data with the supplier to optimize inventory carry.
Dell drove Gateway’s stock price from a high of $80 per share in 2001 to less than $4 at last count. How? Dell did it by having a relentless focus on driving cost out of their system and connecting its operations to all of its suppliers. Dell has a reported inventory carry of 11 days while its competition has averages 80 days worth. This means Dell can bring new product to market 69 days faster than its competition. Dell turns a sales transaction into cash in less than 24 hours, Gateway takes 2 weeks to perform the same maneuver.
Wal-Mart and Dell are real-time enterprises. Simply defined, a real-time enterprise is able to share information with employees, customers and partners in real-time, anytime. This allows a company to instantly alert appropriate individuals to changes in customer demand, inventory, product problems, competitive actions and profitability. CEOs watch dash-board monitors showing real time reports on financial results and product movement. Sales Associates can locate a customer’s requested product immediately and almost always offer detailed delivery times and options. The benefits of becoming a real-time enterprise are significant and numerous. The benefit of becoming the first company in an industry to achieve real-time enterprise status is market share – market share that is almost always at the expense of your slower moving, slower decision making competitors.
But back to Marv and his promotion (did I say congratulations Mr. Adams?)...
He was promoted because Marv Adams sees the fundamental role that IT will play in transforming Ford back into the powerhouse it can be. (I’m not a believer that the domestic car company’s are going to bankrupt-tank in the face of the imports – I’ll blog on this shortly). Marv Adams believes that Ford can become a real time enterprise and link their cash registers (their Dealership's Dealer Management Systems) with their production systems - which in turn can be - and will be - linked into their suppliers systems. He's right. It can be done, it will be done and I believe that Marv Adams would like to see Ford get there first.
I google'd and found an interesting interview that Marv Adams did in January 2003 with CIOInsight – a ZD magazine. To me these quotes tell the tale of the tape as to why Marv now reports to both Jim Padilla – Ford’s COO and Bill Ford – Ford’s CEO:
On why he took the job with Ford:
“There was recognition by Ford CEO Bill Ford … that IT was one of several key competencies that Ford Motor Co. must be best at…to build the best cars and trucks...”
On his “Back to Basics” mantra at Ford:
“Our Back to Basics discipline is all about how we manage the core information of the business. That's fundamental and it flows through product development, manufacturing, sales and marketing”
On Collaboration and why it matters to a car and truck company:
“What’s occurring today is … concurrent engineering. Simultaneous engineering is becoming a reality as collaboration tools enable development to occur simultaneously in multiple locations, not only within Ford but with key Ford suppliers and partners, enabled by technology”
On real time systems:
“Our view of real-time systems is that you can sense rapidly what's happening, and you can respond in the appropriate amount of time. And that enables you to be as flexible as you need to be in the different segments of your business. … you … build a common language across your data infrastructure and company. You decouple the data from your legacy applications so that you can build a Web services-like technology infrastructure. And almost like Legos, build the kind of business solutions that support the different parts of the company”
On the timing of becoming a real time company (remember this interview was done ~ 30 months ago) :
“real-time systems is certainly an aspiration that we are targeting for over the next five to seven years”
On the emphasis to someday sense “demand” at the dealership real-time:
“Yes, we're doing that today. And over time it gets a lot more automated, it's a lot more real time”
On the emphasis to be information competent:
“What we have to do and what we are doing is gradually transforming the competencies of our business to become experts at dealing with information. So people who understand how to mine information, see patterns and then respond to those patterns, and people who can do that who aren't in the IT organization are using the information that we've designed into our business system”
Marv Adams believes in the real time enterprise. He understands the power of a service oriented architecture. He’s sees how IT is about to deliver another fundamental order-of-magnitude gain in productivity to companies that adopt aggressively and correctly (similar to the gains the PC gave the worker - correctly architected IT will do the same for the company).
He wants to help lead Ford toward the same places that Wal-Mart and Dell enjoy in their respective industries. He sees how that can happen and he was promoted for it.
