Thinking Out Loud: CIO Marv Adams - ' Changing Role of Technology '

Changing Role of Technology

You were there at the point when there was clearly a rethinking about what the role of technology was and how companies like Ford could achieve it.

Ten years ago, let's say 15 years ago, I think Ford followed a track that was very similar to a lot of large companies which put in technology to solve departmental problems and to drive departmental productivity. As the personal computer, local area networks and wide area networks came into existence, corporate departments, one by one, started connecting up with each other. This started driving a higher level of productivity across boundaries which, before that point, was driven by more manual processes.

By 1986, Ford recognized that it needed to drive an enterprise-wide strategy so it could create integration and synergies that could have the flexibility to structure the company the way it needed to over time, without technology getting in the way. Ford drove standardization and simplification. And that's the era I was involved in when I worked for IBM. Ford drove common workstation strategies and common local area network strategies. IT drove a common departmental systems infrastructure. That's when Ford built and rolled out common manufacturing systems, common product development systems and so forth.

Ford went the classic route, from having departmental systems to recognizing, as the company started to interconnect these systems, that Ford had an integration challenge to standardization and commonality. Then, in the mid-'90s, Ford did what a lot of companies did, as the Internet really began to take off. It drifted a bit from commonality and allowed creativity to take off, and tried to take advantage of the promises of the Internet and tried to eliminate a lot of the manual paper processes, leveraging Internet technologies, work flow technologies and so forth.

While some of that paid some nice dividends for the company, much like the PC environment created some integration challenges as it began to roll out, I think the era of dot-com mania created some integration challenges, too. So we've gotten a lot of benefits, many of them in isolated areas, and that brings us up to the last couple of years.

Our strategy in IT now, completely in line with the company's overall strategy, is very much a "Back to Basics" strategy. It's integration, it's simplification, it's consolidation and standardization driving efficiency. It's reducing variability so that we can improve the quality of all our processes. It's appropriate integration with our acquired companies. These are some of the themes that we're focused on in IT at Ford today.

When you took the job a couple of years ago, what was the mission that you came in to accomplish?

There was recognition by [Ford CEO] Bill Ford, by the policy committee, by Nasser at the time that information technology was one of several key competencies that Ford Motor Co. must be the best at for us to build the best cars and trucks. And the mission was to make and sustain the best IT competency in automotive.