00:00 Hi, good afternoon and welcome to CIO Leadership Live. I’m your host, Maryfran Johnson, CEO of Maryfran Johnson Media, and the former editor in chief of CIO magazine. Since November of 2017 this video and audio podcast has been produced by the editors of cio.com and the digital media division of foundry, which is an IDG company. Our growing collection of past interviews all openly available on cio.com and CIOs YouTube channel now includes more than 150
in depth conversations with Chief Information technology and digital officers from mid size to large enterprises across every industry joining that esteemed lineup of CIOs is my guest today, Annie Baymiller, who is the Senior Vice President and CIO At Owens Corning. Owens Corning is a $10.4 billion global building and construction materials company based in Toledo, Ohio, and employing 19,000
it’s four integrated businesses, roofing, insulation, composites and doors provide products and services across 33 countries, leveraging the company’s 86 year history of material science, manufacturing and market innovation as the CIO for the last two years, Annie is accountable for Global Information Technology with a focus on digital transformation, analytics, cybersecurity, modern enterprise platforms and business partnerships. She reports to CEO Brian Chambers. Before her current role, Annie served as the it vice president for the roofing and insulation businesses globally, and also led Enterprise Project Management Europe, information technology and the market facing digital strategy for the entire company, a 15 year veteran of the company, Annie joined Owens Corning in 2006 as a project manager, leading SAP deployments and serving as the European IT portfolio leader. After taking a three year consulting break where she gained broader business experience in process transformation and organizational strategy. She rejoined the OC in 2016 as IT director, and was later promoted to vice president of it and then onward to CIO. Among her many industry honors, earlier this year, Annie was chosen as the 2024 global CIO of the year in the Ohio Orbee Awards. She also serves on the board of the Owens Corning Foundation, the Susan G komen community board, and as board chairman for tutor smart, an academic tutoring non profit based in Toledo. Annie, thanks so much for joining me today. Welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having me. It is our pleasure. Let’s start out talking about the range and scope of the CIO job today at Owens Corning, tell us about your marching orders coming into the role two years ago. So I think the predecessor story is sets up the stage for the my journey into the company. So my long time mentor and the prior CIO here at OC who probably many know, Steve Zerby, he had positioned the organization in such a great way, I’d say, especially in terms of talents and in terms of our close connection with the business. So as I came into the role two years ago. You know, it was more about shaping it for the future. And so we spent more time in those first few months being more intentional about the longer term IT strategy and what strategic pillars we wanted to put in place that were tied up to the enterprise strategy. And it turned out to be really useful for us, because it allowed us to communicate. It allowed us to align on the investments going forward. It allowed us to make sure that everyone on the team could see as a function where we were headed.
And then, obviously it was a way to position our investments against the strategic intent. So kind of an example inside those would be, you know, we have a pillar around driving business growth. We have a pillar around leading digital transformation, modernizing and flexing our core, and then, as you would expect, protecting with cybersecurity. So that was kind of the big fundamental shift. Is really anchoring in on kind of the longer range strategy. And then as we put that in place over the last year and a half now, it’s been building out those building blocks of where do we continue to need to make new investments and using it as a as a shaping tool with the executive committee. Yeah, well, and it does seem like it’s been a very graceful transition from from Steve to you. And of course, we, we knew Steve extremely well at CIO magazine and at CIO.com
I we were always chasing after him to be on stage or to speak and, you know, and try to get him to apply for big, important CIO awards, that kind of thing he was. He’s just a very delightful guy. So I hope he’s enjoying himself now in retirement. Lunch with him two weeks ago, and he is so, oh, good, good, good. Well, it’s always such a great story when there’s been a mentorship and a way to do succession planning, because that is something that IT leadership has not always had the luxury to do in the past. So good. Good for the OC that you guys did, I was just gonna say, and not only did we do good, I think, planning, we also had a long transition period, which was really helpful. And so he was sliding out a role as I was getting one step deeper every day, but by the time he was ready to move on to next phase of life, I was feeling like I was more positioned to lead. So the long transition, I think, really helped, from a stability point of view, good, good. Well, that’s got to be a fine balance to strike. You know, you want to, you want to stay around and be as helpful as possible, but then you don’t want to get underfoot. So, so I’m sure it’s, it seems like it’s working out really well. One of the pillars you mentioned, the business pillars, that driving business growth. I love the sound of that, because too often in the past, I think it leaders were focused on aligning with business strategies. But the idea of driving growth explain that a little bit more to how that’s different from the way we might have looked at the the old alignment question in the past. Sure. So there’s a there’s a few things inside this pillar. Maybe there’s, you can imagine a lot of things when we talk about drive about driving business growth, but in order to anchor it to a framework and a strategy, the three things we have positioned in Business Growth first is around the business partnership. So as
as Steve’s kind of, one of his pieces of legacy really was getting us closer and closer to the business so somebody from my leadership team sits on each of the business presidents leadership team, and so driving business growth, when we talk about the business partnerships, it’s about literally being closer and closer every single day to the strategy the current situation. So if we’re sitting on a the roofing leadership team meeting, they’re constantly listening for things that can be fixed today or things that can be optimized, and they’re also thinking and they’re also thinking about, how does this impact my future long range plan? And it so that’s always pacing together. So my view is, to drive business growth, you’ve got to be so intimately connected with what the strategy is and what the team is. And so that’s the first kind of piece. The second is where we position the use of analytics and AI, and so this has been a very big area of investment over the last couple of years, and a really good bright spot for us as well. And then
to add to how this feels different than the aligning and it’s really about the driving is if we get it right with how we do advanced analytics and AI, it will be either a revenue generation source or productivity source, or an insight that gets us closer to market. So we should see real value from those, not just interesting things, but real insights that we can go be, go be an action around. And then, please, I was going to ask you, you had mentioned that that whole framework for data foundations and the advanced capabilities. This is not something that just got whipped together a year or two ago. This is actually something you’ve all been building on for a while Exactly. It’s, honestly, it’s something I’m very, very proud of. It’s that the team has done such good work over the last 10 years to do to have a strong commitment to our data foundation. So we knew where data was we knew who got access. We knew how it was trusted and as generative. AI took, took the scene early in 2023
because we had such a strong protected foundation for data, we were able to more quickly do group of concepts and to understand how it would play and where we might see value, where, I think if we had not made that strong commitment to data and AI and analytics, we would be playing, we’d be playing a bit of catch up to be able to make sure our data was ready for for the true use of the power of generative AI. Yes. And then I think you had mentioned there’s a third big piece around the merger and acquisitions, because last May
Owens Corning had a $3.9 billion acquisition, about a third the size of your company today. I guess when you acquired the doors business, exactly
the Masonite doors, yeah. Doors Exactly. So, yeah, that’s been a big piece of the pillar that has gotten tested because we’ve done the biggest acquisition for the company. And so that’s really around, why we tie it into driving business growth. Is obviously an acquisition is done to inorganically grow the company, but then our ability to integrate it and to find where there’s cost.
Opportunities, sourcing opportunities. A lot of that does come from the technology piece. And so our ability to kind of bring the deal to life and make sure that we reap the most value and set that new business up with either enterprise capabilities that we already have deployed, or with one as sizable as the doors business learn from them as well, in terms of what has worked well, in terms of processes, in terms of capabilities, applications, and the most important thing in the in the M and A side, is around the people right is making sure that we’re we’re inclusive, that we’re learning from each other, that we’re finding the best opportunities and talents, so that the teams one plus one starts to equal three in terms of the teams coming together, which is has been a lot of fun this year having the team grow. Yeah, well, in the consulting work that you did for a few years outside the company before you came back, were you involved in a lot of M and A activities? Because that’s a very specific set of skills and capabilities that not every IT leader gets to put their hands on. No, I It’s very true, I was not actively involved in it. What? What, again, the team has done a nice job of is, over the years, we’ve just been building and refining playbooks, and how do we bring those playbooks to life, and how do we learn from them? And how do we do continuous improvement? And obviously, with one as big as this, you know, leaning on partners as well, who can give us what’s the industry best practices, what things should we be thinking of?
And then some things in the portfolio have to stop, right? We have to be able to be able to pause and say, okay, the pot is already full, and now we have another big project, it’s a great time to realign and make sure that we’re working on the most high value pieces so we know how fast we really want to go on the integration. Do you think that’s these days? Do you think that is still a struggle for CIOs and other senior IT leaders, where you don’t want to be the Department of no nobody wants that anymore. Nobody wants that, but you don’t. You can’t say yes to everything. So talk a little bit about how you handle the flow of demands and expectations as the CIO, yeah, I definitely think it’s, it’s a challenge. I also think it ties a little bit to the brand of folks in it is, you want to say yes, you want to find a solution. You want to fix problems, right? And so when you can’t do that in real time, it’s tricky. And one of the one of our core behaviors inside our strategy is something we call service first. And that’s what it’s all about, like running at the problems and being in service of solving for the business. And so that’s our natural inclination, and that what we hold ourselves to. And it is tough when you when you have to say, to say, not necessarily No, but not now. And kind of how we’ve been approaching it is as we’ve worked through our portfolio process and our prioritization process, one is making sure that that senior leader who’s connected to the business
every day, that they feel like everything that is on the list is in justification of where the business strategy is going and where we’ve kind of sharpened our pencils here in the last year, is getting better and better at quantifying the business case of the work, because if we should all be in alignment of how the work is truly generating revenue or driving productivity or giving faster insights, and so it makes the conversation a little bit easier. I think, when the business and it can look at it the same way, sometimes we can. We can rationalize that you’re right. That isn’t the most important thing for the enterprise right now. Doesn’t mean that wouldn’t be something we can we can bring back in, yeah, well, and it must be additionally challenging, because in a staff full of technical talent. You’re not necessarily going to find a lot of CPAs and people that are used to dealing with spreadsheets or financial things. How do you go about making sure everybody’s on the same terminology and the same messaging? Yeah,
we do some some different capabilities, but I think it’s just the ability to be together and come together and be consistent in how we talk about the strategy and how we talk about the priorities. So like just this morning, I had an all hands call with my entire team. We either we get business updates, we talk about big things happening in the function, we spotlight projects.
And I think that that predictable transparency to who we are, where we’re going, and how we’re getting there, I think helps build kind of everyone rowing together, which is, which is really important. And then I think as people join the company, we do our best to give a thoughtful onboarding, because every every team is different, every organization is different. There’s nuances inside each
and third, I’d say we we’ve made some good commitments to enterprise capabilities. So if we have a tool that can be leveraged across multiple teams, we try and do that so that it doesn’t feel like there’s so many things to learn every time you maybe change a team or change a role.
Now sometimes that’s harder to do than than others, right, where there is a nuance within what a specific team needs to operate. But I just think the value of of creating those forums where people can listen and learn and ask questions, it’s especially as the team has gotten bigger, it’s, it’s, I think, made us more connected. Yes, well, and we’re going to talk a little bit more about this as we get into talking about the staff. But it grew. It is growing tremendously because of this fourth line of business that you’ve gotten into now with the Masonite doors. I think you said there were 225 full timers in IT, and now it’s more like 375.
So what have you seen so far about the impact that is having on your culture within it? I know that’s something that is very near and dear to your heart, making sure the company culture is is hanging in there. Yeah, I would say the culture is the most important thing that I am, that I work on every day, and the thing that I’m surely most passionate about,
I would argue with anybody that we’ve got the best team out there, and I work, I will work tirelessly to make sure that my relentless commitment to that culture, you know, allows us to continue to be where we are today. And it’s just, it’s an incredible team of very smart, very hard working, but just incredible low ego with this team first approach. And as you said, the beginning, Maryfran. You know, I basically grew up at OC. My first real role was project manager, but I came in through our early career program, so I’ve spent the bulk of my career, but those those three years when I was away, I did get to see how other companies operated, and I got a chance to see how special our culture is and that high team and so it’s been, it’s been, it’s been really wonderful. Welcoming the new team members from doors into our team was the biggest growth we’ve ever had, overnight, going 220, to largely 375,
what we did was really kind of forget the applications and the infrastructure at the macro level for the first couple months, and let’s just get to know each other. Let’s get to know what we’re working on. Let’s get to know our backgrounds. Let’s get to know where we can share and then let’s start talking about, okay, what do we think from an application and infrastructure and capabilities? What’s the best of the best? Or do we want to go reimagine it together? And I think that ability to just find time to get to know people and be together, it was very
rewarding for me to get to meet so many interesting people. And you could just start to see people kind of gravitate together, and it become more obvious of how the teams we’re gonna we’re gonna shift, and I think the doors business, the folks who have joined us are going to be wonderfully additive to our culture, and lots of good stuff to come for the product
that that’s great. It’s actually, it’s it’s so nice to hear, because I think that the networks that we develop inside our companies are probably even more important than the ones we develop outside and and I’m and I’m a huge fan of all that networking stuff, but the the internal connections that you make and the way that builds a culture, you can’t really architect it. You can just create the environment where it can thrive. That’s exactly right. I mean, you spend more time at work than you do almost any other place. And so yes, you want to be surrounded by people that you enjoy and that you trust and that you respect. And yeah, you can’t architect it, but you can create the inclusive environment that allows it to come to life. Well, it was I read one of the interviews I read that you done in the last year or two. You were describing your typical day, and you started out saying that, first and foremost, you’re focused on the team. Firm believer in getting great outcome comes with a really engaged team. It sounds like what the old Hewlett and Packard guys originally talked about as the managing by walking around.
I remember that being one of the big frustrations that so many hands on CIOs had during the year or two that everybody was dealing with the worst of the pandemic.
How has your management style changed to kind of adapt to this. It’s a it’s a bigger place. Now. People are more together, but are you still walking around as much as you were able to? Yeah, I am. I joke that I’m in here on the days. I don’t necessarily have to be, because I hoping to bump into somebody and be able to see what’s going on. Yeah. I mean, for me, kind of moving into the role one I have, I have a world class leadership team, people, some with external perspectives, some like me, who have, who have essentially grown up here at oC and so trusting them with the big initiatives that are in their in their camp, allows me to spend even more time focused less.
Maybe the execution of the portfolio, but more on the people and the strategy and where the executive committee is shaping the company so that we can stay connected to
more. For me, it’s because of our recent acquisition. It’s making sure I spend enough time with our folks in Tampa as well, and make sure the regions we continue to include them in all the right ways, because our regions, while they support regional nuances of the capabilities, they’re all working on global platforms as well. So we’re very centralized team, but very global in how we approach it. So now I still think people first is the name of the game.
Well, and you mentioned centralized that was one of the things when we talked earlier. I was probably not surprised, but you don’t hear it talked about as much the fact that your whole approach to your IT strategy is very much a centralized model, and that, you know that has worked really well for very large companies for a long time, but in recent years, there’s been a whole lot more that we hear about the distributed model. Talk about that, about what those big benefits are for for Owens, Corning, and why it is something you think you’re going to stick with into the future, having a centralized approach to it, yeah, I think the benefits of it are, you have the ability to have pockets of talent all over the globe, so you can go find the best people and they get to work on the most important platforms and capabilities for the company.
So you’re not limited to, you know, team in Europe is only working on things for Europe, or a team in Latin America is only working. We have opportunities where we can, we can bring that talent in, and I just think it really is the one team approach. I think is really important to maintain that culture, because there’s better transparency of where are we going. How are we getting there. There’s commonality in terms of how the leadership teams approach their teams, and how we lead as one leadership team for the overall for the overall team. So I think there’s there’s goodness in there as well, and then within with a centralized IT model, obviously, from a people point of view, even though global, it really gets us that enterprise leverage off of our capabilities. So if we have something that we build or we deploy for one business. We work really hard to make sure that even though maybe installation is going to bring some nuances, would they be able to reap the benefits of what has already been created. So if we can create one that’s 80% enterprise with 20% business nuances to it, great, and we can actually go faster. It’s easier to scale to support, to add features and function. So if you’re not centralized, those enterprise platforms become tricky to continue and then to manage well, and that’s how you end up with 17 different ERP systems around the world, right? Yes, exactly.
So let’s talk about the … Owens Corning has been in, I think I saw it called a hyper growth mode somewhere. So things are going well. The company’s growing. You’ve acquired a $3.9 billion other business. What these last few years have been very disruptive and unexpected for a lot of businesses. How have, how have the digital business models had an impact on that for the OC, are they a big part of that hyper growth, or is that a natural market outgrowth that now the digital business is serving very well? Yeah, good question. You know, I think going even a bit further back, I think COVID was a really important flexion point for us from a digital point of view, if you know, if we’re building materials company, if you think of our industry, distributors and contractors, they really had to re imagine how they could continue to work, as people were reluctant to go into stores or have people in their homes. And so this pushed us, collectively as an industry, I think, forward on the digital journey. And for us, then it our strategy is to always strive to be the best partner for those who are selling our products, right? So as they move into E commerce, and they move into more digital touches with with shoppers us being able to provide a great capability there, we definitely saw, I think, a progression forward in the building material space, just by nature of focusing to quickly get creative on how we continue to service homes, homeowners and customers. And we’ve seen that continue to grow, right? You can, especially in the distributor section. We continue to see, you know, good use of product information, e commerce, those sorts of things.
And then it really pushed us forward. On the employee side as well, is people who maybe were reluctant to be on video calls and things like that. Suddenly it wasn’t so hard to have the camera on, and it was easy to learn some of the tools. And so it’s and I think there was this, this need for more asynchronous communication styles, right? That wasn’t always were gathering in a meeting room. It was people were working at different times.
Depending on where they were remote. So I think it really pushed us forward. And then, as we’re in this hyper growth space, from a digital point of view, as I said, that the ability to really look at the business case associated with the work has allowed us to make sure we’re working on the right stuff at the right time. There’s so many things as you grow just quickly, there’s so many things that could be, could be done, and so I think that constant validation and alignment served as well. Okay, good. Well, I noticed that we’d gotten almost 10 minutes into our interview before the topic of AI came up. So I’ve been, I’ve been keeping kind of like a mental track of that as I interview CIOs over the last few months, and it’s very rare to get past the 10 minute mark without it being a very important part. I think you told me at 1.1 of the you made this comment to one of your other executive leaders, that the surprise for you was how often you were talking about AI in your first two years. You didn’t see that one coming. Didn’t see that one, especially generative AI, didn’t see it coming. I mean, I knew we had a great AI strategy and analytics, but generative AI was a whole different topic for of great interest to the executive committee and to the board. So it’s been a fun story to tell. Yeah, yeah. I would imagine it’s just, I think that a lot of the cloud proponent folks were hoping that cloud would take off this way, but it never did. I mean, for everybody, it became, yeah, it’s somebody else’s data center. I get it. I get what a cloud is so but the excitement around Gen AI, let’s talk a little bit about some of the things, some of the places where you’re seeing that provide really genuine driving that business growth. That is one of those pillars. Yeah, absolutely.
So in, you know, generative AI became the buzzword in quarter one of 2023 and everybody kind of started to think through how they want to think about the the capabilities and the strategy. And so we had an approach with a couple of different parallel pass and flow. One, we said, we want to find a way that everybody at the company gets a chance to reap the benefits of some of the more self service pieces, but do it in a way that is secure and stable, right? And so that’s where do you think of the things like copilot? You know, that’s where
probably there’s hundreds of use cases out there that are creating 15 minute efficiencies every day, and that’s great, right? Those are the things that people within their user groups and communities will will share and continue to take advantage of. And that’s just my view. Is that just going to take off like it’s a whole new way of working, right? There’s going to be more capabilities and more more sharing than ever before. And then the second path was, how do we start to go after a handful of really interesting use cases that we think would actually drive True, true value, whether it be revenue generation, productivity? So we strategized with a community of practice that we put together. And an example of one of those is, you know, we’re almost 100 year old company, and we’re material science company, and so there’s many, many years of lab notebooks and test results in our R and D community. And you can imagine that’s hard to one to search through, even just if we’re talking about the digital content of the more recent future, it’s also hard to gather insights out of it, right? Because right, you only can hunt and peck based on what’s what’s available to you, right? And so that’s an area we’re exploring, is putting generative AI and being able to have more of a conversation, and being able to summarize at a different level of detail, but still be able to keep the human in the loop to make sure that the insights are valid. And that is it really going to help us aid in engage after insights on the R and D community, for the R and D community.
And then the third path we have, that’s not those use cases, is, is as our vendors continue to create more content, so you see things being baked into Microsoft and box and those sorts of things. It did a good opportunity then for us to make sure that we’re getting the max value out of those. Yeah. Now, do you have a like an innovation team or a task force that’s like trying to watch the latest and greatest coming out of all the AI innovations? Or is that something that’s part of all of the leaders jobs these days. How do you I’m always curious about how companies approach that, because there’s so much to read, so many podcasts to watch. I you know, there’s just so much out there. So how are you filtering it all? What kind of a structure do you have to a small group of folks in it though. We call it emerging technology, and they use it as an opportunity to educate the rest of the organization. So we’ll have different forums, lunch and learns, things like that, where as things are popping up, they either share or they bring an industry expert in, or they spotlight somebody on the team that’s really good at it. So it’s more of a casual way for us to be learning together. But.
Specific to the generative AI. We did put a what we call a community of practice together, which is a handful of folks from it as kind of the architect, technical experts, my one of my leaders, she leads the AI and analytics team. She’s the chair of it, and then a representative from each of the other teams, meaning the other businesses, the other functions, so it’s got business perspective on it, and that’s what they do. They meet once a month, they ideate. They talk about what’s new. They prioritize the use cases across the company, just so that there’s a constant conversation going on around how we think about AI, okay, and you’d mentioned that the board and the CEO and everything are they also do. They get regular updates on all of this? Because that that’s been one of the very interesting things about AI is the interest from the general public and from the business side, and the feeling everybody has that, oh, well, you know, they understand kind of what AI is, and they’ve seen movies with robots in them, and, you know, I mean, everybody is just really intrigued with it.
It’s great. I mean, it’s a time that to see, to see boards and executive teams so excited about technology. It’s, it’s exciting, right? That when you get to be in, well, yeah, better time to be in, to be in it, in my opinion. But yeah, absolutely. And I think more than anything, it’s,
it’s great to be able to talk out loud about some of the use cases, and to be able to think through, okay, how would they add value, and how will we know, and when would we scale? And those sorts of discussions, right? Because it’s some of this is new, and then some of it is really taking what we spent, you know, the last couple of years around the data strategy, the advanced analytics, the data scientists. And it’s not just all Gen AI, it’s how you take all of those advanced analytics and scale them and get the maximum impact across various businesses, not just one well. And speaking of that, that reminds me about your your project this year, one of you the CIO 100
of 2024 Owens Corning was one of the winners. And the project was about driving safety in plants with predictive analytics. And we used to talk about predictive analytics all the time, I mean, for many years, but now that it gets linked to AI, it suddenly got kind of more of a luster around it, doesn’t? It talk a little bit about that project, and because that’s had some very real benefits for the company. And I’m wondering, I think it was maybe only partially deployed when you won the award earlier this year. So bring us up to date on that one. Yeah, it’s an interesting capability. So it all stems from OC has an incredible commitment to safety. We talk about, everybody should come, should come to work, and then when they leave work, they should be in the same or better condition than when they came. And so
since this has been a mantra for us for so long in terms of our true commitment to safety, we obviously measure it very closely, and we do everything in our power to prevent injuries from happening. And so the idea came up of from a predictive analytics point of view. Could we? Could we model against past data where we had certain conditions that were happening, things like time of year, whether, how sold out the business was, amount of new hires who were on the shop floor, those sorts of things, where you can start to correlate them together and create models that might help predict a future incident. Now that doesn’t say the incident won’t happen, but what it does is it gives great Intel into the plant leadership team to go continue the discussions around best practices and processes that should be followed for safety, and it can provide another piece of input into that plan. And then we can obviously tweak the models going forward based on new information and new different levers that might be happening. So it’s a nice predictive early insight tool that I think is doing a good job of helping to keep our company safe.
Is there a natural next step for it? Like to expand that, take that idea, as you mentioned, you often do that with your centralized approach, to take that idea and go beyond what you’re doing at the plant level, absolutely. And I mean a few things I think we can go beyond. And that more data, more data elements inside, can make it even more interesting.
That predictive analytics, we have that in many, many places. We have it on our production lines to be able to to better determine when we need to do maintenance before a break happens. So the ability to use model against prior data to see what the conditions would be like that might predict an instance we have that in place in many different areas.
Okay? And I often ask CIOs to kind of look across their particular industries or their slice of the industry, and talk about some of the common problems that they are hearing about.
From their peers, and you do get out and about, you’re not one of those CIOs who’s heads down and not out in the world. So what are your peers tackling across the industry? It used to be, I would ask this question. Everybody say, well, cyber security. And then that would pretty much, that would pretty much end the discussion, because nobody can really talk about cyber security? Most people, most of us, don’t even want to, right? But it is. It’s different. Now talk, let’s, let’s explore that one. When you look at some of the problems, you see your peers struggling with, what are you hearing about beyond cyber security?
I do participate in a handful of really great round tables. And I enjoy them because it’s a pretty consistent group of companies. And so you get to know each other, and you get makes it easier and easier to share and to define commonalities. And so if I think back on some of those from the last year, AI, obviously it’s going to be the new cyber in terms of round table discussions. Yeah, I think it’s really, it’s not, it’s not a debate of yes or no. It’s a debate of different ways that people are balancing, spend with value, different ways that people are evaluating, kind of talking about some of those high level use cases that might, that might spark an idea for someone else. So that’s a big one. There’s been good discussions in the last year around really modernizing core applications, and how do you do that in a cost conscious way and make sure that you’re actually driving for real results, you know better, user experience, real time, data. How would you grow the company differently and scale faster? And the discussions are around one, how do you kind of position that, and then there’s still a business that’s running every day, and how do you do it in a way that has minimal change management and you’re sure that it’s actually providing the value you need? So I think everybody that I’m spending time with is always in that. How do you keep the application sweet, contemporary and modern, but how do you do it in a way that the business is excited about it, and it really is moving the business forward? Yeah. And then the third one that maybe I didn’t anticipate in the last two years has been
just given the changing dynamics of the world. There’s just a lot of discussion around balancing that ability to get enterprise enterprise leverage from investments with the need for more regional solutions to meet regulatory compliance sustainability needs. And for a lot of companies, you went on enterprise leverage because it was a way to manage risks and cost and complexity. We create things that would be, you know, usable by various businesses. And so there’s just, there’s just a balancing act that needs to happen there As the world continues to to change and all of us thinking about what the strategy is and where there’s areas where you would say, Okay, this doesn’t need to be global anymore. This doesn’t need to be fully centralized. It’s going to be regional, starting to make some of those decisions. From my view, I don’t think we’ll, we’ll shift away from a centralized model for the vast majority, but there are more regional nuances than than I think ever before, in terms of our ability to to be compliant and also to be efficient. Yeah, I’ve, I’ve heard that same i you express it really eloquently there. I’ve heard similar things from other CIOs who’ve talked about the enormously,
the enormous amounts of more attention being paid to global regulations and privacy and all that, that sort of thing and but I hadn’t really heard it called Enterprise leverage. So much by leverage, do you mean? I tend to hear leverage, and I think, well, getting a better price from your suppliers and vendors, but that’s not the kind of leverage you mean? No, it’s not. There’s a cost piece in there for sure. Meaning, if we build something that we say is enterprise grade, and 80% of the functionality can satisfy, you know, depending on what the capability is, either most businesses or customers, and we It allows us then to deploy future businesses faster, allows us to deploy future businesses at a lower cost, allows us to train people easier and have cross sharing between different teams so we’re getting the leverage of that investment across the breadth of the full enterprise, versus having to build and deploy things for each of the businesses where we can we optimize the value by that central model.
Okay, you and you’d also, you’d mentioned that the discussion around modernizing the core. And I somebody said some years ago that, you know, as soon as an application is five years old, or perhaps less, it’s it’s already legacy, so so that there will never, probably be a day when you can say, Oh, that’s it. Our core is all totally modernized. But I know that a lot of.
Of a lot of industry pundits were have been predicting that what’s going to solve that whole problem is migration to the cloud. So tell me what you think of that. That was, of course, like so many things, the industry proposes. It’s usually very oversimplified and very expensive to do so when you think about the impact that migration to the cloud has had on core modernization, where does that fall for you? I think it definitely aids in the modernization. I mean, I think, or the ability to it creates a different dynamic, I think, in the ability to
to give access to more folks and to continue to evolve with more features and functions, especially if you’re in a SaaS model, versus just stay hosted in the cloud. But I think it solves everything, right? I mean, we all will have technical debt. We all will have applications that will that are so specific to a certain company that they will continue to need the the intentional care and feeding to maintain things that are modern, but the cloud does create some degree of nimbleness of in terms of being able to have easier support and pieces like that when they’re especially like I said, from a SaaS model, where it’s less than the investment of our time and resources. But I don’t think it’s a magic bullet at the same time, either.
And do you have, as for a ten billion company, the size of OC Do you have a percentage goal where eventually you’ll be 75% on cloud and SaaS applications? Or No, I don’t I mean, for us, it’s more as we think of the how, once we’re clear on what the business outcome is, I’d say we probably have a cloud first point of view of or why not cloud point of view? But it’s sure not the it’s not a mandate. It’s more of a decision framework that that would be our normal bias, and we’ve seen an uptick for sure over the last couple of years, as as as the business of function has different needs of watching our cloud. Cloud counts go in terms of things that are hosted, but
it’s not a it’s going to always be, I think, a balance of cost versus value. Yes, yes,
we, I, we talked briefly about how much the size of your technology team has grown with this masonite doors acquisition. How have you got so you went from the 225, roughly, up to 375,
perhaps, and counting. How is i? How are do you have it structured to continue to deliver the kind of value that you intend to to the business and how, how, so far, is it impacting the company culture
we’ve we just did a rather sizable change to the organization, and we use the important moment with the doors teams joining. Because
I felt it was only if the we have much to do in the next couple of years on the doors business and all other other businesses, and so making sure that the doors folks were best positioned inside the teams with which their their talents and capabilities, took a chunk of work to make sure we did it in a thoughtful and thorough way. And thorough way. And so we used as an opportunity to really look across the full organization and think about the future. And like I said, we’re a very centralized team, and so my leadership team, everybody wears multiple hats. And so we have, we have some folks who, you
know, if I have someone who’s looking after enterprise applications, someone who looks after analytics and AI, someone who looks after the digital center of excellence, infrastructure and operations, those sorts of capabilities. But then there’s other things that folks are also accountable for. So someone will sit with the business and they’ll be the roofing business lead, but they’ll also have a capability stack that they own as well. So it’s something that my predecessor used to kind of talk about, is building roles around people, and that gives people stretch assignments and also things that are their core. And it just serves us really well, because even going to 375,
it’s still a relatively small IT team, and so it allows the roles to be big, right? That if you come to OC, and you are a data scientist, you know you’re going to be one of 10 to 15, not one of 1000 and so that means you get you’re working on the business’s biggest problems every day, and you’re partnering with business needs who need those capabilities. And so being able to structure around kind of what people are passionate about, and tack on new things as they continue to grow, also be pretty nimble with how we look at the talent. Yeah, well, and from what you’ve told me, that’s also a an approach that works well in your internship programs and in the rotational programs that you do with younger employees. So you can, you can end up.
Charge of more things than you would think when you’re very early in your career at EOC, probably like you did, I think very much so I owe that program a great deal, and it’s another area that I’m very passionate about, and I think you’re exactly right, is we don’t hire that many people in a year, because we are kind of small but mighty, and we use we have good partners. So we’re very, very thoughtful when we do want to make sure that we do a good job of describing who we are and where we’re headed. So we make sure this is a place that that they want to be participating in, and then we need to make sure that that we’re making additive decisions towards the culture that we continue to create and
and diversity is an important topic for us as well, too, as a lot of us have grown up here. And so we know what we know, and so especially when we bring folks into the organization, that diversity of experience, diversity of background, diversity of, you know, life experiences, not just career experience is is important, right? And then we work hard on that inclusive environment so that every voice is heard and appreciated for that unique perspective that they bring, right? Yeah, the early career one, though, is probably the one where we it’s, you know, between maybe four to six
folks, right out of college who who join us. It’s an 18 month rotational program. It’s, like I said, the program that I went through, and it does, I think, give a accelerated growth platform early in career, because you’re you get to see how the scenes come together across different teams. So you’re in a role, and you get plucked out after six months and you’re asked to go do something completely different, but you start to see after three rotations, okay, now I understand why these teams are maybe structured this way. I understand how the work moves through various teams, and then, because they have
a big focus of development in the program, I think it does position them to then, should they desire to go, keep tackling more and more in their career, so that we, some of our most senior leaders in the organization, are kind of byproducts of that program. So it’s been an important talent piece for us. For sure, how do when you’re bringing people when they’re not early career, or
someone who’s in your internship program, where do you where is your talent coming from? And are there areas that you are find you’re always in a struggle to find talent.
Are you going to say, AI development?
I’d say it totally depends on what the current landscape of our of our folks looks like, but
we do make those decisions as a leadership team. Like I said, we take the talent piece very, very seriously. So we spend time prioritizing,
and then, because we are looking for, you know, a handful of roles that we need to fill each year.
Shame on us if we can’t go find one or two people in the country that want to be a part of what we’re creating, right? Because we’re very proud of it, and I think our our brochure matches the experience. And so once people join, we work hard to make sure this is a place they want to have a long and healthy career. So the talent pools kind of come from from anywhere, and it really depends on what the top priority is in terms of skill set and where we see the, you know, skate to where we see the puck going and and as we build out the strategy, it didn’t inform us. We were looking we were looking longer term out and being able to say, like we know we’re going to have some gaps and some things that we that we are going to be investments as the ERP journeys continue to evolve and different technologies, and so part of it is being able to grow people and getting them into seed. And then for some areas, we knew we needed some real technical experts. And so we went down, yeah, okay, well, and I noticed too, when I was introducing you and reading your very impressive bio, practically the first big buzz words mentioned in your description were digital transformation, and so that’s something that in one guise or another, you’ve been working on at oC for quite a while. How is it different today? Is digital is the digital transformation and how it ties into the business growth and accelerating that. How has that changed from a few years ago?
So in 2020
we decided to define what digital transformation, or digital meant to us, because there’s a million definitions, right? You’ll hear the buzz words all the time, transform this and innovate. So we said, okay, for us and the type of business we are, there was three pieces to it. And the first piece was capabilities and digital touches out to the market, so things that would really help our customers, our contractors, homeowners. And then there was the piece that we call digital worker, which is all about how we.
Work as a company, right? So it’s collaboration, communication, tools, automation, efficiency plays. And then the third piece is all the capabilities that we can bring into our plants to really produce better, faster, safer going forward. And so we oriented to that framework with at the nucleus of a digital wheel is state and information, saying that that is the core piece of what this all stems from. It’s got to be a data that we can access, we can trust, we can grow, we can curate it to make sure that analytics and an AI are an important piece of all of that digital strategy. So that served us really well, because everybody got anchored around one framework with which we’d hang investments off of which we’d be able to tell the story of how we’re advancing the digital strategy. So fast forward a little bit later, and we get to, you know, maybe six to nine months later, and it’s time for the long range plan reviews. And digital was a standalone strategy that we brought in. We showed where we’re making the investments, the framework, and when you say, what has changed since then? Now we don’t need to do a digital long range plan, because it’s baked into each of the businesses. Long range plan, because it’s now not something that sits over here. It’s just the way we work, right? It’s just when we talk about digital, it’s a core capability for the company, and it’s not something that we even need to really educate or socialize around as much, because it’s just kind of a fiber of how the work is getting prioritized and done. Right? One thing that I think is interesting that we did is we then so we had all these different capabilities inside the strategy, and we talked about it in phases. If you were in the stage one, it’s basically, it’s out there. It’s just scale it. We both. We know how to do it. We have capability. Stage two was like, We got to go build this quickly. We know it’s going to be important for us, though it’s an investment area. But this stage three is, was really our way of pushing ourselves to think out 510, years in the future, like past, the long range plan view. We learned a lot by doing that, because it’s very uncomfortable, right? When you you’re running a business or you’re leading a team, and you think, why in the world am I going to spend a minute thinking 10 years in the future? So yeah, we had these think tanks that we did where we bring groups together over a common idea, and we got better and better as time has gone on. But it’s, you know, turning your day brain off. And we talk about, go, go into the future, and look around all the corners, and let’s make sure we’re not missing something. I think that’s sort of those behaviors are tough, but I think they’re really interesting if you’re going to continue to be innovative. Well, they are developing the kind of mental muscle that you need for that is, is daunting. Yeah, I remember the first think tank that I was participating in and helping to kind of set up with one of the business leadership groups, and we tried to get them from through stage one, and then we did a stage two review, and then go right into stage three. And as soon as we got done, I mean, everyone was exhausted because it is, it’s a way of thinking, and it’s, it can be a bit fatigued. So we’ve learned a lot about how to approach it, but it’s been fun well, and so many buzzwords in this industry come in and out of fashion gradually. You know, sometimes it’s a fashion that is simply because Gartner has given it a name, and everybody talked about it. And so I remember one time having the CIO of General Electric on stage at one of our events, and, you know, the the cheeky interviewer basically said, so you said you were doing this digital transformation, it’s been six years. Are you done? And and he just laughed out loud, and he said, the minute you stop, you’re dead. So yeah, it’s kind of ongoing, but I am getting the feeling that asking about digital strategies and digital transformation has gotten to be an empty question. Yeah, because as you say, it’s kind of all should we be asking these days? What’s your AI strategy, or is that naturally tucked under your data and your enterprise data strategy? I think it’s, I think it’s complimentary to, again, though, I think that should be baked into the business strategy, as opposed to because it should. I think the the best use cases for for advanced analytics and AI has been which is so obvious how it’s going to add value that then you’re not you’re not reminding people to use it, or pitching for a business to adopt it because they wouldn’t want to work without it, because it’s getting them either the insight that they need faster or a more automated way. And
that’s why those those forums, like the communities of practice, I think, are really interesting, because people with different roles, different life experiences, just get a chance to talk about business problems. The solution is not nearly as hard as finding the right use case and making sure that the use case is scoped and communicated in a way that people run toward it, versus having to be in a position where you’re kind of convincing and we’ve just made such good.
Progress on that over the last couple of years, we do something called AI in action, where it kind of feels like a high school science fair. You go from we do it virtually and in person, but you go and talk to the person who had the idea, and then they walk you through what the AI invention was on top of it, and then they walk you through how it’s being used, if it’s being rolled out, or if it’s already rolled out. And you walk through this room of 50 people standing with their signs that are constantly changing. It’s, it’s pretty, pretty exciting to see the case with which we can do some of this now, just based on the availability of data and the tools and really smart people, sounds like the grown up version of a really fun science fair? Yeah, exactly.
Which is the kind of thing that it it. People all love that. I mean, they all won prizes at their science fairs.
Now we have talked about various strategic business and technology priorities, the integration of the Masonite business, accelerating the use of AI,
the core modernization, anything that I’ve left off that list that I should ask you about that is still is really high on your priority list these days. No, I don’t, I don’t think so. I mean, there’s so much good work happening across the company, but those are the big ones that going into a new year I think are going to be big focus areas for us. And then on this AI front too, it’s just, how do you keep the momentum and make sure that we’re constantly looking for the right use cases, but turning that into more of a capability so that we can, we can grow it faster in the businesses, but we’re positioned well, I think, and the team’s excited. Okay, that’s great well, because I’m thinking ahead. I have an interview coming up in a few weeks with an executive who is has a new title where he’s a chief AI officer. Oh, wow, I know. And it’s a fairly big insurance company, so you know, it’s not just some startup giving himself a phony title. This is, this is something real going on, right? Well, as we wrap up here today, I love to always ask about what you have learned about your own leadership style in these last few years. You have held multiple leadership roles at oC over the last few years, but two years in now, as the CIO, what has changed about how you you lead and inspire your people? Yeah, it’s a good question. I’ve learned a lot about myself in the last couple of years, I’d say that the thing is, I’ve been very much reminded the value of authenticity in leadership.
There’s so much changing every day. There’s new problems to tackle, and I’ve just found that authenticity brings people together, and I think it disarms any pride of authorship or any questions around intent. If people know that you’re relying on them, and they know they can rely on you, and they know that what they see is what they get,
I think it builds a trust that is super important during hard times, and I think it also rallies people together. And I talk a lot about people in their secret sauce and finding out what your secret sauce is in your career, and exploiting it and using it for for so much personal
enthusiasm as well as the good of the company. And I think when people trust each other, they pull that out of each other, because they bring out the best in other people. And so that’s just been my commitment. Is I try to bring my full self to work every day and and be as authentic as I can. And
I’ve learned that during during the good days and the bad days, it’s it served me well. Yes, well, and a lot of CIOs that are now also operating in board roles, as you are in three different companies and organizations, that often changes the way you look at things in the even bigger picture.
Okay, well, thank you so much for joining me today and spending this time. You are. You are one of that you’ve got to be one of the busiest women in Ohio and probably that whole part of the United States. So it was really nice of you to spend the time with us talking today. Appreciate the invite and the luckiest person in Ohio, I work for a great company with the with the phenomenal team, so it’s fun to talk about them. That is a great line. Matt is going to be so happy with you over that one.
Okay, well, thank you so much. Annie Baymiller, if you joined us late today to watch this. Don’t worry. You can watch the full episode later here today, right on LinkedIn, but you can also find this in our library of leadership live shows on cio.com and on our YouTube channel. CIO Leadership Live is also available as an audio podcast wherever you find your podcast. You.
I hope you enjoyed today’s conversation with CIO and Senior VP Annie Baymiller of Owens Corning, as much as I did. And if you want to be sure you don’t miss any future shows, take a moment to subscribe to CIOs YouTube channel, where you’ll find more than 150
previous episodes of the podcast, along with several international editions that have been developing, involving CIOs from Canada, India, the Middle East, New Zealand and Australia. Thanks so much for tuning in, and we’ll see you here next time you.
Owens Corning CIO Annie Baymiller on supporting business hypergrowth
