MAY - 2023AUTOTECHOUTLOOK.COM8IN MY OPINIONEarl Newsome is currently serving as the chief information officer of Cummins Inc. and has over 30 years of experience in a leading major transformation of global IT organizations into world-class centers of technology innovation and operational excellence. With his strategic vision and IT expertise, Newsome helps organizations align their technology with business requirements and accelerate positive outcomes. His passion for bettering customer experience, increasing employee engagement, and achieving first-mover advantage allows organizations to attain a highly competitive edge in the market. In his current role, Newsome provides his organization with a strategic vision for developing and implementing IT initiatives along with supporting and leading the internal IT organization and outsourced partners. He also delivers strategic input and executes on IT roadmaps. Newsome is also the co-chair of TechPACT, a civic and social organization that aims to amplify people and partnerships to reduce the digital divide and pursue representative diversity throughout the technology community by the end of the decade. In an interview with Auto Tech Outlook, Newsome sheds light on how information technology and operational technology are converging to reshape the future of the automotive industry. He also talks about the importance of diversity and inclusion in eliminating the talent shortage affecting the technology space.Please walk us through a typical day of you as a global IT leader and CIO of Cummins Inc.While being new at Cummins Inc., during the first year I drove the organization's transformation efforts by setting a hundred-day agendas. I divide a year into a group of hundred days and try to achieve certain goals in that timeframe. In the first hundred days, I aim to learn more about the company and the industry and immerse myself in how the business operates. To understand its ethnography, I interact with the distributors and visit plants and offices. In the next set of hundred days, I focus on learning the hot topics in the market and categorizing them from most important to least. It is extremely critical in driving our current initiatives and ensuring that they are aligned with the needs of the business. In the third hundred-day span, the process of establishing my brand identity begins. We work on identifying what we would want the IT brand to reflect and what is necessary for us to succeed in our niche. The fourth set is where I establish the agenda and share it with my employees so they can execute it daily. Here, I study and understand our company's history and collect client feedback to set a strategy that can help the organization improve further and sustain what's properly functioning. By combining ongoing trends and roadmap, the agenda creates a compelling strategy for the future and charts a path towards successful transformation. In this business flexibility is a virtue, thus the activities in each 100-day segment may change based on progresses and business needs.The lesson to take away is about thinking and executing your plans by fragmenting them into short-term goals and immersing yourself in the company's history, objectives, business ideas, and market trends to create a future-proof strategy. It is crucial to understand what your brand reflects and do everything in your power to reinforce that continuously. To do so, you need to build a communication strategy that gets every person in your organization engaged and walking towards success together.By Earl Newsome, Chief Information Officer, Cummins Inc. THE IMPORTANCE OF BRINGING `HYPER REALISM' IN THE TRANSPORTATION AND AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRYEarl Newsome
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