| | DECEMBER 20218CIOReviewIN MY OPINIONBy Bryan Goodman, Director, AI Advancement Center and Cloud, Ford Motor CompanyLEVERAGING THE CLOUD FOR DATA AND ANALYTICSMy grandfather was a farmer from the 1940s through the 1970s. He witnessed significant technological advancements in farming and farm equipment, and he had to balance his capital investment in equipment to have a successful business. He had to stay modern to be efficient and competitive, but if he spent too much the farm would not have been profitable. Of course, all companies face similar decisions. When it comes to leveraging the cloud for data and analytics, however, the trade-offs between investment and performance have some interesting characteristics. These make some business decisions rather complex and others quite simple.At Ford, as in many businesses today, we are well down the path of modernizing all parts of our business, digitally transforming a 118-year-old company into a software-led operation. This transformation is especially important for us to achieve our goal to lead the rollout of new connected vehicle innovations to millions of customers ­ not just a few luxury buyers ­ to radically change our customers' ownership experience -- from occasional transactions to an always-on connection with continuously upgraded products and services. In the old way, Ford would make a vehicle, sell it, and hope to see the customer again in a few years when they wanted to purchase their next vehicle. Now, because of vehicle connectivity, we can adapt products to meet customers' needs, add features and modernize our quality processes through Ford Power-Up over-the-air software updates, and provide services such as predictive maintenance and fleet management.Bryan Goodman
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