| | March 20169CIOReviewIT is Evolving into an Enable RoleToday, IT spends an inordinate amount of time managing the ERP and surrounding systems. Granted, it's the classic mis-sion of IT, but time spent "feeding the monster" in the data center is time not spent on helping our business win. Beyond that, running enterprise systems is not a core competency. The promise is moving to fully service driven software solutions across the board. It exists today in some providers such as Salesforce.com and Workday and others, but it's still not fully realized. We want to see that capability across all our enter-prise systems. Our core system provider, SAP, is moving in that direction with their new suites of S/4 HANA, but it's a work in progress. Beyond enterprise systems, the middle-ware we use is also a work in pro-gress. To operate more effectively its plumbing will need to evolve to work seamlessly in a cloud delivered model, where so-lutions provided from dif-ferent vendors can interact without constant atten-tion. We're not yet there in the middle-ware market, but it's moving that way. I see a lot of promise in In-formatica as they move towards a cloud delivered middleware strat-egy, but nirvana is still several years away.IT has begun evolving into an en-able role in Axalta. We are now beginning to bring together business teams to cre-ate a more robust digital strategy for customer engagement. We are also moving towards business process optimization enabled by a consolidated ERP strategy. Recently, we hired an IT leader for Business IT Innovation and she will be part of a strong push to continue the evolution of IT as a business enabling function. Mobile and IoT as Two Critical ForcesI think mobile and IOT will become critical in the next few years. Our customers run the gamut from Fortune 50 to small mom and pop businesses. We need to be easy to work no mat-ter who is on the other end of a re-quest. Mobile tech-nology will be a key to that, and we'll see continued use of mobile customer interfaces. This needs to lay over a strong data infra-structure and solid delivery systems, so we're back to my first point. But this is one of the critical paths to differentia-tion. On the supply chain side, IOT will help us provide real time information on the efficiency of our processes to our internal teams. Pulling together the data of process manufacturing to optimize our production and fulfill-ment will help us provide the best products possible on a con-sistent basis. An IT integrated Security is EssentialWe're not a consumer company, so today we see the need for IT integrated security. Having IT security embedded in our push to cloud and software as a service is critical now. As we continue to move customer relationships to mobile enabled, we may evolve how we think about IT security, but for now we think it's positioned correctly as a member of our IT leader-ship team.Advice to Budding CIOsGet out and understand the business. If you are inwardly fo-cused, trying to "run IT," then you're not helping as much as you could. Process manufacturing is a widely variable industry that has multiple supply chain, process technology, and customer engagement processes. Create a strong work-ing relationship with Procurement, as raw material strategic sourcing is another critical enabler. Understanding the variety of business process and customer interaction is critical to op-timizing the IT systems you are responsible for. That's advice that works in any business, but it seems to be amplified even more in process manufacturing where the cost is in the raw materials and the customer fulfillment process. Layer in auto-motive manufacturing and the high service coatings business and you can't afford to be an inwardly focused CIO. Aaron Weis
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