Panel Discussion: IT and BI cases and careers, successes and lessons learned • • • • Sarah Griffin, Retired McDonald's Director of System Development Chris Millington, Retired McDonald’s CTO Rohan Phillips- Retired McDonald's Senior Director/Chief Technology Architect Don Chapman, Retired McDonald’s Senior Director, Global Technology Sourcing November 3, 2014 Agenda • Topic 1: Intro, Short Bios • Topic 2: Two or 3 things most responsible for your success • Topic 3: Two or 3 things most desired by businesses from their hires • Topic 4: Your best example of matching a technology solution to a business problem. • Topic 5: Your favorite example of using BI for competitive advantage. • Topic 6: Your recommended action for a 20 year old to take in his/her life, right now, to enhance both life and career. Topic 1: Intro, Short Bios Sarah Griffin – Retired Director of IT at McDonald’s corporation (11 years) • Developed Global business applications • Created a Project Management Office • Directed the Enterprise Architecture/Infrastructure team • Created the multi-year IT strategic plan • Developed a data warehouse and business intelligence tool to access the data – ELC Coach and Instructor, NIU Topic 1: Intro, Short Bios Chris Millington – Principal, Top Down Leadership Consulting, LLC. “Leading from Every Seat”. – Retired Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at McDonald’s corporation (12 years) – Former Vice President/Chief Technology Officer at Kemper Insurance (2 years) – Former Vice President/CIO at Amex Life Assurance (3 years) – Former Vice President Migration Planning at American Express (9 years) Topic 1: Intro, Short Bios Rohan Phillips, Ph.D. – Retired Chief Technology Architect for Information Technology at McDonald’s Corporation (17 years) – Former Partner at Optimum Solutions, Inc. (10 years) • Executed large-scale systems integration projects at Fortune 500 companies Topic 1: Intro, Short Bios Don Chapman – Retired Senior Director, Global Technology Sourcing at McDonald’s corporation (15 years) – BS, Finance, Penn State; MBA Finance, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania – Served as an Army officer, starting as an Armor (tanks) Officer and separated as a Captain in the Finance Corps – Spent 13 years leading financial support to the IT departments of several large banks (US Bankcorp, Continental Bank & Bank of America). Overarching objective was to run IT more like a business. – Spent 15 years at McDonald's, first leading financial support to the IT department and eventually retiring as Senior Director, Global Technology Sourcing. Overarching objective was to maximize the value of IT spending. Topic 2: Two or 3 things most responsible for your success 1.Constant learning 2.Strategic thinking 3.Taking risks Topic 2: Two or 3 things most responsible for your success 1. Owning my career (no entitlement) 2. Listening (Active and passive) 3. Humility 4. Risk Taking (Never afraid to fail). Topic 2: Two or 3 things most responsible for your success 1. Education 2. Working for and with people I respected and could learn from 3. Finding what I was good at and enjoyed doing Topic 2: Two or 3 things most responsible for your success 1. Education and continuous learning 2. Persistence, learning from my mistakes. It’s not about your failures but how you recover from them. 3. Support system: family, friends and business relationships Topic 2: Two or 3 things most responsible for your success 1.Constant learning 2.Strategic thinking 3.Taking risks Rohan Topic 2: Two or 3 things most responsible for your success 1. Owning my career (no entitlement) 2. Listening (Active and passive) 3. Humility 4. Risk Taking (Never afraid to fail). Chris Topic 2: Two or 3 things most responsible for your success 1. Education 2. Working for and with people I respected and could learn from 3. Finding what I was good at and enjoyed doing Don Topic 2: Two or 3 things most responsible for your success 1. Education and continuous learning 2. Persistence, learning from my mistakes. It’s not about your failures but how you recover from them. 3. Support system: family, friends and business relationships Sarah Topic 3: 2 or 3 things most desired by businesses from their hires Topic 3: 2 or 3 things most desired by businesses from their hires 1. 2. 3. Passion and engagement, you can be trained to do anything Resourceful, ability to solve problems innovatively Collaborative working and communicating with others Sarah Topic 3: 2 or 3 things most desired by businesses from their hires 1. 2. 3. 4. Communication Skills (Verbal, Listening and Concise confident responses) Willingness to start at the bottom (NO ENTITLEMENT) Have Goals Display Energy and Passion for you goals Chris Topic 3: 2 or 3 things most desired by businesses from their hires 1. Adaptability – the capability to adapt education and experience to the business environment and objectives of the company so that one can make relevant contributions. 2. Passion for work, good work ethics and the desire and willingness to do whatever it takes to get the job done. 3. Soft skills – people interaction skills, good verbal and written communication skills, ability to collaborate and function effectively in team environments. Rohan Topic 3: 2 or 3 things most desired by businesses from their hires 1. 2. 3. Passion for what we are doing linked to a sharp and enquiring mind Ability to work effectively in teams. Show up on time and do more than your fair share. Emotional intelligence Don Topic 4: Your best example of matching a technology solution to a business problem Sarah’s Business Problem: Problems with the microphone at the drive thru order taker make it hard to hear and often orders are not correctly entered into the POS. Topic 4: Your best example of matching a technology solution to a business problem Sarah’s Solution: By being able to have your order ready to be scanned from a mobile device, there should be less issues in getting the order submitted correctly. Result: Similar to kiosk, people are ordering more and orders were more accurate, so far (This is new and being tested in the US and Australia. ). Topic 4: Your best example of matching a technology solution to a business problem Rohan’s Business Problem: Long lead times (multiple years) required for business application development at McDonald’s because of the difficulty of sourcing business data for the application to use. Further, every business application development project would attempt to source its own data and the efforts would be duplicated with no synergy or leverage between projects. Topic 4: Your best example of matching a technology solution to a business problem Rohan’s Solution: McDonald’s implemented a solution known as “Master Data Management” where all key business data is collected and stored centrally for use by multiple application development teams – each development effort accesses the required business data from a central repository. Lead time for business application development has been reduced from years to months with associated cost reductions and making the applications available to the business in a timely manner. Topic 4: Your best example of matching a technology solution to a business problem Chris’s Business Problem: Cashless payment. Expand the business by allowing credit cards as a new payment option to customers in a secure manner. The Payment Card Industry Standard (PCI) requires that a company have security in place to protect customer credit card information to prevent fraud and harm to the customer. Since MCD did not use credit cards and was a previously a cash business, this was not previously a problem for the company. Credit Cards now would bring more risk in our business model, requiring us to provide a means to protect our customer’s credit card data both stored and transmitted. Topic 4: Your best example of matching a technology solution to a business problem Chris’s Solution: Our previous Point of Sale systems were basically all-inclusive and performed all functions necessary to run the restaurant. We needed to ensure that the payment system was secure and that any future maintenance would not compromise our secure solution. Since a new Point of Sale was being developed and it would be difficult to sell PCI compliance by itself, we teamed with the Point of Sale team to include the security enhancements in the new solution. Architected a solution for a segmented network that isolated payment information from restaurant management functions. Storage of credit card information was prohibited by policy, except that which was allowed under PCI for the very time period for transaction authorization. Solution was presented to senior management and they concurred. Result: McDonald’s Payment Card Solution was certified as PCI compliant in 2010 and is being implemented globally along with the new POS solution. Topic 4: Your best example of matching a business solution to a technology problem (reversed!) Don’s Technology Problem: The IT infrastructure department at McDonald's was not that big and really did not have the critical mass for the long haul. Topic 4: Your best example of matching a business solution to a technology problem (reversed!) Don’s Business Solution: We outsourced the department and saved the McDonald's shareholders about 13% of the projected future spending. Topic 5: Your favorite example of using BI for competitive advantage Topic 5: Your favorite example of using BI for competitive advantage Sarah’s Business Decision: Should McD’s offer a McRib sandwich? Topic 5: Your favorite example of using BI for competitive advantage How BI helped Sarah’s Business Decision: Through analyzing the buying patterns of the customer, McDonald’s was able to see how the McRib would be highly purchased for a few weeks and there were “tradeoffs” – in other words, maybe a big mac was not being purchased anymore. After a few weeks the McRib sales would drop. Having McRib on the menu all the time was difficult – there would be few orders and hard to keep on hand and fresh. Result: Was to offer McRib for just a promotion period. Take advantage of the peak and then remove from the menu. Topic 5: Your favorite example of using BI for competitive advantage Chris’ Business Decision: Who should American Express offer credit cards to? Topic 5: Your favorite example of using BI for competitive advantage How BI helped Chris’ Business Decision: We found the optimal balance of New Accounts growth (by changing credit scoring criteria to accept more applicants -top line revenue) and Credit losses (negative direct bottom line losses). American express had the lowest credit losses in the industry at the time as a result of this ability to tie these two disparate numbers together as a result of a BI application implementation. Topic 5: Your favorite example of using BI for competitive advantage Rohan’s Business Decision: What should McD’s have as current menu items, plan for new menu items and plan for future raw food commodity purchases (commodity hedging)? Topic 5: Your favorite example of using BI for competitive advantage How BI helped Rohan’s Business Decision: McDonald’s requires the capability to understand their customers’ buying patterns in the restaurants around the globe – for example: what menu items are most frequently purchased, what mix of menu items are usually ordered together, what times of the day are certain menu items most likely to be purchased, etc. McDonald’s has developed an application called “Sales and Product Mix Analysis” that answers the above questions. It is an application that is hosted in the McDonald’s Enterprise Business Intelligence Data Warehouse. The application analyzes the sales and associated menu item data in several countries where McDonald’s has a large population of restaurants. Topic 6: Your recommended action for a 20 year old to take in his/her life, right now, to enhance both life and career. • Find that sweet spot of something you like to do and that you can become an expert at doing. Then do the extra hard work to succeed. Don Topic 6: Your recommended action for a 20 year old to take in his/her life, right now, to enhance both life and career. • Look at how to craft a resume, interview, target companies you want to work for, create an approach to getting to them. • Take advantage of the tons of school resources, books, internship opportunities, Experiential Learning Center projects. Take a sales course – you are now the “product”. Books I recommend: “The Peak Interview by Bill Burnett and “Leadership Presence” by Halpern and Lubar. • Just like put the oxygen mask on you first in an flight emergency, take care of yourself – exercise, eat right and manage the stress of a work life balance. You will be of no use to anyone if you are not well. • Once you get a job, take a portion of each paycheck and save it, you will be amazed how fast it will grow. Learn about managing your personal finances. Take full advantage of company 401k and other benefit programs. Sarah Topic 6: Your recommended action for a 20 year old to take in his/her life, right now, to enhance both life and career. • Get yourself on an ELC project and get real world experience working with real companies to solve real business challenges. Sign up for internships to secure further practical knowledge. • Enhance you written and verbal communication skills. Know your styles of listening and communicating. • Develop your expectations/Goals for where you want to be and how you’re going to get there. • Don’t be afraid to fail. Many great learnings have come from perceived failures. Chris Topic 6: Your recommended action for a 20 year old to take in his/her life, right now, to enhance both life and career. • Pursue an industry internship in your Junior and Senior years to get some real world experience and enhance your resume. • Focus on enhancing your “soft skills” – examples: communication (written and verbal), collaborating with peers in team environments (through team projects) and interviewing for jobs. • Broaden your education through either a strong minor outside of your major, or through courses that will give you a better understanding of business and the real world. This gives you a Plan A and Plan B. The capability to adapt and function in a variety of roles will increase your scope of opportunity as you pursue employment. • Live within your means, do not overextend yourself financially, start to build up your credit rating. Rohan