Panel Discussion:
IT and BI cases and careers, successes and
lessons learned
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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