It is my pleasure to introduce Tony Thomas.
Tony is a global CIO of Nissan,
Tony, could you tell us more about your roles
and objectives at Nissan?
-: My responsibility here at Nissan predominantly
is to run all the information systems
and information technology for the entire value chain
across all regions, all functions for Nissan.
-: What were the key challenges for Nissan
to fully capture the value of digital?
-: We identified that our platforms are really fragmented,
quite obsolete and in some cases,
we really don't even have the ability
to move at the speed that the business is looking at.
We don't have the ability to capture the data
from the way we want so that we can unlock the value.
Lastly, because my team is not been able to deliver
at the speed and the quality that they were looking for,
the business teams themselves started
solving this problem themselves.
Which meant that there's been a proliferation
of what we call shadow IT,
where systems have been deployed,
but probably not with the right controls
and the scale that we're looking at.
-: So what are the changes you implemented
to unlock the value of digital and unleash it at scale?
-: Predominantly, three things.
First and foremost, building the right organization.
Second, ensuring that we have the right portfolio
and the portfolio management.
Third, having the right talent to drive
the outcomes that we look for.
Coming back into the organization,
since we were completely regionally aligned in the past,
we had to move towards a global organization
where we have regional CIOs responsible
for driving outcomes for the regions,
we have global leaders who own functionally
the capabilities that we need to drive across.
Then the second thing like I talked about was the portfolio.
We started diligently moving towards
portfolio rationalization and moving towards
more global applications.
We started working towards
more agile way of delivering
rather than the traditional waterfall.
We started focusing on doing
more smaller projects, rather than the long projects.
So we are able to get outcomes much faster.
Coming back to the talent,
our objective is to be truly technical.
So that we can drive the outcomes that we really want.
Which meant that we have to up skill our team,
bring them to the digital skills that we never had before.
So we created a Nissan Digital University,
so our team can learn the skills that they need
to be efficient and effective in the future.
-: One of the cornerstone initiatives
of the Nissan digital transformation,
is the setup of digital urban,
starting with a new digital urban India.
Could you tell us more about this digital urban?
-: It's a new concept in that sense.
So we are not talking about the traditional offshore model.
We are not talking about what they call
the Global Delivery Centers or the GDCs.
We are talking about building the center of excellence
where we have new product development capabilities,
new data delivery capabilities, cyber security capabilities,
some of the new product development skills
that we never had before.
The first came operational in India about a few months ago.
We are already close to 600 people there
and the team is already creating great outcomes
that we are really looking for and we are quite proud
of what we accomplished so far.
-: So where does Nissan digital stand today
in terms of value?
-: Our ambition is to provide 1% revenue growth, 1% overall
cost reduction, and 20% efficiency in my function.
We are very well progressing in all disciplines.
Very specifically speaking,
even the new capabilities we talked about,
artificial intelligence, even cybersecurity,
we have quite a few measurable use cases
where we've driven value back for the company.
From a cost reduction perspective,
we've been measuring the amount
of real cost that we take out from my function
so that we can reinvest that back
into digital transformation.
That is also going very well.
So we are quite happy with the progress
that we've been making that far.
Thank you Alex.
-: Tony, thank you very much.