In 2019, Fast Company named Rockwell Automation among “The 50 Best Workplaces for Innovators”. The company’s workplace culture helped rank it among the best on this inaugural list. Fast Company recognized their way of working, with the resources, technologies, industry expertise, and market presence to drive technology collaboration across the organization, align smart factory technologies and best-in-class platforms, and create unmatched integrated information solutions – the most comprehensive and flexible Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) offering in the industrial space.
In March 2023, Foundry’s CIO named Chris Nardecchia, senior vice president and Chief Digital & Information Officer, Rockwell Automation, as a 2023 CIO 100 award winner. For more than 30 years, the CIO 100 awards have recognized innovative organizations around the world that exemplify the highest level of strategic and operational excellence in information technology (IT).
Also, in March of this year, the Best in Biz Awards named Rockwell Automation a silver winner in three categories: Most Innovative Company of the Year – Large, Technology Executive of the Year and Innovator of the Year, and Chris was recognized for his leadership in both the Technology Executive of the Year and Innovator of the Year categories.
Led by Chris, Rockwell Automation has sponsored hack-a-thons, called 24toCode, to embrace a fast forward mindset. As a leader, Chris wants to encourage employees to experiment, continuous learning and course-correct quickly, and adopt an agile growth mindset. Rockwell hackathons provide a virtual forum for technology, software coding, and programming teams globally to apply their problem-solving skills to real-world challenges that affect the industrial software and automation industry. This is part of Rockwell’s learn-by-doing culture. “We know that innovation results from the collaboration of different voices exchanging and cultivating new ideas. We want to see a group of people from diverse backgrounds and geographies come together to solve real-world business problems, by combining human ingenuity with machine and operations data,” says Chris.
Journey to the CIO Level
Chris began his career at Rockwell Automation in 2017. Before joining the company, he was vice president and CIO, of Global Operations and Supply Chain, at Amgen. He also held leadership roles at Pfizer and Warner-Lambert, which was acquired by Pfizer. At these companies Chris led IT-enabled business and digital strategy and accelerated growth through technology and data analytics, driving business innovations that improved profitability, globalization, restructuring, and mergers. He has an extensive background in portfolio management, engineering, operations, mergers and acquisitions, IT risk management, analytics, and using technology to drive business insights.
Earlier in his career, Chris held process and production engineering roles in the pharmaceutical, chemical, and nuclear industries. One milestone for CIOs in general and personally for Chris is the change in reporting relationships. This is the first time in the history of Rockwell that the CIO has reported directly to the CEO. In previous times the CIO reported to the CFO – as was the case at many companies. As the influence of information and technology grows within and throughout an organization, and with partners and customers, the role of the CIO also grows in prominence. In short, the role of the CIO is evolving from being a technology manager to being a data steward, innovation driver, and strategic advisor. Reporting to the CEO ensures that IT is integral to the company strategy and a voice in decision-making. IT is now viewed as a partner rather than back-office support.
Their vision is helping to transform the enterprise, elevating IT from a fulfillment role to an integral part of accomplishing the company’s mission to make customers more resilient, agile, and sustainable by delivering industrial automation and digital transformation solutions that simplify complex challenges. The convergence of IT with operational technology (OT) is a critical component of digital transformation for industrial operations. “For Rockwell, we are uncovering new opportunities to capitalize on our data, and we’re helping our customers to do the same. As IT and OT converge, only leading-edge ideas and software will survive and thrive, and those are delivered by leveraging IT,” share Chris. He wrote more about this in his Fast Company contributed article: IT/OT convergence starts with the CIO.
The Evolving Role of a CIO
As CIO at a Fortune 500 company, Chris often feels like a captain of a ship piloting through sometimes unpredictable and always changing currents. In the past, his job was to ensure that the ship’s technology infrastructure and transactional systems were running smoothly and that the company was on course to navigate to a destination safely and efficiently. Today, Chris sees himself more as a lighthouse keeper or an admiral of a fleet of ships, responsible not just for guiding the ship safely, but also for anticipating potential hazards and helping the crews of a flotilla of ships steer clear of those hazards. The seascape has changed, and there are new challenges on the horizon that require a different approach. One of the biggest changes is the growing importance of data and the shift to every company being driven by software.
As companies collect more and more data, Chris explains that the role of the CIO has shifted from simply managing technology to becoming a data steward. It is his responsibility to ensure that the data is accurate, secure, and accessible to those who need it and leverage that data to create insights and new opportunities. He’s responsible for creating a unified customer experience and a data factory, that continuously adapts and improves, fuels a company’s economic engine and future opportunities.
Another opportunity is the need to constantly innovate and reinvent. The pace of technological change is rapid, and companies that fail to keep up risk falling behind. As a result, CIOs need to be proactive in identifying new technologies and business models that can give their companies a competitive edge.
Finally, CIOs must also play a strategic role in the overall direction of the company. Technology is now a fundamental driver of business strategy and business success, and CIOs must work closely with other members of the executive team, and the other ships in the flotilla, to ensure that technology initiatives align with the company’s overall goals and strategy.
“It is a challenging and exciting time to be a CIO – a role that encompasses all the traditional CIO accountabilities but is increasingly adding the responsibilities of chief digital, data, transformation, and innovation officers and quickly evolving to include revenue generation and business transformation,” explains Chris.
Aligning IT Initiatives with Company Goals
From a seat at the leadership table, Chris can socialize ideas, innovations, and solutions with his peers and align the company’s actions. Citing an example of a challenge that existed before he became Rockwell’s CIO, Chris explains that over time, packets of shadow IT popped up to solve problems locally. One of his first goals as CIO was to build trust and credibility. He spoke with every employee of IT, more than 300 people, about their ideas of how they can change that situation and transform how IT operates so people could rely on the organization and not just ‘someone they knew who could help.’ They started to fold shadow IT into the larger organization and integrate Rockwell’s objectives and strategy. This was the first step towards creating a culture and shifting the mindset that IT is a business partner. Now, five years later, Rockwell no longer has a separate IT technology roadmap; they are integrated into the business roadmap as the key enabler of success.
CIOs, Chris feels, must be ready to constantly innovate and reinvent so their companies stay competitive and don’t fall behind. And most importantly, modern CIOs must play a strategic role in the overall direction of the company. Technology is a fundamental driver of business strategy and success, and technology initiatives must align with the company’s overall goals and strategy. Modern CIOs are in the best position to be chief organizational change leaders. They are already driving business transformations at scale and need to have strong change leadership skills that align their peers and board members toward the unified end goal. The CIO is no longer just a support function or an enabler of the business, it is the strategic driver of business growth and transformation.
Challenges at Hand
CIOs face many unique challenges and one of the best ways to explore solutions for those challenges is tapping the skills and expertise of industry peers and IT colleagues. That was the approach Chris utilized too with other CIOs at the Transformation Expanded event. Together over two days, these CIOs agreed on themes that apply across industry, including:
1) Leadership and culture matter,
2) Each customer is at a different place in their digital journey – there is no longer a question of why we need to transform, rather it is a strategic imperative and how fast can we transform,
3) Technology is not a limitation however simplification of deployment models helps with scaling fast,
4) There are synergies between digital transformation and ESG goals and more work is to be done and
5) Talent always is top of mind issue.
Regarding talent Chris wrote two more contributed article for Fast Company:
• The CIO’s greatest recruitment challenge: Diversity in tech: The viability of remote work means your company’s location is no longer a potential detriment to recruiting. Since we’re leveling the playing field, companies must rely more heavily on their differentiators, like technology and work culture, to attract and retain talent. This is especially true in the tech space, where an emphasis on a company’s equity and inclusion practices might be the key to attracting diverse talent.
• CIOs need curious technologists: While it’s crucial that people in IT organizations constantly evolve their practical understanding and application of the newest technology, it’s even more important to focus on learning and development for personal and professional growth.
Measuring the Success of IT initiatives
Per Chris, while traditional CIOs were measured on IT outcomes such as cost and efficiency, modern CIOs are evaluated on business outcomes. IT is aligned with integrated business objectives (annual recurring revenue growth, improving customer experience, successful new digital product launches, etc.). They have the traditional KPIs and OKRs for IT but also have business metrics. These metrics help CIOs determine how much time and money they spend on operations (performing – such as MTTR, uptime, say/do ratio and measuring spend on run, grow transform activities) versus investment planning to prioritize what will help them transform the organization and build the future. Alignment of enterprise priorities is managed through a cross-functional investment council that ensures investments are producing the intended results and helps manage change and communication across the enterprise.
Chris cites the Rockwell Enterprise Transformation Office (ExO) as a great example of technology being integrated into all aspects of the business and the cross-functional approach. “Through the ExO we have visibility with the entire executive team and a standing agenda item monthly to look at major strategic technology innovations and how they link to our strategy. That is how we determine our investment planning and prioritization, so we’re focusing our IT spending on what’s most important to the company’s strategy. IT is an enabler of the strategy; the business is IT and IT is the business,” he explains. And this maps closely to what we see in our customers where IT and OT are converging to create a connected enterprise, a digital thread through design, operate and maintain of their products.
Trends to Look For
Chris sees big trends on the horizon in the next five years and will help his organization prepare for them.
Adaptive artificial intelligence (AI) will be key to navigating data challenges in both the cloud and at the edge (closer to the source producing the data) and reaping the greatest rewards from industrial data, expects Chris. We will continue to hear a lot about AI, natural language processing (NLP), and chatbots, as well as augmented reality (AR) and machine learning (ML). There’s a fear of the unknown around emerging technology and Chris advises that CIOs should lead the organization in understanding not only the technology but how the technology can and should be applied to benefit the enterprise, employees, customers, and partners. Among these technologies, he considers the biggest breakthrough is augmented intelligence. “We are not trying to replace humans with this technology; we are trying to bring advanced technology and human creativity together,” he says. Chris wrote about this in How adaptive AI is changing the cloud vs. edge debate for manufacturers.
Advice for Aspiring CIOs
There’s an evolving CIO checklist because changing responsibilities require a broader set of skills and expertise than traditional CIO roles:
• Cross-industry familiarity: Digital innovation requires connecting disparate insights for organizational and customer gain.
• Business & strategy acumen: Emphasize business and technology goals equally, and make decisions through a strategic lens.
• Partnering with business stakeholders: Collaborating with businesses to explore new opportunities and create new business value.
• Customer focus: Engaging in more revenue-generating activities requires a deeper understanding of customer needs.
• Communication & storytelling: Engaging a broader audience through common vocabulary and compelling messaging.
• People management & emotional intelligence: Interactions with internal and external stakeholders require a non-technical empathy for trust-based relationships with a broad stakeholder group.
• Diversity, equity, and inclusion: Strengthen resiliency, decision-making, and team performance by supporting all manner of stakeholders.
• Agile & design thinking practices: Maximize value creation through rapid iterations of customer-centric product delivery.
“You no longer can think of yourself as traditional CIO because we no longer are expected to perform but to TRANSFORM. I sat down with Forbes‘ Diane Brady to discuss my journey in transforming the Rockwell business model and my emphasis on sustainable IT. According to Chris, you can watch it here: Bracing For The Autonomy Revolution, And Why This CIO Wants To “Go Slow To Go Fast”.