Understanding the Language of Technology is the Way Forward

Tracy McElroy, Chief Digital Officer for Alliance Group

Tracy McElroy, Chief Digital Officer for Alliance Group

Tracy is a passionate advocate of Technology enabled Transformation, and is currently Chief Digital Officer at Alliance Group (a major NZ food producer). She originally trained as a BioTechnologist, then joined the graduate training programme for Fonterra (New Zealand’s dairy giant). She progressed through technical roles within Fonterra internationally until she joined their European business, where she decided that the world of information technology was where she wanted to focus. She joined Accenture, managing several ERP projects and change programmes, eventually returning to New Zealand to raise her family.

Here, she joined the Consulting Practice for Deloitte to lead their South Island Human Capital team supporting capability and cultural transformation projects for local government and large scale manufacturing/ supply chain organisations. From there she was offered the role of leading the South Island team for Datacom (Datacom is one of NZ’s largest tech companies and an emerging key player in Australia). And, a year ago, she joined Alliance Group, returning to her roots in the digital enablement of manufacturing, supply chain and export operations.

Following is the conversation we had with McElroy.

As the Chief Digital Officer at Alliance Group, could you provide an overview of your role and responsibilities within the company?

In fact I joined Alliance Group (one of NZ’s largest food manufacturing companies) to establish this role. I kicked off with a discovery phase to identifykey digital challenges and opportunities for Alliance. I also used a portfolio approach that ensured “digital” projects were aligned with the wider spectrum of technology projects, especially where shared resources were required. In practice, our level of technology maturity defined the approach as Alliancehad reached a point where the demand for and complexity of digital tools and the opportunities to engage with customers and suppliers required structure and consolidation. In summary, the role has evolved into three focus areas – building an overall strategy for the IT team and within that, building a strategy and delivery capability to manage digital innovation and thirdly, driving inflight digital initiatives to completion. As a Chief Digital Officer, what are some of the key challenges you face in leveraging technology effectively? Three key challenges have characterized the journey so far. The first is a fairly common one – introducingagile processes into a largely “waterfall” orientedorganization. The organization had also been disappointed by previous “Minimum Viable Product” projects that had failed to deliver the required business capability (instead creating cumbersome workarounds), and this hadn’t helped the reputation of “agile”. I needed to use different language to soften the message, for example reframing MVP as building “core” functionality first, adding new “features” over time.

The second was our fractured data foundation. We had (and still do) incomplete or inconsistent data sets due to being in transit between legacy and modern systems, as well as a plethora of Excel spreadsheets and paper forms and inconsistent use of systems across our distributed plant and office network.

Therefore going “digital”has meant a focus on implementing systems to replace manual processes to create an end-to-end data “backbone”, from which to digitize the business.

Finally, with tight restrictions on budget and resources it has been a challenge to measure the relative value of vastly different technology investments, especially with significant intangible or risk reduction benefits. Foundational systems that don’t produce direct business benefits but are nevertheless key precursors to digital solutions has required a willingness for executive leaders to understand the complex relationships between data, people, technology systems and business outcomes.

With the rapid pace of technological advancements, how to stay informed about emerging technologies and assess their potential impact?

Listening to podcasts is a key way in which I learn, helped by a long commute to work! I usually select American podcasts as NZ tends to lag the United States in terms of uptake of technologies (by a few months or years depending on the technology domain) so it is really useful to hear about the problems of the next stage of our evolution – with the aim of trying to avoid the pitfalls, if possible! I also regularly attend technology and food and manufacturing industry conferences and read relevant publications. And while I don’t want to encourage spamming, I do read the best of the material that I get sent from companies with innovative ideas! I’m also naturally curious and ask lots of questions – I get to sit next to people from different disciplines in our hot-desking situation so I try to learn something from everyone. I also rely on a small group of specialist technology partners to provide expertise, knowledge and critical thinking on our key challenges.

We have had to focus on building foundational systems first, before building truly digital mechanisms to better engage with customers and key stakeholders

What advice would you give to young professionals who are interested in pursuing a career in technology, and what qualities do you think are essential for success in this field?

I regularly speak at events to encourage people to start technology careers, especially women and these are the key points I regularly makeat these presentations….

1• A key enabler to a technology career is knowing the language of technology. Luckily you can use an AI Chatbot to search anything on the internet or listen to podcasts to see how others talk about technology to learn. And once you know some key terms used in the industry, it is much less intimidating to then ask questions and discuss ideas with others.

2• Do a short-course. I’ve advised lots of people who have shown interest in a tech career to take a 6 month, entry level, general IT skills course. From there, try to figure out what field of technology you are most interested in. Networking engineers have very different skills from cloud engineers, back end programming skills are different to front end. And don’t worry if the engineering stuff doesn’t suit, roles such as business analyst, project manager, tester, trainer and change manager are just as important - I have lots of stories about brilliant technology that failed to deliver value due to poor uptake by business users!

3• Focus on understanding the business context. Ask questions and learn about whatever the primary business is of your organization as technology is simply an enabler of the business. Who is the customer? What matters to them? What are the core products and services and what supporting information drives extra value? How does technology fit into the big picture?

In terms of qualities, I like the concept of “T shaped” people. By this I mean people with at least one very deep (probably technical or consulting) skillset, but balanced out by a broad range of other skills in non-technology domains such as sales, marketing, accounting and industry sectors. Don’t be afraid to change jobs every couple of years to get these skills if you need to, but also be careful of your brand and reputation – treat your colleagues, partners and organizations well and aim to build a long list of people who will refer you!

And finally, as the field of technology has such a huge impact in the world, I want to thank the APAC CIOoutlook team for giving me the opportunity to contribute to the conversation!