How CIO Darrell Stein is connecting data at Reckitt Benckiser

Stein explains how he's bringing his decade-long experience of managing data and cyber security to the consumer goods giant

On his journey to becoming a CIO, Darrell Stein has worked for huge organisations - the likes of Mars and Ernst & Young, before finally making it to the top of the IT ladder at Vodafone. Next, he moved to Marks & Spencer (M&S), where he spent eight years - a lengthy period for a CIO - and now, he finds himself at global consumer goods giant Reckitt Benckiser (RB), whose brands include Dettol, Strepsils, Veet and Durex.

Stein tells Computing that his time at M&S was a good preparation for his job at RB, especially when it comes to two key areas: cyber security and data.

"Data has been used in retail [for a while now], whereas it is a bit newer to our organisation. Something retailers have been doing for a while now is [thinking about] high availability within the supply chain; it's all about availability, whether it's in-store, online, or anywhere [products have] to be available, and it's something that drove a lot of benefits at M&S," he says.

"It's all about on-shelf availability; you have to have the right product at the right time, without getting too much. Ideally, if someone comes to the store, you have [what they want] available," he adds.

Stein says it all comes down to connecting data, which is what he is looking to achieve at RB through a digital transformation initiative dubbed the "Connected Company Programme".

He gives three examples of what the firm is attempting to introduce or improve as part of the programme.

The first is to do with stock availability.

"Imagine [an RB sales rep] going into a pharmacy to visit a customer, taking an iPad. We've put an ordering system on the tablet so they can agree with a pharmacist what kind of products they want to re-stock. We've made that much more digital; they press a button and then the order is done," says Stein.

Not only that, the app also allows the rep to access information from social media about what's being said about products, and other useful data such as the latest weather and flu information for specific areas.

"So we can say the flu cycle is going to get bad in specific areas, so you might want to stock up there," Stein explains.

And, of course, RB wants to make sure its staff have real-time stock information, so they know what's available.

The second example Stein gives concerns the supply chain itself.

"We're building systems for forecasting, so that we know how much of a particular product to make based on our sales estimates," Stein says.

But RB wants to get more sophisticated than that.

"If you take new products, you generally don't know how well they're going to trade, so you make a batch and then you sell it. Ideally, you want to constantly monitor sales so that you can increase supplies to areas where the product is selling strongly, and that's all about connecting all of the processes together - in this case the sales and production part," he explains.

Finally, the firm wants the Connected Company Programme to help it get a better understanding of what's going on inside its business. The idea is to get detailed insight into the impact that meeting - or, indeed, missing - internal budgets and targets has on the company's performance in the market.

Leapfrogging to modern tech

In some cases, connecting data is only possible by connecting systems, or at least ensuring data is gathered by one system. As part of its efforts to bring greater uniformity to its core systems, the firm is part way through a project to upgrade its ERP system with SAP.

"Traditionally, we have been fragmented in our local systems, and we are globalising that at the moment," Stein reveals.

"What we're trying to do is take advantage of more modern technology, infrastructure and cloud and all of those things," he says.

And what about SAP HANA?

"We're using HANA in different places, but we're slightly more cautious. When you look at your ERP system, you need something that works all the time, so we're slightly less adventurous [with HANA]. When you talk about reporting, then yes absolutely, and we're taking advantage of the speed it offers, [but for ERP] it has to be industrial strength," says Stein.

Stein says that RB has a lot of data "that doesn't necessarily talk to each other very well". The company wants to make use of cloud services so that the data can be sorted, managed and filtered to ensure it is of high quality, and then stored in the same place.

"In the old days it would be called an enterprise data warehouse, but what we're trying to do is find a clever way of doing that without spending vast sums of money on big data extraction projects that people did 10 years ago, that way we aren't pumping a lot of data everywhere," he says.

Stein explains that the firm is using big data technologies such as Hadoop, Amazon Web Services (AWS) for hosting, and a series of Birst business intelligence tools, which sit on top of that. This enables the company to collate vast amount of data.

On top of that, sit a number of visualisation.

"So, when we're getting data from marketing information provider Nielsen, for example, we use some of their tools because we don't want to rebuild stuff that's already fine. When we are comparing some of our internal statistics we use other visualisation tools," says Stein.

"We use a whole range of different ones - you can't set one tool for the market. It's a bit like BYOD, if you like. You have to be much more flexible, so you need to create the data at the bottom. But then, on the top, you stick on all of the tools because what I wouldn't want to do is have to rebuild and re-invest everything if a new visualisation tool came out. I want to be able to plug and play," he says.

But doesn't it cost more to have all of these different tools in place?

"Not really, because this is where you're really taking advantage of software-as-a-service. You're getting some pretty good deals on some of these products," says Stein.

"The real cost is making sure you're keeping the cost of hosting, data quality and manipulation down, which are areas that we are consolidating," he adds.

Stein says that the firm is trying to move as much as it can into the cloud and host as little as possible itself.

The CDO and CISO

"Myself and the CMO work together," says Stein, suggesting that there is no need for a specific CDO role at RB.

The company has a digital tech team and a digital marketing team that work closely together, and Stein says that the boundaries are a lot more blurred than they used to be.

"So we're hiring marketing people who are a lot more technically savvy and technical people who are much more marketing savvy - so they are separate teams but the line between the two is much more blurred, and what we're trying to do is build teams where you have a marketing person, a sales person and a technical person that are all working together on projects, rather than thinking about functional siloes," he says.

The marketing, IT and R&D teams sit together, and the fact they work in different disciplines is irrelevant. This, Stein says, is all part of the way the firm wants to ensure everything is connected together.

While RB doesn't have a CDO, it does have a CISO who looks after cyber security and data privacy.

The area of cyber security, Stein says, is about driving a cultural change in the organisation - something he tried to do at M&S.

RB has increased both the number of data protection awareness campaigns it holds internally, and its investment in cyber security in the past two years.

Stein says he spoke to cyber security firms recently who claimed that the easiest way to breach an organisation's defences is still phishing.

"That's why a lot of companies are putting in a lot of money in detection and management of incidents rather than protection. It's quite interesting where the budget is being spent, and that's quite a new phenomenon as we all used to spend money on protection," he says.

But who is to blame if RB does suffer a data breach?

"We haven't got to that point, thankfully. But ultimately it's down to me; someone has to be accountable for it," Stein says.

"My job is to increase the awareness, make sure we are spending the right amount of money and getting those investments right as well," he adds.

RB will hope that with more than a decade of experience as a CIO, Stein is ticking all of those boxes.