'The key word is scale': Mars' Amit Apte on where IT can make a difference

Infrastructure scale is a ‘solved problem’, but software, people and applications still challenge IT leaders

Launching a digital product in a market or two is relatively easy; but scaling and expanding across brands and regions takes much more work, says Mars Pet Nutrition CIO Amitabh Apte.

I recently discussed the challenges of true digitisation for global, multi-brand, multi-regional businesses with Amitabh Apte, the CIO for the Pet Nutrition business division at Mars. He has been leading efforts to build core digital capabilities like APIs, data lake, middleware and AI / ML cloud applications at Mars over the past five years, and at Reckitt three years prior where he was the CTO.

"Digitisation is never an outcome," he says. "Digitisation is an ever-evolving challenge. The goalposts are shifting all the time."

New products, new challenges

Based on his experience of delivering a range of digital products across a diverse brand portfolio and multiple geographical regions, he says, "launching initial one or two products and services is never the big challenge."

"I think the key word here is scale. What we've learned in our journey is it's relatively easy to get the minimum viable product and launch initial digital and data services or proof of technology. You may also then be able to launch one product, two products or three products, across one or two brands across one or two regions.

"Where it gets tested and may risk breaking down is when you scale. When you scale digital products and services in truly global, multi-brand, multi-geography companies like Reckitt or Mars, you face some unique growth challenges that are hard to sustain successfully."

"Scale" doesn't just mean ensuring technology infrastructure issues like availability, security, storage or compute are going to meet the multi-brand, multi-geography demands. These challenges have been mostly solved now by the many of cloud computing solution providers.

The real challenge is the other elements: business application architecture, data architecture, software design and more, which underpins these capabilities.

Amitabh says that probably even more difficult solve is how does one scale the organisational digital capabilities, employee up-skilling on new digital ways of working, continuous learning and education that can be distributed evenly across multiple geographies?

"Are the organisations going to leverage a new digital paradigm to optimise existing business processes, go-to-market strategies, launching new consumer value propositions?" he asks

He further notes that not many CPG, FMCG, retail organisation can claim to have truly solved these sort of digital scaling capabilities in a multi-brand, multi-geography environment.

"I don't think many companies are going to say we have mastered scale. You can always keep on improving as you progress."

Business partnerships

Still, there's no doubt that Amitabh and his teams have gained great experience with scaling digital capabilities. Part of that comes from what he considers one of his key achievements from his time at Mars, as well Reckitt: transforming the tech focussed delivery team into "a true business partner."

Increasingly, the CIO - or CTO, COO, CDO etc - has to be more than a technologist. To secure the investment and support they need, they have to be able to talk with business leaders using a common business language.

What Amitabh has done, in both of his prior organisations, is build comprehensive business-technology alignment frameworks: processes that help spread the skills for creating and then speaking this common business language across the entire tech team. This helps business and functional leaders to articulate the digital roadmaps when working with their digital technology partners.

"This is where, typically, the technology teams have struggled. How many times have you heard from business that tech teams are speaking too much tech jargon? It's been there for ages. This also has to be balanced though.

"I never mask the tech details. In fact, I'm known for sharing the tech details with my business leaders. They are intelligent and you as a technology partner need to educate them.

"A good tech partner will never dumb down the technology details but will be a good business technology partner, work with them to create true digital roadmaps, paint the art of the possible, and create the end state that defines the success. And along the journey you also set ambitious but realistic expectations."

As we alluded to earlier, a modern IT leader can have a range of ‘Chief' titles: Information, Data, Technology, Operations, AI, Security. Amitabh says, quite simply, forget about the title:

"Irrespective of the title of the leader, you have to look at the key function they are expected to play, which is a true business technology partnership."