Transforming Disks to Data
Who are Western Digital?
Western Digital is a world leader in manufacturing storage solutions. Their portfolio consists of hard drives, solid state drives, systems and platforms for a variety of markets and segments from consumers to hyperscale cloud data centres. Sitting at #158 in the Fortune 500, with revenues of more than $19 billion and more than 70,000 employees, the organisation is a significant player on the world stage.
Consuming approximately 33% of the total disk drive market, according to IT Candor research, Western Digital is by far the largest player in this space and is certainly one that IT leaders should keep an eye on. Especially considering the company’s recent growth, which has been both organic and through a significant number of mergers and acquisitions.
Over the past several years, Western Digital has made seven sizeable acquisitions. Most notably was a significant competitor, SanDisk, for $19 billion in 2016. Another acquisition was HGST, bought from Hitachi and originally IBM’s hard drive business, which kicked off the acquisition streak when it was purchased for close to $4 billion back in 2012.
Alongside this significant growth through acquisition, Western Digital is working through a transformation of their business strategy described to us as a move from producing storage devices into a data infrastructure provider, able to deliver solutions across the whole storage spectrum.
Who is leading the project?
In tandem with the wider business transformation, Western Digital decided it would be advantageous to perform a digital transformation, revitalising and future proofing its critical technology architecture to allow it to scale and succeed in the future.
At the centre of this transition is Steve Philpott, Western Digital’s CIO. We had the opportunity to talk in depth with Steve about the organisation’s strategy behind these transformations, the challenges the company has encountered, and the opportunities to deliver value they have discovered.
First, we talked a little about Steve’s history. How did he end up in this position? Steve tells us that he did not intend to go into a career in IT. Rather, he completed an undergraduate degree in Engineering from the US Naval Academy as part of his service.
Steve shares that this was around the time when the computer revolution was just beginning and the Navy, in an effort to remain at the forefront of technology, had purchased a number of computers without considering that their servicemen did not have the technical skills to effectively use them. As part of his engineering qualification, Steve had a little computer experience and was able to leverage this into a few simple applications that provided value to his Navy colleagues and got him interested in the opportunities presented by IT.
Following the end of his service, Steve moved into software development full time running a firm that delivered services to the real estate industry. From there, he moved through a variety of IT jobs across many sectors of the economy, including CIO of Amylin Pharmaceuticals, before arriving at Western Digital.
Following Western Digital’s purchase of HGST, the executive team decided that significant digital redevelopment was required and brought in Steve as CIO. This new endeavour was similar to the task he had performed at the pharmaceutical company. A couple of years later, and following the SanDisk acquisition, Steve moved into the role of CIO for the entire Western Digital Corporation, looking to coordinate the three companies’ disparate IT organisations into a more efficient whole.
How are they transforming?
With the three large companies (Western Digital, HGST & SanDisk) coming together, there were three different sets of IT environments that needed to be rationalised, and at least three (if not more) different applications for all business functions.
Steve tells us that he saw this as an opportunity to choose the best business system technology and transition all employees into a completely new, next-generation set of processes and systems that would set up the company for many years to come.
“Transformations need to take advantage of the opportunities that present themselves. The acquisitions that Western Digital made became the catalyst. It was the perfect opportunity to build and transform as two thirds of the company had to undergo change, regardless,” Steve tells us.
The decision to transform gave the company the opportunity to think strategically. Recognising that this transformation would take several years to complete, Steve talked of the team’s work to integrate an ERP system that would be cutting edge and more cost effective in four or five years’ time rather than settling for an immediate “good enough” solution.
This project is, of course, working with live systems, and Western Digital had to continue to function normally throughout the transformation process. In some cases, this meant running four systems in parallel – the three original systems and the one new one, which is a significant cost. Steve tells us that executives were supportive of transformation costs needed now in order to facilitate savings and performance improvements later.
A big part of future proofing is creating systems that are flexible. We do not know what the IT landscape will look like in the future and while we can predict some aspects of what is to come, the history of corporate IT is a history of bold proclamations proved foolish, some almost instantly.
In service of creating a flexible system, Steve talks of moving many systems to Software-as-a-Service model and embracing the ability to host much of the infrastructure in the cloud, not just for small scale applications but for large systems, such as their ERP.
An additional component of the IT digital transformation that Steve and his team considered was alignment to the overall growth and business transformation happening in tandem. As mentioned earlier, Western Digital was becoming more involved across the storage landscape as a provider of systems and platforms rather than just a provider of HDDs and SSDs, and this required more capabilities that their internal systems had to deliver. Making sure that both the old systems and the new systems supported its expanding business was challenging, but also gave the organisation the opportunity for change management as it designed for the future – a teaching part of the process.
What were the key challenges?
Any large-scale project is going to have some significant challenges to overcome. Steve mentioned a couple of key ones: “There are two key challenges we identified and had to get right, which were change management of people, and risk management.”
Change management is a challenge in any project and the scale of the task tends to scale with the scale of the project itself. Finding new and good technology that will provide functions that you desire is rarely as much of a challenge as getting individuals to change at the same rate.
Steve breaks people down into three categories: those who embrace change, for whom change can never come fast enough; the ambivalent who will use whatever systems are put in front of them; and the third set, which is where most of the attention needs to be focused, who are content in their ecosystem and resistant to changing processes or systems.
Change management cannot be ignored. “Invest early, invest often and invest more than you think you need in change management,” Steve said. At Western Digital, Steve and his team involved employees throughout every step of the transition. He used an iterative style of development, which consisted of rounds of testing with select employees across the organisation, then incremental increases to functional teams, followed by more testing. It was A lesson learned early was that it is the organisations best and brightest that he wanted to work on the new systems, going so far as to spend resources on covering people’s normal roles on legacy systems to free up more time using the new technology.
When it comes to change management, getting employees involved early will make transitions easier, as the unknown is reduced. Of course, it can be challenging to get everyone to buy into a training programme at scale, as some are often set in their processes. It is here that Steve repeats his change management mantra and focuses on consistent communications and training as a priority.
The second biggest challenge Steve mentioned was risk management. For any company with this scale of a project, there could be significant risks to business if the new system does not work as desired, or if development takes the wrong direction. Western Digital kept this in mind as this transformation aimed to position the company on the leading edge of the technology curve, if not the bleeding edge.
Steve’s response to risk management was to make sure that the transformation timeline was very clear and split into many sections - all of the sections taking a significant amount of observation and feedback before moving onto the next. By considering each phase of the project in detail, Steve and his team were able to minimise risks while demonstrating successes and key milestones throughout the process.
How are they using Data?
A further prong to the organisation’s evolution is an increasing embrace of analytics. “Data is the new oil or whatever your preferred metaphor is. For Western Digital have been looking to increase the use of data and improve the way they use data to generate more value.” Steve tells us.
Steve is clear that it is the value that is key here. “The data itself is just something you have. It is using the data to empower the company that is valuable.”
The challenge for data analytics is producing a big data platform that enables different people in different functional groups to get different levels of abstraction in the knowledge produced.
Steve gave the example that the manufacturing operations is likely to want relatively simple scorecards or dashboards informing them of the current state of production. Others will desire deeper analytics predicting future change, while another group will want more complex machine learning applications asking the data to suggest ways to improve performance or yields, for example.
Steve has split the management of data into two different teams. The first is a data management team, which verifies the organisation’s data is collected and stored into a stable and governed big data platform that is flexible enough to allow various data scientists to build off it in innovative ways.
The second part, inside IT, is a Digital Analytics Office. Reporting directly to Steve, the office consists of data scientists and data experts who are looking to develop insights using the data both by themselves, and in coordination with other various data experts embedded directly into the various other functions of the organisation who are looking to gain insight.
This hybrid approach is Steve’s attempt to get the best of both worlds - a degree of centralisation and governance to improve efficiency and reduce costs, and a level of distribution to make sure that analytics projects and resources are directly related to the priorities of the business.
When it comes to data analytics projects, Steve praises the value of controlled experimentation. He doesn’t believe in experimenting for experimentation’s sake, with no indication whether anything interesting is going to emerge, but of testing things over short time scales and looking closely at what generates value. If the indication of value can’t be demonstrated over a period, such as 12 weeks likely made up of six two-week sprints, then it is probably time to move on to something else.
Steve is excited by the opportunities that lie ahead in this sphere. He tells us he believes that some of the most significant and exciting developments in technology are some of the data analysis tools and systems that have come online. “The ability of a CIO to deliver new and valuable insights to the business not only helps grow their role as a true business partner, but also their role in the future. The future of the CIO is not about adding new tech, but utilising it to deliver value.”
What impact has change had on the IT team?
Steve’s team is split over five main areas: General Corporate IT, Info Security, IT for Manufacturing, IT for Engineering, and the Digital Analytics Office. In total, this accounts for approximately 1,000 staff with several hundred additional contractors, consultants and service providers working alongside them.
It is the Data Analytics Office that is growing the fastest generating significant value from data for the business. The Cyber Security function will always be incredibly important and always could be provided with additional support.
On the other end of the scale, the Corporate IT can be scaled down. The organisation is reducing its provision of some internal apps, where there are third party solutions that provide the same service and can free up staff to work on more value generating project. Steve gives the example of moving away from having an internal email system, with an email administrator, to using an over the counter solution in Office 365 and freeing the former administrator to provide more value elsewhere.
The changing focus and priorities of the IT department have led to a change in the skillsets required to match. Steve is a champion of the benefit of re-skilling internally, however actively keeps a look in the marketplace for candidates. Of course we are in a time when demand for talented IT professionals is outstripping supply, so this can be a challenge.
And Finally...
We closed by offering Steve a magic wand and letting him change one thing about his world. After a brief thought, he asks for the legacy systems to be negated. “Western Digital has been in the business for 50 years. Getting rid of some of the older legacy systems would make things much easier. Migrating out of these takes so much time, resources and money and to be able to remove them would make it so much easier to add more value.”
Western Digital is a world leader in manufacturing storage solutions. Their portfolio consists of hard drives, solid state drives, systems and platforms for a variety of markets and segments from consumers to hyperscale cloud data centres. Sitting at #158 in the Fortune 500, with revenues of more than $19 billion and more than 70,000 employees, the organisation is a significant player on the world stage.
Consuming approximately 33% of the total disk drive market, according to IT Candor research, Western Digital is by far the largest player in this space and is certainly one that IT leaders should keep an eye on. Especially considering the company’s recent growth, which has been both organic and through a significant number of mergers and acquisitions.
Over the past several years, Western Digital has made seven sizeable acquisitions. Most notably was a significant competitor, SanDisk, for $19 billion in 2016. Another acquisition was HGST, bought from Hitachi and originally IBM’s hard drive business, which kicked off the acquisition streak when it was purchased for close to $4 billion back in 2012.
Alongside this significant growth through acquisition, Western Digital is working through a transformation of their business strategy described to us as a move from producing storage devices into a data infrastructure provider, able to deliver solutions across the whole storage spectrum.
Who is leading the project?
In tandem with the wider business transformation, Western Digital decided it would be advantageous to perform a digital transformation, revitalising and future proofing its critical technology architecture to allow it to scale and succeed in the future.
At the centre of this transition is Steve Philpott, Western Digital’s CIO. We had the opportunity to talk in depth with Steve about the organisation’s strategy behind these transformations, the challenges the company has encountered, and the opportunities to deliver value they have discovered.
First, we talked a little about Steve’s history. How did he end up in this position? Steve tells us that he did not intend to go into a career in IT. Rather, he completed an undergraduate degree in Engineering from the US Naval Academy as part of his service.
Steve shares that this was around the time when the computer revolution was just beginning and the Navy, in an effort to remain at the forefront of technology, had purchased a number of computers without considering that their servicemen did not have the technical skills to effectively use them. As part of his engineering qualification, Steve had a little computer experience and was able to leverage this into a few simple applications that provided value to his Navy colleagues and got him interested in the opportunities presented by IT.
Following the end of his service, Steve moved into software development full time running a firm that delivered services to the real estate industry. From there, he moved through a variety of IT jobs across many sectors of the economy, including CIO of Amylin Pharmaceuticals, before arriving at Western Digital.
Following Western Digital’s purchase of HGST, the executive team decided that significant digital redevelopment was required and brought in Steve as CIO. This new endeavour was similar to the task he had performed at the pharmaceutical company. A couple of years later, and following the SanDisk acquisition, Steve moved into the role of CIO for the entire Western Digital Corporation, looking to coordinate the three companies’ disparate IT organisations into a more efficient whole.
How are they transforming?
With the three large companies (Western Digital, HGST & SanDisk) coming together, there were three different sets of IT environments that needed to be rationalised, and at least three (if not more) different applications for all business functions.
Steve tells us that he saw this as an opportunity to choose the best business system technology and transition all employees into a completely new, next-generation set of processes and systems that would set up the company for many years to come.
“Transformations need to take advantage of the opportunities that present themselves. The acquisitions that Western Digital made became the catalyst. It was the perfect opportunity to build and transform as two thirds of the company had to undergo change, regardless,” Steve tells us.
The decision to transform gave the company the opportunity to think strategically. Recognising that this transformation would take several years to complete, Steve talked of the team’s work to integrate an ERP system that would be cutting edge and more cost effective in four or five years’ time rather than settling for an immediate “good enough” solution.
This project is, of course, working with live systems, and Western Digital had to continue to function normally throughout the transformation process. In some cases, this meant running four systems in parallel – the three original systems and the one new one, which is a significant cost. Steve tells us that executives were supportive of transformation costs needed now in order to facilitate savings and performance improvements later.
A big part of future proofing is creating systems that are flexible. We do not know what the IT landscape will look like in the future and while we can predict some aspects of what is to come, the history of corporate IT is a history of bold proclamations proved foolish, some almost instantly.
In service of creating a flexible system, Steve talks of moving many systems to Software-as-a-Service model and embracing the ability to host much of the infrastructure in the cloud, not just for small scale applications but for large systems, such as their ERP.
An additional component of the IT digital transformation that Steve and his team considered was alignment to the overall growth and business transformation happening in tandem. As mentioned earlier, Western Digital was becoming more involved across the storage landscape as a provider of systems and platforms rather than just a provider of HDDs and SSDs, and this required more capabilities that their internal systems had to deliver. Making sure that both the old systems and the new systems supported its expanding business was challenging, but also gave the organisation the opportunity for change management as it designed for the future – a teaching part of the process.
What were the key challenges?
Any large-scale project is going to have some significant challenges to overcome. Steve mentioned a couple of key ones: “There are two key challenges we identified and had to get right, which were change management of people, and risk management.”
Change management is a challenge in any project and the scale of the task tends to scale with the scale of the project itself. Finding new and good technology that will provide functions that you desire is rarely as much of a challenge as getting individuals to change at the same rate.
Steve breaks people down into three categories: those who embrace change, for whom change can never come fast enough; the ambivalent who will use whatever systems are put in front of them; and the third set, which is where most of the attention needs to be focused, who are content in their ecosystem and resistant to changing processes or systems.
Change management cannot be ignored. “Invest early, invest often and invest more than you think you need in change management,” Steve said. At Western Digital, Steve and his team involved employees throughout every step of the transition. He used an iterative style of development, which consisted of rounds of testing with select employees across the organisation, then incremental increases to functional teams, followed by more testing. It was A lesson learned early was that it is the organisations best and brightest that he wanted to work on the new systems, going so far as to spend resources on covering people’s normal roles on legacy systems to free up more time using the new technology.
When it comes to change management, getting employees involved early will make transitions easier, as the unknown is reduced. Of course, it can be challenging to get everyone to buy into a training programme at scale, as some are often set in their processes. It is here that Steve repeats his change management mantra and focuses on consistent communications and training as a priority.
The second biggest challenge Steve mentioned was risk management. For any company with this scale of a project, there could be significant risks to business if the new system does not work as desired, or if development takes the wrong direction. Western Digital kept this in mind as this transformation aimed to position the company on the leading edge of the technology curve, if not the bleeding edge.
Steve’s response to risk management was to make sure that the transformation timeline was very clear and split into many sections - all of the sections taking a significant amount of observation and feedback before moving onto the next. By considering each phase of the project in detail, Steve and his team were able to minimise risks while demonstrating successes and key milestones throughout the process.
How are they using Data?
A further prong to the organisation’s evolution is an increasing embrace of analytics. “Data is the new oil or whatever your preferred metaphor is. For Western Digital have been looking to increase the use of data and improve the way they use data to generate more value.” Steve tells us.
Steve is clear that it is the value that is key here. “The data itself is just something you have. It is using the data to empower the company that is valuable.”
The challenge for data analytics is producing a big data platform that enables different people in different functional groups to get different levels of abstraction in the knowledge produced.
Steve gave the example that the manufacturing operations is likely to want relatively simple scorecards or dashboards informing them of the current state of production. Others will desire deeper analytics predicting future change, while another group will want more complex machine learning applications asking the data to suggest ways to improve performance or yields, for example.
Steve has split the management of data into two different teams. The first is a data management team, which verifies the organisation’s data is collected and stored into a stable and governed big data platform that is flexible enough to allow various data scientists to build off it in innovative ways.
The second part, inside IT, is a Digital Analytics Office. Reporting directly to Steve, the office consists of data scientists and data experts who are looking to develop insights using the data both by themselves, and in coordination with other various data experts embedded directly into the various other functions of the organisation who are looking to gain insight.
This hybrid approach is Steve’s attempt to get the best of both worlds - a degree of centralisation and governance to improve efficiency and reduce costs, and a level of distribution to make sure that analytics projects and resources are directly related to the priorities of the business.
When it comes to data analytics projects, Steve praises the value of controlled experimentation. He doesn’t believe in experimenting for experimentation’s sake, with no indication whether anything interesting is going to emerge, but of testing things over short time scales and looking closely at what generates value. If the indication of value can’t be demonstrated over a period, such as 12 weeks likely made up of six two-week sprints, then it is probably time to move on to something else.
Steve is excited by the opportunities that lie ahead in this sphere. He tells us he believes that some of the most significant and exciting developments in technology are some of the data analysis tools and systems that have come online. “The ability of a CIO to deliver new and valuable insights to the business not only helps grow their role as a true business partner, but also their role in the future. The future of the CIO is not about adding new tech, but utilising it to deliver value.”
What impact has change had on the IT team?
Steve’s team is split over five main areas: General Corporate IT, Info Security, IT for Manufacturing, IT for Engineering, and the Digital Analytics Office. In total, this accounts for approximately 1,000 staff with several hundred additional contractors, consultants and service providers working alongside them.
It is the Data Analytics Office that is growing the fastest generating significant value from data for the business. The Cyber Security function will always be incredibly important and always could be provided with additional support.
On the other end of the scale, the Corporate IT can be scaled down. The organisation is reducing its provision of some internal apps, where there are third party solutions that provide the same service and can free up staff to work on more value generating project. Steve gives the example of moving away from having an internal email system, with an email administrator, to using an over the counter solution in Office 365 and freeing the former administrator to provide more value elsewhere.
The changing focus and priorities of the IT department have led to a change in the skillsets required to match. Steve is a champion of the benefit of re-skilling internally, however actively keeps a look in the marketplace for candidates. Of course we are in a time when demand for talented IT professionals is outstripping supply, so this can be a challenge.
And Finally...
We closed by offering Steve a magic wand and letting him change one thing about his world. After a brief thought, he asks for the legacy systems to be negated. “Western Digital has been in the business for 50 years. Getting rid of some of the older legacy systems would make things much easier. Migrating out of these takes so much time, resources and money and to be able to remove them would make it so much easier to add more value.”