Newell: Internal Investment Is Key to Digital Intelligence Growth
For Newell Brands, decision intelligence (DI) has come front and center as the company looks to scale tech-enabled innovation across the enterprise. But the company understands that the foundation comes first.
During a session at Shoptalk, Robert Ibarguen of Newell Brands said he's helped design a small strike team that works cross-functionally to try and bring DI to scale, functioning almost like a transmission for the company as it compiles data points from across the organization and consolidates it into a single dashboard.
The head of digital intelligence said gathering data was previously a very manual, time-intensive process. Automating the effort has required maintaining a delicate balance between the IT and business application lenses to understand when it is better to lean on outside experts vs modernizing processes with internal resources.
While external assistance is often needed, in-house expertise is not something to be ignored.
"You need to have knowledge of the function; it's the glue that sits between the tools in the business. Our IT partners are critical but they don't have the boots-on-the-ground knowledge," said Ibarguen.
When it is internal, companies need to find stakeholders who are excited, he added.
"The key to internal motivation is a willingness to learn and accepting the fact that if you're going to the frontier of tech, you're going to fail. It's about failing quickly, trying new things and adjusting."
But very few things at this point are fully autonomous, he pointed out. The company has advanced with its tech strategy so quickly, in part, because it follows a co-pilot vs pilot approach, still leaning on human expertise paired with technology to ensure there are guardrails in place.
"When we see an issue we can potentially solve, we can use a whole array of tools to build complementary systems," said Ibarguen, adding that while Newell can build tech-enabled operating models that automatically understand the business needs and opportunities, people remain at the core of innovation.
