"Attract great people to be part of your team, people who with the right development, challenges and encouragement, can be better than ourselves."

Global VP -Information & Business
Services, CIO
Anheuser-Busch InBev

In her 11 years with Anheuser-Busch InBev, Marina has held various leadership roles within the IT and Business Services organizations in Europe and America. Prior to joining AB InBev, Marina worked at Price Waterhouse Coopers for almost 10 years as a Senior Consultant specializing in process design, system implementation and strategy design.

Challenges in technology to meet enterprise needs in 2013 and expectations
Enterprise needs are constantly evolving to be able to withstand market challenges and this requires a flexible, “easy-todo- business-with” and holistic technology platform. As “techies”, one of our biggest challenges is to help keep our business running while we implement solutions to transform it, finding synergies between quality, risk control, innovation and cost. My dream IT solutions portfolio would have easily interoperable, easily replicable and easily scalable solutions – the speed in which we provide solutions to our global business is essential. It’s important for technology providers to engage and facilitate the enterprise and not trap them. Providers that are able to facilitate cross-provider integrations are going to win in the market as no one provider is able to meet all the needs of an enterprise.

Lessons I learned as a CIO that can help you
My three golden rules +1:
1) Stay connected to the business - a technology solution/update that doesn’t serve a bigger business purpose probably shouldn’t be implemented.
2) Attract great people to be part of your team, people who with the right development,  challenges and encouragement can be better than ourselves. In addition to being technically strong, my team has great business acumen which is essential to understanding the needs of our business partners in order to be proactive in providing the necessary solutions and new capabilities.
3) Develop, cultivate and build strong partnerships with your key providers ensuring that both sides of the partnership are able to leverage one another’s strengths via capabilities we build to support the business. Most importantly, never be satisfied with your results and strive for continuous improvement.

The areas in business environment where solutions do not yet exist or not up to the mark, and which if existed, would've made job easier
Consumer connections and big data. As a global company, staying in tune with our consumers and being able to effectively manage large amounts of data that deliver business insights are priorities for me and my team. Currently, we are utilizing one-off spot solutions to support our consumer connections and related business processes as we have yet to find a scalable end-to-end solution. Also, with the large amounts of point-to-point supplier/ c u s t ome r / c o n s ume r / emp l o y e e transactions we encounter on a daily basis, harvesting and being able to interpret analytics are challenges we must address after years of automation initiatives.

My roles and responsibilities as a CIO
The CIO has evolved from solely being a cost and risk control driven role to an organization capabilities build up and innovation role, while still remaining conscious of controlling costs and keeping risks at low levels. It is the ‘AND’ not the ‘OR’ definition of the role that makes it complex and more exciting than ever. Also the role has changed from a multi-region role to a global role, supporting the best beer company in the world. The team and I focus on always ensuring global alignment, which then makes it easier to converge.

Technology Trends Impacting Enterprise Business Environment
Cloud solutions is definitely one of them. We live in an “app world” within the enterprise and technology professionals must learn to adapt and ensure that they make available a multitude of solutions which are reliable, interoperable and support our business needs on a global scale. A second big trend is data processing. To be effective, we must learn how to organize, prioritize and interpret the large amounts of structured and non-structured data to better understand and predict how our business landscape is evolving while being sure we deliver on the next big opportunity.