"You must engage business leaders appropriately in technology decisions which ultimately aren’t so much about technology as they are about changing the business in fundamental ways"

RON KLYN
CIO& Deputy County Executive
Universal Forest Products

Ron was appointed as CIO of Universal Forest Products in 1997. In this role he is responsible for managing the global IT function. Prior to joining UFP, Ron worked in hi-tech silicon valley businesses focused on CAD/CAM and laser technologies. Ron has worked in IT at various levels for the last 34 years. He has a BA in Accounting and an MBA in Operations Management

Challenges in technology to meet enterprise needs in 2013 & expectations.

Consumerization of IT, growth in data consumption and storage are driving IT costs up. In our business, it’s critical to invest in IT in ways that drive costs out of the business. Solutions from providers that allow us to manage the growth and cost creep but not restrict the growth of consumerization of IT are top on our list. We are also focused on cloud based solutions that allow us to drive down TCO but at the same time allow us to provide access to our applications from many devices and locations throughout the world.

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.

Implementing a cloud based architecture to deliver applications is critical to driving down costs, improving service and increasing reliability. However, cloud based architectures are not without their problems. The largest issue is really delivering consistent, smooth application performance to all of our locations. Many technologies exist today to help us with this mission. But none seem to do it perfectly all the time. We make gains each year on this problem, but look forward to more advances from our technology partners in the areas of delivering 3D modeling capabilities, video and rich UI’s across the network.

Technology Trends Impacting Enterprise Business Environment

E-commerce is another trend that will have an impact on our business. Overtime we see as much as 20-30 percent of our sales volume moving through the E-commerce business channel. We look forward to partnering with our business segment leaders to exploit this sales channel to the fullest to drive top line growth and to reduce operating costs.

My roles and responsibilities as a CIO

Without question the largest change a lot of CIO’s have seen is the shift in focus from innovator to cost-cutter. With a shrinking economy, we see more pressure on margins and an increasing challenge just to maintain market share. In some respects the economic environment we have been operating in has created a chance for us to look more internally at the way we provide services. Our focus has shifted from deploying the newest technologies to a heavy emphasis on standardization and adoption of cloud technologies to eliminate costs, speed up service delivery and most importantly to increase our agility.

Lessons learned as a CIO that can help you

It isn’t enough just to ‘keep the lights on’ these days. Even if you are providing state of the industry technology solutions with outstanding uptime…. that’s the price of admission and its simply not enough in this economic environment. You must engage business leaders appropriately in technology decisions which ultimately aren’t so much about technology as
they are about changing the business in fundamental ways. If you are going to maximize the value of IT, Leadership must be involved to drive user adoption and to facilitate the type change that is needed to ‘move the needle’ on business performance. Failure to do this can result in fancy new toys that are simply used the old way which in turn only drives up costs while
never living up to their ROI promises.