As a result, we’ve been named by Computerworld as one of the best places to work in IT for three years. We value integrity, teamwork, innovation, accountability, and agility as we strive to empower employees to be successful within and outside of the workplace. Being a part of Zebra means being a part of an inclusive and diverse community that helps shape the future of work. Our culture plays a major part in our ability to attract talent. How do you attract and develop the IT talent you need to drive the transformation? The third challenge is quality - we must maintain the ability to clean and curate data so that it remains a meaningful source of insights. However, delivering those tools and learning how to use them takes time and patience. People read about predictive analytics, and they want it done yesterday. You must recruit them and ensure they have a defined career path. The first challenge is talent because the market for data engineers and data scientists is very competitive. What are the challenges in achieving true democratization of data? This group includes a senior enterprise leader who acts as a data librarian, cataloging data sets and ensuring there are standards in how we define the data. We have formed a cross-functional analytics council to ensure we are sharing our learnings, talent needs and role profiles, maturity models, and training assets on a monthly basis. Next, we shortlisted relevant use cases like forecasting, returns, next best move, alerts to partner, and contract renewals, which enabled the functions to see the capabilities of machine learning experimentation. Our functional leaders participated in a cross-functional heat mapping exercise led by expert consultants to identify use cases and learn how to use machine learning. How did the business functions learn to do this experimentation? We are pivoting from a data defensive (controlled) to a data offensive (flexible) position. The hub-and-spoke model supplements our functional leaders’ capability of single source of truth data rigidity with multiple versions of truth experimental capability. This enables functions to generate insights in new ways. They can merge customer data with Dun & Bradstreet data, for example, to segment it into large and small accounts without impacting the core. Once that data goes into the lake though, the business functions can experiment. The core customer data, for example, must be pristine in the data warehouse to serve as a single source of truth. We kept the data warehouse but have augmented it with a cloud-based enterprise Delta Lake and an ML platform. The functions have ML experts who experiment with IT’s “single source of truth” to create relevant insights. So, we have created a hub-and-spoke model, where the hub is data engineering and the spokes are the business functions. At the same time, business functions want to experiment with data for a wide range of business needs and they desire autonomy for insight generation. In IT, we have traditionally focused on protecting the single source of truth. While we already have data-rich platforms at Zebra, we still have an opportunity to generate even greater insights. At the same time, we are mindful of investing in our community of changemakers, innovators, and doers, helping our talent build fulfilling careers while making a positive impact on their communities. Our acquisition growth is also enabling us to offer as-a-service business models. This expansion is enabling us to reimagine our operations, digitize platforms, redesign end-to-end workflows, and generate analytical insights. Zebra is growing rapidly-both organically and through acquisition activity where we continue to add software and solutions to our hardware portfolio. What is the business transformation currently underway at Zebra Technologies? What follows is an edited version of our interview. I recently asked Kaul to explain the major components of Zebra’s transformation. Today, Kaul and Zebra are in the midst of a company-wide transformation that goes far beyond digitization: it is a transformation of their marketplace offering and their very business model. Deepak Kaul first joined Zebra Technologies in 2007 as director of change management and process improvement, and he became CIO of the $5.5 billion workflow digitization and automation solutions company in 2016.
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