Boeing, Dow Chemical CIOs earn innovation awards for overhauling digital platforms

Dive Brief:

For her leadership developing a "tenant" platform supporting The Dow Chemical Company's acquisition and divestiture efforts, the Forbes CIO Innovation Award recognized Melanie Kalmar, CIO, CDO and corporate VP, at the 2018 Half Moon Bay Summit on Monday. Kalmar joins the fourth class of CIO Innovation Award winners.
Kalmar established the Dow Services Businesses, which provides business services and technologies for "tenants" — joint ventures, divested entities and affiliates — and allows Dow's ERP system to house new companies for as long as needed. The system has already benefited the company's bottom-line by hundreds of millions of dollars and saved more than $45 million.
For his work developing a "digital twin" of The Boeing Company's business, tying together digital and analytics tools to create a "model of models," Boeing CIO and SVP Ted Colbert III was awarded the second innovation award. The Digital Flight Deck model ties together models across departments and supply chains and helps leadership simulate business scenarios. Each month, saves the labor equivalent of months of manual data collection by a 100 person team.

Dive Insight.

Being a CIO is about more than migrating a company to the cloud, staving off as many attacks for as long as you can and fighting for a place at the executive table. Digital strategy has the ability to transform an entire business model and bottom-line — or leave a company trailing in the dust.

It's a hard job; add in a company where a fraction of a percent of revenue translates to millions of dollars and the pressure mounts. But some CIOs are doing it right and setting the bar for IT executives in the space.

Colbert has held IT leadership positions at Boeing for almost a decade and is committed to supporting a companywide data analytics platform. 'Trapped' data renders even the best Big Data program meaningless, and Colbert is on a mission to keep Boeing on the cutting edge.

And Colbert has had more on his plate than Big Data and the Digital Flight Deck. The company confirmed that it was hit by WannaCry in its Commercial Airplanes sector and had to deploy the necessary patches and fixes.

Kalmar has only been CIO at Dow for less than two years, but already her presence is making waves and transforming the business. The Dow-DuPont merger was the largest the chemical industry had ever seen, and the tenant platform established under her watch was a crucial technology tool used to facilitate and speed up the deal.