Streamlining IT
Textron’s chief technologist is transforming the conglomerate’s operations with a tech infusion
Textron, a large conglomerate, has begun to transform itself from a traditional holding company — it boasts 40 business units in aircraft, automotive, finance, industrial products, and fastening systems including Bell Helicopter and Cessna Aircraft — into a network of companies leveraging the strengths of the various enterprises. The backbone of the network for this $13 billion company, based in Providence, R.I., will be a set of IT initiatives called Enterprise Excellence, which will include shared services, e-business projects, supply-chain management, and global Internet infrastructure.
Michaelides, also a member of the InfoWorld CTO Advisory Council, doesn’t like to tag the Enterprise Excellence initiative as centralization but rather describes it as standardization in areas where the company can find economies of scale, such as human resources and finance. She is heading up an effort to build “horizontal foundations” of information technology to support the molding of the conglomerate into a network.
The $50-million savings came about as Textron companies began purchasing aggregated indirect materials such as office supplies and computer equipment online via Ariba’s e-procurement tool. Previously, Textron businesses and units would purchase these items individually.
The company also is building a framework to aggregate all its vendor information and consolidate its part information. “As you can imagine, throughout our 40-plus business units and 250 locations, we utilize many vendors and catalogue many parts,” Michaelides says. “We are developing systems that will allow our multiple businesses and locations to more easily share and use this data.”
In addition, the company is developing a common directory service, a portal framework, and middleware for integration to bind the companies together. Michaelides says the message broker middleware will be used to straighten lines of spaghetti code to speed up integration.
“With organizations such as ours where we buy and sell and merge, we bring in a lot of systems, and those really present the issue of having to integrate them,” she says. “Changes to our applications can happen in a much more expeditious way because the lines of communication are straighter. You can’t just look at every disruptive change and say, ‘Everything is old, we have to do something new.’ ”
As part of building these horizontal foundations, Michaelides would like to use them instead of buying common functions such as authentication, other security features, and directories in every new application.
“I actually work with the vendors [and] they tell me what they have [and] I tell them what I want,” she says. “Instead of having them impose another redundant directory … we’re taking pieces out of the application. In the future these major vendors are going to start being more component aware.”
While making the tough decisions required for blueprinting the foundations to transform the company, Michaelides has relied heavily on the experience of working through three eras of computing: mainframe, client/server, and the Web. She began her IT career at John Deere in 1978, where she started as a programmer and then eventually began to work with fledgling Web technologies such as the Mosaic browser. Subsequently, she worked at Allied Signal in architecture and emerging technology before joining Textron in 2000.
Quinten Nufer, an analyst at Lazard Freres & Co., who follows Textron, applauds the efforts of Michaelides. “It’s advantageous to conglomerates, which have disparate operating units, to have a system whereby they can share best practices with each other,” he says. “But it’s painful because people hate change. It has to be driven by the top leadership.”
Michaelides’ past experience will be helpful as she tackles what can be the challenging task of leveraging the strengths of a conglomerate across its disparate companies. “Throughout my career I have seen tools come and go,” she says. “I have seen strategies come and go. You gain a feeling for something that is going to work and things that won’t.”
