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Connecting What Matters Through Technology and People

Posted 10 Jan 2024 by Corporate Communications

Making IT an Internal Business Partner

derek-shawWhat comes to mind when someone says the word “IT department” at a large company? The service desk? Developers coding away for hours on end? A large, dark room full of computers with IT professionals never seeing the light of day? While these ideas may describe some IT departments, they certainly don’t hold true for the IT department at H.B. Fuller, as they are focused on becoming a true internal business partner and consultant for every segment of our company.

Derek Shaw, Chief Information Officer at H.B. Fuller, says the department is aiming to be “an internal consultant, a place where the different businesses can go and have their questions answered and get recommendations as to where to invest their time and resources.” To achieve this goal of having IT become a true business partner, the department is focusing on modernizing technology and creating scalable and simple solutions to enable business growth.

Technology Modernization

On the surface, modernizing technology sounds simple enough: throw out all of the old tech and replace it with the best new products money can buy. However, Shaw emphasizes that updating hardware and software throughout the company means more than just buying the “bright and shiny new objects.” The key to assessing and modernizing technology throughout the company is to prioritize the technology that will help solve the challenges the business is facing, not just finding the “coolest new tech.” While H.B. Fuller is still consistently investing in new and improved IT tools, modernizing technology can sometimes just mean learning how to utilize an existing technology more effectively, rather than spending a large amount of money on a product that has not proven its efficacy yet.

Simplification

The task of technology modernization goes hand-in-hand with the task of simplification. H.B. Fuller is constantly growing and expanding, which means the company has more business, more workers, more locations and more technologies than ever before. Shaw says there are two facets when it comes to the tenet of simplification – simplifying the technology itself and simplifying the structure of the IT organization.

When it comes to simplifying technology, Shaw says it is key to look at redundancies within the company and understand where things can be simplified. Can one solution replace multiple technologies? Can everything be standardized across the organization to save time and money? For example, earlier this year, the IT department finished a project to standardize all telecommunications across the world, which not only made it simpler and easier to communicate, but also saved the company millions of dollars.

The second piece of simplification is to simplify the structure of the IT department itself. Due to the global reach of the company, one of the challenges the IT department faced in years past was having multiple owners and “decision-makers” across the globe, instead of one central figure owning particular technologies and making decisions. Last year, the IT department at H.B. Fuller underwent a restructuring that aimed to resolve that issue, with the new organization structure not only creating clear lines as to who owns what technology, but also opening communication channels between the different parts of the department. By simplifying both the technology landscape and the organization of the IT department, the team has reduced cost and complexity and increased efficiency, thus opening the door to more creative and innovative solutions.

Scalability

Finally, the modernization and simplification work being done allows the IT department to be scalable. Being scalable is important, because for Shaw, being scalable means being agile. He says that with this agile environment, “H.B. Fuller can easily adjust to the needs of the company based on its biggest opportunities and create environments that are easily scalable when entering a new market, acquiring a new company, etc.” These simplified and scalable environments make it easier for H.B. Fuller to find redundancies throughout the company and in recently acquired companies. Having a simplified technological environment with the best tools for H.B. Fuller’s needs will allow simpler integrations within the company, whether through a merger and acquisition or even a new employee onboarding.

Looking to the Future

While the IT department at H.B. Fuller has undergone many changes in the past few years, they never stop looking forward to the technological and business trends on the horizon, especially when it comes to artificial intelligence. As AI tools like ChatGPT begin to enter the collective consciousness of society, Shaw says it’s important to understand the purpose of AI and where it can help streamline processes, make decisions faster and help employees from different parts of the business gather all the information necessary.

One notable example of where the IT department used AI to improve customer experience is through the building of a dashboard that uses predictive analytics to improve manufacturing schedules and product lead times. Last year, Shaw and the department hosted a “hackathon” where the goal was to create a tool that would help to optimize product manufacturing and shipping schedules (a hackathon is a term used to describe an event where a number of different stakeholders get together and solve a problem in a short timeframe, usually 24-48 hours). This particular hackathon lasted two days and resulted in a fully functioning dashboard that uses AI to optimize manufacturing and shipping schedules at plants across North America.

The IT team also uses AI for several other purposes, including service desk requests, software deployments and cybersecurity purposes. The cybersecurity team uses AI to filter out non-credible threats, and without that tool, they would be inundated with thousands of different events and complaints every day. The sheer volume would make it difficult for them to pull out the credible threats from the fake ones. To quote Michael Schmidt, cybersecurity manager at H.B. Fuller, “the bad guys don’t take a break, so neither will we.”

By focusing on modernizing technology and creating scalable and simple environments to enable business growth, the IT department at H.B. Fuller is breaking IT stereotypes and working to become a true internal business partner. They are connecting what matters through technology and people. As H.B. Fuller grows and expands across the globe, we are always looking for the best and the brightest around the world to join our team.

To learn more about working in the IT Department at H.B. Fuller, visit https://jobs.hbfuller.com/

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