Data Transformation Is the CEO’s Business

Caterpillar’s CEO had a problem. Jim Umpleby had stepped into the chief executive role in 2017 with a vision of achieving more profitable growth by selling more services and parts to the company’s heavy-equipment customers. Because offering real-time fleet management information services and selling parts online would depend on digital technologies, he set up a new division called Cat Digital. But the division’s head soon had unwelcome news for Umpleby: The company didn’t know its customers well enough to deliver on its goal. Customer data was siloed, fragmented, and, in the case of secondhand equipment, often entirely lacking.

That problem is one shared by countless leaders who see how digital can enable a growth strategy but are stymied by a legacy of fragmented, incomplete, and inconsistent data assets. They are frequently told that getting their data in order is a prerequisite for taking full advantage of new tools like artificial intelligence but too often see data transformation as an IT modernization project. They delegate the work to IT leaders and evaluate success based on cost, speed, and tool adoption. But when data is treated as IT infrastructure rather than as an enterprise asset, its impact is predictably limited. Companies that gain real value from their data actively involve the top management team in data transformation.

At Caterpillar, Umpleby and his team did more than simply sign off on the proposal by Ogi Redzic, chief digital officer of Cat Digital, to build a new enterprise digital data platform. In 2019, they demonstrated long-term commitment by giving Redzic’s team a generous three years to build the platform, dubbed Helios, that would allow the company, its customers, and its dealers to see consistent and complete fleet information across all applications and interactions. Executives went on to redesign data governance, elevating data ownership to senior leaders.