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Behind the Scenes on Goodyear’s Drive to the Cloud (Part 2)

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This article excerpt, by Jim McKinnon, originally appeared here: http://bit.ly/1D9RbbN
Jim McKinnon joined Goodyear as an IT intern for the company’s England subsidiary and spent the next four decades working his way up to vice president and CIO. McKinnon, who retires this month, isn’t ending his 40-year career on cruise control—instead he’s been in a pedal-to-the-metal drive to change IT at Goodyear.
The transition to Office 365 coincided with our move to a new world headquarters and an increasingly more collaborative company culture. We wanted IT to help enable that culture change. But updating the toolset doesn’t drive behavior modification. If you want projects to succeed, change management is very important.
At Goodyear, we have a mature, externally recognized project management process that delivers results. That process includes change management.
Our Office 365 change process began with executive sponsorship: essential support from the top to ensure proper governance. We established a steering committee of leaders from all business units, representing the key functions of human resources, communications, legal, project management, research and development, and engineering. We laid out the road map for detailed implementation. Very early, we had nearly 2,000 people involved—early adopters and change agents.
We also created a support network of approximately 100 IT professionals who provided online support 24 hours a day, seven days a week. From anywhere in the world, our employees could ask a question via live chat and someone would pop up and answer it.
There were a few bumps, but Microsoft was a good partner and helped us along the way.
So far, the new tools are already making a big difference. Some of them are simple changes: working in the same document instead of passing files around, accessing documents from the web, a significant increase in instant messaging instead of emailing, more sophisticated calendaring and booking of conference rooms. We are using Lync Online for video chat, and soon we will ramp up with Skype for Business. We are also developing plans for how to leverage Yammer more to support our collaboration agenda.
Change is not just about data, processes, and systems—it’s also about people. I take great pleasure in developing teams and individuals, and since I joined Goodyear, we’ve started an IT development program to focus on emerging talent, leadership, and employees with a high level of potential. I wanted to build a great global team top to bottom: a group that works as a team, partners well with the business, and has the respect of the business. I think we’ve done that.
We’ve supported a number of business objectives during my time here, but employees are saying the move to Office 365 is one of the most visible changes for IT and the business. It’s truly a global project—it touched all our office workers, and it’s foundational for the future. 

Behind the Scenes on Goodyear’s Drive to the Cloud (Part 1)

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This article excerpt, by Jim McKinnon, originally appeared here: http://bit.ly/1D9RbbN
Jim McKinnon joined Goodyear as an IT intern for the company’s England subsidiary and spent the next four decades working his way up to vice president and CIO. McKinnon, who retires this month, isn’t ending his 40-year career on cruise control—instead he’s been in a pedal-to-the-metal drive to change IT at Goodyear.
I grew up a working-class boy.
My father was a tire builder at Goodyear. There was no work after the war in Dundee, Scotland, so he went south to England. He married a local girl, raised a family, and instilled strong values and principles in his children. I started as an intern at Goodyear in the IT department, as an analyst/programmer. It was a great job. It’s still a great job. I’m really proud that I’ve gone from IT intern to chief information officer of the company.
I like driving change. That’s where my passion is.
I’ve been driving change my whole career—especially the last five years. Within our global IT organization, we’ve improved communications and project management and deployed new tools to support the business. Technology is fast, and you need to stay current.
When I started as CIO five years ago, we needed more tools for mobility, productivity, and collaboration. Our legacy tools—Lotus Notes, WebEx, and Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007—no longer met our needs. We were frustrated with the old capital model where you purchase a toolset, then upgrade and make another big purchase two or three years later. Office 365 gave us the ability to track our licenses along the way—it’s more transparent and much easier to control.
We have approximately 67,000 employees globally, and we manufacture in 50 facilities spanning 22 countries. Across this geography, we have about 30,000 Office 365 users, and more than 13,000 are using Office 365 ProPlus. It’s a very diverse workforce representing many languages and cultures. Our Office 365 users are located at manufacturing facilities, offices, warehouses, and retail stores; they may be mobile or working from home.
Integration, communication and collaboration were some of the big reasons we made the move to Office 365. Microsoft cybersecurity capabilities gave our team peace of mind about the decision to shift to the cloud.
Watch for Part 2 next week

GE Chooses Microsoft Office 365 for Employee Collaboration and Productivity

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Microsoft Corp. and General Electric (NYSE: GE) have signedan agreement to deliver Microsoft’s cloud productivity suite, Office 365, toGE’s more than 300,000 employees across 170 countries worldwide.

“As we deepen our investments in employee productivity,Microsoft’s innovative approach to collaboration made Office 365 our firstchoice for providing scalable productivity tools to our employees worldwide,”said Jamie Miller, senior vice president and CIO of GE.

GE’s IT organization, which is recognized as one of the moststrategic and forward-thinking among large enterprises worldwide, selectedOffice 365 based on Microsoft’s ability to deliver rich productivityexperiences at massive scale across devices and platforms, as well as itsability to rapidly and reliably deploy to GE’s large global employeepopulation. Specifically, Office 365 will provide several key benefits to GEand its employees, including these:

• A comprehensive and integrated set of productivitycapabilities including email, Skype for Business calling and meetings,real-time document co-authoring, and team collaboration

• Extensibility of the Office 365 platform, which willenable GE to enhance the capabilities of critical line-of-business applicationsby connecting to Office 365 through open APIs

• IT controls and security capabilities that enable GE toprovide employees with secured access to information and full productivitycapabilities on a multitude of devices, while adhering to corporate policies,industry regulations and legal requirements

“Microsoft and GE share many values in common—openness,transparency, data-driven intelligence and innovation—all of which are drivingforces behind Microsoft’s own mission to help people and organizations achievemore,” said John Case, corporate vice president of Microsoft Office. “As one ofthe most innovative companies in the world, GE understands what it takes tounleash the potential of its employees. We’re delighted GE has selected Office365 as the productivity and collaboration solution to empower its globalworkforce.”

Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”/@microsoft) is the leading platformand productivity company for the mobile-first, cloud-first world, and itsmission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet toachieve more.