How CEB Helps EMEA Executives: Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget (SCA)
At CEB's Summit for IT Executives in London on 8th October 2014, Bob Barbiaux - VP IT Serv...
How CEB Helps EMEA Executives: Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget (SCA)
At
CEB's
Summit for IT Executives in
London on
8th October 2014, Bob Barbiaux - VP
IT Services at
Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget (
SCA) - told us why he values his CEB membership and the variety of resources he has benefited from.
How are you finding the IT Summit?
I’ve got two of my colleagues with me this morning and both of us thought the first session on the transformation of IT or adaptive IT was spot on to some of our challenges so really timely and very pertinent. That’s always the case with these sessions you always find some just some gems and things that to take away that are very useful very rapidly and it’s been especially helpful having a couple of colleagues along today just because we’re hearing the same story in the same way .
I find that CEB events are always very practical and pertinent because of the methodology they use in connecting to business leaders and IT leaders. You don’t find that it’s theoretical or ideological it’s very practical useful material.
How did CEB support your IT transformation?
We used CEB in our transformation around service delivery, and we had delivered the service boot camp for a number of our business service owners, and it was again very useful understanding the concept within the practical steps you can take to deploy. We’ve also as we are becoming an adaptive IT organisation trying to learn much more about business engagement, we’ve got a business engagement network concept that we’re deploying and there too CEB was very useful in delivering what others are doing and some practical ideas to move this forward.
It’s mostly about the soft skills we’re also doing some work on project leadership and it’s not the project management the tasks and timelines but much more engagement to the business, business issue resolution and how do you approach different types of stakeholders.
Really focussed on the soft skills of our transformation and it’s been very helpful.
How have you used CEB’s IT bootcamps?
We had bootcamps around the service transformation and there was quite a wide range of understanding or lack of understanding of what service orientation was all about, and so we used that to take some of the guys who were ideologically aware and familiar with it and bring them back to a practical reality and some others that had no really no idea what it was going to be about and get on a common ground. We used some of the CEB examples other companies and what they’ve done, and we’ve then taken that and made our own definition around service level agreements, around service road maps, around our business service owner concept and it’s given us a starting
point of common terminology to build on.
Why would you recommend CEB?
I would recommend CEB on the basis of very practical pertinent industry aware advice and guidance. You can choose to take the advice or you can just look at the material and form your own conclusions but in every case that we’ve seen it’s been very useful.
From an IT perspective there’s very good awareness because of the network of IT leaders that get consulted there’s regular surveys so I can see at first hand that CEB is collecting relevant and timely information and so that from seeing it being gathered on the side of somebody offering information into the surveys you realise that the quality of the data is being built up and then it’s useful to have that played back.