“What does digital transformation actually mean?”

That was the question General Electric (GE) CIO for Australia New Zealand, Ian Lisle, asked a group of technology leaders at the ACS’s second CIO Roundtable event.

Ten CIOs, CDOs and Heads of IT met at the Shangri-La Hotel in Sydney to discuss what digital transformation meant to their companies.

Ian discussed the digitisation of the 124-year old global conglomerate.

With more than 300,000 employees globally, GE has had one of the most large-scale digital transformations ever.

And to do this, its had to change the way it thinks.

“There’s no such thing as digital transformation at all, but rather it’s about evolution,” Lisle said. “Transformation is going from a known state A to a known state B – we don’t know where this is going.”

With businesses across aviation, energy, healthcare, mining and many more, GE has been able to stay relevant in a rapidly changing economy through its shift to a “digital industrial company.”

“People ask what that means, and it effectively means that we are industrial first, we’ve got 124-year history of being a proud industrial organisation that makes big spinning things, and we plan on continuing to make big spinning things, but all powered and empowered by digital.”

Recent innovations such as its Industrial Internet, Predix, that connects machines and people, have enabled this change.

GE CIO Ian Lisle


Is it technology or culture that drive change?

And while it has shown it has the technology to drive this change, what has ensured its effective evolution has been a willing culture.

“For us, digital transformation isn’t all about technology, it’s not about moving everything to the cloud, but it’s about people and building an organisation that is ready to adapt.

“The reality is that change is happening so fast that if we try and build a strategy about what we want to be, it will have changed by the time we get there.

“So, it’s about trying to build an organisation that is really able to adapt to changing paradigms.”

The easiest way to do this? Know what’s going on in the world around you, according to Lisle.

“People talk about Uber and Lyft, and for me they aren’t technology companies, they’re organisations which have been able to predict and adjust to changes in technology,” he said.

“This is done by being super aware, having an appetite for the content that’s out there in the technology world and understanding what other people are doing.”

Take a look at yourself

For years, GE was well-known for its cut-throat annual review process.

The “vitality curve” would rank employees across the global conglomerate as part of their annual review, and if you were in the bottom 10% you were shown the door.

This system is now history. It has since been replaced with a system that looks at real-time feedback and encourages agility in the workplace.

“We don’t do annual performance reviews at all,” said Lisle. “We’ve launched a tool and we’ve also launched a process of continual insights.”

“It’s called PD@GE and it’s really about making sure that as people transition we keep them engaged, and we make sure that we’re having a conversation with them that makes sense about their performance.

“People aren’t going to be in to do an annual review in the future, they’re going to be in to do a role and they’re going to exit.”