The document discusses Boeing's digital transformation efforts, including establishing a vision and work streams to drive implementation, and leveraging partnerships for execution. It highlights impacts such as significantly reducing product development timelines from years to months, increasing asset utilization six times, and improving teammate morale and customer satisfaction. The summary concludes that Boeing's digital transformation journey continues.
Good Morning!!! My name is Niki Allen and I am your friendly, neighborhood IT Transformation Leader
As many of you know, transformation can be tough but when done right it LITERALLY can change the world
And speaking of changing the world, today I’m going to share with you a small piece of my current transformation journey which happens to be taking place at the one the most infamous world changing companies in Aerospace
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Armed with a strategy, purpose, and sense of urgency, we developed a vision for the Digital Transformation Environment.
Getting the DTE stood up was not trivial. First I had to develop a vision that would resonate and inspire people to change. In fact, anytime I pitched DTE to key stakeholders I would state that my vision for the DTE is for it to go away. In other words, it becomes the way IT operates versus an “ elite SW development program or lab”. Partnering with Pivotal was key in this phase as they had a track record of helping large, legacy companies like ours transform. Knowing that I believed in the Pivotal approach was not enough, so I had every one of my leadership team peers, including my boss our CIO, visit a Pivotal office to see the” art of the possible” live and in-person. It was overwhelmingly effective and people wanted to get started right away, but I still knew that it was not enough to just have our IT teams bought in. I had to get the business on board because without their endorsement, we would never realize the CI/CD model we were driving towards. So I scheduled half day visits for several of our Senior Vice President’s from our CTO, to our former Supply Chain & Operations leader ( who happens to be Under Secretary of Defense), to our head of Digital Aviation. All with the intent of having them experience the end-state for them selves. This was the my way of getting them to not only understand what we were trying to do when we spoke about digital transformation within IT, but getting them to endorse and advocate for it across their own organizations.
DTE was officially launched in the beginning of 2017 and has already become a tremendous accelerator for software development & delivery across the Enterprise with hundreds of projects the opportunity pipeline, a backlog of nearly 80 that have been downselected as viable candidates, and DTE locations across three states and two countries,
I think its safe to say that we have had some success!
You may be asking what has continued to that success. I would argue that the DTE has been so effective because it leverages extreme agile, paired programming, the cloud, and all things DevOps to optimize the time developers are spending actually creating product. Think about the factory. The less time mechanics spend looking for work instructions, tools, budget charge lines, installing equipment infrastructure, etc..the more time she/he can spend actually building the airplane. This holds true in the world of software development as well. By redefining our tools & processes to ensure every single product developed is “fully kitted” (think product owner sitting with the teams from the start, budget not just identified but committed, and allocated, infrastructure already stood and provisioned, security baked in) ..all those things before we start. #fully kitted
Doing this enables our developers to quickly begin their work and deliver REAL, tangible value. We see it and it is absolutely working.
The move to the cloud alone is already paying huge dividends:
100 times faster infrastructure service delivery
6 times increase in asset utilization
Database service hosting time used to be measured in months, now its measured in HOURS!
Talk about tangible results…
But one of the Biggest transformation impacts we have witnessed thus far is the culture change. Within IT&DA our teams are excited to work on these projects now leveraging modern tools and techniques. Also there is a rising sense of shared accountability and transparency as the concept of product teams versus silo contributors is starting to take flight. And people are starting to take notice. We’ve had over 300 visitors to our Puget Sound DTE from all over the functions and businesses. They want to see it for themselves and understand how they can leverage the concepts within their own organizations ( e.g. beyond SWDev)
As you all know culture will eat strategy for lunch, so seeing the culture shift begin to take place has been the most rewarding part of this journey thus far.
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And that journey continues…
As I stated before, we have several additional DTE sites that we are standing up as we speak with the intent to scale this approach across the entire IT&DA function.
I know that this may sound easier said than done, but with a relentless focus on the goal, the right level of support/advocacy, a team of empowered, inspired technologists, and an unwavering level of persistence, I KNOW we will see this vision become a reality.
At Boeing we have to continuously work to reinvent ourselves as remaining complacent almost guarantees obsolescence. Being on the leading edge of innovation is a MUST.
As I mentioned at the start of this conversation, we are a 100 year old company who has built a reputation for changing the world.That is not lost on me and I know that I must do my part to help lead the digital transformation and ensure our legacy.
That’s my mission and I am sticking to it.
Thank you for your time today!