Tackling complexity to enable transformation

The CIONET Cookbook n°2 comprises recipes for success from 20 of today’s most influential and dynamic information technology leaders across all business sectors. This fascinating volume presents new recipes for digital success based on TV and research interviews with top digital leaders across Europe. Right now, it’s clear that we all face extraordinary technical and business challenges. This second edition of the Cookbook presents further insights into the best practices required to flourish in a new digital era.

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Meanwhile dive in to the next recipe with our Master Chef Sam Kini, CIO at Unilever.

Ingredients

Creating a common purpose around sustainability
Addressing technology and process complexity that carries a hidden burden for the organisation and in turn creating capacity for greater differentiation and innovation
Embracing the power of enquiry and learning as the fastest route to digital leadership success

Preparing the dish

Sam Kini is global CIO at Unilever. Having graduated with a degree in business administration, she spent the early part of her career in the telecommunications sector, heading technology transformation for Virgin Media in the UK and acting as CIO for Telenet in Belgium. More recently, she was CD&IO for EasyJet. She joined Unilever in January 2021, becoming global CIO in May 2022.

Unilever is a global consumer goods company headquartered in London. The company employs more than 150,000 colleagues, operates in 190 countries, and 3.4 billion people every day use their products, with their global brands including Dove, Hellmann’s, Magnum ice cream and OMO.

Undertaking a global transformation

Unilever in July 2022 changed their business model from a matrix structure, to being organised around five distinct business groups: Home Care, Nutrition, Ice Cream, Health & Wellbeing and Personal Care.

Each business group is fully responsible and accountable for their strategy, growth, and profit

delivery globally. This operating model change has been accompanied by a CEO-led commitment to pursue a common purpose that includes improving the health of the planet, improving health and wellbeing, and contributing to a more socially inclusive world. Unilever believes companies with purpose last, brands with purpose grow, and people with purpose thrive.

One example of how Unilever is using technology to support its sustainability agenda is a joint venture with Google that is employing a geospatial platform to identify the effects of deforestation due to the use of palm oil. The company aims to be deforestation-free by 2023. The venture is also applying blockchain technology to trace the source of ingredients for Unilever’s main product lines to create sustainable supply chains.

Helping to enact the new corporate strategy

Sam believes technology is an essential ingredient in creating a simplified corporate structure and enacting the company’s new vision around a common purpose. The technology organisation is playing a lead role in providing access to emerging technologies, such as blockchain, that can help the company reach its sustainability goals. Automation at scale, meanwhile, is being used to drive

efficiencies, process improvements and enrich the roles that Unilever staff play, allowing people to spend more time improving products and services.

Sam’s main priority is to simplify Unilever’s technology landscape, so that it can be used to enable the company’s new global structure based on supporting growth in its five business groups. She is focused on tackling complexity and simplification, whilst re-investing back into innovation and digital transformation.

Sam’s mantra is “design once and deploy everywhere”. Her team also uses the metaphor of reducing body mass index to describe their aims for digital transformation. This work involves a wholesale consolidation of technology applications, driven by a unifying framework, that will allow the business to use technology to increase its speed and agility.

Introducing a slimmed down approach for ERP

Unilever has spent many years consolidating its various ERP systems into a unified SAP platform.

The company now has just four SAP instances. However, Sam believes further modernisation is necessary to help technology serve the company’s global brands and growth effectively. Her team

have also instituted an aggressive move to the cloud, with the aim of transferring 95% of applications by the end of 2022.

Sam is also aiming to shrink the company’s core SAP system to a centralised financial layer based

on S4/Hana. She will supplement this core with software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications across key areas, such as HR and CRM. This shift to the cloud will improve flexibility and accelerate global standardisation. It will allow Unilever to escape the rigid structures of traditional ERP systems and support an ongoing move towards best-of-breed SaaS services.

Refreshing the kitchen

Sam manages a global technology team across multiple geographies including UK, Singapore, Bangalore, and Brazil. Guided by her operating principle of “utilising the power of one, with targeted solutions for the five business groups”, Sam runs a large central team that has responsibility for setting the overall technology strategy and direction for Unilever and running all global platforms and technology.

To reduce complexity further, Sam is focused on consolidating vendor relationships, especially for service integration. She believes moving to a handful of strategic partnerships will reduce costs and increase collaboration. She is also keen to bring as much intellectual property as possible in-house to encourage innovation and competitive differentiation.

Sam believes innovation can help Unilever solve its business challenges and streamline its structure. She also believes that artificial intelligence and the metaverse bring further

opportunities for product and process innovation.

Defining the qualities of a Master Chef

Sam places business firmly ahead of technology. Her goal is to bring a digital vision to Unilever
and to work with the C-suite to solve business challenges. At the technology coal face, she is keen
to eliminate hierarchy and ensure everyone has a voice. She wants to create a fearless technology
organisation that embraces global transformation projects. Her message to incoming talent is that
Unilever operates with unrivalled scale, providing diverse career choices and great opportunities.

Sam’s curiosity and questioning has always guided her well in her own career and she has a deep desire that all young aspiring leaders ask lots of questions and challenge the status quo.