CDO interview: Andrew Curry, manager of the Central Data Office, ExxonMobil
Andrew Curry is an skilled information chief who’s utilizing his surfeit of data to assist one of the world’s largest corporations embrace digital transformation.
Curry joined oil and fuel big ExxonMobil after graduating with a level in IT from school in 1999. Today, he’s quick approaching 1 / 4 of a century with the firm – and that interval has supplied the alternative to work throughout a variety of roles. “It’s a very long time,” he says. “I’ve been fortunate enough to have about 14 jobs.”
His newest place at ExxonMobil is manager of the agency’s Central Data Office, which was created at the begin of May this yr when the information group left the IT division. His workplace stories into the firm’s Global Business Solutions division, which is itself half of a division known as Transformation Enablement.
“It was a very conscious split out of IT and into more on the business side as a Central Data Office,” he says. “My role is similar to what would be called the chief data officer in many other companies.”
Learning the enterprise
Curry could be heading up information as we speak, however his profession encompasses a broad span of roles and obligations, as you may anticipate from somebody who’s spent so lengthy with a big agency.
He factors to a stint in Canada supporting offshore telecommunications, which allowed him to find out about how the enterprise works and the way a helicopter or provide boat will get despatched to a drilling rig: “You see how we’re looking for gas or oil. And when you work across business, you know what this company does and how it makes money.”
Curry additionally spent a while based mostly out of ExxonMobil’s Baytown Refinery, which is one of the largest refineries in North America. Once once more, it was an expertise that helped him develop his horizons: “Those have been very influential opportunities to say, ‘Hey, I have the technology background, I have the data background, but do I understand the business?’”
Of course, Curry wouldn’t have been capable of rise to an information government place with out slicing his enamel in know-how management. He factors particularly to his administration of a worldwide IT procurement programme, the place he negotiated contracts for ExxonMobil with big-name suppliers, comparable to SAP, Microsoft and Dell.
“That was a great opportunity to learn the financial side of how to deal with vendors and how to negotiate contracts,” Curry says, earlier than outlining how he preceded this work with a spell serving to the firm’s upstream operation to pursue a digital transformation agenda.
“I had the opportunity there to start building one of our early cloud-based data platforms. I also owned a lot of our on-premises data platforms, so that work involved managing legacy systems and the transition. There were some interesting learnings and observations from those early days,” he says.
“Are you truly building reusable data products? Are you gathering this data effectively, so that it can be reused? We took on some of those lessons effectively, sometimes the hard way, sometimes the right way as well. That journey through the upstream digital transformation process put me in a really great position to help lead the Central Data Office.”
Building the foundations
Curry says the alternative to construct the workplace has been the spotlight of his profession to date. He was initially one of eight individuals who was tasked with forming the organisation two years in the past.
“Now we’ve built that office out and we have a global organisation supporting this company,” he says. “The ability to build a data strategy and build the data principles for this corporation, and then enact them, has been a fantastic opportunity.”
Curry says the creation of the workplace was a key first step in the direction of the execution of enterprise-wide information ideas. As the workplace has bedded in and expanded, so has the firm’s information technique. From these nascent beginnings, a totally fashioned information technique started to emerge.
“That’s when we started saying, ‘OK, we’re going to make a conscious decision to say these business capabilities will all share a common platform’. This data is going to be managed at the enterprise level, it will be shared across the organisation, and it will provide a consistent platform for use by applications and analytics.”
As half of its information technique, ExxonMobil has a know-how ecosystem that makes use of the cloud-based platform Snowflake as an underpinning know-how. Curry says Snowflake has given the enterprise a consolidated information basis for the first time. Now, with a powerful know-how platform and ecosystem in place, the workplace can produce enterprise-wide information merchandise.
“The ability to build a data strategy and build the data principles for this corporation, and then enact them, has been a fantastic opportunity”
Andrew Curry, ExxonMobil
“Knowing your customers should be a simple task,” he says. “But if your chemical division has a customer database, and your field division has a customer database, and procurement has its own database, then those opportunities are potentially missed.”
Curry says one of the key duties throughout the previous 18 months has been emigrate and collapse impartial, siloed platforms right into a single information ecosystem that works for the complete company. That work is now full.
“The same data that we’re sending to applications is the same that’s being used by analytics – there’s no curation,” he says.
“There’s no differences and we’ve got that data consistency that we’ve really been striving to achieve. And the transformation we’ve had going on has been underpinned by our data ecosystem, which is structured around Snowflake.”
Delivering digital transformation
An efficient information technique is a key ingredient of a a lot wider enterprise agenda that includes a variety of digital transformation initiatives. When it involves utilizing know-how to create a aggressive benefit, Curry says there’s heaps of work going down at the firm.
“ExxonMobil has broad ambitions from a digital transformation standpoint,” he says. “There’s 10 ERPs in the business today, but there won’t be tomorrow – and making that shift is not without significant effort. Ultimately, digital transformation starts with the business – what are the business drivers that are going to push you to move forwards?”
Curry says the function of his group is to assist guarantee the information initiatives which are enacted are proper for the enterprise. An enormous half of that effort is figuring out the place ExxonMobil can differentiate itself by means of the use of know-how and to determine the place standardised choices work simply positive.
“We need to be very conscious of that as an organisation,” he says. “The areas we can identify as our competitive advantage means we can say in other cases, ‘Hey, don’t do customisation, be more standard, use industry standards, make your data more easily accessible’.”
Standardised know-how choices ought to make it straightforward for folks throughout the enterprise to make use of information. Curry says staff will then be capable of use clear, trusted data to ship a variety of initiatives.
“The business driver right now for ExxonMobil is making sure we’re achieving our full corporate scale – that we’re leveraging the scale of the company to its fullest. And so, can we do more with our supply chain? Can we do more in trading? Can we do more by combining what are today different services into a single enterprise-wide service?” he says.
“All those things require us to break down the silos. If I want to run more things at a corporate scale, I can’t have those historical silos anymore. They have to be broken down.”
Putting information at the centre
What’s clear is information performs a key function in enterprise success throughout ExxonMobil. While some specialists counsel senior executives at blue-chip companies must get up to the game-changing energy of information, Curry says his firm is already effectively conscious of the significance of data and perception, as evidenced by the launch of the Central Data Office.
“The data strategy is not just a push to the business. This isn’t a cultural change anymore. This is the business really demanding that the work we’re doing is imperative and that you have to have data at the corporate scale. There’s a real pull from business for data now,” he says.
Curry says it must be an analogous story at any trendy firm – information must be at the forefront. The worth of information should be understood by the senior management group.
“It’s not a by-product of the business process anymore, it’s an asset,” he says. “We’re producing new data and we use it in different areas, and the business understands that role.”
The great point for Curry is that the Central Data Office is an important ingredient for ExxonMobil going ahead.
“Everything we do is data driven,” he says. “All these initiatives offer transformational opportunities and they all need data. Being able to lead this strategic initiative in the corporation is what makes this an exciting opportunity.”
