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Zebra Technologies’ Matt Ausman on the evolving role of the CIO, the importance of sustainability strategies and the key security challenges in the tech landscape.
Matt Ausman is the chief information officer (CIO) at Zebra Technologies, a US mobile computing company that helps organisations monitor and accelerate workflows using intelligent hardware and software.
With more than 20 years of experience in the IT sector, Ausman joined Zebra Technologies in 2021 as VP of enterprise solutions before becoming CIO in 2022.
In his current role, which he says spans “the breadth of Zebra’s operations”, Ausman is responsible for the company’s digital systems with the objective of driving productivity across the enterprise and delivering “transformational capabilities that improve the employee and customer experience”.
He also leads the company’s generative AI (GenAI) governance and implementation for Zebra’s nearly 10,000 employees. Here, he discusses his role and thoughts on the IT landscape.
What are some of the biggest challenges you’re facing in the current IT landscape and how are you addressing them?
Transformation can be an overused word, but it is truly at the centre of some of the biggest challenges, but also the biggest opportunities for IT leaders. The world is evolving at a rapid pace. The expectations of our employees and customers have dramatically shifted in the past few years, and technology is in the middle of much of that. At the same time, the need to focus on cybersecurity has never been higher. The technology that has helped IT organisations is also being used by bad actors to be even more sophisticated in their attacks.
On the technology side, and GenAI specifically, skills, governance and culture are essential for making implementation and adoption a success while truly adding value. One recent survey of 3,000 CEOs from over 30 countries and 26 industries revealed that CEOs recognise the need for GenAI governance, but only 39pc said they have good GenAI governance in place. Yet they’re driven to make significant GenAI investments, even without understanding its full value, because they believe the danger of falling behind competitors and missing out on gains would be worse.
Across Zebra, we have deployed a combination of internally built tools and externally developed software. Within IT and each business function, we have identified simple use cases that allow us to introduce usage of GenAI in a way that employees can learn, interact and adopt, while starting to understand the long-term potential of this technology that will occur through more complex solutions.
Complexity remains a challenge for CIOs, as legacy hardware and software systems have created a strong set of processes and behaviours. Integrating legacy systems with newer technology increases the complexity level and requires a flexible and agile approach to driving change and transformation. Workforce change and adoption is crucial and many times is a bigger factor in the success or failure of a digitisation programme than the technology solution.
The AI era has also made us much more aware that data quality, for both structured and unstructured data, is vital if we want good quality outcomes. Companies have huge volumes of data being created, processed, stored and accessed in ERPs [enterprise resource planning], CRMs [customer relationship management] and industry-specific counterparts such as warehousing and manufacturing management systems.
The creation of data at the edge of business has also grown significantly, which we see in retail, manufacturing, healthcare and logistics among others. That edge data also needs to be turned into value for a company. However, when it comes to data, there are multiple owners, storage locations and formats, and quality issues including inaccurate, incomplete and obsolete data that needs to be fixed and standardised.
‘As senior leaders, CIOs should be engaged with a company’s wider sustainability strategy’
What are your thoughts on digital transformation in a broad sense within your industry?
The CIO role has evolved from a purely technical and IT one toward a role that is much more concerned with business outcomes and strategic leadership, as enterprises become more digital and where processes and collaboration rely on the best IT tools for the job. Business sustainability, workforce productivity, intelligent automation, customer experience and financial efficiency are crucial outcomes for today’s CIO. The CIO needs to be the senior leader at the crossroads of where company IT, business objectives, employee tooling and even customer-facing technology need strategic alignment.
The CIO team must be able to identify what needs to be digitalised and why, and which transformation projects will create new capabilities and deliver new value, create better experiences and drive cost-effective outcomes for the business. In addition to this top-down, collaborative approach, the CIO team needs to be connected to customer- and partner-facing colleagues to support what they are doing and what back-office staff are experiencing when it comes to working with company tools and processes.
Enterprises are also much more aware and concerned about culture, and from that importance, the CIO needs to lead and nurture a culture of innovation. The CIO heavily influences where a company is with its culture of innovation and experimentation and setting out a plan to move that culture forward. Things like internal summits and townhalls, user-friendly governance and new useful applications can all help encourage employees and teams to adopt digitised ways of working, try new things and share those learnings across the company.
Sustainability has become a key objective for businesses in recent years. What are your thoughts on how this can be addressed from an IT perspective?
The growing use of cloud and AI has propelled the need for CIOs to be more conscious about the carbon footprints and energy consumption of transformation and modernisation projects. As senior leaders, CIOs should be informed and engaged with a company’s wider sustainability strategy as a responsible corporate citizen committed to strong environmental initiatives that benefit all stakeholders. This could include a focus on improving the environmental impact of operations, products and solutions, and pursuing science-based targets for carbon emissions reductions at sites and across supply chains.
Resource conservation initiatives could include waste reduction, circular economy product innovation with refurbished devices, eco-packaging and sustainable product design. Smart operations using IoT sensors and AI can be implemented to control and reduce energy consumption and provide analytics for predictive maintenance so IT products last longer.
To elevate the focus on sustainability inside and outside the four walls of a company, the CIO and IT teams should also seek out providers with reliable green credentials by including its IT supply chain and ecosystem. Incentives and specialisations can also be created to encourage channel partners to prioritise sustainable practices and projects with customers.
What are your thoughts on how we can address the security challenges currently facing your industry?
Malicious emails with dangerous URL links and QR codes, scam calls, fake websites, viruses and ransomware remain top threats to enterprises. With AI, these attacks have become more sophisticated. We regularly read about stories of hackers and other threat actors creating audio and visual deepfakes of senior staff to deceive employees into sharing information and money. We regularly run compulsory cybersecurity training for all staff, so that secure systems are supported by secure behaviours.
That includes using login authentication, secure Wi-Fi and file sharing with the added layers of security we provide, which is particularly important for our contractor workforce and employees working remote from home offices. We also conduct tabletop exercises where we role play different threat scenarios to ensure we can react quickly if needed.
Customers also have lots of questions and expectations about hardware and software security, as they want to keep their employees and customers safe, so we invest a lot in making our portfolio secure, with regular security updates and make sure our sales, customer account and call centre teams are informed so they can manage customer questions.
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