Data Transformation Journey In Lafarge Canada (East)

Today's largest companies by market cap are dominated by information technology firms like Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA, Google, and Amazon, with Apple (https://companiesmarketcap.com/) leading the pack for the past decade. These companies have market valuations in the trillions of dollars, dwarfing the largest industrial firms, which are valued in the hundreds of billions. Just thirty years ago, the market was dominated by oil, consumer goods, aerospace, and pharmaceutical firms. Since 2014, the rise of billion-dollar information technology companies has been prolific, predicting that 40% of the current Fortune 500 companies may disappear within ten years.

This extraordinary growth has been driven by advancements in three key areas:

1. Computing Power: Over the past 50 years, computing power has followed Moore's Law, doubling the capacity of integrated circuits approximately every 18 months. This has made processors smaller, cheaper, and more powerful. Recent advancements in quantum computing and specialized chip architectures continue to push the boundaries of computing power.
2. Internet Ubiquity: The internet, just 40 years old, has become a global network that enables rapid communication and data exchange. Improvements in wired, optical, wireless, and satellite telecommunications have facilitated real-time data exchange over vast distances.
3. Data Storage: Significant advancements in data storage have made it possible to pack more information into smaller devices. This has enabled the rise of data centers, cloud computing, and cloud storage, significantly reducing the cost of developing data and digital solutions. This, in turn, has given rise to the mobile phone and artificial intelligence (AI).

The availability of affordable, fast data exchange has led to the rise of digital, multi-sided platforms like Amazon, Alibaba, Uber, and Airbnb. These platforms connect large networks of stakeholders across industries, automating and facilitating transactions and interactions. AI and automation further personalize these interactions, generating more data and creating a feedback loop of data input, processing, and output.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is characterized by its speed, with the pace of change shifting from linear to exponential. This rapid evolution is disrupting traditional business models, which now also face challenges from a changing global geopolitical environment and the urgency to address climate change. Traditional brick-and-mortar businesses must transform to stay relevant or risk obsolescence.

My Personal Data Journey

With a background in Database Design and Systems Analysis Methods, I have spent over 20 years in the cement and construction materials industry—a literal 'bricks and mortar' business—working in commercial, supply chain, and operations roles. Our successes have been rooted in traditional models of operational excellence, quality, supply chain management, and market strategies. Throughout my career, I have seen that data-informed organizations have a competitive edge over purely data-driven or intuition-based ones. Balancing the power of data with human experience is crucial.

Our industry has significant opportunities to leverage data to improve operational performance and customer interaction. However, these improvements will be incremental due to the physical limits of traditional business models. While there is much work to do with data in our existing operations, we must also invest in transformative efforts that leverage exponential growth. This requires rethinking how we treat data, use AI, and interact with market stakeholders.

As Eastern Canada's Director of Data Integration and Transformation for the past 18 months, I have been tasked with working with Holcim’s Americas and Global IT/Digital functions to build a strategy for data aggregation, cleansing, and leveraging to empower business-led projects with clear success metrics of revenue growth, sustainability, and cost savings.

From the start, we established a vision focused on data-driven storytelling, frictionless data access, and data literacy within the business. Our mission is centred on IT and business collaboration, innovation agility, and business value realization.

We adopted a data-first approach, unifying our business data and democratizing access. Collaboration between business and digital teams was essential, involving difficult conversations about security, governance, architecture, relevance, value, resourcing, and capabilities. We aligned on building a data lake for data unification and providing business professionals with the tools to build analytics, supported by data engineers and data scientists.

A year later, we successfully executed our data lake architecture on AWS, with automated data extractions from SAP and frontline systems. We provisioned Qlik Sense Cloud licenses to business users, enabling them to access data and build analytics applications. We released the first three priority analytics tools for our Concrete Commercial, Aggregate Logistics, and Credit and Collections functions. We are also developing our Data Governance model with Collibra and our internal digital innovation platform, Digital EDGE (Excellence | Data | Growth | Empowerment), which helps our business develop and test solutions quickly, productionize successes, and share experiences from failures.

While these accomplishments are significant, the most rewarding aspect has been establishing strong connections with collaborators inside and outside the organization. The diversity of talent and experience, combined with a willingness to co-create, has been incredibly rewarding. We are energized by the engagement and committed to realizing value from this transformation.