Leaning Into The C-Suite With HMG Max Chan SVP & CIO, Avnet — HMG Global Viewpoint Shorts

So I've been with the company close to about 12 years and been the CIO for the last five and a half years, if not more. When I was asked to take on the CIO position, the first thing that I instituted across the organization is that we do not do IT for IT's sake. It is not about just the backend support, the backbone of the organization. Before becoming a CIO, I had the privilege and honor to work with every business line president. I became the go-to business relationship person for IT, and that allowed me to truly understand what we are trying to achieve from a business standpoint, what are some of the challenges the business is facing, and the technology solutions we can bring to address that. With that in mind, when I took up the CIO position, I was very clear to my team that we need to exist for the business. I started the mindset change, the transformation of my IT organization. If you think of the value chain, you have a four-step approach: starting with operations support, the next step being delivery and strategic delivery, then going up to thought leadership or consultative services, and last but not least, bringing innovation to the organization. I was very intentional driving that transformation to move my organization from operations support and delivery to more of strategic delivery and thought leadership, and also institute this innovative mindset across the IT organization. Anything that they hand on keyboard, operations support, we work with our strategic partner and have them do it better, cheaper for us. I keep telling my team the differentiation between us and our partner is that we understand the business. We probably understand the business better than some of the business because IT touches every single part of the business. That change really repositioned the IT organization in a completely different light for the organization. That gets a thumbs up with the BU, that ultimately helps the stature within the C-suite of Avnet. By doing that, we establish ourselves as business leaders that specialize in technology, that leverage technology and bring technology to the business to help them achieve what they need to achieve. That is number one from a playbook standpoint. The rest of it is really then embedding it into the overall business technology strategy, the enterprise strategy. I was very cognizant of the fact that I do not want to come up with our own IT strategy; instead, we become a strategy enabler for the business and look at capabilities that ultimately deliver to the business strategy, the enterprise strategy itself. I'm going to take a pause there, but I'll probably take the entire 30 minutes talking about this stuff.

From a technology leadership perspective, over the years we have expanded IT to take on digital. To some of the audience out there, you might be thinking that digital and IT come together. No, actually that's not the case for 15 years prior. We started a digital organization that was really sitting in the business because we wanted the business to be driving digital business, e-commerce, etc. But at the point where the organization saw how IT is really focusing on the business, it made more sense for us to get the leverage and bring the digital organization and IT organization together and put it under my wings. That helps tremendously with my team because now instead of just focusing on the foundational piece of technology to help enable the business, we have the opportunity also to drive digital products and different things that directly associate to any of the business pillars or the business strategic initiatives. That's one. The second piece of the expanded responsibility is taking on a P&L responsibility for our digital SI business. We acquired that digital SI about five years ago and it had been sitting in the business. But back to the point that Avnet is a technology supply chain, technology solution provider in the distribution industry, the selling motions of an SI is very different from the selling motions of a supply chain solution as well as moving boxes. The CEO asked me to take on that responsibility. Best decision I have made to agree to that, and really reshaping that organization to be able to provide services, extended services to Avnet's traditional customer and supplier partner base, be it helping them to become part of Avnet's digital extension, for example, that connects demand signal and supply signal together, and be able to leverage Avnet capabilities or additional digital services that they need to be successful in their industry and make it easier for them to work with us as a partner. Those are the different things that I have the opportunity to be leading and expanding into, looking at overall enterprise digital strategy. Because of that, it also gives me the opportunity to create a product-centric digital organization where we adopt a distributed delivery model for digital. The IT team built the foundations and maintain the foundations, the platforms. The digital team focuses on innovations and enterprise-level products, but we invite the business units coming onto our platform that we know is secure, in compliance, has all the standard components and services and governance, that they can safely build additional capabilities, digital capabilities that they want to serve their specific customer needs or specific business needs. That actually has taken shape and is showing great results. People are excited about the fact that they don't have to wait on the queue on a digital team or IT team to get their own things. They are able to invest themselves with resources that are able to leverage generative AI capabilities or just standard cloud platform to build additional applications on top of. We like to call it our building blocks of digital across Avnet.