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Lactalis Australia
Driving IT Transformation at Lactalis Australia
Sabina Janstrom
Sabina Janstrom is an experienced IT leader with a career spanning large multinational companies. She has held roles as a Project Manager, Business Analyst and leader of PM teams and project portfolios, ultimately managing entire IT departments. As the CIO of Lactalis Australia, Sabina oversees a team of 50 people, a $15 million budget and a diverse application portfolio. Lactalis, a global dairy company, focuses on leveraging cuttingedge technology to scale operations efficiently. Sabina is passionate about driving technological advancement within the company, overseeing initiatives across factories, data centers and business systems to support its growth and success.
A curious CIO keeps looking at new technology, trying to understand the different departments in the organization and talking to everyone to find out why certain things work
Recognizing Sabina Janstrom’s extensive expertise in IT leadership at Lactalis Australia, this exclusive feature offers valuable insights into the challenges of scaling technology operations and strategies for leveraging cutting-edge solutions to drive efficiency and innovation across the company’s factories, data centers and business systems.
Challenges in Mergers and Acquisitions
Growth-oriented, Lactalis acquires often. Despite not being particularly unique, our integrations are complex because of the need to integrate both corporate elements of the acquired organization as well as its manufacturing operations. Our projects usually involve two streams, one for networking, infrastructure and end-user devices, the other for operations. Manufacturing, packaging and warehousing will be integrated into operations, along with receiving ingredients.
The acquisition process can be quite challenging for companies that are paper-based and don't have tools like barcodes or radio frequency scanners. To succeed, we work with our Business Process Owner buddies to conduct change impact assessments and train users.
KPIs, Decision-Making, and Project Governance
Among our key performance indicators are days without P1, customer satisfaction in Project Delivery and Helpdesk, cyber security breaches and low staff turnover.
In my opinion, we are effective if we work on Lactalis Australia-beneficial projects, strategies, and services and meet deadlines and budgets. As a result, I would dig deeper and lose customers, our tolerances will be out and outages will occur. My background makes this easy, but I will focus on the two things that sum it up. You need to do the right projects and you need to do them well.
The Dark Art of saying no
In my time in IT, I have learned that good work depends on both what you do and what you don't do. Initiatives that fail or don't deliver benefits even after completion waste so much time. In lessons learned workshops or retrospectives, we can see clearly where we went wrong and how we can improve next time. Yet the same mistakes keep happening. What’s going on? Of course, there are many factors involved, but I would like to focus on my personal favourite, doing the right projects in the first place. Let’s break it down into 3 areas. Saying no to bad projects, saying no to good projects, and saying “not yet”.
Saying no to bad projects:
• Bad ideas
•Siloed thinking
•Terrible technology alignment
Saying no to good projects:
•Poor strategic alignment
•Poor likelihood of success Saying “not yet”
•Good project, poor timing
Projects often struggle halfway through due to unclear scope, benefits, and owners. Stop bringing in pet projects from everywhere. Stop poorly scoped projects. Deliver business benefits to demotivate team members. Then your team can focus on what really matters, so you deliver well. Lactalis Australia's project intake process examines how technology can support each of its long-term goals.
Intake needs to be improved for existing projects as well as new ones. If you fix the intake process, you'll soon have no "no" projects and can start saying "Yes" more often.
Critical Elements of Technology Strategy and Future IT Management
The definition of bad IT is that it impedes users rather than empowers them. Old laptops that constantly need rebooting, poor internet connections at specific sites, or clunky workflows or other business tasks that take longer than they should are among the reasons. Let those people work if those impediments are removed. Can we align our desire for good IT with improving user experience in S4/HANA? In order to make IT strategy responsive and able to deliver business goals, we must understand the "why" and explain how a major transformation will result in user benefits.
AI and Machine Learning have changed how we organize IT. We tend to group people based on their skills and systems. But what if teams of people managed teams of robots? In the future, if AI does the grunt work, entry-level employees will have to find new career paths. Despite the fact that you can probably already take courses on managing in an AI world, there is no standard operating procedure for leading a technology department.
A curious CIO keeps looking at new technology, trying to understand the different departments in the organization and talking to everyone to find out why certain things work. In addition to learning new things, a curious CIO can explain why certain things matter.
