Patrick Hoffstetter, chief digital officer at Renault and director of the Renault Digital Factory, and Tanya Cordrey, former chief digital officer at Guardian News and Media (GNM), talk to Spencer Stuart about guiding their organisations through digital transformation. In this video, Hoffstetter and Cordrey outline how a digital strategy will take effect on multiple fronts. Building cross-functional teams is essential, as is building products for users inside the organisation, not just for those outside.
Video Transcript
Cordrey
When I started at The Guardian, it was in a really interesting spot. It’s not fair to say that The Guardian had not been doing anything digital. If anything, they had been very early on in their embracing of digital, so I was very fortunate that The Guardian had lots of digital nous and enthusiasm and excitement. But what it needed was steering in the right direction in terms of the strategy, skillset and execution.
The digital strategy we pursued in terms of our products was to ensure that we could get the journalism into the hands of our users, so we embarked upon rebuilding the whole product portfolio, to ensure that we had the right apps, the right website, the right presence on places like Google and Facebook to reach the users, and hopefully to engage them and bring them back to The Guardian time and time again.
It wasn’t just building products that were great for users outside The Guardian; we realised that we had to build great products inside The Guardian for the journalists. The role of the journalist was changing so dramatically, but they had the same old clunky content management systems that really supported the days of the newspaper.
Hoffstetter
My first job was to set up a digital strategy for the company. At that time I was in charge of both B2B and B2C aspects. At the same time, we worked on the organisation and set-up of the Digital factory which is basically quite unique. It is a 360 team at HQ level, a mix of people from IT, sales, marketing and product – they called it a Noah’s Ark.
We tried to undertake the various pieces a digital transformation – on the B2C side, we focused on launching a mobile strategy, launching a social strategy, developing a global platform standardisation, which then evolved into an important strategic alliance project called Helios that I undertook with my colleague from Nissan. It was aimed at having our almost 300 websites across the globe for all the brands under the alliance under one single platform. And for the past 12-18 months, I’ve been working with different counterparts, including people from the strategy department on a more medium and long-term vision for our digital strategy and digital acceleration, bringing some input on the way Renault potentially is going to be disrupted on the one hand, or opportunities coming from digital for new business models.
For additional chief digital officer insights, view other videos in the series.