Building and Staffing a Center of Excellence to Drive Digital Transformation

Portia Mount, who spoke at the B2B Online conference earlier this year, is the Vice President and Global Leader of Ingersol Rand, and has been for the past year and a half.

Talking about digital transformation, Mount begins by saying that although we may associate technology, processors, Internet of Things and digital layers with the phrase digital transformation, at Ingersol Rand, they focus on the human aspect of transformation.

How Have Ingersol Rand Developed

Ingersol Rand advances the quality of life that we have by creating comfortable, efficient and sustainable environments. At the start of Mounts' career at Ingersol, she pinpointed a few issues which they are now in the process of rectifying.

• The company was too engineering and product focused, meaning people were being left out of the equation.
• Siloed product, marketing and sales functions.
• There was an uneven marketing maturity across enterprise with some teams being understaffed and underdeveloped.
• Marketing was viewed as practical and not strategic.

Mount set out to change these issues by talking to people and getting to understand the "voice of the internal customer," or in other words - her employees. She was then able to develop a model for marketing excellence, build digital capability, develop a global community of practice, drive productivity, create a standard of work and build marketing talent.

She started out by building the right team, which was heavily focused around employing elite marketers. One of the most important factors to Mount and Ingersol Rand as a business was to hire a diverse range of people - something Mount feels proud to have achieved.

Adding Value Back into The Business

She claims that there are five major factors that contribute to adding value back into a business.

• Having a customer-focused vision
• Having a strong brand strategy
• Demanding generation
• Understanding digital marketing
• Understanding the importance of marketing analytics

Should a business have these five points at the heart of its work and priorities, it should be able to efficiently add value to its units.

By introducing key initiatives, such as internal conferences, marketing tech stack assessments and marketing team assessments, it's encouraging employees to engage with and help facilitate the company's digital transformation. By sparking passion in the people responsible for driving change it makes the entire process run far smoother than it would with an apathetic workforce.

Final Thoughts

Ingersol Rand is just one business of many which are helping to transform the way in which companies can build and staff a center of excellence and drive the digital transformation that is taking place throughout all industry.

Placing staff and the internal voice of the company at the heart of digital transformation has meant that a company such as Ingersol Rand is able to run smoother and deliver a better customer experience. It also means that employees become the driving force of change and is exciting and motivating them to become a center of excellence and excites them in their job roles.

Strategies for driving digital transformation is set to be a hot topic at B2B Online 2019, being held in November, at the JW Marriott Marquis Miami, FL.

Please download the agenda today for more information and insights.