Q&A: Worthington Industries CIO Jonathan Dove on ERP upgrade

Computerworld - Steel processor Worthington Industries Inc. is eight months into a 42-month, multimillion-dollar ERP consolidation project using Oracle E-Business Application as its core ERP application across its lines of business to help lower the cost of inventory. Worthington CIO Jonathan Dove spoke with Computerworld last week at the CIO Symposium conference in Columbus, Ohio, about the project -- and about the changing role of the CIO.
Columbus-based Worthington is a $2.3 billion company with 6,700 employees. Excerpts of the interview with Dove follow:
What do you see as the largest challenge facing CIOs these days? How do I continue to evolve inside the organization? How do I get myself so I'm not looked at as an expense within the organization but as an enabler within the organization? And how do I get them to stop looking at me from the maintenance side of the organization and instead as a strategic partner driving where the company is going?
I want to get from wanting to solve technical problems to wanting to solve business problems. And every step you take, you have to continue to maintain the reliability of existing systems to continue to take the next step forward.
How do you see the role of CIO changing? I think earlier on, with all the different technologies and the lack of stabilization of them, the initial role was to develop a good infrastructure and provide a better technology-based solution for the business. Right now, I think that role is more heavily ... focused on the management of information and getting that information to the right people at the right time to make the right decisions.
There's been a big focus on change management in companies. Is that new for the CIO? Actually, yes. We talk about transformation. In our Oracle project now, I've put in separate methodologies and approaches toward change management. How do you get the business to adapt to change because the systems that you went from, from an ERP perspective, are already good and have industry best practices in them. So getting the business to adapt their business practices that best utilize the package has a tremendous impact.
When we went through our selection process, I let the business pick the package, because ... they were selecting 80% of how they wanted the business to be able to run.
Are each of your individual businesses -- finance, HR, whatever -- going to have separate application models? It's one centralized structure. Especially from the infrastructure perspective. We have implemented their [Oracle's]