What is Digital Transformation? GE's Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Explains (CXOTalk #180)

#DigitalTransformation #CMO #ChiefMarketingOfficer

General Electric is undertaking a massive digital transformation. In this episode, CMO Linda Boff explains digital transformation at GE.

This conversation covers two crucial topics:
-- What is digital transformation at GE?
-- What is the CMO role at General Electric?

Linda Boff is Chief Marketing Officer of General Electric. Boff was formerly GE's executive director of global brand marketing. Linda is one of the most innovative and forward-thinking marketers in the business. Her extensive background in integrated marketing, digital media, and brand, as well as her reputation for innovation help evolve GE's marketing organization, build their iconic brand and advance GE’s digital and industrial strength.

From the conversation:

Michael Krigsman: So digital transformation, we hear that term a lot and you’ve just eluded to some of the components or the characteristics of digital transformation, meaning connecting with things. And so can you describe digital transformation at GE, what does that mean for you in this huge industrial company.

Linda Boff: Company, corporation all of those things all the above right, so you know here’s what it means. You know today we’ve got great machines that help to power the world, that help to create renewable energy, that diagnose in hospitals. But the world we’re imagining is a world where those machines talk to each other. And we’re big sets of machines. Big sets of turbines can share information.

So imagine Michael a jet engine that can tweet, that can tell you it’s time to come off engine, that it’s time to be serviced. Imagine what we think of what we call a ‘digital twin’. And a digital twin very simply is if you’re running a wind turbine farm and you literally have a digital imprint of that farm, and therefore you know when the machines are the most productive, when the machines need to be serviced. Think about how much more productive you can be.

So when we think about digital industrial, we think about the industrial internet. We think about a world that’s more productive. We think about a world that’s more efficient. We think about fuel savings, and again in our world GE operates in a world of scale. So you save a mile of fuel for a big railroad it’s worth millions and millions of dollars.

So we get as you can tell really kind of giddy talking about what a connected ecosystems of machines looks like. I mean we think and the industry thinks that the industrial internet will be bigger than the consumer internet, so that’s a lot to get excited about. Some people call in Industry 4.0 right, the next big industrial revolution.