Passion and purpose

For our Global Chief Information Technology Officer, the learning never stops.

After more than 35 years in the IT industry, Darryl Warren has no intention of slowing down.

A self-confessed early starter, the GFG Alliance Global Chief Information Technology Officer has a jam-packed daily schedule which concludes, often with late night calls to IT leads, Internal customers or suppliers working in other key GFG geographies.

His passion for making a positive difference to the performance of the business and the digital experience of our global workforce, punctuates his sentences.

“Having an absolute thirst for knowledge and a thirst for understanding how technology can be leveraged to deliver a great business outcome,” Darryl says, when explaining what drives his approach. “For instance how can we leverage commodity technology that works in a consumer setting and apply that in a business sense and while a solution might not immediately jump off the page at you, the question is how do you accumulate that knowledge and then use it so that you go, ‘Hold on a minute, there’s an opportunity there for us,’ when those invariable discussions come up.”

As global head of IT, Darryl explains his focus is to gain synergies across the GFG Alliance group so that we’re not “reinventing the wheel”.

“We can take advantage of our size and the opportunities that present themselves in terms of cost efficiencies, in leveraging common standards across the group, sharing learnings across our global IT teams and better enabling our businesses across the globe,” he says.

An ongoing area of attention is the not-so-straightforward task of integrating newly acquired companies and their staff into the existing GFG environment.

“Probably the best example of that that we have managed to achieve so far is the global tenant for Office 365, which provides email and our collaboration base – we’ve got 15,000 users already in the global tenant and two large significant groups with UK steel and Aluminium Dunkerque due to join in the next three months which will take us close to 20,000,” he says.

A sharpened approach on enabling a better customer experience is a key ethos Darryl is promoting within the global IT teams.

“From an IT perspective the industry sectors we operate in are not traditionally recognised as leaders in terms of providing our customers and suppliers with tools to enable them to do business more easily with us – and that includes our customers internally as well,” he says. “By way of example, as we upgrade our applications, amongst other benefits, we need to focus on mobile-enabling these to allow our people, customers and suppliers to complete tasks and provide service at a time and place that’s convenient to them or when an opportunity presents itself.”

Security and connectivity
Undoubtedly, one of the biggest concerns all IT teams face globally is security and protection of our data and environments.

“The reality we face is every single day there are hackers and ransomware organisations that are putting huge effort into beating our defences,” Darryl says, citing the woes of foreign exchange firm Travelex, left reeling from a $USD6.8 million ransomware attack over the new year.

“We need to be vigilant both at an individual level but also as a group, and so we will be undertaking some strengthening of security across the global group.”

Despite this challenge, Darryl sees plenty of up-side. As our workforce increasingly utilise the global Office365 tenant, there will be increased productivity through better access to common collaboration software, conferencing tools and shared applications.

A global intranet to connect and serve all geographies and companies within the GFG group is in the pipeline, and steps are underway to explore the global rollout of the internal social media platform Workplace, which is already in use in some of our businesses.

“We will be better positioned through the use of technology to bring people quickly into the GFG environment and help them feel part of the family and connected to the global GFG organisation,” Darryl says.

And then there are significant projects underway around the world to help drive business transformation. Across the globe there are a number of core business systems projects currently underway which leverage cross Business Unit & geographic learnings, processes and systems.

The opportunity to shift applications as they are updated from legacy on-premise data centres to both public and private cloud is another, and then there’s the work being done on MES (Manufacturing Execution Systems) and Industry 4.0 and its application in our operations.

“Across the business we are making better use of systems that use operational data and predictive analytics to help us run plants more efficiently,” he says. “Understanding the options we have for further improvement through automation, by using low cost sensors, monitoring devices and wearable technology and connecting them to systems to make better informed decisions is an ongoing opportunity.”

Technology will also play a significant part in CN30 – our recently announced target of becoming the first carbon neutral steel and aluminium producer of scale in the world, by 2030.

With all that ‘in-play’, it begs the question, how does he recharge and maintain a sense of balance?

“My wife and I enjoy dining out, so we try to get out a couple of nights a week,” he says. “Catching up with family and friends, we have three adult children and our first granddaughter – I have a few hobbies and I enjoy getting to the gym a couple of mornings a week which is a good thing for my wellbeing and helps with balance and perspective.”