“Dräger is an international company in the fields of medical and safety technology with a proven 128-year old track record of innovation and customer intimacy. “Technology for Life” is our company’s guiding principle and the heart of our brand. I feel it every second when I speak to Dräger employees around the globe. Nevertheless, the way we are doing business and the way we are approaching our customers are starting to change. Digitalization is becoming an integral part of our business relations as well as of our products and service deliveries.
We from IT deliver tools that support our business functions and we have been doing this since years. Our IT has an overall good reputation within the company and the way we deliver our services is state of the art at least. We cover around 90 per cent of Dräger worldwide with one SAP/CRM system suite, and we continuously provide our service business with new state-of-the-art tools to make their life easier. We operate as strong internal service provider delivering IT tools to our customers, and we manage the ongoing cultural changes within our business functions. Nevertheless something is changing substantially in the way our business is asking for support dealing with new technologies. Also here, digitalization is one of the main drivers in changing our business model towards the organization.
As IT organization we claim bringing collaboration tools and the respective collaborative mindset into the company. But the way we have to do that is completely different compared to classical IT rollout projects or system implementations. We have to anticipate the needs of the future workforce inside a company, which comprises largely of people not coming from so-called Generations Y or Z. We still have a lot of baby boomers in the company and you can easily find three or four different generations working together in teams or projects.
What keeps me busy? I would say 80 percent of my time I spent dealing with IT and IT projects in the classical way. This means: endless times in steering boards, functional committees, workshops and team meetings in order to improve our existing IT landscape and make it more efficient. But the more time I spend with discovering the benefits of new technologies for our company, the more I am looking for means and methods for bringing these technologies to all our employees worldwide.
I have started to change the IT organization to meet these challenges in the future, because I am convinced a mindset shift is needed in IT first in order to change the mindset of the rest of the company. Another thing I have intensified is talking and listening to people to make me and them understand, what the digital transformation could mean for all of us and how we in IT can support them on their own digital transformation journey.
Mine has already started and it is a pretty exciting one!”