- Welcome to The Shiproom.
You're on the air.
In 1957, Volvo revolutionized the car safety industry
when they introduced the first two point safety belt.
Today during The Shiproom, I'm going to make
a couple of points myself cause I'm joined here
by the Global CIO and Chief Digital Officer of Volvo
Atif Rafiq.
Thank you for being here.
- Hey, it's a pleasure.
- You are super unique among CIOs because you really
are a pure digital native.
How has that cloud-first mindset impacted how you're
able to drive organizations?
- Now I've been in the internet,
developing products on the internet for about 20 years.
- Yeah as an engineering leader.
- Yeah, exactly.
Leading product and where we want to go for customers.
- What are some of the things you are working on right now
that really would have been impossible
before we had the cloud?
- So I would say two things principally is,
one is the product itself, and then second is how
customers get the product.
- There's an interesting lesson I think there for
all of us which is,
everything that we work on we should
just think about it as being a cloud connected device.
I mean who would have thought that 10 years ago or 5 years
ago that cars would be a cloud connected device.
- Yeah, I mean they started shipping with modems in 2005.
The data plans are now free.
All the barriers and friction points are kinda gone.
It's more about the imagination of coming up with
the right use cases.
- Volvo is one of the most famous companies in Sweden.
So here on The Shiproom we brought in a couple of
Swedish delicacies here.
So Creamed Smoked Roe,
this squeezable Cod Roe paste is salty and convenient.
Well, I don't know that I would take a second bite.
- It delivers on the salty.
- Okay, we're going to call this one dessert.
I've heard the one on the right is particularly terrible
so I'll try this one here first.
- Let's go here this looks like umm-
- Wow, alright so I'm a fan of the middle one.
I love black liquorice and I love salt.
- I think it's all liquorice.
- This is much better than the
fish out of the toothpaste.
So you guys spend a lot of time and energy
modernizing your infrastructure,
what factors did you see that really led to pushing
going from the way you had traditionally done things
to a modern workplace and a modern way of doing things?
- Work in progress as a 90 year old company.
I think that sometimes necessity
is the mother of invention.
So I don't know if everyone is aware but y'know Volvo
was facing hard times about 10 years ago.
It was a part of Ford and it was not really cared for.
In 2010 it was spun out.
As an independent company,
it had to make some tough choices,
we decided to spend a lot on the core product
which is the cars.
So then we had to be much more efficient
about the rest of the things we do - like the workplace.
So then we'd said "Well why don't we go all in on cloud?"
But it was really a matter of saying
"well how are we going to act as a global company
and a global workforce if we don't use the modern
digital tools to run how we interact with each other"?
So I think necessity really drove us to make
some hard choices of saying let's go all in on technology
'cause it's much more efficient.
- Then how has that driven the culture
and the efficiency or productivity or even creativity
of the team itself?
- I think that we act as a global company so we could
work across y'know Shanghai, San Francisco,
Gothenburg Sweden, for example.
It's more natural for us as a behavior.
- Y'know what that is?
That is our Teams phone.
Check this out.
I've got Atif here with me, who's on the call?
- Good day!
This is Carla Gustafson and I'm the director of
the consulate here in Gothenburg, Sweden.
- Ooh, a dignitary.
- That's right.
Alright so you got a question?
You got something on your mind?
- Atif, as you already know, Gothenburg is the home of a
very unique and cherished form of
music called black metal.
I just wanted to do a spot check on how successful
you've absorbed local culture by doing a quick quiz
on your knowledge of the local bands.
Atif, please tell me if the following
black metal bands are true Swedish bands or fakes.
Furious Corpse?
- Sounds very Gothenburg so I'll say yes.
- Hmmm, fake.
Facebreaker?
- Well I struck out the first time so I'll say yes.
- Real.
Rimfrost?
- It can get frosty so let's go with it.
- Real.
Scrompulence?
- Ooh, you have a very creative person here but I think
with the moose head probably yes.
- Nope, sorry. That's actually fake.
- Scrompulence that's a great name.
- Crevice?
- That sounds more like a sushi place so I'll say no.
- Absolutely, fake.
Wretched Abyss?
- That's way too depressing, no.
- Also fake.
Very good Atif, I believe we can go ahead and extend your
work visa but I have one final question.
Last years Volvo board of directors agreed to a plan
that increases your technology team's involvement
with sales and marketing.
How has this impacted the work your team is doing?
And how is this impacting the end product Volvo
customers are getting?
- Well it's actually fundamentally changing how
people get their hands on a Volvo.
So we are really leaning into the idea of a subscription.
- Wow.
- So people ask me well what's a subscription,
how's it different than a lease?
It's a single monthly cost and it includes everything
like in the U.S. it includes insurance,
it includes maintenance, example.
What we think is really interesting about it is
when you're, y'know, it's two years later and you want
a newer version of that same product.
We just swap it out.
- So I've heard a lot of CIO's comment that many of the
responsibilities they have today didn't even
exist five years ago.
So when you look ahead five years from now
what do you think your current responsibilities will be
and how will they change?
- I think they'll be significantly different I mean
basically, the CIO role from my observation is basically
moving from a place where there's been a separation
between business and IT if you will.
And if you're trying to serve customers and users,
which is what our jobs are,
then you can't really separate between
marketing, and sort of software,
metrics, business considerations, strategy.
They're all really one thing.
I think increasingly you'll see this role evolve
to be much more of a front-line role.
In coaching, the people who are day-to-day
let's say product managers,
who are synthesizing
a lot of different inputs and kinda acting like
general managers for their products.
- So much of what we've talked about is about
teamwork and collaboration.
How is technology helping you to improve that across Volvo?
- When I look at things like Teams,
whatever other workspaces people use,
those are very powerful.
I mean what I'm seeing inside our organization
is that the places where we are using that is
freeing up a ton of time,
from meetings and from email,
which are definitely working against people
and it needs to be a much more fluid collaboration
based on where value is actually being created.
So I'm a big believer that the shared work spaces
are really just beginning to unlock the potential
of the competencies we have in the company.
To actually self organize.
- Okay so we've had this learning bot running
in the background listening to the conversation
and it's applied a bunch of ML to try to come up with
what the most interesting questions are that summarize
what we've been talking about.
But we like to make things interesting.
So while we're going to be talking about these questions,
what we have here is the un-assembled pieces of a table
produced by another Swedish company.
So you and I are going to try to build this
while we're talking.
- Let's do it.
There's four legs on the table.
- What's another holiday that deserves fireworks?
- Memorial Day.
- Have you heard the stat that most people eat
eight spiders while they are sleeping?
- I don't believe it.
- True or false; a dog is man's best friend
but an ostrich is man's worst enemy.
- What do you got against ostriches?
- What's one food you should never eat in a Volvo?
- Chalupa.
- Do they have chalupas in Sweden?
- Taco Bell is not there but y'know,
tacos are universal.
- If you run out of milk, what do you put on your cereal?
- I think you just go with air.
- Who are the Swedes most proud of,
Alfred Nobel or Dolph Lundgren?
- The inventor.
- But y'know Dolph has a Masters in Chemical Engineering
if I remember right.
Now your twitter bio says that you've flipped
a few burgers in your life,
how many do you think you've flipped?
- My first job was at Burger King.
I did flip a bunch of burgers of various kinds,
flame broiled as well.
- Yeah y'know we gotta flip it over and make sure it works.
So if people wanna follow you and kinda learn more about
Volvo or learn more about the things that you're doing,
where can they check you out?
- Hit me up on LinkedIn.
I look at everything.
And follow my Twitter.
- I think it's been fascinating to understand
how a 90 year old organization is redefining what the
car ownership and purchase could be.
Thank you for joining us here on The Shiproom.
We will look forward to talking with
you again in the future.
Thank you.
- That'll be fantastic.
- Whoever pulled that one out of the vaults was
like really random.
- Well you guys get really wacky here.
I can only imagine the amount of work that goes into
coming up with all of this.
- We spared no expense.