Data Transformation Is the CEO’s Business
Here is an excerpt from an article written by Barbara Wixom, Ogi Redzic, Brandon Hootman, Joaquin Rodriguez, Gabriele Piccoli,, and Cynthia Beath for MIT Sloan Management Review. To read the complete article, check out others, sign up for email alerts, and obtain subscription information, please click here.
Illustration Credit: Aeriform/Ikon Image
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A massive, multiyear initiative to transform corporate data at Caterpillar demonstrates what top executives must do to unlock the power of their data assets
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The Research
The MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research conducted case study research at Caterpillar, a member of the MIT CISR research consortium since 2007.
- From July 2023 to December 2024, the authors conducted 56 interviews with 42 stakeholders. Interview participants also reviewed the case narrative as it was developed by the researchers and provided supplementary information.
- The authors supplemented the interviews with information from documents provided by Caterpillar and publicly available sources.
Caterpillar’s CEO had a problem. Jim Umpleby had stepped into the chief executive role in 2017 with a vision of achieving more profitable growth by selling more services and parts to the company’s heavy-equipment customers. Because offering real-time fleet management information services and selling parts online would depend on digital technologies, he set up a new division called Cat Digital. But the division’s head soon had unwelcome news for Umpleby: The company didn’t know its customers well enough to deliver on its goal. Customer data was siloed, fragmented, and, in the case of secondhand equipment, often entirely lacking.
That problem is one shared by countless leaders who see how digital can enable a growth strategy but are stymied by a legacy of fragmented, incomplete, and inconsistent data assets. They are frequently told that getting their data in order is a prerequisite for taking full advantage of new tools like artificial intelligence but too often see data transformation as an IT modernization project. They delegate the work to IT leaders and evaluate success based on cost, speed, and tool adoption. But when data is treated as IT infrastructure rather than as an enterprise asset, its impact is predictably limited. Companies that gain real value from their data actively involve the top management team in data transformation.
At Caterpillar, Umpleby and his team did more than simply sign off on the proposal by Ogi Redzic, chief digital officer of Cat Digital, to build a new enterprise digital data platform. In 2019, they demonstrated long-term commitment by giving Redzic’s team a generous three years to build the platform, dubbed Helios, that would allow the company, its customers, and its dealers to see consistent and complete fleet information across all applications and interactions. Executives went on to redesign data governance, elevating data ownership to senior leaders. By 2025, the Helios platform was supporting e-commerce, fleet management, and predictive and preventive maintenance — and Caterpillar had grown its services revenue from $14 billion in 2016 to $24 billion in 2024.
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Here is a direct link to the complete article.
Barbara Wixom is a principal research scientist at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research (CISR). Ogi Redzic is a senior vice president and chief digital officer at Caterpillar. Brandon Hootman is vice president of physical AI platforms and AI autonomy at Caterpillar. Joaquin Rodriguez is an assistant professor at the Grenoble Ecole de Management and a research fellow at CISR. Gabriele Piccoli is the Edward G. Schlieder Chair of Information Sciences and a member of the Cultural Computing group at the Center for Computation and Technology at Louisiana State University. Cynthia Beath is a professor emerita at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin.