by Peter High, published on Forbes
2-1-2016
Jim Swanson has been the Chief Information Officer of $15 billion Monsanto for nearly two and half years after spending almost all of his career to date at healthcare companies at companies like Merck, Johnson & Johnson, and SmithKline Beecham. A scientist by training, Swanson joined the St. Louis-based provider of agricultural products for farmers because it allowed him to continue to pursue opportunities at the intersection between science, technology, and intellectual property innovation. As such, he has thought about the role of CIO much more strategically than most.
Swanson has led a sweeping digital transformation over the organization focused around five pillars that define the digital opportunity: operational excellence, business productivity, customer centricity, revenue enablement, and disruptive innovation, each of which he describes in great depth in this interview. As such, Swanson’s team is playing a significant role in revolutionizing a company in perhaps the oldest industry of all: agriculture.
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Peter High: You are the Chief Information Officer of Monsanto. Please take a moment to describe your role.
Jim Swanson: I have responsibility for all the IT systems and data that spans Monsanto. We are in about 67 countries worldwide, and I have responsibility to deliver on the IT capabilities across that global footprint. Monsanto is comprised of two segments with a third one that is emerging. One is our crop protection business – our chemistry that helps growers with herbicides, pesticides, etc. Our second is our seed trade business – corn, canola, soy, vegetables, etc. Our third emerging area is economic services. We provide information to help growers better improve their yield, improve their outputs, reduce their inputs, and do it more sustainably. As the CIO, I have the responsibility to enable those three segments with data, tools, and capabilities for our business.
High: You operate in the world’s largest and oldest industry – agriculture. To the uneducated outsider, it may seem ironic in some ways that there is a real digital revolution that is happening within agriculture. You have just begun to describe some of that, and how it applies across the three segments of the business. Please talk about the move from analog to digital that is happening within Monsanto and the industry, more generally speaking.
Swanson: We are taking an industry that has probably done it the same way for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Over the last half decade or so, we are digitizing the farm and digitizing agriculture, which is pretty exciting. You think about the seven and a half billion people on the planet, growing to nine billion in a relatively short period, and growing the amount of food we need, and doing it sustainably is an important mission that Monsanto has. We are going to need every tool that we have to enable that. We need information, science, and technology. What is happening on the farm is a leveraging of data and information insights to provide much better ways to do agriculture than has been done in the past.
We connect combines in the field, so we can collect real-time information on how they are performing on the farm. We use analytics and data to get better insights into the performance of our products, as well as sustainable agricultural practices. We internalize and digitize our internal processes, so we connect more effectively across the “ag” ecosystem. It is rapidly evolving with sensor technology, with data, and with insights that have transformed the way that farming is done. It is having a tremendous impact on yield impact, reduced input, and more sustainable agriculture.
High: How tech-savvy are growers? Do you find that adoption is happening readily? Is it readily apparent as to how important and how valuable the new tools that are now available can be?
