Behind the Scenes on Goodyear’s Drive to the Cloud (Part 1)

I grew up a working-class boy.

My father was a tire builder at Goodyear. There was no work after the war in Dundee, Scotland, so he went south to England. He married a local girl, raised a family, and instilled strong values and principles in his children. I started as an intern at Goodyear in the IT department, as an analyst/programmer. It was a great job. It’s still a great job. I’m really proud that I’ve gone from IT intern to chief information officer of the company.

I like driving change. That’s where my passion is.

I’ve been driving change my whole career—especially the last five years. Within our global IT organization, we’ve improved communications and project management and deployed new tools to support the business. Technology is fast, and you need to stay current.

When I started as CIO five years ago, we needed more tools for mobility, productivity, and collaboration. Our legacy tools—Lotus Notes, WebEx, and Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007—no longer met our needs. We were frustrated with the old capital model where you purchase a toolset, then upgrade and make another big purchase two or three years later. Office 365 gave us the ability to track our licenses along the way—it’s more transparent and much easier to control.

We have approximately 67,000 employees globally, and we manufacture in 50 facilities spanning 22 countries. Across this geography, we have about 30,000 Office 365 users, and more than 13,000 are using Office 365 ProPlus. It’s a very diverse workforce representing many languages and cultures. Our Office 365 users are located at manufacturing facilities, offices, warehouses, and retail stores; they may be mobile or working from home.

Integration, communication and collaboration were some of the big reasons we made the move to Office 365. Microsoft cybersecurity capabilities gave our team peace of mind about the decision to shift to the cloud.