2009 TechNO Expo

Beth Nordin, vice president of information technology, CHS, Inc, Inver Grove Heights

In today’s environment, cost control is certainly a high priority. However, in a time of economic caution, skilled information technology professionals have a unique opportunity to help their organizations achieve immediate goals and long-term success. For CHS, an energy, grain, and food company, this means building on long-held disciplines, such as cost control, while focusing on both core business growth and acquisition opportunities.

CHS is a diversified company, with 14 unique business units and more than 500 individual locations spread across two-thirds of the U.S. and internationally. IT is one of few shared company services; even the company’s finance area is decentralized. IT is structured to serve both the whole and individual parts. We use relationship managers to provide all things IT for each business unit, essentially serving as the unit’s IT manager, while remaining connected to the overall company. Relationship managers are responsible for the business unit’s IT governance and prioritization, working with it to align priorities and budgets for annual spending, and adjustments throughout the year. This model gives the business unit essential flexibility to quickly adjust its scope of service for non-asset–based costs during an economic downturn.

Overall, this arrangement challenges CHS IT to maintain a flexible cost structure, with supply always adjusting to meet demand based upon formal service level agreements with each business unit. To connect IT success with business success, a significant part of IT’s pay-at-risk is tied to how well we manage to balance supply and demand and how well we meet our commitments.

We continue to selectively consolidate operations, modernize our IT infrastructure, improve our processes, and hire, train, and retain very skilled people. For example, we are selectively standardizing our applications to take advantage of size, although individual business units have the discretion to participate or not, based on their needs. At the same time, we are reducing our applications footprint through targeted end-of-life programs.

A comprehensive charge-back and reporting model is used to insure complete transparency to the business units. A key focal area is project reporting; each quarter, we report both forecasts and actuals for costs, schedules, and quality issues. Performance metrics are also embedded in a service catalog, for infrastructure services with a “click charge,” as well as an hourly rate for applications. This information is listed very clearly within the service level agreements. With this structure, each business unit understands how much it will spend on IT in the year and can increase or decrease their demand as needed.