Eminent, CIO: Change Management an Essential Element in Successful Business Transformation

Tim Brooks, Managing Director, WorldWide Technology, talks to Michael McCalmont, CIO, about his work background, mergers & acquisitions, and his CIO role.

McCalmont shares he has been the CIO of several global, multi-billion-dollar, mid-size companies. He began with an operations management background in mechanical engineering and got a chance to lead a global ERP project early in his career. He was enamored by the ability of IT to change how a business operates on a global scale, and he soon made a commitment to himself to be a CIO.

He took several roles that were quite deep in the ERP space, but recognized he needed infrastructure and its security. So, he took on some divisional CIO responsibilities and global roles in a multi-billion dollar footprint, a space that he is truly relishing. These companies primarily focus on engineering, manufacturing, and customer service as the heartbeat of what it takes to be a successful company. 

McCalmont shares that he’s been involved in over nine different mergers and acquisitions (M&A) events. They've ranged from small to medium to large on the purchasing side and selling side, and he says he learned a lot about the process. Reflecting on 2021, McCalmont shares that it was an excellent year for him — an intense year of learning as CIO at Service Master. He led a complete carve-out of business from the parent company, standing up a brand new cloud-based ERP system, a higher cloud-based infrastructure system, and all new IT security tools. In addition, he moved the business from Memphis, Tennessee, to Atlanta, Georgia, within a year. During that significant carve-out, they were brought into acquisition events at the same time as the business was set to be a platform for growth.

He shares that it was a significant year of learning and a successful year of setting the business up for them to begin its transformation and growth.

Throughout his career, McCalmont notes, he looked at the opportunity for M&A events to recalibrate the architecture of a business, to look at it as an opportunity to change, to replatform an entire company. “...We had the opportunity to create what we felt was right.”

They invested in time, resources, and money to set a scalable platform for growth that was entirely based on cloud architecture. On the flip side of that, he notes, there were a couple of significant risks. Most companies can't begin their growth curve and fulfill their investment thesis without being separate from the parent company, which takes a lot of energy, and the longer it takes to begin that growth trajectory, the more clearly the financial risk, he explains. There were also risks in terms of possibly losing employees who feared the new technology but had legacy information and experience — critical to the migration — that they would take with them if they left.  

That wasn’t something McCalmont anticipated at the front end of the acquisition, but they dealt with it. As it turned out, it didn’t impact retention numbers across IT and the business. They moved from a very legacy-type footprint to a brand new cloud-based infrastructure in record time within a year, completely standing up a brand new company on new systems. He advises that while the change management aspect of an acquisition isn’t always given a lot of consideration beforehand, it is definitely an essential element.

He may have been skeptical about how different cloud-based tools are, but says, "I'm a fan after living through both worlds." Infrastructure and security tools are more scalable and easily deployable. On the security tool side, he has some experience in a legacy world running a legacy SIM system where they built their own rules, and they probably had half an FTE just working false positives every day on the alerts. So, they replaced it with a cloud-based application and the number of false positives dropped significantly when they got important alerts. He describes it as “a revolutionary change,” as it is with cloud-based IT security tools, which he describes as “just a breath of fresh air in that space.” He shares that he has also become a fan of the Zscaler cloud security tool on the network side.