326: In this interview, Steve Phillpott discusses World Class IT Principle One, People, World Class IT Principle Two, Infrastructure, World Class IT Principle Three, Project and Portfolio Management, World Class IT Principle Four, IT and Business Partnerships, and World Class IT Principle Five, External Partnerships. Some of the topics discussed include: How Steve used the multibillion-dollar acquisitions of HGST and SanDisk as an opportunity to transform Western Digital’s systems, processes, and technologies and lay the foundation for the company to scale The journey of integrating 3000+ applications, and specifically the importance of focusing first on putting communications and collaboration tools in place to enhance the speed and efficiency with which the organization can move forward How the focus on good governance has allowed them to build out program work streams and application roadmaps around ERP, Human Capital Management, PLM, among others How Steve set up change management programs within each workstream to ensure that the users can adapt to the new technology at the same rate it is implemented The criteria Steve uses to prioritize the integration effort Western Digital’s Predictive Analytics as a Service offering and how Steve created a big data platform that is flexible enough to support users at all maturity levels across the business How Western Digital leverages on-premise and cloud-based CPU and GPU high-performance computing clusters to run massive engineering simulations that greatly improve speed to market as well as reduce the cost of development Eye on the trends: artificial intelligence and machine learning, and the industrial IoT