IT Organizations in the Digital Era

Internet of plants:
a world of
opportunities
BASSIM HAJ, CIO, YARA
INTERNATIONAL ASA
The global demand for food and food security is growing significantly,
as the availability of arable land is shrinking. Moreover, the global
population is on the rise, especially in countries like India, China and
Brazil where the middle class is burgeoning. The growing middle class
is changing its eating habits and consuming more meat, which is driving
up the demand for cattle feed such as grains and grass. This is
stimulating the need for fertilizers. All this growing demand in turn
is prompting the need to address environmental issues such as the
level of CO2 emissions and cleaning up sewage, rivers and oceans.
Yara plays a key role in all these areas being the largest fertilizer and
crop nutrition company in the world with 12 to 14 per cent of the global
market share. Apart from fertilizers, other key areas of activity include
industrial solutions, chemicals and industrial gases. Structurally there
are three main operating segments within Yara; Upstream – production
of fertilizers, Downstream – sales, marketing and distribution and
Industrial – development of industrial solutions.
TECHNOLOGY AND IT AT YARA
Technology at Yara has two essential implications – technology
related to production and technology related to the downstream
segment of sales, marketing and distribution. In production, it is our
relentless endeavor to optimize and ensure that our assets are running
efficiently. Technologies such as catalyst technology, sensor technology,
CO2 abatement and emission to air are quite relevant for us.
Within the Crop Nutrition business, on the other hand, most of our IT
is in the area of sales. Even so, we are looking beyond just selling
commodities. We’re exploring technologies and solutions that could
enable us to connect better with our consumers i.e. farmers, open up
new innovative business models, enhance business process efficiency
and gain insights into our consumers through analytics and cloud
adoption. We realize that in order to achieve these goals, we must
engage with our business colleagues closely, move to a new operating
model and restructure our IT organization.
CONNECTING WITH CONSUMERS
Farmers are very sophisticated when it comes to technology adoption.
They all have tablets, they are connected and have everything readily
available. For example in Africa, farmers are quite advanced, especially
in terms of mobile usage, given the lack of general infrastructure.
We see enormous opportunity to develop mobile solutions that would
be attractive to farmers, allowing them to realize value while making
them more profitable. Some areas we could immediately identify to
engage with farmers include:
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