FORWARD

Q&A
Under the Hood with Ford
Roopak Verma
— Ford CIO,
Europe, the Middle East
and Africa
Ford Motor Company was among the first in the industry
to offer connected car services through the driver’s
cell phone. Today, new models released by Ford have
a built-in modem for connectivity. For more on the key
considerations raised by connected cars, CSC recently
spoke with Roopak Verma, Ford’s CIO for the Europe,
Middle East and Africa region.
How is Ford helping to secure the connected car?
How can OEMs work together to address this threat?
Recent security demonstrations have really prompted
all of the OEMs to take a hard look at vehicle security.
We have the capability today to remotely unlock a vehicle,
and if someone can hack into it, that’s the first thing he or
she will do. If someone can control the functionality of the
vehicle remotely, that’s dangerous.
A Fusion Hybrid, for example, is generating 25 gigabytes
of data per hour. A hacker would love to get access to the
functionality of the car, your location data, your contact
data, even your credit card data. At Ford, we realize you
have to have the fundamental security architecture built
into the vehicle. The architecture that controls the vehicle
functionality needs to be isolated from the connected
vehicle architecture, and you need encryption between
every component.
Everybody’s facing a common challenge. A lot of the safety
features we expect are going to require vehicles to talk to
each other, so if a Ford car is not talking to a GM car, it’s not
going to know the car is stopped ahead just around a blind
curve. That type of connectivity is going to require us to work
together on the protocols and the security architecture.
What role is data analytics playing at Ford in supporting
automotive sales, production and services?
Data analytics and intelligence can give us a single, integrated
view of people who are researching a car on the Web, linking
them with the people who may come in and visit the dealer,
and linking them with the people who might actually buy a
car and then come back to Ford for the servicing. It can help
us change the whole marketing paradigm.
It’s also going to help us make a connection with the
customer to design the next-generation car. We won’t
need hundreds of hours of research to find out where
the next trends in car designs are going. We’ll be talking
to our customers.
Organizations are under constant pressure to step up their
rate of innovation. How are you nurturing innovation at Ford?
One of the things we’ve been doing in Europe is looking
for a way to really democratize innovation. What we used
to always see is that you could come up with a great idea,
it worked well, but there was always a challenge in the
implementation and getting the business value out of it.
So we started the Ford Innovation Challenge. The idea is
that anybody in Ford with an innovative idea can put it
forward. We opened it for 2 weeks and we had 415 ideas.
We had a semifinal event to select the top 12 ideas, and
now the business owns these ideas, and we are providing
them time, funding and resources to take them forward.
It’s exciting.
FORWARD: A CSC MAGAZINE
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