Art Hu, global CIO at Lenovo, recognises that leading IT for the Chinese technology giant involves significant challenges, particularly in an age of almost constant change. “We seem to always be in transformation, because there’s always the next mountain that we want to go and conquer,” he says.
Previously a consultant at McKinsey, where he’d offered advice to Lenovo, Hu joined the company in 2009. After developing his awareness of technology-enabled change at an advisory firm, Hu relished the opportunity to put his knowledge into practice as an IT executive at a blue-chip firm.
“It was good to be advising people, but I wanted to have the accountability,” he says. “The consultants advise, but the ultimate ownership resides with the people who are executing. I wanted to be part of the team that was doing the work and owning the results.”
Climbing mountains
The mountain Lenovo was attempting to conquer when Hu joined the firm in 2009 was globalisation. The organisation was eager to avoid separate silos for regional entities, such as the Americas, Europe and Asia, and the business transformation was closely tied to IT change and an attempt to ensure the organisation benefited from globalised systems.
“We wanted to be one company,” he says, referring to the link between business and digital strategy. “And in that sense, it’s something that I’ve always believed, which is that the technology is a manifestation of where the business wants to go, and it’s an embodiment of its strategy.”
Hu says this first slice of technology leadership action was exciting because he hadn’t joined Lenovo to work in the back office, run the systems and keep the lights on. However, shifting from advising companies to running IT was a significant transition.
“It was good to be advising people, but I wanted to have the accountability. The consultants advise, but the ultimate ownership resides with the people who are executing. I wanted to be part of the team that was doing the work and owning the results”
Art Hu, Lenovo
“It probably took me the better part of a year to sink in and develop some muscle memory about what it is like to think and do versus just thinking and saying,” he says. “It was a bit of a rocky transition, but luckily, it did work out, and I was able to rotate through various leadership roles in the team.”
During the subsequent seven years, Hu took on other leadership positions, such as overseeing infrastructure, enterprise architecture, security, development and operations, which allowed him to develop a broader view of IT. As a result of his successful transition across these responsibilities, he became CIO in 2016.
As he moved into the role, Hu helped Lenovo climb its second business transformation mountain – diversification. In addition to its successful PC business, Lenovo was eager to expand into other areas, with the business having acquired Motorola Mobility from Google and IBM’s low-end x86 server business in 2014.
Hu helped ensure a smooth diversification across IT hardware divisions before moving to the third mountain – services. “Increasingly, that’s where our customers want us to be,” he says. “And to meet our customers where they are, we started shifting the company to be more services-led, and that, as a CIO, is where I am today.”
Delivering services
Hu says creating a services-led business is equivalent to creating a new organisation. The systems, processes and talent required for this operation differ significantly from a traditional hardware specialist.
“As a CIO, I’m excited because it’s like starting again,” he says. “You have some things that you can reuse, but those are the minority. And so, fundamentally, it’s a business-building process intersected with an awareness of how to manifest the strategy in the technology architecture.”
Hu suggests the digital leadership magic lies in exploring the delicate balance between designing efficient processes and leveraging cutting-edge technologies. He recognises that this magic has become increasingly important in his attempts to create a services-led business and helps explain why he assumed the additional responsibility of chief delivery and technology officer for Lenovo’s Services & Solutions Group (SSG) in April 2023.
“SSG is Lenovo’s approach to being more services-led,” he says. “We want to take the best of our device, intelligent and infrastructure solutions groups, bring that to customers, and surround that expertise with services. The idea is to take the best of the services I deliver internally as CIO for Lenovo to our customers.”
So, as a digital leader who has developed strong solutions to intractable business challenges during his time with Lenovo, is Hu well placed to lead the sharing of this expertise with his company’s customers? The short answer, he suggests, is yes.
“You have to remember our starting point,” he says. “If we had already had 100,000 people doing services, then maybe it’s not the best fit. But given that we were starting from essentially zero, and we had not built the business before, what we’ve learnt is that internal IT is a good accelerator to create services for our customers.”
Applying AI
Hu’s desire to pass lessons on to Lenovo’s customers will depend on his ongoing attempts to maintain a delicate balance between efficient processes and cutting-edge technologies. Right now, his digitally enabled business transformation internally is focused on artificial intelligence (AI).
“One big area is how do we make the entire company intelligent, and how do we, as IT, serve the company in a very different way, where we are not the only ones who can create technology?” he says. “That power is democratised through AI and now goes into the hands of all of our employees, and we have to govern that change, which takes a lot of effort.”
Top-down is a strategy that involves everyone in the company. But at the same time, the exploration of AI has to be bottom-up, because only the people doing the work have the knowledge of AI and are most likely to find and explore the future Art Hu, Lenovo
Hu says Lenovo wants AI to penetrate all parts of its business. To foster this exploration, the company has created a top-down and bottom-up commitment, where employees are encouraged to explore AI in a tightly governed and secure manner.
“Top-down is a strategy that involves everyone in the company,” he says. “There’s no part of the business where AI should not apply. But at the same time, the exploration of AI has to be bottom-up, because only the people doing the work have the knowledge of AI and are most likely to find and explore the future.”
Hu says there are more than 1,000 registered AI projects running across Lenovo, ranging from explorations to tests and deployments. Key use cases include assisting support specialists via conversation summarisation, refining agents to help with enterprise-grade software engineering, and using generative AI to create effective marketing collateral.
“We have projects across the lifecycle, and that’s really important,” he says. “I take heart from that because I think our bottom-up approach is working. We have more demand than we can review. We’re always getting pressure to review faster, but we love that pressure because it means people are generating ideas.”
Growing services
When Hu turns to priorities during the next few years, he focuses on his desire to grow Lenovo’s SSG business. He says the organisation faces an opportunity to take a new digitally enabled approach to services.
“This is a moment that hasn’t been present in the last 30 or 40 years,” he says. “There’s a chance to introduce a different operating model. The services business has been all about labour arbitrage. Labour has been a huge driver of the IT services industry since modern telecommunications enabled remote work in the 1990s.”
Hu said AI makes it possible to move from labour arbitrage-based services to a capital-based approach. “We’re trying to build a tech-led and labour-light model for serving customers because we believe that it can offer superior experiences for customers and better economics for Lenovo,” he says.
Making that transformational shift relies on the implementation of technology platforms. Hu says Lenovo will invest in technology internally across all its practice areas to build these platforms. This process will involve the creation and integration of digital systems and services.
“We’re very clear-eyed on the fact that you can’t build everything,” he says. “The big trends around being able to take in a lot of data that has been ingested, and predict and be proactive around that, and actually have significantly less human intervention, are just going to continue and compound.”
Hu says growing SSG involves assuming a challenger mindset. The technology investments he’ll make in the next two years will help, and he hopes the changes he makes internally will build momentum externally via a strong set of clients and good business results.
“What we would look for is continued growth with superior profitability as we’re able to create this new model,” he says. “We want to continue to take share as we grow the business using this approach with our customers.”
Changing responsibilities
After more than 15 years at the sharp end of technology delivery, Hu reflects on the scale of change that characterises the CIO position. While the responsibilities associated with digital leadership continue to change, he’s confident that a trusted internal IT adviser is still a crucial executive position.
“I’m very positive about that fact, because digital fluency, and the ability to live comfortably at the intersection of technology and what it means for business and also society, will be at even more of a premium in the future,” he says. “The signal-to-noise ratio is a problem. People who understand and can help chart a path will be highly valuable.”
While digital leadership in some guise will remain, Hu says it’s important not to get hung up on job titles. As digital and AI continue their inexorable rise, more people outside IT will develop a strong understanding of technology. He envisages a situation where digital and AI become part of the business baseline, with a consequential impact on IT leadership positions.
“Maybe we won’t need a CIO in the future,” he says. “But if that change means business leaders pick up the fluency and the dexterity needed to make the most of AI and digital, then that might be a good thing as well.”
Sign Up For Daily Newsletter
Be keep up! Get the latest breaking news delivered straight to your inbox.
By signing up, you agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe at any time.
