A new step forward

The founding and focusing of Boeing Technology

Meeting this challenge was one reason Boeing appointed Jim Jamieson as chief technology officer in late 2003, he added. Jamieson is chartered with establishing, for the first time in Boeing history, a formal organization dedicated to providing technology leadership across the enterprise.

"While our business units need to focus on flawlessly executing their programs, we also need an organization to focus on providing them with the right technologies, processes and people to grow our business and achieve global aerospace leadership," Stonecipher said.

Based on this clear and simple mandate, Jamieson has been shaping his new Boeing Technology organization and strategy. According to Jamieson, the organization's primary goals are to

• Establish a systematic process that will allow Boeing to maximize the yield on its technology investments.
• Establish common systems and processes that will allow Boeing to operate more efficiently and on a global scale.
• Ensure that Boeing has the proper skills mix required for meeting its near- and long-term business objectives.

"To do this we needed to sharpen the focus of our organization and gain a better understanding of where and how the business units are making their technology investments today," Jamieson said.

Accordingly, Jamieson has been using a phased approach to achieving these goals and has recently completed realigning the primary business elements of Boeing Technology, which includes Phantom Works, Intellectual Property Business, Technology Ventures, and Information Technology.

Phantom Works, the advanced research and development unit and catalyst of innovation for the enterprise, is shifting its focus to provide more balanced support to both the government and commercial sides of the business.

"We historically have been more closely associated with the defense side of the business, although we have always provided support to Boeing Commercial Airplanes," said Bob Krieger, Phantom Works president. "Over the past year or so we have been making steady progress in learning more about BCA's needs and how best to satisfy them."

As an example, Krieger explained that Phantom Works has over the past year successfully met 98 percent of the more than 350 technology and process development milestones aligned with the 7E7 airplane program and is supporting BCA on many other programs as well. A major thrust is introducing lean and efficient design and manufacturing tools and processes into these and other programs across the enterprise.

Phantom Works has also integrated into its ranks this year the former Air Traffic Management business unit. It will continue to focus on shaping the market and positioning itself for a lead systems integrator role in the years ahead, when government funding priorities allow.

The Intellectual Property Business is today focusing more on protecting the company's intellectual property while supporting efforts by the business units to derive revenue from licensing intellectual property as part of their core businesses.

To foster this culture, IPB runs several awards programs for invention disclosures, patent applications and awards, and inventions considered to be of especially high value to business unit strategies. They have also implemented a "Quality Checklist" to enhance the business relevance of Boeing's patents and are developing training courses for inventors and business people.

Through such initiatives, IPB has helped expand the number of U.S. patent applications filed each year from 200 in 1999 to more than 800 in 2003. By applying the Quality Checklist, they expect this number to stabilize around 600 per year but for the overall quality of Boeing's patent portfolio to increase. The organization plans to apply for more foreign patents as well.

Boeing Technology Ventures, meanwhile, is looking around the world for more opportunities to establish strategic alliances with universities, research agencies and other technology companies. The aim is to garner new ideas and technologies that can improve Boeing products and services.

"We are coordinating with the needs of the business units to establish key relationships in the United Kingdom, Russia, Italy, Germany, Australia, South Africa and more to collaborate on technologies of mutual interest," said Miller Adams, vice president of Technology Ventures. To date, Technology Ventures has strategic alliances with more than 20 partners around the world.

Technology Ventures also continues to foster a culture of innovation within Boeing through its Chairman's Innovation Initiative, which now is focused on applying innovative ideas provided by employees to improve Boeing's products and services.

Information Technology, on the other hand, is focused on streamlining Boeing's business operations by establishing common processes and systems across the enterprise.

"As part of Boeing Technology, it's the mission of Boeing IT to transform Boeing into a network-enabled enterprise with a design-anywhere, build-anywhere capability," said Scott Griffin, vice president and chief information officer for Boeing. "This includes establishing a single enterprise process and systems architecture in order to ensure that all our IT investments move us toward that goal."

Boeing consolidated all business unit IT personnel into a single, centralized IT organization under Griffin, who reports to both Rick Stephens, president of Shared Services Group, for sustaining IT initiatives, and to Jamieson for IT development initiatives, including the enterprise architecture and common systems.

As part of the development effort, Griffin, Stephens and Jamieson have already established an IT Investment Board to ensure the enterprise focus of IT investments. They've also begun development of a "go-forward" set of enterprise processes and systems to be deployed on all new programs.

This streamlining of business processes and systems is being conducted in concert with the enterprise process councils, three of which are under the executive sponsorship of Jamieson:

• Engineering, led by IDS Chief Engineer John Tracy
• Operations, led by John Van Gels, vice president of Operations for IDS
• Quality, led by Sandy Postel, vice president-Quality for BCA

"These three councils are an important extension of Boeing Technology's organizational structure," said Jamieson. "They are critical to propagating common systems and processes across the enterprise and identifying the skills we need to meet current and future business requirements."

Within the Engineering Process Council, in particular, Boeing Technology integrates many of its Technical Excellence initiatives, which include the activities of the Boeing Technical Fellowship and the former Technical Affiliations group. Technical Excellence initiatives are being spearheaded by both the Engineering Process Council, under John Tracy, and by Hank Queen, vice president of Engineering and Manufacturing for BCA.

"Within this framework we will see Technical Fellows becoming increasingly active in tackling the enterprise's toughest technical challenges and our technical affiliations activities continuing to provide good developmental opportunities for our engineers," Jamieson said.

As Jamieson's team was aligning itself to Boeing Technology's new goals and strategies, he, Krieger and others were also meeting with R&D leaders of the business units to better understand their investment strategies and programs.

"We want to make sure we are investing in the right technologies to meet both the short-and long-term business needs of Boeing, that the business units are not inadvertently duplicating efforts, and that our technology investments—as well as those of our strategic partners and suppliers—are being leveraged with maximum benefit across all the business units," Jamieson said.

Acquiring this enterprise perspective on Boeing's R&D investments is no small challenge, Jamieson said. But, he added, "it is critical to maximizing the competitive yield of our technology investments, just as establishing common processes and systems is critical to maximizing the efficiency of our business and making Boeing a global leader."

Jamieson recognizes that achieving Boeing Technology's goals is more than a one-man and one-organization effort, and that it is going to require an incredible amount of coordination and teamwork across the enterprise.

"We are working closely with the business units, process councils, program personnel and the Executive Council to achieve goals that are vitally important to the enterprise, and fortunately we've had a lot of cooperation by everyone concerned," Jamieson said. "I think that's because we're all recognizing that working together is the only way we'll survive and thrive in the future ahead."