Home City Ice, CIO: Agility Isn't Just a Software Thing

Home City Ice, CIO: Agility Isn't Just a Software Thing

Chris Hickock, CIO, Home City Ice, speaks with David Hammond, Senior Account Executive, Parallel Technologies, about the company’s goal setting and roadmap, and its approach to agility.

Hickock says that Home City Ice, because it’s a family-owned-and-operated business, has its own nuances in the way it does business. The company — almost a century old — maintains a very long-term horizon and doesn’t have to report quarterly earnings to a shareholder group.

“I see other companies making decisions based upon pretty short-term time windows so that they can hit certain metrics, whereas, we keep thinking about what we need to do for the next hundred years,” Hickok points out. “So, if I have to service customers correctly this quarter and not invest in growth, that's what I'm going to do because I know if I don't get my return this quarter or next quarter, even this year, it's coming back at some time over the next century.”

He further explains that the company relies heavily on its customer-first approach to stand out in the market. “A bag of ice is a bag of ice,” he adds. “There is not a ton of differentiation in our product itself. So, the only way that I can stand out from the pack is to deliver a better experience for our customers. It's something that we really live by because the instant we become like the rest of the field, there's no reason for you to buy me over someone else.

Unlike most organizations, Hickok continues, Home City Ice prefers to stick with its roadmap of two or three years to get things done, even during scenarios like COVID. The organization follows a “collaborative process” for each of its business verticals, prioritizing actions based on cost versus benefit to the business.

“I wouldn't say that we're ahead of the curve or that we were so far advanced that COVID didn't affect us. We just have tried to look ahead and prioritize in such a way that it was almost a validation of the things that we needed to do, particularly on the manufacturing side. We do prefer face-to-face, in-office interaction. We have remote desktops, VDI infrastructure, and VPNs set up, but some of the hardware that was in personnel had always been in an office. When COVID first hit, we did accelerate that,” Hickock adds.

Hickock says that while “agile” has become an industry buzzword, Home City Ice developed its own software and has worked to make its teams agile in how they plan and process.

“What agility has done for us is at least becoming a common mindset. It's kind of easy once you see that work to some degree, and we're by no means perfect and have a long way to go in that transition to agility. But once you see that work in one facet of the business, you realize this isn't just a software thing. This could work for everybody,” Hickock says. Home City Ice has adopted agility in the way it adjusts the roadmap as required, while “...keeping that north star of doing what is best for the business to enable the business,” he concludes.

Related Stories

No stories found.
CDO Magazine
www.cdomagazine.tech