Meet the transformational CIOs who are currently leading their businesses into the digital future.
Explore their most important initiatives, leadership goals, and how they see their roles evolving in the near future.
This time, in CIO Insights, we feature Peter Cabello Holmberg, EVP CDO/CIO, Fiskars Group.
We are the business
With his eyes focused straight on the business, CIO Peter Cabello Holmberg very quickly transformed the IT organization at Fiskars Group from being an order taker and an afterthought to a value-creating business contributor.
“You need to perform the same transformation at Fiskars as you did at Pandora, but you need to do it faster,” was the task given to CIO Peter Cabello Holmberg by Fiskars Group CEO Nathalie Ahlström.
The challenge received a decisive yes from Peter who then spent a year and a half to rebuild the Digital & IT organization at Fiskars Group to focusing on driving business. His condition was free rein, and in return, he was given direct reference to the CEO, which is the exception rather than the rule for CIOs in other companies.
Peter’s plan for rebuilding Digital & IT resonated well within the group of design-driven brands, housing some of Denmark’s most respected and best-selling brands, Royal Copenhagen and Georg Jensen, as well as other international brands like Iittala, Waterford, Wedgwood and the Finnish flagship brand, Fiskars.
The first question Peter had to ask was whether this was the right organization to be a “commercial thought leader,” as he translated his given task.
We can’t have a seat at the table without having an opinion
“Being a thought leader is a set of behaviors. When given a seat at the table and being part of the executive management, it comes with an obligation. I told the team: We should not have a seat there if we don’t have an opinion. Are we doing the right things? What should be different? What do we believe is important for the business? Being at the table with Fiskars’ executive management and having ongoing discussions on Fiskars’ strategy, Peter brought his experience with retail and how to drive growth through technology, the sequence in which to implement initiatives, enhance efficiency and create a better customer experience across platforms and move the organization towards being a much-wanted digitally driven business,
“A seat at the table means that everybody must chip in and change their mindset from reactive to proactive and know in-depth what technology can do for the business across the group.”
That took some time, Peter admits, and via a thorough review of the organization, trimming and focusing and with a clear mandate to reinvest any savings within the organization, he funded and built competencies in areas such as advanced analytics, AI, online sales, omnichannel, digital marketing, enterprise architecture, content, vendor management, cybersecurity and other areas that were much needed in the group at the time.
Now, three years in, he points to a couple of examples of what the new mindset meant for the business,
“In 2023, our US market – our largest – had initiated a turnaround process to address headwind in sales. During our discussions about the turnaround in Digital and IT, we identified an opportunity for how to grow online sales, and we built a recommendation for how to execute this. We (the executive team) decided to implement the recommendation, and a direct report of mine was asked to take ownership of the online sales in the US. In Q1 2024, we now see that online sales in the US are significantly up compared to last year.
Another example is the agile way of working that we have implemented. For example, we had a lead time in new product development of up to two years from idea to market. So we asked the creative team: what if we did two drops a year? We faced some skepticism, but we ended up successfully doing it for Iittala and will soon be doing the same for Royal Copenhagen, fully allowing the creative team to own the process whilst involving marketing, the supply chain, and so on. It has nothing to do with technology but is rather about implementing new ways of working and new roles and responsibilities – all with inspiration from being agile.”
“The skepticism was real! It hasn’t been a walk in the park.”
The transformation at IT & Digital had its obstacles since changing organizations also means changing roles and positions,
“The original team felt that things went a little fast in the beginning, and that hurt a bit. Coming in as a Dane with another approach, starting during Covid and not meeting anybody in person in the first five months, I joined with all my ideas and my eyes dead set on the task at hand. The skepticism was real! So at first, taking initiatives and setting things in motion wasn’t a problem, but the personal relations didn’t come until later. But fortunately, they did come.”
Transforming areas like seasonal sales – using advanced analytics – cashed in immediately, e.g., with a 40 percent increase in sales for Iittala’s summer sales in 2022 in Finland. And the transformation didn’t just pay off in euros but also in IT & Digital’s position within Fiskars Group. We could see the impact in the department’s engagement score, which used to be quite lower and ended up as the highest across the group.
“Sure, it hasn’t been a walk in the park,” Peter says, revealing that it took some very difficult decisions along with adamant determination to keep pushing for the organization to learn new technologies such as advanced analytics, generative AI, and so on.
We need to make sure that there is a fundamental understanding of the digital role in our group
With the organization in Digital & IT in place, Peter and his team are headed for the future, and they are moving fast,
“Digital & IT has very much been a push function and is now ready to take on some of the more conflict-ridden discussions. Slowly, we see that more pull is emerging. I have been involved in hiring the new Executive Vice President for the supply chain and others to ensure that there is the right tech competence and a fundamental understanding of the digital role in our group.
Digital & IT has also been the promoter of getting a better understanding of our markets, for instance China with their specific online preferences. We needed to understand the role of WeChat, Alibaba, key opinion leaders, and all that makes the market context-specific for China. We needed to embrace that market differently and build a specific team that targeted solutions for precisely that market.”
Understanding the different markets better aligns with Fiskars Group’s strategy on implementing AI in their business,
“At this point, we have made our own FiskarsGPT like many others. We are currently testing FiskarsGPT with three areas in mind: consumer service, customer service with our sales partners, and finally we are focusing on our own online area where it will be used as an advanced recommendation and buying engine.
We are also testing our CAD/CAM files, electronic copies of our products, connecting them with generative AI and large language models so that we can create photos of a specific environment in specific countries with our products and do it extremely fast. We are not quite there, but we will be. We also consider using AI to inspire our creative teams, building our own closed environment for them to play with their ideas and sketch in an AI setting.
All in all, we need all teams to engage in discussions on what AI can do for their functions and tasks. We haven’t seen it all yet, and we need to be careful moving forward and not simply set everything free without closely checking and verifying the output.”
Trust is a very big part of how I navigate as a leader
Leading the digital transformation at Fiskars Group has also led to thoughts on Peter’s own leadership goals,
“To me, as a leader, it’s all about the team. I made a mistake many years ago and built a team as a copy of myself, which was extremely single-minded and obviously a disaster. I have learned over time that feedback is not my strong suit and that my relentless focus on execution can come on as being too fast-forward and leave people pushed to the side of the road. I have come to understand about myself that I can make decisions too fast for the team to feel involved, so now I spend more time with the team, making sure that there is room for discussion and involvement.
To me, it is now all about placing the corner flags and giving the team the responsibility of organizing and executing within that frame. Trust is a very big part of how I navigate as a leader.”
So are disagreements, which he welcomes,
“It ultimately leads to better decisions. I try to avoid making decisions on my own – I need everybody to speak their mind, and I think you must continuously nourish the discussions, also the intense ones.”
Tech competence is not just nice to have in the board room – it’s crucial
Looking at his evolving role as CIO, he sees himself at some point engaging in more board work in the future,
“Other CIOs are already there. To me, it’s odd that there are so few CIOs on the boards. Tech competence combined with business knowledge is not just nice to have in the board room – it’s crucial.”
The road to that could be through his very extended network that has been built through many years in the business, adding new communities along the way such as the CIO Transformation Board,
“It has been valuable as we are connected through our common interests, and though I am sure I could spend more time on it, I value the connections and see it as a possibility to reach out in the network and ask questions and get inspired.”
”I value the connections and see it as a possibility to reach out in the network and ask questions and get inspired”
On the private front, he uses sports, gardening, and making small building projects around the house to clear his head and think about other things and contemplate how he has positioned IT & Digital within Fiskars Group,
“As CIO, I think that we at Fiskars Group have taken as many steps as possible now, but I still see IT & Digital pushing and presenting building blocks and ideas that can drive the business, the market and the consumer experience and being part of the process from the beginning. Seeing us take the driver’s seat has been fun and exciting. I am so proud that everybody in the team works from the same baseline now: we are driving the business.”
The CIO Transformation Board
In the Danish ICT Industry Association (IT-Branchen), we have the CIO Transformation Board, which brings together the most visionary CIOs from Denmark’s large and medium-sized companies. These are CIOs from businesses where digitalization is a strategic part of the business — but where there is also a desire to do more than just digitalize.
We aim not only to highlight Denmark’s most talented CIOs and share experiences and best practices across industries, but also to set the agenda in the media and with politicians regarding Denmark’s and the business sector’s digital future.
The CIO Transformation Board is created for those who also want to help find the new balance between people and technology. For those who have a stance and want to help influence our green transition, address the skills shortage, and strengthen growth in Denmark.
