How Lockheed Martin’s CIO Balances IT Stewardship With Transformation

As CIOs evolve into enterprise-wide leaders, they can’t forget their role as IT leaders.

While many are shepherding their organizations through a once-in-a-generation AI pivot, CIOs also have to make sure the core technology systems keeping the business afloat — spanning hardware, software, cybersecurity, and more — are not just delivering the necessary capabilities, but doing so in the most cost-effective way.

The modern CIO operates on “two sides of the same coin,” Maria Demaree, Lockheed Martin CIO and SVP of enterprise business and digital transformation, said on “Technovation with Peter High” podcast. Both “running the business, and also strategic vision of how we go forward to operate differently in the future.”

Maria is living this reality at Lockheed Martin, the defense and aerospace manufacturer valued at roughly $109 billion. As Maria’s team looks to help the company quickly embrace AI, they’re also hard at work streamlining the company’s legacy technology environment.

“While we are an over 100-year-old company, don't think of us as slow and sluggish. We are absolutely moving quickly and adopting new and existing technologies and capabilities," Maria said. And “when we bring AI on top of those, I’m already able to start to see the opportunities and possibilities that can be a part of that,” she added.

For example, Lockheed Martin is aiming to connect its global network of factories. What may seem like a straight-forward undertaking, however, is quite complex, and involves both managing legacy systems and bringing in new technology like AI to help.

“Imagine being able to go to one place, looking up all the parts in the whole corporation, being able to move them across business areas, maybe even do some artificial intelligence” Maria said. “We could accelerate deliveries just being able to do something as simple as that, which is really quite complicated right now.”

In the podcast, Maria shared several tips for success:

• Reduce to centralize: Consolidating the number of systems in use across the business naturally helps to centralize control. For example, Lockheed Martin has five different entities, each that had their own technology toolkit for HR and other key functions. Now, the company is “looking at how we bring tools together that are common across particular functions,” said Maria.

• Consistent technology, flexible workforce: When IT systems are standardized, employees don’t have to worry about learning how to use different applications for the same task. Instead, there’s the "ability for people to be able to move across different business areas to not have to be retrained every time,” Maria said.

• Know the audience: For Lockheed Martin, technology is critical to operations. And even though the IT team may not be customer-facing, the job is ultimately about keeping the ecosystem running so the company can serve its clients. The goal is to make sure employees “understand where they fit in the process of delivering mission capabilities to our customers,” said Maria.

• Operate business-first: CIOs need to explain IT decisions — like investing in GPUs or new AI applications — in business terms so other leaders need to understand the impact of the technology.

• Infuse, not rebuild: Don’t always think about overhauling. Sometimes, it “may not make sense to redo an entire program,” Maria said. Instead, it may be better to “look at a component in it that we might try to do some remodeling around,” she added.

Be sure to listen to the whole podcast episode here.