Glenn Pinnel, CIO, Benjamin Moore & Co.

We are in the midst of a digital disruption that is causing business models to change at a faster pace than ever before. The concept of digital business has been on top of almost every business leader's mind for several years now, and the emerging trend that is set to transform organizational workflows is digital signage. Here, at Benjamin Moore, we have partnered with corporate communications and operations to enhance our workforce engagement to digital signage. We chose “REACH” as the internal media platform to rollout our digital signage solution, since their CMS tool allows for easy content creation and sharing. Benjamin Moore’s digital signage solution allows for simple and seamless distribution of corporate and local news, announcements, and events.

Approach Taken to Deliver Exceptional Solutions

To ensure that the solutions we deliver are propitious and exceed user expectations, we have established a set of well-defined strategic priorities at the organizational level. We set out to sustain trusted strategic partnerships, which is fundamental for businesses to continue growing financially and operate more efficiently in today’s competitive environment. We also have an architecture review board that meets on a bi-weekly basis to review any new solution/ application we have developed, to avoid having point solutions. 

By bringing in our key vendors like SAP from time to time, we work on understanding the new capabilities that exist in the technologies we use today. All these strategies help us foster, promote, and deliver innovative, integrated, and agile business solutions.

“We set out to sustain trusted strategic partnerships, which is fundamental for businesses to continue growing financially and operate more efficiently in today’s competitive environment” ​ 

At, Benjamin Moore, we are also working on delivering e-commerce for the national accounts program, utilizing SAP's Hybris application, which will be buckled on to our foundational SAP/ERP application. Some of the other significant initiatives include master data management, data center migration, and CRM expansion utilizing Microsoft Dynamics. We are also planning on implementing visualization tools for real-time drill through reporting for our salesforce that would enable the sales team to take our product to the retailers or contractors they are in touch with on a regular basis. We are working on two-way communication for the digital signage solution which will enable us to learn more about the employees in our manufacturing and distribution centers. I think that will really help from an engagement perspective across the whole organization. I also see a potential use case when we think about digital signage: being able to utilize it at our independent retailers to market the end user a little bit more effectively. Whether it is for promotion or product information, digital signage can be leveraged to help sell more paint.

Leadership Strategies

I grew up around sports my entire life. The key that I have always had whether it is coaching or playing on a team, has been around teamwork. The effectiveness of a team is not just about one person, but about the overall team. I would like to quote Phil Jackson here—“The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.” This is the philosophy I have adhered to in building my team at Benjamin Moore. It has helped us become more successful in establishing business relationships and delivering solutions at a faster pace. As top technologists of an organization, it is our job to identify business problems that are out there and provide solutions to resolve them. And, the key to that is to create trusted business partnerships to truly understand those issues and then apply technology to solve those challenges. But, as a CIO, you can’t do it all alone and if you try to, you will only be unsuccessful. So, it is really important to surround yourself with top talent, empower them, set the strategy, lead them, and also let them lead their groups and functions. At Benjamin Moore, I set the overall IT strategy and allow my IT leaders to lead their teams in delivering productive business solutions, monitoring them on a frequent basis. This strategy has enhanced our business scale to greater heights. Our only mission is to deliver simplified, resilient, extensible, cost-effective technology and business solutions that elucidate the vision, value, and strategies we have defined.