the intelligent cio: driving innovation, insight and integration ... · driving innovation, insight...

FT EXECUTIVE DINNER FORUM

The Intelligent CIO: Driving Innovation, Insight

and IntegrationSUMMARY REPORT

6 July 2011 | The Pearson Building, London

In association with

FINANCIAL TIMES CIO DINNER FORUM – Summary Report

SPEAKERS

Ade McCormackColumnist, Financial Times

Mark HennessyGeneral Manager, Northeast Europe, IBM

Susan CooklinChief Information Officer, Network Rail

Ailsa BeatonDirector of Information and Chief Information Officer, Metropolitan Police Service

Bill McCluggageDirector of ICT Strategy and Policy and HM Government Deputy ChiefInformation Officer, Efficiency and Reform Group, Cabinet Office

The Intelligent CIO: Driving Innovation, Insight and Integration

FT EXECUTIVE DINNER FORUM FOR CHIEFINFORMATION OFFICERS


This is an exciting time for the Chief Information Officer (CIO) in anyorganisation. The pace of change in technology continues to accelerate,with developments such as virtualisation, cloud computing and socialmedia offering opportunities to radically improve processes and services.The CIO is now a key individual in ensuring the success and sustainabilityof the business – as chief executive officers increasingly recognise.

In a complex and dynamic global environment, CIOs must cultivate theskills needed to influence the leadership of their organisations and putthemselves at the forefront of innovation. With technology a criticalenabler of business success, what can CIOs do to capture insights andenable integration – at a time when they must also balance pressuresto cut costs against demands to improve delivery?

To discuss the challenges, a Financial Times Executive Dinner Forumbrought together a panel of experts at Pearson’s Head Office in Londonon 6th July 2011, in the presence of an audience of CIOs from a range oforganisations. Chaired by Ade McCormack, an FT columnist, thespeakers were: Mark Hennessy, General Manager, Northeast Europe for


IBM; Susan Cooklin, Network Rail’s CIO; Ailsa Beaton, Director ofInformation and CIO for the Metropolitan Police Service; and BillMcCluggage, Director of ICT Strategy and HM Government Deputy CIO,Efficiency and Reform Group in the Cabinet Office.

The Dinner Forum was opened by Mark Hennessy with a presentationof the insights gained from IBM’s latest CIO survey, which draws onface-to-face interviews with 3,000 CIOs working in 18 industries aroundthe world. More than a third were based in Europe, and the surveycombined a range of organisations of different sizes, with a thirdemploying less than 1,000 people, a third more than 10,000 and therest in-between.

The top preoccupation of the CIOs surveyed was managing informationand business intelligence, which 85 per cent said was the maintechnology they were focused on. Other technologies they wereprioritising were cloud computing (cited by two-thirds), mobility toolsand capabilities, and virtualisation.

The survey also asked the CIOs how they saw their roles, which elicitedfour different mandates. One was to leverage their office to improve theefficiency of the organisation – for example, through shared services.Another was to extend the scope of their role to a broader set ofresponsibilities, often through business process re-engineering tosimplify operations so they can be automated. A third was to transformtheir organisations by simplifying internal and external processes forclients and partners. The fourth was to pioneer with initiatives to drive


new revenue and boost profitability for the business – for example, bychanging the model, product mix or route to market. All four of thesemandates were reflected by the participants during the evening’sdiscussion, with a particular focus on the public sector where three ofthe speakers had CIO roles.

While all organisations today face budget constraints and the need toseek significant cost-savings, the challenge is acute in the publicservices which are typically required to cut their costs by 20 per cent asthe coalition government seeks to reduce the budget deficit. Themandate of leveraging the CIO’s role to find greater efficiency in suchcircumstance is therefore inescapable. “We are effectively on a ‘burningplatform’,” said one speaker.

The second mandate of extending the CIO’s scope by re-engineeringprocesses to simplify and automate them has already generated somereal successes for public sector CIOs. One example cited was theHMRC system for filing tax returns online, which handled 6.5m returnswithout problems this year. But the speakers wanted to do much moreon this mandate to simplify processes before automating them: “Wehave a saying,” said one. “Don’t automate chaos.”

The transformational mandate is tricky in an era of austerity, withseveral of the speakers commenting on the legacies they must dealwith in hardware and software. “We’ve got no money, so we must re-usethings,” said one. “That’s not always simple when dealing with the scaleof the public sector. But we need to buy effects, not equipment.”


And all the speakers said they could see opportunities to pioneer newways of working – as did contributors from the audience. There areparticular complexities in managing public sector organisations, whichoften have conflicting objectives and multiple layers of accountability tobe reconciled under the ever-present glare of publicity. However, therewas agreement that the stringent financial environment was clearingaway many of the traditional objections to working in new ways.

The elimination of waste, greater use of shared services and new waysof finding step reductions in procurement costs were now seen asunavoidable, said one CIO. And the old silos were disintegrating in thesearch for solutions, because co-operation with customers and otherbodies – locally, nationally or internationally – had become essential.

“Organisations that previously enjoyed a monopoly have found thatthey have to focus on what they are really good at and invest resourcesaccordingly,” said another speaker. “We now have align ourselves muchmore closely with our customers – and that has IT implications. While Iused to spend much of my time with senior management, I’m nowspending more with the leaders of our customer organisations.”

Many CIOs in the public services have come from the private sector,and the speakers emphasised the need to understand the public sectorenvironment if they were to be effective leaders of change. “On oneearly visit to a front-line office, I saw new software being run on oldequipment,” said one, “which explained why the benefits were slow tomaterialise. It’s important to go and touch the business.”


Another speaker said it was a period spent working with front-line staffthat had produced a real understanding of the organisation’s IT needs.“It gave me credibility when presenting my strategy – especially in theboardroom. It also led to several trials of new equipment, in many casessuggested by the staff at the coal-face.”

Finally, the speakers agreed it was vital for the CIO in any business notto lose sight of the requirement to ensure that the basic IT servicesfunctioned effectively day-to-day. As one speaker put it: “Without that, itis impossible to break into the higher-level strategy debates.”


BIOGRAPHIES

Ade McCormackColumnistFinancial Times

Ade McCormack is an adviser, writer and speaker on digital leadership.He has a related opinion column in the Financial Times. His books include‘The e-Skills Manifesto – A Call to Arms’ and ‘The IT Value Stack – Aboardroom guide to IT leadership’. He is a visiting lecturer on digitalleadership at MIT Sloan. He has worked in over 20 countries and workedwith many of the world’s largest end user and technology organisations.According to Nicholas Carr, Former Editor, Harvard Business Review, “AdeMcCormack sounds a much-needed clarion call for IT to “grow up”. Hisblog at www.itbeaconblog.com is regularly short listed as one of the mostinfluential CIO and consulting blogs by Computer Weekly.


BIOGRAPHIES

Ailsa BeatonDirector of Information and Chief Information OfficerMetropolitan Police Service

Miss Beaton’s directorate – the Directorate of Information (DoI) –provides information, communications and technology services to the53,000 police officers and staff of the Metropolitan Police Service across750 locations. The Directorate is also responsible for the strategicdevelopment of the role of information, communications and technology(ICT) within policing in London. The inclusion of Miss Beaton on the MPSManagement Board – the first Chief Information Officer (CIO) within theMPS to do so – highlights the importance of effective ICT and the key partit plays in the work of the MPS. She also leads on InformationManagement matters for the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO)of England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Miss Beaton was awarded an OBE by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II forservices to policing in the 2010 New Year’s Honours list. She is also a pastwinner of the British Computer Society’s IT Director of the Year and herdirectorate won a Computer Weekly award for Best Places To Work In IT.


BIOGRAPHIES

Susan CooklinChief Information OfficerNetwork Rail

Susan Cooklin is Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Network Rail whereshe leads activities that underpin a £1bn technology portfolio focused onreducing the cost of running the railway by 21% over the next 4 years.Susan joined Network Rail in 2006 following over 20 years experience inIT and operational roles within FSTE 20 companies, predominantly in thefinancial sector. Susan is passionate about using technology to driveincreased business performance. Susan’s experience across a numbersof industries has led to her recent appointment as a Non-ExecutiveDirector at Leeds Metropolitan University.


BIOGRAPHIES

Mark HennessyGeneral Manager, Northeast EuropeIBM

Mark Hennessy has been General Manager, IBM Northeast Europe sinceJanuary 2011. Prior to this role, he was IBM’s Vice President for GlobalStrategy and Sales Transformation. He assumed that role in July 2009and was responsible for driving IBM’s Sales & Distribution strategy as wellas global field operations.

Previously, Mark was Vice President and Chief Information Officer forIBM, where he was responsible for global integration initiatives andtechnology operations worldwide. As CIO, he focused on aligning IT andbusiness strategy, instituted a balanced transformation governancemodel, and was a champion of skills and career development for IBM’sbusiness transformation and information technology professionals.

Through his career, Mark has held a diverse series of generalmanagement positions with responsibility for North America, Asia andglobal business units. A graduate of Boston College, Mark earned a BA ineconomics in 1980. In 1990, he earned a Master of BusinessAdministration from the University of Chicago. Mark and his wife Traceyhave two grown children and now live in Zurich, Switzerland.


BIOGRAPHIES

Bill McCluggageDirector of ICT Strategy and Policy and HMGovernment Deputy Chief Information Officer,Efficiency and Reform GroupCabinet Office

Bill joined the Cabinet Office as Deputy Government CIO in September2009. He is also Director of ICT Strategy & Policy within the Office of theHM Government CIO with overall responsibility for the formulation,development and communication of cross-Government ICT strategiesand policies. On behalf of the Government CIO and CIO Council’s SupplyManagement Board he leads on driving forward the Government’s ICT Procurement Strategy, including chairing a number of jointGovernment/Industry teams focused on improving ICT procurement andsupplier management. He joined the Cabinet Office from the NorthernIreland Civil Service (NICS), where he represented Northern Ireland onthe Government’s CIO Council and was the Senior Information RiskOwner (SIRO) for the Northern Ireland Civil Service.

Prior to joining the NICS he held a number of senior positions in privatesector companies, including IT Director for Harland & Wolff HeavyIndustries in Belfast and prior to that served in the Royal Air Force.

Bill is a Chartered Engineer and Member of the Institution of Engineering andTechnology. In June 2008 he was appointed a Visiting Professor within theSchool of International Business at the Ulster University, Magee Campus.

IN ASSOCIATION WITH:

IBM is a globally integrated enterprise operating in over 170 countries.Today IBM UK has around 20,000 employees, bringing innovativesolutions to a diverse client base to help solve some of their toughestbusiness challenges. In addition to being the world’s largest IT andconsulting services company, IBM is a global business and technologyleader, innovating in research and development to shape the future ofsociety at large.

IBM’s prized research, development and technical talent around the worldpartner with governments, corporations, thinkers and doers on groundbreaking real world problems to help make the world work better andbuild a smarter planet.

We collaborate with our clients, bringing together business insight,advanced research and technology to give them a distinct advantage intoday’s rapidly changing environment. Through our integrated approachto business design and execution, we help turn strategies into action. Andwith expertise in 17 industries and global capabilities that span 170countries, we can help clients anticipate change and profit from newopportunities.


NOTES


the intelligent cio: driving innovation, insight and integration ... · driving innovation, insight...

Documents