When David Weymouth left Barclays in 2005, where he had risen to become the bank’s first group chief information officer (CIO), he took the chance to step back from life at the corporate coal-face after nearly 30 years and became an independent consultant.

Weymouth had spent five years as Barclays group CIO, sitting on the bank’s executive committee, but eventually found the shortage of career opportunities frustrating. “To be blunt, at that point there’s only one job left in the organisation that is a promotion of any real consequence and there can only be one person who does that,” he says.

For many CIOs who reach the top of the career ladder at such a big multinational organisation, the consultancy route is often the first step towards retirement ­ a gradual winding down, with a few lucrative and interesting projects won through contacts in their CIO peer network.

Indeed, Weymouth lent his vast experience to various consulting projects, working with Transport for London, Spanish bank Santander, and even completing a stint on the board of Silicon Valley software startup Chordiant.

But after a couple of years the itch returned and he admits the “quasi-freedom of consultancy” began to lose its shine. A chat with a headhunter friend led him to Andy Haste, chief executive of RSA (formerly Royal & Sun Alliance), who was looking for an experienced CIO to combine the IT and operations role at the insurance company.

“It took a while; we talked to each other quite a lot over a number of dinners and getting-to-know-you sessions, and I ended up here in July 2007 and it’s been great fun ever since,” says Weymouth.

The role of group director of operations and IT also includes responsibility for procurement, change management and risk. Weymouth describes it as a “bit of a blank sheet of paper” because no one has held the combined role at RSA before. RSA does not publicly break down the size of its IT operations or its IT budget, with Weymouth only revealing that it is “significant”, and a growing proportion of overall spend.

“If you look at the insurance industry, more and more of it is becoming technology dependent, whether it’s direct business or whether it’s online connectivity to brokers,” he says. “So all those people wandering round the Lloyd’s building with those brown folders, well that’s actually changing and they are gradually going, and everything will become virtualised or immaterialised.”

RSA operates in about 25 countries, and key to improving efficiency and supporting this trend towards multi-channel and web-based services is more standardisation and commonality across its IT and operations.

“We’re not going to do anything like rip out and replace old policy systems, but what we will do is move to a more service-oriented approach. If you can move from what has typically been a very closely-coupled monolithic approach to a more loosely-coupled approach that gives you some flexibility in how you interact with customers and intermediaries,” says Weymouth.

RSA’s business process improvement is largely built around the Lean manufacturing approach first pioneered in the automotive industry by Toyota, and used by many CIOs to improve processes as part of overall IT strategy.

“I’m allergic to massive projects that don’t deliver until year three. Nearly everything we do is broken up into manageable chunks,” he says.

Weymouth has started building the team and capabilities needed to deliver this strategy, bringing in people from outside RSA and from other parts of the business, changing 75 per cent of his leadership team since he joined.

Not surprisingly, Weymouth’s leadership style has evolved over the years.
“You inevitably behave differently when you are 35 and convinced you can make no mistakes, as opposed to at 53 when you know you’ve made some,” he jokes. “It’s quite a sobering experience.”

Elements that have stuck with him through the years are being calm, patient, listening and then sticking to the answer. But he says sometimes “you just need to be quite straightforward and say, ‘I’ve seen that three or four times, we’re going to do it this way’.”

But getting people to buy in and follow a vision is still crucial, says Weymouth.
“It’s a constant challenge ­ do you lead people unthinkingly or do you get them to follow you? You’ve got to convince them why it’s a good thing to do,” he says.
Weymouth admits his career is a mixture of “happy accident and planning ­ and not necessarily in that order”. For a CIO he has not followed the typical computer sciences and IT route, starting out as a languages graduate and joining Barclays’ graduate scheme in the late 1970s.

The first big career milestone came in 1985 when the bank decided to send Weymouth off to Italy in a chief operating officer (COO) role he had no experience of, and where he was in charge of everything non customer-facing ­ IT, finance, HR and operations. Over the next five years he moved data centres, completely replaced banking systems, and sold businesses.

On returning from Italy, Weymouth was handed a credit risk management role during the 1991 recession when the banks had lost a lot of money through bad lending, and he was involved in a large programme to put in place a lot of automated artificial intelligence systems for lending, developing credit scoring and risk-adjusted pricing.

That was followed by a stint setting up a business targeting small and medium-sized firms ­ something that was new to Barclays at the time ­ then running it as chief executive and taking full profit-and-loss responsibility for the unit.
“That has been pretty fundamental in anything I’ve done ever since because I’d seen the whole spread of the business, which is relatively unusual,” he says.

Weymouth then took another step up, becoming a COO, first of the commercial banking side. That morphed “with many a bump along the road” into becoming group CIO of Barclays ­ a completely new role, which Weymouth had to pitch to the then-new incoming chief exectuive Matt Barrett.

“I was looking back and dug out the pitch, which was in equal measure cringe-making and actually quite prescient. It tackled things like what are we going to do about having a separate brand for online banking; it talked about how we would use modern web technologies, so some of it was very prescient. Other bits of it were over-ambitious,” he says.

As Weymouth himself has experienced, CIOs and IT directors are increasingly having more non-IT responsibilities thrown at them, from logistics and operations to issues such as business process and change management. He believes this trend is only likely to continue.

“I personally think it’s increasingly hard to see a role at the very top table for a pure IT director. I think the role has to either incorporate change or incorporate operations. It needs to be a more integrated sort of deliverer of solutions,” he says. “If you want to get to what I would describe as the top executive team of any business you’ve definitely got to have a number of strings to your bow.”