Interview: LV='s Richard Warner, CIO of the Year 2013

LV='s Richard Warner tells Sooraj Shah what it means to be crowned the CIO of the Year, and explains how IT has driven growth at the insurance firm

When Richard Warner was rewarded for his outstanding work at insurance company LV= with the CIO of the Year accolade at the UK IT Industry Awards 2013, he said he felt “privileged and surprised”.

Speaking to Warner a few days after the awards ceremony, he admitted to still being in “some degree of shock”, before heaping praise on his team – a team that has grown dramatically over the past five years.

Back in 2007, there were 1,200 staff working at LV=, whereas today there are nearly 6,000. Six years ago, IT was entirely outsourced and the only internal person responsible for IT was a non-executive director. Now the IT team alone boasts 650 employees.

“That growth wouldn’t have been possible without an underpinning technology landscape; we are heavily reliant in our business on direct consumer technology and electronic data interchange (EDI),” Warner told Computing.

LV= is a data-intensive business, reliant on its ability to manage and interpret data, he said, and it’s the work of Warner’s team in this area that has fuelled much of the firm’s growth.

“In 2007, we had a low market presence and a small customer base with very poor digital presence. Now we have a large customer base and a very well-recognised digital presence – thanks to my team,” he said.

Desktop and mobile

Aside from refreshing LV=’s IT infrastructure, rolling out Windows 7 has been a big priority for Warner and his department over the past 12 months. The firm had initially looked into a virtualisation platform, but decided that Windows 7 was a low risk and stable alternative. But Warner was keen to emphasise that the company could move to a hosted service eventually.

“We’d probably look at something different in the future in terms of a delivery model. When I spoke to Microsoft, my sense was that Windows 8 will be the last major release and Microsoft would just build onto that, which would be a big benefit for us as it removes that big step change you have to go through every few years,” he said.

Microsoft’s Surface 2 tablets are being trialled at the insurer, but Warner said that he’s “waiting for them to develop further before we seriously consider them”.

“They are great in terms of functionality but there are questions about interoperability and robustness that we’re working through, and most mobile users are defaulting to the iPads, which we rolled out to some of our staff,” he explained.

This is partly as a result of mobile users’ needs being quite straightforward, whereas the Surface 2 is seen by LV as less of a companion device and more of a replacement for a desktop or laptop.

LV currently has corporate BlackBerrys and a bring your own device (BYOD) policy for which it uses Good Technology’s mobile device management solution, and Warner and his team are considering whether BYOD should be the default route.

At the same time, LV’s IT team has been busy trying out new tools and techniques around application delivery, with investment in application development being of particular interest to Warner.

Interview: LV='s Richard Warner, CIO of the Year 2013

LV='s Richard Warner tells Sooraj Shah what it means to be crowned the CIO of the Year, and explains how IT has driven growth at the insurance firm

“There has been quite a lot of work going into using new development model-driven tools, so we can deploy full-service applications to the market quickly; we effectively developed and deployed two brand new products to the business in three months on a full-service platform,” he said.

The company has also been trying out new ways of working, using agile methodologies and trying to find ways of accelerating user input and collaboration.
Meanwhile, the insurer has been investing more in analytics. “There is a hygiene factor of sorting out management information which is always there, but now we’re focusing more on digitisation of the value chain and asking how we can increasingly digitise interactions inside the enterprise and outside the enterprise,” Warner said.

The role of the modern CIO

Warner named three main challenges he is currently facing as a CIO: having more business demand than IT has the capacity to deliver; overcoming legacy technology barriers; and ensuring that the firm finds ways of leveraging new and emerging technologies earlier than its competitors.

For Warner, the key to meeting these challenges is LV=’s ability to attract and retain talented staff.

“We offer good opportunities for personal training and development, and we also have a good environment to bring ideas to fruition,” he said.

An example of this is LV’s Viral Change Programme, where any employee can bring an idea to an “innovation board” that has to decide whether or not to give the proposal seed funding.

“We had one idea this year for a room booking system. Of course, you can get commercial room booking systems that are fully functional but are very expensive, but one of our guys was given some seed funding and developed his own system, which we have been piloting. Another employee suggested using Raspberry Pis to provide streaming media content across the estate at a very low cost, which was also a great idea,” he said.

The idea is to boost employees’ confidence and enable them to grow their own capabilities; a process that Warner believes applies to all CIOs.

“The CIO role has evolved to become much more rounded: it is not just the technical side of things but understanding what the business priorities are. Increasingly, you see them having more than IT to deal with. For example, I have supply chain and property and management [lines of business] to manage, it is now the CIOs job to look after the ‘infrastructure of change’,” he said.

And Warner’s responsibilities don’t stop there. He is in effect the chief information security officer of LV= as well.

“Ultimately, I spend time on information security every week, where we are and what capabilities we need to change and how we need to drive that function as it changes all the time around us – most CIOs should spend a chunk of their week looking at information security,” he suggested.

Warner believes that the development of the CIO role into a multi-faceted job is largely because senior business teams now recognise the value of IT.

“The products we create are determined by the data we capture. Senior business teams now realise that technology isn’t just necessary to do a job, but that it’s at the heart of the business. If you get it right, it genuinely creates an advantage,” he said.

@Sooraj_Shah