The top CIO stories of 2016
We bring you our rundown of the most impactful, insightful and intriguing CIO quotes and stories from the year
CIOs continue to adapt as business needs evolve and technology rolls inexorably onwards, but what hasn't altered is the need for a board-level technology leader in most organisations.
Computing speaks to hundreds of IT leaders each year at our events, both face-to-face and digital, and here is our pick of the most insightful and impactful stories from 2016.
Who are the IT procurement decision makers?
The growing importance of technology within organisations has led to many non-IT professionals becoming involved in IT procurement - particularly line of business heads.
Speaking at Computing's Tech Marketing & Innovation Forum 2016, Mark Carter, enterprise marketing leader of Netscout, said that IT decision makers now collaborate with an average of six different functions for procurement, and that nearly half of all technology spend is under control of line of business heads.
Computing and sister site CRN have undertaken a comprehensive research programme with the aim of having a better understanding of the procurement process, from both the buyers' and sellers' perspectives.
The findings have been written up in a report entitled Buying and Selling Enterprise Technology in the era of Cloud and Digital Transformation.
For the purposes of the research, the cycle of technology procurement was broken down into four, individual stages. In chronological order, they are:
1. The identification of a need
2. Matching solution to need
3. Shortlisting vendor/channel partner
4. Final choice
When buyers were asked who was involved at each stage of the process, it was clear that the IT director or head of IT had the greatest overall involvement, and remained as important in the final stage as they were in the first stage. The only time that the profile of IT director drops slightly is the "matching solution to need" phase.
Meanwhile, business department or unit heads' involvement steadily decreased; in the first stage 42 per cent of buyers said they were involved, but by the final stage this went down to 22 per cent. It is during the third stage, when companies are shortlisting vendors or partners that their influence declines significantly, as the importance of commercial/procurement teams, project managers and senior business managers increases.
Meanwhile, perhaps unsurprisingly, the finance director's influence grows in the final two stages, and by the time the process reaches stage four, they are the third most important person involved.
The findings indicate that while traditional patterns of procurement are changing, the IT director and IT manager are still the key figures in each stage of technology procurement. However, sellers need to keep in mind that business heads still play an important role in the process - particularly at the start when needs are still being defined. This is why they should reach out to other relevant departments, not just IT.
The top CIO stories of 2016
We bring you our rundown of the most impactful, insightful and intriguing CIO quotes and stories from the year
Shadow IT? Embrace it, say CIOs
Shadow IT should be embraced by technology departments, because only by acknowledging its existence can it can be managed.
That's one of the views to emerge from a CIO panel session at a recent Computing IT Leaders Forum event 'Architecting your organisation for the future'.
Phil Durbin, Head of IT Systems at the Salvation Army explained that whilst he embraces shadow IT, that doesn't mean he encourages it.
"We've embraced the concept of BYOD [Bring Your Own Device] and shadow IT. We let our 700 church ministers [essentially department heads] to be relatively autonomous [in their IT purchasing decisions]. However corporate systems are kept secure and under our control. But notice I didnt say I encourage shadow IT, I said embrace! We know it's out there, but if they want to do their own thing we just have to embrace it."
Lukas Oberhuber, CTO of Simply Business admitted that shadow IT exists because corporate systems don't do everything every member of staff needs.
"The systems don't do what they need to, that's why there's shadow IT," said Oberhuber, who earlier in the session had advised IT leaders not to worry abot vendor lock-in. "So we embrace it and acknowledge that there are some things your existing tools don't do, which people need. If you pretend they don't exist, you'll be in a really bad place very quickly."
Durbin added: "If you embrace shadow IT, it's no longer shadow, because if staff know the IT deparment will support it, they'll come and bring it to us," They'll being it in from the dark side into the light."
Nick Ioannou, Head of IT at Ratcliffe Groves Partnership said it's surprising how many large firms don't have control over shadow IT.
"We're an information focal point for our clients, but we can't dictate to client what they use. Sometimes they're large financial companies so you'd think they'd know better. Some of biggest firms share huge files over Dropbox because there's nothing else to meet the need. Sometimes it's the only viable option so we just have to work with it.
"But we encourage people to use the paid version so there's an audit trail, and it's paid for corporately and not on smeone's credit card, and then they leave and the whole thing unravels," said Ioannou.
The top CIO stories of 2016
We bring you our rundown of the most impactful, insightful and intriguing CIO quotes and stories from the year
The megalomaniac CFO - the CIO's biggest threat?
CFOs are growing in power, and that power is on a steep upward curve. Like CIOs, their role barely existed a few decades ago. Now they are at the heart of every large organisation, often feared for their ability to kill any project and generally stick their nose into day-to day operations whenever they feel the need.
They also have sufficient sway to sometimes topple the leadership. Leo Apotheker's tenure at the helm of Hewlett-Packard was mortally wounded when his CFO, Cathie Lesjak, vocally opposed his decision to buy analytics firm Autonomy.
CFOs also enjoy direct oversight of the technology function in many businesses, especially since the economic downturn of the late 2000s, with a large proportion of CIOs reporting directly in to the CFO. Is this a threat to today's CIOs, and are technology projects likely to fall wholly under finance's control in future?
Bobby Cameron (pictured below), vice president and principal analyst at research firm Forrester, thinks not, arguing that the drive to digital puts technology leaders in a good position to demand a seat at the top table.
"In many industries, companies cannot compete effectively as digital businesses if the CIO isn't at the table with the rest of the enterprise leadership," he said. "The target behaviour - leveraging digital technologies to understand and respond to the customer - reaches end-to-end, across the enterprise, partner networks, and the customers' own ecosystems. Avoiding digital disruption requires more than a good website and/or mobile app. All of the customer-touching capabilities - like sales, marketing, customer service, fulfillment, and product/service development - tie directly to the rest of the company. And the CIO has to be helping to drive the use of digital technologies both to enable rich digital customer experience and digital operational excellence."
However, he acknowledged that some CIOs enjoy reporting in to the CFO, stating that a good CFO will "fly cover", essentially providing board-level support, enabling the CIO to focus on day-to-day tasks.
Barbara Gomolski, managing vice president at analyst firm Gartner, acknowledges the increasing power of CFOs over technology, and says that CIOs have responded by improving their own financial transparency and understanding.
"Versatile CIOs have adapted to the increased role of the CFO by increasing the level of IT financial transparency, and giving the CFO the kind of information he or she is seeking about the cost and value of IT investments. CIOs that continue to talk about technology investments only in the language of technology will find it challenging to get the right level of funding for the right IT investments."
But it's about more than simply talking the right language and understanding cashflow. CIOs must also prove themselves to be business people, and to be able to move at the speed of the business. In Cameron's words they must be "customer-led, insights driven, fast, and connected." He added that he knows of a process-focused consumer packaged goods firm that wouldn't let the CIO join the executive team because that CIO didn't run IT based on a process model, and so couldn't keep pace with the rest of the business.
In summary, while retaining a strong handle on costs is important, as a business driver it is less important than enhancing customer experience, improving products and services and responding to rising customer expectations. The CIO of a large, UK-based, consumer-facing internet business recently told Computing that his decision to put everything into the cloud was motivated by a desire for business agility, which outweighed the fact that it would cost more in the medium to long term.
The top CIO stories of 2016
We bring you our rundown of the most impactful, insightful and intriguing CIO quotes and stories from the year
How CTO John Linwood is leading Wood Mackenzie's charge to 'go digital'
For the media and other publishers of information, the internet age can only be described as "challenging". Newspapers, for example, have struggled to adapt to a medium in which readers resolutely refuse to pay for the product, notwithstanding the success that a couple of exceptions have made with their subscription models.
Even the market for high-end business information has been challenged, on the one hand by the availability of vast amounts of free information and, on the other, by clients demanding deeper and ever-more sophisticated information and analytical tools.
It is the latter that John Linwood, chief technology officer (CTO) at Edinburgh-based oil and gas information company Wood Mackenzie, was challenged to address when he joined the organisation in June 2014, not too long after a well-documented departure from the BBC.
As a company in the business of business information, it doesn't just have the usual challenges of a publisher in the internet age. Having been around since 1973, it's also carrying with it the baggage of legacy systems.
For Linwood, therefore, the strategy is to re-architect the organisation's systems, which will provide the foundation for more profound change throughout the business, all the way up to the products and services on offer to clients.
"We have a big re-architecture project going on at the moment. Here's the challenge: like everyone, we have many silos of technology and, over time, we've built a lot of stuff, we've acquired companies and systems, and it's very hard to get them all to talk to each other, keep them up-to-date.
"So we have a very large project at the moment where we're moving to a completely services-based architecture. What we're doing is, essentially, re-architecting as we deliver projects. Each new project comes along and delivers the components that it needs in the underlying architecture to be successful," says Linwood.
As the new infrastructure is rolled out, the organisation is able to deliver systems more quickly, as well as providing tools and technology to the front line.
SOA on the way
Linwood expects that as the service-oriented architecture (SOA) is rolled out, analysts will be able to directly "play" with the underlying (and currently siloed) data in order to glean more insight, write more in-depth reports and provide even sharper analysis - and more data - to clients.
"I'm very keen to allow the analysts themselves to start using tools like Python and R to create both customer offerings and tools that can help them.
"One way to do that is to give them all of the services underneath so that they don't have to reinvent the wheel entirely. The idea is very much to have a set of services. They then just have to write the module they are interested in, and they can call whatever services they need underneath," says Linwood.
He continues: "I want to enable the data analysts, the people in the business who have research backgrounds, statistical or deep analytical backgrounds to be able to build services on top of that.
"If you think about it, they have already done that in Excel and Access. Find me an analyst who doesn't build thousands of Excel spreadsheets or Access databases. So the idea is to really empower them to go to the next level and start to create more and more value.
"We've had some good examples of that already. We've had teams, particularly in our Houston office, where we have an innovation centre, who have started to build customer-facing components out of Python.
The top CIO stories of 2016
We bring you our rundown of the most impactful, insightful and intriguing CIO quotes and stories from the year
John Lewis CIO Paul Coby on dealing with Oracle and moving to DevOps
John Lewis has put aside £500m to spend on IT over the next five years, a sum that demonstrates just how firmly embedded IT has become at what was once a rather staid department store chain.
At the helm of its IT operation is Paul Coby, who is five years into his role as IT director. Coby, who's been a prominent IT leader since November 2000 when he was appointed CIO of British Airways, began our interview by emphasising the importance he places on having a good working relationship with his IT suppliers.
While many IT leaders have told Computing how hard it is to work with the likes of Oracle, SAP and IBM - with licensing issues being the biggest complaint - Coby says that John Lewis has a "good working relationship" with Oracle.
"We have Oracle's e-commerce platform, which we put in in 2013, and we are in the process of upgrading that to a new version. We've also successfully put in Endeca, which is Oracle's search and navigation tool," says Coby.
The relationship has developed as John Lewis's e-commerce offering has grown, to a point now where it accounts for about one-third of the company's £4.5bn turnover.
So what's the secret to dealing with Oracle?
"One of the things we've been very careful to do is build a genuinely strategic relationship with Oracle. That means that my colleagues on the board and my boss [John Lewis CEO] Andy Street are planning to meet the top people at Oracle to discuss how we can develop the relationship," he says.
And this is no different to the way John Lewis deals with other key suppliers, such as Cognizant and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS).
"Working with suppliers always has its issues but I think it's about trying to align the overall relationship in a positive way. A big, strategic relationship with a third party has to be set up so that both sides find it beneficial, so that when you do encounter problems you can get them resolved, and I think that's what we try to do," Coby explains.
An increasing proportion of John Lewis's IT investment is going towards supporting and improving its online opperations, Coby says.
"I think six or seven years ago the online business accounted for only 15 per cent of our turnover. Now it has grown to one third. It is my job to make sure that continues to grow and to do that you need a strategy and a substantial investment in IT.
"We are investing, subject to affordability of course, about £100m on IT every year in the next five years, which is a very substantial commitment and a very substantial slice of our available capex investment," he says.
The top CIO stories of 2016
We bring you our rundown of the most impactful, insightful and intriguing CIO quotes and stories from the year
More CIOs report directly to the CEO than ever before, claims recruiter Harvey Nash
More CIOs report directly to a CEO than ever before, indicating that companies are increasingly acknowledging the central importance of IT and technology to their organisation.
More than one-third (34 per cent) of CIOs surveyed by Harvey Nash and KPMG now have the CEO as their boss, rising 10 per cent over the past year alone. That's more than any time in the past decade. Meanwhile, fewer CIOs are now reporting to the CFO (down 20 per cent on previous years).
CIOs directly reporting to the CEO are also, supposedly, the happiest (87 per cent report job fulfilment, according to the report).
"This closer working relationship between the CEO and CIO is probably a contributor to the growing strategic influence and participation in senior decision-making that the CIO is reporting, as well as a widening portfolio of responsibility both within the core IT organisation and beyond," the report states.
According to its findings, reporting to the CEO can enhance the CIO's ability to develop ‘very strong' relationships for the technology function with other business functions, particularly with marketing, where it is 25 per cent better.
Sales rapport is also better with the influence of the CEO reporting line. However, relationships that don't, apparently, improve with the IT leader reporting to the CEO include finance and legal compliance.
The proportion of CIOs now occupying a seat at the executive board or senior leadership committee is also up significantly this year and is at its highest level in 11 years of tracking. Now, almost six-in-10 IT leaders (57 per cent) are a member of the senior executive management team, compared to 51 per cent just last year.
Meanwhile, Harvey Nash found that the CEO continues to be more interested in IT projects that make money, rather than save money. Almost two-thirds (63 per cent) indicate this as a priority, compared to approximately one-third (37 per cent) who report that the CEO is more interested in IT predominantly being used as a cost-saving tool. These findings are very similar to each of the past four years.
"While the CIO is undoubtedly spending more time driving externally facing (and often revenue-generating) projects, it is also clear that much of the role is still rooted in cost management," the report states.
The top CIO stories of 2016
We bring you our rundown of the most impactful, insightful and intriguing CIO quotes and stories from the year
From the agile business to the agile CIO
Mark Ridley, (now former) director of technology of recruitment website reed.co.uk, has taken the difficult decision to leave his organisation after 19 successful years. He joined the business as a developer in 1997, and moved up to head of technology, then director of technology (being effectively the CIO) in 2007.
Before explaining his next step, he describes his firm's journey with agile, and in it are many lessons for any organisation with an interest in product or software development - in other words, every business.
"We decided to become agile in 2007, which came out of consultancy work with McKinsey looking at how we could go from a free to a paid model," begins Ridley. "We were left with quite a big chunk of work to do, which was essentially taking a product which had been developed to be free, and turn it into a real commercial offering in about three months."
That was a big ask, and the only way to do it, Ridley realised, was to embrace agile. But that was easier said than done, as he soon discovered.
"The biggest mistake that I made at that point was thinking I understood agile and knew what to do. We threw together three or four different agile styles, because there were things I liked and didn't like about each of them.
"We had a guide book that said we do this like [agile methodologies] XP [Extreme Programming], and this like RUP [Rational Unified Process], and this like Scrum. And actually we lived with the legacy of that rather egocentric decision for quite a long time.
"If someone came in for interview and asked if we're agile, we'd say we are because we use Sprints, and we do things in two week iterations, and we follow the ceremonies, but we didn't really understand the philosophy. We'd read lots of books, but not enough people really understood the core of what we were trying to do."
Ridley explains that it's impossible to be completely agile as an organisation, rather it's an ideal to continually strive for.
"If you want to start adopting agile principles there are a few important things know," he continues. "One is that not only can you never get to perfect, but every time you take your eye off the ball, you slip further away. The ideal is that the teams absolutely get the principle of agile, and can self-support. It takes a real institutional commitment and constant effort to keep pointing out to people what agile means, and it's very easy to backslide into waterfall.
"Agile is hard and you need champions for it who coach, manage and monitor, and challenge and remind. It's a set of habits you need to develop, and some people like it and some don't, and that's a challenge for the hiring and coaching processes."
Ridley is an advocate of the Mary and Tom Poppendieck Book Lean Software Development, which he describes as "...the real culture of agile distilled down for developers".
He explains that the first time he read it he understood the ceremonies and the need for constant collaboration, but didn't really grasp the philosophies behind it, admitting that he "didn't have enough scars to understand how it was going to be applied".
In the book co-author Mary Poppendieck tells a story about a team within a large business that adopted agile practices, and was quickly seen as such a high performing unit that executives demanded that everyone follow their example.
"It failed abysmally," says Ridley. "Nobody else could replicate their success. It comes down to understanding the reasons behind agile rather than just telling people you're going to meet in the morning for 15 minutes, and you'll meet at the end of the week to talk about your feelings.
The top CIO stories of 2016
We bring you our rundown of the most impactful, insightful and intriguing CIO quotes and stories from the year
Specsavers is halfway through a huge, two-year IT transformation programme, which will consolidate around 90 per cent of its core apps, infrastructure and network into just a handful of global platforms.
The person tasked with heading this programme is the company's global CIO, Phil Pavitt.
He insists that while any CIO can paint an idealistic, big picture of the future, and most are more than capable of "keeping the lights on", the true test of a CIO's ability is how they actually handle a transition like the one he is overseeing - and the big decisions they make along the way.
"The real trick of a quality CIO is to handle the transition. That's where most CIOs come a cropper and they either move on or lose their jobs. It causes huge frustration in the business because everybody can see the future on PowerPoint and can stabilise performance," he says.
"Halfway through the transition, if it doesn't appear to be working, appears to be taking too long or [becoming] too expensive then a good CIO [would take action]," he adds. Pavitt points to Specsavers' recent deal with services firm Accenture as an example of adapting to different needs during the transition period.
As part of the deal, Accenture is looking after Specsavers' legacy systems, as well as getting the company ready to migrate away from them in the next four to five years.
"They've taken out a contract with us, which will ultimately have a low revenue [for them] over quite a few years as we migrate from our heritage to our new platforms, and that's built into our pricing platforms," he says.
"I no longer have to worry about the day-to-day maintenance of our legacy engines as it's Accenture's job to worry about it," he adds.
Pavitt suggests that the deal represents a fundamental change in the way Specsavers operates, and is critical to the business's long-term sustainability. "These changes mean that we're not working around our old stuff, but we're fundamentally changing our engineering climate," he says.
Pavitt believes Specsaver's deal with Accenture may be one of a kind, and is certainly something he nor anyone at the services company had seen before. He sees it as an example of creative thinking about commercial deals that any enterprise or public-sector organisation would do well to consider.
Specsavers also has a similarly unusual deal with a company called eClinicalWorks. "We have a well-known deal with eClinicalWorks, who provide us with a global platform for our retail site. We have a commercial deal with them where they get paid for all of their work as the store goes live, so the incentive on them is that it is a contract. But that contract cannot be monetised until they have got the platform [live] store-by-store, country-by-country. So, again, it's a very difficult deal that you don't normally hear about," Pavitt says.
When it comes to negotiating difficult deals, handling Oracle was by far the most "traumatic" experience, according to Pavitt. He says that Specsavers had to go through six to nine months of "real trauma" to get a good deal from Oracle. "The journey was overly dramatic and traumatic, and didn't need to be," says Pavitt.
"It is a real shame. Their products are really good and, unfortunately, you can't do without them. But the way they operate, it's just not a customer-focused way at all; their approach to the customer is minus the customer," he says, adding that SAP and Oracle are both difficult to work with.
The top CIO stories of 2016
We bring you our rundown of the most impactful, insightful and intriguing CIO quotes and stories from the year
Rising tide: How Northumbrian Water's CIO James Robbins is preparing for market competition
The regulated world of the water industry is about to undergo a revolution. From April next year, business will be free to buy their water from whomsoever they like - and that competition may be extended to consumers from as early as 2020.
Water companies like Northumbrian Water Group*, therefore, are in a race against time to prepare themselves and their systems. It isn't, says Northumbrian's group IS director James Robbins, just about improving customer relationship management systems accordingly, although that is part of the company's strategy.
It will also inaugurate a formal separation of retail and wholesale, similar to the split between BT's Openreach and Retail divisions.
"Our IT investments at the moment are swayed towards where we can add customer value and customer satisfaction. But the big thing that's happening in the industry right now is market reform. From 2017, for our business customers in water in the UK, there's going to be a competitive marketplace like there is for gas and electricity," says Robbins.
That's as if there wasn't enough to do already, with Robbins not just responsible for Northumbrian Water's IT - its ERP, billing and other standard systems - but also its operational IT. That is to say, the IT that underpins Northumbrian's water infrastructure from water purification to waste treatment, and the IT that oversees all that.
"[I'm responsible for] all of the SCADA [supervisory control and data acquisition] and telemetry, and the stuff that helps produce the water - our manufacturing systems - real-time data, that's also under the IS function as well. So it's 'OT' as well as IT," says Robbins.
The role doesn't necessarily require a PhD in Chemistry (as well as the requisite IT knowledge). But with more than 300,000 sensors across 40,000 kilometres of water and waste-water mains, and more than 400 treatment works, with infrastructural operational IT increasingly integrated with corporate IT, that is a lot of responsibility.
"It's about being the 'chief intelligence officer', ensuring that our operational systems are working in harmony: the people, the process and the technology delivering the right intelligence to the right people at the right time. The best way to understand this is by getting out with key operators to witness them using our data first hand."
He continues: "I would have thought any CIO needs to understand the core business processes. While I have only been in water four years, I've spent a lot of time upfront immersed in what the business does, how we support it, how we enable it and, therefore, finding out what's critical in our service.
"I also need to make sure that I have got people in my team who are really up to speed, so our SCADA engineers are what I call our 'rock-star engineers' because they need to really understand the water production and waste water treatment processes, as well as coding, machine learning when we do that, telecoms, Wi-Fi and so on.
"So we need to make sure that we have those sorts of people, but they take some time to develop within the business," says Robbins.
Licence to thrill
Ultimately, the Group is part of the Hutchison Whampoa conglomerate - the same company that owns mobile phone operator Three, via its Cheung Kong Infrastructure Holdings arm, along with UK Power Networks and Wales & West Utilities.
One of the benefits for Northumbrian's IT department is that it can tap Hutchison's global software licensing arrangements with major software vendors and get started on projects straightaway, free from long-winded procurement procedures.
One of the big projects implemented most recently - which is still ongoing as it is rolled out to various parts of the water company's network - is Project SNIPeR, a big-data project based on Oracle BI designed to identify potential bottlenecks across the company's water networks in the North East before they happen.
For Adrian Holmes-Morris, Northumbrian's BI team leader, the ready access to Oracle - rather than having to go through a long procurement exercise - helped speed-up the process.
In many respects, too, the project is a nascent Internet of Things implementation, with sensors feeding back data in real-time and Holmes-Morris's team providing sewer network staff at Northumbrian the means to be able to analyse and digest this information in order to work out where problems may be building up before they become acute.
"We identified four main areas: our data loggers, attached to our CSOs - combined sewer overflows. Then there was our spatial data, our geographic information system, showing our sewer network. That needed to be combined with rainfall data, which we get from the Met Office via a service called Rain Radar, which they issue to us every five minutes," Holmes-Morris told Computing.
The top CIO stories of 2016
We bring you our rundown of the most impactful, insightful and intriguing CIO quotes and stories from the year
RSA CIO Darren Price on digital transformation, agile and what makes a good chief digital officer
The insurance industry isn't renowned for its enthusiasm for cutting-edge technology, but Darren Price, CIO of RSA Insurance Group (formerly Royal & SunAlliance), is on a mission to change that at his firm.
Following a period of strategic planning with consultancy McKinsey, RSA signed a deal in January 2016 making Indian outsourcer Wipro its new infrastructure partner across Europe, part of a revolutionary switch to cloud, and a major part of the group's new digital transformation drive.
With several data centres to migrate and new services and capabilities to bring online, all while improving data security, it's a huge project for Price and his team. And the risks are similarly colossal, with financial costs in the millions for missing project deadlines.
So why do it?
It turns out that the answer is partly about savings costs, not surprisingly, but it's also about improving capabilities.
"We will save 35 per cent on our infrastructure cost base," explains Price. "That's over £200m over six years. And as we've migrated the data centre and upgraded hardware and software, we've seen significant performance improvements, and improvements in stability. Overall, there's been even more benefit than we initially identified. This has given us the opportunity to tidy up our environments, which has also meant we've needed less infrastructure, leading to even further cost savings," he says.
Describing the mandate from RSA's board for the digital transformation of its business as a "once in a lifetime opportunity to invest in technology", he says selecting the right partner was obviously critical. According to Price, Wipro was the "stand out" firm in the selection process, in part due to its cultural fit with RSA.
"We chose Wipro because of their customer focus and the way we're able to work together. They built relationships between our businesses, and they were keen to work in a new and dynamic way. Cost was one element of the decision, but getting the right cultural fit is critical."
Entering this relationship with Wipro has meant exiting from the previous deal with IBM in the UK and Ireland, and CSC in Scandinavia. This was the project's biggest risk, according to Price, as the previous incumbents could have dragged their heels and made life very difficult for the new integrator, and the broader project. Fortunately for RSA, both IBM and CSC were fully co-operative.
"As we've worked through it, IBM and CSC have stepped up to support a quality transition of service to Wipro," he says. "It was a challenging process, having to agree a deal with the current incumbents, including access to the data centres, and then building the new infrastructure. There would have been a huge financial impact had we missed our dates.
"After the commercial wranglings, both IBM and CSC have supported a quality handover. That was an important part of the project, and it doesn't happen in lots of cases. It was a hell of a relief to be honest, as that was the biggest risk," he admits.
The top CIO stories of 2016
We bring you our rundown of the most impactful, insightful and intriguing CIO quotes and stories from the year
Breaking with the past: an interview with Pearson CTO/COO Albert Hitchcock
Sitting on the north bank of the Thames in central London, the headquarters of global publisher and education provider Pearson was once one of Winston Churchill's wartime haunts. Churchill allegedly used to puff his iconic cigars on one of the roof terraces during air raids, watching the Luftwaffe as they tracked up the river, the city itself shrouded in darkness thanks to the blackout.
When Computing meets Pearson CTO and COO Albert Hitchcock there are no warplanes in sight, just the dazzlingly bright September sun. And Hitchcock himself may not have a war to win, but with a huge digital transformation project currently underway, there will be many battles ahead.
"We're transforming the business in every way through the use of technology," begins Hitchcock. "When I joined the business a little over two years ago, it became quite evident to me within a short period of time that we had an incredibly complex tech estate because the company had grown through acquisition over many decades, and had acquired a very diverse set of businesses," he says.
Simplifying and unifying
Pearson effectively ran as a holding company for a set of federated businesses. This strategy changed when current CEO John Fallon joined three years ago, and the decision was made to bring the company together into a more recognisable corporate structure, with enabling functions.
But this change needed to be facilitated by technology. The company was never going to come together as a single unit while it operated a dizzying array of separate systems.
"The technology landscape within the firm mirrored the old way of working, so we had to fundamentally change the way technology served the business," says Hitchcock. "Within a couple of months I created a technology strategy that basically looked to radically simplify the business, and enable efficiency and cost reduction. At the same time we recognised that the digital customer experience was really the thing that was going to drive the top-line revenue growth. It became evident that we needed to bring the customer-facing and product technology strategy together with the enterprise and systems-enabling strategy.
"We did that, and I inherited the digital product development group in the same time period. We didn't want to look at these aspects of technology differently, but all together."
So from this strategy the vision for a single IT architecture for the entire company was born, built around the idea of creating a set of enabling platforms. Part of this vision is to deliver all of Pearson's education content and services via a single platform, in a push to become what Hitchcock describes as the "Netflix of education".
His vision is to stitch together the group's existing education services under one platform using APIs. The company currently operates a diverse set of education services via a large number of different platforms, most of which require separate access credentials.
This is a result of the firm's long-term growth via acquisition, and is something Hitchcock is working hard to change.
"In the past we created separate digital products that have been very successful in their own right, but they're unique instances of products. Now the approach is to create effectively a single platform," he said.
"The analogy I use is to be the Netflix for education. We want to create a single platform to deliver all educational content and services, irrespective of the age and stage of the pupil," said Hitchcock.
"The other aspect is to make that platform very future-proof, to create a micro-services, API-based architecture that enables us to deliver all of our customer experiences through that single mechanism.
"Much as you would consume movies through Netflix, or buy services through Amazon, we want education to be delivered through this single, quality user experience, but available to all ages and stages of learners."
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News UK builds 170 person tech team in 7 months
News UK, the publisher behind The Times and The Sun newspapers, has created a 170-strong technology team in a little over seven months.
Speaking to Computing recently, News UK CTO Christina Scott, formerly Chief Information and Product Officer at the Financial Times, explained that the new team was built in part to in-house work previously carried out by outsourcer HCL.
"When I moved to News UK, I said to the management team that I want to build a team outside London, as it's expensive and difficult to keep hold of talent here," said Scott. "So we built a team in India, in Banglaore. From the start in April 2016 we've managed to build a complete team of 170 people, in new offices which have been purpose-built for us. They're doing everything from operations and infrastructure support, to software development, including working on the the Sun mobile and web apps."
She added that the new hires are replacing previous teams, but contractors.
"Previously we had lots of contractors. We moved from an outsourcing contract with HCL to bring the work in-house with the team in India. And they're work complements everything we do in London. The idea is it's just one tech team, I don't care if the work's done in India or here."
Scott explained that News UK used innovative recruitment techniques to secure the right talent, including hackathons.
"Data scientists are very hard to get, so it's worth investing in a team where you can build up their skills over time. So they may not have 20 years of data science behind them, but get right people with maybe a few years, and then you can build up their experience.
"We worked with HackerEarth, and ran a data-based hackathon over a weekend. We let it be known there were jobs available at the end. We had 1,500 people apply, then 40 attended, and we recruited the best four. That also brings great PR around the company we built out there, as the offices are amazing which creates a buzz. So it works as both a marketing and recruitment tool."
The organisation has also been recruiting in the UK, where Scott recently brought in outside help.
"My mission in life is to make News UK, whether in India, London or anywhere, a destination for technologists. When I arrived, it's not that we had a bad reputation, we had no reputation. We were never speaking at conferences or putting ourselves up for awards."