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9-15 July 2013 | ComputerWeekly.com

The most influential women in IT

Meet 25 inspirational woMen who have Made significant achieveMents

in a Male-doMinated industry

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the week in it

Government & public sectorHMRC gets £200m digital investment with hopes of saving £51m a yearHM Revenue & Customs’ (HMRC) digital service will receive £200m government investment in a move expected to save £51m a year on administrative costs. The investment will enable two million people to carry out transactions online by 2015-16, such as self-serving their repayments, viewing tax codes, updating personal details online and reporting additional sources of income, said HMRC.

Hackers & cyber crime preventionSeventy cyber espionage campaigns hit the UK every month, says GCHQUK intelligence agency GCHQ director Iain Lobban has confirmed that the gov-ernment is targeted by about 70 sophis-ticated cyber espionage campaigns every month. Business secrets are stolen “on an industrial scale” and foreign hackers have penetrated some firms for up to two years, he told the BBC.

Government & public sectorOFT investigates public sector IT outsourcing competitivenessThe Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has called on suppliers and buyers of IT ser-vices in the public sector to provide it with information about their experiences, as it investigates the market for outsourcing in government. The OFT wants to ensure taxpayers get the most for their money with rigorous standards of competition.

Networking hardwareComputer genius Doug Engelbart transferred to archive server, aged 88The inventor of the computer mouse, Doug Engelbart, has died aged 88. His first breakthrough in IT came in December 1968, when he and a group of research-ers from the Stanford Research Institute showed how users could each have their own computer workstation connected to a shared computer system, with each having a private file space and groups of users sharing a community space.

Innovation, research & developmentMid-sized UK IT companies lead Europe in R&D growth investment Medium-sized IT companies in the UK will grow faster than the average this year, and plan to increase spending on research and development (R&D) by more than any other sector, according to research. The GE Capital report surveyed mid-sized companies across all sectors in Europe, including 91 UK IT companies.

Government & public sectorNHS IT embraces open sourceOpen source licensing agreements will be a key feature in NHS IT, according to a report published last week. NHS England said it aimed to “develop a vibrant market of prod-ucts and solutions” for organisations across the UK, all made available under an open source licence model. n

LEEds gEts wi-fi with phonE boxEs

phone boxes across leeds are set to be turned into wi-fi hot-spots by local telecoms company aql.

the leodis project – an anagram of the leeds electronic ordnance and digital information system and the old english name for the city – will see the firm revamp the iconic British installations by painting them blue and souping them up with wireless connectivity for passers-by to take advantage of.

the phone boxes will house aql’s networking equipment, pow-ered by solar energy. as well as being environmentally friendly, the installation will cause no disruption to residents, as no roads will need to be dug up for power or cabling.

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the week in it

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StrategyGartner forecasts return to IT investment as economy improvesGlobal IT spending is set to reach $3.7tn by 2014 as the economy improves, according to Gartner’s Worldwide IT Spending Forecast. Spending on mobile devices is set to increase by 6.5% in 2014 to $740bn, compared to $695bn in 2013. Gartner predicted expanded enterprise spending on e-commerce, social and mobile as organisations boost customer relationship systems.

Risk managementIndonesian student wins global Kaspersky Lab security competitionAn entry from Indonesia’s Bandung Institute of Technology has won the Kaspersky Lab Cyber Security for the Next Generation 2013 international student conference competition. The winning pro-ject – an application using a mobile near-field communications inspection device – was submitted by Firman Azhari.

Mobile networksEE confirms July date for doubling 4G speeds in 12 cities across the UKMobile operator EE has confirmed it will double the speed of its 4G network in 12 cities from 4 July 2013 as it tries to attract new customers. The first locations for the improved connectivity could get speeds as high as 150Mbps, although some com-mentators say an average of between 24Mbps and 30Mbps is more realistic.

Transport & travel industryBus transport operator Arriva puts its e-commerce platform on private cloudUK bus operator Arriva has launched an e-commerce platform hosted on a pri-vate cloud service. The platform is intended to give customers up-to-the-minute service infor-mation and route details on their mobile devices and a process to improve their ticket-buying experience, accessed by iPhone, Android devices and BlackBerrys.

Web softwareOpen Championship prepares website for 10,000 page requests a second The organisers of golf’s Open Championship have configured the web-site in anticipation of 10,000 webpage requests a second from five million site users during the four-day golf tourna-ment. Organisers the R&A outsources the support and development of the website to IT services supplier Endava.

Government & public sectorGovernment commits an extra £250m to superfast broadband budgetThe government has committed an addi-tional £250m of superfast broadband spend to increase coverage to 95% of the UK by 2017. The announcement builds on plans to provide nearly 90% of homes with access to fixed, superfast broadband by 2015. The government also announced a further auction of 4G spectrum. n

softwarE usE in accountancy firms

Source: Thomson Reuters, 2013

18.47%

Other

Sage

Iris

CCH

Thomson Reuters Digita

No, plans to implement

a solution in 12 months

No, works in Excel,

Outlook or similar

Of 1,603 accountancy firms: Does your practice use an integrated suite of accountancy software?

10.36%

3.81%

7.3%

27.89%

14.97%

17.22%

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Computer Weekly’s search for the most influential women in UK IT in 2013 is over. Those who made the grade are profiled here. Kayleigh Bateman reports

The 25 most influential women in IT

The aim of compiling an annual list of the top 25 most influential women in UK IT is to focus on the role of women

in IT, recognise the most influential role mod-els and discuss the vital part that female IT leaders will take in making a difference to the future of the UK’s high-tech economy.

The winners – selected by a judging panel of employers and IT leaders from across the industry and by Computer Weekly’s read-ers – were announced at a special event in London last week.

The 25 inspirational women who made it on to the 2013 list represent the role models that will be so important to the future diver-sity and success of the tech community.

1Joanna Shields, CEO and Chair of Tech City Investment Organisation

Joanna Shields is an American-British executive, currently serving as CEO and chair of Tech City Investment Organisation and as the UK government’s

business ambassador for digital industries. Prior to this she was vice-president and general manager of Facebook in Europe. Before Facebook, she was president of people networks at AOL, a position she assumed after the acquisition of Bebo by AOL. At Bebo, she served as CEO, and prior to this she was managing director for Google Europe, Russia, Middle East & Africa. In February 2013, she was assessed as one of the 100 most powerful women in the UK by Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4.

2Denise McDonagh, CTO, Home Office; former director of the

government’s G-Cloud programmeDenise McDonagh took up the position of Home Office CTO on 1 June, having previously been programme director for the government’s cloud computing

scheme, G-Cloud. McDonagh represents a new breed of leaders, enabling innovation and focusing on building high-performing teams of predominantly civil servant IT professionals.

3Catherine Doran, CIO, Royal Mail Group

The third Royal Mail CIO in less than 18 months, Catherine Doran inherited a controversial IT transfor-mation programme, as well as the splitting of the Post Office as part of

the reorganisation of the UK postal service. She is responsible for devising and delivering the IT strategy to transform the technology estate. Previously, she led a company-wide transfor-mation programme at Network Rail.

4Wendy Hall, professor of computer science, University of

Southampton; founder of Web Science Research Initiative

Wendy Hall is founding director – along with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, professor Nigel Shadbolt and Daniel J. Weitzner – of the Web Science Research Initiative,

HEM

ERA

/TH

INKS

TOC

K

Women in tech think

differently to men in tech,

say industry experts

Women in IT: Take charge of your career

path to success

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6Angela Morrison, CIO, Direct Line Group

Angela Morrison has been CIO of Direct Line Group (DLG) – for-merly RBS Insurance – for three years, managing business tech-nology services, which shapes,

builds, runs and governs IT for DLG. Insurance was a new sector for Morrison, having previously spent 18+ years in food retail and IT, 10 of which were at director level and included being a member of Sainsbury’s operating board, where she was responsible for the insourcing of the IT function and its subsequent transformation to support the business’s recovery plans.

which was launched in 2006 as long-term research collaboration between the University of Southampton and MIT. She is a fellow of the BCS, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Engineering and Technology, and the Royal Society.

5Lesley Cowley, CEO, Nominet

Under Lesley Cowley’s leadership, Nominet has become a trusted guardian of a vital part of the UK internet economy, providing services that are relied on by

millions of businesses and consumers. Cowley serves on the Nominations Committee and the Development Working Group, she is chair of Icann’s Country Code Names Supporting Organisation, and is a fellow of a number of respected bodies.

intErviEw: Joanna shiELds, tEch city cEo – thE most infLuEntiaL woman in uK it 2013companies need to make it more attractive for women to stay in the work-force for longer, according to Joanna shields, ceo of tech city and winner of computer weekly’s Most influential woman in uK it 2013 award.

as the former managing director of facebook europe, and with 27 years of experience in technology, shields believes businesses should be doing more to create an environment that attracts women to the tech industry and helps them stay.

shields was a graduate student in washington dc when she took a job as a research analyst on capitol hill. working for national digital, she entered the world of digital technology just as it was emerging. “it was in the business of transmitting pictures over phone lines for the first time. i remember seeing the technology, which is a normal thing today, but i remember thinking, ‘this is it – this is the technology that is going to change the world’,” she says.

“as soon as i finished my MBa, i jumped in my car and drove across the us to silicon valley, where i took a job as a product manager for an imaging electronics company that was creating chips, so i ended up on the hardware side.”

on challenges she faced as a woman, shields says: “i never compromised my looks – i decided to be who i am. i never wore the boxy suits or tried to dress like a man or act like a man; i was myself, and that, over a certain period of time, tended to make some folks underestimate me.”

she set up her first international operation in the uK in 1990 – when “it was a very different picture for women” – and says she is encouraged by how many women are starting their own businesses now. “it’s amazing – there’s this rising tide of successful women entrepreneurs in the uK. i have the privilege of working in tech city, the east london cluster which is really becoming the hotbed of ideas and creativity, and there are so many women-led businesses and i find that really encouraging.”

shields says diverse teams are important to any business: “women are 51% of the population so we need to be represented in every part of life, and i think it teams are an excellent example of that. you need well-rounded experience, not just in terms of the sexes, but also in age.”

awards

› Women in technology: Why women communicate differently from men

› Women in tech: CIOs talk IT gender roles

Tech City names

Facebook executive

Joanna Shields as CEO

Tech City startups

struggling to acquire capital

for further growth

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money for charity without putting their hands deeper in their pockets. Testament to the company’s success, Everyclick recently won the People’s Choice Award for Most Promising Internet Company at Internet World 2013.

11Sue Black, founder, <GoTo> Foundation; Bletchley Park

campaigner; senior research associate, University College London

Sue Black is a senior research associate in the Department of Computer Science at University College London, and has been widely acclaimed for her role in

campaigning to save Bletchley Park, the home of the UK’s secret codebreakers in World War 2. She founded BCSWomen in 2001, which now has more than 1,200 members. Black also set up The <GoTo> Foundation, a non-profit organisation which aims to make computer science more meaningful to the public.

12Cathryn Riley, group COO, Aviva

Cathryn Riley joined Aviva in 1996 and is chief operations officer with responsibility for IT, business change and shared services across the group. She

joined the group executive board in May 2011. She joined Commercial Union in 1996 and subsequently held a number of senior roles in its successor companies, CGU and Norwich Union.

13Lyn Grobler, vice-president and CIO, corporate functions at BP

Lyn Grobler is the vice-president and CIO of IT strategy and corporate functions and alternative energy and shipping businesses at BP. With an

extensive career in IT, she has been responsible for projects in banking, trading and energy environments for companies including ICL, Ralph M Parsons, Chase Manhattan Bank and Koch Supply and Trading. Grobler is a member of Women in Technology and leads the Women in IT&S group within BP.

7Martha Lane Fox, UK government digital champion; Chair of Go On

UK and the government’s Digital Advisory Board

Martha Lane Fox is the UK’s digital champion and the founder of Go On UK, which she chairs. She is also chair of the Government Digital Service’s

advisory board and sits on the Cabinet Office Efficiency and Reform board. Lane Fox co-founded Lastminute.com in 1998 and sold the business to Sabre Holdings in 2005.

8Chi Onwurah, shadow cyber security minister, Labour MP for

Newcastle upon Tyne CentralChi Onwurah was elected at the 2010 general election as MP for Newcastle upon Tyne Central. The former head of telecoms technology at Ofcom, the UK

telecoms regulator, she became the shadow minister for Business, Innovation and Skills (innovation, science and digital infrastructure) in 2010, and is a board member of the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology.

9Susan Cooklin, CIO, Network Rail

Susan Cooklin is CIO at Network Rail. Her career has spanned over 20 years in financial services, leading business, technology and operational teams across global

organisations. Last year, she took on the added responsibility for finance and HR shared services at the rail operator, which saw her team expand from 600 to 1,000.

10Polly Gowers OBE, CEO and founder, Everyclick

Polly Gowers, OBE, is CEO and founder of Everyclick. The company benefits charities through innovative technology – raising an additional £3.5m for

them to date. Everyclick’s flagship product is Give as you Live, which enables online shoppers to raise

› Horror stories of women in tech: The worst advice I’ve ever received

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leadership roles at Onyx Software and Peregrine, living in both the US and Europe.

18Claire Vyvyan, general manager and executive director, large

institutions, Dell UKClaire Vyvyan is general manager and executive director, large institutions, at Dell UK, and recently acted as general manager for Dell’s public sector business.

She was previously director and general manager of Dell’s Commercial Business Group in the UK and Netherlands. Before rejoining Dell in April 2011, Vyvyan was the global client director for BT Group at Microsoft.

19Bernadette Wightman, managing director, partner organisation,

emerging markets, CiscoBernadette Wightman leads the largest channel sales operation for Cisco outside the US, with more than 2,000 registered partners transacting in excess of

14Gillian Arnold, chair of BCSWomen, founder of Tectre

Gillian Arnold has 30 years’ experience in the IT industry, 22 of these at IBM. She has under-taken customer-facing technical, sales, business development,

strategic marketing and consultancy roles. Now retired from IBM, Arnold has interest in encouraging more women into the science and technology sectors and has chaired a forum for IT trade body Intellect. She sits on the board of directors for the UKRC for Women in SET and is chair for BCSWomen.

15Kate Craig-Wood, managing director, Memset; Intellect

board memberKate Craig-Wood founded Memset with her brother, Nick, in 2002, leading the firm to become one of the UK’s top cloud and hosting providers. She chairs

Intellect’s climate change group, as well as sitting on the trade body’s main and opera-tions boards. Recently she co-led the tech-nical strand of phase two of the Cabinet Office’s G-Cloud and App Store project.

16Jacqueline de Rojas, vice-president and general manager,

UK and Ireland, CA TechnologiesJacqueline de Rojas is vice-presi-dent and general manager, UK & Ireland, at CA Technologies. She is responsible for all aspects of sales, marketing and service throughout

the region. Her 25 years of experience in sales management is helping CA Technologies to grow revenues and extend the provision of IT management software and solutions. De Rojas has previously performed leadership roles at McAfee, Cartesis, Business Objects, Legent and Informix.

17Aileen Allkins, vice-president, Worldwide Software Support, HP

Aileen Allkins is responsible for HP’s Software Support organisa-tion and its credo of “Exceed Expectations” – a vision she developed over a career dedicated

to IT support. Prior to HP, she held global

Judging panEL

the list of the 25 most influential women in uK it was selected by a judging panel of employers and it leaders from across the industry, including:n india gary-Martin, managing director

and global coo, investment banking technology & operations, Jp Morgan

n Maggie Berry, founder, women in technology

n sheila flavell, coo, fdM group n sarah Burnett, representing the

Bcswomen group; research vice-president, nelson hall

n eileen Brown, chair of intellect’s women in technology committee; ceo, amastra

n Belinda parmar, author of Little Miss Geek; ceo, lady geek

n Kayleigh Bateman, special projects editor, computer weekly; editor, cw europe

n Bryan glick, editor in chief, computer weekly

n …and by a reader vote on our website.

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23Jenny Griffiths, CEO, Snap Fashion

Snap Fashion was founded by 25-year-old computer science graduate Jenny Griffiths in 2012. The business used the promise of Technology Strategy Board fund-

ing to attract private investors and develop its novel search engine. Since then, it has won the prestigious $175,000 Cisco BIG award and the Decoded Fashion startup pitch. It is now planning to launch an Android version of the app, a menswear version and take its technology into other retail markets.

24Lucy Dimes, CEO, Alcatel Lucent UK

Lucy Dimes was appointed CEO of Alcatel-Lucent UK & Ireland in April 2011. Previously, she was managing director of group & Openreach service opera-

tions at BT. She was also a member of the BT Operate executive board and BT Group equality & diversity board.

25Kirstin Duffield, managing director, Morning Data

Kirstin Duffield took the helm of Morning Data in 2006 and has led the company to its new development centre location and the introduction of

its total support and systems package. She has spearheaded the company’s approach to client service and product support, combined with long-term cooperative relationships within the Morning Data community. n

90% of Cisco’s UK and Irish business. Wightman is also executive sponsor for Cisco’s Connected Women Network, set up to inspire and attract the best female talent into the IT industry.

20Cary Marsh, CEO, MyDeo.com

Cary Marsh launched Mydeo in 2005 following a government research and development grant for technical innovation. She has since gone on to raise over

£500,000 in funding. Mydeo became the first and only service to be fully integrated into Microsoft’s Windows Movie Maker software. Mydeo provides high-quality streaming video hosting to more than 250,000 individuals, communities and businesses.

21Lesley Sewell, CIO, Post Office Group

Lesley Sewell joined the Post Office in April 2010 from Northern Rock, where she had been managing director for IT since 2005. She is responsible

for the development and delivery of IT strategy in support of the business transfor-mation plans, delivering a transformed IT estate and operating model.

22Ursula Morgenstern, CEO, Atos UK & Ireland

Ursula Morgenstern has been the CEO at Atos UK and Ireland since January 2012, having previously held the role of chief operating officer. She joined

Atos Origin in August 2004 as head of enterprise solutions and worked her way up. She was a partner at KPMG for four years and general manager at K&V Information Systems.

› Women in the workplace: Breaking into a male-dominated IT industry

› Women in leadership roles in IT should guide

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Legal obligations and scale gave the oil firm pause for thought when it started moving from a vast legacy IT estate to the cloud, writes Archana Venkatraman

How BP rigged its IT for the future with a hybrid cloud infrastructure

For a multinational company with 87,000 employees and a distributed IT infrastructure, moving to the cloud

posed a challenge. But BP took a cautious and calculated approach to bridge its cloud gap, using a mix of private cloud, public cloud and in-house IT infrastructure.

Speaking at the Cloud World Forum 2013 in London, BP CIO Dana Deasy said: “Like every large company, we had legacy IT and some-how had to burst to the cloud.”

BP – which had the fifth largest revenue stream for any company in the world in 2012 – has a large and expensive IT infrastructure, including 90,000 PCs, 57 petabytes of data, 340 WAN connections and 17,000 servers.

“Our IT services are delivered by 3,500 employees and contractors, as well as 7,000 staff from managed service providers. It is a big, mixed world,” said Deasy.

The oil and gas company wanted to migrate some of its workloads to a cloud environment to improve efficiency and opti-mise performance and security, he said.

But the IT team needed to take a calcu-lated approach because of the size of the company’s IT estate and legal and regulatory compliance requirements.

Its on-premise IT infrastructure strategy was designed around systems for sensitive data, highly customised applications, stable workloads and legal and regulatory sys-tems. Meanwhile, its off-premise IT strategy was focused around testing and develop-ment, collaborative platforms and customer engagement systems.

Digital communicationsThe IT team began its migration by mov-ing the company’s digital communications infrastructure to the cloud.

Its website is hosted in a cloud envi-ronment, as part of an end-to-end cloud

BP moved some of its it services to the cloud to overcome issues of legacy infrastructure

BP

BP rolls out global

cloud for workforce

BP standardises

finance and accounting

through Accenture

platform for digital communication services.But it was not as simple as picking a cloud

provider and moving the communications system to its platform.

“We wanted best-of-breed cloud solu-tions for every feature, but there is no single provider that can offer the best technological solution for each of our needs,” said Deasy. “It is difficult to pick one service that fits all use cases.”

The IT team chose nine cloud service providers to provide a mix of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) to meet its cloud requirements.

The IaaS platform, delivered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), is designed to auto-scale, according to Deasy.

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“We decided to deliver our email services through private cloud platform as a service,” said Deasy. “Today, our employees have a Google-like email experience.”

BP put Microsoft Exchange 2010 into a pri-vate cloud from T-Systems in 2012 to benefit from pay-per-use functionality and flexibility.

Resolving obstacles and the futureBP’s cloud implementation was not without its obstacles. “There was cost, there were legal and regulatory requirements and we had to develop a new approach to security,” said Deasy.

One of the toughest challenges was to relinquish control of the IT, he said. It took a lot of confidence to believe in a service that is not physically there to see.

Having benefited from cloud’s agility and scalability, BP’s IT team is now building a technology strategy to look at the cloud eco-system. “When we started, AWS was leading and we were testing and developing our ser-vices with it. But now, the cloud marketplace is evolving fast,” said McMohan.

The company is assessing AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google’s cloud services. “We are also looking at traditional service providers, such as IBM, and then there is OpenStack, which is maturing too,” he said.

BP is building a cloud framework and a rule book as guidance to its future cloud use.

“In the coming years, we will expand our cloud deployment for a wider range of appli-cations,” said Deasy. n

Cloud agility in actionUsing cloud’s agility for digital communica-tions proved useful for BP during the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Considered one of the largest oil spills in the industry’s history, it led to several environmental inci-dents, endangering locals and marine life.

“During the incident we had to suddenly provision more IT resources,” said Deasy.

According to the company’s chief cloud architect, Paul McMohan, visitors to BP’s website increased from 15,000 to 17 million during the period of the oil spill. “That was the scale we had to provision for,” he said.

The cloud platform gave BP the ability to meet those demands as well as mak-ing moves to manage expectations: “Use of cloud in digital services also gave us the ability to put out new marketing campaigns quickly during that time,” said Deasy.

Besides being a public cloud provider, Amazon also offers a virtual private cloud. This allows users to provision a logically isolated section of its cloud where users can launch resources in a virtual network they define. “A majority of AWS customers are

demanding Amazon virtual private cloud,” said McMohan.

BP’s IT team also moved

the company’s global email services to the cloud. BP has 160,000 mail boxes and nearly 10 million email transactions every month.

› How to build a hybrid storage cloud› Managing the hybrid cloud model› Hybrid cloud management myths

“There was cosT, There were legal and regulaTory requiremenTs and we had To develop a new approach To securiTy”dana deasy, Bp

analysis

BP

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editor’s comment

Only the men in IT can bring the changes needed for the womenThis time last year, after we announced the first

of our now-annual list of the 25 most influential women in IT, this column explained why we do

not want to have to write about the issue of women in IT anymore.

Simply put, if we had a workforce in IT that reflected the diversity of the audience that the IT industry seeks to serve, we would no longer need to. And as long as that remains a failing, it’s an issue we will continue to high-light, and we will continue to recognise the female role models who are at the forefront of making a change.

This year’s list of women is a reflection of that goal.Fifteen years ago, we were writing about how it was

an embarrassment for the tech sector to have less than 20% of its workforce female. Today, that figure has still not changed.

So there is clearly a bigger problem to be tackled, and it is this: What to do about the men in IT.

Men remain the primary decision-makers in IT recruit-ment and career development. And while many of those men will genuinely express their hope to see more women in the technology workplace, very few actually do anything about it.

As a male-dominated profession, it is only really the men who can change things. Successful, talented women will always do well – but they are too much of an exception to be able to make a difference across the whole sector. To effect widespread change – sorry guys, that’s entirely up to you.

This is not about recruiting women for the sake of recruiting women. It is simply unsustainable for the UK technology scene to take its rightful place in the econ-omy without the broadest range of skills available, and the diversity that demands.

What will it take for men to take the issue of “women in IT” seriously? That’s a tough one to answer – and we would be very keen to hear from anyone who has any suggestions. Nobody has found the solution yet.

But meanwhile – to all men in IT: the lack of women in IT is your problem to solve. Only you can bring about the change needed. n

Bryan GlickEditor in chief

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on being able to work effectively with and through other senior functional leaders.

The CIO regularly plays the role of political broker as there are rarely sufficient resources available to address all the needs of senior functional managers. In addition, the CIO is mindful of shadow IT resources embedded in core and support business functions. To a strong CIO, the location of resources is less important than proactively influencing how such resources are deployed.

Third, the CIO works with his or her senior management team in shaping the wide range of IT services which will be provided across the enterprise. Here the CIO has to keep a constant eye on the differentiated nature of services in the areas of strategic develop-ment, programme delivery and operations/infrastructure services. How the IT spend is distributed across these domains is critical as strong CIOs are keen to release resources from operations/infrastructure with a view to increasing investment in strategic develop-ment and programme delivery. n

opinion

Joe McDonagh sums up the real value a CIO can bring to large organisations

Reclaiming the role of the CIO

While it has become increasingly fashionable to question the essential value of the role of chief

information officer (CIO) in large, complex organisations, it is unfortunate that much of this discourse is both self-serving and with-out any solid foundation.

For the most part, this constant harangu-ing is a product of vested interests in the media, IT advisory business and academia alike. Taken together, these forces coalesce in a manner that places the role under con-stant critique and possible criticism.

Having collaborated extensively over the past decade with executive and technology management teams, there is no doubt that the role of the CIO is essential to large, com-plex organisations. Rather than the menac-ing message so often touted by the IT advice business, the role of the CIO is of profound importance to the strategic development and ongoing transformation of such organisations.

From a leadership perspective, the CIO attends to three shared agendas on an ongoing basis.

Shared agendasFirst, the CIO works collaboratively with the executive management team in terms of shaping the strategic development of the enterprise. The CIO brings to bear unique expertise in terms of integrating the realms of strategy and IT with particular emphases on the manner in which modern IT systems offer the potential to transform the wider business system in which the enterprise is embedded. The CIO’s role in this strategic conversation at the apex of an organisation is both essential and non-negotiable.

Second, the CIO works collaboratively with senior functional managers who are required to exploit the full potential of IT in transform-ing both core and support business func-tions. This emphasis on functional transfor-mation draws on the CIO’s expertise in the effective management of change. Here, the CIO knows that success is highly contingent

Free download:

The DNA of the CIO

As companies

become more data-driven, the CIO role

keeps on changing

Joe McDonagh is associate profes-sor of organisation development and IT at the School of Business, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.

This is an edited version. Click to read the full article online.

“The role of The cio is imporTanT To The sTraTegic developmenT and ongoing TransformaTion of large, complex organisaTions”

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buyer’s Guide

Although the main focus on enterprise software seems to be around customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource management (ERP), one area that often gets overlooked is the workforce.

Organisations will have systems in place, such as from Oracle or SAP, but these are often seen as the poor cousin to the ERP and CRM systems, with little strategic focus on the real capabilities required from an HR system.

Having an excellent technology platform to log all interaction with suppliers and with cus-tomers is good for business, but software is also required to look after the employees . What should be the cornerstones of an HR software architecture? Payroll is clearly one of them, but many other HR processes are paper-based. For example, many organisations still use manual systems to manage their expenses, such as a word processor or a spreadsheet.

It is also apparent that the UK workforce is leaving around £330m per annum on the table in unclaimed expenses. Why? Existing systems are not flexible enough to allow for expenses where a receipt is not available, so car park expenses, underground fares and the odd cup of coffee with a customer are being paid for by the employee directly. Does this matter? Yes it does. An employee who believes they are funding the business themselves will not be tempted to go that extra mile for the business in other areas. Expense management is the next thing that needs to be looked at.

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What is human capital management?

Guide to human capital

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Using software to support your firm’s creative stock

Organisations may already have the blueprint for their next big thing

without knowing it. Clive Longbottom reports on how human capital

management systems can unlock the company’s most valuable assets

Buyer’s guideHR management part 2 of 3

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buyer’s Guide

Next comes vacation and sickness management. Some companies will be working on a flexitime model, where employees can work extra hours on some days and build up time off; some will be working on multiple shift patterns; others will be running a fairly standard 40-hour working week. All these variations on working patterns need to be allowed for.

Everyone is entitled to time off, even if this is due to sickness, maternity or paternity leave – but where a person is off sick or is using up statutory paternity/maternity leave, this needs to be put through to HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) as well, so that payments due to the business itself can be calculated and paid back as applicable. An employee should be able to use a self-service portal to see what time they are allowed off and to request or book vacation time in a clear and easy manner.

It should also be apparent that expenses, vacation and sickness management are also intrinsically linked to payroll, so trying to keep these areas completely apart with separate solutions will only lead to problems in making sure that everything does work together seam-lessly. Expenses and salary should be paid at the same time for most people; any impact on salary through sickness needs to be logged in a manner that makes reporting this as easy as possible so that the employee, the business and HMRC can see what has happened throughout the year at a granular and, for the business and HMRC, an aggregated basis.

Indeed, with the latest changes to how pay is dealt with, everything has to be managed on a near real-time basis to meet HMRC’s RTI requirements.

Knowledge and trainingTraining is an HR issue and systems need to tie in to ensure that each employee, contractor and consultant gets the right training they need, according to the tasks and projects they are working on at any one time.

This collective group of human resources also has a value to the business that few organi-sations are making the most of. Held in the heads of the people are thoughts and ideas on how a task or process could be carried out better, making the employee happier and probably saving the company money at the same time. Some may have innovative ideas for new prod-ucts or services which they are keeping to themselves for no other reason than they believe there is no way to get their idea to the business in the right way.

Managing the training and intellectual capital of human resources is often referred to as human capital management (HCM) and has come on a long way from the computer-based training (CBT) modules and IBM Lotus Notes knowledge bases of old. Companies such as Imaginatix, Infor and Oracle offer systems that work around the concept of capturing ideas from employees and providing recognition to those who provide ideas that lead to a useful outcome to the business.

Part of HCM is also around listening to the people involved and responding to their needs as appropriate. Companies such as Confirmit and Verint provide software that manages not only employee but also consultant, contractor, supplier and customer feedback and can be used to help in adding to the intellectual property base being built up in other areas of HCM.

Getting people in and outEmployee churn will happen. For a 1,000 user organisation with a 10% churn, 100 employ-ees will leave and 100 will have to be taken on, just to stand still. If the organisation is growing at 10%, then an extra 100 people will need to be dealt with – that’s 300 adds and deletions that have to be accommodated, never mind all the amendments such as address changes, changes of surname on marriage and so on.

“rules ThaT underpin much hr are driven By legislaTion and on-premise sysTems can fall Behind”

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On top of this are the more itinerant workers from the contractor and consultant pools: The overall impact for a modern business is in dealing with thousands to tens of thousands of adds, changes and deletions (ACDs) to an HR system where each has a knock-on effect throughout other systems.

Recruitment also has to be a part of the overall solution. Indeed, if there is a need to bring on board 200 new staff a year, it averages out as one person per working day. If each position gets only 10 applications, 2,000 people will have to be dealt with – and some jobs are attract-ing thousands of applications in today’s economic conditions.

A further important part of any HR system is in managing those who are not direct employ-ees. Most organisations now have a mix of employees, consultants and contractors working for them, and it is important to treat each according to their needs.

With such a varied and changing group of resources involved, HR also has to play a direct part in the rest of the technology environment. For example, as soon as a person is put into the HR system as a resource, this should set in place a whole raft of tasks, for example, set up a computer account for them and provision the software services they will need to carry out their job, as well as a telephone account, security passes and so on. When they leave, stating this in their HR records should block their access to all the services they were provided with.

The HR architecture challengeAn additional problem is that the rules that underpin a lot of HR are driven by legislation and on-premise sys-tems run the risk of falling behind the times with what laws they use in their rules engines.

Online systems can be kept up to date more effec-tively and the service providers responsible for them can concentrate on keeping them up to date with the relevant laws, ensuring their software provides the cor-rect support.

HCM solutions are moving to the cloud. The likes of Workday, (which offers a more complete cloud-based HR offering), and SAP’s SuccessFactors offer intel-lectual property management systems based around ideation and jam sessions, with employee recognitions and other modules included, such as succession management to ensure that the loss of key personnel through resignation, sacking or other causes does not have a massive negative impact on the business.

However, if the decision is to go to a cloud-based overall HR solution, the main issue will be in pulling the various bits and pieces together in a manner that is seamless and yet still does

effectively support the business. This is where cloud stand-ards and application programming interfaces (APIs) are important, areas where cloud is still at its most deficient.

This can cause issues when a company looks to using cloud as an overall solution but should not be an insur-mountable issue. Already, many will be using an exter-

nal online service such as APT or Sage One for payroll and the likes of Concur or KDS for expense management.

Over time, it is likely that HR systems will become more cloud-based and sufficiently well integrated. At the moment, it is key to identify where the interfaces between any chosen systems are needed and concentrate on ensuring that these are managed in a manner that avoids any confusion and issues for the business. n

buyer’s Guide

“iT is key To idenTify where The inTerfaces BeTween any chosen sysTems are needed”

Clive Longbottom is co-founder of analyst company Quocirca

› Tools for talent management› The new face of human capital management

› Invest in human capital with talent analytics

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If there is one thing big data specialist Chris Osborne has learned after five years of work-ing with big data, it is that the public don’t like graphs. A lot of people have problems just setting the thermostat at home, so expecting them to make sense of pie chart is a step too far, he told CIOs at Computer Weekly’s CW500 Club for IT leaders.

Osborne is the big data product manager at Alertme.com, a company that is using technol-ogy to help people monitor the energy consumption in their homes. He has learned the hard way just how difficult it is to turn big data into products and services the public can understand.

“An important thing to remember is that the average reading age of a UK online consumer is 12 years old,” he says. “That means that whenever you design anything on the internet, it has to be simple enough for a 12 year old to understand.”

Pie charts may be common currency among data professionals, but user testing has shown that time and again ordinary people find them difficult to interpret.

Osborne says it is far better to present the information in the form of a simple ordered list than to make people jump through the mental hoops trying to work out whether the blue segment of a chart is bigger than the green.

Learning a valuable lesson earlyOsborne’s first foray into big data offered some valuable lessons in the difficulties of work-ing with the public. At first sight, an application to help people find properties in London in commuting distance of their work seemed like a good idea.

The application allowed users to specify how much time they wanted to spend commuting, how much they wanted to spend and what sort of property they were looking for. By combin-ing the users preferences with data on London’s transport network, the app was able recom-mend suitable properties.

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CW500: Shared services

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CW500 in the City: IT

innovation in financial

services

While pie charts may work for data professionals, big data specialist Chris Osborne tells Bill Goodwin why they may not be best for the consumer

Forget the fancy graphics

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“In some ways, it was very successful,” says Osborne. “I was very proud of the style. It was very advanced for its time and it had some quite complex data processing.

“But it completely failed.”With hindsight, Osborne (pictured below

right) realised that the application was unsuccessful because he had not taken the time to understand how people actually buy and talk about property.

“Most people who had bought a house, or were looking for a house, would nearly always say, I want to live here. I am looking for a house there,” he says.

Only then do they decide what type of property they want, how many bedrooms, whether they are looking for a garden and whether the garden is south-facing.

“I made the fundamental mistake in not understanding the context and environment of how people make a decision,” he says.

This, and other experiences have helped Osborne to put together what he calls his Four Rules of Insight (see box); four rules of thumb that help to make big data accessible to the public.

Today, Osborne is putting those lessons into practice at Alertme.com, a company of 100 people that is working on ways to provide the public with useful data by connecting intelli-gent devices in their home to the internet.

One of the firm’s goals is to take data from the 45 million smart electricity meters that will be rolled out across the UK by 2019 and convert that into information that will mean some-thing to consumers.

Osborne’s starting point was to find out how people talk about their electricity consump-tion. They don’t talk about how many kilowatt hours their fridge uses a week or how much they spend per hour on electricity. But they do talk about their actions, such as charging a mobile phone or cooking a chicken. So Alertme.com’s challenge is to find ways to present electricity consumption to consumers in a way they can understand.

“We have sensors in our homes and in our researchers’ homes. We can monitor what energy people use and break it down and show users exactly where all the energy is going in their home, which is a great thing for consumers,” he says.

How to present the findingsIf there is one thing Osborne is clear about, it is that whatever the answer is, it is definitely does not include a graph or a pie chart. And certainly not the main stay of big data visualisation used in businesses – the dashboard.

“Consumers are not interested in them and we should not expect them to be. They are interested in convenience and they are interested in having informa-tion presented to them in a way they don’t have to think about it,” he says.

The challenge is to take the pain away, and only share information that is rele-vant. Hiring someone from a non-IT background to train as a coder can help.

They help to bring a consumer’s perspective, says Osborne, who moved into big data after studying geography at university.

“If people need to make a decision, guide them on how they could make it, but the end goal is a lot of automation and removing of complexity, rather than generating lots of data,” he says. n

thE four ruLEs of insightn personalise – the application should tell the user something relevant to them.n accessible – data should be simple and accessible. hide data that is not relevant to the user. don’t represent data in the form of graphs or pie charts.n actionable – don’t give consumers information unless they can do something with it.n instinctive – the application should be based on an understanding of people’s behaviour, and the context in which they make choices and decisions.

Source: Chris Osborne

CW Buyer’s Guide: Big Data Infrastructure

CW500: Five

technology forces that will change

businesses forever

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Once upon a time, IT outsourcing was a choice between doing it or not, but – with maturing cloud-based services and the arrival of new suppliers – there are now more options to consider and hurdles to overcome.

At the same time, the stakes have risen as IT becomes ever more critical to the efficiency and competitiveness of the business. As IT outsourcing increases, procurement teams grow and IT departments shrink.

Cost, consumerisation, commoditisation and digitisation are all considerations today. And there are many more departments involved. Procurement teams, supplier relationship man-agement operations, the chief financial officer (CFO) and the IT users of the business can all exert their influence in outsourcing programmes now.

In the past, outsourcing was purely about cutting fixed costs. But while contracting a sup-plier to run a service at a lower cost might remain the biggest reason, its importance is now diminishing. Do you want to cut costs or do you want to innovate? Or do you want both?

Decisions, decisions, decisionsToday, executives involved in outsourcing have more than one option for every aspect of their IT. Mark Lewis, outsourcing lawyer at Berwin Leighton Paisner, says the biggest decision facing businesses is whether to move to the cloud or use traditional IT outsourcing.

If a traditional IT outsourcing model is chosen, decisions about the shape and scope of the deal are always a challenge, says Lewis. But the options are now better known, as are the suppliers’ offerings, the suppliers themselves and their delivery models.

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Are there too many

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datacentre operations?

IT sourcing complexity

makes supplier management

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How to make sense of your outsourcing options

With the advent of cloud, commoditisation and third

party innovation, the options for outsourcing your IT services can prove

bewilderingly complex. Karl Flinders looks at how to devise a strategy

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But the cloud brings different challenges. “With cloud, the decision process is still complex and difficult for buyers,” says Lewis. “First,

do they understand cloud offerings? Then, public or private? How do they manage the data risks and the other risks of public cloud they keep hearing about? How easy will it be for them to integrate cloud in their IT environment? And who are the best cloud suppliers for them?”

He adds that the cloud advisory and integrator market is not as developed as in the IT out-sourcing market, so there is still a high level of complexity for buyers.

The digitisation of business – itself driven by cloud computing – is another example of a technology in flux that, while promising substantial benefits, is giving sourcing professionals a headache. New technologies in the digital arena, such as mobile and business intelligence (BI), add complexity to the sourcing process.

According to a Forrester survey of global sourcing executives, 65% of respondents say they are excited about the changes these digital technologies will bring; but 62% say their busi-nesses lack the requisite skills to make the change; and 68% believe they do not have the right policies and business practices.

Forrester analyst Liz Herbert says supplier manage-ment teams need a new approach if they are to harness the skills of the abundance of little-known suppliers. She says businesses must change the rules of engagement with suppliers, by rebalancing risk and value.

Tridip Saha, head of sales in Europe at Indian IT ser-vices firm Mindtree, blogged recently about the confu-sion caused for CIOs by digitisation, because of the different approaches IT services providers take.

He says large, consulting-led IT service providers see digitisation as being “all about the strategy to transform your business, with IT on top; the digital agencies view it as being all about user experience/customer journey, and they don’t bother about technology.

“The platform providers see it as all about having the right underlying technology platform, with no need for writing custom code ever again. Domain-centric IT service providers believe they have the golden solution, created exactly for your industry, and ask the customer how much of it they want.” He says most of the other suppliers take one of these approaches, depending on who you talk to.

Managing multiplesDigitisation and cloud computing stimulate competition between suppliers. Today, it is highly unlikely that a business will sign an all-encompassing, long-term contract with one supplier or even a small consortium of suppliers.

Today, a big business might have thousands of suppliers, many of which are unofficial and arrive through users’ choices.

Not every business has the resources available to micro-manage a huge, multisourced IT delivery model in the same vein as a company such as BP. The oil giant has the financial clout to not only make multiple suppliers deliver over and above expectations, but also has the resources to make sure they do.

BP cut $800m in costs in a couple of years, while retaining a multisupplier IT outsourcing environment. Most of the savings on IT was the result of the company’s sourcing strategy.

The company wanted to reduce the cost and complexity of working with thousands of IT suppliers. It now has seven IT service providers and has shaken up its supplier management capabilities to ensure it gets the most it can from them.

“procuremenT funcTions ofTen deTermine The services conTracTed and ThaT is noT always helpful”mark lewis, Berwin

leighTon paisner

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BP has a big stick to keep suppliers in line and a huge resource to manage them. Not all businesses have this and there is a growing trend for businesses to outsource the service integration role. “We have several service integrator templates ourselves,” says Lewis at Berwin Leighton Paisner. “So, in a relatively short time, I would expect to see service integra-tor/management contracts becoming standardised as well.”

Forrester analyst Lutz Peichert says service integration is usually an internal responsibility.“Service integration is not a new thing because it has been done by in-house teams for

years,” Peichert says, adding that there is now a trend to outsource the role.

Do you know what you want?All suppliers have different stories. This is making it tough for businesses to get exactly what they want but it is critical businesses do so: According to Forrester, 69% of CIOs do not believe they get what they asked for.

“But it is not that the supplier is not delivering, but the contract does not reflect reality,” says Peichert.

Understanding what you want and getting this supported in a contract is vital if the service is to live up to expectations. Part of the problem is a disconnect between the business and the buyers. Lewis says IT and the wider business functions are not joined-up enough and IT services procurement is often divorced from the aims of the business.

“Procurement functions often determine the services contracted and that may introduce another element into the buying process that is not always helpful, especially where cost is the only driver. Change as the ultimate good in IT services contracts is overestimated. The problem is more basic - actually getting what the customer thought it was buying in the first place,” he says.

Even IT experts and not just business buyers are to blame, according to Lewis. “In some cases, even IT professionals on the customer side go fishing for possible solutions to their business problems without knowing what they want or what is out there in the market,” he says. “They then accept the most approximate solution and struggle to adapt it to their busi-ness needs.”

But standardisation is helping. “We have started seeing a level of standardisation in both the legal and commercial terms of IT outsourcing contracts, as well as the service descrip-tions, service levels and even charges schedules. This makes drafting and negotiating deals shorter and less complex,” says Lewis.

The other side is feeling changeIT buyers are not alone in feeling change. Suppliers are experiencing a massive shift in outsourcing behaviour and are transforming in response. Sam Kingston, UK head at T-Systems, says there are buying trends that are shaking up IT outsourcing.

Businesses are buying smaller modules of service to help them control and lower costs. “Services are being broken up and suppliers are being asked

to take on specific parts of IT, rather than end-to-end services,” says Kingston. This is increasing the number of suppliers used and committing less to individual companies.

Kingston also says there has been a shift in the key discus-sion with customers. Although he says the trend for suppliers

to take on a service at a substantial discount is still alive and well, there is more importance put on improving the user experience.

Kingston says emerging trends – such as the increased involvement of business and break-ing up services – is seeing procurement departments grow as IT departments shrink.

There are more people involved in the IT services procurement and there are more options available. But there is also more noise, not all of which is helpful.

Sourcing skills are valuable assets to any organisation, but even the best are being put to the test when it comes to IT sourcing today. n

› Options for outsourcing IT to the cloud› CW Buyer’s Guide: Outsourcing

› Putting innovation on the outsourcing menu

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illicit film, the title of which translates into English as The Forbidden Legend: Sex and Chopsticks, according to the BBC.

The Hong Kong produced film is based on the 17th Century Chinese novel

The Plum in the Golden Vase, which Wikipedia notes has a similar

notoriety in Chinese literature as Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

When the hapless techie was alerted by the owners of the giant display about

his unintended broadcast, he unplugged his computer and

threw away the disc. But thanks to the wonders of modern

technology, photos of his blunder spread quickly after several passers-by posted them online. n

Note to self: Might not be work-safe...New golden rule for techies: be careful where you plug yourself in. Failure to heed this could lead to becoming unplugged or at the very least unstuck.

The point is perfectly illustrated by a Chinese techie who unwit-tingly shared his proclivity for banned adult videos with everyone in the main square and adjacent railway station in Jilin City.

The engineer was meant to be repairing a giant LED screen, but appears to have forgotten he was connected to the display when he took a break.

Only after 10 full minutes did he realise that he was not the only one viewing the

ELLison’s cat gEts thE crEam

oracle ceo larry ellison is no kitten in the corporate world, but there is no doubt cats are his obsession.

last year’s america’s cup winner has unveiled his new boat for the upcoming bout in san francisco Bay in september, the oracle team usa 17 catamaran.

But you cannot be a pussy if you want to sail this bad boy. check out the video and see how this 72ft long, 46ft wide and 131ft tall animal doesn’t just cut through the waves but floats above them, purring at speeds of up to 46mph.

ellison may not reach the cloud with this feline, but his continued striving to become more like comic book playboy tony stark is only going to be boosted if he wins another trophy. good luck larry!

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