Reuters CIO: David Lister

Reuters is best known as a famous international news agency with almost 3,000 journalists and photographers in 130 countries, filing two and a half million stories a year for an audience of over a billion people a day.

But more than 90 per cent of Reuters' revenue actually comes from its financial information business, which provides content, analytics, trading and messaging capabilities to 330,000 financial professionals in various markets.

Technology plays a key role in the multimedia and electronic trading arena that Reuters operates in and the company is nearing the end of a three year transformation programme to save the business. silicon.com's chief reporter, Andy McCue, recently met with Reuter's CIO David Lister at the company's new Canary Wharf headquarters in London.

Andy McCue: David, you joined Reuters two years ago in the middle of the Fast Forward transformation project aimed at simplifying the business and achieving almost half a billion pounds annualised cost savings. What role has technology played in that programme and what progress has been made to date?

David Lister: First of all it was essentially about saving the business and we put in an enormous amount of effort into simplifying, rationalising, restructuring our business - essentially saving costs. And I think many of the things we have done in terms of moving from a highly decentralised organisation to a global business that's focused in on four fundamental business divisions that operate globally have been enabled by some of the things that we have been able to do in terms of standardising systems, consolidating systems - moving to a single global incidence for our Oracle financial systems, for our Siebel CRM and customer service systems, and putting in place global infrastructure to allow anybody to operate in exactly the same way in any office around the world as part of one team. I think that we've still got a long way to go but in terms of the doing the essential things we have to do, to play our part in that change programme, it has brought us on a long way.

AM: With all the focus on consolidation and simplification and cost savings, how do you go about funding new technology investments and what areas are you looking to target?

DL: We have a big opportunities going forward and along with all opportunities, we have some paradoxes that we have to work our way through. I think that bottom line going forward is as we move out of this first phase of saving the company, taking cost out, we're now in a much healthier position and we're now in a phase where we're actually trying to grow the business. Growth needs investment and what we want to do is absolutely put every penny we can into helping the business grow, in terms of fuelling a way forward. That means for continuing the IT transformation, we have to find smarter ways of doing that. We start from a position where we still do still have a large degree of fragmentation in the business and our infrastructure is still run by and large on a local office basis and I think we're in a position now where we can start to apply a hardware rationalisation, consolidation. We can start to bring the benefits of virtualisation and operational automation, where we can bring remote management and far higher degrees of standardisation to our infrastructure to really make some quite dramatic changes. Our trick will be how do we make these changes whilst at the same time funding our way to those changes and not only reducing our costs over the long term but actually dramatically improving the quality of the services that we offer to our colleagues all around the world.

AM: Last year, Reuters moved from its traditional Fleet Street home to these brand new offices here in Canary Wharf in London's Docklands. What new technologies and ways of working have you been able to introduce as part of that move?

DL: The fundamental rationale behind the move was basically to bring together lots of disparate offices we had in Central London into a single location now as part of creating that global business. By doing that, we've been fairly innovative in they way in which we've used technology – by introducing wireless networking, VoIP, smart working, whereby we allow our people to be flexible around this building, but just as importantly, to be flexible in where they connect and how they connect to the services we have, giving people broadband connection and allowing a very simple interface into our core systems.

AM: And how have the staff adapted to that?

DL: By and large, any change like this is one that comes with mixed blessings. We're at the other end of the Jubilee Line so there were obviously lots of issues about location but I think what has happened is that, because we've introduced all of these different new technology components is that people have found smarter and easier ways of accessing what they need. So I think, by and large, people are pretty happy about it. Plus the fact that we're right in the middle of a community, right next to our clients, and I think people are pretty comfortable about that.

AM: And will some of those innovations be rolled out to other Reuters locations around the globe?

DL: The deployment of the most of the things that we've introduced here are in the process of being rolled out around our offices. We're looking at VoIP in New York, we already have that in a number of our offshore locations. Indeed our offshore locations in Bangalore, Bangkok and the office we've recently opened in Beijing are basically just taking these as the standard offerings that we have. So I think there's a huge advantage in being able to pilot, not just in a change programme, but also to create a capability that’s then very easily re-deployable.

AM: David, your chief executive Tom Glocer, said during the company's recent financial results presentation this summer that "open technology suits machines as well as human beings". What did he mean by that and what does that mean for Reuters?

DL: A large part of the attractiveness of our offer is our ability to deliver open products with open standards and interfaces to our customers, to allow them to more easily connect into data feeds and therefore I think the more open they are the more easy and attractive you are to connect to. I think other things around innovations such as algorithmic trading, such as machine readable news can only really be deployed if you deliver them through open standards and actually let our customers really exploit those through their systems. So you're actually talking much more about a business to business interaction.

AM: Some people have tagged you as a paratrooper CIO, coming into organisations on a mission to lead a big transformation or change project and then moving on to your next mission. What are some of the challenges, advantages and attractions of coming into and organisation like Reuters and having to lead and drive through that change?

DL: One of the big attractions is the scale of opportunity and the excitement that comes with that. Alongside the attraction you also have a different starting position – you arrive relatively free from bias and pre-conceived ideas about what should be done or what has to be done. You also arrive as a by-product of that profile with quite a lot of experience of lots of different businesses and industries, so you have a kind of toolkit both in terms of context and in terms of how to deliver and manage change. You start in a good place. I think another characteristic of the role is to be able to move very quickly to envisioning where you want to get to, to focus on quality of people, to build capability, the skills that you'll need to get there and then to really work with that team that you've recruited to both articulate into the business the advantages about where you want to get to but also to drive pace through making sure that you get along that oath as quickly as possible.

AM: Reuters has something of a devolved IT department with many of the techies embedded within the business units. What was the thinking behind that and how's that been received on both sides?

DL: It's a bit of both in a way. We've moved out product development capability as close to the business units as we can put them on the basis that that's exactly where they should be. They should be next to the customer - they should be understanding what the customer's needs are. In parallel with that, we've been also looking at one of the things that you should consolidate and unify i.e. putting them in one place and maximising the value of that. So within our internal organisation we've actually gone through quite a period of consolidation and integration. We now have one global IT team – they operate problems and incidents 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They pass incidents around the world in a sort of follow the sun support model. So we've had to do some of those things, which is about centralising or unifying at the same way as distributing assets as close as possible and capabilities as close as possible to our customers.

AM: With a company like Reuters, success depends on product innovation, getting those products to market, and great customer service, that must put a huge amount of pressure on you and your IT department?

DL: Well I suppose that good quality service is the hygiene factor in all of this. If you can’t deliver reliable services consistently then in many ways you don’t really have the opportunity to add greater value or innovation where it best lies. So, for us it's about making sure that we put in place the right focus, the right skills, the right processes to ensure that we can absolutely deliver that base, fundamental, underlying service that then allows us to start to move forward and to driving greater value, generating change, greater innovation, exploiting new ideas faster.

AM: How is your role split between those internal and those external customer facing demands?

DL: Clearly we've put product development where it needs to be within the business divisions, focused in on our customers. Our internal systems capability is all about supporting our product, supporting the customer service that we deliver. Therefore it breaks down into three or four areas. One is clearly making sure that within the business as a whole, we've got lean, standard, efficient, commoditised processes for things that don’t need to be different. That allows us to put our focus in on the areas that add the greatest value, around unifying our order administration and logistics capability, unifying and integrating the area of product and customer permissioning, authentication, ensuring that we're working to deliver, not just a common product architecture but a common administration architecture that links back into standardised commodity processes. All in all, the end user, whether you're internal or whether you are one of our customers moves towards being seamless, easy to do business with – with less duplication, with less waste. Whilst my focus is on the standardised processes within the business, and how to ensure that our products are as enabled as they can be, with efficient administration capabilities, ultimately it has to be an end to end experience.

AM: What role will outsourcing, both onshore and offshore, have in reducing your costs and simplifying your IT infrastructure and does that help or hinder administration?

DL: Access to organisations and people that have the right skills and competencies and efficient, effective capabilities that you can leverage clearly has to be part of any businesses or IT organisation's plans going forwards. In the past we've probably had quite a fragmented approach to outsourcing – we've done things fairly tactically, market by market. Much of that was driven about getting quick wins, in terms of our contribution to support the Fast Forward programme - I think we're now at the stage where we need to stand back from that and think more clearly about the role that outsourcing will play, the role that our partners will play in terms of the next development of our infrastructure. There's no doubt that we need to move to fewer, more strategic relationships. There's also no doubt that those relationships have to be based on getting to a very clear endpoint, not running what we have today but basically helping us get to the capabilities, the processes, the technologies, the innovation that we need to have over the next four to seven years.

AM: You're a chief information officer in an information business here at Reuters, but more generally, how do see the role of CIO evolving in the future?

DL: There are probably two or three steps to this. The first is to recognise where the role comes from – and that's essentially going back to the role of the IT director in terms of helping automate processes. I think that was always all about efficient, effectiveness and taking cost out. I think the next step is actually about how do you help businesses grow and how do you help organisations innovate around that? The difference between the traditional IT director and the CIO focus is that CIOs should be focused on growing, innovating, enabling, helping the business exploit opportunities as they come forward. To do that you have to be very focused, not on the IT agenda, but the business agenda – making sure that the business strategies and plans are both fully informed by the potential of IT in a broad sense but also that their plans are fully enabled by what IT can deliver in terms of helping them deliver those growth agendas. You also have to be in the position where you're not defensive over the IT part of those plans and actually you're operating as a full member of the executive team to ensure that what we do across the business as a whole is the optimal portfolio of investment and that we're not precious about technology for technology's sake – we're actually precious about making sure that technology really delivers what the business needs.

AM: David Lister, thank you very much…