Winning the hearts and minds of the workforce is the
most important challenge in effecting business transformation, said
David Burden, Royal Mail's chief information
officer.
The workforce should come before business process change, which
should come before technology, he said, addressing the latest
meeting of the Parliamentary Information Technology Committee in
November.
"You can't achieve anything without your staff," he said, "Policy
and processes are necessary, and technology is important, but both
are secondary to people."
Burden did not underestimate his challenge at Royal Mail, where he
is also a board member. "We have about 200,000 employees, 17,000
branches and handle 27% of the UK's cash every week," he
said.
"We have a lot of automation but are not using it well," he said.
"To compete we need to use new technology properly."
Burden aims to fix immediate problems by working with unions, and
wants to start by improving "soul destroying jobs" where people
sort mail that has already been sorted electronically.
Burden is keen to ensure that e-services are accessible to the
workforce and wants to facilitate IT awareness. Burden achieved
this in his last post as CIO of Qantas Airlines in Australia by
allowing staff to access personal services on work PCs
"At Qantas we encouraged people to use online services from the
workplace," he said. "It is more efficient to do banking from your
desk than to leave the office and spend hours in a queue."
Pitcom explains IT to politicians
The all-Party Parliamentary IT Committee (Pitcom) is 22 years
old and meets regularly to discuss the economic and social impact
of IT with Parliamentarians.
Pitcom has nearly 400 members, drawn from a wide background of MPs,
peers, corporate IT user and supplier companies, plus individual
members.
Pitcom is a sister organisation to Eurim, a Parliamentary/industry
lobby group which assess what impact upcoming legislative issues
will have on IT.
www.pitcom.org.uk
www.kablenet.com/pitcom
www.eurim.org