David Lister, CIO at Reuters, is in no doubt about the pivotal
moment in his career. It happened when he became a management
consultant with Coopers & Lybrand.
Until that point, Lister had followed a well-trodden path for IT
professionals - from systems analyst to project leader to systems
development manager. But consultancy was something completely
different. "It gave me a whole new package of skills, competencies
and techniques that I then took back into IT," he recalls.
These skills were the ability to communicate with managers in
other disciplines, to negotiate about priorities, targets and
deadlines, to market the value that IT can bring to a business and
to sell an idea to sceptical managers.
"Then there is the whole package of process consulting skills
that were being developed around the time I was in consulting in
the mid-1980s," he says. "In short, it is about developing
problem-solving skills.
"It made me look at IT from a very different perspective. I
suppose it was the turning point, because I never looked at IT in
the same way again. For me, IT became about delivering business
value, understanding what the role of the shareholder was and the
importance of knowing what a good investment looks like.
"It became about not promoting IT for IT's sake, but finding
opportunities in companies to invest in IT that would deliver a
return."
The first handful of projects Lister worked on as a consultant
had nothing to do with IT. They included the privatisation of the
Royal Naval dockyard at Rosyth and setting up a project office for
the Office of Population, Censuses and Surveys in London. "I found
these projects fascinating," Lister says.
After Lister quit Coopers & Lybrand, his career in IT
powered forward at a pace he had not known before - to senior roles
in no fewer than four companies that at one time or another graced
the FTSE 100.
So could other young IT professionals turbo-charge their careers
with a spell in general management consultancy?
First, they need to be interested - inspired, even - by the
world beyond the bits and bytes of the IT department. Lister
already knew that in his own mind, even before he stepped through
the doors of Coopers & Lybrand's Edinburgh office.
He had discovered in his first job at Highland Electronics, a
small Scottish company, that what really interested him was not
programming languages, but how organisations worked. "From
relatively early days I was more interested in how to help people
be more successful in their organisations," he says.
He broadened his outlook by working in management services for
Lothian Regional Council, where he also fattened up his early CV
with some useful training. "In those days, back in the early 1980s,
local government was one of the best places to get that sort of
development," says Lister.
After Lothian, Lister underscored his management potential by
working as a systems development manager at Croda Polymers
International. "It was the first time I had a group of people
working for me other than for a specific project," says Lister.
By the time he left, he had provided the company with one of the
UK's earliest enterprise resource planning systems and consolidated
its IT into one place.
Second, and equally important, is what IT professionals want to
gain from each of their jobs as they move their career forward. "I
suppose my own philosophy is that it is not necessarily what you
do, it is what you learn and how you apply it that is vital.
Achievements are important, but I think it is what you take from
those achievements that helps build your career," says Lister.
"One piece of advice I would give is this: do not just pat
yourself on the back for a good job delivered. Think about what you
have learnt from it and what you could have done better. Then think
what you need to do to go on and learn about building on what you
have done and how you can develop what you are doing."
This is an approach that has clearly been important in powering
Lister's career to the top since his consultancy days. When he left
Coopers & Lybrand to join Guinness, not long after it had
acquired United Distillers, he found himself in the challenging
role of general manager for what became United Distillers' global
manufacturing operation.
The broader business skills he had acquired during the
consultancy years immediately came to the fore. "I was in a job
where, on the one hand I had to articulate a strategy - what we
were going to do and why we were going to do it - and on the other
hand, engage with multiple facets of the business to develop the
strategy and move it forward."
The old slogan "Guinness is good for you" proved true in
Lister's case. During his period with the company it became a
pioneer in understanding how change management skills can be
harnessed to drive successful projects. Lister's consultancy
background in making change happen proved a critical strength.
"At Guinness we stopped talking about IT projects and projects
that deliver business value," Lister recalls. "We did that by
understanding the behaviours that were at play in helping to change
whatever we were trying to realise and then using IT as a mechanism
to embed new ways of working and new practices in the organisation.
This approach moved IT back into my mind as a fundamental enabler
of these changes, but ultimately, not the primary purpose."
The skills Lister had picked up as a consultant were vital in
1991, when he was sent to Spain by United Distillers to integrate
the IT of seven brewers. "My time with Coopers & Lybrand was
absolutely critical, and those early influencing and consulting
skills helped me to recognise that if I was going to be successful
in the project I had to do it in Spanish.
"It made me think long and hard about the cultural aspects of
the change and what I would need to do to get the full engagement
and buy-in from the people in Spain. Taking the time to think it
through dramatically improved the chances of the project being
successful - which it was."
Since then, this ability to take the broader view alongside the
skills needed to drive complex change has taken Lister to the CIOs'
chair at pharmaceutical firm Glaxo Wellcome (now GlaxoSmithKline)
and high-street chain Boots (now Alliance Boots). At both, he led
major change projects.
At Reuters, Lister has a broad range of responsibilities that
reflect the management style he has developed. "I am responsible
for delivering IT services that support the business in its
day-to-day operations. That stretches from providing more commodity
services, such as e-mail, through to re-engineering our
customer-facing administration systems and the way our customers
interact with our products.
"So my responsibilities range from the relatively
straightforward to the very complex. I report in to David Grigson,
the chief financial officer, but also sit on the Group Leadership
Team where I get to exercise a broader remit."
So would Lister recommend all IT professionals with their eyes
on a CIO's chair in a FTSE 100 company spend a spell in
consultancy? He acknowledges that the big systems integrators have
moved away from the kind of general management projects that he
worked on, but adds, "I would certainly recommend that people think
about broadening their careers by looking at a business from the
inside out - and also by developing the particular set of skills
that consulting brings you."
But he is convinced that a spell in general management
consultancy delivers something richer than merely ticking the boxes
on a list of skills. "I think it helps you to develop different
perspectives on a business," he says.
"I am a great believer in that one of the dangers is becoming
too insular. If that happens in IT, you become almost part of the
problem. You need to be able to take a step back and apply your
capabilities by taking a view of the business."
CV: David Lister
● Studied architecture at Edinburgh University, but quit course
to go into IT.
● Started IT career as systems analyst at Highland Electronics
and project manager at Lothian Regional Council.
● Gained first management experience at Croda Polymers
International as systems development manager.
● Broadened skills by moving into consultancy with accounting
firm Coopers & Lybrand in 1984.
● Joined Guinness in 1989 as IT director for United Distillers'
manufacturing division.
● Moved to Glaxo Wellcome as IT director in 1999.
● Joined Boots in 2001 as CIO to implement major change
programme.
● Head hunted by Reuters in 2004 as CIO.
Lister's current role
David Lister heads 600 IT staff across 130 countries. Lister
works through a number of staff that report directly. These
employees cover: shared services which looks after global service
delivery, solution delivery which works with the business to
deliver new solutions, systems and capabilities, and a business
relationship management team.
The team consists of a manager in Singapore who looks after
Asia, and one in New York who covers the US. There are three
managers in London who manage, sales and service operations,
corporate applications and editorial support. Lister's other
directly reporting employees include the head of group sourcing and
a chief architect.
Reuters' IT supports 20,000 staff ranging from journalists, to
financial specialists and sales staff.