CW@60: A quarter-century as a CIO | Computer Weekly
On 22 September 1966, the launch issue of the world’s first weekly technology newspaper was published – today Computer Weekly is the UK’s oldest business IT title. What’s changed the most for you since then? Here, veteran CIO Paul Coby looks back at the best and worst of decades of digital transformations.
I have always been interested in how you can use IT to make work – and life – more interesting, more productive and more fun. Many CIOs and IT directors love the process of technology itself, writing code and solving technology problems. That’s great but, shockingly, I can’t do any of that.
I remember the excitement my wife and I felt when we got the Amstrad CPC in our dining room to print a kind of picture for the first time – fair enough, it was in ones and zeros but it was still a picture of Pocahontas’s father’s hut.
I loved loading those early computer games through the modem to trade between planets in Elite via strangely angular wire-frame spaceships, attempting to drive the Southern Belle on time to Brighton, and then evading the Nazgul with a well-chosen command in Lord of the Rings.
Today I look on with the same excitement as AI creates a remarkably accurate picture of first-century Roman soldiers gazing at a British hillfort just on the basis of my prompts. The sheep in the background are however not quite in scale – it’s AI, after all. At work I admire AI’s ability to construct the first draft of a pretty workable target operating model for one of my product teams.
An enlightened move
So, when did this all start for a history graduate in the UK civil service? Well, in an enlightened move in the early 1980s, the civil service decided to second some of its up-and-coming leaders to the private sector – a bit of a Thatcherite initiative of course. I was lucky enough to be seconded to IBM UK.
The contrast between what was then the biggest IT company on the planet – they kept reminding people they were as big as the then next seven global IT companies combined – and the UK civil service, where paper files were physically carried between offices by messengers as they moved up the hierarchy to ministers, with officials adding their inky handwritten comments on the way, was mind-blowing.
I remember the arrival in the UK of the very scarce IBM PC – ineptly advertised using Charlie Chaplin’s image. We got one in the IBM office and I was tasked with installing the floppy drive, being careful to earth myself with a wrist tether during the process. I also recall the joys of WordPerfect and the ability to draw real graphs from spreadsheets. As a result, when I returned to Whitehall, I installed PCs, printers and scanners wherever I was posted.
I got hooked on trying to use technology to “do things better” and the more innovative it was, the better. As principal private secretary to the secretary of state for transport in the 1990s, I acquired an Apple Newton, the now long-forgotten predecessor of the iPhone – which didn’t really work.
So, I’m an enthusiast for the application of technology, not a proper techie. My admiration for those that are technically skilled is undiminished by the passage of time – indeed, it has increased.
The new industrial revolution
My professional life has been in large organisations, and all of these have been transformed by what we used to call IT and is now called digital technology. We are privileged, but some say cursed, with living through the new industrial revolution enabled by the transformative speed and general accessibility of AI. The fundamentals of how you make tech work still apply in this new world.
In my experience, fundamental changes result and the magic happens when smart people work out how technology can transform a fundamental business or government process, and people adopt it because it is so easy to use. I have been privileged to be present on several occasions when this has happened.
“The magic happens when smart people work out how technology can transform a fundamental business or government process, and people adopt it because it is so easy to use”
Paul Coby
The first was after 9/11 when British Airways was staring financial meltdown in the face since our core “bus service” between London Heathrow and New York’s JFK airport was grounded. We then had the guts to implement “calendar selling” – that is, exposing to customers four weeks’ fares around the date they wanted to travel, so they could choose which was the most convenient and cost effective for them.
Up until that point the airline industry had been very effective at not showing passengers what the best-value fare was. The result of this approach was that BA was flying empty seats at high prices while low-cost carriers were flying full at prices customers wanted to pay.
The technical challenge of displaying 28 days of prices for any destination and any time on our new website was immense. The cultural change of putting the customer in the driving seat on the web was profound. The marketing challenge of positioning the “world’s favourite airline” as a value-for-money carrier and selling direct online to customers was fundamental.
Business change
We had to convince IATA to abolish those old cardboard tickets and go 100% e-ticket, and we had to convince our colleagues in BA that having literally millions of ticket types was a way to lose revenue not generate it. We could instead have three ticket types – flexible, semi flexible and fixed. It was a test case of how technology can enable fundamental business change, when the business grasps the need to change and an existential threat forces everyone to do things they would normally never dare.
Of course I didn’t do this – many people did it. However, Sir Rod Eddington, BA’s then CEO, was key. When we pitched the proposal to him: he said, ‘”Yes, do it,”’ and asked me to lead the cross-functional implementation team that built and implemented it, chairing a steering committee with all the key leaders on it.
I was privileged to participate in an existential moment for another industry too. Amazon was coming for retail and some people could see it. This was when John Lewis created Click&Collect at scale. I am sure that other businesses had done versions of this, just as I have no doubt that somewhere calendar selling on airlines had been tried. But it’s the scale of change that matters. Many people can build a proof of concept; changing an entire industry requires vision and determination.
Click and collect
If you think about it, the “click and collect” concept is a bit weird. You order online at home by 7pm and then your shirt, perfume, lamp or whatever is delivered to a store the next day and you collect it after 2pm. Why not go to the shop and choose the shirt like, as you would have done before? Well, as we all know, this changed the way we shop. Access to the much wider assortment of products online – and the convenience of shopping from your sofa – did it. It was also the ability to extend the “collect” not just to the 40+ John Lewis stores but the 400+ Waitrose stores round the country, plus the extension to include home delivery, that transformed the way we shop.
Again, I didn’t do it – many people did, but doing this at scale was immense. Yes, it required a pretty good website, but we also had to build distribution centres with robotic picking just off the M1 at Milton Keynes so the lorries could get to the stores by lunchtime the next day. We also had to convince the John Lewis partners in the stores that this fundamental change in how we sold our products and related to our customers, was an existential change we had to make.
Again, vision and leadership from the top was the vital element. Sir Andy Street, as the managing director of John Lewis, was vital. He got everyone in the leadership team to adopt three stores and to get out there and run “town hall” meetings explaining why Click&Collect and johnlewis.com were vital to the future of the John Lewis Partnership.
As I said, my passion for digital tech is derived from making it an integral part of the business process and improving how my colleagues work. Construction site managers are a demanding audience for a CIO – they do a really challenging job managing tradespeople most of whom are sub-contractors, out in all weathers building and selling new homes for families to live in. They need their tools to work well and that includes their technology.
At Persimmon Homes, where I’m now CIO, we require them, first and foremost, to manage safely – but also to record progress and to order bricks, tiles and new kitchens in good time, and to deliver high-quality new homes, each of which is assessed and recorded.
But we were asking them to do this with equipment – laptops or phones – that didn’t work well and relying on Wi-Fi connectivity that was patchy at best. I remember one site manger telling me how they had to go down to the nearest McDonalds to even get a signal to place orders for supplies. Getting site connectivity to work was a key signal that we were listening and that we cared about our colleagues. I noticed a distinct flip of the switch in attitudes to the IT function when we started to get this done.
The best of times, the worst of times
Having been around so long, I often get asked about my best and worst times as a CIO. The worst was the opening of Heathrow Terminal 5, when the baggage system simply did not work on opening day. It was BA’s terminal, opened by Her Majesty the Queen, and it didn’t matter that it was a supplier’s supplier’s supplier who had installed the inoperative system – we at the airline were still accountable for customers’ bags not arriving on the carousel.
What had happened, among other causes, was that the new baggage system had been tested on a perfect summer Sunday morning, using brand-new luggage bought for the test. Reality was, of course, a far tougher challenge. Great teamwork across suppliers and BA produced the award-winning terminal you see now, but it was very painful at the time.
It is vital that the IT team and function do not see itself as somehow separate from the core business. This means taking the rough with the smooth. I still have the steel-toed boots from my stint shifting luggage mountains at Heathrow and the high-vis tabard from helping families stranded without flights during really bad weather one winter. And in retail, the best way to find out if your tills actually work and your stock really is up-to-date is to leave the IT department behind, and head out to a busy city store to do a “helping hands” shift during the pre-Christmas rush.
The best time is possibly a surprise – it certainly was to me when I thought about it. It was when we had intermittent data corruption in one of the core airline systems that was impossible to predict when it appeared and the cause of which was obscure.
Suffice it to say that we were close to “going manual” and stopping the majority of flights. To cut a long and technical story short, the BA techies – with help from across the air transport industry – were able to insert code that removed the cause. I remember this being done in the small hours of the night on the “bridge” of the BA datacentres.
Why was this “worst of times” the best? It was because it encapsulates what IT teams can do when they work together to solve the most complex of challenges – not just professionalism and knowledge, but sheer hard work and courage. It represents the many times in my career as a CIO, when the day has been saved by the efforts of the often-unsung technical heroes I have been privileged to work with.
Humans matter
Let’s finish with the present and AI. Over my quarter-century as a CIO I have learned, as I summarised in one of my maxims in the Digital Leader’s Playbook, that humans matter more than technology.
Over the last 25 years we’ve seen enormous tech advances – web, cloud, augmented and virtual reality, blockchain and more. The constant for me is that how humans use the technology is what matters. It’s whether your customers and/or citizens can use it and, most importantly, want to use it. Whether you can make it work in your organisation. Whether you can change your processes, and whether it is as easy to use as the Amazon, TikTok and ChatGPT that your customers and colleagues use every day.
Do humans still matter more in this fast-evolving age of AI? When asked, AI itself told me that the jobs which are primarily script-based or involve routine processes will be replaced by AI. Government figures show those who have AI skills command salary premiums and there are claims of massive productivity gains. But try getting a job as a recent graduate in business studies at the moment – good luck.
We are three years into what is, I believe, another industrial and social revolution. It’s like being a hand-loom weaver in 1780s Norfolk when the Manchester cotton mills got going or being a car worker in Coventry when the robots took over the production lines. This revolution we are living through is faster and encompasses more industries and more jobs than we have previously seen.
AI is shaping human existence, just as technology advances always have done. CIOs and digital leaders matter more now than ever before in business – as explainers, translators and enablers of digital change. That is, digital change which is ethical, accurate, legal and secure – and which works.
