Paul Coby has worked as chief information officer (CIO) for some of the UK’s most prominent companies over the past 25 years.
He has led major projects at British Airways, John Lewis, chemicals and metals group Johnson Mattey, and, in his current role as group CIO, Persimmon Homes, one of the UK’s largest house builders.
He has also sat as a non-executive director on the boards of companies including Pets at Home, Virgin Money and P&O Ferries.
Now, the CIO has distilled more than a quarter of a century of experience at the cutting edge of information technology and business into a book, the Digital leaders playbook, which presents 62 maxims for success for IT executives.
Coby first began writing down his ideas in 2005, during a long and tedious meeting. He describes it as a personal challenge to give honest answers to the hard questions that CIOs face during their career.
As Coby likes to point out, there is no such thing as an IT project, only business projects. When IT projects go wrong, it’s rarely the technology that is at fault. More often, it’s a combination of poor planning, inattention to business processes and a failure to properly train people in how to use the technology.
Being a successful CIO means building trust with the top people in the organisation, understanding their business priorities and how IT may be able to help them achieve their goals.
One of Coby’s key maxims is that C-suite executives should always receive first-class technology support. During his time at John Lewis and British Airways, for instance, he allocated dedicated people to make sure the executives could resolve any IT issues straight away.
He admits the approach is hardly egalitarian. “A lot of IT folk go, ‘Hurrumph, why are you doing that?’ To which my answer is, ‘In a commercial company, we pay these folks more. They are paid to do difficult and challenging things, and if we are not letting them work, then that is a bigger hit than on others’,” says Coby.
It’s also important to recognise that there are times that matter more than others in the business calendar, he says. At the end of the month, when it’s time to complete accounts, “the finance systems better be working”.
Building bridges with NEDs
During his time at British Airways, Coby discovered that CIOs can find allies among the non-executive directors (NEDs) – the part-time, independent board members who provide strategic advice without being involved in the day-to-day running of the company.
At the time, Martin Read, CEO of IT services and consulting company Logica, was a NED on the BA board. He asked Coby for advanced warning whenever anything related to digital technology or IT was due to come up at a board meeting.
“It is really important to talk to customers. There is no better way than to get out on the front line”
Paul Coby, Persimmon Homes
“Martin said to me, ‘I’m going to get asked. I’d much rather do this from a position of understanding. So give me a heads up before each board meeting on anything that’s going to have some IT, digital, or online behind it’,” he says.
Read often gave Coby a hard time at board meetings, but when he was convinced about an idea, he was able to explain issues to other board members in ways they could understand. “He was an important, critical friend,” says Coby.
Coby encourages CIOs to become non-executive directors themselves to gain experience that they can bring back to their own organisations. “As a CIO or IT director, if you’ve got that broad experience, it helps you understand and empathise with what the board’s worried about,” he says.
Be visible and vocal
Being visible and vocal does not come easily to IT workers, who often prefer to work in the background, but CIOs and their IT teams need to be heard and seen in their companies, says Coby.
At British Airways, for instance, Coby’s IT department ran an annual IT fair, funded by the airline’s IT suppliers. It featured 20 stands staffed by joint business and IT teams, showing their achievements at BA’s headquarters over two days.
At John Lewis, Coby and the rest of the IT team took turns stocking the shelves and operating the tills during the peak Christmas shopping season. It was a valuable learning experience. “You certainly find out whether your IT systems work,” he says.
At Persimmon, Coby has made a point of visiting offices and construction sites to hear first-hand how people are experiencing the company’s technology. “It is really important to talk to customers. There is no better way than to get out on the front line,” he says.
Why techies are important
Coby came into IT through an unusual route. He read history at Cambridge, before joining the civil service as a speech writer, and later became a principal private secretary to the secretary of state for transport.
He was seconded to IBM, then the world’s largest technology company, just as it was introducing the first PCs. During a second secondment, British Airways asked him to conduct an independent review of its IT department. When BA asked him to stay on, he agonised about leaving the civil service, but eventually agreed.
Coby says that because he is more of a business person than a “deep techie”, he asks his teams and IT suppliers to explain things clearly and without jargon.
But he has a great respect for the people on his team with deep technical knowledge. They are the people who frequently come to the rescue when IT systems fail, often spotting and fixing the obscure errors that led to the failure.
It’s important to find a way of rewarding those with deep technical skills who may not be interested in being promoted to a management position, and Coby has found ways of doing so during his career.
British Airways borrowed from IBM by creating career pathways for experts and super experts who wanted to remain technical specialists.
And John Lewis set up technical groups in areas such as networks and e-commerce, and asked them to define who the experts were. “They came up with three levels of expert,” says Coby, “and I hope we reflected that in their remuneration.”
When IT gets difficult
One of the hardest roles of the CIO is to say no to projects that, while important for particular business units, are not the most important priority for the company as a whole.
In one organisation that Coby worked for, the financial department wanted to modernise by putting in an enterprise resource planning system. But it was competing against other projects that were delivering benefits for customers and improving cyber security.
“It didn’t check out. That was very painful. But it’s really important to make those trade-offs, because if you try to do everything, that is a recipe for failure,” he says.
Over the course of his career, Coby has experienced some heart-stopping moments, where big IT projects have gone wrong despite careful planning and preparation.
At John Lewis, he had to tell the CEO that a business-critical project to launch johnlewis.com had to be postponed for three months at great cost to the business, when final testing revealed that the system was not yet ready.
He says it was one of those moments you feel in the pit of your stomach. “No one was happy about it,” he concedes. “But it was much, much, much less painful to have the difficult discussion then, rather than a really awful discussion later.”
When projects go wrong
Coby believes that when things do go wrong, it’s important for CIOs to own mistakes rather than deflect blame.
He recalls one such case at British Airways, when he was overseeing another business-critical project to move the airline from its own booking system to Amadeus, the travel industry’s integrated reservations management platform. It was, Coby describes in his book, “open-heart surgery” for the airline.
I do enjoy being a CIO. The exciting bit is that you see across the whole business. We have the privilege of connecting it all and pulling it all together. I am still rather hooked on that Paul Coby, Persimmon Homes
All the major tests had been passed, but the one area that failed was the least difficult – the integration of the Amadeus platform with the airline’s call centres. “Because we were all focusing on the really big cutovers, we hadn’t focused enough on that one,” he says.
When the call centres failed, the airline had to deal with a mounting backlog of calls from frustrated customers.
“There was no point pretending this wasn’t a mistake,” says Coby. “We had to work together with the whole sales function, and it took us some time to get back. That was a painful lesson because the hard bit had been done well.”
The impact of AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) will have a profound impact on the way businesses use technology, and on the roles of CIOs, programmers and other IT professionals. It will cause at least as much disruption as the dot com revolution that began in 2000, Coby believes.
“It’s changing the world. It is an intense and scary moment when tech is accelerating, and we can see some elements of what will change and some of its possibilities,” he says. “It’s really important that the CIO has a view and a position on AI, and is able to unpack, as far as we understand it, what the opportunities and the risks are.”
After 25 years as a CIO and a non-executive director, Coby has no plans to retire just yet.
“I do enjoy – most of the time – being a CIO. And I think it is an amazing opportunity to make a difference. I think the exciting bit is that you see across the whole business. We have the privilege of connecting it all and pulling it all together. I am still rather hooked on that,” he says.
