Ansley is not willing to stereotype his technology staff – they are not all geeks in constant search of the next new thing, he says. Some are excited by new projects, and some love to do what they know they do well.
To cope with the scale of his responsibilities, he has made sure his seven reports are all good communicators. Each has an area of direct responsibility. “We have an engagement model that is not reliant on me all the time. I can up-skill my direct reports in my communications approach and give them a better understanding of the requirements of the business. So, one of my direct reports looks after the retail business, one looks after fast-moving consumer goods and so on.”
He sends his technology staff into the field, to warehouses for example, so they can experience the pressure and frustrations at the front line of the business.
To keep his reports working at peak, Ansley sends them around the world to training and development programs, most recently in Ireland and America.
Meetings are as regular as needed or as desired by his reports – from fortnightly to monthly or beyond. “Then I make sure that we spend enough time with off-sites. We go off as a group, and talk about what we are trying to achieve and why we are trying to achieve it. We spend a lot of time just thinking through where is the next step, what can we do about it.
“They tease me about when I say, ‘You know what would be good …’ and they go, ‘here we go, here comes another change!’ But I think that the secret is making sure everyone has the skills and the understanding to cope with the very, very fluid nature of business.
“I think that a lot of IT groups who get really bogged down in methodology and structure and rules. That is fine; you have to have a component of that. But you need to be able to be fluid enough to deal with the change that comes with the business.”
Ansley thinks there will always be a CIO role, but he welcomes the current debates over whether the acronym stands for chief innovation officer, or chief infrastructure officer or plain chief information officer. Without an in-house IT division, companies cannot assess new developments, or decide how widely to apply them. “I think it is a critical role. When you see something new in the marketplace and you want to take advantage of it, who takes ownership of it?
“It does depend on the industry and the company,” he admits. “In some places it is a cost focus, and quite often the CFO takes care of the responsibility. But if you get the right people, the role is a really powerful one: to develop new capabilities that are not in the marketplace can be a huge differentiator for a company.”
