Interview: Fiona Capstick, IBM's office of the CIO

IBM's top business transformation executive gives her view on IT leadership issues

Fiona Capstick is the vice president of business transformation at IBM’s office of the CIO. In this role, she leads the deployment, adoption, change management and business transformation activities of the company.

Formerly a vice president for business process integration, Capstick was appointed to her new position in January 2009 as a part of a reshuffle in the IBM CIO office. In this interview, she talks about her project agenda and the IT gender gap issue.

Computing: Tell us about your role within the CIO office and your key areas of responsibility.
Capstick: I am a member of the CIO leadership team and I report to Pat Toole, IBM CIO. I was previously the executive responsible for business process transformation for half of Europe. Now I have a team of people including the person who leads that area, so I am responsible for all of the geographic input to the CIO in terms of understanding the requirements as they come from the business as well as ensuring the initiatives we develop are implemented effectively.

IBM has a strategy of becoming a globally integrated enterprise and that has implications in terms of geography and business integration across IBM in each country. So my brief is to ensure that we are developing an approach to common processes across the business in each country, changing sunset applications or processes, so we work in a common way everywhere.

What is the difference between the old set-up of the CIO office and the arrangement that is in place now?

The change in the CIO organisation in the start of 2009 was significant, as we have gone through a number of dispersed and diverse groups supporting each of the business units into one where we all report hard line into the CIO himself. Until the start of this year, there was a much more dotted line relationship for many in the business.

The way we manage the CIO in IBM is a retained organisation on a outsourcing type of model. Globally, we have just under 5,000 people working for us and those are managing a range of initiatives.

In a year’s time, we will have strengthened the CIO organisation further. As we move into this run-transform mode we still have some people doing both roles because of where they originally sat. So as we move through we are now ensuring that ownership is absolutely clear, compliance management is in the right place and this is still underway. We have further global investments planned and we continue to manage those to ensure we drive towards a globally integrated enterprise.

Does IBM have a target as to how many women should be recruited into the more senior layers of management?

If you look at the senior positions in the CIO office, over half of the positions are held by women. Gender is not an issue at IBM and over all the years I have been working here, I have only ever found it beneficial to be a female. We focus on diversity strongly and are a favourable environment for women to work in, but we recognise there is a big problem related to gender gap in UK IT and we have done a lot of work with e-Skills, in schools and universities to encourage girls into a technology career.

What are the main projects you are working on that have an implication to your UK operations?

The is a big programme underway called Blue Harmony, which is the transformation of the IBM’s business processes using SAP as a backbone. My team is very engaged on that and is working with the development and design teams to ensure we get the business requirements effectively represented for each of the countries.

Another project we have recently completed is the migration of all marketing information from an old application onto Siebel. The technology is already in place, but a lot of the work there was in making the process changes that needed to be made in conjunction to the marketing team in order to shut down the old application.

Examples of work at a process level include pre-sales, fulfilment and our financial processes. Underneath that we have a set of applications that support these areas and many are strategic and global. Historically, many of these systems have been developed in house, although we have several SAP instances and we use Siebel for opportunity management.

What excites IBM in terms of new technology for its own use?

Innovation for us is key. One of the things we have done internally over the last six months was to move our development and testing environment into a cloud. The first implementation was in the US but we will extend that so it is location-independent. That has enabled us to speed up the commissioning and decommissioning of testing environments and allowed us to better utilise resources we have better virtualisation across all the different test cells we have to set up.

Another example is our technology adoption programme, which is a sort of dating agency between people who have ideas and people who like technology and would like to try them. One example of work developed under that initiative is our internal wiki, which is now used by every department in IBM.

Looking ahead, what will be the main developments within your remit over the next few months?

The main objective of the Blue Harmony programme is to ensure we have a common approach to our clients across all lines of business, so our aim is to continue making good progress in that front and strengthen our client engagement, so we can better support business partners and clients directly in the way we do that.