Q&A: Schroders CIO, Matthew Oakeley

Can you describe your management style?
It's my view that you need to apply the appropriate levels of control and process to the appropriate parts of the business. So in our investment room, I have one or two groups that have always done their own IT and they're outside my control. I've never bothered trying to march my tanks onto their lawn. I've always kept an eye on them from a distance and said, 'we're here if you need us'.

What we've found is that those groups have started to come to us and started to say, actually, we don't want to run IT, we want to run fund management, can you have these systems?

Now I'm on the front foot helping them as opposed to having marched in to say, 'I want those systems, I'm head of IT, look at my ego' - in which case I would have always been the baddy trying to take something off them.

What makes a good CIO?
The secret to being a successful head of IT is understanding the places where you have to apply rigour and understanding the places where you have to listen. Ultimately Schroders is not in business to do IT. Schroders is in business to do fund management and it's got to be possible to support that business aim with everything you're doing.

I think most of the CIO's job is people skills, communication skills and working out how to solve people's problems in the best way. It all becomes being the oil in the machine, smoothing the way through.

Being in control of your high-level architecture is important too. Architecture is just a set of fields. You decide that all the blue sheep go in this field and all the red sheep go in this field. Provided you've got that sorted and people know whether they're red sheep or blue sheep, they'll pretty much sort out what goes on inside each field. You have to create the structures and then enable people to work for themselves within those structures.

How do you view the role of CIO now and in the future?
There's a difference between the role of a CIO in an asset management firm and the role of the CIO in other industries. Asset management firms are generally led by investors. As an industry it would take a long time before a head of IT ended up as CEO of a fund management firm because fund managers run fund management firms.

The role of IT in fund management is very much about picking the right level of support for the business and being there to advise and guide. I have a very expansive view of IT - I don't think IT is about technology. Technology is involved but IT is also about a skillset that can be offered to a company for the management of change and the analysis of problems.

I have a business consultancy team that I've started within IT so we can make sure we're involved in a full range of issues such as product development, new initiatives and making sure we understand how we can help [the business].

The role of CIO in an asset management firm is to make sure that IT doesn't end up pigeonholed as being about technology but is about solving problems, change and enabling business growth. That's where it ought to be and that's what I'm working to do at Schroders.