To print: Click here or Select File and then Print from your browser's menu

This story was printed from silicon.com, located at http://www.silicon.com/

Story URL: http://www.silicon.com/cio-insights/0,3800015457,39372010,00.htm

Q&A: Schroders CIO, Matthew Oakeley
Planning for 2009, running successful projects and learning to listen

By Tim Ferguson

Published: Tuesday 06 January 2009

Matthew Oakeley is head of group IT at global asset management company Schroders. He joined the company three and a half years ago and in that time has overseen the Book of Record back-office transformation project which was recently named overall winner at the Corporate IT Forum's Real IT Awards.

Oakeley has spent most of his working life in asset management. He started as a junior programmer at Phillips & Drew (now UBS Global Asset Management) and rose to head of investment IT before moving to Schroders in 2005.

silicon.com recently caught up with Oakeley who shared his thoughts on navigating the economic downturn, planning for 2009 and what makes a good CIO.

How has the current economic climate impacted Schroders' IT?
The reality is market levels are down, revenues are down and costs have to come down. Project budget overall for Schroders [in 2009] has come down by a third. We will find certain things a stretch but I think the most important thing is there will be more priority calls during 2009. I think we'll find a lot more situations where people start to get more fractious about contention for resources.

What other IT projects are in the pipeline for 2009?
We've still got a project pipeline going into 2009 but quite a lot of projects are now about efficiency - things that take money out. There's quite a lot of essential maintenance which, because of the Book of Record project and the change freeze that went with it, we weren't able to do over the last couple of years. So [we're] catching up on upgrades to systems and things like that.

Tell me more about the Book of Record transformation project which you've recently completed
We realised about three years ago that the core of our back office - our portfolio accounting system - was written in-house 27 years ago. It was running on HP 3000s and obviously they were going end of life. Like all really old, mature systems, it worked, it was fine - but because the hardware was going end of life there was just no alternative but to replace it.

What challenges did the project pose?
The thing about a project like this is it affects everything but at the sharp end of the business - our fund managers and our sales teams - it's a plumbing project, it's something behind the scenes, so it's very difficult to get them engaged or enthused. As far as they're concerned they just didn't want to know about it and wanted the whole project to go through without their business being disrupted.

What was behind the project's success?
We recognised that we needed absolutely rock-hard project management and that we needed to bring in a programme director with a really good track record, and really detailed understanding of the subject matter. We brought in Wendy Steel who used to be the head of IT at Gartmore and head of IT at Barings before that. The first job was to find the right person to lead [the project].

The second thing was the recognition that we had to be absolutely focused on the thing we were trying to do. Effectively my job as head of IT was to be a road sweeper, we had to get everything out of the way of the project - nothing could stand in its way.

What are your objectives in 2009?
The watchword [until] now has been delivery, delivery, delivery - everything's been about getting projects in - but we're moving into a different phase now. Delivery is still important but we've now got to look at how we work and [how to work] smarter. It's an old adage, to work smarter not harder, it's the kind of things management consultants trot out, but I think it's true. We've got a problem always in getting people to take a step back and think 'how could this be simpler?'

Click here for page 2