Reuters CIO David Lister

David Lister is just two months into his new role as CIO of Reuters after completing the switch from his old position at Boots and he is, not surprisingly, in an enthusiastic and upbeat mood about the sizeable task ahead of him.

We are sitting in a meeting room in the Reuters building on London's Fleet Street - the company is one of the last media organisations still to have a presence in the old newspaper heartland, but the last of the Reuters staff will pack up their boxes and move to new headquarters at Canary Wharf in 2005.

Despite years spent travelling the globe and learning foreign languages in his various roles, Lister has still retained a strong Edinburgh lilt to his accent and his stocky physique is a legacy from his youthful rugby playing days in Scotland.

He actually played behind a back row that had the legendary Scottish flanker Finlay Calder and his brothers Jim and John for Stewarts Melville College in Edinburgh. "I was a slimmer centre then so they kept me out of trouble," he jokes.

A badly broken leg in a game against Kelso essentially put paid to the rugby career, although Lister cites other reasons. "It was in the golden age of rugby when the purpose of playing was actually to have a few pints afterwards. I was off for a couple of years and when I came back they were all drinking orange juice so I gave up and turned to golf."

It was also in Edinburgh that Lister studied for a degree in architecture and although he decided early on that wasn't the career for him, he believes it has helped him get where he is today.

"I disappeared off quite quickly into the IT world on the basis that the future wasn't particularly bright in the 1970s and 80s around the economy. The initial grounding in architecture has actually served me really well because at the end of the day it's about designing things that have a real purpose and real value," he says.

Then it was onto management consultancy at Coopers & Lybrand, before his first senior IT role at the age of just 29 with Guinness just after the acquisition of Distillers.

"I was recruited essentially to go back up to Scotland and to help integrate the processes and technology that was required to pull together the old Distillers brand businesses - Johnnie Walker, Gordons, et cetera - which in the pre-Guinness days had been run as separate businesses," he says.

Guinness then moved him to Seville in Spain to spend two-and-a-half years working on another business integration project around 12 regional breweries the company had acquired in the early 1990s, a role for which he had to learn Spanish.

"We decided as a team we were going to do it in Spanish. We felt the cultural element of the change programme we were running would have been so much harder if we'd tried to do it as ex-pat Brits. We had some very funny moments but we did everything in Spanish," he says.

Job done, Lister moved back to the UK to become worldwide CIO for Guinness. It was then onto Glaxo before turning down the chance to work in Philadelphia after the SmithKline merger and onto Boots, where Lister put down some roots again after years of relentless travelling.

"I've got three children and every one of them was born in a different country, which makes for interesting times at World Cups, and I made the call that rather than move to Philadelphia with Glaxo I wanted to spend some more time being based in the same place; the Boots job while being tremendously challenging also had the benefit of being based in the one place."

But after dropping down to only a Blue British Airways card, Lister is already clocking up the air miles in his new role at Reuters, visiting operations in Geneva, New York, St Louis, Bangalore, Bangkok, Singapore, Sydney and Japan.

Lister has taken over from his predecessor Greg Meekings at the end of the first phase of Reuters' 'Fast Forward' transformation programme, which aims to simplify and standardise business processes and the underlying technology on a worldwide basis.

On the technology side this involves a small number of large strategic partners, which include Cisco, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and Siebel.

"We have one of the broadest and deepest Siebel implementations in the world in terms of how many people within the organisation use it and the number of products we use. It is a major platform that we are continuing to build upon," he says.

Among the key projects on the table is a significant re-engineering programme to deliver a single order to cash fulfilment capability worldwide, which will involve moving from over 35 different systems to a single standard global process supported by Siebel.

Then there is the completion of the move from Lotus Notes to a single worldwide email system based around Microsoft Exchange, and the implementation of a VoIP network integrated with the desktops at the new Canary Wharf headquarters.

One of his predecessor's achievements was to drive down the Reuters IT budget while still driving ahead with the transformation programme. Without revealing any figures, Lister admits that some new investment will need to be funded from other cost savings.

"This next wave of transformation is more about investing to deliver what the new business model will look like. Clearly the best way of investing is you pay your way as you go - i.e., to be able to fund the investment out of the savings and rationalisations that you can make by becoming ever more efficient and effective."

Reuters already has some outsourcing arrangements for parts of its infrastructure and Lister oversaw a major outsourcing deal to IBM in his last job at Boots, but he is reluctant to commit on what role any further outsourcing will play in the future.

"We've outsourced a lot of desktop support both in the US and the UK, we've outsourced the management of our legacy environment and legacy systems to India and we've just recently completed an application management outsourcing exercise with IBM, so I think in terms of where my challenge is in going forward I think the first question is to see how all these pieces fit together but actually more importantly how do they fit together in light of what does a simplified Reuters look like," he explains.

But he did say that outsourcing should only be used as one of a range of corporate tools when appropriate. "I don't think it should ever be done either as a philosophy or actually for cost-reduction reasons. For me outsourcing can become a vehicle to achieve things. The outsourcing at Boots was about how do you deliver the transformation faster at lower risk at a lower cost overall. But fundamentally it was about delivering the corporate objectives in a more secure way," he says.

At just 46, Lister is fairly young considering all the roles he has had to date, but he points to even younger CIO talent coming through the ranks, naming Robin Dargue, CIO at drinks business Diageo.

It's also interesting to note that absence of any real in-depth talk of technology itself during our conversation and that emphasises Lister's business-led approach to the role of CIO.

"I'm openly not a technologist. The real role that CIOs can add value is around business change. You have to know enough about technology to be able to understand how value can be realised through that but I'm not a techie."