British Energy CIO, Ian Campbell

Just outside the window of Ian Campbell's desk in the open plan office at British Energy's Gloucester headquarters, a mother duck waddles by with her three chicks. A couple of weeks earlier, one might imagine they would have been floating by but the devastating floodwaters have now receded in this part of the country.

British Energy's facilities weren't actually hit by the floods but it did cause problems for some employees getting to work.

"Some of our staff were sleeping in their cars on the Friday night of the weekend the floods hit and some people were cut off," says Campbell.

Fortunately the company recently completed a mobile tech project to give around 750 users secure remote access to the organisation's systems from laptops, PDAs and BlackBerrys, meaning some of those cut off were still able to work despite being away from the office.

British Energy's core business is energy generation - its one coal-fired power station and eight nuclear power stations provide one-fifth of the UK's energy requirements. Alongside the generation business is energy trading in the wholesale electricity market.

There are just over 300 staff in the core in-house IT department at British Energy, plus another 200 in satellite IT teams at the power stations. They are supported by a number of outsourcing contracts - with the likes of Capgemini, Fujitsu and Logica.

Campbell won't reveal British Energy's exact IT budget but says it is just under the two to three per cent of turnover most organisations average. With the company's revenue last year hitting £2.5bn, that puts it somewhere in the region of £50m.

Campbell - who was voted one of the UK's top 50 CIOs in the silicon.com CIO50 - has been group CIO at British Energy since 2005 when he was brought in to lead a programme of change across the IT function - which he says was fragmented, not aligned with the business and lacking in flexibility and responsiveness.

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"The IT function had become a bit isolated and insulated from the rest of the business," he says of the situation when he arrived.

The just-completed 18-month change programme was called IP3 - which stands for intellectual property, intelligent people and improve. Culture and mindset were the big challenges and Campbell put the entire IT team through a series of briefings by the world-famous Red Arrows pilots on professionalism and standards.

"The first step for me was mindset change. We wouldn't achieve anything if we couldn't get a new mindset within the IT function. Although not everyone's going to go along with the programme, you need enough of a groundswell to get the momentum for change, which thankfully we did get."

The other strand of the IP3 programme was improving performance through better measurement and benchmarking.

"It used to be about 20 to 30 pages of written reports of words and paragraphs of what was going on. I simply implemented a dashboard with our KPIs so we can all look instantly at what's going well, what's not," says Campbell.

British Energy's IT department has also standardised processes through the use of the Control Objectives for Information and related Technology (Cobit) best practice guidelines, Itil and Prince2 project management.

Campbell brought in interim managers, as opposed to consultants, to help drive the change programme quickly. "That acceleration of change meant we could do the programme within a defined period, otherwise change just peters out," he says.

What followed was a move from the generalists of the old IT structure, who "did a bit of everything", to specialists split across roles in business-facing relationship management, business design architecture, systems development and service delivery.

Key to this was bringing in non-technical people in a systems analyst role who are the public face of IT within the various business units at British Energy.

"They've got the appropriate understanding of the business function and can translate that into IT speak. These are called business solutions managers and they go off solving problems and future needs and requirements," Campbell explains.

Part of the IT culture change at British Energy means staff are now more empowered to take on responsibility than before - part of Campbell's "whinge-free zone" attitude. In practical terms this new structure means Campbell can devote more of his time to strategic issues and the long-term big picture instead of fire-fighting.

"My day now does not mean drilling down. It's up to the extended leadership team to do the day-to-day. Every time that I have to get involved in today's decisions and problems that means I'm not effective because I should be looking ahead. When I first came on board it was just constant - people queuing up with problems and issues."

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