Martin Taylor, group CIO, LCH.Clearnet

Martin Taylor is a true CIO big hitter who has moved effortlessly across industry sectors turning around and revitalising failing IT functions.

But it's not just IT departments that Taylor has made a habit of saving. A keen sailor for more than 30 years - although he admits to now getting into motorboats to the "utter disgust" of his sailing buddies - he served for 18 months as a volunteer lifeboat man on the River Thames out of the Chiswick station, pulling people out of the water.

He says it was both exciting and a privilege being part of a search and rescue team. "Actually doing a lot of training and seeing it work when you're out at two o'clock in the morning on a freezing night in February and someone's just jumped off a bridge and either you're going to get him out in the next 10 seconds or he's going to die is a big buzz."

The difference in service level agreements (SLAs) between lifeboats and IT is stark too. "When you're talking SLAs it was 90 seconds to have a lifeboat launched and five minutes to the casualty is what you had to hit, otherwise they're going to die. It kind of brings SLAs into a different space."

His current role at clearing house LCH.Clearnet is a case in point for demonstrating his turnaround skills. Taylor joined as an interim CIO in the summer of 2006 with the organisation's IT strategy in a mess - a complex clearing IT platform, called the Generic Clearing System (GCS) was going off the rails while plans to outsource the IT production to IBM were going full steam ahead without a solid business case.

Taylor - just voted one of the UK's top 50 CIOs in the silicon.com CIO50, took control of the rudder, overseeing a radical rethink of the IT strategy. He explains: "By December of that year we had embarked on a different kind of strategy, which was pretty much a major turnaround from that position. What was really important I think was to have control as much as we could of our own means of production, own our own intellectual property, develop as much as we could our own software, because we saw that as really being part of the competitive edge we could offer."

The GCS project was scrapped - with LCH.Clearnet writing off €67.9m in the process - and the outsourcing plans were, and remain, shelved. Taylor then agreed to join the business as full-time group CIO in January 2007.

While speed of response and latency are key issues for the exchanges and traders on the frontlines wanting to shave milliseconds off response times, LCH.Clearnet's role as a clearing counterparty is more about the matching and clearing behind the scenes.

Taylor says: "For us, our technology uses are more about the absolute safety and security of that data. So the technology for us is more about capacity, taking volume through, and making sure that everything is safe rather than the actual pure speed and latency issue."

That means LCH.Clearnet is hugely dependent on technology - more than half (56 per cent) of the organisation's costs are IT. Tech is also vital in the drive to reduce clearing costs per trade and keeping LCH.Clearnet competitive.

As such, tech investment at LCH.Clearnet is now driven by three guiding principles - reliability, security and capacity. To deliver a raft of projects around these goals there has been a big recruitment drive, with around 150 new people joining the IT department over the last 15 months.

Taylor says: "It's a real ramp up at a time when clearing and IT in clearing was seen as pretty boring and unexciting. We are a hugely IT driven business. So we've, over the course of the last 15 months, we've refreshed the teams, it's a much more multiethnic mix than it was, it's much younger than it was, there's a greater preponderance of women in it than there was and we've got a really enthusiastic fired up energised excited, exciting bunch of people doing some really interesting stuff."

All this has also had to be done against a backdrop of huge increases in clearing volumes across all asset classes - in some cases double the volumes going through daily compared to a year ago.

He says: "The markets have not stood still and allowed us some breathing space to get this done. The markets and asset classes we serve have really been pushing volumes through in ever-increasing quantities and it continues to rise. It's a fantastic achievement from the people in technology here to deliver that day in day out."

The ramp up in IT staff has not just been to deal with the production side but also a huge ramp up in projects for customers - either for new instruments for them to use in the clearing of markets that already exist or for different markets to get into.

As a result the IT project portfolio has more than trebled in the past year from 20 to more than 70.

Some of the successful projects delivered over the past year include a new disaster recovery data centre to address "significant" risk and capacity issues, a new storage area network that has significantly increased capacity and performance and remote access and homeworking for mobile and support workers to address the risk posed by a pandemic, such as bird flu.

In the UK LCH.Clearnet's IT consists of almost 350 staff, more than 400 servers, 630 desktops and two synchronous data centres. The organisation's key IT supplier is HP, along with PA Consulting for programme management skills. Taylor is also looking at using offshore IT resources for software development and testing.

"Strategically we would like for some of the real heavy lifting, big projects that we do we want to be able to use tried and trusted offshore third parties to get the benefit of their experience in this space but also to get obviously the cost advantages We would do the up front analysis and they would help us with the development and delivery of that."

LCH.Clearnet also has an operation based in Paris to cater for the French and continental European markets. This is largely an outsourced function with around 50 tech staff.

Taylor's route to the top came via the liberal arts and a Masters degree in English Literature. He started his career in British Airways and then spent what he calls a "highly formative" 10 years at Mars during the 1980s, including 18 months in the US.

The Mars management training programme has produced some of the UK's most talented business leaders and Taylor says this was due to the "banging together" of a lot of very bright people and a "tough but very analytical regime".

"So you really had to think through what you wanted to do, you had to be prepared to argue it, you had to be able to back it up with good forensic argument and intellectual thinking and it really forced you to think very, very hard. I regard that really as the core building block of what I did and everything I've done since then has really been building off that experience."

From there Taylor became CIO of the international paints division of Courtalds and then group CIO at EMI Music from the mid 1990s to 2003.

Many CIOs find it difficult to switch industry and end up trapped in one but Taylor says the key is to develop core skills and competencies that can be deployed across any sector.

"My skill and competence came from taking either IT organisations that had kind of lost their way and needed refocusing and re-energising and had to be seen to be demonstrating their value to the business or where a major change in strategy was required. The issues that EMI Music faced in how they were trying to deploy their technology across a global structure were not dissimilar to the problems that Courtaulds had got. The issues that were facing this business 18 months ago were not financial services problems, they were technology problems that needed somebody who'd done that before to sort out."

His advice for other CIOs is not to worry about the industry they are in but on their competencies.

"Are you a kind of change CIO that's going to pick things up that are messed up and sort them out, are you an operational CIO that just likes running stuff, are you a big kind of strategic thinking CIO who wants to work with senior boards? What are you? If you can figure that out then you can offer your services across sectors much more easily."