Nigel Underwood, CIO, DHL

Bracknell isn't the most glamorous of locations and from the outside, a drab, grey 1970's office tower block fits right in with its surroundings. But housed inside are the buzzing offices of global logistics giant DHL.

In the office of DHL's CIO, Nigel Underwood, the Lincoln City Football Club calendar on the wall gives away his allegiance.

It's more than just a hobby for Underwood, however. He's an associate director of the Coca Cola League Two team, after helping to save the club when it ran into financial problems after ITV Digital's TV sponsorship money disappeared in 2001.

Underwood, who says he put in a "modest investment", explains: "There were about 10 of us at the time who said we'll help steer it. So I was one, not in an executive capacity - I didn't put my house on the line as some of the other guys did. So the associate director role came along. At the board meetings if there's any way I can help I will do."

Back in the day job, Underwood's role as CIO is undergoing change as part of a recent restructuring of the wider Deutsche Post group, DHL's parent company.

Underwood become DHL CIO about two-and-a-half years ago when he moved across as part of Deutsche Post's acquisition of Exel.

The scale of DHL is massive. It's a €27bn-per-year business with 160,000 employees across its three main businesses: global forwarding, air freight and ocean freight; ground-based European transport; and global contract logistics supply chain.

For the IT department, that equates to an annual budget of around €700m and 2,500 tech staff globally, along with some third-party resources from Capgemini and IBM.

A big part of DHL's business is managing the outsourced supply chains of its customers - and a major part of that falls into the CIO and IT function.

Underwood says: "A lot of it is about providing those external services and building geographic or global capability to make that a repeatable process. We need to be very good at integrating those systems with those of our customers, or the systems of our customers with those of other providers."

Progressive investment in vital systems integration and project management capabilities has enabled DHL to develop more sector-specific supply chain products and services for its customers.

He says: "In the automotive sector or the technology sector it's not just the manufacturing of the car or PC that becomes important, it's the aftermarket to service that car or PC when it breaks. So getting the spare part to the engineer [in the field] is a core logistics process where we need to develop a capability to do that."

But Underwood's role is now changing following a restructuring at Deutsche Post. The CEO of DHL became CEO of the Deutsche Post group and took the decision to separate the DHL into two areas: global forwarding and freight, and the supply chain business. Two new CIOs have been appointed for each of these businesses.

That means Underwood has stepped up into a Deutsche Post group-level strategic role, in which he's looking at the future business process roadmap for the organisation. It comes with the snappy title of director of corporate business process optimisation.

"Having spent quite a lot of my life with an IT label around my neck and with a reasonably large team to lead and manage, I'll have a very modest business architecture team who can support the business and I'm trying to describe where the hot spots are we want to make investments in. That's the liberating thing for me from a personal development point of view," he says.

Underwood's rise to the top began with a mathematics degree from Nottingham University. From there he went just down the road to Boots, working in 'organisation and methods'.

He says: "The thing that appealed to me at university wasn't the programming or the technology it was solving real business problems."

He then joined a small consulting and systems house in Nottingham where he got more hands on with the technology, selling relational databases and PC networks and consulting to small businesses.

Then came the big career defining change, when he joined Mars - where many of today's leading CIOs cut their teeth. Both former Tesco CIO Colin Cobain and LCH.Clearnet CIO Martin Taylor were on the assessment panel when Underwood was offered a project management role.

Underwood says: "That was a bit of a life-changing experience for me. People like [leading UK CIOs] Trevor Didcock, Peter Brickley, Robin Dargue - all those were in the teams that I was managing. There's a whole cadre of guys that were all there at the same time."

After five years, and lots of travelling, Underwood landed a UK-based role at a joint venture between Coca Cola and Cadbury Schweppes. He spent another five years there before moving on to become CIO of Hilton.

At Hilton he gained experience with a combined central reservation system, loyalty cards and online booking capabilities. "I found it quite interesting going into a services business versus a products business," he says.

From there it was Exel and then DHL.

Underwood is convinced that technology and, more importantly, information will be increasingly important in the global logistics sector.

He explains: "With every physical flow of goods there is an informational flow. If you're a consumer you want to know where your parcel is in that delivery from Amazon or eBay.

"If you're a large business and you're shipping lots of products around the world, you don't just want to know where it is. You want to know if there's a problem in that part of the world… [so you] can take corrective action to get it there quicker.

"A lot of the challenge as supply chains have become extended and more globalised is to use information to take time out of the process, to make better decisions, to be more agile."

That includes technologies such as RFID, mobile and GPS, which allow you to locate a product, but Underwood says the industry hasn't yet cracked how to get all that data into the hands of decision-makers.

He says: "If you take mash-up technology at the front end and show things on maps, that will have a huge impact. It's linking 'where is the product' and 'how do you make decisions around that'. That whole thing about how do we pass data between companies in an easy, seamless way will become an important technology and way of working."