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German-based Linde Group's £8.2bn acquisition of UK FTSE 100 gas producer BOC last year made the group the world's largest industrial and medical gases company, supplying products such as nitrogen, hydrogen and helium to its global customers. Peter Dew was CIO at BOC at the time of the acquisition and is now group CIO for Linde, responsible for IT for 50,000 employees across the globe. In this CIO Visions interview he talks to silicon.com about post-merger IT integration and using Google in the enteprise…

Andy McCue: Peter, welcome thanks for joining us on CIO Visions at what's a very busy time for yourself and the company as you work on the post-merger integration. Presumably you're racking up the air miles - and brushing up on your German as well. But if we take a step back first to the point where Linde made acquisition bid for BOC, which I think was early 2006, at what point were you as CIO brought into that M&A process and what was your role?

Peter Dew: Well, we need to remember, Andy, that I was the CIO of the former BOC so my involvement in the early stages was not particularly significant because it wasn't clear after the bid for BOC had been accepted what the longer term view on the role information technology could play [was]. As it started to become clear I think to both sides that as well as enabling the integration, the IT could contribute reasonably significantly to the synergy delivery then my involvement stepped up - basically to generate understanding of the core infrastructure, the ERP environment and to help formulate a reasonably short-term view on what the IS strategy could be.

Andy McCue: Now, the acquisition completed in late 2006 and you are now CIO for the whole of the Linde Group. And just put that in some context, that's a vast organisation - 50,000 employees approximately, I think, a host of different business units in just about every country in the world. That must be an incredibly daunting task for a new CIO - just where do you start with that?

Peter Dew: The companies came together on September 6, 2006. I suppose it would be very, very daunting for somebody who didn't know the industry or didn't know the company. One of the wonderful things for me in this role is that knowing the industry, industrial gases, and having been in the industry with BOC for almost 20 years and really having worked in the IT in industrial gases for 20-odd years I brought a fair degree of understanding of the way in which IT enables a gases company. And because of our BOC experience, having been CIO at BOC for eight years, probably more importantly how significantly IT can enable a global enterprise. So when the two companies came together the core business is industrial gases and engineering, which of course those are business activities that BOC had. The enterprise is truly global with coverage in just about every country of the world, and couple that geographic balance, spread with my IT knowledge, exposure and the fact I'd worked tirelessly over the previous eight years enabling the global BOC it probably wasn't as daunting, going back to the first part of your question, as it would have been had I been new from the outside. Also, I think, having worked at a reasonably senior level, at the executive level, in the former BOC my perspective was not just an information technology one, it was as much a business one. And being able to converse, discuss opportunities, direction with my new colleagues in the new company made it a lot easier.

Andy McCue: What does the merger mean for the IT systems of the two companies? BOC has a global model, which is a global SAP system, IBM hardware, a global network. What are the IT integration plans and where are the synergies and savings in this?

Peter Dew: If you look at what great IT assets did both organisations have as they came together, the things we can leverage from, both had a reasonably strong commitment towards SAP as the core ERP base and both had made significant investments in the deployment of those across their respective worlds. So we had a common understanding between both legacy organisations that a bedrock of SAP-enabled business processes was important, and great people, knowledge, skills and capability across the world in understanding its implementation. Commitment towards globalising the organisation - because of its geographic spread perhaps BOC was slightly more advanced in that way - and as you quite rightly say, some IBM hardware technology deployed in some pretty significant data centres. Organisationally though we were a little bit different. As I alluded to in the previous answers we had been a little more global driven by our business from the BOC perspective. Linde had worked very hard to meet the need of its local regional businesses and hadn't organised its IT folk in that way. So basically in terms of the two coming together what we've had to understand and begin developing a process for understanding is 'what's our end point ERP landscape going to be', and having done that when you peel that back what would the synergy benefits be from perhaps having more standardisation on the ERP platform. The ERP platform is going to drive the mainframe, or large-scale systems environment, clearly we need a global telecommunications network. When you talk about synergies, of course there are huge synergies from a third-party spend perspective. We now just about spend twice as much with every key vendor today than either of us did as our constituent parts. So, thankfully, our partners and vendors have come to the table and are working with us to make sure that we achieve some pretty significant benefits there. We've put in a new global operating model for the IS organisation. The former BOC called it, for some reason, ITIM and former Linde called it ITIT so it seemed appropriate to use another letter so we came up with the 's', which is information services, which is more than just a letter, there's a concept around the word service, which I might get back to. But we've put together a more global operating model, which is more appropriate for our global enterprise and what we can see in doing that there is opportunity perhaps to have fewer people in the organisation than we had as the two came together and we are in the process of implementing our new global operating model. And perhaps the last major synergy area is much more standardisation, common deployment of laptop, desktop technologies, server consolidation - the standard things you would expect from a merger of this scale and complexity.

Andy McCue: So what's the overall timescale for this integration?

Peter Dew: I think it's common knowledge, it's public domain information that the merger was predicated on our ability as a combined entity - the new Linde Group - to deliver about €250m of synergies by the end of 2008, and the ISIT function has a part to play in the delivery of those synergies.

Andy McCue: Beyond these big core systems and the standardisation you have talked about, where are the opportunities for innovation and new technology to really have an impact on productivity and new capabilities across the business?

Peter Dew: Like any global business today there's always opportunity. I don't think you should forget the fact that both former organisations were doing quite innovative things already whether it was in the former Linde across the Linde world where quite extensive deployment of cylinder barcoding and some RFID technologies to enhance the asset management of a vast asset pool of cylinders, or in the former BOC some innovative use of Google technology within the BOC domain from a search capability, so those are the kind of things we were doing. Clearly with an enterprise as diverse and as globally spread as we have, innovation comes as well from being able to see something that's being done well in one part of the world, picking it up and deploying it quite quickly in another part of the world. That may not only be about new technology. It may well be the way business processes, for example, are being executed. So, some interesting stuff going on - again, Google, again RFID-based, and also some voice response and voice activation technologies that are being used in some of our call centres around the world I think would seem to be as innovative as anyone in the world at this point in time.

Andy McCue: Peter, when I interviewed you a couple of years ago at BOC you talked then about being able to segment the user base, which basically meant dividing it up into transaction workers, mobile workers, executives, and basically kitting out each of those segments with the relevant IT that they need, in some cases maybe even letting them buy their own IT equipment. Is that a vision that you still have?

Peter Dew: Yes, I think one of the dangers and pitfalls of a generic IT approach in any enterprise, and we perhaps fell into this approach with the advent of personal technology 20-odd years ago into corporations, one of the pitfalls is adopting a one-size fits all from the device you provide or the help that you provide for that device. We have to acknowledge the fact that our end-users by-and-large are much more sophisticated today than they were last year and will be much more sophisticated in a year or five years time than they were now, and that's about capability at home, more technology available, it's about as you get more churn in the workforce we're having more capable people join us. So, going back to this one size fits all I do believe - continue to believe - that a segmentation of our end-user base to provide fit-for-purpose technology is important. I do think those people that are transaction type workers who perhaps spend more time with technology than others require a very different solution to those who require perhaps a mobile solution that may well be made up of many different devices. I do ultimately believe that what we have in our workforce who are very, very capable, if you like, of driving their own technology needs and what we need to do is provide a technology integration service that will enable people that we trust to plug their devices into our network either directly, wirelessly or whatever. And therefore my view that I expressed a couple of years ago to you Andy I still think is truer today and will be even more true in a year's time.

Andy McCue: At BOC you were trialling Linux in some parts of the business, fairly small scale stuff. I was wondering how that's gone and where you now see the opportunities for open source to save money and add value in an enterprise?

Peter Dew: I think that we always need to be aware of alternative technologies. I think often what they are able to do is to drive alternative forms of behaviour from our traditional technology suppliers. Is the fact that Google now has an enterprise email solution available something that I have and am looking at seriously? Absolutely. Would I deploy it across the vast range of end users that I have today? Probably not. Will it perhaps cause the more traditional vendors of messaging and collaboration software to behave differently either from a licensing perspective or a functionality perspective? I absolutely hope so. So I think it's a bit of balance We have to have a need to understand where innovation is coming from. We also need to understand that at times it won't necessarily deliver the robust quality of service type solution we need but it is certainly something I believe in and without these from the side developments the world would be a very boring place.

Andy McCue: Peter, thank you.

Peter Dew: Thank you.