Story URL: http://comment.silicon.com/andymccue/0,3800002580,39151864,00.htm
The McCue Interview: Unilever CIO Neil Cameron The woodworking IT chief on tackling complexity, cutting costs and Linux... By Andy McCue Published: Thursday 01 September 2005 Unilever CIO Neil Cameron looks admiringly out of the window at the cranes and construction work busily underway on the shell of the global consumer goods manufacturer's opulent headquarters at Blackfriars Bridge in London. The façade of the 70-year old building is listed and has to be kept intact while the rest of it is demolished and redeveloped over the next two years. Cameron is fascinated by the complex construction project and admits to a keen passion for woodwork that has seen him build his own state-of-the-art workshop and collect all the power tools known to man. "You can sit and get lost in something for five hours and think about nothing except what is in front of you and I find that quite relaxing. I spend my life writing about things and talking about things but not really 'doing' anything so I'm trying to get some balance there," he says. Cameron jokes that it might give him another career option as he gets older - he was 50 last month - but the reality right now is that he is focused on building a world-class IT infrastructure that will support Unilever's recently announced 'One Unilever' programme, to cut 700m per year in costs by 2006 through the streamlining and simplification of the organisation. "Complexity is the enemy. There is a huge dividend in this business for simplification. That's the biggest challenge," he says. "The technology challenges will always be there whether it's big SAP back-office common process system convergence issues, costs of infrastructure, globalisation of infrastructure, data quality or data standards information. That's just the job but the biggest challenge is how you really work with the business and bring it to bear." Cameron was brought in as the company's first ever dedicated CIO two years ago after a history of putting more general business managers in charge of IT, and he is one of the most senior external appointments at Unilever for years. Which isn't bad for a self-confessed failed art college dropout - "I always thought I was pretty good at it and then I met real talent," he says. It was a temporary IT job at RHM management services that started it all and Cameron has climbed the ladder steadily ever since at the likes of Diageo, Dixons, Guinness, Marks & Spencer and now Unilever. "I like brands and I like to orientate myself off brands that I think give you value and energy. I would find it a challenge to work in say financial services because, while the money would be terribly attractive to any of us, I'm just not sure I can get that resonance, excitement and intimacy with it all," he says. As well as tackling complexity he is well aware that he needs to improve the cost structure of a 4,000-strong global IT department and 85,000 desktops with an annual budget of around 800m but warns of the danger of making cuts across the board purely to hit targets. "The problem so often is that people talk in percentages at a very generic level and that can actually cause you to do some short term things that really aren't as healthy as they need to be," he says. "We are some way away from being world class in some of our cost structures because of our historic structure of the business, which was very regional but, frankly, I think we need to invest behind some of our growth systems and saving money there is a false economy." Part of that is about making the right long-term bets on the IT vendors and suppliers who will still be around in five years. Cameron has placed Unilever's bets with HP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. BT is also in there but Cameron doesn't consider them a pure IT player. "There will be a small number of big suppliers and a very large number of small suppliers. Customers are placing bigger bets than they have done before and they need to be bets not gambles. The world's changing and these suppliers have got to be mature," he says. Suppliers need to be more responsible about testing their products, providing support and, Cameron insists, "not leaving us hanging out there". One significant IT infrastructure decision already taken by Cameron is to ditch a plan started back in 2003 to switch Unilever's global IT platform to Linux on Itanium by 2006<http://www.silicon.com/research/specialreports/opensource/0,3800004943,39151835,00.htm>. The project was supposed to cut 66m off the IT budget but Cameron admits the open source landscape has changed somewhat since then. "I was a bit concerned that we started to talk in terms of religion about this. The world moves on. I think there are issues with open source, whether it's security or about support or just about sustainability of certain areas. Additionally what starts to happen is that the rest of the industry starts to respond and that's a healthy thing," he says. The price/performance gap has narrowed as proprietary vendors raised their game in response to the threat from open source. The financial model for the Linux migration no longer works, says Cameron, and the risk-reward "just doesn't start to make as much sense as it did". That's not to say open source is being banished from Unilever. Cameron says it will now be about "appropriate adoption" rather than migration and that open source is being used in parts of the IT infrastructure such as firewalls. The bottom line is that there has to be a sound financial and business reason for any IT decision. "This is about how you navigate through quite choppy waters and keep your options open because at the end of the day we sell deodorants and washing powder and my job is to get IT in at the best price, most securely," says Cameron. But Cameron is also aware of the need for differentiation and the use of technologies that can provide a competitive advantage. To that extent he established a CTO office<http://management.silicon.com/itdirector/0,39024673,39122226,00.htm>at Unilever to look at technical and application architecture and do proof of concept work around new technologies. Cameron admits that it will be a "long old trip" at Unilever, and one that will require all the ambassadorial skills and powers of motivation he can summon in order to energise his staff for the task ahead. "There is a figurehead element to this role. There are IT teams all around the world and when you turn up they get quite excited. You are an ambassador and you have to spend time with them and that's new for me. In other businesses people see you every day. Now when you turn up they are waiting for some wise words because this maybe is once every five years. Whatever I say has to last for five years for these guys," he says. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Get Bzzzy! (real tools to help you find a job). Welcome to the Sweet Life. http://us.click.yahoo.com/A77XvD/vlQLAA/TtwFAA/0XFolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Linux/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
