Catherine Doran
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EXECUTIVE INSIGHTS ON APPLICATION LANDSCAPE MANAGEMENT: CIO INTERVIEW Catherine Doran joined Royal Mail in September 2011 as Chief Information Officer from Catherine Doran Network Rail, where she led the company-wide transformation programme. Before that CIO Royal Mail Group she had been CIO for BT Retail and Capital One (Europe) as well as holding senior IT management positions at NatWest Bank and British Telecom. Catherine is a member of the CIO Board for the Tech Partnership, a growing network of employers creating the skills for the digital economy and working to inspire young people about technology. ▌Q. Could you provide an overview of Logistic Services which has operations Royal Mail Group and how the various in 37 countries. In terms of scale, we postal services are organised within it? employ 143,000 people in the UK and hire additionally about 19,000 temporary ▌A. Royal Mail is one of the oldest staff for about six weeks to deliver the companies in the world and we will Christmas peak. We deliver in excess of be celebrating our 500th anniversary 13 billion letters in the UK and 1.1 billion next year. Under our Universal Service parcels every year. Obligation we are required to deliver letters to twenty nine million addresses ▌Q. Where does technology fit in the UK, six days a week, with the cost into Royal Mail’s operations? of a stamp being the same regardless of the distance that the letter has to travel. ▌A. For at least 15 years now, we have used letter sorting and address The Group is split into three brands: Royal interpretation machines in the mail Mail, its core letters and packets delivery centres to process the huge volumes of network, Parcelforce and GLS, Global mail handled every day. If any one of 2 EXECUTIVE INSIGHTS ON APPLICATION LANDSCAPE MANAGEMENT CATHERINE DORAN these machines goes down, we are retained organisation as being the budget for IT was about £200 million able immediately to re-route the mail. ‘conscience of the business’, as its with headroom to be as high as £350 The system was designed as a kind ‘corporate memory’ and owning million, but the ability to invest was of node system which meant that the future. Royal Mail had retained severely constrained by the fact that business continuity was built-in from an internal IT organisation in 2003, the IT department was sub-scale. We the start. Since the core operations but by the time I joined in 2011, of needed a rapid infusion of talented systems were inherently resilient, it had the 400 people retained in 2003 people to work alongside our existing given the business an inaccurate belief numbers were down to just 119 staff. teams who could maintain and extract in the resilience and the robustness We had a small set of individuals the best out of a legacy environment of information technology systems. with huge amounts of knowledge and build for the future needs of the in their heads which is both very business, which would need to operate It is really only in the last decade or so powerful and risky in equal measure. in an increasingly competitive and that IT has come to the fore with for deregulated market environment. example, the success of systems like We did not even have capabilities such the OBA, Online Business Account as a fully resourced and functioning The second task was a programme ordering platform used by our largest architecture team or security team. that we called Get Safe, named as corporate customers. The OBA Everything was cut back to the core such to emphasise to non-technical platform processes a huge volume of of what was needed to be done ‘to people its importance in managing transactions in just a few hours every keep the lights on’. Looking back, day-to-day operations. For many years day and accounts for a large proportion when I consider how the 119 people under public ownership, Royal Mail had of company revenues. managed to keep the whole ship afloat, under-invested in its annual care and I am stunned and full of admiration maintenance of its physical estate. Due ▌Q. How was IT organised when for them. to this successive under-investment, you joined the business? four years ago many of the servers ▌Q. You embarked upon a multi- were over 5 years old, and a few ▌A. Over an extended period of time, year transformation programme were even older. While these servers IT had been under invested in, like soon after joining. What were its continued to function perfectly well, many other parts of the business. I main priorities and their impact it meant that in some instances there joined Royal Mail from Network Rail on the application landscape and were databases, applications and even in 2011, but some years before in other aspects of IT operations? operating systems which were out 2003, nearly all of Royal Mail’s IT had of support. Any ageing IT estate poses been outsourced including most of its ▌A. We had four things to a potential risk to business operations people, the buildings, the machines balance and any of the four by and so we deliberately used the and all the applications. There was themselves were big asks. term Get Safe to help the rest of the a view, which was pretty common business understand the need to invest at the time, that having outsourced The first priority was to rebuild in our physical IT assets, like they had the IT you could outsource the risk. the IT function itself. At that time, to do with engineering systems for mail the application landscape was 388 sorting operations in the mail centres. ▌Q. How were the IT outsourcing systems, but it took us about four arrangements being managed? months to find that figure out since The third task in 2011 was that the nobody had a complete picture. major service contract with our ▌A. Often when companies go through Therefore, one of the immediate incumbent supplier at the time was a major outsource programme, they business needs was to get a clearer scheduled to finish two years later will put a great deal of care into the idea of the landscape itself. The annual in 2013. The business had not even started to think about what would be the desired shape of any replacement contract or set of contracts. At the Since the core operations systems were inherently time, as a publicly-owned body resilient, it had given the business an inaccurate belief we also needed to go though the government procurement process, in the resilience and the robustness of information OJEU (Official Journal of the European technology systems. Community) which itself can be a time 3 consuming process. For these reasons, we decided to extend the existing contract by two years to give us time to decide on what we wanted to do in the longer term. And fourthly, the UK coalition government had already stated its intention to privatise the RMG business. We knew that by early 2012, the Royal Mail would need to have built a long-term strategy to make the business more attractive to institutional and private investors. This meant IT needed to work more closely with the business and become more customer- centric, offering more products and services, and start to move the dial rapidly in terms of what Royal Mail was capable of doing. We deliberately used the term Get Safe to help the rest of the business understand the need to invest in our physical IT assets. ▌Q. What problems did you face in bringing about these 350 people. In fact, we ended up hiring So instead, we worked out that there transformational changes in an more than that number because as were 67 critical roles which needed to organisation like Royal Mail? we went on, we realised we needed be filled almost immediately. These more people. Incredibly, we received 67 roles would give us sufficient ▌A. We had to keep the business more than 33,000 applications for the head room to be able to launch a full transformation relevant and interesting 240 positions, which is by any odds recruitment drive. We met with several for our own people while at the same just amazing. consultancies and told them that if time, organising a rapid programme they were interested in providing any to hire additional people. For both ▌Q. How did you do it from a of these roles, we would need to keep groups, we had the same story: that crawl, walk and run perspective? their people anywhere between six together with them we were going to and twelve months, but while their rebuild and transform an IT function. ▌A. We could not wait for the consultants were here, they had to That is pretty exciting for IT people. recruitment process to be fully up work for us and have our badge. and running because it would slow At the end of my sixth month here, I us down. As a business, we also could The second part was equally got sign-off from the board to grow not afford to get external consultants as important. There were 119 people the internal IT function from 119 to to come in and do all this work for us. internally who had each been through 4 EXECUTIVE INSIGHTS ON APPLICATION LANDSCAPE MANAGEMENT CATHERINE DORAN difficult circumstances over a long 100 contractors and 2,000 people who our business partners since if you are period of time. We needed to make we were working with from third- sitting in one of our offices anywhere sure everyone understood what we parties, then we would end up with in the country, we all need to work were doing, why we were doing it, and some form of organisational culture.