Tuesday 12 November 2013

BP CIO

Interview with global CIO of BP, Dana Deasy.
Huge operation, budget of $3bn.
20,000 IT staff in 50 countries.

Really interesting interview. Just jotted a few notes down that resonated with me.

Radical changes, new people brought in with new skills. Biggest change is that BP has moved from trying to cut cost in IT, to spending more. Business is pushing IT, rather than pushing away from it.

Important that no matter how much change you want to implement, you have get the basic IT right.

Cyber threat very important to them, 40% of all attacks are in the energy sector. Organised crime, state sponsored activity, very well organised and sophisticated. Don't always know what they're after. Risk is a part of the weekly agenda.
Big debate at moment is locking down of personal devices. Balance between flexibility and freedom and protecting the firm.

Most IT organisations have sophisticated service stacks, data centres, networks, applications, all with service levels etc. Now need to flip it and move to business outcomes. SLAs are different. Eg Not based on "uptime", but based on whether outcomes have been met. IT professionals have to be able to see services end to end, not just know or understand their bit of the stack. It's not about network availability, or storage, it's about meeting business objectives. Need a radical change of culture. Need people who are business savvy, and technical enough to talk to technical IT people.

HPC very important to them. 4th largest HPC centre in world. Memory measured in petabytes. Analysis of seismic readings requires a lot of compute power.

Huge advocate of getting to know your peers in industry. Eyeopening and sometimes humbling. Only 50% of CIOs in audience regularly network with their peers. Including me of course :-)

Moving to a new role in banking soon. Most important legacy for him to leave behind? "Have I left a sustained talent base and delivered leaders for tomorrow?"


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