Two extracts from the CIOs featured in the CIO article.
Craig Walker, VP and global CIO, Shell Downstream
Shell Downstream’s VP and global CIO Craig Walker has helped the organisation along its digital journey, and he sees business models, customer connectivity, innovation and digitisation as the main accelerators for change.
“Our history for 100 or more years has been oil and gas, predominantly oil in the early days and then far more gas business,” Walker said. “But these days, we’re very much moving to be an energy business.
In an interview with CIO UK earlier this year, Walker explained how the future of Shell will be driven by emerging technologies such as blockchain and autonomous vehicles.
“We are transforming from moving molecules to moving electrons,” he added. “And that business is all driven by IT. We are in the process of using digital technology to create business models we have not yet invented.”
Clare Patterson, CIO, Shell Energy
Innovation is highly important for Shell Energy’s international trading and supply CIO Clare Patterson. In fact, Patterson has made some big investments taking on emerging technologies such as AI, machine learning and robotics processing over the past year.
“Having a computer science background and being more of an analytical person, the technology side of the transformation is the bit where I’m probably most comfortable,” Patterson said speaking at the 2019 CIO Summit. “It’s measurable, and you can plan it.”
With teams in Australia, Singapore, Japan, China, India, Dubai, London and Houston, Patterson has also been making equal efforts to drive staffing innovation across the organisation.
According to Patterson, one of the biggest successes of 2018 was moving away from project delivery to product-based teams. The result of assigning product owners and aligning IT teams with product delivery teams includes a reduction in release times and ticket backlogs.
“If you want to make changes, you do need to start from the leaders,” she explained. “With Shell Energy’s leadership team, we first got the training in the outward mindset and it was by humbly explaining the issues that we had, the mistakes we were making, that we could help other people have the confidence to pick up some of these ways of working.”
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