Talking innovation

Neil Cameron is a 30-year veteran of the IT industry, who joined Unilever in July 2003 from Diageo PLC where he was also CIO. What made them decide on him? “Well, they realized that while they’d addressed the issue of disengagement, they had no calibration of how well they were doing, no sense of what was best practice or how to drive it,” he states. “They failed to engage the total IT organization, because they were led by a non-IT person.” It was this combination of events that led to the decision to look further for talent. Despite his IT-based background, Cameron obviously has a keen grasp of the business side of his work, making him an ideal candidate.

The main difference between Cameron and previous CIOs at Unilever was – predictably – his attitude towards IT. "I was less precious about IT than they had been. Unless you’re experienced in IT, you’re not too sure what you can change without disrupting everything else. Previously there was always nervousness about driving too much change into IT, but I’m more confident in what I can do because I’m not worried about it collapsing under my feet.”

Cameron is lucky not to operate under the constant disquiet of what he can or can’t do with his technology. So where do the pressures of his job come from? “I’m fortunate it’s not things like day-to-day service issues. I’ve got capable people all around the world to worry about all that on my behalf. The only time I hear about something at item level is when a senior person happens to have my number on quick-dial on their mobile, but that will never change! You get budget pressure once a year when you set your budget, then every quarter when you review your results.” Cameron spends the majority of his time building relationships around the organisation: clarifying priorities and the department’s focus. He also spends an increasing amount of time stimulating how Unilever can move forward into different areas and add new and diverse value: an important way for any CIO to spend their days.

Time management

Although he is often out and about, Cameron says he still probably spends too much time in the office: a challenge of getting the balance right that we can all relate to. Unilever operates in over a hundred countries, so when he is mobile, how does he manage to fit everybody in? “I can’t meet everyone face to face. I would just spend all my time on airplanes and that’s not good for anybody. But we’re implementing new live meeting technology and collaboration software, so you can start to connect with people.”

Cameron also reaches out to his staff in other innovative ways: he has recently completed a video celebrating all the things Unilever IT achieved last year. He also mentions the IT Awards that he sponsors, which are given out at programmes worldwide. He visits the programmes for the awards ceremonies and speeches, goes out for dinner and celebrates with his staff. As he puts it: “You’re just out there, trying to be part of everything, trying to give a bit of leadership.”

So how often does leadership come into his role as CIO? “Leadership is lots of things,” he says. “You have to own the vision, you have to stand for something, you have to make it through the tough times, you have to be visible, you have to be accountable. People have to see what you stand for, they must trust and believe in you, even if they don’t like what you’re doing (as that’s not always possible). You have to be authentic about what you believe in. That’s just part of the job.”

Beyond leadership

Cameron explains that Unilever has a “strategy-into-action” process, which starts with the Unilever vision and their “must-win battle”. They set out five major areas that they need to become distinctive in the next five to 10 years. Each area is broken down into business-led strategic goals. Every individual in Cameron’s organization knows which of the strategic actions IT are taking, which one their activity is lined up to, and how that aligns with strategic goals and Unilever’s “must-win battle”. A clear line of sight for all employees is imperative. Cameron budgets for infrastructure and sets tough targets reducing annual unit costs. Then he makes sure he’s spending the majority of his money against the strategic actions defined as a function of the biggest goals of the company.

Embracing the future

Coming from an IT background, does this put Cameron as CIO (and Unilever under his leadership) in a better situation to embrace new technologies? Is there enough recognition of advanced technologies, or does enterprise still see it as a cost? “It’s a mixed bag,” explains Cameron. “Traditional IT-run projects concern technology, people and information processes. There are tight controls around that, good rigour and good governance: as a business, you couldn’t make decisions on an act-of-faith basis. Now there are different ways of accessing technology and information, illustrated by the advent of multi-user collaborations like YouTube, mashups, wikis. The rate of change is so fast you can’t implement the same kind of structure around it anymore. We’ve got to find a way of being schizophrenic and see how to measure value, because it will be different.”

Historically, the ROI from Unilever’s large-scale technological investments was easy to determine. They derived value from big programmes that created the business infrastructure for their supply chain, selling operations and financial management systems. The goal was to standardise them throughout every business in every country. Once the organisation was simplified, understanding of the company increased and they were better equipped to make decisions.

Once they could examine their supply chain, it became apparent what Unilever should keep in-house, what they should outsource to parties. In some cases they moved production east to keep costs down, but as Cameron points out, “once you’ve done that, you’ve had your return, and you become in danger of trying to build a better mousetrap.” Instead, Unilever are trying to find value in different places.

Standardised approaches are also the way Cameron wants IT to develop. In the past, he says, IT was guilty of being too complicated in how it did things, meaning things became very difficult to change after the fact; essentially “pouring concrete into your business if you weren’t careful”, as he explained. “So we want standardised approaches. We don’t want a million different ways of doing something. We have a mission statement; rather than efficiency, we want to move to growth. IT in Unilever – not unusually in CPG and many other businesses – has been focused on driving efficiency and taking cost out. We want to shift that focus to growth, which is much harder. If you do it well and achieve success it’s much more important.”

Cameron’s targets are shifting focus to gradual growth, simplification and standardisation. With a clear architecture and sets of strategic partners, he is confident they will get there.

How do you choose strategic partners from the hundreds of potentials on offer when your organisation is as large as Unilever? Recently, they have done extensive simplification work in this area. “You just can’t work with everybody anymore. It’s too complicated. We don’t invent anything inside Unilever IT anymore: we bring the outside in. I don’t design SAP, I buy SAP, and then I configure it to fit my business. In fact we don’t write anything from scratch anymore,” he ruminates. “Part of the simplification decision was informed by our view that the world is changing, there are going to be fewer and fewer big guys; you can see that with Oracle buying everybody. We focused down to a small number of strategic suppliers and we call that our eco-system. We will work with those suppliers – SAP, Microsoft, BT, HP – and get them to work together, so we don’t have to organise integration of their products.”

From that perspective, choosing these partners seems straightforward. Cameron’s strategic supplier organization is linked to and part of his PTO organisation and it is, as he puts it, managed “very carefully. We do quarterly reviews on their progress, we scorecard them and have rigorous conversations questioning whether they are delivering what we’d expect them to deliver as a strategic partner. It pays huge dividends for us: it works, they love it as there’s nothing nicer than being told you are genuinely a strategic partner, and they lose the overhead of selling. We don’t have salesman from those companies coming to sell to us, because we’ve already agreed that – when it adds value to our business – we will use their product.” The problem for Cameron then becomes telling other companies that they are not strategic for Unilever. How can he keep the hundreds of companies motivated to work with him, when he has told them they are not strategic?

According to Cameron, it’s a good challenge to face. “How do we deal with that? We’re just very honest. My view in life is that actually, honesty is the best policy, because ultimately people start to believe you when you tell them things. As an organisation that’s what we try to do with our suppliers: just tell them the truth. I genuinely think when you tell somebody the truth, even if they don’t like it they will give you credit for telling them. At least it’s clear for them; they know what the situation really is, so it plays out. At the end of the day you’re dealing with human beings.”

It’s a commendable attitude in a world where integrity can become submerged beneath profit margins. At C-level, it can be difficult to balance the human side with the business requirements of your role. But Unilever’s CIO seems to have got the mix just right.