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On the Outside - Christian Torkington

Christian Torkington | Monday August 11, 2008



Christian Torkington is Managing Director of Operations of Scottish Widows. He joined Scottish Widows as IT Director at the end of July 2004. He has responsibility for strategy, planning, development and delivery for all IT-based services.
Before joining Scottish Widows, Christian was Chief Executive of Rural Regeneration Cumbria, England's first rural regeneration company. Prior to this, he held a number of senior positions in IT and Operations in Barclays. He is a chartered accountant and was a management consultant before joining Barclays.

Hi-Tech Scotland (HTS): Describe your current role.
Christian Torkington (CT): I’m Managing Director of Operations for Scottish Widows – the board director with responsibility for “everything south of a sale”. I’m ultimately responsible for servicing the customer throughout the lifetime of their relationship with Scottish Widows. This means running the customer service, back office administration, including all the IT operations and technical aspects of change programmes, not mentioning our premises, supply chain and security.

HTS: When and why did you decide to pursue a career in IT?
CT: Actually, a career in IT pursued me rather than the other way around! That’s probably characteristic of a lot of people my age who work in IT. I’m a qualified chartered accountant and have also worked as a management consultant in large change programme management. IT was always a fairly large component of that work.
About 12 years ago, while working as a consultant, I was headhunted by Barclays, where I became involved more closely with the technology side of business. The ongoing challenge of getting people, technology and organisational systems to work together effectively is the part that I enjoy most.

HTS: Are there any particular challenges to implementing ICT solutions in a financial services environment?
CT: ICT is absolutely mission critical to any modern financial services company. Technology is pervasive in this industry to the extent that there aren’t any financial services products I can think of that could be delivered without the use of technology. In fact, more often than not, the product is completely embedded within the IT solution.
Most financial services organisations are pretty large scale which, in turn, means that, traditionally, technology projects have tended to be large scale too. However, in recent years, I’ve seen a move away from large, sweeping technology investments towards a more focused approach on ICT-enabled projects and programmes that deliver strong business benefits. The key challenge for the modern IT manager has become delivering a robust architecture while managing investment budgets carefully to deliver the maximum business benefits.

HTS: In your experience, what are the worst mistakes an ICT salesperson can make during a pitch?
CT: I can remember attending an account management training course years ago where the speaker said you should never, ever use the phrase: ‘What do I need to do to win your business?’ The funny thing was that I knew for a fact that the colleague sitting next to me said that all the time.
The main thing that I’ve noticed over the years is that the best IT salespeople are great listeners, rather than great talkers. Those that take the time to build up a relationship and truly understand their client’s business are always the ones who come out on top.

HTS: Professionally speaking, what are the big issues you face in 2008 and beyond?
CT: There are some that are very unique to our industry. For example, a lot of the shifts in the value chain right now are drawing us to look at improving our distribution platform and the tools we use to collaborate with distributors.
Then, much like everyone else, we’re under constant pressure to do more for less, and we’re driving forward with a number of projects looking at automating certain business processes.
We also have the ongoing challenge of phasing out some of the legacy systems that have accumulated in the organisation over years.

HTS: What types of technology do you think will prove most important over the next 5 years?
CT: The pace of technological change doesn’t really dictate the pace of change within a large organisation so I think a lot of the same technologies that we’re using at the moment will continue to be important.
Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) is something that everyone is talking about but few people are doing successfully at the moment. Likewise, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) continues to be a set of technologies that everyone wants, but few do well. So, in the short term, it will really be a case of which companies can improve most in utilising the technologies we already have.
More broadly, I think concepts like grid computing will grow in global importance, but that sort of thing has limited relevance to my industry at the moment.
One trend that I’ve noticed in recent years is the growing level of “technological expectation” from the young people now entering the world of work. Increasingly, these younger members of staff are experiencing a gulf in usability between the applications and interfaces they experience at home and the environments they’re forced to work with in the workplace. That will create some interesting issues over the next few years, particularly as the need for heightened data security may start to restrict the ways in which individual staff members are allowed to access and use technology resources at work.

www.scottishwidows.co.uk

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