The CIO 'born and bred' in the IT department
Published: 18 Aug 2005 15:50 BST
Peter Dew's background
Dew has worked at BOC for the last 21 years, working his way up from project manager to CIO. "I'm one of the very few people who've been born and bred, and come through the ranks of the IT organisation to be CIO. This makes me unique among my peer group of FTSE 100 company CIOs," says Dew.
After he completed a computer science degree in the UK, Dew decided to move to South Africa. "I'm not a great fan of living in the UK so when I had the opportunity I went to live in South Africa," he says. It was not long after he arrived there that he was recruited to work for Afrox, a South African subsidiary of BOC.
"I joined Afrox as an overrated project manager — I was taken on in a role that was five years ahead of my capability," he says.
He worked there for six years as a project manager, systems development manager and finally as a departmental manager. In 1991, at the age of 31, he was asked to take on the role of systems development manager in the UK, managing a department of around 90 people.
"When I greeted the room just about everyone was older than me," he says, describing his first day in his new role. "The IT department had become disconnected from the business — it had its own strategy not linked to business strategy and was a little too expensive."
Only a couple of years after starting this role he was asked by the Australian business to direct a project to implement SAP across Australia and New Zealand. After the project he stayed on until 1998 when the CIO of the BOC Group resigned. He was offered this role, which he accepted on the condition that he was given the remit to bring together the IT departments across the organisation — at the time much of BOC's infrastructure was fragmented, with countries independently managing disparate networks and systems.
Dew has pursued this vision since 1998. Today, BOC runs a standard version of SAP in its global data centre that supports most of the organisation's worldwide SAP work. It has a telecoms network that spans all operations worldwide and uses offshore partners to provide IT services as well as using the technical skills of its employees in its global centres of excellence in South Africa and Australia.
Through these measures the organisation has reduced its global spending on IT, including a halving in staff numbers, from between 850 and 900 full-time employees in 1998 to around 400 in 2005
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