The McCue Interview: Manpower global CIO, Rick Davidson

Rick Davidson is a very busy man. As global CIO of recruitment and staffing agency Manpower, he spends most of his time on the road and in the air, visiting local operations in each of the 72 countries the company has a presence in.

Right now he's on a brief trip to London to catch up with what's going on in the UK, having just got in from Germany, and later in the day will board a flight back to his Milwaukee base in the US.

Over an early morning breakfast at a faceless hotel opposite London's Heathrow airport, Davidson accepts that this lifestyle comes with the job.

He says: "It requires a lot of travel, a lot of late-night meetings, phone calls, early morning meetings. Any CIO that works in a global organisation of significant size pretty much is on call 24/7. It's just the nature of the job. It never really stops, the world doesn't sleep so there's always something going on in some country around the world and we've got to be there and be ready as issues come up to address it."

It's been like that since he joined Manpower as CIO back in 2003, the year the CEO made a root-and-branch overhaul of the company's IT operations one of five key strategic initiatives for the business.

He explains: "We had IT operating in 64 countries around the world, each of them autonomous, so we didn't have a single IT group, we really had 64 independent IT operations and each of them pursuing their own agendas more or less to support the countries that they operate in."

The difficulty for a company like Manpower was that it needed the efficiencies and savings that result from global standard IT systems while still retaining enough flexibility and agility to move swiftly in the local markets.

Davidson says: "One of the decisions we made early on was to leverage the strength of having local IT but build a global IT organisation too but the balance constantly moves. The line separating global and local is not really a defined line, it's rather broad."

But that still left the not insignificant issue of the IT sprawl across the company's 4,300 offices worldwide. Some 600 unique applications were used throughout the business, and most countries had their own data centre and network connecting branches to each other and to the head office.

Davidson's response was to pull together a team of 40 business and IT leaders from Manpower's operations around the world to develop a three-year plan for overhauling the company's IT operations. This included looking at data centres, headcount and spending and putting together a definitive audit of Manpower's position in 2003.

The next step was defining what could be standardised by looking at all the different business processes across the group to see what was common. Davidson admits this was a huge challenge.

He explains: "When you bring together different countries, different languages, different cultures, it takes a long time to get agreement on what the business processes are because things like 'customer' and 'client' all mean different things in different countries."

It was also important for Davidson to seek the active involvement of the business mangers in the local operations and break down the traditional suspicion of central IT that pervades many large companies.

Davidson says: "One of the things we did early on was go out and meet with the business leaders and in doing that you start to develop trust with each other because you sit down, you break bread together, you know each other, you express a real interest in what's going on in their business."

The result was a federated IT structure with a mix of functions managed locally - such as end-user, PC and application support - combined with standard platforms for various financial, front-office and ecommerce systems.

Davidson says, as a result of the changes, he is already 80 per cent of the way toward the company's goal of a 10 to 15 per cent reduction in total IT spend; his current budget is around $275m with a headcount of 1,200. But he admits that changing the business processes is the hardest part of executing a plan like this.

He says: "Getting people to change the way they work - that's the hard part. The technology is probably pretty straightforward. It's always about getting people to change behaviours. That's where an effective CIO will shine if they are able to change the way people behave and change business processes."

Understanding how the business works is vital for Davidson. Although he comes from an electrical engineering background, he has held a wide variety of both business and IT positions at companies such as Revlon and Whirlpool as well as at consultancies. He reckons he has spent about a third of his career in 'the business' and the rest in IT - and doesn't hesitate when asked where he wants to go next.

"I want to get back into the business. I've been working in IT for some time now. The best business leaders of the future are going to have a strong awareness of what IT is and what it can do. Where I go in the future is probably back into a business role."

His advice for fellow CIOs, IT directors and IT managers wanting to make that same leap across to wider business roles is simple. "Get out of your office and go spend time with the business leaders, go spend time with the clients or customers. Even if you're unsuccessful in terms of getting into the business you are going to be much more effective as an IT person."

Despite his hectic schedule, endless travelling and family responsibilities, Davidson finds time to let off steam by - bizarrely for someone who spends so much time on commercial airplanes - flying an aerobatic stunt plane.

He says: "People need to have a passion outside of work. Flying is that for me. It's easy to get consumed by work."

Which means Davidson can often be found in the cockpit of his 220 miles-per-hour Pitts S2C plane doing tumbles - that's forward rolls to you and me - and other death-defying stunts.

"When I'm doing tumbles," he says, "or finish a hammerhead - where you pitch up and then come back down accelerating straight down at the ground at 180mph - you're really focused, so you're not thinking about work at that moment and it's also a lot of fun."

Davidson readily admits to being something of an "overachiever" - he's fluent in French and Spanish, and plays jazz guitar for relaxation. Extreme as it may seem to others, Davidson says it is all about achieving the right balance between work and play.

"For us to be balanced we need to do things that nourish our soul," he says.