McCue Interview: Norwich Union CIO Alex Robinson

When we talk about the 'bilingual CIO' it usually means someone who can talk the language of business and technology. Alex Robinson, CIO at Norwich Union, however, is a literally bilingual CIO - fluent in English and French, pretty good at Russian and with a smattering of Finnish, Norwegian, German and Spanish thrown in for good measure.

The languages come in handy working for Aviva - the parent of better-known insurance brand Norwich Union. Robinson also sits as a non-exec on the supervisory group of Aviva Russia, a new small start-up business in the life and savings sector there.

Back in his CIO day job Robinson is responsible for the UK IT operations of Aviva, through Norwich Union - an annual budget of around £500m covering some 37,000 desktop PCs, 14,000 laptops, 3,200 servers, six IBM mainframes, 800TB of data across 140 UK sites and nine offshore sites in India. Running those operations is an in-house IT department of around 1,900 staff alongside 2,000 outsourced staff, with most of those based offshore in India.

By the end of this year Robinson says between 40 and 50 per cent of Norwich Union's IT will be offshore and, in certain areas such as application development, that will be closer to 70 per cent.

It was the company's decision to outsource more IT work offshore to India last year that saw Norwich Union hit the headlines, with trade union Amicus calling the cuts "brutal". But it is a decision Robinson still stands by and believes is crucial to the future of the company.

He says: "There is a labour cost differential - the Indian work is cheaper. The other advantage, and the one that persists almost irrespective of where labour costs go, is the flexibility we get from tapping into the offshore workforce and the offshore suppliers. We can ramp up or ramp down the work that's going on with those companies in a reasonably quick and easy way."

In terms of the future of India as a location for IT services Robinson believes the pure cost advantage won't last forever.

He says: "I can see labour costs rising in India and as that happens that labour cost differential advantage diminishes. I'm estimating we might have eight to 10 years of material labour cost advantage offshore. In time the differential will diminish to being reasonably insignificant but we think India will continue to be for some time the best place to get the range of skills we need - both legacy skills and emerging skills as well."

The offshore outsourcing decision was one of the topics Robinson discussed on his daily internal blog, communicating with staff how he felt about it and why it mattered to the organisation. He started the blog - now read by 4,000 staff - almost two years ago and devotes at least half an hour each day to entries that range from more formal topics, right through to domestic anecdotes about broken kettles.

Robinson says: "It's a very personal document, it's not something written for me by the corporate communications team. What I'm trying to do with it is just open up. It's opened up a channel of communication for me, and actually I think for the whole IT organisation, that is of great value."

Alongside outsourcing, simplification is a big theme for IT at Norwich Union as part of companywide plans to slash £250m off total operating costs of £2bn by the end of the year. An 18-month project in the general insurance business has just halved the legacy estate by switching off 700 legacy systems. Similar work is ongoing in the life assurance and savings business.

The business context to this is that Norwich Union is currently in what Robinson calls the "down slope" of the cyclical insurance sector, with fierce competition putting pressure on the company's cost base and profit margins.

He says: "A large proportion of costs ultimately need to be variable so what I want to do is make sure we know what the bottom limit of our in-house capability is and try not to go below that in terms of losing skills, competence and knowledge. When we are investing we will want to layer on but probably from outside."

In financial services, probably more than any other sector, the internet has had a huge impact on the customer relationship and Norwich Union is no different - with lots of activity around internet-based trading and customer self-service.

He says: "The penetration of broadband has, I think, fundamentally changed the way a lot of people interact with financial services companies. The internet is seen as probably the quickest and easiest and most convenient way for customers to interact with companies like ours. In certain classes of business, like motor insurance, we have seen internet business has overtaken call centre business."

The motor insurance business has also seen other innovations, such as the company's GPS satellite-based navigation technology to track cars as part of a new pay-as-you-drive insurance scheme which could lower premiums for many drivers. Robinson says the use of mobile technology not only benefits customers but also helps Norwich Union gather more accurate and detailed data.

He says: "For a fleet of vehicles, for example, if you've got the means to capture data about those vehicles your view of your risk profile becomes much richer. Innovation around data is also important. We run some very big databases and we're always looking at how we can extract value from that data."

Robinson is also looking at the potential of collaborative web 2.0 technologies to add value to Norwich Union's products.

He adds: "I'm sure there's an opportunity there somewhere in what can be done with web 2.0 technologies, particularly user-collaborative tools to involve customers in interactions."

Robinson's rise through the ranks at Norwich Union has been remarkable. As with many who work in IT, he confesses to getting into the profession by accident after graduating from Oxford University with a degree in French and Russian. A short spell in marketing for The Observer newspaper convinced him selling wasn't going to be his career, while a subsequent stint at freelance writing also proved unsuccessful.

It was a Manpower Services Commission training scheme in computer programming that finally got Robinson into IT. "That was the turning point career-wise. I enjoyed it. It was vibrant, exciting and intellectually stimulating," he says.

After a couple of years at Leicestershire County Council as a programmer he relocated to Norfolk with his family and joined Norwich Union as a systems analyst in 1989, rising to the position of IT director in 1999 and then CIO, via a spell out of IT as a project manager working on big business change projects.

Robinson has also racked up experience through several non-executive positions both inside and outside of Norwich Union over the years. As well as the Aviva Russia position he's just finished a spell on the board of Aviva Canada and sits as chairman on the insurance industry-owned software and data standards group Polaris.

He tells silicon.com: "Having non-exec positions gives you the chance to develop - you learn things - but also it allows you to spread knowledge."

But ultimately Robinson still believes it's essential for a CIO to have a good understanding of IT.

Robinson says: "I don't feel I could do my job without understanding the broad basics of how technology works, what it's like developing a system and what it's like working on a project. I've seen how it works, I've sat next to the guys running the machines and watched the programmes compiled right through to doing the flow-charts for systems design."