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The McCue Interview: Claire Hamon, CIO, Rok Group
The rugby-playing tech chief on her route to the top…

By Andy McCue

Published: Tuesday 13 May 2008

Whether at work or play Claire Hamon, CIO of construction company Rok Group, isn't one to shy away from or shirk a challenge.

On route to the top of her profession she has successfully tackled some massive IT-based change management programmes in both the private and public sector but out of the office she can also be found charging towards the try line or making crunching tackles for her local rugby team.

Hamon is quick to draw parallels between her two passions. "What I do know is that when the whistle blows I run towards the ball not away from it," she says.

Hamon joined Rok last autumn, where she sits on the executive committee. Construction isn't an industry noted for its heavy reliance on technology but she says her priority is to develop an IT strategy and build a team that will support the company's ambitious growth plans and frequent acquisitions over the next three or four years - the target is to double company turnover to £2bn and increase headcount from 5,000 to 20,000.

The key to this, she says, is enabling more sharing and better use of information - an asset as valuable as a tangible, physical building.

She says: "The focus in the first instance is about getting stability in the core platforms and building from there. I've refocused the team around having a strategic perspective. And the great thing is we've got the skills in my team now and we are developing the skills around the business analysis piece - what we in IT would term as business process re-engineering."

In practical terms this currently translates into what is core and what is not for Hamon and her team and managing the "tin and wires" is clearly not core, she says, and Rok has just put out an initial request for proposals for outsourcing data centre support.

"I'd like my teams to be focusing on core business application development, supporting the customers, working very closely with our business customers rather than sitting in a room with some machinery," she says.

One of the themes that runs throughout Hamon's career is managing large-scale change. Early on in her career after joining what was then Lloyds bank she initiated and ran the bank's Y2K programme - a mammoth 800 man year project covering 29 UK and 21 international subsidiaries.

The key to that was people and stakeholder management rather than technology and Hamon says it was a project that enabled her to move out of pure IT into a more corporate role.

"I mean it's core - we were looking at systems - but actually my role was very much around facilitating conversations and ensuring that the right people were speaking together and setting the governance framework in place," she explains.

One of the most important skills there was influencing. "The success of that venture was entirely driven by my ability to recognise I could influence but could not direct. At the end of the day the managing director for Lloyds Abbey Life knew a lot more about his business than I did so the notion that I could somehow tell him what to do was farcical."

After that she headed up project delivery for the bank's retail ecommerce business at the height of the dot com boom as well as a special project looking at the future of the financial services industry for the bank.

While at Lloyds Hamon studied part-time for an MBA at Bath University, specialising in change management, and after having her second child decided she wanted a new challenge and when the headhunters came calling she jumped at the chance to become CIO of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).

As part of a massive department-wide change programme Hamon was responsible for developing a national case management system used by around 7,000 people within the CPS.

Behind the success, Hamon says, was a strong and "morally motivated" team of around 100 people, combined with clear organisational boundaries and strong leadership by the director of public prosecutions.

"It was such a strong team, such a fun team. Together we did some remarkable things."

But Hamon admits those clear boundaries, strategic accountability, stewardship and delivery responsibility are not as easy for some of the larger government departments.

"I think there is still a lot of bureaucracy still in government. I think the alignment between the vision and the ambition of the politician and the delivery capability of his department may be a mismatch."

Hamon says her private sector background also helped her at the CPS. "I fitted in the CPS because I absolutely didn't fit," she says.

Although Hamon now has a business-focused role as CIO at Rok she started out as a techie, studying computing at the London Computer Electronic School and working in mainframe and PC programming in her early days.

But she believes today's computing education is failing to prepare young people for careers in the technology profession and warns there is a fundamental disconnect between the education and the business need.

The big problem, she says, is the gap between the overly technical computer science courses and the very basic computing education.

"The things that my children are learning at school with technology are around how to use Excel. Well they're doing that at home. We're teaching people how to use a computer but we're not teaching people how to get the value out of being able to use a computer," she says.

Hamon is in favour of a more practical hands-on and vocational mini-MBA type computing qualification which, as well as covering the fundamentals of how a computer works - binary and the underlying principles in the machinery - also covers the interaction between computers and people, change management and business benefits.

Enjoying work and having fun doing it is obviously important to Hamon and it is something that carries across to her life outside of the office.

After the slog of completing her MBA four years ago and the many weekends holed up studying she took up rugby with her local women's team to fill the gap and found she loved the physicality and aggression of the game.

Undaunted by taking a punch in the eye in one of her first games Hamon - who claims she has good hands and is quite fast but admits being a "terrible kicker" - became the team's top try scorer a couple of years ago. She prefers being a winger but normally finds herself playing full back.

"The other thing it did, which I didn't expect, is it created some common ground between me and a predominantly male community and that's quite important," she says.

As for the future, Hamon is clear that she wants to continue along the CIO path wherever she can make a difference, add value - and have fun.

"What I now know is the bit of the job I enjoy most is around the executive leadership, so working as part of that broader team making sure the IT delivery is part of something more than just technology and I laugh out loud at work and that's really important."