Interview: Rackspace EMEA CTO on why it pays to put people at the heart of IT transformation

Received wisdom dictates that the success of any digital transformation rests on the ability of organisations to address three core areas – people, process and technology.

The technology and process parts of this equation are often referred to as easiest to address because people, in short, are unpredictable, particularly when it comes to how they accept and respond to changes in their environment.

How they react often comes down to how the transformation is pitched to them in the first place by senior management, says Lee James, CTO for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) at Rackspace, talking to Computer Weekly during a recent visit to the company’s UK headquarters in Hayes, west London.  

For instance, it is easier to secure buy-in and support from people if digital transformation is being presented as something they will be actively involved in, rather than a process they will be subjected to, says James.

“With any transformation, it can sometimes feel like it is being done to you, rather than with you, so it is important to make people aware of what the aims of the transformation are, what they will get out of it and what the customer benefits will be,” he says.

And with the right messaging and communication, organisations stand a better chance of having employees who are engaged and enthused by what is going on around them, he continues – but the language used needs to be inclusive right from the start. 

“You have to set out your intent, saying this is what we are going to achieve as a team,” he says. “Here are the business benefits, and the organisational benefits too. This is what we are going to become and this is what we are going to achieve as a team – together.” 

This is important messaging to get right, because employees are often the CIO’s greatest allies when it comes to securing the support of team members who may be more sceptical or unsure of the direction the company is heading. 

“That’s what you have to remember about digital transformation,” says James. “It’s not ‘have I got the right people [to do it]?’, but ‘how will we bring everyone along the journey as part of this transformation?’. Because these are the people who are going to be your promoters, as well as your detractors.”

“It is important to make people aware of what the aims of the transformation are, what they will get out of it and what the customer benefits will be”

Lee James, Rackspace

James joined Rackspace as EMEA CTO in mid-2017 from IT services company Computacenter. During his tenure there, he helped the firm’s enterprise customers with their cloud migrations in his role as group services development director.

James has also spent a fair amount of his 21-year tech career working on the user side of the fence at some of the world’s largest and best-known enterprises, including oil and gas giant BP, where he was involved in a $600m datacentre consolidation project, and pharmaceutical behemoth GSK. He also spent a couple of years at online betting company Betfair before switching to the supplier side.

“I had a really great time at BP and saw parts of the world I never thought I would, and worked on some amazing projects,” he says. “Then I turned up at Betfair, which was kind of like this little startup [by comparison].

“I went from an organisation with 100,000 people in defined structures to a company with 1,000 people delivering this online gaming product.”

It is fair to say these experiences have all served to shape and inform James’ own views on what it takes to create and maintain a supportive and collaborative culture, and why it is so important to give people the right tools to deliver a top-quality digital product.

“I interviewed a software developer to come and work for my team at Betfair and we sat down, did the ‘how are yous’ and everything else, and he said, ‘What laptop will I get? Will I get an iMac?’ And I remember sitting there thinking, ‘That’s bold in an interview’,” he says.

James says his response was non-committal enough to prompt the interviewee to state that if his request for an iMac was denied, he would not be coming to work for the firm, but, in hindsight, James understands why this prospective employee was so insistent on it.

“Inwardly, I was quite shocked at the time, but really what he was saying was ‘these are the tools that help me work the best’, and I thought it was amazing that someone was so passionate about it. So we made it one of our criteria for hiring,” he says.

“I always remember that interview. We can’t give people everything they want, as much as I would like to, but where we can, we get a brilliant software developer and an engaged person too.”