Mary Hensher, CIO for professional services firm Deloitte in the UK, is refreshingly straightforward about the role of IT in an organisation. “My job is constantly reviewing the firm’s IT cost base, and building on business continuity plans and security,” she says. But when it comes to new ideas and implementing strategic business models she believes the CIO has a central role to play.
“Nobody has a monopoly on good ideas, and the CIO is often in a central position where they have a broader sight of where business processes need to be improved, than other senior executives,” she says. “The CIO should be ideally placed to harness the creative ideas from the best people in their business and bring them together to create efficient business models.
Hensher’s rise to the top of Deloitte began with what at the time was quite a conventional career path. In the 1980s large numbers of programmers were needed by business, and many people with language skills went into it, especially women. “It was a logical route into IT at the time, but now it doesn’t happen so much because programming is much easier,” she says. Hensher was a languages graduate, studying French and Russian at Cambridge. As well as her three-year degree she completed a numeracy course covering maths and computer skills aimed at arts graduates. “This sparked my interest in computing, and I went on to become a trainee programmer at KPMG.”
She thinks the languages route into IT was a good one, and doesn’t believe IT degrees are really worth that much in the real world. “IT is not about programming now, that viewpoint has to be modernised. It is about how many things can you do at once. It is a specialist skill and is not about technology, it is about people.”
Hensher left KPMG in 1999 to move to Deloitte as IT director. By 2002 she was leading the IT integration of 3,500 Andersen partners and employees into the firm, joining Deloitte’s 6,500 people and IT systems literally overnight, including the IT departments of both firms.
About Deloitte
Deloitte is one of the UK’s leading professional services firms, providing audit, tax, consulting and corporate finance services. It is run as a partnership, with around 600 partners in the UK firm, 10 per cent of whom are women. It is also a member firm of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu (DTT), where each member firm is a separate and independent legal entity.
Member firm clients include more than 80 per cent of the world’s largest companies, as well as large national enterprises, public institutions, locally important clients and successful, fast-growing global companies. In 2007 aggregate member firm revenues exceeded £11.8 billion, an increase of 15.5 per cent over 2006.
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