Essential AGL
Australia's second oldest company, Australian Gas Light, was established by private interests in New South Wales on September 7, 1837 to light the streets of Sydney with coal gas. It remains Australia's leading energy provider, its wholesale and retail marketing businesses selling natural gas, electricity and associated products and services to approximately three million Australian customers.
AGL has an extensive portfolio of wholly- and partially-owned investments in energy infrastructure, infrastructure management and other energy businesses, including Agility, the Australian Pipeline Trust (APT), Elgas, NGC Holdings of New Zealand and HC Extractions. It seeks to capture the quintessence of its business in something it calls "The Essential AGL", which it says "summarizes the core of what defines us today and encapsulates those things that will guide us on our journey of profitably growing and developing AGL". At the core of The Essential AGL is so-called Energy Know-How: the expertise, skills and problem-solving capability that collectively drive service to customers, employees, shareholders and the community.
So it is only natural that it should have turned to a man with considerable know-how - Boyles - to knock its IT into shape. Boyles had most recently transformed the way ANZ's technology team related to its customers (internal business units); the way it dealt with its people; the consistency and quality of its processes, and its infrastructure. But at 55, he was keen to move into semi-retirement from permanent "corporate warrior-hood".
Neither the retirement nor the "semi" lasted very long.
After signing on at AGL Boyles spent three days a week there for six months (working at Microsoft for another couple of days a week - an odd kind of retirement) putting in place what he believes is an "outstanding IT road map" then starting AGL down the defined path.
He says when he first started with AGL he found a fairly typical IT organization, where the businesses thought IT was not properly aligned with them and the IT folks feared the businesses were not thinking far enough into the future to put necessary infrastructure in place. Remediation began with extensive discussions, brainstorming and prioritization. Strengthening the IT team was an early emphasis, starting with the introduction of a true competency-based hiring model. That meant examining the competencies and capabilities IT was trying to deliver to the business, and then determining whether the skill sets were available to deliver on those needs.
"So we actually went through our whole leadership team - three levels of leadership team - and redefined our organization to match up with the business capabilities that we needed to deliver," Boyles says. "Then we took each job position and defined it in terms of technical competence, leadership competence, and values and behaviour. And we wrote pretty rigorous descriptions around those, and then we actually spilled and filled the organization to match up to those competencies. And we had a structured hiring process that we used in that process."
However, Boyles also knows that to strengthen IT means having clear development paths for the people in IT, so he defined a stratified development plan and strategy for employees, with specific programs to keep specialists' skills up to speed.
"The next level of development is for high-potential people," he says. "It's early days on that, but one of the things I did was to start meeting with high-potential people and actually engaged them in the definition of our vision. So part of their development in this case was a special project, and the project was to have them break up into small groups and to talk about IT and to come up with their ideas about how IT should run. And we took that information to build into our overall IT vision and road map.
"Then the final segment of the development strategy has to do with leaders, and we haven't really finalized this but we're in the process - in fact we just talked about it earlier this week - of defining the details of our leadership road map. And we will have a very specific development program for all IT leaders at AGL going into the future."
Next came the vision, encapsulated in the phrase "Driving Excellence", and embracing IT's strategy, objectives and the ways IT would explain itself to itself in order to get "everybody on the bus as part of the team". At its most basic, Driving Excellence is about having the best people, fact-based decisions, robust and flexible infrastructure, rigorous processes, value for money and an intense focus on strategic alignment with the business.
"We came up with a vision around Driving Excellence, but we got very specific," Boyles says. "It wasn't just: 'Here's a phrase: Driving Excellence'. We have a complete and very detailed road map about how that's going to be done over an extended period of time. It's actually a three- to five-year plan."
Determined to strengthen alignment, Boyles took the kind of governance model he set up at ANZ, with its multiple IT units and thousands of employees, and translated it, albeit in a modified manner, to AGL for its hundreds of IT people, after some rigorous benchmarking of best practice at organizations of similar size. Primarily that meant setting up an IT Executive Council - chaired by Boyles then and Tizi now - comprising all senior business people and key IT people. The ITEC meets monthly and works extremely well, he says.
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