Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss
As Tizi takes the reins at AGL, he says he is delighted with the human resources capability Boyles has handed him. "The key is making sure you have the right people in the team, and then cascading across a 'culture' from the leadership level all the way down," he says.
"AGL has got a great leadership team, and what David has done is extended that leadership thinking and that approach to leadership down through the IT organization. He also put the right people in the right jobs as well. AGL, like a lot of companies, has grown through mergers and acquisitions, which means you've got a lot of people who've come in from different organizations. Now the temptation is - and the actual state of people is - to stay in their historical organizational groups, and that may not be the ideal for the whole company in the new model."
Now Tizi is keen to focus on making AGL an infinitely more agile company.
"AGL is a growing company. It's an acquiring company. It's reacting to market forces. It also wants to react quickly to the business needs in the sense of what customers are after, to be competitive," he says. "Now, like many other companies, AGL has electronically automated everything, and whenever it changes, whenever the business changes, it looks to IT to change the automation processes to match the business changes after. The key thing though is that it wants that to happen quickly and at a rate that matches its appetite for change."
For IT to be able to deliver on that agility, speed and performance, it will mean doing some "very clever work" in the platforms, software and infrastructure AGL uses and the way that people respond to change, Tizi says. In other words, it will mean being highly efficient in development processes, being very careful in managing risks and doing things in ways that are consistent with what the business wants by way of speed and responsiveness.
SOA will be a major part of that, Tizi says, but so will aggregation of technologies and platforms.
"We can no longer have hundreds of servers in a computer room; we have to aggregate those into something like blade technology at some point in the future," he says. "We have to aggregate storage because storage is becoming a significant part of use in there, created by such soft storage requirements as e-mail but also hard storage of transactions. We have to literally create an abstraction layer between the infrastructure and the applications, so that the applications can be modified, enabled very quickly and the infrastructure can be configured and provided to the application people efficiently."
Tizi also plans to shift the focus to electronic channels. While he was at Transurban he was able to shift about 40 per cent of customer interactions from the call centre into electronic channels. The kiosk was "super successful", the Web channel was "very successful", while the Transurban experience with interactive voice response (IVR) was mixed, he says.
"People find different types of channels [offer] different benefits, but if they don't get something back, something better than the human channel, then it's not as successful as it can be," he says. "So one of the success stories we've had at Transurban, which I plan to repeat here, is to try and shift people away from the human channels to the electronic channels, but all in a way that's engaging to the customer."
To move to electronic channels you need to have a 360-degree view of the customer. If a customer is using one of many channels, or swaps between channels, he wants to be able to see the same information. That means creating a real-time enterprise with some sort of integration layer, to allow any channel to get access to data in real time. "Now, we're not there yet. That has got to be an aim for any organization, and that is why we are going to go there," Tizi says.
Also drawing on his experience at Transurban, he plans to improve the management of contracts. The Transurban way of managing contracts is very much oriented towards the construction industry and incorporates a very mature risk modelling technique. Too many IT contracts fail to have a risk focus, Tizi believes. That failure to incorporate a clear statement of who is managing what risk all too often leads to a very ugly fight between vendor and client, he says.
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