Steve Lewis

ARCO British Ltd

UK Exploration & Production subsidiary of US Oil & Gas multi-national, ARCO (Atlantic Richfield Company)

Head of I.T. (UK), 1994 - 1998

Reporting to the Finance Director in the UK and to the US-based Regional I.T. Manager for Eurasia/Africa & Latin America. The position included the role of delegated Head of Procurement for I.T. in the UK. Responsible for an annual budget in excess of £7m and for a staff of 30 in the UK managing the provision of PC and UNIX networks across 6 sites (including offshore platforms), with Lotus Notes and Oracle business applications, voice and data networks, and a 2.5TB data centre.

Leadership

• Appointed by the Managing Director to a team of nine middle managers to establish a framework for a company-wide business culture change programme. Assumed a championing role for empowerment and accountability.

• Developed technical strategies and policies for IT. Worked with department managers and at board level to champion and establish commitment to those strategies.

• Integrated the UK subsidiary of a $1.5bn corporate acquisition in less than 2 months from date of merger.

Service Management

• Developed processes and established business/IT steering groups to identify, select, and monitor IT projects and programmes within the business. Using these groups which had a remit to consider strategy for a specific business area, created a sense of ownership for IT and a cross-functional alignment that encouraged a broader perspective and greater understanding of information uses and opportunities.

• Outsourced services including helpdesk, training, technical consulting, hardware maintenance, systems implementation, and established framework agreements for supply of materials and services. Developed innovative forms of sourcing contracts: "pay for what you get" for maintenance; support contracts with end-user satisfaction criteria as key SLA measures; and partnering agreements for frequently but irregularly used specialist skills.

• Through aggressive use of best practices, achieved delivery of PC desktop services at low quartile costs and best in class performance among UK oil and gas operators. Innovations included: introduction of interactive user feedback on helpdesk support with automated user satisfaction monitoring; continuous monitoring of service availability against targets; remote control for faster support of remote PCs; and streamlined change management procedures.

IT Infrastructure

• Achieved recognition as a centre of excellence for PC networking in the corporation. As an aggressive early adopter of several PC technologies including Windows NT and Mosaic and evolved a sophisticated, highly functional PC network architecture. Fully automated maintenance, including Windows version upgrades, using extensions of functionality from Microsoft SMS and incorporating bespoke methods for version control across multiple international maintenance sites.

• Migrated the company WAN to TCP/IP and extended it to include remote locations such as satellite connected drilling rigs in the North Sea, offshore production platforms, and third parties for continuous exchange of real-time operational data.

Business Process

• Created an e-procurement system to streamline IT procurement, asset, and contract management. Included functionality for tracking expenditure against contracts, budgets and project authorities; asset tracking for hardware and software; electronic on-line approval using cryptographic digital signatures; contract management; invoice tracking; and spend analysis.

• Developed a programme management methodology focussed on identifying and maximising the delivery of benefits from integrated business and IT change programmes.

• Developed self-service Intranet applications including room/resource reservations, e-requisitioning, e-procurement, timesheets, and official company documents, forms and manuals.