Dealing in data

Christine Ashton

For Christine Ashton, chief information manager for strategy and integration in BP’s refining and marketing business, clarity and simplicity are the basis for achieving the best IT solutions, as Hester Thomas reports

There are not many fathers who would be happy to see their exceptionally bright daughter leave school at the age of 16 having just sat her first public examinations. However, you cannot help suspecting that Christine Ashton’s father had the measure of his determined off-spring and knew that letting her have her way would be the better option in the long term.

‘The deal with my father, who was the driving force in my life, was that I could leave school but I had to get a degree by some other route,’ explains Ashton. So, he helped her find a job on a nationally recognised training scheme with the UK’s North West Water Authority.

Now, as chief information manager for strategy and integration in BP’s refining and marketing business based in Sunbury, Ashton has a string of qualifications.

As well as a first class honours degree in chemistry, she has an MSc in computing, electronics, instrumentation and process control, is a chartered chemist, a chartered systems engineer, a chartered information technology professional, a chartered scientist and a member of the British Computer Society.

The dogged pursuit of qualifications was not an attempt to impress her father. Rather, she sought equality with all the different functions she was likely to work with. ‘Early on I worked out that the only way to have credibility as a “hybrid” in business and information technology (IT) was to be a member of several professional institutions. That way, I could always say to people I understood what they were talking about.’

She is the first to admit that combining work and study has not been easy. ‘It’s the hard way to do it but I always had the best car in the college car park,’ she quips, adding, ‘and more importantly I never had any student debt.’

Pragmatic progress

Ashton grew up in Prescot, between Liverpool and Manchester. She speaks with the regional accent and has the direct, down-to-earth approach of many Northerners.

She stayed in the water industry for 14 years, during which time it was privatised. She rose to senior scientist before switching to IT to become the newly formed limited company’s technical data manager.

She is passionate about IT. ‘I love its progressiveness. It’s never one thing at any one time but is always changing. Good IT is like good art: it is enduring. Take Picasso’s charcoal or pen and ink studies of the camel or dove – they are simple, elegant and timeless. It takes great artistry to put together something so stunning and yet so straightforward. And the best IT is like that.’

Clarity and simplicity are among the touchstones that Ashton is using in BP.

‘One of the dangers in IT is that people slip into solutions before they’re clear on the requirements. My adage is that we don’t automatically give the business what they ask for, but what they need. It’s a bit of a black art but we have to help them articulate what they really need rather than what they’re asking for.’

Her views on the need to establish requirements before ever venturing near a solution are based on experience built up over a long career. Her employers have included Cable & Wireless, Octel Corporation, Caudwell Communications Group and Lattice Group. She has worked in every major utility: water, gas, electricity, telecoms and mobile communications. All were consumer based service industries, managing high volumes as well as requiring planning and systems integration on a big scale.

Over the years she has learned to recognise what constitutes a sound IT infrastructure and to take a pragmatic approach to all IT development. ‘Establish standards, commoditise and standardise systems everywhere you can,’ she says. ‘Don’t create anything which you can buy elsewhere from someone who can do it better than you, and put your leading edge thinking into areas that will up your game. Only with the basics in place is it then possible to step back and consider the broader picture, finding areas where IT can optimise assets further, differentiate the business and add value.’

Delivery road map

Ashton joined BP Energy as IT director in 2001, rising quickly to vice president for digital and communications technology in the gas, power and renewables business, then on to her current refining and marketing role. ‘What most attracted me to BP were the corporate values,’ she says. ‘I wanted somewhere where I could give 120 per cent.’ She also liked the company’s scale and its geographic spread, combined with the changes and complex challenges it faced.

Her first project is the one she is most proud of. Prior to her joining, delivery of the Gas Business Infrastructure project, aimed at optimising BP’s gas business from source to customer, had been estimated at $50 million. She was confident it could be delivered for much less. By encouraging the business to redefine its processes she and her team were able to use ‘out of the box’, non-customised products from the application software corporation SAP. As a result, the project finally came in at less than half the original estimate. ‘This has been seed-corn for the gas, power and renewables information systems strategy,’ she states, ‘establishing an approach that continues to be implemented in the natural gas liquids business unit today.’

Now, as chief information manager in refining and marketing, her job is two-fold. ‘I’m thinking about what the architectural end-state and applications need to look like in 2015 as well as the strategies we need to put in place to make that happen,’ she explains. ‘The challenge is to work out an implementation road map that balances business drivers with building an integrated portfolio of systems in bite-sized chunks. Given that no-one ever starts with a green-field situation, the transition to strategic platforms involves planning the co-existence of a range of developed and developing technologies and software that will provide BP with an edge.’

Future delivery

Ashton regards BP’s size as hugely beneficial for an IT professional. ‘Suppliers and infrastructure partners will collaborate with you and develop IT thinking if you’re a very big company. If you’re interested in technology and how it can make a difference this is a great place to be. It’s like moving the whole frontier forward.’

Currently, the company is working with a number of software providers on various projects. The aim is to develop aspects of their products to create a single architecture for refining and marketing that will allow future systems implementations to be driven more by business timescales and less by technology development.

‘For example, one supplier is further refining its product to combine functionality from two different modules. It had never considered putting them together for the oil and gas area. However, by working with them to extend product functionality and create a powerful optimising engine, we can really take our processes to the next level of added value.’

Ashton’s professional interests have extended beyond her employer. Among other roles, she has been a non-executive director for the UK Passport Office where she advised on organisational change and IT issues. She sought the job, ‘to add a different string to my bow. In the information management world you have to demonstrate you’re a broad thinker.’

Outside work, she likes to garden. ‘If I had my way the garden would be full of different magnolias. I’m a bit of a magnolia techie,’ she admits, laughing.

Given all that she has achieved, what would her father have thought? ‘He’d be absolutely amazed. He used to say, “Aim high, girl – you can always come a bit lower. But if you aim low, there’s nowhere left to go.”’

An approach that has clearly worked to good effect for Christine Ashton.

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