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should be a small, technically strong team that was well informed
about BP business unit needs and highly networked with exter-
nal companies and experts across the global IT ecosystem. Its
operating focus would be on bringing in new digital technology
from the outside to improve the company’s operations and per-
formance in areas beyond the traditional IT domains of transac-
tion processing and enterprise resource planning.
Unlike a venture capital organization, however, Daru did
something counterintuitive. He requested a modest budget—
about $10 million out of BP’s $2.5 billion IT budget—and no for-
mal authority. He reasoned that in BP’s culture, a central group
with a large budget would foster resistance and become dis-
connected from the business units. Having limited resources
would require that business units fund implementation pro -
jects, which would help ensure that the CTO office’s activities
made business sense rather than becoming just research-type
activities. The CTO office would be measured by how much
bottom-line value it delivered through persuading business-
people with profit-and-loss responsibilities. The CTO office’s
job would be to perform due diligence on external firms and
develop concepts with them that were relevant to BP’s business
units. The CTO office would then act as matchmakers, coaches,
and translators, bridging the significant cultural and opera-
tional gaps between small technology firms and a large global
enterprise like BP. As part of this process, it would often have
to bridge groups within BP that otherwise might not connect.
Daru founded the CTO office with six carefully selected pro-
fessionals. He then slowly built the group to just over a dozen
people, which is where it stands today. Fewer would be insuffi-
cient to generate and manage a critical mass of projects; more
would require too much administration and coordination. He
was highly selective in hiring—only one person out of every ten
or more serious candidates received an offer. It sometimes took