We often hear about the work that a CIO has done over a period of a few short years. But rarely do we get a look at several decades of experience.

Craig Walker is the definition of this. Having taken his first role as IT analyst/ programmer at oil and gas firm Shell UK in 1981, fresh out of university, he went on to dedicate more than 40 years to excelling in this field. Or, in his own words, “by any yardstick, I got to the top of my chosen career.”

Walker spoke to DCD about his lengthy career, compressing forty-odd years into forty-odd minutes. Throughout our interview, the passion he has gained along the way shone through.

He held many roles at Shell between 1981 and 2020, interspersed with a spell as a consultant at KPMG, where he advised other CIOs on decision-making in their various fields and companies. After returning to Shell, then leaving again for a final time in 2020, he worked at Salesforce as a “strategic advisor to the office of the CEO, then as an advisor to the Great British Railways Transition Team. His current positions include co-founder and director at Veles Consulting and chair and president of CIONET UK.

Walker admits he has had a few failed attempts at retirement.

“Shell ruthlessly retires you at 60, so in 2020 I finished with them,” he explains, adding that it’s not a ‘requirement’ but a very tempting offer that is hard to refuse. He was almost immediately scouted by Salesforce, but requested a few months of rest.

2020 had different ideas, however. “I managed to retire for eight hours,” says Walker, half jokingly. The Covid-19 pandemic almost immediately forced him back into work, and that led to a four-year stint at Salesforce.

“That was 43 years of corporate life now,” Walker explains. “Then I decided to have a second go at retirement, but, of course, that failed as well.”

Early years at Shell

Walker studied chemical engineering at university, but he tells DCD: “I would have made a terrible chemical engineer.”

Explaining his transition into an IT role, he says: “Shell recognized that I loved programming. I spent three years in London, got very drunk with my Australian boss one night, and woke up the next day realizing that I had agreed to move to Saudi Arabia.”

After a stint in the Kingdom, where he was based in both Riyadh and Jeddah, Walker commenced a global tour, working in Dubai, Scotland, Colombia, Cape Town, and Texas, before heading back to London, where he finished his tenure as CIO of Shell’s downstream business.

The early days of Walker’s time at Shell are like a window into a different world. When he went to Saudi Arabia in 1984, there was no email or Internet. “You couldn’t even phone head office, because it was too expensive and, besides, the phones didn’t work half the time,” he laughs.

At that point, the company used a Telex machine to communicate – an electromechanical device used for sending and receiving typed messages over telephone lines, akin to a fax machine.

He recalls being told that he needed to implement some software upon his arrival, only to discover that he would have to do some of the coding in Arabic, as all the readouts and invoices in the region would also be in Arabic.

“When I started out at Shell, PCs hadn’t even hit yet,” he says. “You were sitting in front of a terminal that was a hardwired box somewhere on the floor with some air conditioning. We would write some code, and put it on these massive disk platters that looked like LP records.

“You couldn’t even take them on the tube because the current was too high on the rails, and it would demagnetize the disks. So we had to take them out to regional offices in the UK, load them there, then go back to head office.”

It wasn’t until the end of the 1990s, with what Walker describes as the “PC revolution,” that Shell began to run “pretty powerful and sophisticated machines.”

One pivotal shift Walker recalls is when he replaced the Telex system with email.

“I remember when I brought it in, I was summoned by the then-CEO who said to me: “Walker, this was your idea, and I agreed to it. But how do people sign off on these emails?” and I said, “Well, they don’t. You write an email, and you send it.”

“His response? ‘I’m not too sure that’s going to work.’” But once the Internet hit, “we started to get more interoperability,” Walker says.

The Apotheosis

Walker’s first CIO role at Shell was heading up IT operations at Shell Markets in Dubai, starting in 1986. He later became DS Pan-African CIO, VP, and global CIO of trading and supply with several other IT roles smattered in between, before finally settling down as the global CIO of downstream business, which covers all the B2B and B2C elements of the company – from retail, to trading, to refineries – in 2014.

“The big challenge of the downstream business was that the place was a mess,” Walker says. “It took us about four years, but we managed to get [operating] costs down from around $2.5 billion to $1.3 billion. We virtually halved it, and saw a much better performance.”

A big part of that work was aiding Shell in its migration to the cloud and out of its data centers.

According to Walker, a lot of that cost reduction was made by getting rid of global systems and renegotiating contracts. “We also recognized the legacy of our data centers in terms of facilities,” he says. “The cost was too high, and we had to learn how to move to the cloud.”

He says a lot of people within the firm were “skeptical” about the migration to begin with. “People worry about [the cloud] – particularly the big companies that tend to try and customize stuff a lot,” Walker says, noting that it was in the early 2010s that the company finally made the “major decision” and decided it would migrate onto virtual servers.

With many moving parts in Shell, the “cloud migration” journey was a complicated one, and for different parts of the business, happened on different timelines.

The nerves on the part of senior management, however, remained consistent.

In 2014, the Shell enterprise product manager, Oskar Brink, speaking at an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Summit in London, told delegates: “It’s been a four-year journey and a lot of scepticism from many of our stakeholders.”

“Will it work? Is it secure? Can we get assurance that it will continue to work?’, were just some of the questions stakeholders asked.”

According to Brink, that particular migration effort to AWS private cloud saw between 8,000 and 10,000 applications rationalized, and took four years to complete. By the end, the company had reduced its load to 5,000-6,000 unique applications, which Brink said could be categorized, enabling the rationalization of the environment.

Walker estimates that by 2016-2017, it had shut down most of its data centers.

He recalls the company had three major data centers in the Netherlands, a massive one in Houston, and a big one in the UK, among others, as well as small Edge-type deployments – described as “a couple of computers in a cupboard somewhere with an AC.”

The exact distribution of Shell’s IT footprint today is hard to get a clear look at, though DCD has reached out to the company for information about how many – if any – data centers the company still operates, and which cloud platforms it is using for operations.

DCD reported in 2012 that Shell had renewed its data center outsourcing contract with T-Systems. The company had been outsourcing its data centers to T-Systems since 2008, with the 2012 renewal spanning five years, and included T-Systems helping Shell move customer data onto a cloud infrastructure, and was then valued at $1.2 billion (approximately $1.64bn today).

At that point, the company had already moved its global dynamic SAP services into the cloud. T-Systems was reported to have data centers in Europe located in Craig Walker Debrecen, Hungary, St. Petersburg, and the Czech Republic in 2012.

Beyond the reported relationships with AWS and T-Systems, Shell is also a known customer of Microsoft.

Ethical considerations

It’s impossible to write about Shell – or any oil company – without noting both the detrimental impact that such industries have on the environment, and the political tensions that are frequently associated with them.

Cloud computing providers have also come under fire for their willingness to provide cloud services to the oil and gas industry.

Both Microsoft and AWS are keen to promote their green credentials. In 2019, AWS said it would be net-zero carbon by 2040, and added in 2023 that 100 percent of its electricity consumption was matched with renewable energy, though this claim has been disputed by some of the company’s own employees.

Microsoft is looking to be carbon negative by 2050, and aims to have removed from the environment all the carbon it has emitted either directly or by electrical consumption since it was founded in 1975.

Both cloud providers are also big proponents of Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) and carbon capture technologies, all of which seem somewhat contradictory to simultaneously getting into bed with Big Oil.

Despite they’re greener pronouncements, they have not shown any inclination to turn down the lucrative contracts offered by companies like Shell.

Shell itself has a “goal” to be climate neutral by 2050, and the company’s website claims it achieved a 9-12 percent reduction in the net carbon intensity of its energy products in 2024 compared to 2016, and aims to increase this to 13 percent this year.

There is some doubt, however, about the company’s commitment to this effort. Its 2024 annual report notes that, of its capex for that year, $2.2 billion went on non-energy products, $2.4bn on low carbon energy solutions, $5bn on liquefied natural gas, gas and power marketing and trading, and a massive $11.5 billion on oil, oil products, and “other.”

The report notes that Shell defines low-carbon energy as anything with “an average carbon intensity that is lower than conventional hydrocarbon products, assessed on a life-cycle basis.” Whether this includes natural gas is unclear.

Notably, the $2.2bn is lower than both 2023 and 2022, which saw Shell investing $3.5bn and $2.7bn respectively in low carbon energy solutions.

In 2024, Shell announced that it would weaken its own efforts to reduce emissions per unit of energy, scrap some of its climate goals, scale back renewable efforts, and double down on fossil fuels.

The company laid off workers in its greener divisions, including hydrogen, and expanded oil and gas projects.

Shell continues to explore for new sources of oil and gas, and does not expect to reduce the overall amount of fossil fuels it produces by 2030, the date by which IPCC scenarios say emissions from oil, gas, and coal will need to have substantially reduced to avoid global calamity.

DCD asked Walker if he had any qualms about the ethics of Shell’s business.

“I think the company is doing all the things it can,” he says. “I do believe Shell ran to a very high standard across the world, and I can’t ask any more of the company. I was pretty senior, and I was privy to the board decisions, and safety and the environment were always top of our minds.” He also pointed to the world’s current reliance on fossil fuels, beyond just energy. “If [the wider public] wanted to stop using oil tomorrow, how many things in your life do you think are still going to exist? So much is based on petrochemicals.”

Indeed, Shell’s net-zero target only covers energy products, and excludes its petrochemicals business – including plastics – the production of which has a significant carbon footprint.

Walker continues: “The reason we have cheap energy and we’ve learned to live a certain type of lifestyle is because of oil and gas. Now, do I personally think it’s sensible to burn oil and gas? No, I don’t. I think that’s a mistake.

“It’s such a complex story that I never felt I was doing something immoral. Certainly, I was never asked to do anything immoral or ethically wrong.”

As for the company’s ties to countries Walker concedes are often viewed as “corrupt and dodgy,” the former CIO says: “[Oil] has made them so much money over the decades, and that opens up the danger that money can get siphoned off in a way that we might not consider morally or ethically right.”

He adds: “We were extracting the oil and doing it in a safe way. The company gets its cut, markets it, and sells it on their behalf. Shell doesn’t get a say on what that government ultimately does with the money.”

It isn’t hard to find stories of corruption related to Big Oil in countries with large resources.

For its part, Shell found itself in the news earlier this year due to a cleanup operation in Southern Nigeria, when oil pollution was allegedly caused by the company’s work. A BBC investigation in February 2025 found that the eight-year project is, perhaps, not going as well as Shell and the Nigerian government have previously claimed.

One close observer described the clean-up project as a “con” and a “scam” that has wasted money and left the people of Ogoniland stuck living with the pollution.

A civil trial at the High Court in London was held, during which lawyers representing two Ogoniland communities of around 50,000 inhabitants argued that Shell must take responsibility for oil pollution that occurred between 1989 and 2020, which was allegedly caused by its infrastructure. A decision on the case is still pending.

The present

Having failed at his second attempt at “proper” retirement, Walker is now co-founder and director at Veles Consulting, where he and several of his former colleagues, friends, and acquaintances pass on their extensive knowledge to other companies.

“Veles Consulting really came about because a bunch of ex-KPMG consultants got together and realized we were at a similar stage of life,” he says. “A lot of us were either retiring or thinking of retiring, and it became obvious that there was a huge amount of experience and knowledge in the room.

“Someone, who I think had had a lot less wine than I at that point, said we ought to get together more often, and that eventually became a consultancy. Since then, we’ve added around 35 people to Veles.”

It would seem Walker is unable to sit still. After decades of running around, he is not used to, well, not working. But he says one positive to come out of his latest endeavor is that the company now gives one percent of both its profits and time to charities and good causes. With the other 99 percent, Walker is doing what he knows best.