Mark McDougall
Mr Mark McDougall is the Global Chief Information Officer for Computershare and the Global Chief Executive Officer for Computershare Communication Services.
Mr McDougall graduated from Monash University with a Bachelor of Computing (with Honours). It was from his earliest days at Monash that Mr McDougall recognised the parallels between his love for music and a fast-developing passion for programming; “I could see the code in my mind in the same way as when I visualised a new piece of music.”
While Mr McDougall’s time at Monash was spent in a deeply technical domain, it influenced his thinking and how he would later approach navigating the world of business in a much broader sense. It gave him a solid grounding in programming languages, data centres, networks, servers, database and n-tier applications. “I learned many programming languages and paradigms which taught me not to be a slave to one and that there’s always a multitude of ways to solve a problem.”
Mr McDougall went on to work as a management consultant and held various roles within financial services companies before joining Computershare in 2009 as Global Chief Technology Officer, leading its global development group. Technology and broader business transformation has been at the heart of every role in his career, spanning multiple geographies and cultures across the globe.
He was appointed Global Chief Information Officer (CIO) in 2014 and has been responsible for all aspects of line-of-business application development and management, governance, and Computershare’s customer-driven innovation framework.
In 2023, Mr McDougall was appointed CEO for Communication Services, one of Computershare’s four global business lines. He holds this role in conjunction with his responsibilities as the company’s Global CIO.
Over his 15 years with Computershare, Mr McDougall has worked on dozens of acquisitions and associated technology integrations. Contributing to Computershare’s significant growth and expansion through these projects count as some of the most satisfying and memorable times of his career and they’ve provided Mr McDougall with the opportunity to work with many different people and personalities from a range of countries and cultures.
Mr McDougall has three simple rules of thumb that serve as a mantra for his career, and indeed every other community and sporting group in which he gets involved. He says that there is nothing quite like the environment of integrating one business with another to test these out!
- Stewardship – always leave the place in a better state than you found it.
- Collaboration – jump in and fix things in a crisis, then no one’s to blame.
- Leaders of the future get their hands dirty – experience is learning what not to worry about.
Mr McDougall has for many years championed initiatives that enable people to kickstart or restart their technology career, including returning mothers, career changers and recent graduates. Getting involved in identifying and mentoring the next generation of Computershare’s leaders is something Mr McDougall is particularly passionate about, “I love seeing the people around me grow.”