Using interpersonal skills he learned as an officer, the head of IT at Northrop Grumman has turned his focus to Dublin, writes Karlin Lillington

Jim O'Neill's upbringing in Arklow, Co Wicklow was low key enough. Schooled by the Christian Brothers, he spent summers jumping off the Arklow pier and swimming competitively, enough to earn various badges and work as a lifeguard as a teenager.

He blames where he is today - heading up 25,000 employees in one of the world's largest defence and aerospace companies - on The Irish Times.

"In 1972, The Irish Times had an article about the Kennedys and their life at Hyannis on Cape Cod [ Massachusetts]. And my mother, on the basis of that article, just decided out of the blue that we should all move to Hyannis because the Kennedys were there and the economy was much better in America," he says, still amused at the idea some 34 years later.

He was 17 at the time, with a year to go in school. But the transition was relatively easy. His father, a carpenter, was employed within a day of arrival and O'Neill picked up a lifeguarding job on Cape Cod itself.

After finishing his last year of school, he spent three years as a police officer in Manchester, New Hampshire after taking a bachelors degree in criminal justice at St Anselm's College there, a Benedictine-run school "with lots of Irish priests".

And that set him on a path that would eventually see him become president of the information technology (IT) division of defence giant Northrop Grumman. Along the way, he went from policing to working as a contract negotiator for a defence contractor that eventually became BAE Systems, then executive roles in Digital (senior vice-president and general manager of Digital's federal government region), Lucent (president of its Government Solutions business unit and a company officer) and Oracle (senior vice-president and general manager of Oracle Services Industries) - always with a focus on intelligence, networks and electronics.

His stint at Oracle was relatively brief - a year and a half - during which he was in charge of all the telecoms and utilities business. "That's the good news," he says, laughing. "The bad news is that the industry had just gone under." That meant a lot of hard work, but O'Neill says "it was great experience".

From Oracle, he jumped to Northrop Grumman in 2002, where he has had a fairly swift rise.

Coming in as president of one of the IT sector business units, within a year he was running the computing systems division as well and the entire IT division not long after.

Now he oversees 25,000 Northrop employees and a division worth $5.25 billion (€4.20 billion) to the company.

How did he get from policing to IT? "Well, negotiating contracts brings in the human element of working with people that I had from police work. Plus, I just learned the technology along the way." Contract negotiation "at the end of the day, is really just about dealing honestly with people."

How does IT fit into a company that is best known in the public mind as a ship and aircraft builder and defence contractor? "The most simplistic way to put it is, IT enables the rest of the company to function. IT really drives the company, not just in our company but across the world."

Much of the IT that Northrop Grumman offers as products and services is developed and used in-house, he says. And most of what they do is take other companies' technology - SAP, Oracle, HP, IBM - and fit it together.

"Our focus is really integration," he says. "We bought 26 companies in the past decade. If you integrate 26 companies into a single entity known as Northrop Grumman, you have to meld all those systems.

"Our job is to take old and disparate technology and integrate it into one enterprise."

The company does this on a monumentally large scale at times. O'Neill points to a deal Northrop has to run the technology for the government of the state of Virginia - a $2.5 billion contract bringing together 92 separate state agencies where some 600 state employees transferred over to Northrop.

Often, Northrop integration projects involve some element of security or identification management. In the UK, the company runs "the fingerprinting business", as O'Neill puts it, for the police and security agencies, for example.

Northrop will also handle part of the UK's massive eBorders scheme for tracking visitors to and from the country. "We'll be teaming with them to process those visa entries and exits into a database," he says.

Given the nature of such projects, and the highly personal data handled in them, don't clients have concerns about whether the hardware and software may have technical "back doors" to allow for surveillance by third parties?

"That's a good question," he says. "In all industries today, whether pharmaceuticals or financial services, the common theme is network security. Identity management is a huge focus in industry and part of that business is doing due diligence on the programs we use. We have a lot of specialised tools and processes for testing everything we use," he says.

The nature of the company means it is involved on confidential government work in the US as well as abroad. "A lot of our people are security cleared and polygraphed and a lot of our projects are very complex and highly classified."

O'Neill, who was in the UK this week to do business at the Farnborough Airshow, says he is also here for talks with Curam Software in Dublin, which makes social enterprise management software - software that the company describes as integrating "human services, labour, health, social security and military and veterans agencies around the globe."

O'Neill, who describes Curam as "a really fantastic company", says he is discussing health IT with them.

"What we're trying to do is [ work] with their software so that we can have one plus one make three. As a company, we're always looking for new technology.

"Usually there's a good relationship between a large company and a small company for that kind of project - the small company helps us get access to some new technology and markets, while we can scale their product for them and give them greater market access."

A $30 billion (€23.8 billion) aerospace and defence conglomerate based in Los Angeles, Northrop Grumman does everything from building ships, airplanes and space technology to systems integration and information technology solutions.

Operations in all 50 US states, and 25 countries

125,000 global employees

The world's largest radar maker and naval ship builder

Information technology overall - across several company divisions - brings in about one-third of corporate revenue

The IT division, headed by Jim O'Neill, has 25,000 employees and $5.25 billion in revenue

Key sectors for the IT division are public safety, identification and homeland security