Martin Wright, CIO of PPC: Staying in the technology vanguard

Remember the days when the closest thing to a CIO was a “director of data processing”? How times have changed. In an age when IT has a huge impact on a company’s bottom-line, a CIO has to stay at the forefront of technology like never before. So, when Martin Wright was tapped as CIO of PPC, an IT and environmental consulting firm, back in 2003, he promptly got to work coining a phrase that would encapsulate the vision he had set for himself and his team: “in the technology vanguard.” Wright has been pushing that core “ideology” ever since, and aims to do the same with PPC’s recent merger with AEA, a UK-based energy and environment consultancy. Now a “global CIO” of both organizations, Wright has set his sights on further ways to maximize investments in technology. Here Wright offers his take on ways to harness the best in technology — and how you can get a piece of the vanguard yourself.

How do you stay in the vanguard?

Martin Wright: The biggest way to stay in the vanguard is first understanding the corporate vision of the company and then taking that vision and translating it into IT. So there are things that will help accelerate you in getting to that vision … technology is going to play a key part in that.  If I know  the vision of  my company is I can quickly attach and piece together the technology that is going to help us get there.

What other strategies have helped you navigate your role as CIO?

Martin Wright: Another strategy that has helped is making sure that I have the right team supporting each initiative.  The right team is based more on people who care about the mission and have a passion for what they do than on being the best technical people.  I can work with passion, I can’t work with a closed technical attitude.  I want people who enjoy doing the job.

Any other last strategies come to mind?

Martin Wright: A big one that has helped me as a management consultant is project management.  Project management approaches to IT really work: establishing schedules, timelines, actions, budgets … it’s very helpful.  Then collaboration, leveraging any technology that you do have in house to deliver others is one way that you can absolutely stretch out your current investment so you can deliver more.
Also, communicating constantly, making sure that the corporation has buy-in and providing IT to business translation services is important. A lot of the time it’s really difficult to explain why we need to install that new switch at the core, why we need to make sure that our firewalls are enabled the way they are, why we lock down the machine environment.  So providing translation services to the executives and the staff of the company is critical.

What’s on the horizon in terms of technology?

Martin Wright: A lot of people are finally virtualizing because it’s the buzzword or the technology has arrived or there is a reduction in cost.  We are trying to go beyond virtualizing for its own sake to see how it can make us a much greener corporation. The ability to consolidate down multiple servers into single instances of servers and having the ability to turn off and on machines when they are needed … IT can quickly and rapidly reduce your carbon footprints with some investment.

What sites do you routinely follow?

Martin Wright: LinkedIn is a big one; that’s my link professionally to what’s going on and what people are involved in.  CIO Today is a great one, BNet Business Network is another.  CIO.com is the traditional one, then there are a handful of some smaller ones that I just get RSS feeds on topics such as mobility, virtualization, and storage, for example.

At the end of the day, what’s the single most important piece of advice you’d give other CIOs?

Martin Wright: My most important advice is to remember it’s more than just a job; it’s a way of life. It’s that blend between life and work and somewhere in between making sure that people understand that this is more than just a job, that they will get gratification out of the work that they give.  If I’ve got someone who wants to approach it that way I think that we will accomplish just about anything.

Interview conducted by JD Kathuria

Read more interviews here: http://blog.executivebiz.com/category/interviews/

Posted by Staff Writer on Monday, February 23rd, 2009. Filed under Executive Spotlight. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry