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Sportingbet Plc: IT Director (EMEA) promoted to CTO (Europe & Emerging Markets)
(Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; Internet industry)
July 2005 – Present (3 years 3 months)
19 recommendations for this position
CTO
Working with the Board to deliver optimum global IT solutions. Having successfully ‘turned around’ IT in Europe, the challenge was to implement these changes throughout the group, with a backdrop of huge business changes.
Provided guidance in relation to the technological and commercial impact of the following business projects
- Sale of the US business to Jazette and the subsequent technology & people splits,
- Offshoring of Customer Services and Fraud departments to Dublin, followed by the rest of the organization (and production systems) to Guernsey
- The amalgamating of Boss and Paradise Poker (at a technological & commercial level, including the subsequent disposal of Mindspan Technologies).
Renegotiated supplier contracts therefore reducing the IT cost base dramatically (including C&W, Colt, Finsoft, Sun, HP, EMC, Cisco and Dell).
Implemented Agile methodology (Scrum) into Software Development & Testing and scaled up the internal teams from 14 to 60, with a further 50 outsourced offshore to Belgrade and India.
Sponsored a new global architecture, called ‘N-Silo’, that will allow the number of disparate systems to be reduced, allow downtime to be taken during quiet periods for each continent, provide shared purse functionality and use parallelism to boost production capacity.
Sponsored group compliance with PCI regulations.
Implemented Project Prioritisation across the group, ensuring that project justifications were produced and business benefits were achieved. This has enabled the group to benefit in terms of both competitive advantage and financial performance.
IT Director (EMEA)
The objective of this role was to take an existing IT function and turn it into a world leader. The business had undergone a period of rapid growth with revenues increasing by 3.5x year on year between 2005 and 2006. The IT department needed to support the rapidly expanding business.
Produced, monitored and communicated the IT strategy, ensuring that the targets were met and all variations were monitored and managed accordingly.
Business Restructuring. The existing structure was deemed inefficient and was therefore restructured into 5 distinct areas – Projects, Operations, Infrastructure, Internal Development and Outsourced Development. Each area had a Head, who were responsible for managing their team and produced ‘get-well plans’ under my overall guidance. This change enabled increased accountability and control.
Release Management was overhauled and the Test team was brought in-house resulting in improved control. Test tools were implement enabling regression and performance testing. This reduced the number of bugs entering production by nearly 20%.
Created a virtual support team, comprising of sysadmin, DBA, desktop, tester and a developer. This enabled increased efficiencies as the remaining staff were able to focus on project work.
Incident Management processes were introduced thus enabling clear communication channels in relation to escalation issues, therefore dramatically reducing the average fix time.
An automated IT fault monitoring system was introduced. Automation was a key driver within the Infrastructure team and coupled with standardization, produced significant cost benefits as well as rapid deployment.
Introduced a full Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) for all software development.
Production capacity was increased from 4,500 bets per hour to over 21,000 on Grand National 2006 and from 12,000 bets per day to 190,000. Ongoing, the Tuning Group made up of representatives from all of the IT teams and 3rd parties, optimizes and tunes the systems. For Grand National 2007, the daily bet capacity has been increased to 320,000 bets per day.
Implemented Project Prioritisation whereby every department head across the European business attended a bi-weekly meeting to jointly assess all new projects. As a result, projects are actively worked on in line with business needs.
Advised the Board on all IT matters, including acquisition targets.
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