SMAC stack strategy delivers change says Lance Fisher

CIO of recruitment specialist SThreeLance Fisher says a focus on what analysts call the SMAC stack is enabling more business for his organisation.

SThreeis a major recruiter for, IT roles, the energy industry, as well as pharmaceuticals. Headquartered in London the company has 2,100 recruitment consultants in 46 offices. It operates the recruitment brands Computer Futures, as well as the Progressive Recruitment, Huxley and Real Staffing. Progressive focuses on the energy industry, Huxley banking and financial services and Real the life science and healthcare sector.

For at least the past two years Fisher has been refocusing the technology strategy at SThree to be social, mobile, analytics and cloud, dubbed the SMAC stack.

“Simply put, as we reduce our on-premise and legacy spend by efficiencies, we channel the savings into SMAC,” he told this title’s CIO 100 annual survey of transformative CIOs. “The overall impact is that my IT cost is not going up as we grow global sales staff, yet we are delivering significantly more business enablement from our systems.”

Fisher has been a major user of Salesforce, which in turn has enabled greater mobility for the consultants of SThree, which improves the face-toface opportunity for the business.

“The big-name strategic partners are Oracle, Salesforce, Microsoft and SAP. We have just done a strategic deal with Dell to refresh all our desktops this year. We also have a lot of niche partners who help us greatly: Bluefin and Tquila in particular are helping us develop new apps,” he says. Fisher is also considering the Microsoft Office 365 software-as-a-service toolset.”

The entire IT and data operation is run by Fisher and his team of 110 in London, which he described as being a highly efficient team.