Pearson Australia on hunt for CIO

Media and education company Pearson Australia Group is on the hunt for a CIO following the creation of the new role to oversee the transformation of its information services.

The new role, reporting to the chief operating officer and sitting in the company’s Shared Services team, comes at a time when the company is shifting its business to capitalise on the emergence of e-books and e-readers.

Previously, Peter Dart, in the role of information services director, managed the company’s IT operations across Australia and New Zealand, as well as supported initiatives in India and China.

The announcement of the new role comes at a time when the company, which publishes the Penguin and Viking imprints in Australia, is expanding from being a regional book publisher to one that is also responsible for delivery of technology services such, as its BookMaster enterprise resource planning system, into New Zealand, India, China and South Africa.

Pearson also runs the United Book Distributors business that provides warehousing and logistics services to its own brands, as well as to rivals Allen Unwin and Simon and Schuster.

“We are running a multi-company, multi-geography and-multi currency computer system, and basically acting sort of like cloud computing service for the ERP of Allen Unwin,” Dart told CIO late last month.

Pearson has about 850 Australian staff and an IT environment which includes around 100 Apple Macintoshes, and a huge amount of storage.

Current major projects include the roll out of a Documentum document management system from EMC designed to modernise the whole of the company’s publishing cycle and help it adapt to being a producer of books, to effectively, a software company.

With additional reporting from Brad Howarth.