Key Travel is a leading travel management company dedicated to providing services specifically to the not-for-profit sector. The company works with charities such as The Salvation Army, Save the Children and Tearfund by organising flights, accommodation and visas for people travelling abroad who work with the charities. Key travel also works with academic institutions including universities and organisations such as Research Council UK. Key Travel also works with faith networks to organise missionary travel and with local schools and colleges. The UK branches of the company are based in Manchester, Birmingham and London. Key Travel has expanded over the last 30 years to become one of the leading travel organisations representing the charity sector and academic organisations in the UK. However, the company has developed a strong international presence and has offices based in Brussels and America. Key Travel currently has 173 members of staff working in the UK and international sales from last year rose to £14.4 million. The current CIO for Key Travel, Matt Haynes has been working for the company for five years and has previously worked in insurance and within the education sector. IT leader:Matt Haynes, Group Head of IT. In role since:August 2007. Reporting line:CFO. How often does the CIO meet with the CEO:About once per month. Board level seat:Member of the senior management team, the leadership team that comprises heads of departments below the board. IT budget:£650,000. IT estate and or number of log on accounts under the control of the IT leader:200 users. Level of the workforce that relies on technology to carry out their tasks:100%. IT staff currently employed:Nine. Split between in-house/outsourced staff: Aside from the full time staff, Key Travel occasionally hires outside consultants or developers to assist with critical projects or add skills. Additionally, we work closely with our online booking tool provider to develop a customised version of their tool for our customer’s unique uses, whereby we specify the development change requirements. There are ad-hoc projects that generally run less than one year. IT management team and reporting structure:Eight direct reports, including one development manager. The team looks after all aspects of IT including infrastructure, ERP support, development, website, customer-facing booking tool support, telephony, business analysis, and project management. Primary technology platforms at the organisation:Agresso, as our in-house production system and Amadeus. Primary technology suppliers: Agresso, Softcat, TET, Salesforce, CCT, BT, Easynet, Amadeus, Microsoft. Significant strategic technology deals struck in the last 12 months:Given our expansion in the US, and the need for a stable infrastructure beyond what could be accommodated on our hurricane-prone office in Washington, DC, we relocated our US infrastructure to a co-location environment using Peer1. Percentage of your applications/infrastructure run from the cloud: We use  Salesforce for our internal CRM and sales management activities. Major technology or transformation project recently completed and how did it transform operations, customer experience or the organisation:Masterpricer project was developed internally will transform our ability to offer a broader offering of travel solutions to our customers, the ability to customise offers on a per-client basis, improve operational productivity by greater than 10%, enable greater negotiating power over our suppliers, and widen our staffing search opportunities. Improvement on these factors will positively impact margins and customer satisfaction measures. My role has not only been in providing technology to business problems, but transforming my organisation to be proactively consultative and value-driven. As I had not worked in travel before, but had worked in financial services and education, I have been able to apply lessons learned from those different organisations towards this technologically-lagging industry. This influence has had an immense impact on the business, improving customer service and productivity across all departments from finance to operations to sales. The overall impact of my efforts, along with those of my colleagues has been an increase in business with significant growth in profitability. Strategic aim of the CIO and IT operation for the next financial year:Improving productivity and improving our customer’s experience have been the major aim for several years – however, we need to become more flexible so we can accommodate a broader range of customers profitably. As the top supplier of travel to our niche, attracting new customers becomes increasingly difficult, thus we must broaden our capabilities to serve new customer segments – and I will play a key role in identifying and delivering these operational capabilities. Strategy in the use by employees of their own technology, use of mobiles and how social networking is impacting operations, customer experiences or the organisation: We’re just beginning to enable staff to use their own devices at work, and are relatively relaxed about it. Our marketing department is beginning to use social networking more actively and a new intranet will help tie our new physically-separated locations together into a more cohesive team. Thus far, it has not been a business priority. Strategy for dealing with shadow IT and BYOD including influence and engagement with executives, to place the right controls around employee choice: We have a high proportion of staff with small children, and provide methods for them to work flexibly, but otherwise, shadow IT and BYOD isn’t a significant consideration for us at this time. We allow staff to access systems remotely, and have a robust security policy to protect our customer’s data, which all staff must review and agree annually. Transformational inspiration sources:I seek inspiration from everywhere – and for different purposes. Inspiration from my team helps provide their views on what IT can do be help the organisation grow; others in the business often have ideas for innovation – particularly around their business areas; IT, business, and economic literature provides perspectives of how others are using innovation, building their businesses, and a broad exposure and perspective; colleagues in the travel guild provide more industry-specific inspiration; and courses in my MBA have provided significant inspiration in relation to value creation and capture. All of these sources, combined with a “we should always do better” attitude, have helped to breed a culture of transformation and innovation beyond IT.