Moneysupermarket.com is a price comparison online business specialising in financial services. Established in 1993 by Simon Nixon and listed on the London Stock Exchange in July 2007, it is now a FTSE 250 company with a 2013 revenue of £225.6 million and net income of £44.5 million. Tim Jones is a co-founder of Autotrader.co.uk and CTO of Trader Media Group, the company that runs the AutoTrader brand. When did you start your current role?July 2013 Have you completed an MBA?No Order the following sources of advice/information by value to you:1. Peer group2. In-house3. Analyst4. Consultant5. Vendors Technology strategy and spending What is the major transformational IT project that has been recently completed, or is underway at your organisation?The Technology function (note not called IT) will be driving 'Reset' a business and customer proposition step change over 18months. We are currently 6 months in. We will be mobilising an additional circa 100 software engineering heads in 2014 from core partners to establish and embed this transformation. What impact will it/does it have on the organisation?We describe is as a magnitude project. Things that took years, will be months, months become weeks, weeks become days and things that took Developers days will be changes the business can self serve. This will remove the glass ceiling on the organisation that is held in place by current technologies, legacy and technical debt. It will allow the business to expand into multiple regions and grow the value of the organisation materially. What new strategic technology deals has your organisation struck and with whom?Being an online business and a founder of startups, we are very open source. So strategic partnerships tend to be more development and knowledge share than vendor purchasing. However this year we have built new significant deals with EPAM, Adobe, Amazon (AWS), Rackspace Cloud (Open Stack), Rightscale, HP Vertica, Talend, Verisign, Typesafe, Google, EMC to name a few. Name your strategic technology suppliers?EPAM, Adobe, Amazon, Rackspace, Rightscale, HP Vertica, Google, Hybris, Cake, ThoughtWorks Labs. What is the IT budget?£34m an increase of £9m on 2013 against a turnover of circa £200m What is the strategic aim of the CIO and IT operations for the next financial year?Bringing new market leading online customer experiences to UK house holds to save them £2b in 2015, releasing the value in our data, facilitating transformation in the ways of working, increasing the agility of the business, enabling growth through expansion into new markets. Transformation achievements Would you describe the CIO role as a transformation leader in your organisation?Yes Describe the transformations you have led / been involved in, how did they transform operations, customer experience or the organisation?In my last role as CIO and co-founder of autotrader.co.uk, we executed the worlds most successful migration of print to online for a media brand. Creating a £2b digital organisation in the process.Migrating all revenue online, whist growing the EBITDA by double digits each year, consolidating the print operations and reverse publishing the print titles until closure from the market leading online business. Most recently this was reflected in 2011 by leading the winning team in the client award in Business Transformation at the Times Management Consultancy awards. I joined the Executive Board at Moneysupermarket.com in 2013 in order to help treble the size of the company over the next 5 years. Technology is the centre, the fulcrum of an online business and the work we are currently doing is highly innovative, never been done in this industry before and will break down the majority of the barriers to strategy step changes in business performance. Beyond technology, can you describe a business transformation programme that you own or contribute to?I am the product owner for the consumer Native Mobile Apps on iOS and Android for moneysupermarket.com. I am currently working with partners in the US and Russia to build out our new portfolio of Apps to replace the current tired execution and provide a new and engaging way for UK consumers to save money. What key technologies are being considered to enable transformation?Public and Hybrid Cloud technologies, but most importantly the new breed of use cases with very high levels of automation driven through establishing CD/CI and DevOps at the core of the Engineering function (Rightscale, Jenkins, GitHUB). These form the base, with a variety of Open Source tech  Kafka, Solr, RabbitMQ, MongoDB, etc. Note this is an entire migration to Open Source and Cloud from a very 'Enterprise' stack of .net, SQL Server, Abinitio, Windows Server, etc. What percentage of your applications / infrastructure is run from the Cloud?Currently 25%, but 90% by the end of 2014 and 100% by mid 2015. How is the use by employees of their own technology, use of mobiles and social networking impacting operations, customer experiences or the organisation at present?Twitter in particular is a great source of information in emerging technologies. Enabling direct contact with those driving those particular products etc. As a consumer online business clearly consumer technology such as mobile, smart TV and other IoT type devices are a constant influence on what new things we can bring to our users. Regular internal and external Hackathons are a great way we explore these and their use cases. Do you have a plan in place for how to deal with shadow IT and BYOD. How do you influence and engage executives, place the right controls around employee choice and engage with the organisation on this issue?Having only circa 500 employee's makes the challenge materially lower than other organisations. However we now focus on providing very secure, very locked down devices for those few with access to customers PII and very confidential information. However this segmentation allows us to open up the wider enterprise with more freedom, negating the need for any Shadow IT (public cloud resources available to all) and Guest networks for all BYOD landing on site. Which includes the many 3rd parties. A core aim to get someone working in minutes with their own kit, bureaucracy being a blocker to productivity. Where do you seek transformational inspiration from?I've had the good fortune to spend a lot of time with Start Ups all over the world, I love the disrupting thinking that successful entrepreneurs bring to various challenges. In particular I look at how people solve problems in other verticals that can be applied to the business that I work in.  I love lean thinking and any ways of reducing the time from idea inception to deploying a live product to consumers. You would be surprised how much opportunity there is to improve this in most organisations! The CIO role in the business Who do you report to?CEO Do you have a seat on the board?Yes How often do you meet with the CEO?Weekly Does your organisation have a digital leader and what is the difference in their responsibilities to yours?No, in a Digital Business the CEO is the CDO. So the model is very different to how traditional businesses have to organise to accommodate the Digital agenda. However it means the CIO must be as much a Commercial Head as an IT Leader. What percentage of IT budget do you control and what percentage of IT budget does your digital peer hold?100% The IT department How many staff make up the IT team?(What is the split between in-house/outsourced staff)Circa 250 with 110 being outsourced. Describe the CIO’s management team, do you have direct reports that develop the relationship and services between the business and IT?The organisation is small and clear. I have a CTO that is responsible for Technical Strategy and Architecture; a Head of Delivery that is responsible for the Programme Management of our Product Delivery Pipelines; a Head of Data that leads a team of Technology and Data Scientists in maximising the data asset we have in the business and finally a Head of Infrastructure and Operations. This latter role also encompasses what you would describe as a traditional IT team that supports the internal IT requirements of the business. All the team have direct relationships with Commercial, Marketing and User Experience Stakeholders in the business. And how many log-in accounts do you issue across you organisation?No idea, but probably not many more than the 500 employees plus contract staff.  The majority of applications are all single sign on via AD. What is the primary technology platform? ( for example ERP, Website, trading system)Website