The traditional world of banking IT can seem a long way away
from the increasingly ubiquitous world of internet-based
business.
Fin
Goulding, CIO at
Lastminute.com, made the
jump from one to the other in 2007, when he joined the dotcom boom
business that was co-founded by
Martha Lane Fox in 1999.
After a career of working in corporate IT teams in companies
such as Visa, NatWest and HSBC, he says that Lastminute.com held a
bit of a culture shock.
Corporate IT departments are there as a support system to the
rest of the business. They breathe life into banks, accountancy
firms or retailers. But technology is at the heart of what
Lastminute.com does and that is reflected in the way the company is
run.
Goulding says this is part of the reason younger technologists
feel increasingly at home in businesses such as his. There is more
flexibility, less formality, but most importantly there is the
chance to be creative and come up with ideas.
"In the traditional technology world, you receive the business
strategy, align the technology strategy to it, and IT projects come
from that. Here, it is the other way around. People work on ideas
and there are no constraints on them. There is no predetermined
business specification. The banks I know would die for some of the
innovation here."
He says the internet is forcing a culture change on to IT. It
may not happen quickly, but it is increasingly likely that workers
who are inspired by the dynamism at some internet-focused
businesses will choose to keep their valuable skills well clear of
the traditional IT department.
Competition for the best staff will get hotter in the coming
years - and higher salaries alone are not guaranteed to attract
people.
Tackling problems
But Goulding admits it is "not all sweetness and light". He has
spent his time at the company tackling reliability problems caused
by its fast growth.
There are around 350 applications and 2,500 servers at
Lastminute.com, and Goulding says it got to a stage where new
applications could not be added without
things breaking. He says the business has repaired some
applications and retired others.
"At first, the strategy was to get stuff out there as quickly as
possible. The company wanted to be first to market. That worked at
the time, but now the business is so big the technology could not
scale."
He adds the biggest challenge for CIOs at the moment is fighting
budget cuts, which means changing the workplace culture is not high
on the to-do list.
"Most CIOs have become cost-focused and are quite controlling.
They are trying to be very predictable in what they do and keep
change to a minimum," Goulding says.
"We work within a certain corporate culture, and it is difficult
to change that. But I think that if you start restricting people,
they will stop being innovative."