Surprisingly Chris White has only been in the legal sector for six years. For many, I’m sure he seems like a lifer, someone who has always been part of the legal IT crowd. Starting his career in financial institutions he says his journey has not followed a normal path. “I came into IT by accident and was more involved in project management and business related projects than IT beforehand.” He says he was working at MPI, a pensions company who took a decision to spin the investment department away from the main company to make it a stand alone investment house. So he worked with the CEO of the asset management business on a corporate structure, recruitment, organisational policies and then wrote the IT strategy. I ask if this prove hard. “If you can write a business plan then it’s not that far away from understanding what the business wants and then providing the bits that make that happen. I’d been involved with IT in the past and ran some projects and also had good IT professionals working for me. So I developed the IT
strategy then the CEO said we need an IT director, so gave me the job.”
Chris, who has an MBA, thinks it’s beneficial not to be too focused on IT. “The job of an IT Director and systems staff is very different, more like conducting an orchestra. I think a lot of IT directors get too immersed in the technology rather than the strategy. I think IT simply needs to meet the needs of the business and should spend time promoting the whole IT function to internal staff and beyond.”
Read the rest at http://www.citytechmag.com/assets/Citytech_Ashurt_edition.pdf
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