How Reed.co.uk does IT without an IT department

Mark Ridley, Reed.co.uk director of technology, explains how every team within the business pays for their own IT

Reed.co.uk is a company without an IT department.

That isn't to say that the firm doesn't have an IT function, but back in 2007, director of technology Mark Ridley decided that the organisation could function better if it split its IT from mother company Reed, which also runs the well-known chain of employment agencies across the UK.

"We [Reed.co.uk] decided we wanted to move away from Reed as a central supplier of IT," he says.

Reed's central IT department delivered things like IT provisioning, Wyse thin clients, Citrix and Lotus Notes - all elements of IT that Ridley believes would be familiar with people who worked in IT "five or 10 years ago".

"[The IT department] was seen as the ‘cost centre' but there aren't really IT costs - in the same way that there isn't one department that is responsible for heating or electricity, we're trying to do the same with IT," he says.

As part of the shift, Reed.co.uk implemented new hardware and software across the organisation - moving from Lotus Notes to Google Apps, and from Windows PCs to Chromeboxes and Chromebooks, all as part of an "agile lean transformation strategy".

This approach would affect not only the product development teams, but also procurement, finance, management and accounting teams. "It means we can start accounting for all of those appropriately - but there still isn't really an IT department," he says.

Ridley adds that there are Reed.co.uk employees who can help with IT support, procurement, integration and security, but that IT costs should be given to those who see the upside of implementing any new technology.

"It might be that if we work with our sales team to purchase something that makes their sales process more efficient, it should be sales that should be bearing the cost of the upside, and they are the people that really understand the benefits of those changes, so they should be the ones representing that to the board," Ridley states.

"There is a big cultural shift in the organisation of really removing the sense of IT as a department and pushing the fact that IT is an enabler," he adds.

Shifting to agile

Ridley joined Reed.co.uk back in November 1997 as a developer and rose up the ranks to become director of technology. And, although he is no longer a developer at the firm, he is using much of what he learnt on his journey to become the IT chief at the firm to push the company forwards. This includes his familiarity with agile development.

Historically, Reed.co.uk was a development house running a website, but in 2007 became a sales and product development company too. Today it employs about 270 people in central London, 150 of which are sales staff, 80 of which work in product development, with the remaining employees working in finance, HR and support functions.

Ridley is responsible for the team that takes care of the production of the website, as well as the more traditional IT functions. In total he is responsible for more than 60 people, 50 working on the operational running of the website, and six employees working on the business support functions, including running POCs and giving IT support.

Ridley says his team did not want to own its own servers, but at no point did the firm have a vision to end up with no Windows PCs - this was just a result of the way the business moved towards a new "hybrid" model. Ridley says that the only traditional service that remains at the company is Microsoft Active Directory.

"The only real operational item we have internally is Active Directory, and this is the core record of identity for everyone in our business that's been pushed out to external identity management readers. We use Google for most of our document management storage, and we use Jive as a social intranet to communicate and collaborate," he says.

Ridley's team had to learn things that are usually meant for IT departments on-the-go, such as how it should provide finance and HR systems and how to do a workflow.

Recruiting at a recruitment agency

"We're recruiting all of the time, and in product development we're significantly going to grow," claims Ridley. He adds that Reed.co.uk is focusing on bringing in talent with specialist skills, but that doesn't mean all staff will be taken on full-time.

In the past, he says that when Reed.co.uk was looking to buy new infrastructure, it would bring in specialists on a temporary basis as it couldn't afford to employ someone on a full-time basis for a skillset that it only needed once every two years.

Ridley wants to bring in some more security skills in-house, and the company is also working with Salesforce.com on the software-as-a-service company's apprentices programme. "We're bringing in someone on board from Salesforce's programme to bolster our sales operations," he states.

Reed.co.uk is also developing its own graduate, apprentice and internship programme. "We want to bring through the next generation of users and investing in graduates or school leavers to get involved in technology and train them - that's a really big focus for us," he says.

The next project

Reed.co.uk is currently going through a procurement process for business intelligence (BI) and data visualisation products.

According to Ridley, the company has already looked at 20 different providers in that space alone. The technology is important for the company because it still hasn't managed to pull all of its data sources into one convenient place to view and analyse.

"We are building a commercial analysis team now and want to push through the development of core analytics competence across the business in all of the teams.

"The BI team is working on getting the best tools to analyse the data, rather than just report on it, and one of the main things we are interested in is how we can integrate lots of datasets that are generally stored in different places.

"We have our own data coming into the website, we use Salesforce for our CRM, we have finance and HR systems, and so one of the big projects we're working on is the accumulation and integration of that data," he says.