How Moneysupermarket.com CIO Tim Jones is taking inspiration from Spotify, Netflix and Zynga to shape his own technology strategy
Jones has been inspired by ideas such as squads and tribes, Z-Cloud and Chaos Monkey
Tim Jones was one of the co-founders of Auto Trader's digital business in 1996, and went on to transform the company from one that turned over £900 in its first year, to one that turned over about £220m.
While he has enjoyed the first 18 months of his new role, he has had to revamp several key areas within the business to ensure that the organisation remains competitive.
The first thing he wanted to change was the way the company viewed its IT department.
"It was quite traditional in structure, and one of the first things in trying to increase the velocity of the business was to reposition technology from a service to making it a central pillar to the business," he told Computing.
He rebranded the IT department as the technology department, as well as splitting it into other divisions such as product engineering, and has put forward a strategy to move the business forwards.
Inspiration from the internet
Jones explained that he had to build a strong leadership team by retaining the best talent he had and hiring others based on the skills and culture that the organisation required. Then, he took on board several concepts from other internet companies in order to change the way Moneysupermarket.com worked.
This included a derivation of Spotify's squads and tribes strategy.
"For example, we would have a tribe that focused on our data; they would focus on insight, big data, data engineering and analytics. But the tribe doesn't just include technologists, but analysts from different teams - so you create multifunctional teams," he explained.
"The whole ethos we tried to establish was for employees to forget who they report into; it doesn't matter if they report to the CIO or chief marketing officer - we're just a group of people in the organisation together that should work together," he added.
The company has a "platform tribe" and a "customer tribe", which focuses on the front-end. Within that tribe, Jones said, the scalability comes from the squads.
"A squad is typically 12 to 14 individuals who are multi-skilled and are self-contained," Jones stated.
Each squad is different; within the scalability squad there would be a mix of developers, user experience specialists, developers, testers and iteration managers, while a squad within the data tribe would have front-end developers, data engineers and database administrators. Each squad is made up of permanent employees and contractors.
Jones believes this structure gives a lot of clarity to the business.
"It allows us to shift from staff stating that they have ideas that IT can't support, to me being able to say, ‘yes you can have the people you need if you want to invest in an initiative, but is the initiative the right one?'.
"Now the board has refocused, and can ask who is going to build the requirements and who is going to drive those teams to make sure the project isn't idle... It puts technology at the core, but shifts the focus onto the other parts of the business you need to scale," he said.
Different flavours of cloud
Another approach that Jones has taken inspiration from is gaming firm Zynga's Z-Cloud, which was created about four years ago.
"It was a hybrid cloud, and they were very early adopters and pioneers in this space," he said.
Moneysupermarket.com has invested in its very own version, dubbed the M-Cloud strategy, which covers its use of various public cloud technologies such as Docker.
The company uses Amazon Web Services and Rackspace for its cloud computing needs, with Jones claiming that the company has put a management layer on top that allows the firm to be "cloud agnostic".
"So we will use different vendors depending on security, location of data, performance and cost. AWS offers great tools for a start-up such as database services, but as a larger organisation I don't want to be tied into their proprietary bits, so we've limited it to Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and compute, and even within compute we have limited some of the use," Jones explained.
Using a hybrid cloud has enabled the organisation to reduce the need for back-up data centres and act quickly if there are security issues.
"Amazon had to recently patch their servers and they asked us to switch onto new servers. Various clients said that they could do this within a month, and my guys said we can do this in an hour and a half; we rebuilt everything. As long as my data is secured and in several locations I am confident I can reinstate my web environment in a short space of time," he said.
As well as Spotify and Zynga, Jones looked at implementing Netflix's Chaos Monkey approach at Moneysupermarket.com.
"We created our own Chaos Badger. It means having a script that will randomly move around your live environment in the cloud, turning your servers off - clearly not too many at once - but the whole idea is to prove that your entire environment should just continue to operate," he explained.
"If you've built your system in that way, you are already building in a level of resilience," he stated.
Out with the old
As well as trying to bring in new ways of working and different technologies at Moneysupermarket.com, Jones has also been left with a lot of legacy technology that he wants to move away from.
"Legacy in an online business like ours doesn't look the same as a bank or insurance firm's legacy - it isn't mainframes, it's more about the consequences of rapid growth," he said.
Moneysupermarket.com's growth has meant it has more than 50 separate products and each one of them has its own siloed environment and siloed code, leaving customer data secure but also hard to collect and analyse together.
The company has what Jones refers to as "good, robust, solid, reliable technologies" such as Microsoft's SQL Server, which his predecessors had bought.
He said that the legacy products had left the firm with scaling issues and that paying for licensing meant that the company's margins were eroding. This is one of the main reasons Jones decided to shift the business to the cloud, and also move away from large corporate licensed software to open-source alternatives.
"We're going to use lots of NoSQL rather than SQL, lots of big data technologies rather than SQL and Linux over Windows," he said.
According to Jones, the only pieces of commercially licensed software that the organisation uses are Adobe Experience Manager as a content management system, and Vertica as a big data platform.
"I have commercial deals with these vendors in place which give me the flexibility and ability to investigate launching new products, which would have been cost-prohibited under traditional licence methods," he said.
"The cloud has meant that it hasn't taken me eight weeks to buy a server, go through procurement, delivery and put VMs on a machine. I want to be able to do all of this in seconds," he said.
Resistance to change
Moving away from legacy, and managing vendors is not Jones' number one concern. He believes that talent management requires the most attention, particularly because many experienced IT staff aren't willing to up-skill in order to remain relevant in the workforce.
"A lot of [the employees] have technology skills that I don't need, and I need new ones. You have to look at which of the workforce is just generally interested in technology and open-minded so that you can send them to training courses and conferences and they will put the time in to learn new skills," he said.
"You need to ask which ones of your staff are going to pick up skills in testing, development, cloud and big data, and which ones are going to say they have expertise in using Windows Server and don't want to learn anything new.
Tim Jones was ranked as no. 67 in Computing's IT Leaders 100 list.