Nando's hires JustGiving CIO Richard Atkinson as technology director

'I'm delighted to be able to bring my background in consumer technology to enhance the restaurant experience for both our people and our customers,' Atkinson tells Computing

Restaurant chain Nando's has hired former JustGiving chief information officer (CIO) Richard Atkinson in the position of technology director.

Atkinson told Computing that his new role will see him responsible for enhancing the Nando's experience for both the company's staff and customers within the UK.

"Nando's is a great business, with highly engaged staff and fans. So I'm delighted to be able to bring my background in consumer technology to enhance the restaurant experience for both our people and our customers," he said.

The Nando's brand has 1,200 restaurants across the globe, with 340 of them in the UK. Atkinson explained that it's in this country that "most of the worldwide technology expertise resides" in the form of a team of around 50 people working with various technology partners and vendors "to broaden and deepen their capability".

The key challenge in his new role, Atkinson said, "is to design, drive and deliver the most effective technology in a busy and growing business at a time of enormous technological change".

Atkinson will report directly to the Nando's UK CEO. As a board member he'll also work alongside group technology director and global CIO Ralph Marshall "to create solutions for global markets".

In his previous role at JustGiving, Atkinson was responsible for the infrastructure of an online social platform that enables over 15 million registered users to donate money to more than 20,000 charities.

Despite the service being used by millions of people - Atkinson described JustGiving as "the world's largest fundraising platform" and "bigger than Kickstarter" - the company is of a relatively small size. In order to develop the firm's ever-growing infrastructure and to cope with peaks in demand during big charity drives, Atkinson turned to cloud services.

"People talk about scale, but in our case it's the speed to scale that matters. My peers in retail all talk about Black Friday bringing 10 times normal traffic, but for us, a busy day is 100 times normal," he previously told Computing.

"If One Direction or Stephen Fry Tweet something, we can have 10,000 visitors in 10 seconds, so you need to scale but you need to scale quickly, it's about the gradient of the slope," Atkinson said.

During his time at JustGiving, Atkinson also pushed for agile development with DevOps, something he described as opening up "a whole new world" for developers. It will be interesting to see whether he transfers these methodologies to his new post.