CIO interview: Alan Crawford, City & Guilds Group

Helping newly assimilated organisations negotiate their newly stretched and unknown IT landscape is an area Crawford has sold knowledge in.

He assimilated Help a Aged as IT executive in 2007, only forward of a organisation’s partnership with Age Concern, that resulted in a origination of a Age UK code in 2010.

“I went out of IT for a year on a secondment to work on a partnership as a programme manager, that was a good experience,” he says. “I afterwards went on to turn a initial IT director.”

“We will need connectivity to both Microsoft and AWS, and we can’t means to tighten ourselves off”

Alan Crawford, City Guilds Group

“That was a genuine merger, where we had to build all new: a networks, datacentres, IT support, financial systems and CRM [customer attribute management]. Everything.

“We had dual to 3 of any kind of technology, and it was a unequivocally good experience, though also 3 or 4 years of tough work.”

It is this knowledge Crawford intends to move to his stream role, as he gets to grips with how best to facilitate a IT estate of a companies that make adult a City Guilds Group, and any other destiny acquisitions a organization decides to embark on.

The City Guilds partial of a organization uses Microsoft Azure, but, as formerly stated, other collection of a business have hosting contracts in place with other cloud and datacentre providers, including AWS.

“We’re going to have to be operative with both Amazon and Azure in a short-to-medium term, and since we have contracts in place still to run, we will be using some-more on-premise, third-party private cloud providers within a organization estate for a subsequent dual to 3 years during least,” he says.

“Whichever approach we go after that, we will finish adult with a hybrid cloud, and we have a transparent instruction of where we wish to take a business, that would need connectivity to both Azure and AWS.”

Beyond that, standardising some of a organisation’s back-office IT is another entrance Crawford is exploring, that will embody eventually relocating any worker on to Office 365, Microsoft’s online business capability suite.

Alongside this effort, he is now identifying that systems and applications give any organization within a City Guilds organization their rival edge.

“At a front end, we need larger lively and innovation, quite where a customer-facing issues are concerned,” says Crawford. “Then we have a ubiquitous bureau and partnership collection any bureau uses. we wish us to standardize there.”