See also: CIO column from Daily Mail's David Henderson
Digital reinvention at the Telegraph
Tinity Mirror: tech for the modern newspaper business
Tony Pusey's life in retail
Many organisations are looking to IT to open up new business, but for publishing companies it’s a case of embrace technology or die.
Traditional print-based media businesses have suffered significant dips in revenues as the market has shifted to online media and it’s up to CIOs like Tony Pusey of Trinity Mirror to help them reinvent themselves for the digital age.
Meeting Pusey in the company’s Canary Wharf offices, it’s clear to see that the company has a modern outlook, but it’s safe to say that nowhere else is the CIO’s remit more critical to the company’s survival.
Pusey is used to a transformation agenda though, from his experiences at Accenture and Storehouse Group, and he looks as if he’s taking this particular task in his stride.
Pusey has been at Trinity for over a decade, and his mood is confident and relaxed, as well it should be, as he has just returned from a winter break in Italy.
On the walls of the meeting room, high above London’s Docklands, are front pages from the company’s publications.
The most well-known of these are the Daily and Sunday Mirror, but Trinity also publishes over 140 newspapers and magazines, plus 500 digital products. It employs 6500 people in 60 locations across the UK.
CIOs need to have a deep understanding of the business they work in and have a clear view of what IT needs to be put in place to achieve the necessary long-term goals, but Pusey works in an industry that is faced with an uncertain future, which makes defining such a strategy hard.
The traditional print media industry is having to transform itself into a multimedia beast even as it continues to operate the presses.
It’s a drastic transformation requirement that would make even the stoutest of hearts skip a beat.
Pusey says he has come up against his share of hostility, but Trinity Mirror is on the latest stage of a process that began many years ago.
Up until the turn of the century, Trinity Mirror had grown as a result of a series of acquisitions and had been left with a legacy of 20 or so autonomous business units, each with their own IT operation.
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That meant each business unit had their own editorial, pre-press and sales applications, which had often been developed in-house independently of the rest of the company.
Pusey’s first task was to rationalise these operations, but now that has been accomplished he has gone much further and is currently going through the process of turning core systems into cloud-based services.
In tandem with this, he is driving the company’s reach out to readers over mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet PCs.
“From my perspective, publishing is a very exciting industry at a very exciting stage. I know it can be depressing when you look at it, because it’s going through a huge transformation,” says Pusey.
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