The online provider of UK airport parking and hotel packages has been running for 27 years, but Pack exudes the can-do spirit of a start-up.

“When I joined, the IT role was a support operation focusing on business uptime, but its attitude ring-fenced progress,” he says.

Pack believes IT departments often over-step their authority in controlling what the business can do. “I don’t want the feeling that nothing can ever happen without the IT team’s approval,” says Pack, who removed IT barriers to the business.

“[These changes] demanded a dramatic change in culture. I started employing people fast, including developers, data and search engine specialists and project managers.”

The main aim was to build a team that could respond quickly to new business requirements.

“To be an online player, you need to be quick at doing things and have flexible systems where you can update pages on the site in less than five minutes. Before, such updates would be put in a queue and executed whenever the guys got round to doing it,” says Pack.

He believes an IT leader should focus their team on what it is good at, and use suppliers who can enhance their capabilities.

Email is a core tool and the company recently moved its email platform to StrongMail, which is now integrated into its existing database infrastructure.

“We are world class in managing our customers and we use StrongMail which is world class in sending emails. Combining these strengths has improved our email marketing campaigns through more relevant targeting,” says Pack.

He favours cloud computing and open-source technologies. “I want to get really brutal with what we do and don’t do, and it is inevitable we use cloud computing to help run the business. I support the open-source software route, but will spend money where necessary, for example on IBM’s DB2 database, as MySQL doesn’t cut it. If there were a DB2 cloud, however, we would be on it,” he says.

Online collaboration is used extensively, but Pack has met with some resistance.

“We are all on Facebook, have instant messenger and use 37signals’ Basecamp to manage projects. However, moving people towards collaboration and sharing documents is easier for a start-up, but we are investing time in people to move them forward,” he says.

Pack is also pushing for outside collaboration and wants to open up Holiday Extra’s platform to enable partners to develop and build on it. The platform already runs the Legoland and London Dungeons sites.

“Ideally, we would like to put more businesses on our platform as we have a capable fulfilment and distribution business. As an intelligent partner to the business, we can help it grow,” says Pack.

Read part two of our definitive guide to IT leadership here and find out how Nationwide Building Society is planning an IT transformation