Interview: Volkswagen UK systems director Nick Gaines

Founded in 1937, Volkswagen’s marques include Audi, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini, Seat, Škoda and heavy goods vehicle manufacturer Scania. Computing caught up with Nick Gaines, the firm’s UK group information systems director, to find out the role that the latest technology plays in a company with such a long and prestigious pedigree.

Gaines says he fell into IT after studying nuclear engineering and then working in a nuclear power plant.

“Many years ago I was leading a tour for visitors from our head office at the power station, and explaining how we optimised the performance of the power plant,” explains Gaines.

“I had done a bit of programming to facilitate the presentation and little did I know that one of the guys to whom I was giving a tour was the IT director at the time. He said to me that I must come and talk to his IT guys about my work.”

As a result of that meeting, Gaines found himself leading teams that were building real-time simulations of power plants and teaching safety processes to operators in replica control rooms created by his team.

“I found myself doing IT because I understood the business end of it, the engineering, the physics and the way that people worked in a power plant,” he says.

After his spell in the nuclear industry, Gaines worked in the financial services sector, but then fell back into IT a few years later when he became head of IT for an accountancy firm. From there he went on to run large infrastructure projects for the British Airports Authority (BAA).

“I became head of technology, as it was called in those days, purely by accident. It was because I had worked in power plant construction, and that experience was useful for the Terminal 5 programme for which I ran all the IT.”

He left BAA in January 2008 and took on his current role at Volkswagen.

Talk the talk

Gaines says the offer of such a plum IT role at one of the world’s leading companies was down to the wide range of business experience he had accumulated, as well as his technical knowledge.

“Business acumen is more than an optional extra, it’s mandatory,” he says.

“When I was interviewed by the managing director for the role here at Volkswagen, he said I was the only person to have had a discussion with him about business issues in business terms and was looking at people, process and strategy as well as technology. He explained that most people looking to be CIO were overly focused on the technical side.”

Importance of integration

At Volkswagen, Gaines has spent most of his time working on a £30m project that has seen him integrate the company’s core systems in order to gain a single view of the customer and improve processes across the organisation.