Trinity Mirror is searching for a new CIO

Candidate does not need experience as a CIO or IT director

Trinity Mirror plc, the British newspaper, magazine and digital publisher behind the Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror, is looking for a new chief information officer (CIO).

The organisation, which has five national titles, 130 regional titles and more than 500 digital products, is in the middle of a digital transformation programme, and believes it has reached a pivotal point after growing its digital audience and digital revenues. The group wants to now focus on "innovation and diversification of [its] product portfolio".

This, it claimed, forms part of a strategy to build its digital future around the unique local footprint it holds across the UK - particularly after purchasing rival Local World for £220m in October 2015.

In a bid to manage this next wave of innovation, the organisation recently appointed a group chief innovation officer, Eirik Svendsen. However, it wants to apply a similar mindset and culture to enterprise IT and therefore is on the hunt for a new CIO.

In a job advert, the publisher said that it had outsourced a large proportion of IT operations to trusted partners several years ago, in what had been a ‘successful transition'. It said it was now focused on continuous improvement of service delivery and updating working practices across the IT teams.

The CIO will report directly to the company's group CIO in "a newly created position to raise the bar in enterprise technology across the group and to lead the transformation in this function". The selected candidate will be the owner of the group's enterprise IT strategy.

They will oversee a 40 person IT team, which they can improve on and change as they see fit. They will be tasked with updating the IT strategy, overseeing a product strategy and roadmap delivery for core enterprise application areas, and delivering large scale infrastructure changes including data centre consolidation and a move to Amazon Web Services.

While the new CIO will need a track record of ‘doing things differently and more effectively with enterprise IT', experience of working with outsourced partners and of leading multi-disciplinary teams, they will not need experience as a CIO or IT director - or experience of working in a publishing media company.

"It can be someone with ambition, desire and credibility to grow into a challenging role with the right support around them," the company said.

"This is a great opportunity to redefine enterprise IT. To ‘do IT' in a different way which is more in line with a digital native than as a traditional publisher," it added.

The CIO will be based in Canary Wharf in Central London. A salary for the role has not been disclosed.