What's your proudest work-related achievement of the last 12 months?
This year I've been working on a major end-of-life and migration programme, as we've been replacing a decade-old infrastructure supporting thousands of end users, retaining almost all our customers and revenue (95 per cent), and growing the business significantly at the same time.
This achievement took focus and close collaboration, cohesion and alignment of dozens of people from almost every discipline in the firm, during a time of great organisational change as Refinitiv was spun out of Thomson Reuters in one of the biggest corporate transactions of the year.
What's the number one skill today's IT leaders need?
To be a truly great leader, you have to have great communication skills - they're truly the foundation of everything else. Listening, with intent to understand; being open to being influenced; and asking great questions are just as important as delivering a compelling message and a clear sense of direction around which everyone can align.
What's your top priority for the next 12 months?
Continuing to unlock the inherent value of the content we provide to the finance industry. The opportunities for the IT and data science disciplines to make a real difference to a firm's success have never been greater, and by continuing the transformation of our Enterprise product suite, and the petabytes of data it makes available, into a cohesive and public cloud-integrated whole, we can ensure our customers reap the benefits.
For example, I'm working on some exciting plans to leverage the public cloud for some of our industry-leading data. Our customers can query this data directly in the search for ‘alpha' signals, and to meet their compliance reporting objectives, and do so more cheaply and quickly than ever.
