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The McCue Interview: United Business Media CIO Matthew Graham-Hyde
An unorthodox route to the top for Eminem-loving IT exec...

By Andy McCue

Published: Monday 22 May 2006

Despite being the obvious route to the top, a degree from a good university or an MBA isn't always necessary for the IT guy to break into the upper echelons of a FTSE 250 company. This is something United Business Media's (UBM) group CIO Matthew Graham-Hyde can testify to.

We meet in a plush conference room at UBM's offices by Blackfriar's bridge with a glorious vista of the Thames and the skyline of London on a crisp spring morning but it's fair to say Graham-Hyde's career started in somewhat less salubrious surroundings.

Having left school at 16 he got a job "shovelling shit" on a pig and poultry farm before moving into IT, doing batch control in the good old days of mainframe computing.

Now, as CIO of UBM, Graham-Hyde has around 6,000 end users to keep happy and is spearheading a move towards a standardised IT platform to replace the many disparate systems that have resulted from years of acquisitions and the variety of relatively autonomous business units owned globally by UBM.

Graham-Hyde describes it as a "holding company mentality" - the units managed individually with bespoke IT environments because they were in such different markets - but that's starting to change.

He says: "They all had different IT infrastructure. It wasn't part of the strategy to glue it all together. Now we are totally run as a business and there is more focus on having an enterprise architecture strategy. That's around business technology and platforms and governance models. It is all moving towards a standard framework."

In terms of governance and best practice that means things like the introduction of the Prince 2 project management principles, IT information library (ITIL) guidelines for IT infrastructure and BS7799 certification for security.

He says: "That's been helpful in getting people to think the same way."

In infrastructure and technical architecture this standardisation means a move away from complex bespoke environments. UBM has just completed an 18 month migration from Unix to open source and Microsoft's .NET.

Graham-Hyde says: "By the end of the first half of this year we won't have any Unix left. .NET is ubiquitous; there's plenty of expertise around in the market place, you can source pretty much from anywhere and it is less techie than J2EE. We don't need the sophistication of home-grown J2EE."

Although Graham-Hyde dismisses suggestions of wholesale outsourcing of the IT function as "the wrong way to do it", he says UBM uses outsourcing when there is a specific cost advantage. This has led to the company now doing a lot of IT augmentation work in India.

He says: "We have seen real cost advantages to using project teams in India rather than bringing in [someone like PricewaterhouseCoopers] in the UK. We started that around cost but we quickly discovered we not only got cost advantages but huge improvements in quality. It helps with governance. We are in some quite deep relationships now."

The goal of all this standardisation is to drive down UBM's fixed IT costs and Graham-Hyde is aiming to keep those at 3.5 per cent of revenue or below globally. "We are at that level in the UK and I suspect we will get below that," he says.

A standard enterprise IT infrastructure will also aid the business integrating the new acquisitions that are a common feature of the publishing industry, according to Graham-Hyde.

He explains: "It used to take 21 weeks to integrate a publisher. It now takes 10 weeks and we are moving to get that down to five weeks. If you don't integrate fast you lose the benefits of acquisition quickly."

The publishing industry, with its heavy focus on the internet and new technology for delivering media, also puts other pressures on the IT department to understand and embrace new technologies such as wikis.

He says: "There is the traditional [corporate] IT thinking that anything like that is bad. In publishing that is contrary to what you are trying to do as a business. The IT guys have to get ahead of the game. That's the real challenge. You can't afford to be the barrier to those things."

Graham-Hyde's first real grounding in IT management came when he worked at Chubb Security where the company set a target to double revenue in five years but he says many IT professionals are woefully unprepared for that transition.

He adds: "As you move from technical roles to management roles people underestimate how long it takes you to stop being a 'trekkie' and get communication skills and build relationships. You have to talk to them about IT without even mentioning IT."

As CIO, Graham-Hyde is in the office by 8:15 every morning ready for his first meeting of the day at 8:30. His last meeting is at 6:30pm. Then it's time to deal with his emails - more than 100 per day - before getting home for dinner around 9pm.

He admits to being a particularly demanding boss who "can be volatile", though you wouldn't guess it from his easy-going and friendly demeanour.

Sport and an eclectic music collection take Graham-Hyde away from the pressures of management. He manages to swim a couple of times each week as well as playing a spot of tennis and golf. On the music front his taste ranges from Eminem - "clearly the best rap artist in the world ever" - to opera and classical music, via a bit of Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan.

As for future challenges, he points to the constant battle in predicting IT capacity and demand for an organisation.

He says: "One of the difficult things for an internal IT organisation is there is unpredictability in demand. The challenge now is the level of unpredictability hitting your internal infrastructure."