CASE: Nord Anglia Education
Global Head IT Operations
The Situation
Nord Anglia is the world’s leading premium international schools’ organization, a network of 80 international schools based in 28 countries, with a global revenue of £1.5b and an aim to reach 100 schools and a revenue of £3b by 2023.
They were going through a major business transformation that included centralizing most of their core functions of support from a distributed country model to a federated regional and global model. They asked us to recruit a new role – Global Head of IT Operations.
While this was a new client to The Digital Board, our founder/ CEO knew the Global Head of Technology, having previously placed him as a CIO in DHL. He approached us to recruit this role as Nord Anglia were starting to build a global strategy, coherent operating model & system, and creating a leadership team to manage Nord Anglia as a proper global business. It was important for them to strike the right balance between keeping what was individual and important to each school alongside what standards were necessary to run them better with a global operating model.
The Opportunity
Nord Anglia’s business model is largely federated, and therefore they only needed to standardize and centralize what elements were considered essential. In terms of IT, so far only a few systems had been applied globally (Finance, HR and their Global Campus applications). The role of Global Head of IT Operations was needed to work closely with the regional IT Directors to create a global operating model, including people, processes and support technology.
For Nord Anglia technology is key to their ability to scale, and due to the lack of industry standards for the group they needed innovation. This leader would also need to help build the central team that could design, deploy and support this new operating model.
They needed automation, reporting and analytics tools to improve efficiency. This technology needed to support multiple dynamic demographics and customer journeys.
This leader would need to establish and leverage IT standards and scale to drive growth and differentiation, establish and embed a data model, and create and deploy an innovative industry standard technology and data architecture for all stakeholders and functions. They would need to work with the stakeholders of Business and IT, to support the infrastructure projects and operations of the global IT systems and implement ITIL across the organization.
What made this interesting?
Nord Anglia Education was both a very traditional business for education, but they were disrupting the market by creating a new business model and they were also private equity backed – part owned by Barings and part owned by a Canadian pension fund. These groups invested to provide the capital for acquisition so Nord Anglia could grow and transform their business. These acquisitions brought schools that would have their own IT, HR, and finance functions into the Nord Anglia global command centre, where they would now provide those services; becoming more efficient through economies of scale. This also allowed Nord Anglia to provide innovation at scale. For example, how they could deliver education more dynamically and digitally in the classroom.
This role was also being filled as they created 4 other new roles; Global head of Applications, Global Head of Infrastructure, Global Head of IT Security and Global Head of Enterprise architecture. Off the back of this search we also successfully recruited their Global Head of Infrastructure.
What made this challenging?
It was a difficult environment we were recruiting into as Nord Anglia were acquiring schools for their growth and moving their services from a local to a global level. Therefore, our candidate needed significant change management experience, to spearhead the change of moving these schools to this new IT operating model., and then ensuring communication to these 70 schools through the help desk.
At the same time, Nord Anglia also needed someone that could operate IT in a bi modal state – ensuring its stability and user confidence in the IT service, as well as someone that could bring their own level of change. This meant finding a candidate with a very unique set of skills and experiences.
The Digital Board Process
We began the process by working with the client and talking to the key figures that were already involved in leading the programme to understand the main requirements of the role.
We then wrote the candidate brief, capturing the idiosyncrasies of the position and the programme and focusing on the following areas:
A Head of Operations with a track record of managing large scale operations over multiple countries and business units
Experience of managing operations’ organisational change from a largely federated approach towards a standard and centralized model, balancing those elements that are considered global with local needs.
An ability to demonstrate an understanding of both the culture and economic rationale for operating in a mix of centralized and federated approach.
Working closely with our CEO and founder Bryan, our research team conducted an intensive sourcing process, identifying 44 candidates that we felt fit the role description. We interviewed and assessed 10 of these candidates and recommended 4 candidates to shortlist, confident that all 4 could do the job. These 4 candidates met with the global CTO and the HR Director, who then narrowed the candidates down to 2. These 2 candidates met 3 people from the CTO’s team as a form of peer review. From there they met the Global Head of Education. Both candidates then met 1 of the 4 regional CEOs, and finally only our successful candidate met the Group CEO.
Success Story
The successful candidate brought with him to Nord Anglia 25 years of experience within market leading blue-chip organisations across several market sectors including; retail, travel and trading as well as IT Services. This candidate was a self motivated, and adaptable service driven operational process specialist, with the needed experience of building and managing enthusiastic and high performing teams to meet challenging objectives.
The candidate has used their valuable experience managing the change towards a global operating model while simultaneously running and managing operations with various business units maintaining their independence. Our candidate has used their ability to engage and communicate around change to build up relationships within the business based on trust and transparency.
Since this search Nord Anglia has grown from 61 to 83 international schools, and operates in 30 countries.