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Story URL: http://management.silicon.com/itdirector/0,39024673,39127044,00.htm

Former easyGroup CTO starts up IT consultancy
Helping businesses get more from IT...

By Sylvia Carr

Published: Thursday 13 January 2005

Phil Jones, former CTO of easyGroup, has launched a consultancy called iStrategy dedicated to advising businesses on how to extract the maximum benefit from their IT investment.

Jones told silicon.com: "In my experience, business executives find it difficult to make a link between money spent on IT and what its contribution is to the organisation as a whole."

iStrategy's goal for it clients, he continued, is to put IT spend into the context of the overall business and determine how it can create the greatest value.

"In [performing this] analysis you often find a disproportionate amount of money is invested in areas that do not create value... and also find key value drivers that are underfunded."

Business leaders are then encouraged to re-evaluate these over or underfunded areas.

iStrategy aims to advise CEOs, CFOs and CIOs in medium-sized businesses.

"[Our] message resonates most with CEOs and CFOs," he said. "They intuitively believe IT is important but struggle with the connection of what they should be spending on."

CIOs could also benefit, he said, because "if CIOs want to make the transition from service providers to business strategists, they need to talk about IT in relationship to" how it can add value to the company's core areas.

Jones was CTO of easyGroup for five years before leaving at the end of 2004 in what he described as an "amicable" parting.

According to a company statement, easyGroup founder Stelios Haji-Ioannou "wishes Jones every success in setting up iStrategy".