Simon Conroy

Qrious was already well established when I arrived with approximately 40 FTEs. My role was to develop the existing data and analytics capability into marketing and customer focused use cases. Within a month of starting the role we commenced due diligence on acquiring an 18 year old Auckland-based marketing automation agency called Ubiquity. The acquisition was completed in mid-2017 which grew Qrious' headcount to over 90 staff. For the remainder of my time at Qrious I led this new division.

Due to the important role that Data was starting to play in Spark, the new role of General Manager Data Strategy and Analytics was created in the Finance division, reporting to the then CFO (now CEO) Jolie Hodson. While my team achieved some great things during my tenure such as developing a single customer view with profitability metrics, implementing the new Data Warehouse and overhauling the B2B contact strategy, in my opinion the organisation was not culturally ready for a General Manager to head up this function due to the fragmented nature of the structure. As a result the Chief Ventures Officer offered me the role within Qrious.

This was a new role created reporting to the CMO when the Board endorsed a recommendation to establish new discipline under marketing for customer analytics. As I had written the Board paper which led to the decision, I was appointed to head up the team. Over the course of the three years in the role I recruited the team (15 FTEs when I left), we implemented the infrastructure (Responsys Marketing Automation, SAS Enterprise Guide, SAS Enterprise Miner, SAS Visual Analytics, Boxever), insourced all direct marketing activity and became an analytics service provider to the rest of the organisation.

The role of Strategy Manager reported to the Chief Strategy Officer and regularly interacted with the airline's Executive team and Board. We were responsible for working alongside the business to provide analytical and strategic support in any large or far-reaching decisions facing the organisation. Examples of the projects I worked on were the Data and Analytics strategy (as mentioned above), review of the direct channel strategy, Airpoints programme review, multiple union negotiations and the Air NZ / Virgin Australia partnership. These projects were typically highly commercial and computationally intensive.

After 8 months in my previous role at Flight Centre, the existing Head of Information Technology departed, and I was promoted to lead the function reporting to the CEO. As an organisation, Flight Centre had not invested sufficiently into its infrastructure which was evident in the performance of the network. We put in place a strategy and roadmap to address the technical debt which included migrating from a distributed server structure (effectively a PC in each store running all the programmes) to a Revera hosted data centre, implementing virtualisation to give us more redundancy and switching from Spark (then Telecom) to Vodafone as our network provider yielding over $1m in savings.