Step into the CIO's office: Adil Nasri on his new role

Thanks! Honestly, I've always had a passion for knowledge management and how the right tools and software can help teams work better. veniture [now Adaptavist] was an embodiment of that, really—our work focused on fostering collaboration, transparency, and improved communication, and we had great experience with the tools we sold because we used them all internally. As CEO of veniture, that was really important to me, and it fits with the values of The Adaptavist Group (TAG) as a whole, too. It's one of the reasons veniture was a great fit to join TAG in the first place. So, when Neal [Riley, former CIO] decided to move on to focus on growing Salable, Simon approached me, and I was happy to accept! What excites me about the CIO role is how the flow of information ties in with a company's culture—from access and availability of information to how we interact with and contribute to the organisation's shared knowledge—and I'll be able to help guide that.

I'd say 'clarity'. I want everyone across the business to understand where we are, where we're going, and how everyone is contributing to that. Each person and each team should know how their work connects with and impacts others' work so that we're all aligned. We've grown quickly and there's always so much happening as a global business—and of course, we want to keep growing—so we need robust processes and communication to make sure nobody gets left behind.

I think whenever you have a group of over 1,000 people based all around the world, getting everyone on the same page with the same information is a challenge in itself! A lot of it is cultural—and I don't mean geographically, but organisationally. Everyone's career history is different, and every company does things differently. Just within TAG, we've previously had more than ten distinct brands, all with their own communication preferences and ways of working. Change is hard! But I'd like to lead a transition to more open communication everywhere. For example, I personally much prefer to use public channels for conversation over direct messages, for anything that isn't confidential or sensitive. I really value transparency and documenting decisions openly wherever possible. Of course, realistically not every piece of information can be public, but everyone benefits from knowing more about how or why a decision is made.

I think the 'proper' term for it is 'servant leadership', but I really just value trying to help where I see a need for it. I'm not interested in micromanaging or having people run absolutely everything past me. I see myself as a supporter, and an unblocker when needed, but primarily I want to give people what they need to make decisions for themselves. Historically, I've always done myself out of a job by empowering and upskilling my team to the point that I moved on because they didn't need me any more! In fact, I'm proud of that. My goal is to make myself obsolete.

I really believe data is an asset—and with so many thousands of customers, we have loads of it. The value lies in extrapolating from that data where the trends and patterns of success are, and those become our 'blueprints'. Whether it's internal or external, whatever we do, it's not just about sharing information, but really getting to the heart of what we can learn from it. And no doubt there's a greater role for AI to play there, too—for deeper analysis, or to identify and react to trends in the data more quickly. I see the role of a CIO as being central to driving all of this, ensuring that knowledge flows through the organisation and helps all our businesses to grow, and in turn that our customers benefit from our wealth of knowledge and insights.