1. intheblack.com April 2015 7170 ITB April 2015
Ian Herman FCPA
National managing partner, Strategic
Performance & Engagement
Grant Thornton, Melbourne
Ours is the fifth-biggest accounting firm in Australia
behind the Big Four. We’ve grown rapidly. In fact,
our growth has outstripped the big boys due to
mergers in the last three years. These mergers have
delivered growth and our yearly revenue is now
running at A$225 million.
But along with those mergers have come legacy
and different IT infrastructure issues. Andrew
Pritchett, our chief information officer, has made an
enormous difference to Grant Thornton by building
a unified system to streamline all that.
Andrew has really helped us use technology to
compete better. He’s reshaped and restructured
IT here, to the point that the firm has huge
confidence in him and the IT team.
He’s a wonderful asset to Grant Thornton and he’s
saved us an enormous amount of money. We now get
more value from our technology. He’s built a national
infrastructure from what was formerly five offices
of ours running independently. Since he started
18 months ago, he’s dealt with our merger last year
with the Cairns office of KPMG of more than 70 staff,
and another two years ago when we took over the
Melbourne and Sydney practices of BDO Australia.
One of our opportunities is to build our brand
over the next few years. Those that know us stay
with us, and we’re winning our fair share of former
Big Four clients. We mostly have midsize clients
up to A$500 million, which include firms like
Clean Seas Tuna and The Coffee Club.
Andrew started reporting directly to me early last
year. Before that I was managing partner of the
Ian Herman loves football.
Andrew Pritchett adores gadgets.
And together they’re looping IT
into the business strategy at
Grant Thornton.
my boss and me
AS TOLD TO Shelley Dempsey
PHOTO graham jepson
Bringing IT
into business
Andrew Pritchett (at left)
and Ian Herman embrace
individual differences
as it produces better
ideas and more innovative
problem-solving.
my boss AND me
What Andrew would change about Ian: “I want to hear more of
Ian’s footy stories.I’m a nerd and not naturally athletic, so some of his
sports insights are really valuable.
He should embrace that side a bit more with us in the IT team.”
Melbourne office from 2007. Now I have a team
of about 80 and 25 are in IT. [Grant Thornton has
1300 staff across Australia.]
He is a different IT leader. He has some geek
tendencies, but also a unique ability to be able to
provide a connection between IT-speak and business
need, and to loop IT into business priorities. He can
shape what IT needs in the eyes of the business in
simple language.
We complement each other. He brings me IT
solutions and we really work together to nail what
the ideal solution should be. Our partners here like
to make sure we get the best out of our investment,
because it comes from the partners’ pockets. Andrew
is really cognisant of that and he’s able to create
some really good IT solutions, really economically.
I think a long time ago IT was seen just as an
enabler for us to do things. But I think IT is now as
important as our people and has moved up to the
front of our strategy considerations. That means
Andrew is intricately involved in our partner
strategy workshops.
I think the biggest surprise [for me] was how little
Andrew knows about sport. I played AFL footy
[Australian Rules football] for Richmond and Carlton
and I guess I expected him to know more. I think
I learnt a lot from my sport career. Footy built my
character and resilience. I used to think if I applied
what I learnt at footy into business I’d be a successful
leader. But I realised it’s different, because in sport
you know your competitors, but in business they come
fast and sometimes you don’t know where from.
The most useful aspect of having Andrew
reporting to me is I now have an on-call IT helpdesk
only a few feet away. My PC has never run better
and gets fixed in record time.
Andrew Pritchett
Chief information officer
Grant Thornton, Melbourne
Ian and I are very different. He probably has the
most energy and focus of anyone I’ve ever worked
with. It’s quite intense. He’s always on the go and
I think he’s probably off the chart in that regard.
I first got to know him when I started here and
had some tough calls to make around people in
the IT team. Since then he’s become my direct
manager and we’ve both really driven changes in
IT management together. I’m most proud of our
cultural changes, which are so obvious. We get
constant remarks about how it’s completely
different to 18 months ago. When we do our
surveys, our team say they’re really happy.
We give our people opportunities to move forward.
We had a guy on the service desk in Adelaide who
was interested in software development, so we gave
him a couple of projects in iPhone applications and
he did really well. So we’ve moved him to Melbourne
as a solution developer.
With this guy I asked him what his unique value
proposition is. I got that from Ian, who told me a
football coach once asked him the same thing. Ian
takes ideas from sport into the business world and
he’s developed himself to be a little bit different.
That’s connected him to his team on various levels.
Ian and I have been working on a new three-
year IT strategy to leverage technology more to
empower our people and clients. Already we’ve
created apps such as our partner conference app
which links back to our Yammer enterprise social
network. Yammer cuts down email. Some of our
people get more than 200 emails a day, so it can
make a difference. We’ve had really good success
with Yammer in building the firm’s culture at
a national level.
In working with Ian, I’ve learned to focus on
the business and not just IT and to translate my
ideas to business English. I have to go and tell
him how this technical thing has to support the
business. I’m better at the visioning now and
trying to explain what it means, as opposed to
presenting 12 slides of technical stuff.
I’ve had to explain technology before, but not
to accountants. I’ve learned they’re very logical and
numbers focused and you really have to connect
emotionally and have their respect or it just all
falls apart. There’s often more of a story underneath
the numbers and Ian is good at getting to the
heart of what’s going on.
Ian is very resilient and that’s fed through to
me and my team. In our culture everyone knows
they can say something a bit odd and they’re
not going to lose their job or be bullied. So we’ve
had some really different outcomes around
recruitment and solution delivery.
Another great thing about Ian is he’s not into
conformity. He embraces individual differences.
That produces much better ideas, much more
innovation and much richer problem-solving. And
more conversations that have deeper meaning,
as opposed to: “Hey Andrew, you are just IT,
what do you know?” n
What Ian would change about Andrew:
“I wish he’d sometimes temper his
enthusiasm about the newest IT gadgets.”
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