Martin's career has spanned five industries over the last 19 years including travel, investment banking, technology, consulting and entertainment. Martin started out in life as a programmer, and then trained as an accountant, but quickly moved back into technology-based roles. Starting out early in his career, he believed that the combination of finance and technology skills could enable him to work in many areas of business and would one day give him the opportunity to become a CEO of a company.
As he moved up the career ladder in the early 90's, Martin realized he could innovate fast, a natural talent that was fun. Martin had a constant curiosity for change and craved to build things - not always technological, but most products were. This quickly translated into a desire to run a business early in his career, and led him to take charge of his passionate entrepreneurship. His first real break came working for Mark Warner Travel (no relation) where he excelled in developing financial systems. But it wasn't until Martin moved to JP Morgan (now JP Morgan Chase), the investment bank, when he realized that working in many line-based roles including trading, technology, transformation and venture capital were not the optimal fit for Martin. He quickly went in search of a product he could build, market and deliver to clients - and shortly afterwards a business he could run inside JP Morgan.
It was at JP Morgan that Martin pioneered many revolutionary things that industry use today such as financial automation products (early web-based products), extreme RAD principles to advance application development, as well as pioneering a vision and system for how IT should be managed - a true ERP for IT over the internet. Martin also founded the first xRAD (Extreme RAD) business called Global Desktop Automation Services (GDAS) at JP Morgan.
He soon realized he was an entrepreneur at heart, whose passion was developing and proving ideas.
During his time in investment banking, Martin had become a trusted transformation leader too, an executive who could deliver change on a variety of levels, inspiring his team and leaders to achieve significant value across the bank. It was here Martin played a key role in the largest outsourcing deal of its time with IBM, and used his strong technology background to drive innovation and change through the outsourcing deal.
But it was through his strategy role in technology, the outsourcing deal he had been involved in, and his transformation experience that led to an obsession for ERP thinking inside IT. Martin's persistent curiosity for why 'IT Management' hadn't innovated far enough - led him to leave the field of investment banking where he had shared 8 years of fast paced growth and innovation.
Using his knowledge of IT Strategy, IT Management and infrastructure, application delivery, internet-based technologies, outsourcing, and the enterprise software market - Martin became a practice leader in technology at BearingPoint (formerly KPMG Consulting, and a leading management and technology consulting firm). What was appealing to him was the nature of his assignment - to build a new IT Strategy & Transformation business from the ground up in an investment territory for BearingPoint. Martin could now leverage his IT Management experience and pursue it more broadly in the market. He would set about building an extension of the brand for technology, and bring fresh innovation to solutions that would help CIO's shape their business. Martin again found himself innovating and building a business in the world of technology and now consulting.
As well as admitting his success in consulting was humbly due to some natural sales ability, he was once again inspiring people to believe in his ideas and philosophies. During his time at BearingPoint, Martin managed the European business for IT Strategy & Transformation, re-focused BearingPoint's technology solution offerings, brought new innovation to the market of IT Management and application delivery, advised leading enterprise software companies on how to set the right technology visions in the area of IT Management, and brokered an innovative, market first partnership with CA (formerly Computer Associates) to transform how companies manage investment portfolio change.
Martin was also a global thought leader for BearingPoint, and a frequent commentator in the national and trade press globally. Martin continued from JP Morgan and at BearingPoint, to frequently speak at conferences and seminars around the world on subjects he was passionate about - namely the Internet, IT Management, and Business Transformation.
He continues to be a frequent author of articles and has featured many times on the front covers of leading management magazines. He was the founder, publisher and editor of a transformational CIO Magazine called 'CIO Agenda', and he founded and hosted a European technology event series called 'CIO Connections', hosting 500 leading CIO's in London, Paris and Frankfurt on issues affecting their organization. Martin has featured in many publications and articles including the Financial Times, The Times, Forbes, CIO Magazine, to name a few.
Today, Martin is Managing Director of Nuevo Entertainment Limited, a boutique business event and film entertainment company focused on Technology that he co-founded with Mark Parker. Their upcoming flagship project is called technology of tomorrow 08, a transformational business seminar series (at the Royal Albert Hall, London) for the business and technology executive that focuses on discussing how technology can shape people's lives both at home and in the workplace. A globally unique seminar series that features business revolutionaries and technology leaders from around the world including Sir Richard Branson (Chairman of Virgin Group), Jimmy Wales (Founder of Wikipedia), Carly Fiorina (Former Chairman and CEO of HP), Steve Wozniak (Co-founder of Apple), Ben Verwaayen (CEO of BT Plc), Peter Guber (Chairman and CEO of Mandalay Entertainment) among others. Martin founded TOT2008, and is Executive Producer and Host of the event. technology of tomorrow08 has been seen as a beacon of light for how business seminars should work - bringing together world quality perspective from the world's finest leaders in the best venues. Part of its recent success has been due to exclusive interviews Martin has hosted with the speakers at TOT 2008 including Sir Richard Branson, Carly Fiorina and many others. Also while producing TOT2008, Martin continues to write his blog which has received rave reviews after just 4 months, it receives over 30,000 regularly readers and has become one of the key technology blog's in the UK.
Martin is also focused on his latest film project - The Deadliest Game, his new Business Web TV platform and developing his latest technology venture - talkbiznow, a project focused on transforming the 'Business Networking' world as social networking has done in the home. Martin is author of the upcoming book about the Internet called 'WEB - What You DON'T Know And NEED To Know..' due out in November 2008.
When not travelling, Martin resides just outside London in the UK, with his wife and son.Read about Martin's innovations
- Building a business universe like Social Networking...
- Soon the market will experience the latest networking solution that will allow the business professional to analyse business opportunity such as finding new customers, partners, suppliers etc, find the right business individuals in target companies and interact with them in simple, transactional dialogue and request similar to what social networking has done. Martin's view is that business networking does not have to be fragmented any more, we have the data, organizational structure and technology to do business faster.
- Tackling the big issues in IT, while transforming the business seminar market...
- Martin recently founded a new kind of business seminar called Technology of Tomorrow 08, at the Royal Albert Hall in London (and later in 08 in the US) that focuses on technology leadership, consumer experience and the impact of tomorrow's technology platforms. Martin built an audacious vision for tackling the biggest issues in technology and got the greatest leaders to join him to explore the issues. TOT2008 is unique as it focuses on telling the story 8 months before the event in exclusive video podcast interviews with the great leaders, and has built intentionally an eco-system around the event such as case studies, trailers, blog, podcasts and much more. It has brought together the finest leaders ever of its kind in front of 5000+ attendees at one of the world's finest venues. As well as raising the ceiling on quality, TOT2008 offers the seminar at 40-50% lower than any other seminar. It has literally turned the business seminar market on its head.
- Obsession with IT Management innovation and solving IT's complexity conundrum...
- At JP Morgan and later in consulting, Martin built upon his foundation of convergence and automation experience and applied it to the processes that drove managing the IT Enterprise. Martin had been responsible for many of the processes at JP Morgan and understood a lot of the emerging principles at the time around business and service management, asset and financial management, portfolio and investment change and others. Martin could quickly predict how 'software and services' in the market would evolve to solve IT Management problems for CIO's and corporate IT departments. At the center of Martin's thinking was his belief that IT Management = less IT Complexity - and that this simple philosophy would lead to efficiency and effectiveness both in process maturity, staff training, and in software and services. From a software path, IT Management solutions could evolve through the experiences of ERP being applied to IT (see below). Martin would soon be asked to help companies like IBM, HP, CA and others in determining their visions for IT Management, and would help Venture Capital firms determine how smart investments in Enterprise Software could be realised through the market investing in IT Management. Martin's perspective was in demand and led him to speak at many conferences around the world while at JP Morgan and BearingPoint.
- Setting the vision and building the first real ERP for IT system the market had seen...
- Before the IT Management software vendors such as IBM, HP, CA and others had integrated their software to deliver a single management platform, Martin was brought back to JP Morgan (now JP Morgan Chase) to help build a vision for their global infrastructure's management platform. Martin soon built and managed a global technology application that would see new innovation for the first time beating the market to emerging practices such as implementing an IT Services organization, building an IT Services-based catalogue, developing a first management language for IT (before ITIL), innovating and evolving cost recovery and chargeback theory, and developing modern IT financial management practices based upon a services-based organization. Martin had imagined a world that was not too different to manufacturing that could be applied to IT - managing supply and demand, and in doing so develop just-in-time principles that could be applied to demand management processes that would reside at the heart of this new ERP system for IT. It was built for the internet and intranet, using multi-dimensional modelling and advanced querying code and smart interfaces that could link to a vast array of legacy infrastructure systems. It still remains today one the key technological innovations of the management age that has spurred on a significant level of investment and innovation in the global enterprise software industry and forever changed the IT Management market.
- Launched the first Corporate News Ticker...
- When the early internet pioneers where building news tickers such as Yahoo's, the BBC's (British Broadcasting Corporation) among others, Martin developed the market's first news ticker for the corporation, enabling the 'ticker bar' to be edited with corporate information. It became a secure way for trade information to be sent in seconds to desks around the world using this communication tool. Now, most banks and many other companies from different industries use Martin's technology to communicate real-time on their desktops with information ranging from current news, corporate news, product information and prices. Where there is a need to communicate real-time and at pace in a secure way, the corporate news ticker was a perfect vehicle. Later on, popular SMS Messaging technology was based on similar principles and technology.
- Pioneering Rapid Application Development (RAD) principles and techniques...
- During Martin's time in investment banking, he saw the problems with IT operating models and silo-based technology functions that didn't partner well with the business. The challenge was getting business requirements turned into technology products when the business wanted them, as opposed to requirements being queued up like application development functions would often do. Martin was fascinated with the productivity revolution taking hold in the late 90's and the proliferation of the spreadsheets and databases solutions. His curiosity led him to architect and build a number of leading edge solutions around financial management, project management and communication that spawned a rapid application development culture and structure inside JP Morgan that would see the industry look up and listen to how technology products could be development quickly, securely and reliably using Extreme RAD principles and techniques. Under Martin's leadership, he built over 30 products across two companies that specialised in rapid application development. One particular innovation in itself was the case example for how financial management could deliver huge productivity savings in technology while addressing fast business requirements and control needs within investment banks - this was to be known as The Engine Concept - see below.
- The Engine Concept - automating financial trades of investment banks...
- Martin was responsible for delivering a huge automation and cost reductions to middle office functions of investment banks through his pioneering thinking and delivery of the first object-oriented, multi-dimensional modelled financial management application that reconciled financial trades of investment banks. From dealers in the front office to the back office finance function - The Engine Concept could reconcile in seconds profit and loss and balance sheets for any financial product. This thinking became the inspiration for several software houses that soon realised how to help all investment banks using Martin's innovation. The Engine Concept still resides as part of the solutions in many investment banks today.
