Dominic Redmond, group CIO of recruitment firm PageGroup, is a digital leader driven by a desire to help his team and the rest of the business use data to boost operational processes and customer services.
Having started his career as a project manager, Redmond delivered major initiatives for Xerox and Aon that touched on the implementation of technology. As he increasingly focused on IT systems, his career trajectory changed, saying: “I blended large-scale transformations with IT early in my career, so that’s why I’m a technologist today.”
After working as head of strategy for brewer SAB Miller, in November 2016 Redmond joined FTSE 250 firm PageGroup – often best known by its Michael Page brand. He worked as an IT director and managed applications globally for the company before assuming the group CIO role in January 2021.
“I ran a major digital transformation programme and started to inherit other parts of technology until it became quite a natural segue into taking the CIO job, because I was running all the different pieces, and technology is a big opportunity in professional services,” he says.
As group CIO, Redmond has a global mandate to drive business performance through technology and data. He says there are many facets to that broad role, including engaging with disparate functions, overseeing information security, managing day-to-day operational IT systems, plus some gazing into a crystal ball.
“I look for opportunities to take advantage of modern technology and connectivity. Then you get into your business systems, and the fact that those platforms are what we ultimately use to engage with our customers, whether that’s clients or candidates,” he says.
“I also look to help drive productivity across our operations business, which is the people who sell and recruit. Those people are effectively the revenue-generating part of our business. The more we can give them the right tools, the more successful we are.”
Delivering service excellence
Since assuming the CIO role, Redmond has delivered a technology strategy and created a roadmap to a modern enterprise architecture. He believes one of his key achievements is that the rest of the company recognises his team delivers great services across the business, with the right levels of efficiency and excellence.
Redmond also points to the development of a culture of cohesiveness and collaboration, which promotes a strong sense of teamwork across the IT organisation. This sense of togetherness promotes connectivity within his team and helps build relationships with other people across PageGroup.
“If you lead a function, you want people in your team to be supported, to grow, to be engaged in their day-to-day work, and to want to come in and work with their colleagues. But it’s also important because so much of technology now is cross-functional,” he says.
“You have to have so many teams coming together, from infrastructure and cyber security through to architecture and the application side with your vendors. If you can’t do that work collaboratively and cohesively, you aren’t efficient in what you deliver.”
Now Redmond wants to build on these technological and cultural foundations to support further digitalisation. The aim here is to use data-enabled technologies, including automation and artificial intelligence (AI), to enhance workplace activities and boost employee productivity.
“This effort isn’t about the replacement of people,” he says. “This effort is about taking the work that our employees do that can be made easier through technology, or indeed made more efficient through technology, and allowing them to do the things that differentiate us as an organisation. That’s where the context of any digital, data, AI, or technological transformation should always be grounded.”
Integrating enterprise systems
Redmond has built a technology stack that uses a range of big-name providers, including Salesforce, Microsoft, NetSuite, and ServiceNow. One of the things he was keen to help the organisation move away from was unconnected spot solutions that solved one challenge at a point in time.
To bring a stronger sense of direction and cohesion, Redmond has worked with Boomi, using the supplier’s platform to integrate services and data. He says the result is a joined-up approach to enterprise technologies where Boomi helps to integrate more than 150 applications across the business.
“Boomi also allowed us to create a data lake, which initially started with the finance information in our NetSuite system,” he says. “However, this success quickly allowed us to bring in operational data on performance, KPIs, and metrics, and that has grown over several years, because we got our approach to integration right at the start.”
“This effort is about taking the work that our employees do that can be made easier through technology…and allowing them to do the things that differentiate us as an organisation”
Dominic Redmond, PageGroup
PageGroup started working with Boomi in 2016 after a procurement exercise. Redmond says the platform helps data flow around PageGroup. Today, the company uses Boomi to streamline day-to-day operations, including processing CVs, onboarding candidates, paying suppliers and managing employee expenses.
“Now, at every touchpoint when one system talks to another, we’re using Boomi to make that happen,” he says. “The technology is the way we move data around our systems. But, clearly, some of that is processing rather than just moving data. So, Boomi ingests our data and then moves it into different systems.”
These integrations allow PageGroup to process over one million CVs each month. Across all business processes, Redmond says Boomi’s integration platform creates a unified view of data. He’s now considering other ways to use the technology, including taking a proactive approach to problem resolution in an age of AI.
“The other area, based on what I’m hearing and what we’ve already thought about, is, if we’re using this technology to integrate services, and we’re using agents in other systems, how far can Boomi go to be our control around identification, monitoring and governance? That’s something we’ll continue to consider.”
Delivering fresh experiences
In addition to using digital and data to enhance employee roles, Redmond is eager to use technology to enrich customer service. With millions of people seeking work in an increasingly competitive labour market, Page Group must focus on developing effective digital engagement processes.
“You want to do that work the right way,” he says. “Digital can’t just be a catch-all. It has to be something that feels like the digital channels are as personalised as possible. So, that’s the front end of a lot of what we do as a technology team.”
Redmond describes these efforts as a funnel through which digital technologies and human expertise guide candidates towards the best opportunities. As jobseekers engage with the company, they move through the funnel, focusing on specific openings and opportunities, some of which will rely on digital interfaces.Eventually, these individuals reach a point where they’re placed in a job, and there’s a high degree of human-to-human interaction at that stage.
“That’s how the technology and people come together as you go through the funnel,” says Redmond. “We’ve definitely got that cycle from digital, personalised interactions through to the more direct people-based interactions. That level of interaction can vary at different stages, but, in principle, that’s how it works.”
Redmond says the right digital approach helps to curate relationships with candidates so that they think of PageGroup as the first point of call for recruitment services now and in the future: “It’s about trying to home in on the essence of the person at the heart of what we do, and it’s supported by technology to enable us to work with as many people as we need to.”
Defining the CIO of the future
During the next few years, Redmond will work with his team to ensure that digital and data technologies are sourced to provide creative solutions to the company’s business challenges. While there’s ongoing debate about the future role of the digital leader, he says great CIOs always focus on delivery.
However, some issues will impact the responsibilities of IT chiefs, most notably the democratisation of technology. While the path to digital transformation in the past decade has involved line-of-business employees making more choices about IT, Redmond recognises that the level of democratisation has risen in an age of AI.
“I don’t think we’ve ever seen it like this before,” he says. “Finding ways to work cross-functionally, being more collaborative, working with that ambiguity, and trying to frame how you bring a business together in a more matrix way through technology is a different role from command and control, which is perhaps how the CIOs of 10 years ago were working.”
Redmond says successful CIOs of the future will embrace this engaged approach. Rather than being asked to build something and returning, potentially, with a solution that doesn’t overcome the challenge, digital leaders and their teams will work in harmony with business peers to develop data-enabled systems and services.
“There’s a lot of adaptability now, so there’s an adjustment for CIOs to make,” he says. “Also, things haven’t settled down. Generative and agentic AI are still at an embryonic stage. As that area of innovation becomes a little bit more settled, the future role of the CIO will become clearer.”
While there has been significant hype about generative and agentic AI during the past few years, Redmond recognises that many organisations, including his own, have established interests in using AI, particularly machine learning. The role for CIOs now is to consider how this confluence of advances produces business value.
“If you look at the way we run CRM campaigns through our digital teams, they’re using data intelligence and algorithms to find out how to give people the most personalised content that’s going to engage them in the best way. That is not a new approach; that’s been around for a while,” he says.
“Then, of course, there’s the day-to-day processes around how the business uses GenAI tools, such as Microsoft Copilot. CIOs must consider how to use those systems effectively. There’s lots of stuff going on, and it’s about homing in on areas that are going to add the most value.”