Aston Martin's Bradley Yorke-Biggs on streamlining performance

Yorke-Biggs has been directing not only the business strategy of one of the UK’s most ­famous car marques, but has of late been ­developing an IT strategy that will allow the company to continue its rich heritage into the future. In order to develop that strategy to best effect, Yorke-Biggs has developed key relationships with leading software and services suppliers like Microsoft and Verizon.

Divestment of companies is never easy, especially after a 16-year relationship which inevitably meant there were shared resources. Bradley Yorke-Biggs had joined Aston Martin initially on secondment from the Ford PAG company and would find himself working on the divestment and then leading the Aston Martin business and IT strategy as the company steered its own course without Ford.

New datacentre

“We have invested in a new datacentre, which is 300 yards from the main company headquarters in Gaydon, Warwickshire; we put in a new local area network (LAN) and wide area network (WAN) as well as a Cisco VOIP system,” Yorke-Biggs says of meeting the ­initial IT challenges.As far as the business is concerned, Yorke-Biggs is sanguine about the split: “What we do is very different from Ford, they are a volume manufacturer; we are niche and specialist.”

“The walls between IT and the business are dissolving. The question is always ‘How can IT add business value?’ I am working closely with the marketing and communications departments to use IT effectively in CRM, on our Digital Strategy and in areas like social media,” Yorke-Biggs says.