InfoWorld CTO 25: Roland Whitehead

When your IT department has successfully accommodated five M&As in the past four years, you must be doing something right. For Roland Whitehead, global director of IT for the elite auction house Bonhams, the secret lies in custom development, which he considers a key component of Bonhams’ dramatic growth.

Whitehead’s most important project is Bonham’s A3 enterprise application, the central process control of the business, which he characterizes as “midway between ERP and CRM, [because] neither of these two types of applications fit the auction-business model.” A3’s functions include customer and inventory management, auction management and analysis, Web site content publishing, customer transactions, and item appraisal.

A3 is constantly being revised and improved, in part because it must handle growing numbers of users and transactions, not to mention policies, laws, and trading approaches specific to 21 countries. Yet Whitehead maintains that the benefits of building out A3 far outweigh the cost and hassle usually associated with commercial software licensing and integration.

“I delight in eschewing SOA and other integration tools,” Whitehead says. “We don’t need them, and I am always so pleased to still be shocked at the huge sums some people still spend on the big enterprise applications.”