Andy Kelk

Chief Information Officer

Experienced IT executive with strong commercial, technical and people skills
Building a vision and strategy for building and sustaining a fast-growing online business
Managing substantial IT budgets with responsibility for delivering services and innovation to drive business value
Creating and leading a high performing team across multiple Asian countries
Integrating new acquisitions into existing businesses and realising operational improvements
Focusing on service, performance and availability in highly competitive environments
Architecting a solid, reliable and flexible platform to support business growth
Migrating from legacy hosting providers, leveraging virtualisation technology and working with cloud hosting providers
Dealing with all levels of the business from the board downwards to bring about the right results

Strategy, Vision, Budgeting, Change Management, Infrastructure and Operations, Agile Software Development, Web Development

iProperty Group is the ASX-listed owner of Asia's No. 1 network of property portal sites under the iProperty umbrella brand (www.iproperty.com).
Key executive role bringing a wealth of IT experience to the boardroom table
Responsible for the group's IT portfolio including market-leading consumer websites, innovative b2b tools and internal IT assets
Leading a team of 50 IT staff located in four countries (Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia)
Transformation to Agile software development approaches and practices including continuous integration, automated testing, continuous improvement, limited work-in-progress and Kanban.
Working with the IT community in the APAC region to showcase the innovative and exciting approaches taken to running an IT business
Datacentre consolidation and deployment of website acceleration solution
Moving from a physical hosting environment to a virtualised datacentre and cloud hosting
Negotiating contracts and managing performance with multiple vendors
Implementing metrics, policies and processes to increase mean time between failure and reduce mean time to respond
Introducing elements of the ITIL suite to add structure to web operations

Key member of the IT leadership team, responsible for delivering new features and maintaining code on the group's customer-facing tools
Developing and implementing IT strategic direction and vision with other senior IT managers
Management of existing vendors, development of new partnerships
Member of the REA Group Senior Leadership Team, a key part of the business structure, liaising regularly with members of the Executive Leadership Team from IT, consumer marketing, customer marketing, sales & operations
Budgetary responsibility for major strategic projects
Focusing on delivering value to the rest of the business, our customers, consumers and shareholders
Managing an internal software development team through a major transition to Agile practices
Setting principles, guidelines and standards for the development team to ensure quality, repeatable practice
Driving technical, product and process innovation within the IT team. For example:

Rapid prototyping of new product features around map-based searching, content syndication and advanced user interactions
Implementing Kanban practices for the product maintenance and support team
Deploying visual build status indicators to highlight code quality

Regularly presenting new ideas, updates and developments to the IT team and wider organisation through town hall meetings and blog posts
Interviewing and hiring new staff

Founding member of the Venda technical team, building the company from a start-up to a global business with over 250 staff and operating more than 100 websites
Leading a team of developers to integrate the Venda SaaS eCommerce platform with client systems;
Pioneering the opening of Venda's wholly owned, offshore development facility in Thailand.
Leading a team of local developers in Thailand to create sites and integration modules using the Venda eCommerce platform.
Defining and implementing internal business processes to ensure quality and robustness of code
Interviewing and hiring new staff to join the growing Venda team
Development using Object Oriented Perl, SQL Databases, using Linux and Microsoft platforms
Defining and finding solutions to integration requirements
Developing standard interfaces for all data updates to Venda sites

Key member of the initial UK business start-up team; part of a focused group responsible for building the search database for the site's successful March 2000 launch
Providing business intelligence to identify weaknesses in the core search offering
Scoping and building tools to improve operational efficiency; working closely with product managers to develop and implement best practices for developing the search database
Instigating and building a high-volume, scalable reporting solution to maximise relevancy and monetisation of the search database
Maintaining and optimising all databases within the company using Microsoft SQL Server
Interviewing and hiring new staff to continue developing the organisation