CIO interview: Michael Taylor, Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One
Summary
He says: “I left the far healthier IT infrastructure in local government where I used to take care of systems such as those for council tax payments and went to Renault [the car maker that took over the Benetton Formula One team in 2000]. I liked to watch the sport, but I was never a massive fan.” As he recalls, at the time there was an explosion of data, which led to teams “pushing the envelope of the regulations and what was and wasn’t acceptable. Even today, when data is everything in the sport of Formula One, Taylor says: “The stopwatch is the only true metric of the effective performance of your organisation these days. Data is often used as a reference to back that up, or to correlate.” On the Monday after a race, the team go about building the next iteration of the theoretical digital twin, which evolved over the course of the weekend. While it would seem the fast-paced world of Formula One involves a highly iterative development lifecycle, Taylor says: “These days, there is always an assessment of benefit and value between waiting to pull together a number of different updates into a single package or bringing in those individual updates as quickly as they are available.” • None As the IT handover from Asda to Walmart looms, Asda CIO Carl Dawson explains how the business is renewing all of its technology, putting the retailer in the rare position of being able to start from scratch.