McCue Interview: Martin Frick, CIO, Avis Europe

Frick explains how the service works: "You go on the web and you reserve a car in Paris Gare du Nord from 3 to 5pm. The system sends a signal through GPRS to the box in the car, so the box knows you are going to come tomorrow at three o'clock. You go to the car and hold your ID card with a RFID chip against the screen. This opens the locking system.

"The actual car key is in the car. If you don't show the right RFID the ignition system is not unlocked, and so the key won't help you. Then you drive around and through GPS we calculate the distance and charge per kilometre. You hand the car back, lock it again and that's it."

For now, Frick's big focus is on reducing costs and duplication, and expanding functionality.

"IT governance plays an important part, as do industrialised processes, both in solution and in service delivery. With appropriate and reliable processes you avoid wastage due to inefficiencies."

It all adds up to a busy schedule for German-born Frick. While he works out of the Bracknell office during the week, he leaves that behind every Friday to spend the weekend with his family in Switzerland.

"At the weekends the laptop stays closed after the last mail replication at Zurich airport. Every now and then I peek at the BlackBerry to see if there is an emergency. The weekend clearly belongs to the family."

Unusually for a CIO Frick started out in a pure science background. He studies physics and earned a PhD in Germany before going to work for supercomputer manufacturer Thinking Machines, where he worked on massive parallel processing systems and architectures.

After that, it was onto Andersen Consulting - now Accenture - to join the architectural team for banking. There he worked on internet and telephone multichannel direct banking strategy before he got involved in a dot-com banking venture in Ireland in 1999. At the start-up - a direct B2B bank - Frick was COO in charge of IT development, IT operations, customer service and banking operations.

"That was during the Celtic Tiger times - wild times, it was very exciting. It was a very young company, the average age was 19/20 years old. Pretty young for a bank."

Of course the dot-com bubble burst and, having experienced the build-up of a company, Frick found himself involved in the rapid downsizing.

"It was a true dot-com experience with all its positives and all its areas where there are lots of lessons to be learnt."

Frick stayed in financial services and joined Swiss insurer Winterthur as group CIO for their non-life business. When the company then got hit by the shakedown in the equity markets in 2002, Frick assumed wider responsibility for the life and Swiss businesses of Winterthur, which involved a huge cost-cutting turnaround exercise.

"The delivery maturity was very high but the cost of delivery was just too high," he explains.

Winterthur was then sold to Axa. After integrating the operations into Axa, Frick began looking for another opportunity to steer an organisation's IT turnaround - a search that ended with his role at Avis Europe.

"[I'm driven by] the change management and governance - how to properly run an IT organisation and lead it through change. At the end of the day, making IT effective is much more about people than about technology."