After almost two decades at Abbey involving 11 different jobs and an impressive career trajectory from systems analyst to executive director, most technology professionals might decide to ease into comfortable semi-retirement when their company was taken over by a Spanish bank.

But taking the soft option is not Yasmin Jetha’s style. Instead of staying in the lucrative consultancy market, she accepted the position of chief information officer at the Financial Times.

The newspaper has been through difficult times recently, notching up several years of losses and only recently returning to financial health. Like every other UK paper, growing the title’s circulation is hard work and it faces huge uncertainty from the rapid changes in technology.

However, unlike other quality UK papers, the FT aims to be a global brand. It has set itself the target of being the gold standard for business news and analysis, both in print and online. “I see my role as IT director as helping the company achieve that goal,” says Jetha.

The technological revolution poses more challenges for the media industry than any other business sector. The proliferation of the internet and the growth in multimedia poses huge questions for publishers around the globe. Is the newspaper dead? Can we charge for content? Is it a realistic business model to rely entirely on advertising revenue?

Jetha says the attraction of joining the FT was to be part of a company that has to grapple with such enormous challenges.

“Every day here is exciting,” she says. “There is the pressure of having to produce up to seven editions of the paper everyday around the world – up to three for the UK, and editions in America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.”

As well as the complexity of producing different editions, the web site has to be kept up and running constantly, all the company’s other applications must work smoothly and the 500 journalists around the world in the FT’s 30 bureaus or working remotely all have to have access to the company’s IT systems. “And that’s just the day job, without all the projects to help the business adapt and change,” says Jetha.

Thankfully, however, Jetha exudes the energy needed for such a role. In spite of many years working in the corporate world, Jetha is far from cynical and jaded. An Ismaili Muslim, she grew up in Tanzania and left her family at just 16 to live in London to study A-levels.

Jetha retains a youthful enthusiasm when she talks about the UK. “This is a wonderful country with marvellous opportunities,” she says. “It’s just a question of being clear about what you want and going for it.”

Jetha met her husband and married after graduating with a Masters in business administration at Imperial College. Her career in IT began by accident when her first job at manufacturing firm Lucas saw her placed in the technology department, even though her ambition was to work in the finance division.

At the time, her husband was studying for his actuary exams. “In the evening after work, I decided while he’s got his head down in his actuarial studies, I’ll have my head down studying accountancy,” she says. Jetha took all her accountancy exams in just 18 months – it normally takes three years: “I just assumed I had passed every exam, and moved on to the next one.”

Procurement

In addition to her role as IT director at the FT, she is also head of procurement and purchasing, a role she created.

“Quite soon after arriving I suggested to the finance director that we should have a proper procurement function because we could generate a lot of savings,” she says.

Her decision to set up a purchasing system reflects Jetha’s habit of having to justify decisions that will affect the company’s profit and loss account. She could not bear to see the FT losing money and admits that she loves doing deals. “I get a great thrill out of negotiating and getting the very best value for money,” she says.

After several loss-making years, the FT had to rein in its IT expenses and Jetha inherited a department suffering from under investment. She says the FT’s ambition to be the gold standard for business reporting was not reflected by the company’s IT infrastructure.

Since she joined the company, there has been a volley of changes; Jetha rattles through them: “First of all we upgraded our core content publishing system, both the front and back end. We put a brand-new search engine on the FT web site.

We’ve also made the search engine much more interactive. We’ve improved the response times on the web site as we know our audience is impatient and short of time.”

The company’s IT infrastructure has also been transformed: a brand-new voice over internet protocol network has been installed, the data centre has been migrated to supplier Cable and Wireless and the company’s servers have been virtualised.

But while Jetha is obviously pleased that she has managed to update the systems so quickly, she is not in love with the technology itself.

“I have never been excited by the wires and boxes being able to work faster and more effectively,” she says. “What I find exciting it is what a good IT system can do for a business.”

Such sentiment applies as much today as it did when Jetha started out in her first job at Lucas.

“Now the FT has the IT it needs to achieve its aspiration of being the gold standard of business news,” she says.

Jetha has also revolutionised the way the company undertakes its IT development. “With all IT developments, you can strive for perfection in your delivery or you can aim for agility and speed and get the system out there because it is good enough,” she says.

The FT now uses the agile system of IT development, with the firm throwing business people, IT developers and project managers in one virtual room for four weeks to see how far it gets.

“Then we stop,” says Jetha. “And we work for another four weeks. Then we stop again. Then a final four weeks and that’s it – we go live.” The stop-start system ensures all the feedback needed to keep the project on track is continuously fed into the development process.

Such innovative thinking seems a long way from when Jetha was studying at Imperial College, where she would have to queue with 20 other students to use the only computer on the campus. Fast forward three decades and the readers of the FT can download print, audio and video files from their computer at work or at home.

More challenges ahead

Just as publishers like the FT have had to constantly change and adapt to keep up with extraordinary technological developments, so too has Jetha. From the day she arrived in the UK to study for her A-levels, she has never shied away from seemingly insurmountable challenges.

But Jetha seems to relish when things do not quite turn as expected. “Glitches, setbacks and obstacles seem to upset most people. But I see them as part of IT development,” she says. “The more experience you build up with each job that you do, the more you learn to find ways to turn things around. What makes leaders rather than just managers is getting your team to turn a setback into a competitive advantage.”

In spite of its return to profitability, the FT faces a challenging future. But its chances of growing have increased with the appointment of a chief information officer that is always prepared to avoid the soft option.