Denis Edwards’ house is littered with a trail of his interests and hobbies – and the latest addition is a serious road bike. It’s all for a good cause though: a 100-mile bike ride in aid of a charity supported by one of his colleagues on the executive board at the international recruitment services company Manpower.

The training is going well, although Edwards admits he has to be careful that his impatience and competitiveness don’t stretch him too far too soon. “I have to realise that if I ride 10 or 12 miles away from the house, I still have another 10 or 12 miles to ride back,” he jokes.

As senior vice president and global CIO at Manpower, Edwards leads an in-house IT team of just under 800 and is responsible for an annual budget of $300 million, spanning operations at 4,400 offices and sites spread across 82 countries and territories around the globe. It’s not a path he could have easily foreseen in his student days when he seemed destined for a future in chemical engineering after working part time in 
the labs for Exxon Mobil Chemical.

“When I was at university, there weren’t many people looking at the nascent computer industry as an occupation. So I started out with an interest in chemical engineering,” he says. But then the company installed an IBM System/34 terminal, primarily so the engineers could get access to online reports.

Edwards saw an opportunity to use the computer to automate some of the reports and, armed with a Fortran manual, he started programming some of the statistical analysis.

“What really excited me was being able to solve problems for people much faster than they had been able to in the past. I also started automating a lot of the analysis, which saved us a lot of time and effort and gave people an opportunity to start looking at some of their results a little differently.” Edwards graduated with two IT degrees – in computer science and computer information systems – plus a masters certificate in computer science.

From movies to Marriott

In his career, Edwards has developed his knowledge of both development and infrastructure in order not to become pigeonholed in any single vertical industry sector.

He was IS director at Carolco Pictures (home of the Sly Stallone Rocky films), spent two years in the music industry as VP of IT at Alliance Entertainment, and a year as global director of technology at Tyco’s Sensormatic security tag division before starting a career-defining five years with global hotel chain Marriott International. Here, he led IS strategy and planning and also held the exotic title of CTO for the Marriott Vacation Club.

“I felt that having an understanding of the way a lot of different organisations worked would make me a better business person, so I took the opportunities when they presented themselves,” he says.

Although Edwards didn’t go down the MBA route to CIO, he admits to being lucky to have worked for companies with superb executive and leadership training programmes, particularly Marriott. And the executive training never stops – he says the access he gets to the leadership team at Manpower is the best MBA education he could get.

Start-ups and guitars

Working as CTO for several start-ups has also enriched Edwards’ career. After a spell at PricewaterhouseCoopers as managing director of application services, he did a three-month favour to an entrepreneur friend who was developing a system for colleges and universities to protect them from the illegal downloading of music by students.

While the idea was well received by the music industry, issues of academic freedom and First Amendment rights proved insurmountable barriers, so the project’s direction changed to a more general network access management tool for education institutions.

Despite the red tape, Edwards enjoyed the energy, teamwork and lack of hierarchy of the start-up world. “I’d meet with venture capitalists, C-level people, be out on the field selling the technology, and some days be humbled by a 19-year-old able to write C++ code better than I ever will.”

One of his extra-curricular activities came about through his love of music and playing the guitar – there are 12 hung up on his wall at home, including a much-cherished Fender Telecaster, and as an Eric Clapton devotee, he loves playing Cream and Yardbirds songs.

This passion led to his involvement as an advisory board member at the not-for-profit organisation, Guitars for Vets. It was launched in Milwaukee after Vietnam veteran Dan Van Buskirk, who struggled for years dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the horrors he encountered during the war, met guitar teacher Patrick Nettesheim and was helped by music therapy. The group provides guitar lessons, guitars and sheet music for injured war veterans.

“It’s a great organisation and we’re trying to expand it. We are starting to see more people returning from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq who it would be worth getting this training to,” he says.

Optimal blend of global and local

Edwards joined Manpower as VP of global solutions delivery in 2007 after two years at Cadbury Schweppes as global VP of enterprise architecture. Manpower promoted him to senior VP and global CIO in January 2009 where he now leads and co-ordinates the company’s global IT functions.

As with most organisations, Manpower was hit by the downturn, although there are now signs of green shoots with the group recently reporting a return to solid growth and profitability as businesses start to hire more temporary workers – a trend that industry and market watchers say is also an historic sign of wider economic recovery.

Despite the global downturn, Manpower kept technology spending as a priority, avoiding the knee-jerk cuts seen in other businesses. IT headcount is down by almost a third, however, compared to four years ago, at 800 full-time employees, but Edwards says Manpower can ramp up resources using partners when needed. “We want to be able to flex the teams as much as possible, so we’re using offshore providers and partners to help with that.”

One of Manpower’s technology challenges is managing the local and global balance for its operations. Previous CIO Rick Davidson started a programme to transform the IT operations from autonomous regional operations to a more federated model rather than a one-size fits all operation, and Edwards says progress continues to be made here.

“If you look at Manpower and what we are as an organisation, it’s really our blend of both local and global interests that makes us very strong. A lot of what happens is in the local markets – this is where a lot of the key relationships are and where we source the talent that helps our clients win in the changing world of work,” he explains.

“The other thing that really strengthens us is our international breadth – our ability to take all these local operations and bring them together in order to serve some of our larger global clients. So there is a lot of focus on the local/global aspect of things. I think we’re starting to achieve a very good balance here.”

Social networks and crowdsourcing

One specific IT-based programme currently high on his agenda is Manpower’s digital strategy. Co-led by Edwards and Manpower’s chief marketing officer, the initiative aims to recreate online the full experience of interacting and working with a physical branch office for clients and candidates. An initial element of that appeared last year: MyPath.com is a career development social network “guided by Manpower”.

“My challenge at the moment is how to take the good sense you get when you interact with our people and bring it to the digital space,” he says. “One of the interesting things that we’re looking at is crowdsourcing [for technology development]. It’s sort of the next evolution in getting work done. We are looking at some of the competition models and platforms that basically allow you to have people from all over the world competing to develop your systems.”

It’s these very technology trends that some industry future-gazers predict will be the downfall of the CIO and corporate IT. But Edwards sees only opportunity in this innovation and says IT leaders must embrace these changes if they are to survive and prosper.

“My advice would be to accept that we’ve been through these cycles before in our roles as CIOs,” he says. “We need to be a bit more flexible and embrace some of the models that are being touted as our nemeses. Rather than seeing them as threats, I think we need to embrace them as opportunities with real business value.”