GHD's CTO switches to CIO

Engineering firm GHD current chief technology officer Paul Murphy is set to take over the role of chief information officer.

Murphy will replace Elizabeth Harper, who is retiring this October after more than 12 years in the role.

Murphy will report directly to CEO Ashley Wright and assume leadership of GHD’s transformation ambitions, which entails moving the company’s infrastructure, applications and data to Azure.

According to GHD, two on-premises data centres have already been migrated to the cloud.

Prior to the role change, Murphy oversaw responsibility for core vendor relationships, infrastructure, technical applications and compute environments.

Speaking on the change, Murphy said GHD is "committed to significantly transforming our IT capability” to optimise “global hybrid working for our people and improve the services we deliver to our clients”.

“Our vision is to be able to deploy technologies in a faster, highly secure, scalable, and nimble way to meet our clients’ and our markets’ rapidly evolving challenges,” he said.

GHD is yet to decide a replacement for the soon-to-be-vacated CTO role.

However, once appointed, the new CTO will report to Murphy and “has responsibility for enterprise & network architecture, platform technologies, end-user compute and services, cyber defence strategy and operations and technical applications”.

“The CIO has overall accountability for the information services [IS] function in GHD, development of the IS strategy and contributing to the enterprise strategy as a member of the enterprise leadership team,” Murphy said. 

Murphy held the CTO role for a year-and-a-half and has been with GHD for 22 years, holding numerous IT-based roles across the company.

Prior to the CTO position, some of the top roles Murphy held across his two decades at GHD include Asia-Pacific information service leader, and technology and technical applications leader.

He was also an Australian Army officer for 11 years and a project engineer for infrastructure company John Holland.