ALVAREZ

Alvarez & Marsal (A&M) is improving employee experience by deploying leading technologies and transforming existing systems

Supporting a global professional services firm that enables world class organisations presents many opportunities and challenges for an Information Technology function. Supporting such an organisation requires intense focus and high flexibility. These environments leave little time to be introspective and require a CIO to make instantaneous decisions and constantly evolve their thinking. Working in such a highly dynamic and fluid environment has never been a problem for flexible CIOs such as Jeremy Zung, Chief Information Officer (CIO) for Alvarez & Marsal (A&M).

“When I joined A&M during COVID, there was no playbook or manual to tap into,” he says. “It became very clear, though, that our primary focus needed to be about stabilising the core – this included not just technology, but our staff. We had a lot of technical debt that had built up, similar to many companies.”

As global CIO, Zung is responsible for all internal IT matters including all backoffice technologies and systems. Once the core was stabilised, it allowed the focus to quickly move to improving services to A&M’s growing base of global professionals. Transforming the IT department required a change of mindset to operate IT as a business.

Founded in 1983, A&M provides advisory, business performance improvement, and turnaround management services to a diverse range of clients – from corporates and government agencies to private equity firms and law practices. The business has been expanding rapidly of late and now boasts more than 7,500 people, who provide services across the world.

Based in Florida, Zung joined A&M in July 2021 following a 30-year career at professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). After college, Zung’s first job was as an actuarial associate with Coopers & Lybrand – where he could never have imagined the diverse jobs he would hold during his career. Those roles included multiple client-facing and internal roles including being the US Advisory IT leader for 12 years, leading 13 acquisitions.

It was a big career move when he made the switch to A&M – but Zung himself is not afraid of change, given that his career has been about continuous improvement and transformation, and his 30 years at PwC had prepared him for this opportunity.

“One of the things that really attracted me to A&M was its history based on relationships and not relying on commercials or TV ads,” he explains. “It’s a people business. That really stuck with me – that its work is through referrals, word-of-mouth, people saying what we’ve done for them.”