Crawford, who was previously managing director of data services at Eclipse 4DM, joined GI Solutions on 7 April and has been tasked with assessing the group's IT infrastructure and coming up with an investment plan to underpin the company's continued growth.

His remit and the corresponding investment plan covers everything from office IT infrastructure, to production and MIS and GI's in-house developed tools for customer data analytics and for the delivery of customer-facing portals.

Crawford said: "GI predominantly uses off the shelf software for all of the admin and office functions as well as for production management control, although that's a mixture of different packages and one of the challenges is integrating seamlessly across those. For the customer analytics side it's a lot of self-developed software tools."

He added: "There's an immediate requirement to get the capacity up to where it needs to be in terms of the GI Insight computing power to catch up with the phenomenal growth the previous growth and the predicted growth on the customer analytics side over the next 2-3 years.

"The next bit is to get the right structures in place so we can move towards a more web-based offering in terms of web portals and online reporting - giving our clients much more visibility of what it is we're doing."

Crawford said that the total IT investment was likely to run to £750,000 over the next three years.

GI Solutions managing director Robin Welch said: "Our requirement for strength and resilience in IT services continues to grow on the back of our investment in new technology and commitment to improved production workflow.

"Darren is a great addition to an already strong team which will support our growth aspirations."

GI Solutions employs around around 20 document composition and software development staff and five IT support staff.