Responsible for the establishment, refinement and roadmap creation for a digital transformation programme aimed at evolving the business and operational model from an analogue sales operation to a market disruptive, knowledge-led, customer centric, digital-by-default marketing and branding agency.Key responsibilities include:• Domain knowledge acquisition to understand the sector, market, opportunities, and restrictions.• Influencing strategic thinking, shaping the future ideation, and exploring new market propositions.• Creation, promotion, refinement, and adoption of a digital transformation & data strategy.• Providing goal-focused, value-lead blueprints with accurate cost & timescale forecasting for SLT.• Build vs. buy vs. borrow decisioning with evidential outputs to ensure right-fit solutions.• Conducted technology selection processes including RFI/P/Q procurement to mobilisation.• Definition of standards, frameworks, and best practice to assist sustainability & repeatability.• Create pathways and remediation plans for non-compliance & out-of-tolerance processes.• Build maturity and integrity within the organisation including PCI-DSS, CE+ & InfoSec compliance.• Working in collaboration with colleagues to create TOM, technology underpinning, and value streams.• Development of product backlogs, work pipelines, Agile establishment & maturity with MD teams.• Establish, debate, promote and engage in team development to improve culture and working model.

Enterprise Architect for SCMD, Higher & Further Education plus Research and Evidence portfolios responsible for defining the vision, goals, strategy, and roadmaps in delivering technical transformation in these critical national sectors.Key responsibilities include:• Keeping user needs at the heart of decision making and architectures as an unequivocal principle. • Working with service owners, senior stakeholders, and colleagues to increase digital outreach.• Vision shaping, dialectic investigation and strategising delivery in support of value-chain construction.• Conceptual & reference architecture production providing clarity and portfolio structure.• Providing direction, guidance, governance, and assurance to SA’s & TA’s in delivery units.• Modelling processes with enabling technology blueprint to drive operational transformation to TOM.• Running procurement, market evaluation & ROI forecasts for policy guidance for buy vs. build options.• Business case definition, funding proposals and option modelling to reduce investment risk.• Alignment to standards, guidance, and legislation in accordance with GDS, ISO & NCSC policies.• Focusing on efficiencies, process automation and self-service for benefit and cost fulfilment.• Focusing on portability, componentisation, and open-source solutions to reduce proprietary services.• Acceleration towards containersation, microservices, encapsulation, and resiliency of assets.• Cloud centric solutions providing operational efficiencies, resiliency, availability, and continuity.

Leading the Aviva Health customer transformation digital agenda, as part of the strategic vision of customer self-service, removing uncertainty, reducing the risk & cost profile and simplifying the operational workflow, I have been involved in delivering market disruptive solutions, leading the technology discussion and ensuring customer-centric outcomesBack in 2016 Aviva’s health customers' online capability was virtually zero; zoom to the present day and the ability for digitally enabled transactional engagement is 25%, rising to 60% during Covid, with certain channels & journeys being 100% digitally delivered leading to significant operational cost reduction, improving customer experience (NPS +10% YoY), streamlined processes and giving real-time outcomesThe latest focus has been on Cloud delivery, DevOps transformation and customer-focused AI/ML solutions, on a business sector with a revenue stream in excess of £900m accelerating savings, providing business continuity, eliminating waste, providing market differential, and future-proofing Aviva’s technology landscape for years to comeWorking alongside and supervising other architects in a senior capacity, I have ensured alignment to governance frameworks, strategic roadmaps, correct technology choices, security & service factors. Stakeholder management incorporating technical, business and offshore partners has been a key element of the role; ranging from EAs & Technical Architects, SMEs and delivery personnel in the technology field, to POs, transformational and customer leads, exec. sponsors and project colleagues on the business sideLeading the discussion and making visions a reality & unlock customer benefits has truly been game-changing for Aviva. My accurate forecasting, modelling, resourcing and estimation has removed technical and delivery uncertainty to provide confidence to stakeholders and shine a beacon on how technology, and its application, can be a game changer in the PMI market

Joining Pearson (Edexcel) in 2004 as a software developer, I was involved heavily in the first on-screen marking of examination papers by a UK exam body. Initially involved in the creation of a large back-office data capture, marking and QA system that would ultimately be responsible for the marking of over 7 million scripts every summer.Much of my focus at Pearson has been delivering highly-scalable, distributed, enterprise-wide systems supporting ever increasing demand for throughput. This in turn, allowed the business to further expand their portfolio of customers, and the company to bid for external work from other organisations and international contracts, including the SATS primary school test suite from 2008 onwards.Transforming what had been described as a “cottage-industry” into a large-scale industrial processing operation through the use of IT was a major challenge. This allowed the business to significantly reduce costs, improve quality and offer new revenue opportunities alongside increasing the range of data available to customers. Some of the highlights of my experience at Pearson include:• Delivery of image capture systems. Circa 140 million sheets of paper are scanned during a typical 8 week window during a summer series.• Production of a scalable, distributed and highly performant workflow data capture system. Processing millions of key depressions daily along with nearly 200 million scores every summer.• Involvement in multiple web projects for high throughput, secure and reliable score capture. This was particularly for scan-attachment, review and post result marking – making seven figure yearly cost savings and transforming a largely paper-based business process.• Working in a capacity of technical lead/ScrumMaster/mentor on multiple projects including a 6-month project with a medium sized offshore, multiple functional team from a partner company, in delivery of a configuration and setup system for examination papers.

I obtained MCPD in 2008 along with qualifications for OOAD and SCRUM certification during my employment.Technology stack: C#, VB.Net, VB6, SQL Server, ASP.NET, MVC, EF, COM+, SSRS, XML, Web-Services, REST, WCF, Web-API, Unity, XMLIT Disciplines: Agile, Scrum, TDD, BDD, RUP, SDLC, Dev-Ops, OOAD, UML, ScrumMaster role, mentor, technical lead, relational DB design, acceptance criteria, mock-ups/wireframes

I joined HEN as a contract developer for delivery of the software part of a solution incorporating a wider data-centric system for the quality control and regulation of measuring instruments for the molten metal industry.Sole developer on the delivery of a Winforms system using a variety of inputs both automated and manually captured. The ultimate goal was to deliver a system that eliminated a practice in which 2% of all products had to be sacrificed for QA purposes, saving the business tens of thousands of pounds yearly.The role also involved liaison with various stakeholders from a managerial level through to front-end users on the factory floor. User acceptance was a critical feature in the acceptance of the software and the business process change from a largely manual QA process to a more data-centric approach.Technology stack: VB6, SQL Server.

Working as part of a small development team (5 developers and less than 50 employees) on a practice management software solution for the optical industry. Customers include Tesco, Rayners and Ronald Brown Optical Group.Very much a “hands-on” role due to the size of the organisation – often involved in implementation, customer interaction and large volume data transfer when customers moved from rival suppliers or bespoke systems.Technology stack: VB6, MS Access, SQL Server and XML.