Gavin Brown Email & Phone Number

Timişoara, Timiş, Romania

Supporting LSPs in their Digital Strategy, working to optimise the Client Journey through Digital Transformation.

Timişoara, Timiş, Romania

Successfully integrated cross-European TechOps functions post acquisition, resulting in a seamless merger of two medium-sized organisations with a combined revenue of roughly $30M. Led the integration of business IT infrastructure, security protections, core SAAS platform spend, and workstation estate. Focused on cost optimisation, maintaining business user needs, and addressing shadow IT risks and issues.Managed platforms and technologies including Cisco Meraki, Netgate pfSense, Fortinet Fortigate, Zoom, GSuite, Slack, Atlassian JIRA, ZenDesk, Jamf, and Bitdefender GravityZone. Oversaw a mixed Windows and macOS workstation estate across 6 global office sites and 4 continents, supporting remote working.Redefined, recruited and mentored global combined Technical Operations, aligning them with ITIL best practices. Successfully renegotiated combined SaaS contracts across core service providers, resulting in significant cost savings for both organisations with IT budget responsibilities exceeding $2M annually.Provided leadership for large-scale office refurbishment projects spanning three sites in Edinburgh UK, Timisoara Romania, and Cebu Philippines, management of an annual Office Management budget.Maintained and ensured the ISO 27001 certified Information Security Management System (ISMS) capabilities for both organisations. Successfully completed audits and accreditation for the acquiring company's ISMS.

Timişoara, Timiş, Romania

Reporting to the Chief Technology Officer (CTO), responsible for the leading and evolving Lingo24’s support and technical content services capability globally.Service and security management for all Lingo24 technology including products, platforms and internal ICT infrastructure. Fostering a culture of customer service excellence and ensuring robust 24x7 delivery structures are in place to support Lingo24’s strategic ambitions while meeting revenue and cost targets.Providing leadership and oversight for all aspects of technical operations for internal and customer facing services delivered by the Technology Department.Operational ownership of Lingo24’s Information Security Management System (ISMS) and the ongoing evolution to ensure continued investment in security and support of the increasing Enterprise customer base. Structure, lead and mentor the team mangers to develop a robust customer focused function that acts as a profit centre for the business, enabling Lingo24’s growing Global Content services offering.Operational management of a multi-tiered delivery model operating on a 24x7 basis, including provision of helpdesk and system administration capabilities as well as customer facing content services. Oversight of core infrastructure improvement projects including the implementation of a full active/active Disaster Recovery site, and the expansion of Lingo24’s next generation Machine Translation architecture based on Docker and Kubernetes.Continuous improvement of Lingo24’s services through the improvement of supporting documentation, process optimisation, toolkit development and adoption to optimise Lingo24’s operational delivery, along with identification of additional content services which can be brought to market.

Edinburgh/Romania

Responsible for Lingo24’s global Service Delivery (SD) function, including over 100 Projects Managers (PMs), across 3 sites worldwide, ensuring the successful, on time, to budget delivery of Lingo24’s localisation projects within set quality targets.Major AchievementsSuccessful optimisation of the global PM function, increasing revenue per head year on year while successfully servicing higher project volume and reducing overall head count.Migration of PM function cross-Pacific, from AMER to APAC, with implementation of additional APAC night shift, reducing office site locations from 2 sites each serving 1 shift to 1 site serving 2 shifts.Improvement of gross margin through optimised allocation of suppliers, increase charging of additional services through improved analysis and reporting, continued adoption of Post Edited Machine Translation to optimise cost base while increasing throughput and maintaining quality levels. Improved adherence to core service catalogue and compliance with ISO certified processes, thereby reducing costs from varied custom approaches to service delivery.Improvement of cash flow position through stricter adherence to client sign-off of projects and improved purchase order validation before final project delivery and close down.Implementation of function-wide reporting and forecasting, utilising sales input, to allow improved insight of daily SD workload, weekly forecast and clients performance against set KPIs, thus allowing improved team capacity planning and highlighting underperforming clients.Steering of internal client maturity model assessments, ensuring clients are adhering to core service offerings and defined approaches, risks and issues assessments with implementation of action plans to realign outlier clients.Training and mentoring of departmental and team managers to ensure they continued to grow into confident independent mangers, reducing decision-making turn around times and the growh of self reliant teams.

Edinburgh

Reporting to the Chief Technology Officer (CTO), responsible for the leading and evolving Lingo24’s Global Support and Systems Administration function across 5 global sites.Service Desk Support Function Improvements:* Amalgamation of disparate world-wide support roles, both Helpdesk and client/supplier facing support teams, to Global Support function covering 24/5, “follow the sun” support model, based on ITIL foundations* Implementation of impact and urgency-based SLAs for incident prioritisation and response* Mentoring and guidance of global service desk team in ITIL-based service management fundamentals and promotion of their own knowledge and confidence* Migration of service desk to centralised Atlassian JIRA service desk instance.Global Workstation and Office Estate Improvements:* Implementation of global corporate WAN utilising Cisco Mekrai edge devices, including remote worker VPN access across 5 geographically dispersed core sites* Upgrade of core office networking and wireless capabilities globally to improve performance and resilience along with enabling centralised management through Cisco Meraki hardware* Audit of workstation and business function licensing and virus protections globally and procurement of required to move from unknown to fully auditable license state.Business Compute Platform Improvements:* Redeployment of hand-configured internet facing Linux servers to centralised, air-gapped, configuration management-controlled (Puppet), Centos Linux server estate, employing Center for Internet Security (CIS) base recommendations* Implementation of platform-wide monitoring and across Linux server estate* Implementation of automated backup and restore function of core business production data systems* Design, implementation and deployment of VMware based virtual test environment to allow isolated, production-mirrored, development, system-test and operation acceptance testing, before promotion of changes to production environments.

The Sopra Digital Practice is collection of senior consultants and engineers from within Sopra Group who are experts in modern digital technologies and Agile delivery techniques.Combining this modern digital experience with our domain knowledge, we help organisations to create integrated digital solutions that enable them to wow their users and achieve their outcomes.The practice is able to provide strategic guidance to customers and projects as well as seed project teams to mainstream techniques in larger engagements.

Responsible for all technical architecture aspects of the Application Management projects delivered from the Edinburgh Service Centre.The principal areas of accountability are:Technical Architecture• Providing technical guidance to the team• Assessing and addressing risks to the service deliveryPre-Sales Consultancy• Providing estimates for additional work for current support clients, as agreed• Providing pre-sales support for new Service Centre bids and tender responsesTechnical Consultancy• Managing relationships with hosting providers in use by Edinburgh Service Centre clients• Delivering technical solutions as part of Edinburgh Service Centre projects

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Responsible for the creation and ongoing management of a team tasked with the provision of testing environments and managing the complexity and proliferation of virtual testing environments, based around a large VMware ESXi virtual platform. Delivered as a management service with staff both at F&C's Edinburgh site and Sopra Group offices.The Test Environment Managed Service included: • Test Environment ManagementTo control the delivery and creation of the service and to liaise with the Project teams and other service departments to ensure that environments are delivered on time and trouble free• Configuration ManagementThe control of the configuration of the environments at all levels to ensure a defect free delivery every time. • Release ManagementThe management of delivery of software releases into the required environment and the subsequent management of change throughout the software lifecycle• Capacity ManagementEnsuring all environments, whether new or existing, have the appropriate amount of resources required for testing.• Data ManagementTo populate and clear-down environments with appropriate sets of data as required for the testing purposes. • Problem/Issue ManagementRoot cause analysis, and fixing of problems/issues with the testing environment.Gavin was in particular responsible for:• The recruitment of a team of Microsoft infrastructure experts• Interfacing the Sopra Group support team with the existing F&C teams.• Documentation of the existing F&C infrastructure and processes• Overseeing knowledge transfer from existing teams at F&C• Development of more streamlined test environment deployment and management techniques• Day to day management of the team and high priority incidents• Design and implementation of infrastructure wide monitoring and alerting utilizing the open source Zabbix monitoring solution.

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Responsible for the Product Mangement for a number of custom built SaaS (Software as a Service) projects. Including:*HR Director Recruitment* : End to end recrutiment platform built for the UK Local Authority market, clients included Perth & Kinross Council, West Lothian Council, East Lothian Council, Dundee City Council, Hounslow Council, Hounslow Homes.*HR Director Continuous Professional Development* : Comprehensive professional development platform built to meet the requirements of the May 2000 McCrone Inquiry. Clients included Dumfries & Galloway Council, Scottish Borders Council, Fife Council.*Impensa - Expense Tracking* : Custom built online expenses tracking and reporting platform built to meet the Scottish Government's MSP Expense tracking legislation. Clients included West Lothian Council.

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

The challenge was to take the often cumbersome and time consuming paper based process currently in use and develop web based application to mirror the process. Working closely with the Local Authority's Gavin quickly mapped out the processes currently in place and which parts were legislatively or council policy based. This information along with work with the front end HR staff allowed an web application system to be built which not only captured all the key decision point only managed to streamline the recruitment process, reducing both the time to fill a vacancy and expenditure on external advertising. This solution was named "HR Director Recruitment" and rolled out to a number of local authorities around Scotland, each time the system being slightly tailored to meet the individual client’s needs.Work on the Recruitment system then led to a similar product being developed to tackle the authorities’ need to track employees Professional Development. This became of particular importance following the May 2000 McCrone Inquiry. With this in mind Gavin was tasked with leading a development team to implement an fully web based online system recording the Continuous Professional Development (CPD) of local authority’s teaching staff. A similar process to the implementation of HR Director Recruitment was undertaken with "HR Director CPD" the product developed to meet this need. The system is still in use by a number of Scottish Local Authorities and has vastly expanded over the years to include full course booking and management, training costs and to include Local Authority staff from all services.

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

One of the three founding members of XPT Solutions. Responsible for the planning and development of XPT Solutions' Software As A Service offerings, including HR Director Recruitment, HR Director Continuous Professional Development and the Impensa Expenses systems.Responsible for the full development life cycle from Requirements Gathering, through Analysis & Design to Implementation, Testing and finally Deployment. All systems were developed to improve existing business process issues, such as Local Authority staff recruitment (HRD Recruitment), Local Authority education department professional development (HRD CPD) or Elected Members' Remuneration of Allowances & Expenses (Impensa). All development was performed in-house by a small team of Open Source developers utilising a LAMP stack under an Agile development methodology. Applications were deployed to XPT's private co-located Linux hardware and sold under a Software As A Service (SaaS) model, with clients purchasing a licence to use the system.As the company grew in size and reputation it attracted interest from outside investors and was acquired in 2005 by independent IT Consultancy firm Newell & Budge. Newell & Budge was then subsequently acquired by French IT Consultancy and Service company Sopra Group in 2006.