I like to joke that AlixPartners is the largest Management Consulting firm that you've never heard of. The company was started in the '70s by Jay Alix and completely dominated the restructuring and turn-around market, earning the moniker, the bankruptcy firm, and indeed we are still the absolute leader in this market. In fact, we have done many of the largest every handled, including the GM restructuring. Since those early days, we've built out a significant performance improvement practice and today this accounts for approximately 85% of our work. This is the area in which I operate. We are different from most Management Consultancies in that we typically only hire people with very significant industry experience - often, like myself, ex-CxO roles. People who aren't just "book smart", but have spent time in the trenches, getting it done with their own jobs on the line.I am most often engaged at our clients as an interim-CIO or in a similar role. The majority of my work is in Merger and Acquisitions (bringing together two IT departments and tech stacks), Carve-outs (creating brand new IT departments and tech stacks) and IT optimization (driving down costs and/or improving capabilities of existing IT departments and tech stacks).I am also the lead for our ERP practice and so I frequently get involved in large project turnarounds. I have worked with most ERP's on the market these days and I am an expert in SAP systems.

After the best part of a decade in the CIO/CTO role I have decided to return to my consulting roots. Quizitive (formally RBA Consulting) combine Strategy, Design & Technology in a way that truly speaks to the digital “Experience” that this generation just simply expects from today’s technology.A quick glance at my resume will show that I have a solid Technology background so I can and do work with customers at a technical architecture level when appropriate. My major focus is in Strategy however; building upon this existing capability to make RBA the consultancy of choice for our customers - because of our seamless approach from business strategy through to experience delivery - is the reason I was recruited in. I am tremendously excited to be joining such a talented team. A typical engagement starts at one of three different points:CIO/CTO - I am often engaged here as a “CIO Advisor”. Sometimes this is one or more days a month to act as a sounding board for strategic direction issues and to help keep a CIO in touch with what’s going on in the industry around them - hard for them to do when they’re busy keeping the lights on every day. Other times this will be a week or two dedicate facilitation to deep dive on a particular strategy issue.CxO/Business Unit Director - One of my favorite engagement types, helping non-technical CxO or Business Directors understand how they can help move their business units along by leveraging today’s technology without needing to be able to talk in “technobabble”.Systems Architects - I am often called upon to be the bridge from the strategic business need to the systems design best suited to realize the promised value. Big picture thinking combined with ensuring benefits aren’t lost in the details.

GDT is a great place to work and an excellent Cisco VAR. I joined GDT as their first CIO. GDT had grown very quickly on the back of excellent customer service and great technical expertise in the Data Center and Networking infrastructure space. It had been so busy serving its customers that it had lacked attention on its own IT infrastructure. I built a team of focused and highly skilled professionals, committed to enabling GDT to continue to deliver on its well deserved, "customer service excellence”, reputation. In addition to building appropriate skills, system availability needed to be guaranteed and so Internally housed systems were moved to two newly configured Data Centers with appropriate redundancy between them.With skill set and systems issues behind us we were able to focus on delivering process efficiency improvements & business data insights to allow for faster and more accurate responses to customer requests. Furthermore, we needed to make progress on a long term project to enable EDI with both our customers and prime vendors (particularly Cisco) which had been languishing in various states of incompletion for years. We chose to replace our Accounting system with a full implementation of SAP S/4 HANA (including Employee Central, ECC, Project Systems and EWM). Given the extreme importance of our customer focus and the challenges of making SAP’s traditional data entry screens fit the unusual VAR model, we decided to design a custom Sales UI front end, built in SAP’s FIORI technology.When we started the SAP implementation, we were one of only 11 companies adopting SAP HANA worldwide and the first to attempt a greenfield implementation. We went live, successfully, only 19 months later, the first outside SAP itself to be running S/4 HANA. I am extremely proud of the outstanding achievement of my team and I am certain that GDT will reap the benefit of such an amazing system for decades to come.

Driving the technical vision to deliver on our mission of providing cloud hosted API discovery, testing and monitoring capabilities that are: instantly accessible; utterly dependable; infinitely scalable and truly affordable.

When I took on the role of CIO at P&O Ferries they were at an interesting inflection point from an IT perspective. They had three main challenges in my determination:1) They had previously ramped up their development capabilities for a large, internal re-write of their critical operational systems that, though serving their business well, were tied to unsupported legacy hardware based on the old DEC Alpha chip (no longer in production). That in-house development was cancelled but the department was still sized for it. 2) They had recently entered into Managed Services contract which wasn’t really working for either party.3) They had committed to leave one of their “datacenter” buildings, housing half their operations critical hardware and the building was scheduled for demolition, however, because of the complexity of the legacy nature of the hardware, they hadn’t been able to devise a plan to safely exit the building without risk of operational impact. The deadline for this move was looming and immovable.I built them a two year plan to resolve this challenges and actually delivered it in just over one year. I worked with their HR department to restructure the IT organization appropriately for its expected future role, reducing IT costs by over 50% in the process. I converted all non-operational systems to a Hybrid Cloud basis (hybrid because, being a ferry company, they have a large number of “branch offices” that tend to move around a lot, sometimes well connected, sometimes poorly connected and sometimes not seen on the network for days!). I extracted the legacy, but still useful, operational software from the unsupportable hardware by creating a Virtualization shell for it and then safely moved the operations systems to a new data center location. Finally I worked with Finance and Legal to resolve our differences with the Managed Services partner which ultimate resulted in a dissolution on terms each side could live with.

Working for one of the largest and most complex "Local Government"​ transport organization in the world was a phenomenal experience. Transport for London was an organization created from the merger of 7 individual directorates that governed Taxis, Underground Trains, Overground Trains, Trams, Traffic Lights, Ferries, Cyclists and even Pedestrian traffic in London. By my tenure, these directorates had been merged to the point that they were supported by two large IT organizations, essentially divided as London Underground (basically all trains) and Surface Traffic (everything else). On top of establishing a core Enterprise Architecture function and working to bring "Cloud"​ capabilities to bring up massive amounts of data into the public domain safely, securely and reliably at little or no cost to the Tax Payer, I was also fortunate enough to work with two great CIO's to help forge a single IT department from the two. Designing and implementing a single IT organization to cover such a vast need was an exercise in patience and careful planning. Every detail was covered from process design through to career management for the affected people. The result was a smooth transition to a much more efficient organization with no impact on operational services that run more than 6 million travel trips everyday.

SOA has taken off in Europe; SOA Software has decided to invest heavily in establishing local offices in the UK, France and Germany and to create partnership arrangements that will provide sales and support to our customers in EMEA. I have accepted this position as Vice President of European Operations because I fervently believe that SOA provides exactly the IT Governance that we need to make systems implementations more successful, more reliable and ultimately much more cost effective. I believe that SOA Software choose me for this challenge because of my demonstrated passion and success in pushing out this message during my time with Microsoft in the US.

During almost a decade working for the greatest software house in history, I have held many roles - from consulting for fortune 500 companies using Microsoft's technologies to working in the Windows Product Group, helping to ship Windows Server 2003. I am most proud, however, of the work I have done with my colleague, William Oellermann, in setting up Microsoft's field based SOA Solutions group. We created a new way of thinking about this space for Microsoft. During this time I help author our Service Oriented Architecture Maturity Model and was the chief architect behind the Microsoft Managed Services Engine.

Responsible for Accounting and Payroll/Time Tracking systems at BNSF

Consulting for various Fortune 100 companies in the US

Working for Vauxhall, originally at their Dunstable office, later at the Luton Plant, as an IT Consultant.