Neil Brooks Email & Phone Number

As a seasoned CTO consultant, I leverage my extensive technical expertise to help organisations and individuals with their strategic innovation and digital transformations. With a wealth of leadership experience and strategic insight I bring a broad perspective on industry trends and governance best practices as well as value creation through product development.I provide guidance on the intricacies of technical development, advise on fostering a culture of continuous improvement and adaptability and implementing agile methodologies.

Sheffield, England, Gb

A global EdTech business supporting more than 13 million educators worldwide. We power schools and enable great teaching worldwide, by creating intelligent online products and services to make the greatest difference in education.

London, Gb

A community for technology leaders, and future leaders, looking for fresh thinking that solves real problems. A community that connects people from all sectors who are in a period of transition, whatever that means for them. We call ourselves a Speakeasy Community because we provide safe environments for our hand-picked membership to discuss ideas, challenges and anything else related to leadership centred around technology.

Leeds, England, Gb

Led the technology transformation and product delivery underpinning year-on-year double digit business growth. Responsible for technical product development, back-end systems and office infrastructure.Sale of the business twice in less than three years with an increase in value of 137%. May 2014 for £143m to P.E. companies Bowmark & Five Arrows and January 2017 to Solera Holdings Inc. for £340mTechnical due diligence on acquisitions in France and Finland plus post-sale integration.Introduced modern Agile product development processes, directed the application architecture and aligned operations to support Continuous Integration and Delivery. Feature time to market reduced dramatically with product releases currently averaging 5/week.Conceived and build execution of a global e-commerce platform, with market localisation, that is on track to deliver 20% of revenue in FY20. Pushed the business transformation and automation of back-end services to support it with no material uplift in operational costs.Proposed and executed the implementation of a Subscription Management & Billing System. Core subscriptions fully automated, from set-up to invoicing, including renewals and upgrades. System supports Autodata’s global trading companies, in multiple countries and currencies, including the handling of the local sales tax obligations.Workshop Power awards for Software Product of the Year in 2017 and Best Tech Product in 2016.

Led the Product and Technology functions at Insurecom with responsibility for both the client facing and internal corporate technologies.Worked with the board to formulate corporate strategy and a three to five year financial plan that led to the successful sale of the business to Applied Systems in the summer of 2013.Architected and led a move to develop a consumption based Rating-as-a-Service offering drawing upon the technology from the real-time control and distribution services for insurers that Insurecom already processed. Partnered with Microsoft and based the solution on Azure Cloud services which provided compute elasticity and large-scale storage capabilities. This cloud model made possible a commercially feasible product with high availability, high throughput and with low operating costs.Transformed the technical development delivery capability of the company:• Set-up the Product Management function• Re-organised and recruited on-shore team• Introduced and set-up captive near-shore operation in Kiev (14 developers/testers)• Set-up and integrated DevOps into the development process• Delivered a Commercial Lines system with monthly product release cycles

London, Gb

Responsible for IT Operations/Service Delivery, IT Development, Facilities, Editorial Production and Sub-Editorial. A total headcount of 85 staff including 20 consultants/contractors.Secured BMI’s core revenue generating system from catastrophic failure on arrival at the company. Applications re-architected and moved on to managed service hardware within 10 weeks of issues being identified. 99.998% availability achieved in 2010.Drove the professionalization of the organisation; Set up IT Operations, IT Development. Prepared budget propositions, recruited team members, retained near shore captive development team and introduced ITSM practises. Development changes and enhancements underpinned 60% year on year revenue growth of the core online system.Proposal and board acceptance of a high-level technical strategy and architecture for content creation and distribution combining the immediate needs of the business to go web-first with the longer term aim of replacing the ageing legacy online system.Agile infrastructure strategy definition and execution. Email and general ledger systems placed into the cloud; all other backend systems virtualised (VMWare & Datacore SAN); XenDesktop utilised for VDI/remote access; VOIP systems installed (giving a 40% year 1 saving in costs).Organic lead generation site developed and live within 14 weeks, utilising Alfresco and Varnish technology. Architected the high level solution and engaged a third party (fixed price) as well as an internal team in a two stream build. Site generating 2k leads a week at launch.Successful office moves for the Singapore, New York and the main London office all completed within a twelve month period. London office move and technology refresh for 230 people completed in July 2011 in less than five months with no disruption to business operations.Addressed key organisational deficiencies in service provision and staff hiring/retention by setting up both Facilities and HR functions.

London, England, Gb

Provided business and technical leadership with responsibility for all the developers and contractors working on FT.com.Responsible for 20+ permanent developers and 30+ contractors/consultants, an opex budget line and oversight of capital expenditure budgets of £5M-£10M. Worked with board members and other senior managers on idea shaping for both revenue generating opportunities and cost savings.Set-up a dedicated small change team in Q3 2008 realising revenue opportunities of more than £75k in its first quarter of operation. Set-up of team also removed distractions from engineers working on projects taking their efficiency from below 60% to over 80%.Introduced customisable syndication feeds using OpenSearch and Atom technologies to increase the value proposition for corporate clients. Scrum team set-up and software delivered within eight weeks, used by clients such as Santander.Introduced a hub-and-spoke model for FT.com’s third-party personal data to enable cross site personalisation and address compliance issues. An off-shoring agent was used for execution and a JSON/REST based web-service delivered in Q1 2008 using Agile with minimal FT resource involvement.Conceived the architecture behind the award winning Mockingbird project (winner of the AOP 2008 Innovation award) which underpinned the FT.com subscription revenue model.Championed the use of CDN technology along with other site speed improvements. Reduced download times by up to 80% and increased site traffic capacity by 150% with no additional infrastructure costs.

Professional Services & consultancyTechnical ArchitecturePre-sales support

London, Gb

Technical Architect working on the Loyalty Scheme Data Warehousing project used for marketing analysis and driving campaigns.

London, Gb

Produced an in-store shelf-edge label printing system in under 3 months using DSDM. Developed and co-ordinated upgrades to the Store based MIS.

Comprehensive database management including set-up of core MIS repository and ETL system.

London, Gb