A key challenge today is how to Integrate your business applications in a seamless manner at a pace that supports the business strategy and priorities. The importance of an Integration Strategy as part of the overall IT strategy is often misunderstood or neglected, reducing the agility and performance of IT projects and business change. The business teams do not want to wait months (or weeks) to start using the best in class products and software that are now Cloud first. A key and essential enabler to this revolution, is ensuring you have a modern Integration Strategy that supports your core business integrations in a stable manner, that also drives flexibility and agility for the faster moving API world.As a co-founder of Pace Integration I work alongside clients in shaping their integration journey, helping them define and realise their integration goals.

In this role I have been working as an Independent consultant for Unilever as the Global Solution Design Lead, a trusted advisor to the Global Integration Director. Based out of London with frequent travel to Netherlands and Germany. The primary priority of this role was to design, implement and run the end to end solution design governance process, leading a geographically distributed team of Solution Architects. This role also involved working closely with the Enterprise Architecture team to define the Integration strategy and roadmap, along with completion of technology selection and procurement. In parallel, I was an Engagement Manager within in the Adaptive Integration team and responsible for building out the API integration capability, which included working with the Unilever DevOps (Agile) organization and software vendor architects and consultants.

On return to London, following the experience working within both a large scale European and Americas harmonisation I built up strong trusted relationships with senior Directors, CTO and Innovation stakeholders within Unilever. This provided me the opportunity work within the Enterprise Business Integration CoE as the Lead Global Integration Architect. This was a cross functional role, responsible for a team of architects from Unilever and other vendors, to ensure that all projects had clearly defined solutions and best practices were applied – aligned with the broader strategy and simplification agenda. Within Accenture, I led the Integration function for the UK/I TGP team, where I represented Accenture within the Gartner ADDI summit in 2013

In this role I relocated to North America for two years to work within the ERP harmonisation programme for North and Latin America. This was a challenging role as I was the overall Integration Architecture lead for the programme that covered multiple releases across geographies. The scope consisted of over 500 interfaces, and multiple legacy integration technologies. The primary focus was to define the e2e integration solutions working across 20+ teams, whilst delivering on strategic targets (TCO reduction, reusability, SOA, strategic integration patterns). The Integration Architecture function delivered over 30 Integration Conceptual Designs aligned with global standards, convergence and best practices. As a leader, I had to collaborate and manage resources that were in different regions with varying integration maturity levels.

After the European ERP implementation was completed, I accepted a role as the Integration Portfolio Lead within Project Services, to establish and drive multiple Integration projects for the CoE. In this role I delivered around 30 Integration projects, which included:- Technical MQ upgrades on SAP ECC and SAP PI Landscapes- Implementation of the Global HR extract Interface- Programme to refresh and deploy critical interfaces to over 20 European factory sites- SAP GDS (Global Data Synchronisation) implementationIn addition to developing the pipeline and projects, I successfully led over 40 resources (both onshore and offshore), exceeding the expectations of the client and winning a client satisfaction award in 2009.

Based out of Rotterdam I worked in the Integration Architecture Team, as the Connectivity Team Lead. This was a central team that supported all Releases of the European ERP Programme (2.5 years). The scope spanned a minimum of 20 European countries and covered over 2000 interfaces. I was located for one year in Netherlands and then travelled to over 15 different cities throughout the deployment. This role involved a wide variety of technologies/middleware mainly including SAP XI 7.0, IBM WebSphere Message Broker and IBM WebSphere MQ. As a central team, the prioritization and planning aspects of the role was imperative, given that Product Testing and UAT phases of multiple releases was dependent on end to end connectivity.

Following my Accenture induction training, my first role within Management Consulting was part of the Operational Acceptance team, with the main aim of protecting the IT services stream. This role is focused around ensuring the Operability of the applications developed by the delivery (build) workstreams to facilitate the transition into the Services Run Organisation, which will support the applications in the longer term. The role was cross-release, therefore having involvement in every application developed, working on multiple different releases at the same time. I managed four external contractors who were SMEs within Integration technologies such as Microsoft Biztalk.

Following a successful Industrial placement with Mitsubishi electric, where they sponsored and funded my final year project (1st class honour's) I was given an opportunity to work within the Marketing IT function to develop a custom built CRM platform and manage a CMS project for a self-service portal on the corporate Website. I gained fantastic experiences and learnt the basic fundamentals of business. My role also includes ad-hoc travel and support to the UK/I sales team and graduate recruitment.