Drawing over 3 million visitors a year, Somerset House is a 500 000 square foot, 249 year old, Grade I listed building in the heart of central London. At its core lies a creative community of hundreds of innovative businesses and enterprises, spanning the arts, culture and technology. With an annual budget of £23m, Somerset House Trust is charged with both maintaining the buildings and sustaining the creative community of some 2,600 creatives.The Director of Operations and Infrastructure sits as a strategic member of the Executive team and is a newly created role within the Trust. The role takes on oversight of the significant Estates and Facilities Management elements of the vast Grade I listed estate, in addition to the IT remit.

The IT department of the Trust acts as both a service function and an additional revenue stream, responsible for selling the provision of all IT connectivity and telephony services to all 2600 building members, totalling some 7000 connected devices daily. Services include wired and wireless connections, dedicated VLANs per organisation, more than 1200 Avaya unified communication endpoints, server room hosting, dedicated and shared bandwidth packages, and more.In addition, the Trust runs a series of large public events in the various spaces around the estate, including an outdoor cinema, open air concerts, and a winter ice rink. The IT department is responsible for ensuring all facets of IT are provided for these and other public and private events.As part of the Trust's senior management team, responsibilities include development and realisation of IT strategy and policies, large scale project implementations, IT security and information governance oversight, and staff management of all IT, project, and vendor teams. Projects over the last few years have included a £600k infrastructure upgrade and a £250k unified communications overhaul.

The St Christopher’s Hospice Group provides palliative care to thousands of patients a year, with an annual budget of c. £30m, 465 staff and over 1200 volunteers across multiple locations in London and the South West of England.In early 2016 I was contacted by the Director and asked to consult on several large IT projects that the Group was undertaking. These included an upgrade of the entire VMware estate, integration of NHS provided email and a major redesign of the core electronic patient system alongside the procurement of a replacement system.

RAPt/The Forward Trust are the leading provider of substance abuse rehabilitation in prisons and communities, with an annual budget of c. £33m, 600 staff across 7 offices and 28 prison services across the United Kingdom.Responsibilities ran across RAPt and our sister organisation Blue Sky and include the formulation and ownership of IT strategy, project management of all IT projects, R&D of new technical solutions and management of all IT systems, staff, and budgets.

The first ever internal IT appointment for RAPt/The Forward Trust, the primary objective of the role was to build an entire internal IT function to phase out the costly outsourced solution. In addition the various IT systems had long been neglected and were in need of a complete overhaul.

This was a newly created role designed to provide more direction to the development of IT within the Group. The role held responsibility for the entire IT projects portfolio of the Group, ensuring strategic goals were met and delivered on time and within budget. It also included leadership of the IT support team, project staff, and associated functions.

The role included management of the group’s IT systems and the creation of formal IT processes. The role required the designing, building, and maintaining of infrastructure systems along with the leadership of the support team.

Research and development of new systems solutions and 3rd line support for services based on Novell Netware for 5000+ staff.

IT support and training for 5000+ staff, along with infrastructure renewal project work.

Senior IT support for 450 corporate users as well as mentoring junior staff.