My Life In Communications

My professional life began when I left public school  and took a job as a paste-up artist at a printing company in Cambridge.  Because there were so many art students in Cambridge, artists were two-a-penny, and I was paid pretty poorly for the work I was doing.

When home computers started to become affordable it wasn’t long before I bought one of the first ZX81s and BBC Micros sold in Cambridge, and very soon after that I developed a huge passion for IT

When I discovered how computers were set to turn the business world on its head, and I realised that ‘computer people’ would earn huge amounts of money I found myself a job in IT and went on to build an IT career that lasted for a further 28 years, working mainly in biotech and manufacturing.

The last 7 years of my IT career I was the Global Director of IT for a hugely successful biotech company in Cambridge. It was there that I found my métier as a presenter and public speaker.  We were always doing pretty clever stuff with our corporate IT, and some of these things were streets ahead of what anyone else was doing.  I had an interview published in the The Financial Times about how we were exploiting the Internet to advance drug discovery.

Not long after that I was approached by an organisation that wanted me to talk about our achievements at their seminar.  Since then things have grown from strength to strength, to the point where I am now regularly invited to give presentations all over the world on how business can exploit information technology, and how they can protect themselves with sound information security best practices.

In the past six years through my role as panel member of the UK Net Focus security group I have been researching social media, specifically examining and documenting the opportunities and risks social media can present to businesses. Given the reputation I have acquired in Information Security and IT circles I’m now finding the majority of my speaking engagements have been to present my findings of my social media research to business leaders and senior decision makers across the UK and Europe. I’m now also regularly invited to run Social Media Boot-camps for the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) at the University of Harlow.

In my leisure time the artist within me still asserts itself, and I enjoy drawing and painting in watercolour.