Four decades, twelve sectors, one problem

The current work as Head of Enterprise Architecture across a multi-institutional organisation is building the capabilities for a Sovereign Smart City Digital Twin of one square mile of London: 877 buildings, bridges, and heritage monuments, and the City Police Force, all under a single organisation, in a district producing £110bn a year and moving $4.7tn in daily foreign exchange.

Before it, the £15bn restoration of the Palace of Westminster. Two £1bn government programmes, at the Ministry of Justice and at DEFRA, the latter putting £2bn of farm payments online.

A FTSE250-listed automotive group trading across thirty-five international markets. A global bank, a global hedge fund, a national air traffic service, the London Underground, a European national police force.

As a Director and Lead Enterprise Architect at KPMG: the IT and OT strategy for a €15bn cross-border railway spanning three countries, the digital strategy for a listed private hospital group treating over a million patients a year, and five-year digital strategies for two leading UK universities.

The route to it ran from systems engineer to technical architect to enterprise architect to digital strategist, starting in 1986 at component level. From OS/2 LAN Server to Spatial Computing. One problem runs through all of it: every one of these organisations already held enormous quantities of data about the physical things it owned — track, estates, vehicles, evidence, patient records, buildings — and none could see it as a single picture.

The engineering is rarely the hard part. Deciding what the picture is for, who has to trust it, and what happens when it is wrong: that is the work.

Climbing the whole stack is what makes it possible to hold both conversations — the one with the board and the one with the engineer who has to build it.