Welcome.

I’m Michael

For over 25 years I have been working in IT, I started in the service desk and am now head of IT for a large local authority in Essex. Along the way I have picked up a number of technical, cultural and leadership skills.

The majority of the last 20 years I have been working in the public sector, although I have taken roles in many other sectors including the MSP world and private sector. The common theme through all these roles has been digital transformation. I have overseen a number of migrations to the cloud, specialising in Office 365 migrations, this includes the technical and cultural shift that is needed to make the most from the investments. I have also been involved in a number of infrastructure programmes moving from on-prem infrastructure to cloud based systems including virtualisation and migration to Azure.

This site is primarily a place where you will find my musings about technical, cultural and smart home projects I am working on. I don’t update the posts unless there is something new to add!

My current focus, in Essex, involves working on a massive transformation project to totally overhaul back and front office systems to simplify the complex IT estate and to distil down to 3 or 4 main suppliers, allowing us to use our data in more powerful ways, within the restraints of the public sector budget constraints.

This programme is delivering sweeping process and culture change within the authority, enabling staff, customers and residents to get the most from their local council. Workflow and business process optimisation as well as technical and staff transformation form the backbone of the programme.

I am a technical leadership professional with a wide range of technical and solution design expertise. A proven track record in delivering solutions for a variety of technical business issues including specialties in:

• Digital Transformation specialist, unlocking potential from existing solutions and staff.
• Culture and “hearts and minds” transformation
• A passionate leader with experience in staff management and transformation
• Proprietary and Opensource software
• Virtualisation & Cloud Technologies

I am available for consultancy work for small projects. My rates start at £450 per day, but I am more than happy to provide a fixed price quote for interesting projects. As you will see from my recent project I have completed a number of v2v, p2v and virtualisation platform migrations as well as support and management, this is my main focus, although I do provide technical leadership as a service to a number of small businesses.

I am based just outside Norwich, Norfolk, where I live with my wife, daughter, three dogs and a cat. Outside of work I enjoy a number of hobbies, including Lego, technology projects, reading, cooking and all the other things a boring techy enjoys.