How I Got Here
I've been in IT professionally since 2006, but the obsession started when I was seven, playing Boulder Dash on my Dad's Atari 800XL. I still have that machine, reconditioned, in my collection. I didn't just play games on it. I learned to programme in BASIC, I learned to troubleshoot, and things spiralled from there. I grew up building PCs at a time when most households didn't have one.
I came up through the NHS: data entry, desktop support, server engineering, architecture. Healthcare IT teaches you something that commercial tech often doesn't. There's no budget to throw at problems. You learn to be resourceful. You find novel solutions because you have to, not because it's interesting. I designed the infrastructure for the UK's largest GP super surgery, built a single management domain across an entire county's NHS sites, and created tools that ended up in NHS England approved guidance. None of that happened with big budgets. It happened because I understood the problem well enough to find a way through it.
That resourcefulness followed me into the private sector. At Monmouth Partners I was analysing billing data and finding multi-million pound savings for healthcare clients. At Eddisbury Digital I was product-owning a £6M digital transformation. At McCann I was hired to run IT but ended up rebuilding their broadcast production environment and, when generative AI arrived, I was already in the right place to make it useful. There's a thread through all of it: understanding a domain deeply enough to build the right product for it, not just the right technology.
What I've found is that the most useful skill I have isn't technical. It's translation. I sit between research teams, creative departments, engineering, and executive leadership, and I make complex technology make sense to all of them. That's what gets AI from a demo into a decision, and from a decision into production. The technology is the easy part. Getting an organisation to trust it, adopt it, and build on it is the actual work.