DIG20: Infrastructure in a world of Digital Transformation

Paula is the Director of IT Middlesex University, where she leads a Service of 46 doggedly determined staff who have responsibility for maintaining and enhancing the University’s IT infrastructure, services and systems in partnership with an ever growing number of 3rd party providers.

With over 20 years of experience in IT, international keynote speaker Nancy Rademaker shares her experiences straight from the places where technology is shaping our future. Over her career, Nancy has worked for several IT companies, including Microsoft in the Netherlands and Europe. In 2016, speaker Nancy Rademaker became a partner at Nexxworks, a thought leadership consultancy that inspires organizations to act on their ‘day after tomorrow’.

Rachel Clay is an experienced Education Sales Manager and longtime Education enthusiast. She’s on a mission to enhance the Academic experience for all students and to ensure the use and access of technology; whether physically or virtually is accessible to everyone.

A successful and well-respected enterprise architect and consultant. James has worked at all levels of IT for large blue-chip organisations and public sector bodies. A reputation for delivery and transformation has allowed him to lead some very complex programmes of work within the UK Public Sector – leading to successful delivery and measurable service benefits for patients and citizens. A very effective communicator at all levels, he has successfully established himself as someone who can understand business objectives and strategies and translate that into technology systems and services design. Through his roles with Softcat, Shaping Cloud, Channel 3 Consulting and The Greater Manchester Combined Authority, he has led teams to deliver market shifting transformation and collaboration programmes; e.g. creating and leading the first multi-agency technical strategy group across an entire county focussed on a consolidated public service IT model. His experience in the UK public sector and the delivery of major transformation programmes, combined with his knowledge of Enterprise Architecture allows him to understand and translate functional business requirements into a meaningful and achievable strategy through to individual programmes, projects and technical delivery streams.

Francis has worked as an analyst in the risk management and international cyber security sectors, for over 20 years with particular interests in strategic policy, geopolitical horizon-scanning, and threat intelligence. His academic background includes a PhD in Defence & Security and four Master's degrees in Information Technology (Management Information Systems), International Law, Terrorism Studies, and an MBA in Strategic Leadership. He has contributed to three books. At Mimecast, Francis is the Director of Threat Intelligence and is responsible for the generation of policy & doctrine, resource planning, and intelligence output. He leads four separate teams – Threat Intelligence Analysis, Strategic Intelligence & Security Research, Threat Intelligence Risk & Resilience, and Data Science & Overwatch. Francis is a Chartered Manager and a Fellow of the Chartered Management Institute. He is also a Chartered Chemist, a Chartered Scientist, and Member of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Nick developed his digital HE career at the University of Bristol, where his roles included head of IT infrastructure. He is now an independent consultant, working with universities on initiatives from data centres to digital learning.

Mat is (Interim) Deputy Director & Head of Digital Infrastructure/Information Security at the University of Wolverhampton, where he is responsible for shaping and planning the University’s digital architecture encompassing core infrastructure and information security. Mat is also UCISA Secretary and a Director of USL.

Worked in the Higher Education for 2 decades, leading and driving the transformation of University infrastructure from physical, on campus provision to virtualised, cloud hosted and hyper-converged. This has included both VM platforms and backup. This Infrastructure transformation journey has been more about people and hearts and minds rather than technology!

With teaching migrating to Zoom, and being one of the technical architects and developers of our lecture capture implementation, I was responsible for developing the ‘glue’ that held everything together. This required late nights of reading through API documentation, and long days of wedging Zoom into our existing processes.