It's with more than just a tinge of sadness that I have decided to move on from Imagination at the end of this month. I will be making a bit of a career leap, and taking on an exciting new role at Microsoft (about which I will talk more in the weeks to come).
It has been a hard decision to make because as Head of Imagination IT I have had more success and a greater sense of achievement than in any role I have had before. I am hugely proud of what the team has achieved since I started at Store Street back in the summer of 2008. When I arrived, I inherited a set of services that had been designed for a different era, and a team that had lost direction. I will leave the company using a core set of services that are fit for a 21st century, global operation, and an IT group that is aligned to serving the business's needs.
The poster boy of all of the projects has been our move to Google and a Cloud-based approach to core collaborative tools. Google provide a fabulous product set, but I have also been really enlightened by the way in which Cloud-based services enable a project to focus on the business change by simply removing all of the things that usually scupper an IT initiative – namely, the IT bit!
However, we have made changes in many more areas. We:
– consolidated on BlackBerry for mobile data services, resulting in a consistent, global, and affordable solution for the company during a time of economic uncertainty (although I doubt whether BlackBerry alone will suffice in the years to come);
– renewed our core network infrastructure in London, and moved day-to-day management to a specialist provider Scalable;
– are about to dramatically improve the services available for printing across the London offices through moving to a managed print service;
– developed a blueprint for the deployment of new offices at speed, and moved core file serving in those offices to more commodity devices;
– are about to move from a hotch-potch of bespoke authentication and identity services into a manageable Active Directory;
– put in place a global, subscription-based licencing model for the core creative tools used across the business;
– implemented infrastructure to automate the build and management of desktop and laptop devices;
– restructured the team, and provided the basis of ITIL best practice for service delivery;
– most of all developed a culture where business decisions and priorities became pre-eminent.
All of the above happened whilst we kept providing a service to the 500 or so people who are able to say that they work for Imagination at any given time.
I've a few weeks to go now to make sure that I can transition out of Imagination and keep everything on track as I leave. Telling lots of people over the past few days that I'm going to be leaving has been really hard, as I have built up some great relationships in what (for many at Imagination) is quite a short period of time. There will be goodbyes to come, but I also hope that my new role will give me a number of ways in which I can keep a professional relationship with what is the quirky, engaging, sometimes frustrating, stupidly hard working and incredibly talented beast that is Imagination.
mmitII 