Ian is Director of Cloud and Government IT in the Information and Communications Technologies Knowledge Transfer Network (ICT KTN), part of the programme funded by the Technology Strategy Board, the UK Government's Innovation Agency. KTNs work closely with academics, leading industry suppliers and early adopters to promote ICT-based innovation in private and public sector organisations. His key areas of interest lie in IT as a Service, Open Standards and Sustainable Computing, especially for Government and SME applications. He also retains an abiding interest in multicore computing. See www.ictktn.org.uk for more information.

Ian is also responsible for much of Intellect's externally funded project work, most notably in the area of Knowledge Transfer and Collaborative R&D projects. These projects must be of added value to the Intellect Membership and their core business interests. Ian successfully led two previous Knowledge Transfer Networks in the area of IT and distributed computing: Digital Systems and Grid Computing Now!, also funded by the Technology Strategy Board. Between 2007 and 2009, Ian contributed to the Open Grid Forum, an open standards body, as Vice President for Enterprise, and acted as a principal in the OGF-Europe FP7 project funded by the European Commission, also aimed at establishing open standards for distributed computing. In 2009/10 he contributed to the UK Government's G-Cloud Programme as industry lead for the Application Store Requirements Specification.

Ian has worked in ICT since 1972, with early stints at British Airways and International Computers Limited. In 1979, he joined Hewlett-Packard Limited where he enjoyed a substantial career working in Research & Development, Quality and Marketing at HP locations in the US and UK. He held senior management positions in HP's Corporate Research Laboratories in Bristol and Telecom Systems Business in Edinburgh. He has an MSc in the Management of Technology, a joint degree awarded by the Universities of Sussex and Brighton in 1992. He conducted research work in the area of Innovation Management in the Doctoral Programme at Cranfield University between 2004 and 2006. He is a Member of the British Computer Society and a Chartered Information Technology Professional, a past chair of the BCS Distributed and Scalable Computing Special Interest Group, a member of the Association for Computing Machinery and an Associate Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

 

 

CloudscapeIV Position Paper
UK’s Government Cloud – What happened next?
Abstract           
In March 2011 a new IT Strategy was published by the UK Government. This reinforced the G-Cloud strategy of Data Centre Consolidation, Infrastructure and an Applications Store for services. In October 2011, an Implementation Plan was published, including a number of specific technology strategies, and a framework procurement for G-Cloud launched. This closed at Christmas with more than 600 companies expressing interest and 300 submitting 1700 services for consideration. What are the new challenges presented in this open approach to service based computing? What standards are required and what more needs to be done to change government computing?