John Foster-Hill

In terms of relevant specifics:

• I’ve been a Company Director of a digital consultancy/agency for 15 years. I’m also the co-Founder of a fintech eCommerce & IP product business that has been operating for nine years, but that now runs in the background. I have a thorough knowledge of effective senior management approaches, both in terms of the practice of 25 years’ of experience, but also the theory learned on my MBA from Oxford University. 

• I love helping complex organisations with multiple stakeholders (often with competing needs) translate their strategic business plans into long-term roadmaps and then delivering them. However, my interest is not just spanners & bolts, but also the (more important) people-related things - managing change and soothing cultural issues. These are always more than 50% of the challenge. 

• Digital transformation to improve services is at the heart of what I do. Recent/important examples include:
  • OECD: delivered the Base Erosion Profit Shifting (BEPS) platform that underpinned the G7’s successful adoption of a single global corporate tax rate
  • Office for National Statistics: award-winning time-use reporting platform (replacing a paper-based approach) detailing the UK’s working patterns, leisure time-use and caring responsibilities during the Covid pandemic
  • Health & Safety Executive: successful ‘Lift & Shift’ strategic feasibility programme to de-risk move of eCommerce & corporate services to new technology platform
  • UK Fire & Rescue Service (UKFRS): digital strategy detailing how to deliver a successful rollout of a National Operational Guidance platform, alongside local operational guidance for the UK’s 50 Fire & Rescue Services
  • National Apprenticeships Service: helped deliver 1,000% growth of potential candidates via digital channels
  • Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy: edited the consultancy report to shape the UK’s implementation of the EU Services Directive
  • Exponential-e: created their corporate digital transformation strategy and then delivered the workstreams to achieve it prior to an IPO on the London Stock Exchange
  • Royal Society of Medicine: created the digital transformation strategy and then delivered the workstreams to achieve for a national membership body charity

• Managing multiple complex, globally-significant work-streams and reporting on these is what I’ve done for 25 years. This entails robust Programme Management to marshal the integration of organisational technology, third-party solutions, legacy systems and infrastructure to deliver commercialisation agendas that increase revenues or automation/efficiency agendas that reduce costs. Communication of progress, risks and issues to C-Level, Boards and Steering Groups is second nature.

• I’ve worked for large organisations and run smaller ones, including 200-year-old venerable institutions as well as dynamic start-ups. I’ve worked in both the public- & private-sector, as well as for charities & membership bodies. This experience has been both agency- & client-side and has spanned digital applications, products & services and technical infrastructure. Consequently, I understand the challenges and dependencies across all of these.

• My background covers an eclectic list of areas including: organisational strategy/growth; fundraising/investment (e.g. VCs, Angels, Trusts, Foundations, HNWIs); M&A activity; new business development; client relationship management; delivery; product development; operations; resourcing/recruitment; partner/supplier relations; staff development; systems/processes; policies/compliance. 

• I'm an experienced Executive Board Director. I enjoy working with big picture organisational leaders, collaboratively helping to frame the strategic options, develop the detail and then deliver against targets.

• I co-founded DONATE - an innovative integrated giving platform that has raised over £3 million for good causes. This has required both big-picture strategic thinking and getting dirty with the minutiae of the data. 

• I have a lot of experience working with global supplier/partners, having commissioned outsourced suppliers from Poland, Malta, Ukraine and India. As part of a previous role, I commuted month-on/month-off to Bangalore to deliver a large digital educational programme for Macmillan. Pan-European/multi-lingual digital roll-outs have included Siemens, QXL and the OECD.

• In terms of innovation and product development I do everything from writing white-papers that are the genesis of an innovative idea, to developing the business plan that grounds the idea in reality, then constituting the organisations that will house it, hiring the team or engaging with the suppliers to deliver it and finally continuously improving the product/service to meet the market and user needs.

• I like the President Eisenhower quote that "plans are worthless, but planning is everything". I’ve created many business plans for innovative products/services/businesses and the thing that they all have in common is the need to combine robustness with flexibility. Where you end up is rarely where you thought you would when you started. Being too wedded to a struggling vision, means you fail to deliver whatever works.

• My approach to innovation and product development is to utilise data-driven decision making and to test iteratively. Sometimes this is about incremental improvements; sometimes it’s about something more transformative. 

• In terms of delivery, my teams are Agile, quickly developing a tangible, user-centred proof of concept/prototype which can then be progressed iteratively, collaboratively and visually with stakeholders, towards the desired solution.

• I love building harmonious teams. I currently lead a team of around 40 or so. This involves nurturing existing employees, but also cultivating: Associate pools, diasporas, freelancer networks, UK delivery partners and off-shore suppliers. And I've been around in digital for ages, so know lots of good people with both generalist and specialist skill-sets.

I hope this all sounds of interest and outlines how I might complement your organisation.

KEY SKILLS

• Digital transformation (service, systems & people/culture)
• Business strategy and consultancy
• Entrepreneur, business case development, Angel/VC/HNWI fundraising
• Delivery
• Sales
• Service design & user-centred design
• Product development & eCommerce
• Relationship building, people management and comms
• Understanding commercial, creative and technical synergies
• Digital product life cycle: business case and strategy, service design, automation & process efficiency, product development, delivery, platform integration, user-centred design, user experience, creative design, accessibility, social media, GDPR and data security, analytics and management information, QA & testing, deployment and roll-out, service-level agreements, managed services, digital marketing

WORK EXPERIENCE

2022-Present: Royal Society of Medicine – a national charity & membership body

Chief Digital Officer

• Head of corporate digital transformation including data, digital & technology
• Responsible for all digital services & technical infrastructure 
• Data Protection Officer (DPO) for GDPR
• Five-year digital strategy definition & roadmap for implementation of a suite of workstreams to achieve strategy
• Aligning this with corporate vision, strategy & objectives
• Definition of the right technology platform(s) to deliver:
  • A sustainable financial model
  • A ‘single version of truth’ data model
  • 350+ in-person, hybrid & webinar educational events (including its highly-regarded series on both medicine & mental health and medicine & climate change) during the COVID pandemic to 200,000 delegates (members and multi-disciplinary healthcare professionals & stakeholders)
  • 55 specialist sections / chapters 
  • Library services to support 400,000 volumes (including digitisation of 40,000 rare / antiquarian books) and 8,000 e-books / e-Journals
  • The RSM’s collection of over 4,000 artworks
  • Formal & informal learning networks
  • Digital fundraising activities
  • Commercial activities (hotel, club, restaurant, bar)
  • Innovation support for the medical community
  • Membership acquisition & retention
  • Improvement of customer experience
  • Definition of potential IP for commercialisation
  • A scalable technology infrastructure & applications ecosystem
  • A new delivery model with ‘right-sized’ supplier contracts
  • Automations & self-serve, where possible
  • Preparation of business cases to funding bodies for technology innovation ‘packages’
  • Balance between strategic and ‘quick win’ delivery
  • Business continuity & disaster recovery
• Delivery of ‘Business as Usual’ ‘cloud-first’ working for 150+ employees (Office365, Azure, agile continuous improvement, SaaS etc.)
• Responsible for Application, Infrastructure & Support teams
• Saved over 20% from multi-million pound IT budget
• Managed multiple procurements for new framework providers

2021-2022: Exponential-e – a Cloud, IT and Network services company

Director of Digital Transformation

• Created corporate digital transformation strategy for £200m company
• Achieved Board approval for strategy, roadmap and secured budgets for strategy delivery
• Implementation of a suite of new workstreams to achieve strategy prior to FTSE250 IPO on the London Stock Exchange to make organisation ‘fit for IPO’:
  • Upgrade (‘Paris’ to ‘Rome’) & re-platforming ServiceNow (multi-domain & out-of-the-box) to make it scalable for enterprise customers. Implementation of: IT Service Management (ITSM); Customer Service Management (CSM); Field Service Management FSM); IT Operations Management (ITOM); and Configuration Management (CMDB) modules and associated integrations.
  • Codebase migration of ‘Configure - Price – Quotation’ (CPQ) Engine to more efficient technology (C# to NodeJS)
  • Centralised, standalone datastore to provide a ‘single version of truth’ for all data across the business and remove reliance on COTS software providers.
  • DAM & dynamic ‘single pane of glass’ reporting tool: sitting on top of this datastore.
  • Product database: providing consistent product record & naming convention for vendor/internal SKUs; a complete naming, pricing, vendor, specification & component history.
  • Configuration Management Database (CMDB): providing a single view of the technical solutions a customer has; products / services / components; SLAs; monitoring information. 
  • 360° customer view: holistic account view for each customer across any system; value; solutions by segment; current specific configurations; contract timings; sector/vertical information; links to tickets / live issues
  • Contract database: trusted, source of services & contractual / financial data under a single Masters Services Agreement (MSA); financials (mini P&L; revenue; services bought & cost; cost to service; margin)
  • Self-serve tools: incrementally built: Pricing / quotation tool; Ordering tool; Ticketing / Incident tool; Technical management tool (e.g. DNS changes, password resets); Account management tool (e.g. billing, novations)
  • APIs: two-way, real-time data-driven connections between previously siloed systems (i.e. Billing, Delivery, Sales, Pricing/Ordering, HR)
  • Multi-track sales approach: free up organisation to be more ‘service-led’ with high-value enterprise customers and stricter with ‘low margin, high volume’ commoditised customers
  • Real-time natural language search: ‘eat the Elephant’ approach: central datastore; advanced search across systems; Natural Language Processing tools; AI-based search (combining disparate data to form answers); Machine Learning to promote increasingly accurate results
  • New service design, user interfaces (UI) & branding: consistently applied across digital estate
  • Automations: Robotic Process Automation (RPA) looking for opportunities; AI/Machine Learning identifying manual processes / pain-points; key automations: novations, renewals, commissions & vendor pricing.
  • Salesforce upgrade (to latest ‘Lightning’ version) & out-of-the-box
• Implementation of new ‘specify, oversee & QA’ delivery model: definition & implementation of required skills mapped to roles / recruitment; delivery of correct mix of a focused internal team, with scale-up partners and specialist contractors; training plan both for systems team & wider business.
• Productisation: white-labelling of internally-developed products & services to commercialise them with customers
• Instigation of ‘Zero tolerance’ testing regime: Test-Driven Development (TDD); test scripts; test cases; orchestration; automated testing; test harnesses
• Putting scalable architecture in place to take account of future M&A activity
• Improved approach to systems-related process & governance: single team to own change requests; consistent, CAB governance; security considerations up-front; Lean Six Sigma etc.
• Products / services included: connectivity (SD-WAN); cloud (storage, compute, desktop-as-a-service); managed services (365x24x7 NOCs, remote desktop, Office365); unified comms & collaboration (MS Teams, bespoke integrated comms platform, hosted PBX); call centres; business continuity (disaster recovery-as-a-service); migration (databases, identities/users, phone numbers); security (365x24x7 CSOCs, managed services, identity/access (Okta), SSO, MFA); regulatory / compliance (GDPR, ISO); co-location & data-centres.

2006-2021: Panlogic – a digital consultancy / delivery agency

Company Director

• Delivery of financial plan - helped turn loss-making company into a profitable one (at 10% margin)
• Corporate strategy, M&A activity
• Senior client relationship management 
• New business development:
  • Frameworks: won places on coveted government (and other) procurement frameworks: Technology Services, Digital Marketplace, G-Cloud, Digital Outcomes & Specialists (DOS), Management Consultancy framework, BBC
  • ITTs/RFPs/PQQs: 250+ new business proposals & presentations
• Recent strategic consultancy work delivered:
  • OECD
    • Delivered the OECD’s Base Erosion Profit Shifting (BEPS) platform that underpinned the G7’s successful adoption of a single global corporate tax rate
    • Strategic consultancy on how to commercialise OECD data/assets through new business models
    • Strategic review of 34 OECD online/offline channels to create a new holistic service design
    • Defining new OECD digital landscape, TOGAF framework & TOM (Target Operating Model) approach & content strategy
    • Strategic Analysis & User Experience Design for OECD.org
    • ‘PISA-based Test for Schools’ strategic digital platform provider procurement
  • Health & Safety Executive (HSE)
    • ‘Lift & Shift’ feasibility programme de-risking move of eCommerce & corporate services to new platform
    • Successful ‘Lift & Shift’ migration that increased confidence levels from 50% to 75%.
    • Strategic roadmap definition to ensure legal/regulatory compliance and data security first, then a move to new, optimised user-centred service
    • Provided answers to six strategic HSE questions around: business case; functionality; content authoring/publishing; timescales; costs; Design Pattern Libraries; risks; governance etc.
    • Definition of: what would migrate easily; what would need to be amended; what would need to be re-built
    • Cost-benefit analysis of increased migration fidelity costs vs. development re-work costs
    • Creation of devolved publishing workflow process
    • Governance and cultural change definition
    • Identification of usability issues and pain-points (e.g. search and user journeys)
    • Content modernisation process (e.g. CRUD prioritisation / DITA model of ‘write once/deploy anywhere’)
    • ‘Freemium’ business model definition for HSE
    • Automation recommendations (e.g. use of AI/Machine Learning to reduce time to structure content)
  • Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)
    • Digital strategy report outlining how to address the FCA’s distinct ‘Firm’ & ‘Consumer’ audiences
    • Recommendations for how to build user trust
    • Strategic, de-risked roadmap:
      • A ‘top tasks’ approach for separate ‘Firm’ & ‘Consumer’ user journeys
      • Highly-focused for ‘Firm’ audiences, a more visually appealing ‘Consumer’ proposition
      • A single tone of voice, but with different applications per audience
    • Identification of usability issues and pain-points (e.g. search, navigation and ‘laddered’ content)
    • Focused social media strategy
    • ‘As is’ content audit and ‘to be’ content strategy
    • Functionality definition (contextual tools; personalisation; 
    • Affiliate and partner definition
    • Commercialisation/monetisation opportunity definition
    • Automation: how to streamline processes and help foster a more joined-up organisational culture
    • Organisational change definition
  • UK Fire & Rescue Service (UKFRS)
    • Digital strategy report outlining the results of a Trial of how the UKFRS’s National Operational Guidance (NOG) platform, interacted with local operational guidance platforms (SITs) to allow 3x Trial fire and rescues services (London, Kent, Thames Valley) to each have a ‘single version of truth’ for their guidance at each local level.
    • Proof that a consistent national approach (e.g. NOG + SITs) was a massive improvement over disjointed legacy approaches. SITs were seen to be:
      • A huge improvement over existing processes
      • Better for reviewing, distributing, storing local ‘Policy, Procedure & Guidance’
      • Faster to access
      • Easier to use
      • Helpful to version control
    • Strategic, de-risked roadmap for SIT rollout to maximise stakeholder enthusiasm and buy-in 
    • Resource and collateral definition for national roll-out
    • Approaches to increase convergence/minimise divergence despite widely differing FRS starting-points
    • Definition of SIT improvements required, before national roll-out
    • Detailing of best practice content improvements
    • Governance recommendations
    • Approaches to address concern about SIT workload outlined (e.g. templating tools; AI/machine learning migration automation; ‘drag and drop’ upload mechanisms etc.)
  • National Apprenticeships Service: grew the throughput of potential candidates by 1,000%
  • Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy: edited the consultancy report to shape the UK’s implementation of the EU Services Directive
• Authored a number of strategic white papers (including the report that formed the genesis of DONATE®) and then delivered services to support the need that they articulated.
• My oversight and delivery work has included programmes of work for:
  • Multi-lateral organisations: OECD, G20, International Transport Forum, UNICEF, WWF, International Energy Agency, British Council, Financial Action Task Force, Enterprise Europe Network
  • Public sector: Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, UK Trade & Invest, Government Digital Services, Health & Safety Executive, National Apprenticeships Service, Office for National Statistics, National Crime Agency, Skills Funding Agency, Care Quality Commission, Greater London Authority, London Councils, Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea Council, NHS Trusts, BBC, Security Industry Authority, Oxfordshire County Council, Business Link, Energy Saving Trust, Media Monitoring Unit, Shared Business Service
  • Emergency services & military: UK Fire & Rescue Service, London Fire Brigade, Kent Fire & Rescue Service, Thames Valley Police, Hampshire Constabulary, Household Cavalry, Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund
  • Financial Services: Financial Conduct Authority, Pensions & Lifetime Savings Association, Financial Reporting Council, Association of Investment Companies, Pensions Infrastructure Platform
  • Corporate: MasterCard, O2, Mazda, Channel 4, Sky, Virgin Holidays, ITV, Jani-King, Boodle & Dunthorne, Serco
  • Education: CASS Business School, City University Law School, ACS International Schools; Nuffield Foundation, Capital City College Training, Bromley College, Achievement for All, Workers’ Educational Association
  • Membership bodies: RUSI
  • Not-for-profit/Charity: Royal National Institute for the Blind, World Vision, ActionAid, Royal National Lifeboat Institute, Breast Cancer Care, Breakthrough Breast Cancer, Help the Aged, National Council for Palliative Care, National Deaf Children’s Society, AbilityNet, Nasen, National Funding Scheme
  • Start-ups: ChartsNow (mobile music), Brave New Talent (social recruitment)
• Conception of and strategic move to ‘brains trust’ business model and automation specialism
• Move from PRINCE2 to Agile project methodology
• Moved business from physical servers to Cloud-based working (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud etc.)
• Delivering operational solutions to support this, including: Associate pool, trusted freelance network, UK delivery partners and global outsource ‘scale-up’ suppliers
• Legal, contractual and Service Level Agreements
• Line management, recruitment and HR
• Tight cost control across all programmes of work (e.g. instigated monthly commercial review process)
• Introduced processes/systems to provide flexible and scalable platform for growth (timesheets, reconciliations, commercial review and forecasting system; templates & best practice examples; new business process; resourcing; blog; intranet; new corporate website; QA process; skills audit; JIRA/Freshdesk technical helpdesks; promotion of best practice team tools: Trello, Slack, Confluence, Jenkins , Github etc.)

2012-2021: National Funding Scheme – fintech mobile giving charity 

Co-Founder

• Development of an innovative integrated giving platform to disrupt charity fund-raising market. 
• The charity uses the DONATE® brand to deliver this integrated giving platform across text, online and contactless:
  • Text/SMS: large crowds (e.g. conferences, festivals, stadium events etc.)
  • Online/web/App-based: private audiences (e.g. fundraising events, dinners, auctions etc.)
  • Contactless: passing traffic (e.g. outside a train station, hospital visitors, parishioners etc.)
• Value:
  • As of June 2021, the platform has raised a total of £3,073,726 for UK charities. From small beginnings in 2013, where only £237 was raised through the platform in one month, the service is now seeing donations of up to £329,000 per month.
  • 160,000 donations have been made (providing receiving charities with huge amounts of valuable relationship and other data) and NFS is now approaching 6,100 donations per month
  • Nearly 3,000 UK charities have joined the Scheme and nearly 1,000 are raising money through it at any one time and is now up to 69 new charities joining per month
  • Average donation size is £23.40 (with SMS donations – capped at £30 per person per day) and £81.18 (without SMS). A huge improvement on a few coins in a donation box.
• Developing the conception, business case and delivery of the National Funding Scheme
• Fund-raising for charity to deliver the Scheme in the UK 
• Managing product delivery through contracted 3rd-parties (i.e. the nearly 3,000 signed up charities)
• Product development: DONATE® Platinum (bespoke service suite of additional support from NFS’s team).
• PR/marketing of platform to charitable sector (e.g. an Ambassador programme, award entries, social media marketing, promotional events, offline collateral, infographics, presentations, webinars, ‘Giving Tuesday’ materials, sponsorship programmes etc.).
• Helping charities market causes, particularly during emergencies (e.g. Battersea Arts Centre fire, Notre Dame cathedral fire, Intensive Care Society COVID-19 appeal etc.).
• Helping make applications to over 60 funding bodies and national Foundations.
• Supporting relations with regulators (e.g. Charity Commission).
• Generation of branding, logos and platform collateral both for charity partners and the NFS itself.
• Supporting relations with suppliers (e.g. Barclaycard) and technology partners (e.g. contactless box providers).
• Supporting major fundraising event partners (e.g. pre-populating auctions, fundraising resourcing at events etc.).
• Producing collateral to support digital fundraising best practice (e.g. ‘How to…’ guides, case studies etc.).
• Development of legal contracts, organisational policies, partner terms and conditions, supplier agreements.
• Charity partner management and administration (for the nearly 3,000 registered charities).
• Producing primary research on the fundraising sector.
• Developing and delivering to strategic plans.

2012-2021: Digital Innovation & Growth (DIG) – a commercial mobile giving platform

Co-Founder/ Company Director

• Software IP holding company that delivers the platform behind the National Funding Scheme charity 
• IP includes: DONATE® integrated giving platform; ORIGINS operational guidance platform; VESTA matching system
• Business case development and corporate fundraising
• Strategy and delivery of software IP
• Service design: delivery of end-to-end technical platforms for software IP 
• Business case model: moving DONATE® from licence sale model to levy model
• DONATE® integrated giving platform product development
• ORIGINS operational guidance platform
  • Many organisations with distributed workforces have a lot of operational guidance. This is often not in one place or up-to-date, presenting a major risk of harm or threat to life. It is also hard to search through duplicated or contradictory paper-based information in impenetrable files. This means workforces aren’t able to adopt best practice and keep themselves safe ‘at the coalface’. 
  • The ORIGINS platform ensures that the right guidance is delivered to the right people at the right time. 
  • It provides organisations with confidence their workforces are safe and working to a ‘single version of truth’.
• ORIGINS product development
• Supporting sales to international sectors, corporates and organisations.
• Design and partnership agreements for the end-to-end technical platform.
• Utilising data/analytics to a) innovate the product and b) build ‘big data’ value for the organisation.
• Recruitment of CEO and senior sales team.
• Developing the DONATE® platform and building innovations with no/limited income, including all of the specification, management, development and delivery across the platform’s increasing complexity/sophistication.
• Helping secure investment from High Net Worth Individuals (HNWIs) to develop the business.
• Taking account of strategic developments in the sector (e.g. the discontinuation of competitor JustTextGiving; developments in the contactless box space; new payment providers etc.).
• Platform PR/marketing (e.g. events, white-labelling, offline collateral, videos, infographics, presentations, etc.).
• Generation of branding, logos and platform collateral.
• Competitor analysis to understand strategic developments in the sector.
• Development of legal contracts, organisational policies, partner terms and conditions, supplier agreements.

2005-06: Digital Public (London, UK) – a strategic management consultancy (now Engine Group)

Senior Technical Consultant

• Ran advertising pilot and conducted management information review for Teachers’ TV 
• Delivered Department for Constitutional Affairs (DCA) proof of concept 
• Conducted research for DCA defining Public Legal Education best practice
• Developed information system for DfES to improve effectiveness/efficiency of Department’s comms
• Wrote exception submission for Cabinet Office
• Ran governmental procurement exercises, managing suppliers to OGC standards
• Utilised PRINCE2 standards (qualified to Practitioner level) on applicable projects

EDUCATION & QUALIFICATIONS

2003-04 University of Oxford, Saïd Business School, UK M.B.A.(Awarded place on the ‘Dean’s List’)

1996-97 Middlesex University, UK M.Sc. Interactive Computer Systems (Distinction)

1991-94 Bristol University, UK B.A. English Literature

2005 PRINCE2 Foundation & Practitioner