I’ve spent 25 years developing technology to help people who can’t make mistakes: emergency call handlers, fire crews, armed response units. The people you rely on when the worst happens to you rely on the technology I create.
That tends to focus the mind.
I didn’t plan this, any of it. It just sort of happened. I started out as an electronics research technician. All I wanted was a fast car and some sort of maths that made multimode optical fibre make sense. Then one day I was in a nightclub, dressed as Britney Spears and a guy whispered in my ear “hey, I’d really like to quantize your frequency.”
OK, that’s not literally true. I didn’t know he was the tech lead at the company I’d just applied to when I twiddled my pigtails at him, but they needed people with DSP experience and I knew my way around a Fast Fourier Transform. We were destined to be together.
It just so happened that the little niche that business had carved out was in mobile data systems and the emergency services were major customers. They found out I could do databases as well as DSP and before you could say Grzegorz with the correct Polish pronunciation I was all over everything.
We did some great work there, but I needed more.
The opportunity came up to lead not just a project, but a whole product. I was the architect of BRIGID Command and Control at Seed Software, a computer aided dispatch (CAD) system that grew from a small university project into the primary call and incident management platform for three of Britain’s Fire and Rescue Services. A key reality of Seed was that we were just too small to have dedicated salespeople, or marketing, or product management. Every role in the business was, essentially, covered by two people.
It was the most exciting but also the most challenging experience and I’m incredibly proud of what we achieved. It was the step I needed from just being a lead engineer to being able to lead a product, a business.
Later I led the development of what is now Motorola Guardian ICCS, a cloud-based platform that brings together emergency calls, radio and non-emergency communications into a single resilient solution for control rooms.
Now I lead technology at Agilysis, a specialist consultancy driving evidence-led improvements in road safety and public safety across the world. Data is the lifeblood of what we do, the foundation of the research and analysis that allows us to deliver real meaning and real world outcomes for our clients. I own the technology strategy, the data platform, our direct products and the drive to find new ways to push the boundaries of what’s possible. Because every single death or serious injury on our roads is one too many.
When I’m not working I’m difficult to keep still. I can usually be found somewhere in the Suffolk countryside on a bike or in my favourite car, at a motor sport event, propping up the bar at my local, or in the workshop making something real, something I can actually touch.
Tom can be found on most social networks…