Cameron Smith

Dynamic Planner is a Fintech company which makes a SaaS application used by the UKs financial advice industry. This has been an interesting journey into an established and successful SaaS company with lots of operational work required behind the scenes. Dynamic Planner was already using Microsoft Azure, but I have been able to make significant improvements to the infrastructure and running costs.

• Managing team of 7 and IT Budget
• Successful ISO27001:2022 certification project
• Large Salesforce project to modernise internal operations with ERP
• Led information and communications strategy development.
• Managing SaaS application hosted on Microsoft Azure
• Modern Management of IT using Microsoft 365, Endpoint Manager and Autopilot
• Working with agile developers to implement DevOps practices
• Data Protection Officer.

River software is a former Professional Service software company that made bespoke applications for various companies including Jaguar Land Rover and Mercedes-Benz Group that has pivoted into a SaaS start-up using some of their existing IP as a base to make a Reward and Recognition platform and a BI analytics platform.

In September 2020 I was promoted to Head of Service Delivery and took on the management of 1st line (User Support), 2nd Line (App Support) and Compliance, this saw me move away from day-to-day IT operations and focus more on strategy and management of the various teams.

• Senior Leadership team role reporting to CEO
• Strategic influence over company direction and goals
• OKR implementation
• Responsible for 4 teams consisting of 20+ individuals
• Managing several budgets
• ISO27001:2013
• Automation of processes
• Managing large Azure environment
• Data Protection Officer.

My first project was to professionalise the IT department after a culture of DevOps had left the day-to-day essentials of IT in a mess I focused on getting the department back to operational efficiency. After the first two months we embarked on a project to become Microsoft Partners, provision Office 365 and move away from Google Suite. Migrating all the on-premises infrastructure to the cloud (Azure) and moving all operations from various 3rd party data centres consolidated costs and allowed us to become office free and 100% remote.

• Large IT migration from On-Premises and Private cloud to Microsoft Azure
• Saved over £300,000 on expenditure through various initiatives
• Managing IT team of 5 and IT budget
• Implementing Modern Management of IT using Microsoft 365/Intune
• Migrating finance system from Sage to Xero
• Working with agile Development teams
• Project to ensure email delivery with SPF, DKIM and DMARC
• Overhauled Google Analytics to utilise more its functionality
• Migration of WordPress site to Headless CRM with custom HTML frontend
• Data Protection Officer.

BCS is the professional body which oversees the IT profession. Various roles over 16 years, ending with 4 years as Infrastructure Manager.

• Technical lead and IT manager
• Successful migration of 70 physical servers to VMware
• Managing large corporate website hosted internally
• Responsibility for all IT security and security hardware
• Increased performance and Improved Security
• Support of 300+ staff, Laptops and PCS, 30+ Printers/Copiers, 70+ severs and applications/sites
• Management of 10 Staff
• Multi Million £ office move in London
• Merger of another organisation and the consolidation of the IT infrastructure.

In my spare time and with a business partner I founded a company to specialise in bringing bleeding edge technology to the public and companies in the form of experiences and demonstrations. Unfortunately, the return wasn’t enough in the start-up phase to make the company work, we decided to close the company before we needed further investment or credit. I learnt huge amounts through this entrepreneurial venture, acting as CEO, CFO and IT Director while my business partner acted as Sales Director and MD

• Writing Business plan and securing finance of £50,000
• Led negotiations with vendors and suppliers, securing favourable terms.
• Defined business strategies and roadmaps to drive performance across sales, promotions and marketing departments.
• Designed business strategies to obtain short and long-term goals for company.

Technical support engineer/systems administrator for BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT. My main duties were 2nd/3rd line support for 300+ individuals and computers across three offices as well as 70 servers and network services. As part of a small IT team my role was varied, and I gained skills in many areas of corporate business.

• Combined technical expertise and strong interpersonal skills to diagnose and resolve issues remotely.
• Troubleshot operating systems, hardware and software problems to identify root causes.
• Offered technical expertise to contribute to 2nd and 3rd line of support.
• Acted as reliable Subject Matter Expert (SME) by providing prompt and accurate expertise to other support agents.
• Offered technical advice to programmers and developers to help optimise designs.