While we’re very proud to have so many well-known comms and intranet speakers lined up, we also have some fantastic first-time speakers and comms and intranet practitioners.
- Most of our speakers in a Twitter List.
Our speakers
Gerry McGovern, of Gerry McGovern and Customer Carewords
Gerry helps large organizations become more customer centric on the Web. His clients include Microsoft, Cisco, VMware, the European Commission, IBM, Atlas Copco and Tetra Pak.
He is the founder and CEO of Customer Carewords, a company that has developed a set of tools and methods to help large organizations identify and optimize their customers’ top online tasks.
He has written five books on how the Web has facilitated the rise of customer power. His fifth book, The Stranger’s Long Neck, focuses on explaining the methods for identifying and measuring the performance of customer top tasks.
The Irish Times described Gerry as one of five visionaries who have had a major impact on the development of the Web. He has appeared on BBC, CNN and CNBC television, partaken in various radio shows, and featured in numerous print media publications. Gerry has spoken about top task management in over in 35 countries.
He began his Web career in 1994. In 1996, Nua, a company he founded, received the Best Overall World Wide Web Business Achievement award from the European Union.
Sam Marshall, of ClearBox
Sam is the owner of ClearBox Consulting and has specialised in intranets and the digital workplace for over 15 years, working with companies such as AstraZeneca, AkzoNobel, BT, The RSPB, Standard Life and BUPA. His current activities focus on intranet and digital workplace strategy, the business side of SharePoint, and the use of social tools for collaboration and internal communication.
Sam was responsible for Unilever’s Global Portal Implementation, overseeing the roll-out of over 700 online communities to 90,000 people and consolidating several thousand intranets into one.
He is a regular speaker at international conferences. He has an MSc in Artificial Intelligence, an MA in Psychology and more bicycles than shoes.
Gabriele Sani, of Oxfam International
Gabriele is the Internal Collaboration Tools Manager at Oxfam. He is currently working on the new generation of collaboration tools for the Oxfam confederation of 17 organizations, while managing Oxfam’s global intranet using a third of the initial resources. Serving 10000 staff spread across more than 90 countries, these tasks demand creative thinking, a lot of passion, and coffee.
Besides constantly looking for new solutions, Gabriele spends his free time wondering if people ever read bios, growing grey hairs, and playing Ultimate.
Martin White, of Intranet Focus
Martin has been involved in intranet strategy and implantation since 1997. He set up Intranet Focus Ltd in 1999 and since then has worked on intranets that are being used by approaching 500,000 employees of organisations in Europe, North America and the Middle East. Many of his clients have been in the pharmaceutical and high tech sectors, but he is especially proud of his work for the IMF, World Bank and the United Nations.
At present his current clients include one of the world’s leading law firms, a European pharmaceutical company and a small UK professional services organisation.
Martin is the author of books on information consulting, content management and intranet management and three books on enterprise search implementation. He is currently working on a second edition of ‘Enterprise Search’ for publication in early 2015
Martin has been a Visiting Professor at the Information School, University of Sheffield since 2002 and has served on a number of committees for the Royal Society of Chemistry, of which he is a Fellow. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Information Management and also a member of the Royal College of Organists.
Elizabeth Marsh, from DWG.
In her role as Director of Research at the Digital Workplace Group, Elizabeth leads the member research and event content programmes across the business.
She is passionate about ‘connecting the dots’ within the community, whether through connecting members to peers or resources, enabling new research opportunities or bringing new organizations into the research programme.
Elizabeth brings over ten years of experience in the fields of intranet and knowledge management to her role in DWG. Her career has included intranet management roles at T-Mobile and Reuters, with broad-ranging responsibilities including community management, internal communications and research.
Digital manager with particular interest in digital transformation within organisations, psychology of technology – where human meets tech, the psychodynamics of social media and collaboration, philosophy in the boardroom and how all of this plays an absolutely crucial function in meaningfulness, bottom line profit and productivity for business, employees and society.
Kim England, of Pearson
Kim England is Head of Internal Community and Collaboration at Pearson, managing an internal and bridged external Jive Software community of approx 42,000 users. Kim is responsible for the strategic direction of both communities, working across Pearson at all levels of the organisation to help deliver business value. Kim’s background is internal communication and change management she made the shift from comms to business collaboration in 2011. In addition to the overall direction and strategy of the platform, she supports all the internal collaboration training needs, moderation and helping leaders and business units develop their own business collaboration strategies through community management.
Michelle Baillie, of The Children’s Trust
Michelle is the Senior Communications & Marketing Officer at The Children’s Trust, the UK’s leading charity for children with brain injury. With 13 years’ experience in communications (from trade journalism through to charity marketing) she’s passionate about helping people connect and get the information they need.
This year she’s helped develop and launch the charity’s first intranet, affectionately known as her ‘baby’ and with a small band of helpers, is on a mission to get the charity’s multidisciplinary workforce united, one user at a time!
Sharon O’Dea, of Standard Chartered
Sharon O’Dea is Deputy Head of Digital Comms at Standard Chartered, where she’s busy rolling out a new intranet. Prior to moving into financial services, she worked for a host of well-known public sector organisations, including delivering an award-winning mobile intranet at the UK Parliament. She is one quarter of the team behind leading intranet blog, Intranetizen, and one of the co-founders of 300 Seconds.
Jonathan Phillips, of CCE.
Jon is always full of bright ideas, including the one to found Intranetizen in the first place. By day he’s Senior Manager of Digital Communications at Coca-Cola Enterprises, where he’s been managing their intranet in one form or another for the best part of a decade. With over 15 years experience of intranet, internet, social media and other digital communication technologies, he is a regular conference speaker and contributor to the intranet community. Based in Bristol and London, he is a recognised global expert on intranet technologies.
Jon is also on the board of two Bristol charities.
Jessie Punia, of IBM
Jessie is an award-winning Organisation and People consultant with IBM and has experience of all facets of business transformation within a variety of industries. She has a personal interest in the connection between Engagement, Communications and Social – something she has had the opportunity to explore successfully with a number of her clients. Jessie thoroughly enjoys understanding how organisations arrange themselves and subsequently operate and is passionate about smoothing this running through engagement and effective communications at every level. In 2013, Jessie was internally recognised by IBM as a top performer and also won the ‘30 under 30’ award for rising stars in the field of communications from the Institute of Internal Communications.
Reg Lewin, of Which? The Consumers’ Association
Trained in Design before discovering websites, Reg has worked with Global Intranets since 2000 and at Which? for the past 7 years. In this time he both seen and made most Intranet mistakes while striving toward the fabled nirvana of a true digital work place.
He believes that a good Intranet Manager should have one foot in Comms, one foot in IT, a head in UX and a plethora of tentacles in the organisation. Is hoping that there might be a graphic recording artist at the conference to sketch that beast out.
Ayesha Graves, of the Federation of Small Businesses
Ayesha joined the FSB just over a year ago, and launched their new intranet some four months later. Ayesha came to intranets by way of Internal Communications and IT (systems training), and considers this a solid background for managing intranets. Ayesha has, variously, been located within IT, eCommerce, Communications and Operational teams, serving to highlight the dilemma as to where the intranet ‘sits’!
“Whom do we serve?” asks Ayesha (to throw in a little ‘Game of Thrones’ parlance). “Everyone – without bias”, she answers.
Kevin has been working in technology for over 25 years and specifically with intranets for most of those. He built Ogilvy’s first global intranet for their 10,000 employees in 1997 winning possibly the only intranet award of the time. Since launching SmallWorlders in 2006 he has gone on to win virtually every intranet award on behalf of clients including Heineken, Nestle and De Beers.
As founder and CEO of SmallWorlders he is responsible for the company’s performance which he thinks is best served by ensuring the success of all of SmallWorlders’ clients’ intranet initiatives and he remains an active member of all clients’ teams.
He is a father to a grown up daughter and two small boys, plays the violin in a local orchestra and sits on the board of a local charity.
Virginia Henry, of Unltd, and LIKE.
Virginia is the Manager of Knowledge and Learning at UnLtd (The Foundation for Social Entrepreneurs).
Working with skilled knowledge-brokers, her job is to lead the implementation of simple mechanisms for capturing, building on, and sharing a growing body of knowledge and entrepreneurial insights.
To keep herself grounded (the strategic ‘drive’ can be exhilarating!), Virginia focuses on the 3 Cs – communication, collaboration, and connecting.
Chris Willard, from Igloo.
Chris Willard is the Regional Sales Manager at Igloo Software, in charge of European, Middle Eastern and African territories. Chris is responsible for managing the strategic development of the company, for driving growth and sales, while promoting customer satisfaction.
Previously, Chris is a 6 year veteran of SYNNEX Corporation where he managed several product lines, including Hewlett Packard, Seagate Technologies and more. In this role Chris was a key part of driving record sales and exceeding goals regularly by 150%+. Since joining Igloo, Chris has played a key role in helping with the organizations success, from managing partner relationships to increasing sales.
Justin King, from Igloo.
Justin is a part of Igloo’s executive team, and assisted global 1000 and midmarket clients drive engagement and adoption with their social intranets and extranets. Justin is also responsible for Igloo’s global sales effort while ensuring the highest level of customer satisfaction, and the development of long term client partnerships. He brings 12 years of international experience, having held leadership and strategy roles throughout the UK, Europe, and Canada. Justin obtained an MBA from The University of Glasgow, and holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree from Wilfrid Laurier University.
Daniel McPherson from RapidCircle
Daniel has been a SharePoint techie since attending the first public announcement of project “Tahoe” at the Microsoft Technical Briefing in January 1999. It has had a profound impact on his career, taking him to the doorstep of hundreds of companies, of all shapes and sizes, in a range of industries and in over 25 different countries. He’s worked on projects that create solutions, evaluate possibilities, deploy to tens of thousands of users and to fix problems when the sirens are sounding. After 10 years at Microsoft, spent mostly in Microsoft Consulting Services, he co-founded Rapid Circle, a boutique consultancy focused on Social Enterprise and Communications, and is having more fun than ever before.
Nigel Williams from Interact
Nigel has consulted on the intranets and extranets of some of the world’s largest companies (as well as broader business efficiency programmes), helping companies maximise the potential of their intranets and evolve these into essential business applications. He leads Interact’s Customer Community and previously managed a 4,500 user intranet and extranets, delivering multi million pound revenue and savings.
Dan Hawtrey from Content Formula
Dan built his first intranet in 1997. Later at Johnson & Johnson he set up the knowledge management function responsible for building and managing global community intranet sites for J&J’s brands. From an early point in his career Dan recognised the power of social. All his sites treated the community as the main source of content and experimented with ways to get employees to share and collaborate – some successful, some not.
He set up Content Formula in 2005, a company specialising in intranets, collaboration and employee engagement. Content Formula counts amongst its clients GSK, Novartis, Jaguar Land Rover, Pfizer, Reckitt Benckiser, Nuffield Health.
Edmund Ovington from Beem
Edmund is the VP, Business Development at Beem. He helps customers globally realise dreams of a better informed and more connected workforce, irrespective of location – by simplifying content, aggregating sources and giving employees a single beautiful mobile experience.
Prior to joining Beem in April 2014 Edmund was looking after sales at Yammer, with a particular focus on emerging markets in EMEA. Subsequent to the acquisition by Microsoft he worked closely with the UK Public Sector helping government embrace social technologies and change archaic working cultures.
Edmund is passionate about the power of social in the enterprise and helping organisations around the world accelerate their journey to truly engaged employees.
Luke Oatham from Helpful Technology
Luke is Development and User Experience Lead at Helpful Technology. He has over 20 years experience in IT and digital communications, working with a wide range of clients, including at Transport for London and the Ministry of Justice.
Originally a developer, then an information architect and user experience practitioner, Luke’s passion is intranets and usability, with a twist of human psychology. Luke has pioneered the Govintranet – a clean, WordPress intranet theme that’s been implemented by a number of Government departments and is focused on the user.
Luke blogs about all things intranet at intranetdiary.co.uk
- Most of our speakers in a Twitter List.
