The Enabling Technology
3SW - Speaker Biographies |
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Houston Spencer
Vice President, Business Strategy & Marketing Alcatel-Lucent, North & West Europe Houston’s professional passion is helping others carve opportunity from dramatic change. He has written and spoken extensively on the unprecedented competitive dynamics transforming the communications industry, and has assisted telecoms operators, internationally, in drawing out the service and network implications of the competitive trends in their markets.
Houston entered high-tech in 1991, working with satellite ground systems in the Australian outback. After five years with strategy consultants McKinsey & Company, helping clients in several industries grapple with major upheaval, Houston returned to high tech in 2001. He joined Alcatel’s Asia Pacific headquarters, in Shanghai, then moved to Paris, in 2003, to help establish Alcatel’s global Marketing team. In his current role, Houston has undertaken a major repositioning of Alcatel-Lucent’s business in North and West Europe.
Along the way, Houston has served on the editorial boards of several professional journals, including The McKinsey Quarterly and The Business Communicator. He is a member of the CMO Council’s European Advisory Board and is an advisor to AIESEC International. Houston holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in social science and comparative theology.
John Rees-Evans
Head of Economic Development
Hampshire County Council
John was brought up and educated in Southampton, from where he went on to obtain an Honours degree in Modern Languages from Oxford University.
In his early career, he worked in the private sector as an Export Sales Manager in a major international corporation with world-wide interests in the aerospace and engineering industries. This enabled him to satisfy his travel bug and see many parts of the world from the point of view of a business traveller.
His concern at the demise of many manufacturing industries in the early eighties led him into a new career in economic development, starting in the North East region with Aycliffe and Peterlee Development Corporation, and then leading initiatives to promote investment and tourism in the South West. In 1994, he set up the Economic Development Office of Hampshire County Council and established a small team of professionals, committed to supporting the economic prosperity of the County. John’s key role is ensuring that the Council’s policies have a positive impact on the local economy and people’s jobs. He manages a wide range of initiatives aimed at business support, regeneration, investment, employment and skills.
He holds a Masters degree in Business Administration (MBA) from the University of Plymouth and is a Director of WSX Enterprise (Business Link) and Wessex Housing Partnership. Jos Creese
Head of IT
Hampshire County Council
In addition to running the IT group of technology and business professionals, Jos supports a variety of ‘business change through IT’ programmes for the County Council. The Council also provides IT services to several hundred other public sector organisations on a business basis.
Jos has over 20 years of IT management experience, and has worked for central government, district and unitary councils. He is involved in a number of national groups on IT, working with the LGA, Cabinet Office, and SOCITM. He is Chair of the SOCITM Insight business stream, a member of the Government CIO Council and chairs the Hampshire and Isle of Wight ‘ePartnership’.
Jos’ IT career has been based on the principle that successful IT delivery must follow business disciplines with strong customer focused full ‘profit and loss’, whilst maintaining corporate service ethos. Linking IT closely to the business it support in this way helps to maximise the value IT contributes as well as controlling the costs it incurs.
A regular speaker at conferences, Jos is an advocate for the need for changing approaches to IT leadership to reflect the changing role of IT demanded by the private and public sectors alike. |