Biography
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Biography
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I am the director of Office Futures, which I set up in 1981. Through it, I consult to corporate and public sector clients (see What I do for details).
The second string to my bow is writing. This includes books, reports, newsletters, 'white papers' and feature articles. I also edit and publish Office Jotter, an online magazine of comment and analysis.
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In January 2006. Cambridge University Press published Mastering Your Organization's Processes: A Plain Guide to BPM, a book on business process management (BPM) that I co-authored. See here for an outline of the topic.
The previous year, I had joined Bloor Research as an associate, working with them part-time on topics such as groupware and search. Bloor has sinced published several reports and papers from me, mainly on enterprise-wide search.
When the market is in the mood for them, I get involved in conferences and seminars, mainly on IT and business. I design, manage, chair and speak at these.
Until June 2007, I worked from home in Oxted. I then went on a sabbatical, travelling around the coastal counties of Britain. You can read about it on my travel blog, Roger's Rambles.
The sabbatical has been beneficial and I am taking up the consulting and writing tasks again with renewed enthusiasm and refreshed thinking.
Another gain from the year has been the discovery that I enjoy travelling. I shall continue to do so, therefore. Modern communications tools let you work from the mobile office with ease.
Before Office Futures
Before setting up Office Futures, I worked at Standard Telephones & Cables, London, then part of ITT. I joined to help set up a company-wide manpower control programme. We met our targets by the year end.
I then worked on organizational development before being asked to set up the company's office automation programme. This, I soon realised, was the subject for me -- but I did not want to carry on doing it there. I needed the freedom of being my own boss, which I became by setting up Office Futures.
I had joined STC from Legal & General Assurance, also in London. I spent the first three years there as an organization and methods analyst, investigating and changing processes throughout the company.
I was then asked to help set up and run a new department of investment planning. After couple of years of this I realised that I preferred setting up things to running them and started looking around. STC came knocking, just at the right time.
My schooldays were spent in Portsmouth, where I was born. From school, I joined Ford Motor Company who sent me to City University, London, to read mechanical engineering. Psychology was my minor subject. After Ford, and a short spell in the civil service, I joined Legal & General.
Professional Affiliations
These have included:
being an advisory participant in the 1994 Royal Society of Arts inquiry, “Tomorrow's Company”chairing the British Computer Society's office automation specialist group for three yearsfounding and chairing Office of the Future Information Exchange (OFIX). This connected people interested in office automation and ran seminars on the subjectbeing an active member of the Association of Teachers of Management, a network of organizational development practitioners. I co-founded its IT special interest group.founding and moderating for two years an on-line forum on groupware, on the CIX networkfor several years, being a judge for the annual Information Management awardsbeing a founder member of The Process Modelling Group, on whose management committee I sat.