Venturi's Voice: Technology | Leadership | Staffing | Career | Innovation

Ben Simonds is Head of Analytics at Contino, with responsibility for internal analytics and reporting as well as consulting with clients on BI, Analytics, and Cloud FinOps engagements. Contino is a leading transformation consultancy that helps large, heavily-regulated enterprises to become fast, agile and competitive. Ben has an incredibly interesting career path, starting out his journey by setting up his own successful 3D animation studio (Gecko Animation) and then moving into the world of Analytics. During the podcast episode, Ben discusses the correlation between data analytics and 3D animation, as well as the often overlooked hard and soft skills required to be successful in data.

Jennifer Agnes is Managing Director at Cynozure, a people-led data and analytics strategy consultancy, that creates data-guided organisations. Jennifer is a strategically focused and execution-biased senior executive with extensive global experience in increasing business value through comprehensive data, analytics, and team transformation strategies. Known for designing and delivering business solutions with a pragmatic, hands-on approach to meet strategic goals of the customer and company, provide value to shareholders, and ensure employee success. During the podcast episode, Ben sat down with Jennifer to discuss all things Data; What is 'good' Data? Is Data more important than code? and how to look into Data objectively, and how to extract the true value of Data to maximize its potential for your business. Thanks again to Jennifer for taking the time to come on the show and providing such a brilliant conversation.

Ian Venner is CTO and Co-Founder of Hurricane Modular Commerce. Ian is a highly analytical, technically savvy C-level exec and consultant with extensive experience in delivering best-in-class, cutting-edge solutions to clients from diverse industries. He is passionate about technology, about defining, implementing and managing solutions that offer immediate value and also support business growth, both organic and planned. What drives and inspires Ian is designing bespoke solution architecture that meets exact requirements within operational and financial constraints. Through Ian's career, he has worked with industry leaders from media, financial services and the telecoms sectors, providing high-quality solutions such as application architecture, mobile technology and more traditional system solutions that have spearheaded the implementation of technologies. He has worked on projects such as the launch of Samsung’s Media Hub platform in the US, the first system to globally utilise the Ultraviolet/DECE model. With strong commercial acumen and entrepreneurial vision, Ian is a confident operational and business lead, making a positive contribution to the development of wider corporate strategies that realise revenue, reputation and sustainable success in the field. Hurricane Commerce is the data partner for postal operators, online retailers, eCommerce platforms and carriers. Nothing moves without the right data and increasing global regulation is providing huge challenges to those involved in cross-border eCommerce trade. During the podcast episode, Ben sat down with Ian to discuss left-field thinking, unconstrained design, and letting innovation drive technology.

Vincent Gratrick is responsible for the strategic and operational use of Digital and Technology at one of the most well-known and loved UK charities. Vincent is a highly driven, accomplished and articulate Senior Leader, with an in-depth understanding of the strategic and operational requirements of a Digital and technology function. Experience in running global projects, high availability systems and teams to deliver a service orientated function. Proven ability to translate business requirements into practical, imaginative and highly effective IT solutions with experience in managing senior internal/external stakeholder relationships. Renowned as a forward-thinking strategist and creative problem solver with a consistent history of organisational success and the support to accelerate a variety of business objectives. Continually exhibit a pragmatic and entrepreneurial leadership style to improve poor performing and misaligned teams and revitalized and realigned them to become business partners improving employee engagement and investment in IT as a digital transformation agent.

David Lewanda is Director of Mobile Engineering at Major League Baseball, an experienced technology leader working hard to develop world-class solutions. David has worked productively in a variety of different industries, from the Department of Defense to television broadcast and consumer electronics, while also thriving in many different environments from early-stage startups to large multinational corporations. His number one goal has always been to deliver high-quality products while staying on schedule and within budget.  During the Podcast, Ben and David discuss David's interesting route into technology, as well as the challenges that David has faced when hiring mobile engineers to work on streaming platforms. With the benefit of hiring distributed teams, managers can access a pool of applicants that is far greater than if hiring locally. We speak about how David has successfully led these distributed teams and how working life has been affected by the pandemic.

James Cross is a Big Data Engineer and certified AWS Solutions Architect with a passion for data-driven applications. He has spent the last decade helping his clients to design and implement huge scale streaming Big Data platforms, Cloud-based analytics stacks, and serverless architectures. James started his professional career in Investment Banking, working with well-established technologies such as Java and SQL Server, before moving into the Big Data space. Since then he has worked with a huge range of Big Data tools including most of the Hadoop eco-system, Spark and many No-SQL technologies such as Cassandra, MongoDB, Redis and DynamoDB. More recently his focus has been on Cloud technologies and how they can be applied to data analytics, culminating in his work at Scout Solutions as CTO, and more recently with companies including Mckinsey, HSBC and Shell. Colibri Ltd. is a technology consultancy company founded in 2013 by James Cross. The company works to help its clients navigate the rapidly changing and complex world of emerging technologies, with deep expertise in areas such as Big Data, Data Science, Machine Learning, and Cloud Computing. Over the past few years, they have worked with some of the world's largest and most prestigious companies, including a tier 1 investment bank, a leading management consultancy group, and one of the world's most popular soft drinks companies, helping each of them to better make sense of their data and process it in more intelligent ways. During this podcast episode, Ben and James discuss what DataOps exactly is, and why we need it - how to implement a DataOps strategy into your business and some of the pitfalls to be aware of when doing so, and the benefits DataOps can bring to your business.

Ben sat down with Lakuan Smith, who is Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Manager at Justworks. Lakuan's motivation for taking this career path stems from personal discriminatory experiences in his life, job hunting and work environments, finding the need to change this - Lakuan delved into DE&I and realised that he could make a real difference within this role. Justworks is the fastest-growing HR technology company in the US. They provide small- and medium-sized businesses access to big-company benefits, automated payroll, HR tools, and compliance support — all in one place. They do this by combining the power of a Professional Employer Organization with expert 24/7 support and a simple and friendly online platform. Their customers work across all 50 U.S. states in a variety of industries.

Stories from professional leading women in tech discussing the benefits of diversity in the industry as well as Covid's impact on the topic. As we continuously challenge gender inequality at Venturi, we were joined by prominent industry leaders for International Women’s Day to share how they have built remarkable careers; their respective journeys to now and emphasise the importance of championing an industry with more equal opportunities. Listen back to our live round-table with four professional women in leadership roles within the tech industry, as they share their experiences, knowledge and offer advice in order to prioritize D&I. Collectively, they have created their careers from varying backgrounds in the industry and unanimously have one common goal: to keep discussing and pushing for diversity, to bring the gap together and engage other professionals in the industry, making this a comfortable, common topic in the workplace. Introducing your roundtable guests: Anna Chalon– Sr. Director of Talent and DE&I @ Frame.IO - After relocating from France, Anna fell in love with Recruitment and has forged a career as a passionate DE&I Advocate giving back to the community whilst scaling a growing series C startup Daljeet Kukreja– Director of Engineering @ Walmart Global Tech – Former IBM leader after relocating to the US from India, Daljeet built her career with two prolific technology companies and is growing a team throughout a pandemic Neetu Rajpal – VP of Engineering @ Oscar Health - Former CTO at Conductor, Neetu is now leading one of New York’s leading fastest growing healthcare startups with a huge engineering team With Host: Ciara McCarry - Head of Back End Technology @ Venturi Ltd - Ciara is a leading advocate for D&I and will be hosting the roundtable

Akshay Sheth is Vice President, Director of Engineering at FactSet. Akshay has incubated FactSet's API program in 2017 which shaped the company's product, technology and go-to-market strategy for public APIs. He has built an engineering and product team within Analytics and Trading group to deliver first set of public APIs leading to a revenue increase of $3M+. The program has now expanded to other parts of the company and has positioned FactSet as an open and flexible technology provider to the investment community. During this podcast episode, we covered new technologies and how to decipher what new technology and tools are right for your business to get the best end solution. We also discussed Akshay's journey into technology, and advice for people looking to take a similar career path- making the most of opportunities that are handed to you, and when presented with a challenge - how to react and take it head-on to further your career.

Culture Shift helps businesses and universities to assist their staff, students and teachers to report workplace harassment on their anonymous reporting tool. Culture Shift is the epitome of tech for good, making real, positive changes to people's lives, by building products that empower organisations to tackle harassment and bullying. The software is designed to empower those who are reluctant to report wrongdoing, by removing barriers to reporting, and ensuring they have a secure and confidential platform in which to do so. The software also allows victims or witnesses of harassment to access support for what they’ve experienced as well as giving organisations oversight of any worrying trends, helping them to tackle them. As well as providing a confidential platform for reporting bullying and harassment, the software allows businesses to analyze data to identify trends that mean they can take appropriate action. They can monitor any worrying behaviour and intervene early with communications or specific training. This helps businesses to better support their employees, which in turn reduces the cost of workplace bullying-based absenteeism, staff turnover and whistleblowing related costs. In the first half of the podcast, I sat down with Gemma McCall, CEO of Culture Shift to discuss the story behind the business and their mission to tackle harassment and bullying. In the second half of the podcast, I caught up with Chris Northwood, Head of Development, and Co-Founder and CTO Carl Sadd to talk about the technical side of the business, and their plans to scale Culture Shift in the months and years to come.