Kitson P. Kelly

Leading delivery for the Advisory practice within CTO Labs. Specialising in M&A technical due diligence and providing technical advisory to organisations at executive levels. In addition to providing advisory services, working to internally scale our advisory capability in the market and organise and manage the delivery of services.

Working within a small global cross-functional team within a seed funded start-up building Deno a modern JavaScript, TypeScript and Web Assembly runtime, and Deno Deploy as globally distributed edge computing platform for JavaScript, TypeScript and Web Assembly.

Focusing in leading the engineering effort around developer experience, including integrations into intelligent editors, documentation, and discovery of the Deno eco-system.

Thoughtworks provides consulting and technology delivery services to large IT organisations. As a Principal Technologist I focused on advising clients, on their digital transformation strategy, data platform strategy, platform architecture, and engineering practices. I advised across verticals but specialised in the financial sector.

An approximately 30-person company focused on delivering enterprise web applications. I was responsible for leading software engineering and engaging with our clients on their architecture, digital transformation road-map, and engineering practices. I also lead our growth into more business consulting with a focus on helping large enterprises adopt open source methodologies to scale their enterprise development.

I also have been the project lead for Dojo 2. Dojo 2+ is a total re-invention of Dojo 1 and is a front-end web framework focused on enabling delivery of modern enterprise web applications at scale. This role has meant I have become very involved with Microsoft's TypeScript language and have in depth knowledge of web technologies including the standards bodies that support them.

A truly unique opportunity in my life was to lead technology for NOW. NOW was Sky's response to Netflix entering the UK market, but soon after I joined, we realised that there was a much broader focus for NOW. NOW offers the best pay TV in the UK on your terms.

I was responsible for around 120 technologists across multiple disciplines. The NOW grew its customer base about four-fold in the two years I was responsible. We also started the process of extending the business into broadband during my tenure. While the role was almost exclusively management, my technical depth allowed me to understand the challenges facing my teams better as well as guide the business in a direction where technology was an enabler, not a barrier.

NOW was very demanding, because of the low friction to join meant that there was also low fiction to leave. It really highlighted to me the challenges of operating a digital business and the key role technology plays in enabling that.

I took over a failing programme of work to deliver a new customer management system. I successfully delivered the programme and then transitioned the programme team to an efficient business as usual support model. We went from a project team of about 185 who were mostly contractors to a team of about 65 who were 90% employees. It was a challenge to take something that was designed with abstract best of breed technologies into something that was a reasonable solution that meet the business needs to service Sky's commercial customers.

A transitional period, where I continued to work for Sky after leaving Dimension Data. I was focused primarily continued stabilisation and roll-out of the contact centre solution we deployed for them as part of my earlier work. In additional to technical expertise, there was need for organisational design to build an internal team at Sky which could effectively manage the large, complex contact centre solution.

I moved full-time to the UK in November 2006 and joined Dimension Data in the UK less than a month later. Dimension Data wanted to grow their call centre consulting business in the UK and had landed a major contract at Sky to roll out the largest installation at that time of Genesys as a fully Voice over IP solution. It needed to scale to 4,000+ users on a global footprint. I led the architecture of the solution and we handed over to the in-house deployment team. I continued to architect other solutions, traveling globally working with other customers for Dimension Data.

The solution at Sky though ran into scalability issues which resulted in several frequent outages, several times a week. Because of my expertise and knowledge, I was requested to go up to Scotland to work with crisis team at Sky to resolve the issues.

I joined eLoyalty as a Consultant and continued to grow into more senior roles. I wanted to travel globally, and I was put on projects in varied locations across the US and Hong Kong, Hamburg, Belfast, Paris, and Dublin. I touched most technologies that were present in customer contact centres, though my main specialty was large scale global call routing solutions.