ALISON ADAMS

Alison has the highest level of ITIL qualification (ITIL Managers Certificate ‘Red Badge’) and is an ISEB accredited ITIL Lecturer.

Alison's IT career spans 25 years, giving her an impressive breadth of experience and knowledge. Alison's early IT career with British Railways saw her fast tracked from Operations Support on ICL mainframes to COBOL programming. She then moved to IBM platforms and a range of roles including technical support, database administration and customer support.

In 1991 Alison took a decisive step forward when she was recruited by Sainsburys as a systems analyst where she undertook Post Implementation Reviews and Process Improvement.

From this role she was headhunted by the Director of European Passenger Services (later 'Eurostar') to build and manage a team of Unix and DBA engineers and systems administrators. Alison's managerial involvement grew, with strategic planning for infrastructure and support, contract and vendor management, software and hardware procurement all becoming key elements of her role.

In 1997 Alison moved to a smaller organisation -Thru Transport Systems, where she led a team providing 24x7 technical support (HP Unix, DBA, Networks). A primarily managerial role, it involved some hands-on support and the development of a remote customer service helpdesk. Alison's key achievement with this company was to lead them to the successful migration of customer hardware from the UK to the US, working with HP to ensure a smooth handover of equipment and support services to a new location and support team.

Alison subsequently joined Hewlett Packard in 1999 as a Technical Account Manager. In this role she ensured the highest level of mission critical support was delivered to a portfolio of HP's most important blue chip clients. The position demanded a broad technical understanding of IT incidents and problems in tandem with an appreciation of business impact and response co-ordination. Alison began her formal ITIL training in 1999 and in 2000 joined the Operational Healthcheck Assessment team - a staff of 5 specialists responsible for the delivery of ITIL based process maturity assessments to mission critical customers throughout the UK.

Alison took a career break with the birth of her son in 2002, returning to work with the founding of NorthStar.

With NorthStar, in addition to undertaking regular training engagements around the UK, Alison has delivered Best Practice consulting direct to clients, and has helped partner organisations to develop their own service offerings.