You don’t have to work in London to have an exciting and fulfilling career in tech. Read what Marc Sumner gets up to in his role as Senior Manager, Enterprise Applications Service Delivery, at BGL Tech:
Following a recommendation, I joined BGL Group 15 years ago having relocated from London. I moved out of the capital for a better quality of life, to start a family and enjoy the local area. Joining BGL gave me the best of both worlds - it felt like you were still in London in terms of the tech and the ambition and culture, but it was far greener and cheaper to live. And, although I am based in Peterborough, I’m actually working regularly with partners and suppliers all over the world.
My first role in the organisation was working within the Group change management team as a project manager. The role helped me to build a strong network across different areas that enabled me to broaden my skills and experience within the organisation. This included taking roles within Information Security, further project management teams and on to my current role in Enterprise Technology.
My role as a senior manager in Enterprise Technology is a varied one that I really enjoy. I am responsible for the service delivery, maintenance, and supplier management for numerous systems that support the group and our employees from an HR, finance and communications perspective.
To do that, I meet our suppliers regularly to talk about what services they are providing to BGL and make sure we are getting value out of their products.
Ensuring that we have appropriate governance controls around data management, information security and change management play a big part whilst ensuring that the development of our enterprise systems is aligned to Group strategy and growth plans.
One of the most challenging projects the team has worked on was a major upgrade of our HR systems. Previously we relied on a number of disparate in-house systems and manual processing to provide HR services to our organisation. Opting to migrate to a cloud-based platform provided the capability for employee self-service, enabled easy access at any time in any place and increased automation. This touched all areas of the Group and it was a project that I found rewarding, as it was creating something designed to make work life easier rather than a defence system.
A highlight for me is working with a large network of colleagues: within my own immediate area Enterprise Technology; with teams across the business that we support; and, also, our outside partners providing services to the Group. It keeps the day varied and means the team has to be open-minded and flexible in order to support the demands of the business.
BGL has made a big leap during my time here in workplace technology available to its people. This change means there is now more flexibility around where and how you work. It also means we can attract talent from a wider area and provide more working options to people who are balancing busy lives.
When I joined BGL, it was significantly smaller as the business units were all under one umbrella with slightly different workplace technology. We still had terminals in the contact centre, no PCs or laptops. Now we a huge number of collaboration tools and we use cloud products rather than on-premise products which means we can access systems from anywhere and work more flexibly.
So the tech has changed massively and the culture has changed as well. We are also much more flexible in the way we approach projects - we’re not afraid to try things differently. So we can be agile/ waterfall or whatever the project requires. We have to be flexible as a team which serves so many departments and customers.
And if you want new experiences and opportunities that broaden you as a person, BGL is great. In 15 years I have managed to do lots of fantastic things - charity trips, countless away days and plenty of exciting challenges that I may never have had the opportunity to be involved in had I not worked for BGL.
