Ed Dowding
Date of birth: 22 July 1977
Tel.: +44 (0)7775 79 18 14
Business and product development for the web-based enterprise.
Creative, intelligent, fast learning and widely experienced consultant and entrepreneur. Skilled and experienced in web technology, business process integration and administration, and project consultation.
CitySafe Ltd.
Product Manager, CTO.
London. 2004 - 2008.
CitySafe's pioneering and user-friendly approach defined and filled a market for integrated emergency response. Within three years of active business, CitySafe provided not only London's emergency notification systems, but also the incident response and coordination application in use by all 33 of her boroughs.
My own company was contracting to CitySafe, then a one-man operation, for a year before the launch. The launch came 2 months earlier than scheduled, necessitated by the attacks on the city on 7 July 2005.
From the company's inception I was responsible for the technical growth and stability of our products and their design and usability, in addition to all user-training, account management, sales presentations and support in both the commercial and Government sectors.
The company's rapid progress is due to a passion for systemic and strategic thinking, and an ability to manage limited resources with great effect.
Thus I have developed and embedded products that serve clients' diverse priorities and objectives, whilst meeting varied regulatory requirements and budgets.
Notable Achievements
- Created a mission critical application in daily use by the emergency services and local authorities
- Managed the Government procurement process, including Prince2 project management
- Recruited an excellent team of developers, and retained them when times were lean
- Ensured all applications were compliant with regulatory requirements
- Worked with SysAdmins to ensure comprehensive locational redundancy
- Runner-up in the bid to deliver all the UK's emergency training, a process which included Government procurement compliancy, Catalist partnering, and final presentations to the board
- Setup and managed client liaison and feedback groups
- Performed needs analysis with public sector clients, established working protocols and business process workflow, and created and delivered products to meet their requirements and exceed their expectations
- Created free online business resilience training programmes using Moodle and Drupal
- Award winning innovation
Project approaches
- Frequent, clear communication
- Business driven, agile development
- Frequent, phased iterations
- Structured client feedback sessions
- Nurture participation and innovation from all levels
Personal Skills
- Strong business sense and understanding of its relationship to project development
- Clear communicator, traversing the language and concept barrier between 'geek' and 'non-geek'
- Understand requirements quickly, and fast to foresee potential problems
- Good relationships with clients and personnel
Specific knowledge
- GIS: MapServer, OpenLayers -- we were doing online maps years before Google made it commonplace
- Ruby -- quickly realised the potential and managed the migration from PHP in Nov '06 - Jan '07
- Postgres -- with PostGIS due to their advanced geographic capabilities
- SMS Messaging -- legalities, capabilities, weaknesses, and opportunities
- Online training -- using Drupal, Moodle, and a custom built application to deliver engaging content
Reuters
Consultant. London. 2007.
Whilst working with CitySafe, I was seconded to Reuters Innovation Labs to create and develop an idea based on risk management and crowd intelligence.
This gained them £250,000 internal funding - one of only a handful of products from the lab to receive support from the board.
This product has now launched as Reuters Insight
Exclusive Analysis
Sole Technical Contractor.
London. 2002 - 2005.
Working with another startup, I turned a spreadsheet into a market-leading intelligence analysis application, aggregating data from over 500 news sources and analysing it to create global risk-contour maps for use by the insurance industry.
- Pioneering global risk maps -- designed Flash app to allow clear visualisation of an abundance of complex data
- Statistical risk modeling -- establishing how best to represent data, and ensuring the risk model can fairly represent the impact of everything from imprudent economics to truck bombs.
- Simple intuitive user interface -- minimised the training load on the company, and allowed clients to quickly adopt the service into their daily routine
- Data mining -- comprehensive and geographic search allows analysts to support reports with detailed information
- Enabled rapid growth -- the easy-to-use system allowed the team and their clients to focus on their core competencies, and not the technology. In less than two years they were able to grow from a 2 to a 40 man company with a global network of intelligence analysts.
- Managed outsourcing -- as the project grew, more of the work was outsourced under my sole responsibility
Prospect Magazine
Website development. 2005.
I designed and delivered a complete content and subscription management system for Prospect Magazine.
It was required to integrate with Quark, their desktop publishing application, and handle a large number of subscription permutations and processing.
The site also includes classifieds and paid advertisement systems.
It received excellent feedback and strengthened their offer to subscribers.
Usology
Internet application consultancy and development. 2000 - 2005.
Formed as the online media arm of IodineMedia, Usology started out creating interactive kiosk CD-ROMs, delivering online video-based media training, and tracking distribution of viral marketing.
As my programming (PHP) skills increased I tackled more and more complex sites, but quickly realised my forte lay in working with clients to establish their requirements, and managing outsourced programmers to deliver high quality, affordable sites and applications.
IodineMedia
Film and digital media production. Founder. 1998 - 2001.
Taking advantage of a revolution in digital media production, I formed a partnership with writer / director Michael Keillor. We specialised in fast turn-around concept projects for the advertising industry (with frequently less than 24 hours from commission to delivery), and as the internet spread, moved in to comedic viral videos.
We also won a number of awards for our drama work.
WhyNot?
Freelance Management & Leadership trainer. 1997 - 1999.
Having started out filming the events for this management training and team-building company, I quickly moved into facilitating exercises and reviewing performance with the teams. This was a fantastic insight into the world of team work and objective performance analysis.
Education
Edinburgh University, 1996
MA Psychology
Voluntarily withdrew to pursue business interests
Sherborne School, Dorset, 1990-1995.
A-LEVELS: A grades in Economics, Physics, Geography
AO & AS French & Maths
8As at GCSE
Miscellaneous
- Security cleared
- World-record holder for fastest dragon-boat across the English Channel (smashing the previous record of 7h45m to complete it in 3h30m) and raising £100,000 for charity (video)
- Keen skier, mountain biker, runner
- Quadrathelete
- I speak near fluent French, and a smattering of Spanish
- HSE First aid
References
References are available on request, alternatively please feel free to contact the companies listed.