Andrew Flegg

Alfa Financial Software

Global Director of Platforms (CIO)

Combining the traditional role of Chief Information Officer and my previous role of Head of Solution Architecture, I am responsible for the strategy, delivery and operation of Alfa’s platforms: internally, to customers, and as a wider ecosystem.

Operations

By combining operational, delivery and strategic leadership in one organisation, I’m able to ensure our internal systems and development platforms are focused on developer experience and delivering customer value. This is balanced against the security needs of an ISO 27001/27018 and SOC 2-audited organisation, which – as a GDPR Data Processor for Alfa’s cloud hosting clients – is critically important to us. This is the delivery of our core platforms.

Delivery

I lead the worldwide team of solution architects who work with clients on integration, architecture, performance and implementation challenges. By using our broad range of technical, functional and consultancy skills, we can leverage the Alfa Systems platform as well as the other middleware platform and microservice architectures our clients have to deliver our customers’ platforms.

Strategic

Finally, the team’s experience is fed back into Product Engineering's roadmap, platform innovation, and building our wider Alfa ecosystem. This involves both building & maintaining technical partnerships; and developer advocacy & platform evangelism within our existing customer base – through site visits, events and conferences – and developing a strategy for building that out to the wider community in 2019 and beyond. This strengthens all our platforms, and delivers our platform ecosystem.

Head of Solution Architecture & co-CTO

On returning from the US, I had global responsibility for the technical implementation of Alfa Systems. This involved growing talent within the organisation to guide clients’ implementation projects; continuing my role as one of the senior Alfa Systems’ product architects; and developing strategies to deliver Alfa Systems’ implementations more quickly, with less risk, and at lower cost, to align with Alfa’ corporate direction.

I delivered two key programmes as part of this simplification. The first is the move from the delivery of the Alfa Systems application as an on-premises installation, managed by our customers, to an Alfa-managed cloud service in AWS. This went live with our first client’s production data in late 2016, and Alfa moved to a “cloud first” sales model in 2017 in recognition of the success of the service in generating revenue and delivering value to our clients.

The second programme is developing and delivering Alfa’s digital strategy. We designed Alfa Systems v5 from the outset to have a service-oriented, modular architecture, and our digital strategy is now to demonstrate the power and flexibility that that platform can deliver; for example by building end-customer mobile applications in React Native.

Lead Delivery Architect & Director

My technical leadership within the company led me to being promoted to the Alfa’s Executive Team in 2013. I also took the opportunity to relocate to the US for three years to work on a project to deploy Alfa Systems at one of the largest US automotive finance companies. As the lead solution architect, I was responsible for leading the Alfa team working with the client to appropriately use the Alfa Systems platform to deliver their end-to-end requirements. This included managing the usage of Alfa Systems within the larger system landscape, and - when necessary - the identification of enhancements to meet customer requirements.

The role also included the drafting of contracts, including statements of work, and other involvement in the US management team, as well as an ongoing role in the US sales team. I was also regularly involved in our other US projects, often visiting at short notice for troubleshooting in the event of politically sensitive technical issue.

Lead Product Architect & Senior Manager

In 2007, Alfa recognised its technology stack was a sales inhibitor, and a project was formed to develop the next generation of Alfa Systems as an end-to-end Java EE application with a web user interface. I was made the lead architect for this project, which also encompassed the enormous business change facing Alfa - for example, staff retraining.

The new version of the system was developed in an agile manner, ensuring working software was delivered every four weeks. To maintain the investment in the product to date, we developed tools to automatically translate the LANSA backend to Java source. I was involved in technical and user interface steering; line and project management and leading a number of teams of developers around the world.

After the successful launch of ALFA v5, I was responsible for the delivery of the technical aspects at the first customer, a major Nordic bank. Expansion of my role (including promotion to senior manager) resulted in regular meetings with the board, COO and CEO; as well as visiting clients and prospects to position Alfa Systems within their enterprise landscapes.

In 2012, recognising the need for a CTO, I was involved in persuading the board to create a “Corporate Technology Oversight Group” consisting of myself and two other key architects in the company. Our role was similar to that of a CTO: we were responsible for the company’s technology choices; ensuring that our offerings were always market leading; and that our technology was a feature during the sales process.

Senior Consultant

I have worked on a number of projects within Alfa, providing development, support and consultancy to the asset finance industry. These include enhancements to the legacy-technology version of Alfa’s “Alfa Systems”, data migrations from clients’ old systems and framework development.

Maemo Community Council

Founder, Member, Chair

I was a member of the inaugral Maemo Community Council and, subsequently, Chair. I conceived of the idea during Maemo’s “100 days’ brainstorm” as a mechanism to allow Nokia to deal with a single body when working with the wide-ranging and disparate open source community around its Linux-based Maemo operating system, used in Nokia’s range of mobile computers, Internet tablets and phones. Having convinced both Nokia and the community of this council’s value, I stood for - and was elected to - the first, second, fourth and fifth councils, a volunteer role I undertook in my spare time.

IBM Corporation

Developer on CICS Transaction Gateway

As a developer on a middleware product to provide a remote Java/J2EE connector to CICS (a transaction processing system), I designed features from requirements through to implementation and coded in Java and C; as well as unit testing and overseeing testing by the team in India.

Mentor/proposer of Extreme Blue internship programme

The project ensured that a web site’s links always point to the intended content, based on patents that a colleague and I filed in June 2003. The final-year students were challenged to investigate the technology and business case. Their successful Java prototype generated large amounts of customer and press interest, resulting in interviews with the BBC, New Scientist and New York Times. The project went on to be a finalist in the IT category in the IEE Innovation In Engineering Awards 2005, which included Tim Berners-Lee on the judging panel.

Communications Web Editor, Intranet Team Leader; Hursley Lab

These roles included responsibility for the technology running IBM Hursley’s internal and external web sites. The heterogeneous environment posed challenges; although the unique landscape allowed me to develop new technology to integrate a search engine I designed and coded in Perl, Java servlets running in WebSphere Application Server, the Lotus Notes databases storing teams’ content, and PHP and CGI scripts which users wished to develop to facilitate their internal processes.

Ford Motor Company

Developer