Drew Keavey

This role followed on from the Head of IT Services at Derby Tertiary College : Wilmorton.

The role is as the senior manager responsible for the IT Services, ILT and Archive functions within the College. This includes;

• The strategic management of IT Services, Information Learning Technology (including development team, ILT Training and Library and Resources) and Archive areas.
• Directing IT and ILT strategies to ensure that they are aligned to the requirements of the diverse range of stake-holders within the College and beyond.
• Directing the development of the Colleges IT Infrastructure in all its forms, from network design to implementation of business systems.
• Management of revenue budgets for departments managed, currently in excess of £2 million and also capital budgets for all College IT procurement.

I presently have 4 direct reports who in turn have 56 staff reporting to them.

As a member of the College's Senior Leadership Team I help set overall College direction and strategy.

Initially the role was to develop the College IT infrastructure and manage a small team of three support technicians. Over the first three years this resulted in the design of a new gigabit Ethernet networking infrastructure and the design and implementation of a Windows NT server solution covering all aspects of network services including authentication, file/print, Microsoft Exchange, intranet services using IIS and Internet access via Proxy 2.

Over this same period in excess of 1000 PC clients were specified, budgeted and procured by myself and installed onto the network by my team. These installations ranged from individual items to projects of 100+ PCs, all of which were achieved to time and to budget. Having made large scale additions to the infrastructure the support team was restructured into a dedicated helpdesk consisting of 7 staff members and an infrastructure team, concentrating mainly on further developments, of four.

The College also expanded to additional sites and in order to facilitate this I designed a wide area networking solution to allow remote sites to access LAN based resources such as the main student records, network drives and the Internet. Four sites were completed in this manner adding a further 100 PCs. Following from these developments I undertook a project to upgrade to Windows 2000 with Active Directory and Exchange 2000. I designed the active directory and implementation was completed in September 2001.

Resource is a small company specialising in developing software for special needs and primary education. In addition, at the time of my employment, it offered a range of consultancy services to schools including network design, hardware specification and procurement and special needs hardware and software advice and demonstration. My role within the company was split 50:50 between programming and technical support of the software and the consultancy services, particularly network design and implementation.

Honormead Group began life as a group of special education schools and the software division was set up to develop specialist programs for both these institutions and a wider market. Initially my role was as a programmer during which time I designed and wrote several popular programs, including one shortlisted for a Joseph Rowntree Foundation Award.

In 1987 British American Tobacco research and development began a project to create a database of all the chemicals in tobacco, tobacco smoke and exhaled tobacco smoke. The database was to be created by students on one year placements as part of their degrees. I was the third student to take the project forward. During my year the number of chemical unique chemicals identified increased to 5050 and the database had over 22000 product specific records. I also began work on introducing graphical representations of the chemicals into the database. The database finally went live within BAT worldwide in July 1992.