Samantha Horsman: Infrastructure is Sexy!

How to liberate your user community.

Putting people first is not just a tired cliche at the Wellcome Trust where we discover putting users first guides the leadership team.

Samantha Horsman is the Platform Manager for Wellcome Trust a Not for Profit that is focussed on health, supporting a museum and Library, funding activities into cutting edge healthcare research and a trading floor to name a few.

Being able to support facilities, curators scientists and financiers means “90% of my job is a communicator” and everyone is a ViP and special.

This has meant liberating technology that enables a diverse user group do their best job with tools that work for them (not just a budget holder’s view of the one size fits all enterprise ) ”IT can’t happen to people it has to work with people”

Sam describes the use of agile in infrastructure (yes agile in infrastructure!) For Sam the user is central to everything they do, what is it the user needs, are we checking back to see if this is right?

Samantha presents how modern , responsive IT leadership can work without disguising the challenges in balancing user needs and keep the “Blinky” boxes working safely and cost effectively. The organic v enterprise, the arbitrage between alignment and personal choice, is not a simple one to navigate. The core brief remains: We need to have an environment that anyone can plug into safely. But where are the boundaries?

Sam is the refreshing face of enlightened IT leadership where Infrastructure is sexy and IT engineers are computing educators. She brings warmth, energy and pragmatism to her role that is infectious. The question for IT managers now is: are you really enabling your users or are you just another IT says no?

Learn more about Wellcome Trust:

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