ABOUT
Paddy Baxter
Founder and Principal
Hi. I'm Paddy and I'm a Digital Architect
Digital Age Architects is the vehicle I have created for delivering the services that are best suited to my talents, skills and experience. You will find on this site what I am all about, what services I offer (and why), who I think would get the most value from them and how I engage.
My Vision and Purpose
Business and society in general needs new leaders. People who are comfortable with complex dynamic systems, the type of systems that will come to define the Digital Age.
It is my deeply held belief that these leaders are to be found in every IT department in every organisation in the world.
The vision and purpose of Digital Age Architects is to find these new leaders and help them reach their full potential.
My Business Model
When comes to technology change, big is not beautiful.
Big IT change programmes, staffed by large teams of external consultants, generally do not deliver on the value that they originally promised. Agile, iterative change is the way of the future not just in software development but across the whole of the organisation. For an organisation to become agile core internal processes must change fundamentally. Core operational staff must learn new approaches. Responsibilities and accountabilities must be redefined. The very nature of the communication between individuals and teams must change.
My business model is based on working with key individuals in your team - your technology experts - to teach them how to increase their impact and value by unlocking their existing deep knowledge of both your organisation and technology, using key Digital Age concepts such as Jobs to be Done, business modelling, service orientation and emotional intelligence. I believe the potential impact of such a cohort of digital transformation leaders within your organisation is huge and sustainable in the long term.
Where necessary I partner with the best specialists I can find, in a range of disciplines to build a small team that can provide the creative energy required to catalyze real and enduring change in your organisation. This is a relatively new and somewhat experimental approach and if you have tried all of the alternatives and failed then give me a call and we can talk. What is there to lose?
My Bio
As a solution designer I have moved from designing point in time IT solutions to designing IT services that meet customer needs not just on day 1 but throughout the full service lifecycle. In the last 5 years my focus has moved to designing service oriented IT organisations that are capable of keeping up with the exponential growth in demand for digital technology. Not only does this require IT organisations to build new capability in cloud, mobile, social and big data, it also necessitates fundamental changes to the IT operating model - the people and the processes they use to deliver what the business needs. In particular finding ways to better connect the traditional silos is critical.
My early career coincided with the PC revolution of the 90's and 00's. During this time I delivered a range of large enterprise solutions in life sciences, public sector, telco and retail in Europe, the US and SE Asia, working for leading service providers such as Digital, Compaq, HQ and Microsoft. I disrupted my own career in 2011 to move into the new world of start-ups, mobility and most recently digital operating model design.