Speaker Biographies

Nia Lewis  

Service Manager - Digital Transformation Service - The Scottish Government 

Nia is an experienced leader of digital transformation who has helped the Scottish public sector deliver services that are more efficient to run and meet the raised expectations of today’s customers. She now helps organisations transition to working in the cloud.
Before that Nia spent 19 years working in both the Welsh and English public sector delivering policy improvements, community development, digital connectivity and business transformation.


Ross Lyon

Transformation Manager, Cloud 1stThe Scottish Government 

Ross joined the Scottish Government in 2000, initially in agriculture, moving to Digital Communications in 2007 working on the intranet and website, latterly as Website Manager for gov.scot. Ross moved to the Cloud First Programme within Digital Directorate as Product Manager in 2018. 
The Cloud First Programme’s main aim is to promote cloud & support public organisations to move to the cloud. Ross also has a leading role within the Cloud Community which has been established across the public sector in Scotland.


 

Deryck Mitchelson

Chief Information Officer - NHS National Services Scotland (NSS) 

Deryck Mitchelson is a highly experienced digital executive with a global technical, product development and security background through small, medium and FTSE 100 companies. 
A proven track record of transforming distributed businesses through high periods of growth and change. Prior to working at NSS, Deryck was Global CISO and CIO for Wood Mackenzie where he delivered re-platforming of legacy enterprise systems (B2B and B2C) onto the public cloud. He previously worked as Chief Operating Officer for brightsolid and Group CIO of media giant DC Thomson.  
Deryck has full responsibility for National digital and security services for NHS Scotland including managing the National NHS Information Security team. In this capacity he acts as Senior Information Risk Officer for NSS.


John Baxter

Managing Director – Accenture

John Baxter is an experienced Managing Director within Accenture’s Intelligent Cloud & Infrastructure practice and also Accenture’s Health & Public Services Lead for Scotland. During his 20 year IT career, he was worked across the Oil & Gas, Utilities, Capital Markets and Government sectors delivering complex IT Transformation initiatives. John specialises in supporting clients in cloud adoption at scale, covering: enablement of Cloud CoE; development of migration business cases and roadmaps; application discovery/assessment through to executing the migration of business services to the Cloud and legacy modernisation. He is a passionate advocate of technology and its ability to deliver benefits to all citizens in Scotland, and underpin the development of a sustainable and modern economy for Scotland.


Kevin O'Sullivan 

Editor – FutureScot

Kevin has been a journalist for over 15 years, starting at local newspapers and a press agency before moving to Scotland in 2010, where he worked for the Sun and Daily Express.
He then worked as a political correspondent at the Scottish Parliament before finding a new berth covering news in the public sector technology market for FutureScot. Kevin edits the online and print titles, writes a weekly newsletter and programmes content for FutureScot conferences, including Digital Scotland. He has a passion for storytelling and believes that effective engagement with the media is the best way to share ideas and inspire change.


 

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