Do you ever look at your role today and wonder “How the devil did I get here and where on earth will I need to be in 2 years?”
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Seasoned Group CIO with three decades of expertise in leading IT delivery teams for Blue Chip and Central Government organisations. Named in the UK Top100 CIO Awards in 2024 & 2025. Demonstrated success in driving business value through technology solutioning. A strategic thinker and effective collaborator, passionate about agile delivery to meet organisational objectives. Extensive experience in Digital Transformation, Business Change, Consultancy, Service Delivery, ERP Programmes, T&T Projects, and Organisational Management. Proven ability to navigate complex business landscapes and deliver results in high-pressure regulated environments.
Looking at various methods to ensure that change is embedded into the culture of a company, not just added on top.
Examples covering:
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Winner – Hot Topics Global Future CIO 100
Finalist – Women in Insurance Awards: Role Model category
Mollie Brentnall joined Crawford as IT Director for UK & Ireland in 2024. As IT Director, Mollie Brentnall is responsible for managing the UK Development and Crawford Legal Services™ IT teams and is accountable for all IT deliverables across the UK business. She is also part of the UK executive leadership team at Crawford.
Mollie Brentnall has considerable experience in leading IT teams for major organisations in the UK. Most recently, she was IT Director, UKI, AXA Partners where she led teams across IT service delivery, applications, infrastructure, project delivery, and security execution. Prior to this, Mollie was Head of IT, Core Transport, DHL with her remit spanning the UK.
Delivering technology transformation isn’t about technology but leadership, clarity and execution. Drawing on CIO experience, Barry Smith shares lessons on stakeholders, teams and governance in an AI-driven world.
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Barry Smith is a Chief Information Officer and digital transformation leader with over 20 years’ experience delivering large-scale technology change acrossglobal infrastructure and professional services organisations. He specialises in aligning technology strategy with business outcomes and leading complexprogrammes spanning ERP, cloud, cyber security and AI governance. Barry has led multi-country transformation initiatives and advises boards on technologystrategy and risk. He is recognised for building high-performing teams and delivering measurable business value, with a focus on the leadership required todeliver transformation in an increasingly complex world.
A ransomware attack has locked down your organisation’s systems and the hackers are playing games. Literally.
They claim they only needed one set of stolen credentials to get in. Now, they’ve given you the five suspects, five possible methods of compromise, and five locations it could have happened.
If your team can crack the case and identify the right combination, they’ll have over the decryption key. Get it wrong? Game over.
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We do escape rooms, vishing simulations, AR missions and large-scale events that make people actually experience what a breach feels like. Because the only cyber training that changes behaviour is the kind that leaves a mark. In spring 2023, we built a cyber escape room that lived in a briefcase. It was scrappy, rough, and completely unlike anything else in the industry. The goal was simple: make people actually engage with cyber security by letting them experience it. Not observe it. Not memorise it. Live it.
That first escape room turned heads. Then it turned into a business. Then it went global. “We’re not here to tick boxes. We’re here to change what people do when the real thing hits”
Today, The Cyber Escape Room Co. designs and delivers physical, digital, and hybrid experiences that help organisations around the world engage their teams, change behaviour, and build a genuine security culture. Not through compliance theatre. Not through annual awareness programmes everyone forgets by Thursday. Through immersive, high-stakes experience that the brain actually encodes.
AI Governance in Practice: Shadow Models, Cultural Blindspots, and the Gap Between Individual Innovation and Institutional Control Exploring how organisations manage AI development outside formal SDLC, the cultural dimensions models miss and building governance that enables rather than suppresses creativity.
AI Governance in Practice: Shadow Models, Cultural Blindspots, and the Gap Between Individual Innovation and Institutional Control Exploring how organisations manage AI development outside formal SDLC, the cultural dimensions models miss and building governance that enables rather than suppresses creativity.
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Matthew Simon leads global technology and service operations at scale, most recently scaling a business unit in Comcast’s India Engineering Centerencompassing a wide range of operational and engineering disciplines. His trajectory maps how technology organisations actually work: fromtroubleshooting dial-up modems in 2003, to designing operating models, chairing a UK credit union through regulatory crisis to successful merger, to settingup 250+ person operations and engineering organisations and designing policy and governance for enterprise IT.
He translates executive ambition into durable systems – workforce strategy, offshore governance, regulatory compliance, and the decision rights that preventdisasters. Board-level experience as SMF8 in regulated financial services; trusted advisor on operational risk, resilience, and what’s actually feasible. Currentlystudying for a doctorate in AI and Machine Learning.
Beyond operations, Matthew’s interests span appropriate technology, safe water access, humanitarian work with displaced persons in Ukraine, stray animal welfare in Georgia, wolf conservation, and intercultural understanding, reflecting a belief that technical capability should serve human dignity.
Digital transformation fails less often because of poor technology — and more often because human systems are not architected with the same rigour as technical ones. This talk explores how cognitive operating systems collide — and how integrating them stabilises delivery.
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Si Ball is a technology and data strategist focused on the structural resilience of enterprise systems, both technical and organisational. He has led global IT and BI functions, delivered integrated data and ERP strategies, and advised on complex system modernisation within regulated and operationally intensive environments. Si’s work centres on identifying early signals of systemic fragility in digital transformation. He examines how architectural overlap, distributed accountability, and misaligned cognitive operating systems can create hidden integration risk despite positive reporting indicators.
His perspective combines deep data architecture experience with governance awareness, enabling him to bridge technical complexity and board-level oversight. He speaks and advises on integration risk, cross-boundary accountability, and the structural factors that determine whether enterprise transformation stabilises or drifts.
