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.
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.
