Alan Simmonds is an experienced and pragmatic Enterprise and Business Architect with a comprehensive understanding of architecture across sectors including accounting, education, financial, food, freight, retail, hospitality, sporting, and medical technology. He has a particular interest in ensuring that architecture is properly supported through a practice structure. Additionally, he has a specific interest in operating models being at the core of organisational change and utilising Enterprise and Business Architecture appropriately to support large-scale organisational change.
He believes architecture should be pragmatic, and deliver timely and measurable benefits - not be the subject of endless and unproductive philosophical debate.
He also serves as a statutory DPO, privacy, and data protection professional focusing on the GDPR, DPA 2018, PECR, and related legislation and governance in the UK, Europe, and the ASEAN, assisting organisations with managing their legal data protection challenges effectively and lawfully. He was retained by an ASEAN stock exchange delivering governance workshops to all listed mid-cap company directors, NEDs, CAEs, and RMC members.
His MBA dissertation 'Technology Governance - A Model for Enablement and Advantage', brings together a considerable understanding of information management, architecture, and strategy with current business thinking into strategy and competitive advantage. On the legal side, his LLM (Data Protection and Intellectual Property) helps him to assist organisations in addressing their legislative and policy obligations, from local through to national level. This is being followed up with a PhD focusing on legal rights, with a focus on Artificial Intelligence.
A regular international conference speaker including for the International Association of Airline Internal Auditors (IAAIA, Borneo) on Framework Convergence, also, the Institute of Internal Auditors (Singapore and Kuala Lumpur) on Auditing IT Governance and Managing Technology Risk, and for the Enterprise Risk Management Academy (ERMA, Indonesia) on Privacy Risk (he also serves on the Certification Board of ERMA). Alan has spoken at several Open Group conferences, including on Accelerated Delivery (Paris) and the EA Practice (Kuala Lumpur).
Alan has contributed to several global standards, including TOGAF, COBIT, and OMDDMS, and is also an experienced TOGAF, OMDDS, COBIT, and Applied Business Architecture course instructor.
Alan has a strong academic background with Bachelors of Science and Arts in Psychology related disciplines and a MBA in Strategy and Governance. He has been a strong contributor to the development of various global standards, including TOGAF and COBIT and has trained over 2,000 practitioners around the world in TOGAF alone.
Anyone can read the book – good training is about imparting insight, experience and real examples of where we’ve failed and just as importantly where we’ve succeeded. Training is the event, practising is the journey and carrying the book weighs you down by nearly 2 kilos
