My eclectic jottings on running an IT consultancy – Brian Green Consultancy.

There’s both a Brian Green Consultancy Community Interest Company (CIC),  and Brian Green Consultancy UK Limited (Ltd). I’m a director of both these companies.  My partner, Kit, an International Shipping Lawyer, is joint director,  and when she’s not travelling the world on business, the company secretary.

After a vary varied career including Lecturing, Training, Manager, as a developer, and as a Project Manager and Business Analyst (the latter for a large International Bank (should I admit to this … ?) as an IT Project Manager for project in over 34 countries, plus other eBusiness projects) I’ve decided that my best contribution to the world of IT will be served if I’m self employed.

My qualifications including teaching (Cert. Ed.), mathematics (BA Hons 1st Class), information management (HE Diploma), and information security (MSc).  I still have fond memories of programming in Algol, FORTRAN, and COBOL via punched cards; then with the emergence of PCs, writing in DOS, and assembler.  A period of training SMEs to use Wordstar, and Visicalc (the new “kill-app” – a spreadsheet, including its variants SuperCalc, Microsoft’s MultiPlan, and Lotus 1-2-3 ).  Then a period of database developer for a large education authority with applications: dBase, Clipper, Microsoft Access, and ORACLE and still found time to dabble with Forth!

In late June 2005 I had a major paragliding accident near Annecy, France.  Both lower legs were broken, with major damage to the right knee.  Essentially, I can now give an exceedingly good impression of a normal walk – but it hides the removal of 250gm of metal work (left tibia plate with 13 screws – 18cm long, 28 stitches, tibia right knee plate with 6 screws, right tibia plate with 12 screws – 39cm long, 43 staples and 1 stitch), major re-constructive surgery (Taylor Spatial frame for 65 days adjustment regime), many-many hours of physiotherapy,  and the time and talent of many surgeons and physiotherapists … Oh! But I still so miss paragliding.

Currently, my time is spent, when I’m not working on the nonprofit edition of Salesforce, with developing in PHP, MySQL, XML, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and with Linux the LAMP stack.  With RSS feeds, SEO site maps, and the whole emerging Social Media melee.

The Community Interest Company supports my pro bono work in the charity sector, helping charities with their implementation of the Salesforce.com CRM.  The Limited company has a far more generous IT brief …