My name is Graham Kent and I’m currently working as the Director of Technology at dotDigitalGroup. I am responsible for the strategy, planning and execution of all technology functions within the company. This principally encompasses the management and leadership of both the product development and systems infrastructure teams, currently amounting to 35 staff and their line managers.
When not working at dotDigital I consult independently through my company GlobalGoat, although my free time is becoming less and less these days, and globalgoat has become more of an online identity and vanity project, as opposed to a going concern. I’m an IT consultant of 17 years experience, working in the UK and Swedish markets, specialising in SQL Server and Windows architecture. I worked full time with SQL Server between 1997 and 2011 in a variety of roles across many different organisations, ranging from start-ups to banks, including 5 years in the SQL Server support team at Microsoft. Nowadays I’m moving away from day to day technical roles and am more interested in leadership and high level architecture and planning. That said I still do the odd bit of DBA work or windbg debugging to keep my hand in and to satisfy my inner geek.
My technical specialities are
System Architecture and Design
SQL Server Performance analysis and tuning
High Availability and Disaster Recovery
Beyond the technical, I’m an experienced team leader and I particularly enjoy acting as mentor to people in different stages of their careers as well.
I am a confident communicator at all levels of an organisation, having delivered numerous training courses and onsite assessments with enterprise level customers, throughout my career to date. I have also spoken at a number of public events such as Microsoft TechDays Sweden and various career days for IT students.
English is my mother tongue but I’m comfortable working within Swedish organisations as well after living in the country for 5 years between 2006 and 2011. All my documentation and communication are in English for technical accuracy.
GlobalGoat is both the name of my consulting company and also my online identity which you can find in many of the usual places across the web, such as linkedin, flickr, blogger , twitter and msdn. This website attempts to pull together all my online publications, so as well as the content here, you might wish to visit my old MSDN blog from my time at Microsoft, or the Basefarm technology blog where I sometimes write for one of my customers.
You can also find some of my thoughts about Sweden on one of my other websites, Undiscovered Stockholm.