About

This is the weblog of Alastair Bathgate.

My current role in life is running a rapidly growing enterprise software company, Blue Prism Ltd.  Blue Prism serves enterprise sized service organisations like banks, utilities, telcos and retailers with a software solution that facilitates:

  • Clerical process optimisation - analyse improve and automate front and back office processes.
  • One-off campaigns - flexible automated workforce to react to marketing initiatives and to solve one-off problems like processing errors.
  • Change management - enabling big bang changes in systems, processes and environments to be broken down into less risky stepping stones.

My interests and the intention of this blog is to be at the intersection of customer service, business processes and how IT can help the enterprise deliver better service for lower cost.

My background and my domain knowledge is biased towards financial services.  In this regard I look at the service available to me as a customer and my objectives are to get a level of service that is pain free, quick, and uses technology in intelligent ways to make my life easier.

When it comes to enterprise IT architecture, I think that the principles of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) are great.  It’s just delivery of that vision that’s a nightmare.  So you will hear me arguing for a bottom up approach that delivers bite sized, but manageable and measurable benefits that contribute incrementally towards the long term whole.

I also believe that the role of the enterprise IT function is to deliver what the business needs and currently that means business agility and local control.  In the past IT people have been too protective over technology and nowadays control of technology should be shared with the business users wherever possible.

My interests outside work are limited by time, but I am into wine in a big (but totally amateur) way.  If you are too, you might wish to view my other blog at Confessions of a Wino.

If you want to contact me directly you can get me at abathgate at blueprism.co.uk.