Local Public Services Innovation Summit 2025

Chris Melia

Growth Director – Local Public Services, Capita Public Service

No bio provided

Naomi Elia

Head of Public Sector for the UK and Ireland, Juniper Networks

Naomi Elia is the Head of Public Sector for the UK and Ireland at Juniper Networks, where she leads strategic engagement across central and local government, the NHS, and emergency services. With a deep understanding of the unique challenges facing public sector organisations, Naomi is passionate about harnessing technology to enhance citizen services, drive operational efficiency, and support mission-critical infrastructure. Naomi’s work is grounded in the belief that smart, secure, and scalable networks are key to delivering better outcomes for communities across the UK and Ireland.

Tim Matson

Local and Central Government Lead, Cloud Gateway

Tim Matson is the Local and Central Government Lead at Cloud Gateway, where he champions the transformative role of digital innovation in the public sector. Tim is passionate about helping Local Government organisations achieve more through the adoption of new and emerging technologies, enabling them to drive efficiencies, deliver smarter services, and better serve their communities. He believes in reimagining public service delivery to unlock the full potential of digital transformation and emerging technologies, including AI.

Alex Fillingham

Account Director, Civiteq

With a background in programme and project management, agile, cloud and digital transformation, strategy and future operating models, Alex helps organisations to shape their response to technologically driven business evolution. Having worked in both local government and consultancy, Alex’s comprehensive experience benefits his clients. In his spare time Alex runs a regenerative agriculture business from his farm in Devon.

Cameron Major

Sales Director, Oxygen Insights

No bio provided

Sean Price

Public Sector Strategist, Splunk

No bio provided

Majid Ali

UK Public Sector CTO, CrowdStrike

Majid Ali, currently the UK Public Sector CTO for CrowdStrike, is a highly experienced cyber security professional with a background in technical and management consultancy. He has held senior roles at Deloitte and NTT, and is a recognized trusted advisor to his clients. Majid’s extensive experience in cyber security enables him to effectively and pragmatically guide his clients through the constantly changing threat landscape.

Jonny Davis

Head of Data Science, ADSP

Jonny leads a growing data science team at ADSP, a consultancy specializing in applied AI solutions for organizations across diverse industries and regions. His team works across various machine learning domains, including classical structured machine learning problems, reinforcement learning, and generative AI.

Jonny originally specialised in natural language processing, leading the NLP expert group for Accenture UKI. He has successfully delivered machine learning solutions for text-based problems across industries such as the public sector, broadband, and resources. Additionally, Jonny is passionate about AI communication and is currently leading an O'Reilly course on AI Governance for business leaders.

Sarah Peña

Service Manager – Digital Innovation, Wokingham Borough Council

Sarah is a passionate advocate for innovation, collaboration, and public service. With over 25 years of experience spanning both private and public sectors, Sarah harnesses technology to help solve business challenges and deliver impactful solutions. She looks to combine the best of technology and people expertise to create a harmony where the genius of both can shine – to enable us, connect us and do good. Sarah's work extends to a number of practical applications, such as Simply Readable, a world-first GenAI solution, co-created with the Learning Disability community that helps organisations create Easy Read accessible information, Report It which uses computer vision to improve the response to ‘report it’ patterned services (e.g. flytipping, graffiti etc) and Document Translation which utilises advanced machine learning for improved community support.

 

Raj Mack

Head of Digital City and Innovation, Birmingham City Council

Raj has over 33 years experience of working in the public and private sectors. He has worked in diverse roles, including finance and auditing, policy and strategy, business transformation and change and IT & Digital Services. For the last 19 years, he has been instrumental in developing the City’s digital and smart cities agendas, bringing together city partner collaborations between public, private, academic and voluntary and community sector  organisations at European, regional and local levels in order to deliver transformational digital programmes covering infrastructure, innovation, data and inclusion, enabling inclusive and sustainable economic and positioning Birmingham as a leading international digital city.

Alex Nash

Head of Strategy, The Access Group

Alex Nash is Head of Strategy at Access HSC and the founder of Alcuris, an AI-driven technology enabled start-up providing innovative connected solutions to enhance independence and wellbeing in local communities. 

Following the acquisition of Alcuris by The Access Group, Alex has continued to bring his entrepreneurial expertise and strategic vision to advance innovation and improve outcomes in the technology enabled services.

Dr Colin Birchenall

Chief Digital Officer, Glasgow City Council

Colin is the Chief Digital Officer for Glasgow City Council and is responsible for the Digital Glasgow Strategy. The latest strategy consists of three missions: A fair and empowered digital society, An inclusive digital economy, sustainable and innovative digital public services. Colin has a particular interest in how digital technology and data can improve outcomes for communities and the places where they live. As well as his role with Glasgow, Colin also plays a key role for digital transformation across local government in Scotland as the Chief Technology Officer for the Digital Office for Scottish Local Government. His current work for the Digital Office includes developing a future state vision for digital-enabled local government and working in partnership with Scottish Government to refresh Scotland’s digital strategy.

Hannah Roden

Innovation Officer for the Integrated Digital Service, Leeds City Council/ Leeds Office of West Yorkshire ICB

Hannah Roden is the Digital Innovation Officer for the Integrated Digital Service, providing digital services for both Leeds City Council and the Integrated Care Board (ICB) in Leeds, with a passion for driving positive change through technology and connectivity. Hannah plays a pivotal role in driving strategic initiatives and fostering innovation. With a keen eye for identifying emerging trends and a strategic mindset, Hannah excels in developing and implementing innovative solutions that address complex challenges. Hannah is particularly passionate about AI, smart city initiatives and technology enabled care, aiming to harness innovation to enhance the quality of life for residents in Leeds and beyond.

Sharna Quirke

Founder, The Effective Method

After several years working in trade and diplomacy, Sharna moved into human rights, defining policies and solutions on data sharing and the use of technology to significantly improve public service delivery for central and local government. This was the beginning of what has now been 18 years in designing digital solutions to address complex public needs.

In this time, Sharna has delivered endless programmes of digital transformation, designing solutions to meet the most strategic needs (and savings) for local authorities. Sharna has an education in law, economics and business which drives her perspective that technology should be an enabler to superior public services and achieving business/policy priorities.
Sharna has published academic articles on e-Democracy, advised the World Bank on digital inclusion in service delivery and (pre-Brexit) designed benchmarking framework to assess how digitally advanced local service delivery was across Europe.

Sharna is currently the Strategic Director for Local Government and Health at Hitachi Solutions.