“Technology does the remembering. The team does the reading. The moment you flip that, you have broken the model.” Sammy was born in Montserrat. He left for the United Kingdom at 11, when the volcano was beginning to make itself known. Came back at 13. Left again. Built a career across some of the world’s largest organisations – government, healthcare, retail, cinema – before founding his own consultancy in 2021. Today he works between Manchester, London and Antigua, with architecture engagements that include the UK government and the government of Jersey. But, as he tells me, the Caribbean never quite let him go. Some of what this part of the world teaches you, he says, you cannot learn anywhere else. How to be calm when everything around you is moving. How to make a decision with incomplete information. How to read a room with your whole body, not just your ears. How to find comfort in change, rather than fight it. When he is not working, he takes photographs. He started a few years ago, as a way of pinning down memories before they faded. It has become, in his words, a discipline of noticing – the same quality, he says, that underpins his work as an architect. I find that detail telling. The man who builds invisible systems for his living spends his spare time learning to see. I have always believed that this business is, fundamentally, about people. About the conversations that unfold when someone is choosing the place they will wake up in for the next chapter of their life. That has not changed. It will not change. But it has, I think, been ready for some time to change around
that. To find a way of preserving the deeply human heart of what we do, while gently lifting the smaller, repetitive, time-consuming tasks off the plates of a team I am unfailingly proud of. That is what Sammy is helping us do. Not faster for the sake of it. Faster where speed makes the rest of the work better. If you are reading this from a desk in London at 11pm and you have wondered to yourself whether the team in St John’s is paying attention to your enquiry – the answer, increasingly, will be yes. Not because anyone is awake at that hour. Because the system Sammy is helping us build will mean that when our team starts their day, they already know what you need. That, to me, is what good technology should look like in our kind of business. Invisible yet competent. Deeply respectful of the human work it sits underneath. It is also, I think, why some of the most thoughtful conversations I have had this year have been with Sammy. He believes in the same things I do. He just expresses them in a different language. I am very glad he is here. n Sammy Williams is an enterprise and solution architect leading the technology strategy for Luxury Locations. He is the founder of Inventur and of TicketPulse Events, and currently holds architecture roles with the governments of the UK and Jersey.
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