The three Aperia directors; Steve Gallagher, Ian Singleton and Simon Dickinson, all have strong track records of working with the public sector nationally and across Northern England to facilitate and deliver sustainable improvements in business performance.
Steve Gallagher, O.B.E.
Steve spent over 30 years working in local government, working for “excellent” authorities Bolton, Blackburn with Darwen and latterly Knowsley as its Chief Executive. Whilst in this role he was also Chief Executive of Merseyside Police Authority. Steve founded and chaired the North West eGovernment Group and the Merseyside Digital Development Agency and, following his retirement from local government, chaired the Government Connect programme for a year. His commitment to partnership working has been evident throughout the 30 years as has his belief that new technology can help to radically improve services and organizations. Steve became Chair of Aperia in April 2005 and joined because Aperia was grounded in local authorities and reflected this in both its ethos and methods of working.
Simon Dickinson
Simon originally trained and worked as teacher for three years before setting up a business providing sports holidays for children. He completed an MBA at Manchester Business School in 1998 before joining The Institute of Management Resources (IMR). Based in Paris, he worked across the UK, France and the US on Business Process Re-engineering and transformation projects within the public sector, utilities, financial services and manufacturing industries.
Simon then spent six enjoyable years with Capita Consulting, working on a range of internal Capita and external Public Sector assignments. These included “local” clients such as Bolton, Macclesfield, York, Pendle, Sunderland Housing and Blackburn with Darwen, but also included less convenient locations for the Harrogate family such as Poole, Swansea Pension Service, London Congestion Charge, Harrow and Sandwell.
Simon joined Aperia as a Director in 2006 to continue to work on exciting projects with Local Government, but with the ambition to secure a better work-life balance!
Ian Singleton
Ian Singleton is a founding Director with Aperia and is an OU qualified project manager as well as an MSP, PRINCE2 and DSDM practitioner. He worked his way through the ranks at Sefton Council to then spend two years setting up an e-Government unit in the private sector before working with Steve Gallagher to establish the NWeGG partnership. He went on to set up esd-toolkit nationally with 9 regional groups, the benefits case for the Government Connect programme, working with NWeGG to re-establish LeGSB, working with chorley on the process architecture and recently working with DWP and BIS to provide innovation tools.Ian is currently seeking to establish Aperia as a supporting partner for joining up public sector services around customer need. Ian believes that his and colleagues’ experience in strategic, programme, project, process, benefits and change management integrated into the now formalised Circles of Need® transformation methodology can help make public sector service delivery more citizen focussed.