Our Leadership

The four Aperia directors; Steve Gallagher, Ian Singleton, Phil Swan 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 Gallagher - Chairman

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.

 

Phil Swan

Phil Swan - Director

Phil began his career working for Accenture (then Andersen Consulting), initially as an enterprise-wide system implementation specialist at retailers including Boots the Chemist and WH Smiths. During the dot com boom years he advised companies like Tesco and BP on B2B commerce and eRetail strategies.

Phil then studied for an MBA at Cambridge in 2001-2002, specialising in entrepreneurship and disruptive technologies. Between 2003 and 2004, he worked as the Greater Manchester ePartnership Programme Manager before succeeding Ian Singleton as NWeGG Programme Manager.  Phil co-founded Aperia in 2003 with the aspiration of creating a better value and deeply knowledgeable organisation that just happened to be a great place to work too.

 

Simon Dickinson

Simon Dickinson - Director

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 - Director

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 work with Rosi Somerville to establish esd-toolkit on a national scale, then Sue Devlin in an attempt to drive the Government Connect programme with business benefits and more recently working with NWeGG to re-establish LeGSB.

Ian is currently helping to establish Aperia as an up and coming transformation consultancy in the North West. Ian believes that his and colleagues’ experience in strategic, programme, project, process, benefits and change management can all be integrated into a transformation methodology to help make public sector service delivery more citizen focussed.