ABOUT DAVID BEST

Dr David Best brings to large projects (whether IT and knowledge management, or large scale change projects) more than 20 years of experience as a trusted adviser and business problem solver working in virtually all sectors of industry and commerce and in over 20 countries.

A former partner and European Industry Director for Energy at Deloitte and Touche, he held the title of Visiting Professor in the Department of Information Science in the University of Strathclyde from 1992 until 2000.

He was a member of the Advisory Board of the Faculty of Informatics of the City University London and has been an occasional Lecturer on Leadership programmes at the Civil Service College and City University Business School.

He was the founder of the Information Management Awards (now the BCS information Management Awards, which he set up jointly with Elan Conferences to recognise contributions to the field of Information management; these awards are now in their second decade and are recognised throughout the Information Industry.

David Best has been associated with the World Wide Web since the early nineties. In 1992 he was instrumental in associating Touche Ross and Co. (Now Deloitte and Touche) with the then recently formed Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG www.imrg.org) which was established to promote the emerging on line retail community.

Now with more than 1300 members in the UK and accounting for more than 80 per cent of all online transactions in the UK IMRG continues to grow, and is associated with similar organizations in Europe and round the world as well as working closely with the Uk government and the European commission in related areas.

David's involvement in this area continued throughout with projects to digitise the British Library's National Sound Archive. This project paved the way for the on line access to all the sounds in the Library's collections. He was also responsible for the digitisation of the Pathe News Archive, a priceless archive spanning the period from the late eighteen hundreds to the 70s.

From 2000 to 2004 he was responsible for a dot com JV between Deloitte and Ogilvy Worldwide whose achievements included the Oystercard website for Transport for London, and information architecture for the MSN network.

He continues to work with IMRG and recently addressed the E-Merging markets conference on the development of the on line sector in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Working as a board level adviser, he specialises in navigating the difficult space that can exist between IT and business, producing straightforward solutions - often by focusing on an understanding of the personalities involved in a project and their interaction.

A specialist in knowledge and information management, David has written a number of publications, including ‘The Fourth Resource: Information and its Management’, published by ASLIB/Gower in 1997, and the general management guide for the ISO standard 15489:2001 the International Standard in Record Management. He has a PhD in Cybernetics, specialising in Control and Communication.

David was the founding Chairman in 1982, of the Symphonia Viva, originally the East of England Orchestra and led the orchestra's Board through its first ten years of Growth and development.

He brings particular expertise in:
  IT Project implementation
  Expert witness testimony
  Personal development

Download David's CV, and view his Linked In and Plaxo profiles.