Stephen Cottham is the Chief Technology Officer at Robert Bird Group. Stephen is a multi-skilled CTO with 18 years’ experience and excellent all round supervisory and technical expertise. He is an experienced professional with a proven ability to ensure the fluid running of global ICT systems and to provide innovative solutions to IT services that improve the efficiency and performance of the company.
Stephen Joined RBG in 2005 working with Management teams to elicit their requirements and future aspirations. He proposed to design and build a new Datacentre to allow for the rapid growth of the London office and soon after moved to the Australian business for 4 years heading up the Group IT Manager position.
In 2011 Stephen returned to the London office proudly promoted as the Associate Group IT Manager Role; a role which requires him to spend a third of his time overseas in the other RBG offices. In his current role as Chief Technology Officer Stephen manages 9 staff located in 6 offices and ensures that he keeps up to date with new technologies, promoting innovative ideas and provide solutions that push the technology boundary with what can be achieved as a global resource. Most recently he has introduced the Office 365 Suite and collaboration tools, small scale VDI, Cyber security defenses, project email management and solving distributed file storage problems by introducing Talon caching appliances using a single DFS namespace.
Stephen’s passion for technology is what drives him to design and implement agnostic solutions that best suit the requirements of the company whilst always being mindful of external factors such as cost, skills and time. Stephen was promoted to CTO in 2016, a long-term aspiration that finally came to fruition, he looks forward to the future at RBG and how technology will evolve.