Clive Longbottom

Clive Longbottom - Quocirca, FRSA, Service Director, Business Process Facilitation
Clive Longbottom is Service Director for Business Processes Facilitation for Quocirca Ltd, a leader in Business and IT analysis in Europe. In this position, Clive covers the needs for companies to understand the core processes in their value chains, and the technologies that should be utilized to facilitate these processes in the most flexible and effective manner. Within his remit, Clive covers collaborative tools, workflow, business process discovery and management tools, service-based architectures and outsourcing, as well as other associated areas such as security, voice/data convergence and IT asset optimization.

Clive has been an ITC analyst for over 10 years, but started his working career as a Chemical Engineer, before entering the world of ITC. Clive’s background covers a mix of end-user experience as a process engineer in the chemical and research industries, as well as ITC work and project management in large and medium sized organisations. This breadth of experience gives Clive a solid viewpoint on the pressures and problems impacting today’s businesses – and keeps him from viewing technology as a solution in itself. Now, as an internationally recognised expert in business and ITC, Clive’s pragmatic approach concentrates on the provision of actionable advice, keeping away from “flavours of the month” and from the “cut and burn” approaches of many analysts.

Clive is a regular presenter on public platforms, as well as being a contributor to silicon.com through Quocirca’s Straight Talking column, and to other media outlets. Consistently placed high in PR Audit’s “top European quoted analysts” tables, Clive understands the importance of dealing with the media at a sensible level – not just being a “rent a quote”, but helping the journalists understand the real issues behind the headline.

Clive started his working career working in a research role for Johnson Matthey in the UK, research in such areas as car catalysts, fuel cells and advanced low-nox burners. From here, Clive moved to implementing office automation across the European and American operations of Johnson Matthey, developing integrated solutions in such areas as X.400/X.500 messaging, Control of Substances Hazardous to Health (COSHH) and laboratory management systems. From here, Clive moved to the UK’s largest electricity generator, National Power, where he was responsible for the integration of PC-based systems into back-end office automation systems, as well as the development of secure messaging systems for National Power’s fledgling international research group. Clive then became and IT consultant before joining the European arm of META Group, taking responsibility for areas such as desktop hardware, operating systems and office suites, collaborative systems and information management systems. On leaving META Group, Clive joined Strategy Partners for a period of time, creating a successful CRM practice based on the premise that multi-channel, personalised, service-based CRM solutions would be the future, as opposed to the received wisdom of the time of large monolithic systems.

On leaving Strategy Partners, Clive founded Quocirca to provide a highly personal offering to the market based on fixed-price projects, rather than retainer-based services. Clive’s work was recognised in 2007 when he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Promotion of the Arts, Commerce and Manufacturing (FRSA).

Clive has a B.Sc. (Hons) in Chemical Engineering from the University of Aston in the UK.