About Us
Experienced Consultants with Long Established Relationships
Our small team of consultants have been working together for many years in different roles. Although we have also worked in the past in other sectors, most of Kingdom Technology’s work is now in railways – we have worked for over 30 in five continents.
Robin Hirsch, Kingdom Technology’s Managing Partner, came into management consultancy in 1985 after a corporate career. He first joined A T Kearney, founding Kingdom Technology in 1990. He often works through the Railway & Transport Strategy Centre at Imperial College or through CARIS Research Ltd, a company that took over the commercial activities of the Centre for Applied Research in Information Systems at Kingston University.
Most of us are also university lecturers and most also have other businesses:
Piers Connor, MD of PRC Rail Consulting, has front line experience in maintenance, operations, design, planning, manufacturing, project development. His consultancy includes new line development, rail systems integration, interface management, train operations planning, rolling stock maintenance, systems design and modelling
Malcolm Hamer, Director of Acumen solutions, has 20 years’ experience of in building state-of-the-art networks and data centre infrastructures, and developing pioneering network-based applications, for leading global organizations. He is an expert (amongst other things) at Improving IT Operations processes and the toolsets used to manage these processes. Based in New York.
Michael Hamlyn, CEO of Kuseiog Ltd., is a specialist in railway train control systems, railway safety and risk-based asset lifecycle management. He is based in Hong Kong, Bangkok and Delhi. He sold his earlier company MHA Systems to Lloyds Register in 2001 and ran it until 2007.
Dr Nigel J Harris, MD of The Railway Consultancy, has a reputation originally based on technical advances in network modelling and fares policy research, but he also has world-wide expertise in operational simulation, demand forecasting, scheme appraisal and railway business planning.
Kathleen Hirsch was a Chief Sub-Editor at the BBC Overseas News Services and Editor of Age Concern Surrey news, a course organiser for the Local Government Group of the Law Society.
Associate Professor Felix Schmid runs the MSc in Railway Systems Engineering & Integration at the University of Birmingham. His particular interest is in robust forms of organisation and leadership in safety critical businesses. His expertise is much wider, from railway capacity to human factors in safety critical systems, train control algorithms and freight demand modelling.
Bernard Thouin, owner of Define IT GmbH, has 30+ years of experience in IT, mainly in banking IT. He covers the whole product life cycle from requirements gathering to analysis, design, development, deployment and support of solutions. He is based in Zürich.
Chris Wills is MD of CARIS Research Ltd. His specialist area is that of software processes in safety critical systems. For example, he scoped the design of warship command and control systems for the Royal Navy. His other information systems and computing project clients include the UK Defence Evaluation Research Agency, Police Service, Health Service, Department for Transport, and in other countries, the UITP and Hong Kong’s MTR Corporation.
Iebe Ypma is a Director of Alastor Consulting. His strengths lie in IT strategy, IT procurement, process mapping and process innovation, logistics / value chain and project management.