Nikki has worked in a number of private and public sector senior procurement and programme management roles since graduating in 1990 with a BA(Hons) in Business Economics and Marketing. With IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Agilent she gained extensive experience in leading national and international procurement and system transformation programmes. Since joining the Scottish Government in 2005 she has played a key role in driving and enabling public procurement reform in Scotland, with a particular focus on building Scottish Government’s Procurement, Commercial and Project Delivery skills. An FCIPS Chartered Procurement & Supply professional, Nikki currently sits on the CIPS Foundation Steering Group and is an ex-trustee of their Global Board of Trustees. With specific interests in developing the capability of individuals, organisations, supply chains and our Procurement People of Tomorrow, Nikki also plays an active role in encouraging diversity (in all its forms) within senior procurement and supply chain roles.

Rona Dougall is a broadcaster, freelance journalist and also a popular TV presenter best known as the host of STV’s flagship current affairs programme ‘Scotland Tonight‘. The thirty minute live programme takes an in-depth look at the big news stories of the day, along with sport, politics, business, art and entertainment. Before becoming a Scottish Television anchor, Rona was Sky News Scotland correspondent for over 15 years. During that time she covered many headline stories, including the Dunblane massacre, the trial of the Lockerbie bomber at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, the death of Princess Diana from Balmoral, the opening of the Scottish parliament and several Scottish elections. She was also part of the British Bafta award winning team which covered the terrorist attack at Glasgow airport. Off duty Rona Dougall is a mother to her two children, a keen runner and a voracious reader.

Cath Baxter is one of the UK’s leading voice coaches and a Public Speaking expert. For 14 years she was Head of Voice at Mountview, one of the top 5 drama schools in the UK, where she trained some of the UK’s best actors and musical theatre performers. Her time is now spent working with a wide range of business clients and companies, helping them to add greater impact to their communications. She has most recently delivered group training for the following organisations: Foreign Office - British Overseas Territories and Polar Directorate, Government Internal Audit Agency, Department for Education - Legal and Transactions, Home Office, Ministry of Defence, HM Treasury, HMRC, Crown Commercial Service, Health Education England, GSK – Global Supply Chain, GSK – Vaccines, NHS Improvement, Independent Office for Police Conduct, Cancer Research, Women into Leadership Conference and Ethnic Minorities into Leadership conference. Cath has a PGCert in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

David has over 30 years’ experience in managing complex supply chains in both the private and public sectors, and internationally. He is passionate about the value that the procurement and supply profession can add and has built his career developing high performing teams and being a business leader and advocate for the profession. Before joining CIPS, David was the Deputy Government Chief Commercial Officer, responsible for developing the capabilities of the procurement organisation across government and the wider public sector, with £50 billion of procurement spend under management and some 6000 procurement professionals in central government, who form the Government Commercial Function. David began his career in the public sector with the Home Office, where he became a part of the executive leadership team as the Chief Commercial Officer, managing a procurement spend of £4bn, revenue generation of nearly £2bn with a direct team of 300. Prior to joining the public sector in 2008, David had an extensive career in the private sector across multiple sectors, including technology and telecoms with Sony, Cable & Wireless, Vodafone and Orange. David has also worked with private equity and was the European Commercial Director in a leveraged buy out of Hertz from Ford, with a subsequent re-engineering of the global business and its supply chains, resulting in a successful IPO. David has lived and worked overseas, and was also a volunteer in Africa with Raleigh International, a youth development charity.

Joe Tilley joined the Crown Commercial Service (CCS) in May 2019 as a senior civil servant. His current role as Sustainability Director is to lead the new enterprise-wide Sustainability Team to enable better outcomes for the public sector across our entire product and service offering. He is responsible for CCS' advisory offer to the whole public sector, working with the supply chain, and linking with colleagues across government to drive sustainability efforts across policy implementation, commercial, and delivery. Joe is based in Hertfordshire and also forms part of the Buildings Pillar senior leadership team with a focus on Strategic Portfolios, such as PFI hand back and transition. Joe has over 14 years’ experience across industry, private and public sector, in business development, sales, strategy and start-up leadership roles. He is a mentor to start-ups backed by Unreasonable, whose companies believe in the power of companies to drive lasting change, and have raised over £7bn in capital to bring solutions to life. He brings a passion for sustainability, technology as a force for good, and social impact. Joe believes collaboration is critical in all walks of life, between public and private sectors, and also in one's personal life and takes a keen interest in mentoring colleagues around race and social mobility.'

Alistair Kerr Director & Chair of BASE Scotland. Alistair represents Scotland on BASE UK National Executive Committee. BASE network supports People living with Disabilities or are Disadvantaged in some unique way in our local communities across the UK. Utilising Sustainable Procurement legislation, Community Wealth Building & Social Value Policy drivers to transform lives of Disabled or Disadvantaged people across the UK. Alistair has held various Executive, Board & Chair positions since 2002 representing Disabled Peoples rights and advocating a Socially just society. Industry expert promoting Scottish, UK & Irish Government Sustainable Procurement ambitions, BASE National Executive Council & RI World congress, examples of high-profile annual events where Alistair is a voice for People who without such legislation would simply not have a chance to achieve individual goals & ambitions and ultimately transform their lives. Recognised by Scottish Government as a Champion of Scotland’s Supported Businesses. BASE is recognised by Scottish Government Procurement Directorates as a key stakeholder facilitating understanding of the Supported Business landscape across Scotland and beyond.

Mark's been involved with innovation for almost the whole of his life, certainly since his teenage years when his father – a researcher, inventor and innovator [though he preferred the word ‘engineer’] – realised Mark would be a good lab rat. Mark is also one of those rare animals who’s developed long and successful track records at the highest levels of the digital and creative industries, in multiple disciplines - as a creative practitioner, as a business lead, as an economic development strategist, and latterly as the guiding force behind CivTech Scotland, the world’s first successful public-sector-focused innovation accelerator. With the ability to range from big visions to the tiniest detail, he couples strategy with successful, genuine and impactful on-the-ground effort. He graduated from St Martin’s School of Art, London and became London’s [and probably the world’s] youngest commercials editor, then its youngest commercials director, making films across the world for clients including Coca Cola, Walt Disney, Volkswagen, Ford, Unilever and Procter & Gamble. Business-wise, he first took charge of the fortunes of a start-up at the age of 22 and helped it grow into one of the most successful commercials post-production companies around. It means he’s worked in, and with, start-ups and SMEs pretty much ever since. At the same time as working in film Mark took on many other challenges. In 1996 he became the world’s first Creative Head of a Premiership football club – helping to massively increase the brand power and commercial activities of [the then fashionable] Middlesbrough AFC. He was also co-founder and creative head of radical and highly successful training company ClickHere Ltd – sold to Tanfield Plc in 2003. Mark has also sat on numerous advisory and regulatory boards at local, regional and national level, including Audiences North East, the Film and Television Skills Advisory Group, North East England [2003 – 2007], the Tees Valley Learning and Skills Council [2002 – 2006], and the Creative Industries Advisory Group Member, ONE North East [2001 – 2005]. In 2003 he took over DigitalCity in the Tees Valley, North East England: in the eleven years under his leadership it went from ‘troubled’ paper exercise to a fully-fledged and brilliantly successful creative and digital cluster initiative, acknowledged as one of the greatest projects of its type anywhere in Europe. Mark was its 'architect' and champion, and with a mission to create and maintain a vibrant, successful and self-sustaining digital and creative supercluster. It delivered everything a regeneration project should do [which they often don't], including massive company growth, hundreds of jobs, significant private sector investment and huge local economic impact. In his time there, Middlesbrough – the centre of the initiative - went from plumb bottom of over 400 areas in England to fourth place in terms of the proportion of high-growth-potential tech companies [Experian]; and in 2013 it was identified by the Financial Times as one of the UK’s digital hotspots – the only one in the UK north of Birmingham. Key partners in the DigitalCity were the region’s local authorities, and with DigitalCity actually based out of Middlesbrough Council, Mark became all too aware of the challenges and barriers faced by councils – especially those that are custodians of deprived areas. Mark’s history in tech has been a long one. The film industry has always been an early adopter, and Mark ordered some of the first non-linear editing systems for the editing company he ran back in the 1980s. At DigitalCity he started his long association with tech accelerators: there in 2009 he co-founded The Difference Engine – Europe’s first true, intensive tech accelerator, and on moving to Scotland in 2014, designed and executed Scotland’s first accelerator – the UP Accelerator. And in 2015 he was part of the team that gor CivTech off the ground. Now, some 90 or so Challenges later, it’s regarded as a singular success story, acknowledged in the Uk as the ‘gold standard’ in innovation systems, and internationally. CivTech is a key component of the Scottish Government’s transformation strategy, centred on driving daring and innovation in the Scottish public sector by collaboratively solving challenges to make people’s lives better, with an absolute focus on citizen-centred design and co-development, it pure and simple ‘tech for good’. He still walks the walk creatively and is currently developing a potentially huge cross-gender, worldwide children’s entertainment franchise - a future-based action-adventure story universe the world’s most popular sport, at its heart. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland with his wife Janet Archer. And when he has time he escapes to the wonderful, rugged landscapes surrounding the city because he’s a passionate, 'double badass' [for those of you who know the Rules of Cycling], but very slow cyclist.

With a diverse background in managing a spectrum of cyber services, fostering strategic partnerships, and driving government-funded cyber security programs, Janka firmly believes that education is the cornerstone of effective defence. She has championed the use of cost-effective resources to equip businesses with essential cyber security insights to empower them to stay secure in today's digital age.

Andrew Morrison is the founder of AM Bid, a UK-leading bid consultancy. In 2022, Andrew was honoured by APMP (Association of Proposal Management Professionals) with their inaugural Global Thought Leader of the Year award. He is generous in sharing work-winning insights as evidenced by his over 120 LinkedIn Live broadcasts (Andrew has 20,000 LinkedIn followers) which have reached an audience of over 150,000 viewers. AM Bid operates in 25 different market sectors across the UK, the majority of which bid for public sector contracts. They have 85%+ bid success rates (independently audited figures). In working with bidders of all sizes from FTSE-100s to sole traders, Andrew has a unique perspective on not only what is needed for bid success but also what constitutes good procurement. Prior to his 18-year career in bidding which has included leading 5 national bid teams at British Gas, Andrew had a 12-year career in local government. In addition to his bidding qualifications, Andrew is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Housing and holds an MSc (with distinction) in Housing Studies from the University of Stirling.

Ian Schollar is the Head of CIPS Business Study Centre at CIPS and has had a progressive career in procurement and commercial roles spanning over 30 years in both public and private sectors. He started his career with Mallory Batteries (Duracell) in 1983, before spending 15 years working within both central and local public sector organisations. He was responsible for procuring a diverse range of categories from breathing apparatus for fire fighters to high tech radar systems for air traffic controllers. In 1998, Ian became a Senior Advisor for Crown Agents, an International Development Agency. He was project lead on numerous capacity building projects working in Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and Eastern Europe and headed up the procurement and supply chain training at their Training Centre. Ian has worked at CIPS since 2005 and has a particular passion for professional development. Ian is a Fellow of CIPS and holds a Master’s Degree in Management, Learning and Leadership from Lancaster University Management School.

Dan Rawling is a Director in the Cartel Enforcement team at the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). Dan has worked in competition enforcement, consumer protection and economic regulation for over 15 years. At the Office of Fair Trading (OFT), Dan worked on a variety of competition and consumer law investigations, including cases on payment card interchange fees and current account overdraft charges. Subsequently, Dan helped to establish and operationalise the Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) and spent a year at the Bank of England working on the financial stability supervision of market infrastructure. Dan was formerly Director of Policy & International at the CMA, where he led on cross-cutting policy with an emphasis on reform of the CMA’s powers and tools, and how they are used. As part of the CMA’s Covid-19 Taskforce, in 2020, Dan led the organisation’s policy response to price gouging behaviour on products like hand sanitiser, including advising the Government on options for emergency anti-profiteering legislation.

Starting his career as an apprentice in Glasgow with Barr & Stroud, Iain moved into high volume, commercial packaging for tech companies and then within the drinks industry. This led onto working as a Category Manager for OKI, covering quality and all commercial aspects of all print & packaging including branding. Iain developed his career further within Mitsubishi as Materials Manager, negotiating and procuring goods from across the globe and the management of Stores and delivery into Production. After a short period working in Ireland for a small printing company as Operations Manager, Iain returned to Scotland and worked as the Corporate Procurement Manager, with the key task of facilitating change, for Renfrewshire then South Lanarkshire Councils, over 7 years. Iain then took up the post of Head of Procurement for BT to deliver an outsourced procurement on behalf of South Tyneside Council, delivering significant benefits to the Council and the full restructure of the service. Upon completion of that 10 year contract, Iain took up the post of Head of Procurement for Police Scotland, having had the initial task to deliver change to support improvement to the service and now working to ensure the procurement service continues to add value to the benefit of the Police Officers and the public.

Debra manages the Software Value Added Reseller Services (SVARS) framework and supports the procurement of various eCommerce contracts for Scottish Government. Debra has worked in various other Procurement roles in Scottish Government and at Transport Scotland.

Gregor is a Chartered Procurement and Supply Professional who leads on improving procurement, commercial and project delivery capability. He is interested in making procurement a career of choice, and enabling procurement professionals to tackle the big issues facing Scotland.

The Collaborative Delivery Manager in Scottish Procurement who contract manages the Scottish national DPS for Requirements Reserved for Supported Businesses. This key aim of the DPS is to provide Scottish Public Sector and Third Sector Bodies (Framework Public Bodies) with a clear path for the purchase of goods and services from Supported Businesses and in doing so, support the integration of disabled and disadvantaged citizens into the mainstream workforce.

Barry is Principal Educational Psychologist for the City of Glasgow and manages a team of 44 educational psychologists. He has been an educational psychologist within Glasgow for over 30 years. Barry has a strategic remit for mental health in children and young people in Glasgow schools. He represents Education Services on the Glasgow Suicide Prevention Group and has been involved in developing suicide awareness and prevention training across all educational establishments in the city. He leads on school counselling for all 170 schools in Glasgow as well as commissioning other mental health supports for young people in Glasgow. He is currently working with GCC Corporate Procurement Unit on a wider framework for embedded mental health supports in schools involving a range of organisations. Other specialist remits include lead trainer on the All Behaviour is Communication programme, anti-bullying policy and school attendance. Barry continues to work as a practitioner psychologist.

Sales leader Stu is responsible for several teams across Manchester and Glasgow. His remit covers Cadence Marketing, business intelligence and eProcurement products – as well as consultancy services to connect buyers and suppliers. Outside work he tries to keep up with his daughter at karate. She’s much better than him.