Admission of Howard Watson to the William Pitt Fellowship
On 19th March 2024 we rang in the Spring with a toast and welcomed a new William Pitt Fellow to Pembroke College. Howard Watson, Chief Security and Networks Officer at BT Group, joined a roll call of the great and the good who have signed their name in the College’s Matriculation Book including Roger Bushell (aka ‘Big X’), Jo Cox MP, and William Pitt the Younger.
Since graduating from Aston in 1984 with a 1st in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Howard has spent over forty years working in the telecoms industry where he has held a range of senior roles in technology, operations and transformation, including being Chief Architect and Managing Director for Global IT systems. He has been a Chief Technology Officer for 25 years, successfully leading on a number of major infrastructure and change programmes, delivering new technologies, improvements in customer experience and cost reduction.
Howard’s admission to the William Pitt Fellowship continues Pembroke’s long-standing partnership with BT Group which has now entered its twenty-first year. Since 2002 our relationship with BT Group has grown ever deeper. We have continuously collaborated on a series of highly beneficial mutual exchanges in a variety of forms, from contributing to our ongoing blog series, to a massive research study on the use and impact of modern media and technology in our lives with an international scope, to suggesting brilliant young people for paid internships at BT which have helped to advance research at the company as well as teaching our students new skills. Pembroke and BT Group have worked together dynamically to bring out the best in each other.
As the ink in the Matriculation Book dries, we begin a new chapter in our much-valued relationship with BT Group. We look forward to continuing our annual BT-Pembroke Lecture series, which in 2022 was given by Howard. Likewise we look forward to continuing to host part of the BT Leader Labs – a mind-sharing exercise where Pembroke helps to provide the future leaders of the telecoms industry with thought-leadership on how to lead organisations through transformation, as well as building the openness and resiliency required to embrace emerging technologies.
