European Telework Development
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Jeremy has moved!
Please note that Jeremy is now with Danish Technology Institure.
Tel.: +45 89 43 88 08 |
IntroductionJeremy Millard is a Managing Consultant with Tele Danmark Consult, the main Danish telecoms supplier and carrier, and specialises in assisting clients understand the socio-economic, human and marketing aspects of new information and communication technologies. His main concern is to help create a human information society rather than an exclusively virtual one.
Jeremy is Project Manager of ETD responsible for all the financial, contractual and administrative aspects, and is its direct interface to the European Commission. He also makes an input to numerous "content" aspects of the project. Jeremy works closely with Horace Mitchell, ETD's Programme Director, with whom he put together the original proposal back in the wintry days of early 1996.
Jeremy is an archetypal example of the baby-boom generation, born in London's docklands in 1947 and shortly afterwards moving out to Harlow, one London's new towns, in the early 1950s. Disillusioned with the grammar school ethos, he dropped out in the mid 1960s and revelled in London's beat scene, hitched around Europe and then realised he needed a conventional education as well. Taking the necessary qualifications at evening school, he also worked in local government and with ITT as a research assistant, who later offered him a job as personal assistant to the head of the telephone development section. Though Jeremy declined, he has often chuckled at the fact that he ended up in telecoms after all!
After an external London University degree in geography and geology (later supplemented by a Masters in historical geography), he joined the newly established British Open University (OU) in 1972 as a research assistant in the social sciences at Milton Keynes, helping to develop adult distance education courses, both in terms of content and structured study guides. He later moved to the OU's regional office in Nottingham where he was responsible for social science teaching. Despite its faults, revealed in abundance more recently, Jeremy's admiration for the British Labour movement's regular innovative creations (like the health service, the new towns and, not least, the OU) spurred him to become politically active as a local politician in Derbyshire, elected in that fateful year of 1979.
This promising career was, however, abruptly cut-short by meeting a Danish au-pair girl whilst working at one of the OU's famed summer schools (famed in the annals of romantic relations, that is, if nothing else!). One thing leading to another, Jeremy left England for Denmark and true love in 1983 without a job and few prospects. Rapidly establishing himself as a part time university and English language teacher, however, he also set-up his own company which offered the language and cultural experiences of foreigners in Denmark to local businesses. One of his customers offered a full time job, and with babes on the way he accepted, though he still keeps the private company in order to write-off his PC acquisitions. Now, working with the international arm of the Danish PTT, Jeremy helped set-up its first consultancy operations in 1988, and thereafter gained much experience working on traditional telecoms consultancy in Europe, Africa and Asia.
A burgeoning realisation that telecoms wasn't just fixing the technology nor advising on the organisation of a telco, and that aid organisations were becoming interested in the development effects of telecoms, coupled with his involvement with the world's first telecottages in Denmark and Sweden, led Jeremy to specialise in what is now known as information society consultancy. The early 1990s saw the European Commission, as well as the aid agencies, starting to put research money into studies and surveys of this type which Jeremy successfully tapped. For example in DELTA, RACE, STAR, ORA, Telework 94, TAP and ACTS. This specialisation, and the fact that he became an early e-mail user, led to both frustrations and successes as the corporation transformed itself into a customer-oriented commercial undertaking. Today, Jeremy has been joined by others specialising in this expanding area of consultancy and he is now working hard to combine this with an intensive family life. Telework is helping here!
Some years ago, my wife, Inger, succumbed to my arguments that if we really had to live in Denmark, and that if I really had permanently to give up English cheese, beer and mountains, we should move to the best part of Denmark (only 45 minutes by bus from the office). We now live in Ry in the Danish Lake District where my passions for walking, running and many sports (including kayaking) can be partially satisfied. Simon (aged 12), Teresa (10) and Peter (7) are becoming enthusiatic accomplices, especially since we acquired a lively labrador retriever puppy in 1996. We were lucky to purchase a large house in this small artistic town, and welcome visitors from around the world on a business trip or on holiday. Or both together!