Steve Smith

I started as an aircraft engineer building and certifying avionic systems — designing and physically installing the equipment and wiring, modifying the airframe & structures that carried it — and then had to prove, against an airworthiness standard and with my name on it, that the aircraft was safe to fly. This is a discipline, and it is not paperwork: a certificate is not the same thing as a safe aeroplane, and someone has to be able to tell the difference.

I have been doing the same job ever since — across industries where operational safety and quality assurance are critical: oil and gas, chemical, nuclear, marine and aviation. Coming through the ranks as a control and automation engineer, and along the way meeting the same problem from every side: from engineering and operations, to engineering sales and projects, then to business development, before consultancy on the operator's side and finally onto quality assurance, standards, safety and reliability. From poacher to gamekeeper. Most recently I led robotics, sensing, integrity and inspection, and OT strategy at BP.

The problem I keep meeting is the same one. The technology is rarely the difficulty. The organisation it lands in — the people, the process, the OT infrastructure beneath it, and the authority to actually adopt it — is where the value is won or lost. Certified doesn't mean safe; working in a trial doesn't mean working on your asset. Closing that gap is one continuous discipline, not four careers, and it is the whole of what I do.

Today I do that work independently, through my own practice, Dewhurst.tech — as an advisor, a board member, or a hands-on lead, depending on what the decision needs.