Leader. Builder. The person you want running the hardest projects.
Karen Parkin has spent four decades delivering complex, high-stakes digital projects across six continents — for global corporations, entrepreneurial startups, and institutions that couldn’t afford to fail. She is the rare combination of systems thinker, creative director, and seasoned leader: someone equally at home defining technical architecture and shaping the human experience around it.
From IBM to the BBC — a career defined by complexity
Karen trained as a systems engineer at IBM before spending more than a decade at Dow Chemical’s European headquarters in Switzerland. As head of IT application development, she managed project teams drawn from more than thirty nations — an experience that gave her both the discipline of rigorous engineering and the instinct for leading across cultures. She was the natural choice to also head Dow’s European Total Quality Management initiative.
Moving to London in the early 1990s, she founded a creative technology company producing internet-based simulations, computer games, and animation properties. She defined processes and tools that made commercially viable what had previously been impossible, and patented technologies still in use today. When she sold the business, the BBC asked her to lead its Digital Archive Project — restoring and digitising a vast content archive and making it accessible via web technology. It was central to the BBC’s transformation into a real-time new-media organisation, and it required as much diplomacy and executive negotiation as it did technical mastery.
Scale, precision, and delivery
At EURO RSCG in Washington D.C., Karen ran award-winning online projects for Intel, Lockheed Martin, and The Humane Society. Then at Marriott International she led the internationalisation of web presence across 3,000 hotels in 20 countries, in nine languages — coordinating writers, designers, information architects, UX researchers, and IT teams from Argentina to Japan to Germany. The completed booking platform ranked among the top ten e-commerce sites in the world.
These engagements share a common thread: extreme complexity, multinational teams, uncompromising standards, and delivery.
The work today
Karen now works selectively with senior leaders and organisations on strategy, leadership, usability, and digital experience — particularly in hospitality, media, beauty, and luxury. She serves on several boards, and brings the same exacting standards to her pro bono work: she is deeply engaged in the mission of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, of which she is a Dame.
She is a co-founder of Britefire.
A few facts
Degree in Economics and Business Administration — University of the Witwatersrand.
Based in Cape Town. Works worldwide.