Ethan FraserChief Information Officer

Personal correspondence

Shared centres, separated clients

Chief Information Officer Canada

Each client should find its callers' information exactly where it agreed to keep it, and nowhere else.

The first systems I supported belonged to other people's businesses. In June 1996, a month after finishing a computer science degree at Mirlochan University, I joined Brennacove Computer Services in Moncton as a service-desk technician. We supported law offices, the administrative staff of a regional hospital and several small manufacturers. A caller rarely cared which component had failed; they wanted to know whether their files were safe and when they could work again. I learnt to answer the second question honestly before guessing at the first.

An outsourcer sells its clients a promise about other people's information. Callers never chose us; they chose a utility, an insurer or a software company, and reached our agents because that company hired us. I judge our systems by whether such a caller would recognise the arrangement if it were explained to them, not only by whether a contract permits it.

Company revenue in 2025
C$318M
Customer contact and IT support for 29 clients
Agent seats migrated
4,300
41 programmes moved to a cloud platform, 2024–2025
Measured availability, 2025
99.96%
Includes a 52-minute routing failure

I run the systems of a shared contact-centre business so that each client's data, calls and consent decisions stay separate even when agents, sites and platforms are shared.

I am chief information officer of Tidelorne Contact Services, a Moncton company listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange that answers calls, chats and emails and provides second-line IT support for 29 client organisations. We run six centres, in Moncton and Bathurst, Trois-Rivières and Sherbrooke, and Winnipeg and Brandon, plus about 700 agents working from home. Revenue in 2025 was C$318 million and we employ about 5,400 people. My 164 colleagues run the systems the company itself depends on: telephony, workforce management, client integrations, agent desktops and information security.

Our clients include utilities, property and casualty insurers, software companies and health-technology vendors. They hire us for trained people, but they also hand us their customers' personal information, their call recordings and, increasingly, their decisions about automation. Most of my work is keeping those commitments apart while agents, buildings and platforms are shared. A client's security reviewer wants to know where a recording sits and who can open it. An agent wants a schedule that matches the day actually worked. Our finance team wants the platform to cost less every year.

I began on a computer help desk in Moncton in 1996, moved into business telephony and then ran contact-centre systems for an insurer in Halifax before joining Tidelorne in 2010. That route left me wary of any change described only from the vendor's side. Each decision on this site cost something visible: agent flexibility, a vendor incentive and two prospective contracts. I set out those costs plainly because our audit and risk committee asked to see them that way.

Every programme on its own environment

Between 2021 and 2023 we moved all 36 programmes then running onto separate desktop pools, recording stores and encryption keys. Blended staffing ended for most clients, and occupancy at the affected centres fell three points before rebuilt forecasting recovered two.

4,300 seats moved one programme at a time

Our telephony migration ran for fifteen months rather than three weekends. Dual running cost C$2.3 million and we gave up a C$900,000 vendor incentive. Annual telephony cost is now C$3.1 million lower.

Agent-assist only where clients instructed it

Eleven programmes use real-time transcription and suggested answers, processed in Canada with a caller notice. We declined two prospective contracts worth C$4.2 million a year that wanted transcripts used for model training.

Current focus

I am preparing our next ISO/IEC 27001 surveillance audit while reviewing how long we keep recordings and transcripts for each client, because several retention schedules were written before transcription existed.

Conversations I welcome

I would welcome a first non-executive role on an audit, risk or technology committee of a Canadian organisation that holds customer information at scale, with about eighteen days a year available, subject to our board's consent and a check of client relationships.

The leadership record

Trusted with consequential decisions.

Formation

  • Bachelor of science in computer scienceMirlochan University · 1996
When Ethan brings me a recommendation, it arrives with the objection already written into it, usually in the words of the colleague who raised it. That made the telephony decision harder to approve and much easier to defend to clients afterwards.
Lucienne ThibodraisChief executive officer, Tidelorne Contact Services
The full record ↗

Contact

I would welcome a first non-executive role on an audit, risk or technology committee of a Canadian organisation that holds customer information at scale, with about eighteen days a year available, subject to our board's consent and a check of client relationships.

  • Board appointments
Write to Ethan Contact page