From one plant's backups to seventy-eight systems

Mandate

Bring plant control, telemetry, infrastructure, business applications and asset records under one accountable technology function as the company keeps acquiring systems.

Outcomes

• Replaced the 2009 work and asset management system with a subscription service in three of four regions
• Reduced the share of service lines of unknown material from 38 to 14 per cent
• Required field verification of district meters before leakage results reach directors
• Decommissioned 31 on-premises servers in 2026

Decisions in context

The CTO appointment joined plant technology to the business systems that had previously reported to finance. That mattered because the same questions now crossed both: whether a reading could be trusted, how a cost would be treated in a rate case, and who would support a system after its vendor moved on. I lead five managers and keep operators and field supervisors involved in design reviews. I do not set treatment practice, staffing or the company's regulatory strategy, and I make sure my proposals state which of those they depend on. The leakage verification and the subscription decision both happened in this role, and both disappointed colleagues who had good reasons for their positions. My quarterly reports to the audit and risk committee cover cyber risk, unsupported systems and technology capital, and they name the open items I have not yet resolved.

Reason for the move

Current appointment; preparing for a first independent board seat compatible with this role.

Mandate

Bring acquired plants and pumping stations into a common, supportable control environment without weakening operators' ability to run them.

Outcomes

• Brought 14 acquired systems into the central control environment through segmented networks
• Reduced remote-access routes into plant networks from 37 to two brokered gateways
• Created a standard controller-logic library for pumping stations, tanks and filters
• Held one acquired plant on local control for eleven months while its network was rebuilt

Decisions in context

I arrived as the company's acquisition programme accelerated. Each system came with different controllers, different integrators and different ideas about who could connect from where. I spent my first months visiting plants and listing what was actually installed, because the records rarely matched. The rebuild that followed was slow by design: one site at a time, with operators signing off the new screens before the old ones were removed. The Kentucky plant decision, described in my cases, tested whether that discipline would survive a timetable in an acquisition filing. It did, with the cost recorded. I reported to the chief operating officer, which kept me close to the people whose shifts my decisions affected. I began presenting to the audit and risk committee in 2019, initially once a year and quarterly from 2021, usually alongside the operations leaders whose plants were affected.

Reason for the move

Appointed chief technology officer when business applications and asset records were combined with operational technology.

Mandate

Build a practice advising utilities on control-system design, security and resilience planning.

Outcomes

• Led control-system reviews and resilience work for 41 utilities
• Supported larger community water systems with assessments under the 2018 federal requirement
• Introduced an inventory-first method before any network design was proposed

Decisions in context

Consulting gave me breadth that a single utility could not. In five and a half years I worked with forty-one utilities, from a city system serving 600,000 people to a rural district with one plant and a part-time operator. The 2018 federal requirement for risk and resilience assessments brought many of them to examine their control networks seriously for the first time. I learnt that the largest risks were usually ordinary: shared passwords, undocumented connections and nobody clearly responsible for the network between the plant and the office. I also learnt the limits of advice. A recommendation could be accepted warmly in a meeting and then never funded or staffed. By 2018 I wanted to be accountable for implementing the measures I had been proposing to others, and Halverick's acquisition programme offered exactly that problem at scale.

Reason for the move

Moved to an operating utility to carry responsibility for the systems rather than advise on them.

Mandate

Restore operators' confidence in plant instruments and the supervisory system inherited from several integrators.

Outcomes

• Created a single register and calibration schedule for about 1,900 instruments
• Replaced telemetry at 74 pumping stations over four years
• Reduced nuisance alarms at the largest plant by about 70 per cent through operator-led reviews

Decisions in context

This was my first role on the client side, and it changed how I judged my earlier work. Operators at the largest plant had learnt to silence alarms they considered unreliable, which meant genuine alarms were sometimes missed for a few minutes. I did not blame them; the system had taught them that habit. We reviewed every alarm with each shift, removed or reset the ones that served no purpose and recalibrated the instruments behind the rest. The register of 1,900 instruments became the district's first complete account of what it owned. I presented the telemetry replacement programme to the trustees' operations committee, which taught me to explain technical risk to people who were not engineers but carried public accountability. I completed my part-time master's degree during this period, studying in the evenings while managing the team.

Reason for the move

Joined consulting to work across many utilities and on resilience planning.

Mandate

Design, program and commission controls for municipal pumping stations and treatment plants.

Outcomes

• Programmed controls for more than 60 pumping and lift stations
• Led eight treatment-plant control upgrades as project lead
• Introduced a client handover pack with full logic, drawings and credentials

Decisions in context

Integration work taught me how control systems are actually built: under schedule pressure, by small teams, often with the client's operators too busy to attend the factory test. I wrote logic for pumping stations, filter galleries and lift stations, and from 2004 led projects of up to US$3 million. The handover pack I introduced began as a personal habit. A client had called me eighteen months after a project because nobody could change a setpoint without my password. I decided that a finished project should leave the utility fully independent of us and of me. Not every client wanted to pay for that, and some colleagues at Orvandale Controls thought it reduced our future service work. The question of who controls a system after the contractor leaves still shapes how I buy plant technology today.

Reason for the move

Moved to a utility to take responsibility for systems after commissioning.

Mandate

Maintain and improve controls on drying, conveying and extraction equipment.

Outcomes

• Documented manual operating practices before controller changes
• Rewrote dryer control sequences with shift supervisors' review
• Assembled the plant's first complete set of controller backups

Decisions in context

My first job taught me humility before it taught me engineering. I changed a dryer sequence that looked inefficient and removed a manual hold the night crew relied on during wet harvests. The shift supervisor was right to make me reverse it. Afterwards I asked operators to walk me through any equipment before I touched its logic, and I started writing down the practices that existed only in their heads. I also gathered the plant's first complete set of controller backups, because I found that two programs existed only on the machines themselves and nowhere else. The work was practical and local, and I had no authority beyond my assigned projects. It gave me a respect for operators that has shaped every later role, and a curiosity about public utilities that took me to integration work in 2000.

Reason for the move

Joined an integrator to work on public water and wastewater systems.