Four vantage points on the same control panel

The first control program I changed on my own authority ran a grain dryer, and a shift supervisor made me change it back. It was 1997, two months after I finished an electrical engineering degree at Harlanmere Institute of Technology, and I had joined Wendlecote Grain Processing as a process-control engineer. My change was technically correct. It also removed a manual hold that the night crew used during wet harvests, which nobody had written down. I learnt that a control system records how a plant is meant to run, the people on shift know how it actually runs, and the two accounts must be reconciled before anything is altered.

In 2000 I moved to Orvandale Controls, an Ohio integrator that built control panels and supervisory systems for municipal water and wastewater utilities. Over six and a half years I wrote programmable logic for pumping stations, filter galleries and lift stations, and later led projects of up to US$3 million. Integrators are paid to finish, and finishing tempts a project to leave behind whatever the next person will struggle with: undocumented tags, passwords known only to the commissioning engineer, a dial-up modem kept for convenience. I began insisting on a handover pack the utility's own staff could use without calling us. Some clients valued it. Others saw a cost they had not asked for.

Ellisbrae Regional Sewer District hired me in 2007 to manage its instrumentation and control team, then five technicians responsible for three treatment plants and 74 pumping stations. I was now the client, and I inherited systems built by several integrators, two of them projects of my own. The district taught me what operators do when a pump and a screen disagree: they believe the pump, and they stop believing the screen until someone proves it has been put right. I spent much of six years rebuilding that confidence through calibration schedules, alarm reviews with each plant and a single register of every instrument. I completed a part-time master's degree in engineering management at Dunsmoor University in 2010, largely to understand the capital-planning arguments I kept losing.

Consulting came next. I joined the water practice of Varrington Engineering in 2013 and later led its control-systems and resilience group of 24 engineers. After the 2018 federal law requiring larger community water systems to complete risk and resilience assessments, much of our work helped utilities examine their control networks properly for the first time. The contrast between clients was instructive. A large utility might have a documented network and an unresolved argument about who owned it; a small one might have neither. I learnt to start with an inventory and a conversation with operators before proposing any design.

I joined Halverick Water Company in March 2019 as vice president of operational technology. The company had been family-controlled since 1911 and, from 2016, majority-owned by a Canadian pension investor that wanted to grow by buying small municipal and private systems. Each purchase brought its own control equipment, records and habits. My task was to bring those systems into a common environment without leaving operators less able to run them. I became chief technology officer in January 2023, when business applications, infrastructure and asset records joined my remit.

I lead through five managers and expect them to put operators and field crews in the room before a design is settled. I try to keep apart three questions that tend to merge in a technology budget: whether a system is safe and supportable, whether its data is reliable enough for the decision it will inform, and how its cost will be treated by our regulators. Each has a different owner and needs a different kind of evidence. When I report to our board's audit and risk committee, I try to keep those questions distinct and to say plainly where my recommendation has cost the company something it had planned to have.

I am now preparing for a first independent board seat. Water and wastewater are the obvious fit, but a regulated or infrastructure-services company running ageing plant technology could also use a director who has been integrator, client, adviser and operator in turn. I am clear about what I lack. I have presented to boards and committees for more than a decade without serving as a director, and I would want an experienced chair and a defined committee role before assuming I understood the collective duty that comes with the seat.

Open to Board appointments

Languages / English