Six appointments between the bill and the field crew

Mandate

Make corporate, commercial and field systems dependable through the wet season and meet the cyber obligations in the company's supply contracts.

Outcomes

• Moved corporate recovery to Brisbane for A$3.2 million; invoicing and customer notices ran through a thirty-one-hour head-office outage in March 2025
• Delivered an offline job application to 380 field staff; same-day job closure rose from 54 to 89 per cent
• Brought invoicing support in-house for about A$0.6 million a year; the annual indexation round fell from nine weeks to four
• Prepared the annual risk-management report for board approval each year

Decisions in context

The CIO role combined two estates that had grown up separately. Corporate and commercial systems had been run as an office function, while station control systems belonged to operations. I kept that ownership clear but gave both one view of risk, one recovery plan and one supplier register. My first two years were spent on recovery and field systems, because the wet season exposed their weaknesses every year. The invoicing decision followed when the managed-service contract approached renewal. I report to the chief executive and present quarterly to the audit and risk committee, which also reviews the annual risk-management report before the board approves it. I am accountable for the technology budget and for the honesty of what reaches directors. Operations, commercial and finance executives own the decisions their systems support, and I try to make that line visible in every paper.

Reason for the move

Current appointment, which I intend to keep while adding one outside governance role.

Mandate

Establish what the operational estate contained and bring supplier access and field tools under control.

Outcomes

• Recorded 1,400 operational devices across thirty-eight stations in a single register
• Routed supplier remote access to every station through one brokered gateway
• Replaced paper and radio job dispatch at eight of fourteen regional bases
• Fitted satellite terminals to the first 60 field vehicles

Decisions in context

I joined a power business that knew its engines, panels and batteries far better than its software. The remote operations centre's systems were well maintained, but nobody held a complete list of the devices connected to them or of the suppliers who could reach them remotely. My team spent the first year building that register with base technicians, often by flying to sites. The most exposed stations were those whose equipment suppliers maintained them over satellite links, using arrangements agreed years earlier. Consolidating that access behind one gateway took eighteen months and some uncomfortable conversations with suppliers who preferred their own tools. I also inherited the field-dispatch programme, which replaced radio job dispatch at most bases and taught me exactly where coverage ended. The role gave me credibility with operations engineers that I still rely on as CIO.

Reason for the move

Appointed chief information officer when that role took on shared oversight of operational technology security.

Mandate

Run outsourced infrastructure and application support for a state water business and a port corporation.

Outcomes

• Renewed both contracts on revised service levels in 2014
• Reduced priority-one incidents on the water account from thirty-one a year to nine
• Introduced client shadowing for critical changes, later adopted on two further accounts

Decisions in context

This was my education in outsourcing from the side that sends the invoice. I ran two public-sector accounts and answered to our managing director for service levels and margin. Both clients were well served by most measures. I nevertheless saw their understanding of their own systems thin out each year, as experienced staff left and my engineers became the only people who knew why a configuration existed. The contracts rewarded our response times and said nothing about knowledge. I introduced shadowing, in which client staff joined critical changes, partly because it reduced our own risk of being blamed for decisions we had not made. It was popular with one client and ignored by the other. I left when I realised I wanted to be the person deciding what to outsource, not the person explaining afterwards what had been lost.

Reason for the move

Wanted to carry a client's accountability for its systems rather than a provider's.

Mandate

Make maintenance records from mine sites complete and timely despite unreliable connectivity.

Outcomes

• Redesigned synchronisation so that devices held a full roster of work offline
• Cut missing or out-of-order work records from about 9 per cent to under 1 per cent
• Standardised rugged devices from five models to two

Decisions in context

The mines paid us for completed maintenance, so a missing record was a missing invoice and sometimes a disputed safety inspection. Our fitters worked twelve-hour shifts on sites where the network reached the workshop but not the pit. Their tablets were supposed to synchronise continuously; in practice they often held a shift's work and then sent it in the wrong order. I rebuilt the synchronisation around the assumption that the device was the master copy until it reconnected, with clear rules for conflicts. I learnt the work by riding with supervisors and watching fitters use gloves, torches and dusty screens. The CFO gave me a small team and considerable freedom. Those five years gave me my lasting preference for testing field software where conditions are worst, which shaped the technicians' application at Ollanvale fifteen years later.

Reason for the move

Joined a managed-service provider to understand outsourced IT from the provider's side.

Mandate

Change the billing system safely through a period of tariff reform.

Outcomes

• Recorded the reasons behind about 260 billing rules before they were changed
• Implemented a tiered water charge in fourteen weeks without a billing reversal
• Introduced parallel billing runs for every tariff change

Decisions in context

I joined as an analyst and led the billing systems team from 2003. The system had been altered for every tariff decision since its installation, and many alterations were undocumented. My team's most valuable work was unglamorous: recording why each rule existed, who had asked for it and what would break if it changed. When the business introduced a tiered water charge, we needed fourteen weeks, and most of that time went on finding earlier exceptions rather than writing new code. We ran old and new calculations side by side for two billing cycles before switching. No bills were reversed. The experience made me sceptical of any billing estimate that starts with the new requirement instead of the existing code. I moved to Mackay because I wanted to work closer to physical operations than a billing team allows.

Reason for the move

Moved to Mackay to run field systems in a mining environment.

Mandate

Write and test billing changes for council clients.

Outcomes

• Built a test library from each council's rounding and concession rules
• Worked on year-2000 remediation of the billing package across eleven councils
• Took first-line support calls from council revenue officers during notice runs

Decisions in context

My first employer sold one billing package to eleven councils, each of which had its own rules for rounding, concessions and instalments. I wrote code changes and tested them, at first under close supervision. The one-cent rounding error I describe in my biography happened in my first year and changed how I tested. I built a library of each council's rules so that a change could be run against all of them before release. During notice runs I also took calls from council revenue officers, which was the best training I could have had in what a billing defect costs the people outside the software team. The year-2000 remediation filled much of my last eighteen months. I left because I wanted to see how a utility lived with billing software every day, rather than how a vendor shipped it.

Reason for the move

Joined a water business to work on billing from the client side.