From billing code to the far side of coverage

The first bill I helped send was wrong by one cent. In 1996 I was a graduate analyst-programmer at Merriwen Software, a small Brisbane firm whose rates and water-billing package ran in eleven Queensland councils. A rounding change I had tested on one council's data produced a one-cent difference on 4,800 notices at another council, whose rules rounded differently. Nobody lost money that mattered, but its revenue officer spent two days answering calls. I learnt that billing code carries local decisions that are rarely written down, and that the people who answer the telephone pay for a programmer's assumptions.

That lesson took me to Moorlenna Water in 2000, a council-owned water and sewerage business in south-east Queensland, where I joined the billing team and later led it. Our system had been modified for every tariff change since installation. I spent much of those years recording why a rule existed before anyone altered it. When the business introduced a tiered water charge, my team of nine needed fourteen weeks, most of them spent discovering earlier exceptions. I became wary of any estimate for a billing change that did not begin with an inventory of what the code already did.

In 2006 I moved north to Mackay as field systems manager at Brolgavale Mining Services, a maintenance contractor on open-cut coal mines in the Bowen Basin. Our fitters recorded work on rugged tablets that were meant to synchronise with the planning system. On some sites they could not connect for a whole shift, and records arrived out of order or not at all. I redesigned the synchronisation so that a device could hold a full roster of work and resolve conflicts on reconnection. I also spent many hours in utes with supervisors, which taught me more about software design than any specification.

From 2011 I worked on the other side of the contract. As service delivery director at Halvarine Technology Services, a Brisbane managed-service provider, I ran outsourced infrastructure and application support for two public-sector clients and answered for service levels and margin. I watched knowledge of each client's systems settle into a handful of my engineers while the client's own staff lost the ability to question our estimates. Neither side intended it. It followed from contracts that measured response times rather than understanding. I left in 2016 because I wanted to carry a client's accountability instead of explaining a provider's.

Ollanvale Energy appointed me general manager of operational technology and field systems in September 2016. I reported to the executive general manager of operations and looked after the remote operations centre's systems, the control systems and communications at each station, and the tools our technicians carry. My first year went on establishing what was connected to what. We found 1,400 devices across the thirty-eight stations we then ran, some reachable through arrangements that only a supplier's technician understood. We routed all supplier access through a single brokered gateway that the operations centre could watch and switch off. I completed a graduate certificate in cyber security part-time in 2019, because I needed to challenge specialists as an informed client.

I became chief information officer in March 2021. The role joins corporate and commercial systems with shared responsibility for the security of station control systems, which our operations division owns in daily practice. Most of our stations sit outside the Commonwealth's critical-infrastructure regime, but mining customers write comparable cyber and incident-notification duties into their contracts, so our board now approves an annual risk report modelled on that regime. I spend more time than I expected explaining residual risk in plain language. I try to show directors what remains unfixed and when we expect to fix it, rather than offering a maturity score on its own.

A few fixed habits shape how I lead. Every major change has a named owner outside technology. Recovery tests involve the people who would actually do the recovering, including customer-desk staff and base supervisors. Contracts state which knowledge must stay with us. I visit at least two remote bases every wet season, because the questions a technician asks in Katherine are rarely the ones raised in a Cairns meeting room.

Colleagues describe me as patient with detail and slow to accept a supplier's assurance. Some of my decisions have cost money that a cheaper option would have saved, and the cases on this site record where I was wrong. I would like to take those lessons to a board in another essential service, where recovery, dependence on suppliers and the gap between a tested capability and an assumed one deserve the same attention.

Open to Board appointments

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