The permission that travels with every mapped point

I am chief data officer of Pellarwick Geospatial, an Edmonton software company whose products collect field survey observations, hold municipal infrastructure registers and keep utility network records. We earned C$164 million in 2025, employ about 780 people and serve 370 municipalities, 88 electricity, gas and water utilities and some 2,900 survey and engineering firms in Canada and the northern United States. I lead 52 colleagues across data governance, platform engineering, product analytics and the preparation of data for machine-learning models. I report to the chief executive and present to our board and its audit and risk committee.

I came to this role from the customer side. I spent four years carrying a total station across Alberta farmland, five years reconciling field notes for a Calgary survey practice, five more maintaining land and utility records for a rural county, and four managing the network records of an electricity distributor. At each stage I learnt that a coordinate is only as useful as the account of how it was measured, and that the people who supplied a record usually had a specific use in mind. Pellarwick hired me in 2017 partly because I had complained, as their customer, about exactly those questions.

Three decisions on this site show the work. We trained an asset-detection model only on imagery from customers who signed a separate consent, which delayed its launch by seven months. We paused a cross-product records integration after an acquisition because positions disagreed by up to two metres. We withdrew precise locations from a benchmark product before it reached insurers. None of these was free, and each depended on product, legal and commercial colleagues accepting a slower or smaller result.

Current focus

I am rewriting our standard customer terms so that service use, product analytics, model training and aggregated benchmarks are four separate permissions, each with its own default and a plain explanation a municipal clerk can take to council.

Conversations I welcome

I am open to a first independent board seat in Canada, particularly an audit and risk or technology and privacy committee role, with up to twenty-two days a year available, subject to the written consent my chief executive has agreed in principle to give.