What a Townsville tenant file taught me

The file that taught me most was a manila folder in a Townsville office in 1995. A tenant had asked to transfer to another town, and the folder held her reasons: a protection order, a hospital letter and a note from her support worker. It also held the work orders for her flat, which our maintenance contractor collected from the same cabinet. Nobody had decided that a carpenter should be able to read about her former partner. The paperwork had simply been filed in one place. I have spent most of my career since then deciding where things should be filed and who should be able to open them.

I grew up in Mackay and completed a Bachelor of Business in information systems at Carrowmont University in November 1993. Townsville had few technology positions, so in February 1994 I joined Marrabine Housing Association as a tenancy officer. Marrabine managed about 640 homes then. I collected rent, ran entry inspections, attended tribunal hearings over arrears and learnt how much a household tells its landlord when it applies for a home. Within two years I was also maintaining the association's database, which is how I became its housing systems officer.

In 1999 I moved to Brisbane to work for Orrendale Property Systems, a company selling tenancy and property-management software to housing providers and councils. I implemented its software at fourteen organisations over five years and led a team of five by the end. The work taught me that a vendor's default settings become a client's policy unless someone questions them. Most of our customers let every staff member open every tenant screen because that was how the product shipped. I started asking, during each implementation, which roles needed which screens. It slowed projects and irritated my manager, but it gave me a habit.

From 2004 I sat on the other side of the work order at Sundercombe Maintenance Services, a contractor maintaining public and community housing and state schools across Queensland. As systems and contracts information manager, I built the mobile dispatch that sent work to 180 technicians and the portal through which roughly 300 subcontracting firms received it. I saw what tradespeople needed from a landlord's record: an address, a way in, a contact number and any safety instruction. I also saw how often they received much more, because it was easier for housing providers to send everything than to choose.

In October 2009 I joined Calvenmoor Housing in Brisbane as manager of information systems. Calvenmoor managed 3,900 tenancies with a tenancy system, a separate maintenance package and a great many spreadsheets. I replaced the arrears spreadsheets with system workflows, introduced after-hours maintenance routing and, in 2013, led the technology workstream when Calvenmoor's board agreed to merge with Marrabine. I completed a part-time graduate certificate in information security in 2012, mostly in the evenings, because the merger was going to put two sets of tenant records into one system and I wanted to understand the risks properly.

Wynnorra Community Housing began in July 2014. As general manager of technology and information I consolidated two tenancy systems into one, moving 7,300 tenancy records, and replaced two maintenance systems with a single work-order platform shared with our contractors. That portal, launched in 2016, is the one I later had to cut back. I wrote its access model too generously. Contractors could see forty-six tenant fields, including free-text alerts, because the maintenance team asked for them and I did not argue hard enough.

I became chief information officer in July 2019. The role sits on the executive team, reports to the chief executive and reports quarterly to the board's Audit, Risk and Technology Committee. Since then I have restricted contractor access, led our response to a mailbox compromise in 2023 and argued for a physical resurvey of every home. None of those decisions involved remarkable technology. They involved choosing what our systems should hold, who should see it and how we would know it was still accurate.

I lead through a small number of rules that the team can apply without me. A field must have a stated purpose before it is collected. An account must have a named owner who confirms it each quarter. A forecast must say when its underlying data was last checked. I hold weekly sessions with tenancy and maintenance managers, because the people who use our systems with tenants usually see a problem before my team does.

I have not held a directorship. I have presented to Wynnorra's board and reported to its committee for seven years, and I know the difference between explaining a risk and sharing responsibility for accepting it. A first board role would test that difference properly, and I would expect to spend the early part of it listening.

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