Software ready before the site gate opens

I am chief technology officer of Quorrindale Site Systems, a privately owned Melbourne company whose software runs gate sign-in, worker inductions, safety paperwork, site diaries and defect records for about 620 builders and civil contractors. On a typical weekday roughly 1,850 sites use it and about 58,000 workers sign in, most of them between six and quarter past seven. Revenue for the year to 30 June 2026 was A$47.2 million. I lead 58 engineers, platform, security and data staff, and a technology budget of A$13.6 million that includes A$3.9 million of cloud spending.

My first job, in February 1999, was writing plant-hire and timesheet systems for a civil contractor in Newcastle. I spent enough mornings in site sheds to learn that a foreman will abandon any screen that slows the start of work. Later I wrote permit software for local councils and then spent five years on a hosting company's on-call rota in Sydney, where outages taught me to write down what had happened before anyone discussed blame. I joined Quorrindale in 2014, when it had nine engineers.

The decisions I find worth discussing all involved giving something up. We paused most feature work for eleven weeks to separate each customer's data properly inside the database. We moved older site photographs to slower, cheaper storage and lost a customer over it. We paid more than twice as much to keep our standby systems in Melbourne rather than Singapore because our contracts promise Australian hosting. None of those choices was free, and I describe their costs as plainly as their results.

Current focus

I am rebuilding the permits module, which we deferred for two quarters to fund the standby work, and teaching our seven product teams to estimate the cloud cost of a feature before they build it rather than after the invoice arrives.

Conversations I welcome

I am seeking a first non-executive role on a board or its audit and risk committee, in software, construction services or a member organisation, with about twenty-two days a year available subject to my chief executive's consent and a conflicts review.