Learning whose customers I was serving

The first systems I supported belonged to other people's businesses. In June 1996, a month after finishing a computer science degree at Mirlochan University, I joined Brennacove Computer Services in Moncton as a service-desk technician. We supported law offices, the administrative staff of a regional hospital and several small manufacturers. A caller rarely cared which component had failed; they wanted to know whether their files were safe and when they could work again. I learnt to answer the second question honestly before guessing at the first.

In 1999 I moved to Tessivane Business Communications in Fredericton, which sold and maintained business telephone systems across the Maritimes. Voice engineering gave me a lasting respect for the parts of a service nobody notices until they stop. A misrouted trunk or a forgotten number translation could leave a business silent while every internal check looked healthy. Over five years I installed and repaired systems for customers ranging from a dental practice to a 300-seat collections centre. That collections centre taught me how much of a contact centre's behaviour lives in routing rules nobody had written down.

Marrisholt Mutual Insurance hired me in 2004 to look after the telephony behind its Halifax customer and claims centre, and from 2007 I managed all of its contact-centre systems. The insurer had about 600 agents and a strict view of policyholder privacy. I introduced its first workforce management system and found that schedulers, agents and supervisors read the same forecast in very different ways. When a winter storm doubled claims calls overnight, the forecast helped only if the people answering trusted that their breaks and shifts would be honoured afterwards. I also worked through the insurer's first card-payment compliance assessment, which showed me how one recording practice could bring an entire telephony estate into scope.

I joined Tidelorne in May 2010 as director of contact-centre technology. The company then had three centres and about 1,800 people. Unlike an insurer, an outsourcer never owns the customer relationship it serves. Every system decision has a client behind it, often several, and their contracts do not always agree. The founders were candid that the business had grown faster than its systems. In my first year I found three telephony platforms, two of them beyond support, and client reports compiled by hand every Monday morning. Consolidating them took most of 2011 and showed me that clients accept an awkward cutover more readily once they have seen reconciled evidence from a pilot. I built the telephony and workforce systems team, equipped our Winnipeg centre when it opened in 2012 and helped prepare the descriptions of IT controls needed before our listing in 2014.

As vice-president of IT operations and security from 2014, I added infrastructure, end-user computing and information security. We received our first SOC 2 Type II report in 2017, and the work changed how I think about evidence. A control that operates but leaves no record is, for a client's auditor, a control that might not exist. I also began reporting to our audit and risk committee, where I learnt to describe an incident by its effect on clients before its technical cause.

I became chief information officer in April 2019. Since then my work has gathered around three questions. Can a client be sure its information is isolated from every other client's? Can we change the platform beneath 4,300 seats without callers noticing? Can we introduce automated assistance without breaking promises made to callers and agents who never asked for it? The cases on this site describe one decision on each, including who disagreed and what we gave up.

Many of my colleagues work night shifts in centres I visit monthly at best, and that shapes how I lead. I ask managers to write a decision once in the language a client's security reviewer would use and again in the language an agent would use. If either version sounds evasive, the decision usually needs more work. I am wary of any change that improves a dashboard while making an agent's shift harder, because agents notice that cost first and are rarely asked about it.

I am not a lawyer, a privacy officer or an auditor. Tidelorne has a privacy officer, outside counsel and external assessors, and I depend on each of them. My part is to turn their conclusions into system designs that can be tested, and to report honestly when a design falls short. That habit, together with an operator's sense of how outsourced work reaches the people a company serves, is what I would offer a board.

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