Infrastructure Team Kudos

Infrastructure Team Appreciation, the Infrastructure team is the glue that hold the Tech at a firm together, no doubt. Especially with the current complexity, information security, connectivity and the sheer amount of data and compute. All of this technology is in the background and only noticed when something is not working.

For the past few years, I had thought that as we move into the "Cloud" the need for infrastructure may lesson, but I have not seen this, I have seen the complexity, security, connectively and integration and vendor reliability has meant this team is as, if not more important as ever.

Although I started my "Info Tech" career as a Computer Operator, my real career kicked off as an Infrastructure/System Admin role back 20+ years.

The Infrastructure team, could go by another name, but the network/server/solutions engineers.

I had the opportunity to build the first (albeit small) infrastructure team at Diners Club and then move on to Join great teams at MinterEllison Ellison and Norton Rose Fulbright before getting my first Chief Information Officer role.?This means that to this day I have a soft spot for an Infrastructure team for sure, I am definitely not saying the other teams are not as valuable, however often the Service Desk and Applications teams are more visible to the business and the Infrastructure team is in the background, forgotten about, minimised and taken for granted.

When I arrived at Minter Ellison back in the day it was already a super strong team, with Leon Boda, Michael S. , Chris Edwards , Peter Domine , Gino Martiniello , Ben Lowry Adrian de Bear , Ben Tan and Nathan MacGregor led at the time by Luke Brindley , just to name a few, all these people were super smart and capable. Probably the most important thing I learnt (apart from having the best possible people!) was the importance of longevity in tenure in an Infrastructure team, the history of "why", I remember once looking at a problem relating to a very old router, that was implemented close to a decade earlier and realizing it was implemented by someone still in the team, instead of learning from scratch I just called up the guy and we sorted out the issue in minutes.

When I started at Norton Rose Fullbright, the team was small with Peter Gjokmarkovic , Rob Holmes , Ban Ch'ng and Jordan Jeffery , again these guys knew their stuff, it was a much newer team, where we had to unravel years of technology debt, luckily they all knew their stuff and managed to not only keep the firm running but make a real difference to how smooth everything was. At lunch yesterday, I told the story about when I started at NRF and the CIO asked me to let someone go from the team, thought they were "no good", I refused as I knew that history with the tech was really important, the IP and I personally rated the individual based on my initial interactions, to this day I am super happy with that call, the person was exceptional, maybe a bit odd, (aren’t we all?) but it was a really smart call for me, it helped me be successful and in truth the team and firm. Later we had Matt Davies and Ben Stirling join the team, honestly this was a super team that at the time was likely the best Infrastructure Team going around in Australia, big call, but it was a golden time, especially if you include Peter M. our Information Security Manager at the time who was always over performing.

Why this post?

As I hinted, we had a team lunch yesterday and I found myself at the end of the table with the Infrastructure team, rather than with the Managers at the other end, to me, this felt more like home, please do not get me wrong, I would loved the Managers end of the table as well, all super people, but later it got me thinking about how good our Technology team actually is, especially the Infrastructure team, and upon reflection probably pound for pound the best Infrastructure team going around right now in Australia, at least equal best.?They do so much, often without anyone really knowing and keep things running both now and into the future.?

So Massive Kudos to the team:

Carlo De-Fazio , Ben Watson , Jonathan Clifton , Dac Ngo , Yang Cao , Paul Hickey , Torben Scorgie , David McKone , if you include our Information Security Team, Ben Wright , Peter Corso and Dean Settinelli , with a total tenure of 120+ years.

If you have got this far and are a CEO, COO, CIO or anyone and you have not shown appreciation lately for this backbone sub team of your firms Technology team, send them some cookies, beers or even just a shout out, maybe just call them and let them know they are appreciated.