Between 1998 & 2007 I spent numerous years doing data analysis, presentation & training for over 350 organizations.

I am no longer active in IT services or consulting, nor seeking any work within in it. My interests now lie in innovation, arts & culture, as I work as Executive Director of Innovtion at 2thinknow.

350+ Organizations.

Clients across all industries & sectors, included:

Kelloggs. Zurich Insurance. Anglican Church. Catholic Education. Toyota. Commonwealth Bank. ANZ Investment Bank. NAB/National Australia Bank. Fitch Ratings. Reserve Bank. NRMA. IAG. Red Cross. LendLease. Merrill Lynch. Pfizer. Optus. Freehills. 3M. Readers Digest. Price Waterhouse/Coopers Lybrand. NSW State government. Victorian State Government. Australian Defence Dept. DSTO.  State Ferries NSW. State Rail NSW. State Transit NSW. GPT. Westfield. RPA hospital. Cranswick Wines. Rice Growers Association of Australia. Sunrice. Worley/Worley Parsons. McDonalds. NSW Fire Brigades. Parliament of Victoria – Assembly, Council & Joint Committees. Barlow Jonker. Air Services Australia. Boral. James Hardie. Legato. Primary & English Teachers Association NSW. IMA. Transfield. Just Group.

Data is the Truth of a Corporation.

All the diversity of work, across industries & departments (sometimes I would see 7-10 firms in one week), gave me a huge exposure to corporations.

My understanding, not being grounded in the “shoulds” of business school, I saw more & more how things actually worked. Politically, yes. But more importantly how a pronouncement looked in the “data”.

Constant exposure to different corporations (and my AGSM studies, as well as my reading during periods) helped me understand the reality gap between theory & practice.

Projects.

Some of these, mainly in 1998-2001, were training in advanced VBA or data analysis using excel. Some was training in formatting financial data (as in Reserve Bank’s case). Or training in data presentation.

Learning from NRMA.

In 1998-99 I worked for NRMA/IAG a lot during demutualization, working for GM of Corporate Strategy Mario Pirone. Projects often included summarising content by McKinseys, AT Kearney & others for board presentations.

The diagrams I worked on gave me, and reading real strategy content first hand, gave me an early appreciation for corporate strategy & board processes, for which I shall be forever indebted.

Being a fly on the wall (outside the CEO’s office) during demutualisation; was incredibly instructive on real world outcomes, not bloated theory MBAs learn. Having seen the real world, I’ve been an advocate for more commercial exchange as part of university. The real world does not waste time for formulas or ‘empowerment’.

As well as my later work for all the GMs through their assistants this taught me a lot. At the same time I was working for HR dept, and building tools for frontline training of staff in corporate initiatives. it was fascinating observing both top-level strategy become front-line training.

I have to say NRMA Insurance taught me the most about how business really works, and a good, principled  corporation.

For a contrast, I was also teaching evening classes in IT & other subjects to Non-English Speaking Background students. This I found enriching, but I felt that it was hard to help them break into the business world.

Simple.

In the 2001-07 my projects were exclusively with my firm simple (www.simple.net.au) where I was Director of Consulting in 2006.

In many cases I built financial or budgetary systems – as for LendLease Retail, Catholic Education Office or Anglican Church. Sometimes asset or project management systems for numerous government branches.

In 2004-07 I supervised project staff to complete these projects. Such as Commonwealth Bank’s Annual Report automation project.

Much of the data analysis I did personally later, was highly confidential/sensitive & included locating mis-payments, lost assets, and large errors.

High Growth.

The firm grew at triple digit growth for over 3 years, before deciding to halt operations. I did this in anticipation of the 2008 crash, and to stave off numerous health problems caused by the 80+ hour weeks.

The firm was founded in 1999, I became Director in 2001 and it really took off in late 2003. Needless to say, this was quite stressful, and became moreso as capacity constraints in the Australia economy became prevalent in 2006.

Even travel could not relieve the stress, I was eating too much, depressed and I had no time for art. In 2005-2006 I was averaging around 150 days a year interstate on projects for Catholic Education, various banks/financial services, LendLease and branches of Government.

I once worked 28 days straight from 8am to 10pm to finish projects that contractors had left incomplete. I became frustrated with the absence of quality IT personnel in Australia available as the economy overheated.

Big Numbers.

In 2006 I had been developing a model whilst travelling for Innovation Cities, and this eventually became 2thinknow, initially as a quick weekend enterprise.

In 2003  I started a MBA at AGSM (now UNSW Business). The Economics content (where I received a Distinction) fascinated me & enable me to understand better the systems built for clients.

The accounting module (despite previous night school studies) opened my eyes. And intensive work with Michael Duffy at Catholic Education and projects for Dennis Price at Lendlease greatly improved my understanding of accounting & marketing in the real world.

My work on numetrous financial services projects convinced me that not many people in banking actually understood the risk models they were using. Where a single 0.01 could make a Million dollars difference, I could see problems.

Implementation is the real ball game.

As I built systems for others, and analysed their systems, I could see how KPIs actually worked in implementation. High-faluting theories often stuck in implementing. I remember numerous never completed Cognos roll-outs.

Sometimes the bottom-up tactical implementation was neglected, and would defeat the top-down strategy. I learnt from this to always listen to users, something which was rare in IT & data analysis.

The more I workshopped,  analyzed needs & developed systems for clients the more I could see technology alone is not the answer. Nor are people. Nor even strategy.

It’s an integration of 5 processes, and I subsequently built a model to explain this. I introduced this as part of my MBA studies, but quickly found the lecturer preferred I regurgitate academic theories that didn’t work.

He ended up guinea-pigging his ideas on corporations. Good luck!

“Talking good Game”.

Having met numerous Australian IT professors, and learnt the fact that very few of them know anything practical, I believe they teach IT students in Australia the most impractical, useless, outdate knowledge.

IT education in Australia is a parochial, outdated notion, so much so that very few of the brighter students turn up to classes at notable universities. I once chaired a group of these bitter, outdated & socially inept souls at the Australian Computer Society IT symposium in 2006 I think.

Of the programmers I met over the years I held the highest opinion of the skills of German, US & Canadian programmers. I believe this is attibuted to commercial integration into the curricula, something Australian IT deprtments parochially despise, in my experience.

For different reasons the Nordic countries, as well as Czech, Poland & Estonia seem to generate some of the best IT people I have met.

I found over the years, a lot of people learn the buzzwords & regurgitate their way through interviews & sometimes exams. Foreign student funding means lecturers often pass students who do not have commercial skills.

In many cases graduates of second-tier Australian universities cannot read, write or spell – something I noted in numerous CVs.

You’ll pardon all these observations, as one of the main ways I received clients was often cleaning up others failed projects or implementations from academics, theorists, hobbyists more well-known firms.

I respected people for what they “did” not what they “said”. I am too much an idealist I think, and too much an American as well.

And the corporate world rather more works on the basis of “talking a good game” and hoping like hell you never have to implement (or outsourcing it).

Although I can’t complain too much. It was my stressful bread & butter for numerous years. In the end it enabled me to travel.

Project Management.

I am not necessarily tough to be a great project manager. Although I would say around the world Australian’s political skills enables them to be the world’s best project managers.

Australian’s may not have tolerance for coding standards (like Germans), but I grew to respect the numerous project managers I met for their chutzpah, guts, forcefulness with guile & sheer will to drag projects over the line.

As a few in Australian ICT have noted, Australians are brilliant users of technology, and perhaps, unless they receive better training is where the skills really lie.

Skills.

In the end my strength was in integrating both executive strategy & bottom-up frontline implementation. The biggest learning curve was comparatives across all industries & multiple locations over the 10 year period.

I understand how things actually work, not how they “should”.

Technical Skills.

Technical skills  acquired have helped me do many things since – including designing 2thinknow’s website & building my own Content Management System for it.

Most notably working on innovation analysis.

These technical  skills over this period included:

• Workshopping Interface Design
• Report Design
• Dashboard Design
• Microsoft Project Management
• Access VBA to an advanced level
• SQL (normally I got others to do this)
• Excel Analysis of every data type from shipping, sales, finance, headcount, kpis, scorecards, flight data, dashboards, et al.
• Massive Excel pivot-tables
• Excel VBA
• Excel Graphs of every shape, size & type
• PowerPoint (my slideshows were legendary)
• Microsoft Visio
• HTML/CSS/Scripting
• Windows Server administration
• Butchering MS Exchange Administration