Thankfulness is a foundation for a healthy attitude for living, providing an elegant balance for the natural desire of people to seek more: the motivation of the "Hungry Spirit" (Handy, 1999). This applies in all areas of my life but for the purpose of this article I look at the people to who have contributed to my IT career.
Thanks to Mick Ryan and John Filetti for giving me the opportunity to design and write some software that was deployed across the Vodafone call centres. It allowed customer service staff to answer customers' questions about how to call other countries and their time zones. This gave me a taste for the joy of delivering a useful tool that made life more convenient, providing better service and the beauty of software to deliver a uniform and predictable result.
The first real break as a programmer came through the referral of a friend, Peter Luckock, who had a connection to Peter Bourke. At the time Peter was the head of Horwath Computing Services, a company that provided banking loan risk assessment software solutions.
From there I was lucky to enter the Dot-Com boom by joining Webcom and working with one of the owners, Richard Morgan. Richard's great sense of adventure and passion for technology created a very energetic culture within the company as we seized every project with a can-do attitude.
My first Enterprise Architecture experience at Hoyts was thanks to Patrick Teh for giving me authority to shape the organisation's systems. He expected each member of the team to behave as accountable units and given the freedom to act independently, we each delivered on our responsibilities.
At Altiris (and later Symantec) I was grateful to Tony Nguyen and Steve Gibbon for hiring me. For a time I worked with Scott Hopwood and appreciated his management skills, insightful ability to see abstract patterns and passion for sharing those insights. Michael Sainsbury was the Chief Technology Officer and a key founding member so I appreciate his hand in building one of the most successful and creative software organisations that I have witnessed first-hand.
Nayyar Ghaznavi at FujiXerox empowered me to work across the enterprise in a number of different systems including the CRM. Of particular interest was my work in designing and building an Object Management Framework and this was an implementation of a major project for my Masters degree.
Angela Hosking must get a special mention as she placed me at Altiris and FujiXerox and continues to be one of the most professional, personable and effective recruiters in the market today.
As True Software (my consulting company) was launched, there was now an opportunity to create independent solutions that represented genuine value for my clients: meaningful results for their business that save money and create wealth. I had some great help in getting the company off the ground especially from Anne-Marie Orrock. Since then I have partnered on a number of projects with Ian Fewtrell and David Jordan and thanks to their deep experience in business I learn something every time I talk with them.
From here, there are many more business opportunities and technological solutions to pursue with friends old and new. I intend to maintain my grateful attitude as an essential foundation for business and hope I will maintain that wherever life leads.
Handy, C. (1999) The Hungry Spirit.