The short version
I’m a solution architect in Melbourne. For over two decades I’ve worked across the public and private sectors, from enterprise data warehousing and IoT to containerised data & AI platforms. Along the way I’ve been the architect, the delivery lead, the program manager and the customer, and I think that’s what I bring to a problem: I know what each of those people needs from the others.
Today I lead an in-house team in the Digital Transformation Office of Defence’s Land Systems Division. We design, run and upgrade DSLab, an air-gapped data & AI platform, ourselves.
How I got here
It started with a question about how people explore data. My honours thesis at Monash University in 2003 tested an alternative to the pivot table for ad hoc access to OLAP data, and became a paper at the IFIP Decision Support Systems conference in Prato, Italy the following year.
I spent the next three years as a data warehousing and business intelligence consultant with BearingPoint (formerly KPMG Consulting), working for public and private sector clients in Victoria and New South Wales. In parallel I tutored two masters units at Monash: Dimensional Modelling and Data Warehouse Development Methodologies.
In 2007 I joined Defence’s data warehousing program. I took on an ageing platform that was losing its customers’ confidence, rebuilt it with industry partners and the infrastructure team, and then built and led the team that delivered the next generation of business intelligence across Defence: program performance dashboards, a data quality framework and reporting that went to the Senate. That work took me to IBM Information On Demand in Las Vegas in 2012 to talk about information governance.
From 2015 I moved to the Land Engineering Agency as solution architect for vehicle health and usage monitoring and for Vulcan, the Land domain’s data engineering and analytics capability. Vulcan’s Oil Condition Monitoring framework was featured in the Defence Data Strategy 2021–2023.
Since 2021 I’ve been building DSLab and the team behind it. In 2025 I presented our air-gapped platform at IBM TechXchange in Orlando, and in 2026 I was named an IBM Champion.
How I work
- Know the platform. A green dashboard isn’t understanding. I want to know a system well enough to notice when something changes.
- Evidence over assumption. Assumptions aren’t shortcuts; they’re risks that can cost months. Every alert gets tested and every claim to a vendor comes with data.
- Own what you build. You build differently when you’re the one who has to keep it alive.
- Build the team, not the dependency. The measure of a platform is whether the people who run it can own it without me.
- Plan for the constraints. In a high-security environment, change is measured in months, so the detail has to be right before the first step.
- Share what works. I write and speak about what we’ve learned so others in similar environments don’t have to learn it the hard way.
Recognition
- IBM Champion, 2026
- Speaker at IBM TechXchange (Orlando, 2025), IBM Information On Demand (Las Vegas, 2012) and DSS2004 (Prato, 2004), and at Defence and industry forums in Canberra and Sydney
- Oil Condition Monitoring featured in the Defence Data Strategy 2021–2023
Elsewhere
The best way to reach me is LinkedIn. I write on Medium and post talks on YouTube.
Views on this site are my own and do not represent the Department of Defence.