My first datacenter role was an internship at IBM’s Canada Lab in Markham. After a 2014 role packaging software for Ontario Tech’s labs, I joined the university full-time in 2015 in second-level support, as the IT liaison for the Faculty of Business and IT. Over the next six years I worked up through the technical roles, from campus-scale imaging and deployment of up to 10,000 assets a year to leading the university’s MFA and encryption rollouts, before moving into management.
Since 2021 I’ve led the IT Services team at eCampusOntario, a cross-functional team of five developers and analysts, with responsibility for cloud infrastructure, service management, security, and the IT budget. The mandate is broad by design: we own everything from strategy and budget through to the infrastructure itself, work that larger organizations divide across several departments. I’ve stayed hands-on within it. The AWS environment is mine to architect and run, and I’m the escalation point above my team for anything technical.
My degree is in communications, which turned out to be useful preparation for IT leadership. It shows up in how my team works: documentation as standard practice, dashboards that put everyone in the room on the same numbers, and technical decisions explained in language that executives and vendors can act on.
Since 2019 I’ve also taught part-time at Durham College in Linux, cloud networking and ITSM, and developed their post-graduate cloud networking curriculum. Teaching technical material is good training for management; both depend on making complex things clear.