Andy Carnahan Email and Phone Number

Volunteer President of not-for-profit community association Bundanoon. Part-time, at times feels like full-time for the largest community association in the Wingecarribee Shire.

After 32 grateful years in IT I am moving on to creative pursuits. I want to pursue big themes and dreams - David Christian's Origin Stories, Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus are starting points.Many thanks to those who have supported me in my IT career - I was never a brilliant technologist, merely curious and generally able to see how to fit pieces of the puzzle together. A 60 second video I created for the first TEDx in Sydney (see below) is still a nice summary of my interests.

After almost 5 years as Manager of Customer and Information Services an external review recommend moving Customer Service and Corporate Information to a governance area. A part of this restructure was to enable greater focus on the Information Services area. The review recognized the significant changes I made in bringing a digital first, customer first focus to Customer Service over 5 years and Corporate Information over 10 years. One significant achievement was in promoting the web site to the status of an online customer service centre and stressing the need to resource this as an essential service channel.My current role is to provide infrastructure and systems services to Council. With over 400 employees and growing internal and external demands for reliable and resilient business applications the role is a challenging one.

Working through four direct reports I was responsible for providing leadership for Council’s Customer Service, ICT and Systems. The portfolio also included Library Services as a more independent unit.My major achievement has been the restructuring, recruiting and development of a multi-channel customer service delivery model. The model was proudly adopted by the General Manager and respected by our Councillors. I presented a vision for a knowledge management strategy, using a “single point of truth” model that is available to customers and staff, and delivered through all channels, from social media, our online customer service centre, contact centre, correspondence and counter.Across the branch I drove a vision of the changing face of Local Government where “finding” is the desired skill rather than “knowing”. Our information assets are being progressively made available online and staff are learning to use the shared online resource with the customer. I view Customer Service as an applied Information Service and use my expertise in ICT to provide the business model.A current drive in the Systems and ICT Operations areas is to focus on rapid business solutions with precise, achievable and agreed scopes. This is challenging both the traditional ICT project management delivery and the expectations of business units.The changes are challenging as the environment is undergoing rapid changes in external and internal demands. The role of the Manager requires effective communication to enable challenging conversations to take place with peers, subordinate and superior staff within Council. I am improving in this skill and believe it is one of the most important soft skills an effective leader can possess.

As Information Services Manager I was responsible for all ICT aspects of Council’s operations. This was split between operations and corporate systems. The role also included responsibility for the Records section. The ICT operations area was four staff, Corporate Systems was four staff and Records (Information Management) was nine staff. The annual budget for the Branch was about $1.7 million.The major achievements in the role were to bring a professional management to the entire section by introducing a service delivery framework (the ITIL framework); introducing a formalised Disaster Recovery capability for ICT Operations, redefining Records as Information Management and upgrading and rebadging the web site to an Online Customer Service Centre.My focus was always on providing the best value to business and for customers. I developed a Service Catalog (an informal series of SLAs) for all aspects of service delivery, an ICT Strategic Plan for 2007 to 2011, surveyed the business managers to align service delivery to business functions and upgrade and introduced various new processes, systems and technologies.Direct achievements• Information Services Strategy developed and adopted• Wide Area Network (Microwave) tender process to connect major Council sites. • Replacement of multi-function devices through tender• Develop, implement and test “warm” disaster recovery solution• Present at Local Government IT Conference 2006 “tiered storage management”, 2009 “Wingecarribee’s big ITIL adventure”• Present at RMAA national conference 2008 “The record keeper is dead”• Present at Ark eDiscovery conference 2009 “unstructured data and its causes”• Introduce email archiving• Managed approval and provided supervision for virtualisation of the data centre

Liverpool Health Service is a major Service in the South Western Sydney Area Health Service. I managed the IT Support and Communications Department. The Department had nineteen staff. Five were IT Support and thirteen were telephonist/receptionists with a team leader reporting to me. The technical staff were responsible for the end-user support of over 1300 computers and over 3000 telephone extensions. The role involved balancing a complex mix of technology and high user demands in the dynamic environment of one of Sydney’s busiest hospitals.My major achievement was to provide a reliable consistent service with particular emphasis on encouraging IT self-sufficiency. I received positive feedback about the difference I made to the working environment of doctors, nurses and administrative staff.

At Arnott's new manufacturing facility at Huntingwood I was employed as the site support specialist. The facility is highly computerised, with PC's providing the interface between the manufacturing personnel and the production equipment.I had responsibility for the availability of the manufacturing system, office automation system, security of all computer systems including AS/400 BPCS system and voice communications. A special focus was on training staff in the systems.A major achievement was the requirement for extremely high availability for the industrial control systems as the production process ran 24 hours and was controlled entirely by input from computer workstations.

Avon ran a multi-platform computing environment. As Network Controller, I was responsible for one hundred and fifty users on the Novell network. The applications I supported included electronic mail, MS Office, Lotus, WordPerfect, Mainframe Gateway and AS/400 sessions, as well as custom database systems.I was responsible for ensuring system availability, redundancy and data recovery services and most importantly, maintaining a high level of user satisfaction.Major accomplishments included performing several major hardware and software upgrades, introducing electronic mail and the on-going development of two part-time network administrators.This was the first dedicated PC/IT Support position for Avon in Australia and I provided a reliable and responsive infrastructure.