My career in Information Technology spans almost 30 years, and although I have held several management and leadership positions, my passion has always centred around the technical aspects of the industry.In recent years, my focus has turned to infrastructure automation technology, such as Puppet, Ansible, and other cloud-based provisioning solutions. My most recent contract with Transpower includes developing Ansible playbooks and roles as part of an infrastructure-as-code initiative. Before this, I worked for the Ministry of Social Development, where I developed a complete automated installation and configuration of their secure website access management product using the Python Fabric2 library. During my contract with the Inland Revenue, I was the primary DevOps engineer responsible for developing Ansible automation to upgrade their legacy MyIR IBM WebSphere Portal Server platform.Throughout my career, I have found that the most common oversight with many organisations is a lack of investment in automation to build infrastructure and deploy applications in a rapid, reliable, and repeatable way. Failing to consider these key benefits when scoping complex programmes of work inevitably leads to unreliable practices, missing critical milestones, and substantial cost overruns.I see my future working on successful IT programmes with organisations that focus on what they are delivering and place equal if not more emphasis on how it will be delivered. The "how" is where I see the most significant benefits of automation in the IT industry and is a subject area where I know I can make a valued contribution.