John, Technologist with a Passion for Plants

“Over my career I have held diverse roles ranging from Service Desk to CTO. What I know about myself is that I like to be close to the outcome and achieve tangible results.”

 

The role as Principal Technologist at LAB³ sparked my interest. At the time I was working as a management consultant, doing a lot of strategic and financial planning for large-scale technology investments. It felt like I was creating stacks of paperwork, judged by how heavy the documentation was and not by the value of the outcomes they were intended to deliver.

LAB³ offered the chance to work on new and exciting client-facing projects and involved interesting work across the latest cloud technologies. Another attractive aspect was that by joining a growing business and helping to establish the Canberra office, I would still be involved with strategic direction, and a part of an evolving company.

My role has been almost evenly split between growing the business and directly supporting Federal Government agencies accelerate cloud transformation. And I have also had the chance to be involved in other areas of practice which has been an exciting bonus.

Backed by a long family history in farming, a side passion of mine is the use of technology in agriculture. My wife and I have an off-grid farm where my wife has launched her own range of organic beauty products. I was already trialing the use of precision agriculture techniques via drones & IoT devices to measure soil moisture and salinity levels across the farm with long-range telemetry. So, it really impressed me that LAB³ was doing similar projects and on an industrial scale. I have been stoked to help resolve some connectivity and performance issues.