Leaders in Tech sat down with board member Eoghan Nolan to hear his thoughts on the community, cloud computing and life as a technology leader.
What made you want to get involved with Leaders in Tech?
I was delighted to be invited to play a direct part in shaping the Leaders in Tech community. It speaks to several of the challenges I face myself in a technology leadership role. Whenever I get the chance to meet other tech leaders, they tell me the same thing: they want more engagement, more discussion and more sharing of ideas about where the industry is heading technically and about the difficulties of leading in the sector today. Taken together, there is an extraordinary depth of talent in technology leadership roles across Ireland, so building a like-minded community around that idea felt not only interesting but genuinely necessary.
Could you share a bit more about your talk at the Leaders in Tech launch event?
Of course. It’s hardly news that cloud computing is reshaping both consumer and enterprise computing. Amazon Web Services turns 17 this July, Google Cloud Platform is 11 years old and Microsoft Azure will only turn 10 *next year*, so these platforms have been with us for a long time. The value organisations can gain from adopting them is well documented, as are the challenges of adoption projects. What matters right now is that technology leaders clearly communicate to their partners the value they expect from the cloud computing model, what it can deliver and, just as importantly, what it can’t.
What would you like people to take away from your talk?
Cloud computing is an enormous topic, and it often gets reduced to a simple Amazon vs. Microsoft vs. Google argument. I want to push the audience to think differently. The real question is how cloud computing can improve (or fail to improve) the customer and company experience of technology, and how it can support the operational and commercial needs of the business. Yes, AWS still leads on market share and services, and Azure is now a viable option for almost any workload, but the conversation that matters is about the opportunity to build new services in the cloud and about getting maximum value from non-cloud services in line with strategic corporate objectives.
What would you like Leaders in Tech to achieve, both soon and over the longer term?
Leaders in Tech began as a cross-industry, peer-to-peer community built on the belief that innovation and new ideas are sparked and developed best through collaboration. We invite every leader in the technology industry to join the community, gain real value from sharing ideas and thrive on the conversations that push us to examine the latest thinking and what it means for our roles. For this association, success means a healthy, thriving membership and engaging events that are topical, practical and challenging.
What does a typical day look like for you?
All of our engineers and product teams work with an agile methodology, so the heart of my role is keeping the weekly rhythm and tempo high and engaging for the teams, with a clear focus on the goal and regular status checks. That weekly schedule is central to our corporate culture, which makes the morning stand-up, demos and retros the cornerstones of my week. Beyond that, it’s all about communication, whether in 1:1s with the team or in working sessions with the commercial teams tackling their problems.
Is there anything exciting you’re working on right now that you’d like to share?
Yes, absolutely. One of the biggest tasks the commercial teams have handed me is to identify and verify new customers quickly and uniquely. On the surface it looks like a simple, straightforward process, but in the online world with high customer expectations it has become a genuinely interesting problem. Our challenge is to ask the customer the fewest questions in the shortest time while still identifying them uniquely and completely. It combines machine learning, big data and a reliance on existing and new personal identification methods. It’s in beta at the moment and we expect it to become a cornerstone of the technology platform.