Fresh from winning the MASS Achievement Award 2024, our Lead Service Delivery Engineer Martin told us what it meant for him to be recognised by colleagues, his passion for new technology and being a car enthusiast. Here’s what he had to say:
Tell us about yourself.
I’m an IT person through and through owing to my 24 years industry experience. Outside of work, I have a lot of interest in motor sport mainly around circuits and sprints and have been known to have been involved in one or two incidents that have left cars upside down! I also have a love for classic cars and sometimes take them on European tours to Holland, Belgium and Germany. I’ve also had the distinct pleasure of being heavily involved in the rebuild of an Austin 7.
You’re known as the Office Oracle, how did that name come about?
I’d like to believe it’s borne from my resourcefulness and support I provide to people and teams I’ve worked with. I’ve learnt so much over the years, either from self-taught or from mentors when I was just starting out in my career. As much as I can, I try to be that resource for my team and colleagues.
Tell us about being the MASS Achievement Award winner, how does that make you feel?
Proud. Considering the complexities around the projects we work on and the many touchpoints with a few teams, it’s great to be recognised by colleagues from these teams. In IT sometimes you only get noticed when things go wrong or aren’t working. It’s also a great feeling to know that I’ve been able to live the MASS values well enough through the work I do. I think I’m lucky to receive the recognition but as always success isn’t down to one person, it’s as a result of collaboration, creativity and respect for each other.
You spoke about the MASS values there, what do they mean to you and how do they translate to your role?
First, I think the MASS values are great principles to live by not just at work but in general. In terms of my role as an IT professional I think they are important as a guide to being effective in my work. For example, we need to respect the people we work with and to be successful as a delivery team we have to collaborate with each other and the teams we support.
How has IT managed services in secure environments changed over the last decade and how has MASS evolved in that?
I’d say for some time the direction of travel for IT has been cloud technology and it’ll be the same in the near future. Where there used to physical servers, we’re now prioritising cloud servers, cloud storage and databases hosted online (on the cloud). As a business, our principle is always to ensure the services we deliver are in keeping with new technology but still easily accessible to our customers and that’s what we’ll continue to do. Cloud technology brings an extra layer of security consideration, and we work to detach products from needing to be connected to the internet. We always aim to be vendor agnostic, and we work with cloud tech vendors to ensure any secure by design offerings align with the needs of our customers.
Any advice for younger IT professionals coming through in the industry?
I’d say, learn as much as you can, take every opportunity to learn technology whether relevant to your current journey or not because it’ll be useful one day. Don’t be afraid to put yourself out of your comfort zone, as it’ll get recognised by industry leaders and help you stand out.
