Newsletters Hubble trouble and getting smarter I’ve always loved all aspects of flying and the stories around it. I joined the Royal Australian Air Force as a radar engineer in my early twenties after doin’ my time at uni. I learned to fly and by a stroke of good luck obtained my recreational pilot licence a few years ago. But it […] Written by Olivia Morgan September 19, 2022September 19, 2022 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
Newsletters Robots and IT What makes a good software engineer? Each day we see things, build things, and support things that suggest IT could be better. But why is it this way? Allan Kay in a recent campfire talk explores this very issue. If you don’t know of Allan, he is the inventor of the Dynabook. In Allan’s words “Steve Jobs was very […] Written by Olivia Morgan September 9, 2022September 9, 2022 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
Newsletters Estimating Projects and More Estimating the effort required to successfully build a system can be tricky. Function point (FP) analysis can be a good place to start, especially if you have a rough idea of how users will interact with the system. Although it’s another gem from the 80’s, my experience suggests that it’s still relevant today. First step is to […] Written by Olivia Morgan August 31, 2022August 31, 2022 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
Newsletters I’m no Teen Wolf… …but I get that Michael J Fox gets IT. Doc Hollywood was a great movie from the 80s. It reminds me that although things may not turn out as you intend, you sometimes end up in a better place. I was a bit of a Michael J Fox fan, hanging on the crazy stuff that he […] Written by Olivia Morgan August 26, 2022August 26, 2022 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
Newsletters Embrace your 80s IT coolness Have you ever tried the Pomodoro method of working – where your work day is a series of 25 min focus sessions. Developed by Frances Cirillo in the late 80s, its mantra is to simply commit to 25 min of uninterrupted work on something requiring your focus. Then, once a focus session is over, you spend a subsequent 5 […] Written by Olivia Morgan August 19, 2022August 19, 2022 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
Newsletters 10th August 2022 Newsletter Information Technology is like a box of chocolates – you’ll never know what you might get. But there is a joy in this, from the Turkish delight through to the peanut brittle (must admit, not my favourite) – the thrill of nailing a problem, learning something new, and getting to work with others in the […] Written by Olivia Morgan August 14, 2022August 14, 2022 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
Newsletters 3rd August 2022 Newsletter Click here to subscribe! Reliable printing from anywhere is something that Microsoft’s Universal Print aspires to. On the whole, it’s a good printing solution for distributed workforces. In a Universal Print world, there are no on-premises print servers – which I really like. My view is that there should be no on-premises infrastructure – other than network […] Written by Olivia Morgan August 4, 2022August 4, 2022 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
Newsletters 27th July 2022 Newsletter Click here to subscribe! If you have engaged us for IT strategy work, you may have heard me talk about the magic 3% – where the average annual IT spend for government agencies is around 3% of annual revenue. Although there may appear to be lots of change in the IT sector, many things stay […] Written by Olivia Morgan July 28, 2022July 28, 2022 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
Newsletters 20th July 2022 Newsletter Click here to subscribe! It takes some work to divide up and allocate work – doesn’t it? All good work starts with a sound plan – in your head or on paper. And there is an art in dividing up work – giving everyone in the team something to chow down on – so that […] Written by Olivia Morgan July 21, 2022July 21, 2022 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
Newsletters 13th July 2022 Newsletter Click here to subscribe! This week sees a focus on building, testing, advising and supporting. One goal I’m pretty keen on is to have a fully automated out-of-the-box experience for provisioning new devices over the air – using Microsoft EndPoint Manager (previously called Intune). Most of this works really well, from installing apps, applying security […] Written by Olivia Morgan July 15, 2022July 15, 2022 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
It’s bigger on the inside… Building a customer portal can be tricky. In the heat of the dot com bubble, I was a consultant working on the telstra.com team – Telstra’s first shot at a one-stop-shop for customers. I was working for Accenture at the time as a Manager in the UAT team. It was a goliath of a project, […] Written by Olivia Morgan February 13, 2023February 13, 2023 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
Low Cost eLearning 📝 Learning in my uni years was fun and not because of the lecturers or the material, but more so of the antics we got up to. Engineers with too much idle time and all that. In an auditorium full of people, a group from up the back launched a massive paper plane (I reckon 5ft […] Written by Olivia Morgan February 1, 2023February 1, 2023 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
It’s bigger on the inside… Building a customer portal can be tricky. In the heat of the dot com bubble, I was a consultant working on the telstra.com team – Telstra’s first shot at a one-stop-shop for customers. I was working for Accenture at the time as a Manager in the UAT team. It was a goliath of a project, […] Written by Olivia Morgan February 13, 2023February 13, 2023 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
Low Cost eLearning 📝 Learning in my uni years was fun and not because of the lecturers or the material, but more so of the antics we got up to. Engineers with too much idle time and all that. In an auditorium full of people, a group from up the back launched a massive paper plane (I reckon 5ft […] Written by Olivia Morgan February 1, 2023February 1, 2023 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
The Future is Calling ☎️ Do you remember the grungy dens that were public payphones? Before the days of mobile phones, I’d have to push my way past McDonalds wrappers so I could call Mum to let her know I was going to be late for dinner. My uni friends talked of all sorts of scams to get free phone […] Written by Olivia Morgan January 15, 2023January 15, 2023 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
Office 365 backup and archive have landed In the beginning, there were no backup solutions for Office 365. I mean, there were some limited recovery options. Microsoft now has a retention and recovery function that is good for up to 30 days for Exchange Online. SharePoint fairs a little better with a 93-day retention period after deletion (exc hard deletes), and the […] Written by Olivia Morgan February 8, 2024February 8, 2024 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
Simplify IT security with zero trust 🚫 My first job out of uni was as an Electronic Systems Engineer in the RAAF designing solid state replacements for SURAD, the ATC radar of the day. One of the hardest things to recreate was Identify Friend or Foe (IFF) tags. In a target rich environment, IFF tags help air defence officers filter good aircraft […] Written by Olivia Morgan June 13, 2023June 13, 2023 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
Securing IT Systems in Freefall ✈️ Stalling an aircraft, intentionally, was never fun – but necessary to feel the effects of when you lose control. The procedure was to 1) ascend to 4000ft AGL over farmland, 2) jam the throttle control in to idle, 3) as airspeed decreases, keep pulling the stick back to raise the nose and maintain altitude, 4) […] Written by Olivia Morgan June 5, 2023June 5, 2023 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
Strengthening Security with MFA 🔍 We all have customers in some form or another and identifying them can be tricky. Mid last year ACMA brought in regulation to make it mandatory for telcos to use a second factor in verifying a customer attempting to perform a high risk transaction (for example, adding an account holder). Many telcos adopted this second […] Written by Olivia Morgan May 8, 2023May 8, 2023 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
