Career

“Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.”

William Faulkner (the American author)

Last updated: 8 September 2026

William Faulkner MCSE

I spent more than 35 years working in IT, variously as a Systems Administrator, Consultant, IT Manager and eventually Head of IT.

Over that time I worked with organisations ranging from small businesses with relatively simple networks through to large multi-site companies with complex Enterprise infrastructure. Somewhere along the way I discovered that the size of the organisation bears remarkably little relationship to the creativity with which its users can break things.

My background has always been predominantly infrastructure based: Windows Server, Active Directory, networking, virtualisation, storage, SQL, high availability, monitoring, disaster recovery and IT security.

I have always preferred to remain technically hands-on. Management was necessary and, occasionally, even enjoyable, but I never particularly wanted to become the sort of IT Manager who could discuss “digital transformation strategy” for an hour but couldn’t tell you why a Domain Controller wasn’t replicating.

I was happiest somewhere between the server room and the boardroom.

Throughout my career I designed, built, migrated, repaired and occasionally rescued IT systems, often against fairly aggressive deadlines and usually while somebody nearby was asking how long it was going to take.

There were plenty of major infrastructure projects over the years: server and storage migrations, multi-site networking, virtualisation, datacentres, security improvements, acquisitions, office moves and the inevitable assortment of systems that had been running perfectly well for years until somebody touched them.

IT security was always one of my particular interests. Long before ransomware became a board-level conversation and cybersecurity acquired its own industry of acronyms, I regarded security as simply part of designing IT properly.

That interest eventually covered everything from firewalls, endpoint protection and authentication through to penetration testing, monitoring, vulnerability management and trying to persuade otherwise intelligent human beings not to click on things promising them unexpected parcels.

The Hacking Exposed series of books was an early influence and remains something I remember fondly. One of its authors later co-founded CrowdStrike. Given subsequent events, there is possibly a lesson in there somewhere.

Supreme PLC

The final major chapter of my full-time career was Supreme PLC.

I initially joined Supreme as a consultant in 2017 and subsequently became an employee, ultimately heading up the company’s IT function.

When I arrived, the IT operation was relatively immature. Over the following years I built and developed the infrastructure, systems and security environment alongside what became a small but extremely capable internal IT team.

Amongst the early improvements was increasing availability of the company’s core systems from approximately 94% to greater than 99.999%, followed by substantial improvements in resilience, monitoring, performance and security.

As Supreme expanded, so did the infrastructure.

That involved connecting and supporting multiple sites, integrating businesses, expanding server and storage platforms, managing Microsoft 365 and cloud services, maintaining large Windows and SQL environments and trying to ensure that everything continued working while the business enthusiastically grew around it.

It wasn’t always quiet.

There were major migrations, warehouse systems, Sage, OrderWise, CCTV, VPNs, virtualisation clusters, storage arrays, switches, firewalls and enough infrastructure monitoring to illuminate several very colourful screens.

There were also outages, failed hardware, mysterious network loops, suppliers who assured us nothing had changed immediately before explaining what they had changed, and all the other things that make infrastructure IT considerably more entertaining in retrospect than they were at three o’clock in the morning.

But the part I’m probably most proud of wasn’t the technology.

It was the team.

By the time I left, we’d built a small internal IT department capable of supporting a complex and rapidly growing business, with people I trusted to challenge me, solve problems and increasingly run things without me.

That, ultimately, is what a good IT department should become.

Before Supreme

Before Supreme, I spent many years working both permanently and as an independent consultant across a wide variety of organisations and industries.

These included the Police, Asda, Littlewoods, Precision Polymer Engineering, Caudwell Distribution and numerous businesses across manufacturing, finance, distribution and professional services.

The technology changed enormously during that time.

I watched standalone PCs become networks, networks become WANs, physical servers become virtual machines, server rooms become datacentres and “the cloud” become an apparently compulsory answer to questions nobody had yet asked.

Some technologies disappeared completely. Others disappeared and then returned twenty years later wearing a new name and accompanied by a subscription fee.

The underlying job changed rather less.

Understand what the business actually needs, design something sensible, keep it secure, make it reliable and fix it when reality inevitably disagrees with the documentation.

Semi-Retirement

I left Supreme in 2026 and moved into semi-retirement.

After spending most of my adult life being professionally responsible for computers, networks, servers and the increasingly imaginative ways in which they can fail, I now have the luxury of only becoming involved with technology when I actually want to.

Curiously, I still want to rather more often than expected.

I continue to follow developments in infrastructure, security, AI and computing generally, maintain this website and inevitably find technical projects to occupy myself with.

Apparently, you can retire from IT. Getting IT to retire from you may take considerably longer.