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Well, it has been a while! My last post here was in February 2024. More than two years later, I have plenty to catch up on—and some news to share.

I’m now the Global Head of IT at my company.

Over the past few years, I’ve been busy leading a team as Director of IT Infrastructure and Cloud. That work took priority over writing about it. The blog went quiet, but the learning certainly didn’t.

A lot of learning between posts

That journey has taken me through Microsoft technologies, cloud infrastructure, security technologies, and the many decisions that come with running a team. There is always another challenge to work through, another technology to understand, and another opportunity to make things better.

I’m grateful to the team I’ve been working with. Leading IT is a team effort, and the experience of working through those challenges together has shaped how I approach this next chapter.

I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog digging into how technology works. I still enjoy that, and it isn’t going away. But my responsibilities now call for a wider view.

Thinking across a global organization

As Global Head of IT, I have to think about how the pieces fit together across the organization: the people using our systems, the applications supporting their work, the security protecting them, and the investment required to keep moving forward.

A technical decision can be sound on its own and still create challenges somewhere else. How will it work for teams in different locations? Can we support it consistently? What does it cost over time? Does it solve the problem people actually have?

Those are the kinds of questions I want to explore here. Expect more posts about zero trust, identity and security, enterprise applications, cloud and infrastructure, budgeting, and the practical side of IT leadership. Some will be technical. Others will focus on the decisions and tradeoffs behind the technology.

Supporting the AI evolution

One area I’m particularly interested in is supporting the evolution of AI within my own company—and helping people understand how to use it.

My last post introduced Azure AI and Azure AI Studio. Coming back to the blog now, AI is still very much part of the conversation, but I’m thinking about it through a broader organizational lens.

Which problems are worth addressing with AI? How do we give people useful tools while protecting company information? How do we evaluate the results and understand whether we’re making work better?

You can have all the AI tools in the world, but without proper education on how to use them, adoption will stall. Giving someone access is a starting point. Helping them understand what they can do with that access is where the real work begins.

For many people, AI still means opening a chat window, asking a question, and getting an answer. That is useful, but there is much more to explore. Agentic capabilities can help carry out a sequence of tasks, work across connected tools, and support a workflow rather than stop at a single response. People need practical examples to understand where those capabilities fit into their own work.

Training our employee population is an important part of moving forward. That means going beyond a product demonstration and giving people opportunities to practice with relevant use cases, ask questions, and build confidence. It also means teaching them how to define a task, set boundaries for an agent, review its work, and recognize when a person needs to step in.

People need clear guidance on what information they can share, which tools and connections are approved, when to verify an answer, and which actions require human approval. As AI moves from answering questions to taking actions, that understanding becomes even more important.

I want to help people move beyond simply having AI available to understanding how to use it effectively in their day-to-day work. The tools will keep evolving, and our education needs to evolve with them.

I plan to share my experiences with AI adoption and education as that work develops, alongside the wider IT topics that support it. I’ll keep the discussion practical and respect the boundaries around internal company information.

Back to sharing the experience

This blog has always been a place for me to share what I’m learning. The new role gives me more to think about, and I want to bring those experiences back here.

I won’t promise a post every week, but I do want to make writing part of the journey again.

Thanks for sticking around. If there is an IT leadership, security, enterprise application, or AI education topic you’d like me to cover, let me know.

It’s good to be back.

Until next time,
Rob.