Michael van Rooyen: 0:00
My guest today delivered an interview that was so interesting and full of insights we had to break it into two parts. Here is part one of that interview.
Mark Hind: 0:08
I think the interesting thing that COVID has brought us is zero tolerance for failure, because the expectation now is that it will work on a single click or the first click. I just need to get to what I need to get to, and the expectation has grown higher. There’s no tolerance left in the system.
Michael van Rooyen: 0:25
Today I have the pleasure of interviewing Mark Hind, the CTO of Air Service Australia. I’ve known Mark for a while and he’s got a very interesting career in history. Mark, welcome.
Mark Hind: 0:35
Yeah, thanks, Michael. Thanks for inviting me to the soundproof booth.
Michael van Rooyen: 0:39
I didn’t make season one cut clearly. No, you were invited to season one, you just weren’t interested. Now that it’s popular, you’re interested. You’re right, I am, but thanks for having me and I appreciate the time to kick things off for those who are listening. Do you mind just sharing a little bit about your, your history and your journey in the tech industry and what’s led you to your current role as cto of air services australia?
Mark Hind: 1:00
well, let me. Let me try and do that backwards and talk about what air Services does first. Right, Fair enough, it might be interesting. It’s not a household name, although it should be. So Air Services is a government-owned organisation. It looks after air traffic control and firefighting and rescue and firefighting services at airports around Australia Really important job, I think. April we helped move around about 120,000 passenger jet movements throughout the country and in fact, interestingly, almost back to pre-pandemic kind of numbers. So the industry’s come back strong Air traffic control, rescue and firefighting services and as the CTO, I have the absolute pleasure of leading a great group of people to support delivery of that.
Mark Hind: 1:49
In fact, my title is actually CTO. We’ve thrown an E in there just to make sure it’s a little bit more abnormal. The E’s for enablement. Really, the kind of things that we’re trying to do is make sure that we’re not an engineering company. We’re here to service our customer and that enablement helps us remind us that that’s the way we want to go. A little bit about me A veteran, I think, is now where you can put that of the IT industry. I started my career back in the 90s when technology was cool.
Michael van Rooyen: 2:20
Well, it’s not cool now.
Mark Hind: 2:22
No, it’s not cool now. I think it’s not cool now. Well, it’s not. No, it’s not cool now, I think it’s.
Mark Hind: 2:25
I think it’s generic now, but certainly back in the 90s, in a small little shop in downtown mount cravat and looking after customers on the way to the year 2000, the heady days of it it was a fantastic thing, the heady days of it, really trying to help get ready for this unknown, unknown and then work through that kind of space, and then transitioned into a large government organisation here in Queensland Department of Education Fantastic place, mission driven. Worked my way through that organisation over a course of 10 or 12 years, I can’t remember. You always look back more romantically at what you used to do and the timings that you used to do and ended up as the CIA forio for department of ed for a couple of years, went out into consulting world for a bit, realized that’s not my bag, I’m not a. I’m not a guy that can. Actually I’m a guy that can provide free advice.
Mark Hind: 3:14
But I’m not a guy but not a guy that that doesn’t like not seeing that advice implemented. So and then into into air services, started air services as leading the design and delivery functions, so trying to look at operate and the operations side of that. And then into for the last four years as the chief technology enablement officer and yeah, so a bit of a kind of straight trajectory. I’ve done large projects, small projects, love the technology industry because it’s always moving and there’s always something else to do.
Michael van Rooyen: 3:45
So yeah, lots of learnings on the way, lots of learnings. And look in your career there. You just touched on that aviation, your current focus and you spent quite a bit of time in the education sector. Can you share some experiences how these two different roles have shaped your leadership style and approach to technology? Yeah, I don’t govern airlines just very quickly.
Mark Hind: 4:03
No, no, I just look after we support the traffic controllers. So they are vastly different roles. But I actually consider myself in the technology business. Whilst the industries are vastly different and have vastly different kind of outcomes, technology doesn’t and I think this is a really kind of important piece we always look for differences in industries. We never look at the similarities and the similarities are running. Large organisations that have to have a guaranteed uptime, have to have a guarantee, a level of service. It’s a very similar kind of approach. Now I get different things out of the different industries.
Mark Hind: 4:41
Education, as I said at the start, is a very mission-driven vocation. You can see the change that you’re creating almost immediately. You can create programs, you can engage different technologies and actually see it being applied in the classroom at a micro level and delivering on real outcomes. And from a mission kind of perspective, that’s a hard job. It’s probably a little bit different to the transport sector. Now transport sector is customer-driven and from a mission kind of perspective, that’s a hard job. It’s probably a little bit different to the transport sector. Now transport sector is customer driven and, again, very, very similar in the things that you do today have a demonstrable effect.
Mark Hind: 5:13
Different drivers. One is kind of get people to where they need to be on time. Our vision statement in the organisation is connecting people with their world safely, and so making sure that it doesn’t matter whether you’re getting on a plane for business travel leisure travel, which is becoming more and more of a market than business probably was pre-COVID or going for an event or sending a package. I mean, it’s all about on-time performance, and performance is king, and so that drives probably a little bit different behaviour, but the basics are the same. It’s the need to provide a service that doesn’t quit.
Michael van Rooyen: 5:46
That’s a good point. Just talking a bit about the education sector, then you look at reflecting your time in that area. What technology do you think can further revolutionise that field? And particularly I know you went there during pandemic but post-pandemic of what you’ve seen. If you were back in the education sector are there some technologies that really could help in a post-pandemic Great?
Mark Hind: 6:05
question, if I reflect on that it’s probably an opportunity, but also a threat is how will AI change the game? And what I mean by that is, on a good side of that, the deliberate decision, or deliberate marketing decision, to push the right content to the right people at the right time to increase their learning outcomes is absolutely a game changer, and I think that we need to step into that more. You never replace the human element of that, though. Right, the content is interesting, context is important, so trying to get that right is fantastic. I think, on the opposite side of that, how AI gets weaponized backwards in, plagiarism has always been an interesting kind of problem in both middle school and higher learning. I think that that’s now on steroids and it’ll become weaponized in. How do you protect against that Right? What do you need to do? So one side of the equation absolute enabler. Other side, disabler and trying to get the right balance is pretty interesting.
Mark Hind: 7:05
I think more and more will be around delivering the right content to make sure people get a personalised education journey as opposed to that sheep dip. You know, go to school every day, go to these classes. You know I’m old enough, I’m from the 70s. Chalkboards Not slate, but chalkboards certainly meter rulers. It’s not rote learning, it’s different learning and the skills of the future. The skills that I look for in my teams as we build people, is the ability to unlearn and relearn, and you don’t get that from holding a great deal of data in your mind. You get that from being able to swap between concepts and be agile in your thinking, and so if that’s the workforce of the future, then we need to have the students of the future. To get to that that’s a good point then we need to have the students of the future.
Michael van Rooyen: 7:51
That’s a good point. To get to that, that’s a good point. What’s interesting is, whilst you were not there with this explosion, it’d be interesting to see your thoughts If you were at the education department. Still, there was quite a lot of debate originally when AI came out. Should we ban kids from it? Should we let them use it? You touched on being an enabler and there’s a lot of people opposed to it because of that. Would you think that would have been you to drive some of that decision making back then? What would your thoughts be in that space?
Mark Hind: 8:15
Yeah, my thoughts. I thank God I’m not there, right. I think it’s a minefield, and if I relate that to phones in the classroom, we’re now banning them. Interesting when phones were first becoming a thing, I was kind of in the department at that stage and it was how do you integrate? And so we’ve gone from integrate to disintegrate. I wonder whether AI kind of gets to the same point. We want to integrate as much as we possibly can until the point where we can’t control the monster and then we’ll disintegrate.
Mark Hind: 8:40
I think policymakers have got a long way to go to kind of get to that outcome. Yes, and a lot of strong debate. I mean AI can be moved around. It’s the large language model that you feed. It gives you the right outcome and they can go south pretty quick. And so how do you build education, specific LLMs to be able to then drive the right outcome that can be non-corruptible? How do you deal with information drift, because it’s learning on the go?
Mark Hind: 9:07
It’s actually a really interesting kind of problem from a safety connotations perspective in the aviation sector as well. Right, because we’ve got to prove that what we’re doing is safe. And how do you prove? How do you get algorithmic integrity when the algorithm moves, how do you prove your starting point and your end game has got engineering discipline all the way through. Similarly, I think that’ll be in education, but again, I’ve been out of that sector for almost 10 years and I’m sure I always used to say cloud years are like dog years. You get four cloud years for every normal year. Education was the same. I think the beautiful thing about education is that your customer probably knows more than you do because they’re growing up on the free and agile and you’re stuck in your waterfall kind of methodology. Trying to get to a different outcome is an interesting beast.
Michael van Rooyen: 9:57
Yeah, look, that’s a really good point that with so much enablement, people are expecting because you click a button, things happen. It’s just bleeding through without people thinking of safety, security. Just expectations continue to grow right and you must be seeing that more and more on-time performance, but also all the things that go around that.
Mark Hind: 10:11
I think the interesting thing that COVID has brought us is zero tolerance for failure, because the expectation now is that it will work on a single click or the first click there won’t be. I just need to get to what I need to get to, and the expectation has grown higher. There’s no tolerance left in the system, and I see that through service to customers, but I also see that even through family life. Right, it’s that immediacy. I have an old Gen X not a boomer Gen X theory. That is, when you’re hyper-connected to everything and you don’t have to go anywhere, you’re working from home, you’re connected to the office, your social circle’s about 120 metres around your house, everything’s at your fingertips, and that creates that kind of always on immediate.
Michael van Rooyen: 10:59
Anyway, that’s a conspiracy theory. That’s not necessarily. I agree with you and it’s interesting. Even if I talk about basic digital plumbing, we see customers needing to really spend more money upgrading even internal infrastructure because offices have been closed for a long time. No investment there, which is fair enough because everyone was at home, and now there’s a large push to return to work and part of that is the expectation of how you’ve been able to work at home with your NBN or much better service at home and experience to do video call, and they come to the office and it’s not the same. So there’s this actually big reason to not go to the office because they’re saying I don’t have the same experience at the office, right?
Mark Hind: 11:36
Why do I need to click on that VPN button? I don’t have to do it at home. Yeah, correct.
Michael van Rooyen: 11:39
Well.
Mark Hind: 11:40
I’ve got to do it. When I’ve got to go to the office or get into the office, I don’t get policies. I can be looking at stuff on the left-hand pane of my window and working on the right. Yeah, it’s a kind of different problem. And we sent 1500 people home on the first day of COVID to work from home in an organisation that we weren’t even provisioning email on phones at that stage. Oh, wow, so because we had a lockdown view of the world. Fair, fair. You come into the office and you transact in the office, and it was a specialty to not transact in the office. And so overnight that changed. Yes, now it’s changed for the good. I think COVID drove many organisations’ digital policy in a way that you could never do organically. What we then did was we spent two or three years retrofitting the holes we created to make sure that we could be safe and secure. It’s an interesting business model. It’s not one I’d want to do again, I think.
Michael van Rooyen: 12:32
Yeah, fair enough. And look on that point future of work really reshaped technology. Right, and when you take that lens, how should technology leaders think about remote work, collaboration tools and workforce management under this new kind of structure?
Mark Hind: 12:45
As a people leader, I like to be with people. I like to be with people physically in a room and have great conversations. Gartner did a fantastic document probably two years now it’s probably aged or re-revved, I don’t know around the different working modes, and the working modes are around together, together, which is I need to be in the same room and I need to engage, but I need to have the same experience as I need a digital experience. That kind of matches that together, together mode. That’s key and I think you get your true collaboration gets driven from the time together because you can have a two way dialogue. There’s together alone, which is over a team’s kind of environment. That becomes really tactical.
Mark Hind: 13:26
What you see is disconnection, people looking clearly, looking at other things, but interacting. But it becomes that tactical kind of conversation and that’s good. You need those. In fact, why do a meeting when an email will suffice? I’m a massive fan of not having a meeting for a meeting’s sake. And Teams kind of drives some of that, because you get those disconnections. If you’ve got more than five or six people in a Teams, call it’s a town hall, it’s not a Teams call. Put 30, five or six people in a Teams call. It’s a town hall. It’s not a Teams call and put 30 people in a room on a Teams call. I have a simple view that someone’s talking and Everyone’s listening.
Michael van Rooyen: 13:57
Well, you think they’re listening.
Mark Hind: 13:58
You think they’re listening, they’ve attended. Yes, the other two modes are alone-alone, which is perfect for home. I don’t need to interact with someone. In fact, I want to do some of my best thinking work. I don’t need to engage. In fact, go and do not disturb and get some really focused time. That’s great time at home, yes, hard to get in the office.
Mark Hind: 14:15
That’s that last model, which is alone. Together, you’re all in the office but you’re doing your alone work. What I find in the post-COVID world is that alone, together time becomes really hard because when you’re in the office you want to be together and so that you can’t get that individualised thinking time. So the future of working you know I’m no Nostradamus, but the future of working is that blended model, but it’s trying to get that right. Granted, that’s not for everything. If you’ve got a team of people that need to look on glass and collaborate together and I’ve got a 24 by 7, 365 technical operations centre in Brisbane and Melbourne they’re in the room. They don’t have the luxury of working from home. That’s a different operating mode.
Michael van Rooyen: 14:56
Yeah, sure, it’s important because you do touch on a good thing and I know you’ve described the alone together thing to me and when you really think about it, it is really those three modes.
Mark Hind: 15:04
One of the biggest things that I’ve noticed, returning to seeing, flying around, seeing customers and meeting and interacting, is just those curious conversations you have outside of that, I think that the other dimension to this is generational change as well, and so, for some, text is good, and when I say text, I don’t mean on that old thing that you use called a phone. I mean whether it’s a Teams message or whether it’s a casual check, or whether it’s a not a Snapchat, because you know, of course, we would never do that. You know, maybe a WhatsApp message. There’s different engagement modes, but those engagement modes do not detract from the value of bringing teams together to work on team problems and getting team outcomes. Generate the environment you want for people to succeed. Yep.
Michael van Rooyen: 15:45
Not just talking about education, but it leads on to this, which is different ways of working, different workforce skill sets. I liked your message before around retraining people and really much more customised training. Are you, in your industry, seeing a challenge gaining talent or acquiring talent from a technical person, because people see that maybe as a critical infrastructure role. Do they really want to do that? Is it a cool job?
Mark Hind: 16:07
Yeah, you’re right, talent’s tough right. I once had a boss who sticks with me If you want the right people, there’s only two ways to get it you get better people or you get people better. And I really like that, because you actually have to bring in talent, but you also have to grow talent. It’s a really interesting kind of challenge at the moment, especially in Australia, trying to get the depth of talent. I’ve got a couple of pools of different, very different skill sets.
Mark Hind: 16:36
We are a very heavy engineering organisation. We engineer for safety. You need to be a member of the Queensland College of Engineers to be able to certify design work that you’ve done, because consequence matters. We also have a very heavy standard technical workforce, and that standard technical workforce can move at twice the speed of the engineering workforce. And so if you want to do innovation, if you want to do test and learn, if you want to be agile, if you want to deliver cool stuff, you often test there, learn your issues and then industrialize, and so you need both.
Mark Hind: 17:07
And to do that A you need to bring in partners. Make sure that those partners are well-trained. You don’t need to love them forever. You can bring them in and cycle them back out as well as talent in the market, but you also need to bring good talent in and grow them through the business. We are running a cyber grad program at the moment, which is a great step forward, because I think cyber is a really interesting marketplace for all the people in cyber that might listen to this. Cyber will only be cool for another two years and you’ll be like everyone else and there’ll be something else cool. So you know, live with it now right.
Mark Hind: 17:38
Enterprise architecture used to be cool too.
Michael van Rooyen: 17:40
So did networking, so did networking and cloud.
Mark Hind: 17:43
I know Michael, as a former digital plumber. It used to be a cool kind of vocation, but maybe not anymore. But you can’t hack without a network. So that’s very important. Yeah, it’s never the network. So you need to build the right talent and you’ve got to have the right pipeline. So graduate programs bringing people in but not being so stuck that they’re going to be with you forever. Actually, you’ve got to make sure that you get the best out of them while you have them, because people move on and move up and move across and in fact it’s that variety in technology that I really like. You get a lot of experiences across, a lot of different pieces. That all add to the right outcome. But talent’s tough. I mean, trying to get it is tough, trying to keep it, it’s tough, yes, and it becomes a bit of a voting market. Right, you move in shape with the dollars and the way the market shifts Absolutely.
Michael van Rooyen: 18:26
And I know that not only getting talent is tough, right, but even some of the work you do is fairly bespoke and just finding talent, current talent, like even just to solve today’s problems.
Mark Hind: 18:35
I think you were telling me that you’ve had to bring people in from overseas to really solve problems market with our vendor stack trying to make things simpler to configure, simpler to put in, gui driven. What we’re actually missing is the foundation of fault, finding the foundation of real. How does it work at a base layer? Now I’m saying there’s good people out there that know exactly what that is, but we’ve also got a layer of fast connections and so what that does is you’ve got to spend more time skilling the workforce in complex problems because the problems get more complex.
Mark Hind: 19:20
It used to be back in my day. It used to be. They were easy problems but they were complex to solve. Now they’re complex problems that are really complex to solve. And you’re right. We see ourselves bringing in more and more talent from across the globe to try and make up for some of that deficit, and the numbers aren’t growing. It’s just that we need more people, but the baseline is not growing in Australia and we need to do more with that. And in fact it’s emboldened on all organisations to grow talent to be able to go in that talent pool.
Michael van Rooyen: 19:48
Yeah, fair enough, you touched on cyber, because that’s obviously where the most talent pool is required at the moment. Yes, a longer term that should dissipate a bit.
Michael van Rooyen: 19:56
Time’s coming cyber people yeah that’s very good, very good, very good. So it’s a growing concern across all industries. The government’s trying to put a lot of emphasis behind it the SOCI Act and all these different components and then, if I think particularly about aviation, relies so heavily on your interconnected systems across integration with airlines and all your control towers. How are you guys really grappling with the evolution of more hyper-connectivity between these systems and cyber at the same time?
Mark Hind: 20:21
Yeah, I think that’s a great question and one I could talk about for hours. I think the biggest change in the cyber industry is when cyber criminals were commercialised. It moved from an embuggerance to a real kind of commercial model where people could make money. And when you can make money, it’s going to go through the roof. You’re right. Hyperconnected systems are a honeypot for that type of easy win, easy money. I’m not saying it’s easy win or easy money, I’m sure, but it’s now been codified. You can buy a hack for a couple of bucks. You can take a competitor’s website down for a couple of bucks. It’s an interesting problem In aviation.
Mark Hind: 20:57
It’s a real challenge, right. For many years we’ve created systems that are open, because open equals safe. If I can get onto a frequency, if anyone can get onto that frequency, we must be safe, because you can get onto it pretty easily. You don’t have the overhead of that security layer. It’s no longer true, in fact, it’s been no longer true for a number of years. But moving systems take a fair while we’re down the path of you can’t be safe unless you’re secure.
Mark Hind: 21:23
That’s not my quote, but it’s a great one. That kind of rings in my ear. And in fact, you’ve got to start with that whole safety by design as you’re going through the systems. I think we’re under a false sense of security, though, because all the old systems that we thought were safe because they were firewalled out, dioded out or in their own network. I’d encourage anyone to go and have a look at those systems and work out that they’re probably not safe. They’re probably a Swiss cheese of changed firewall ports over a 30 year period because people just want to make stuff work. Yes, more importantly, they probably didn’t document it. Yeah, correct.
Michael van Rooyen: 21:52
As-built right, Just don’t exist.
Mark Hind: 21:54
Yeah, yeah, correct, heritage Heritage equipment systems. That sounds old, it does. Well, it’s way past legacy, right, it’s in the heritage. Heritage systems are not as safe as we think they are and not as secure as they ever were, because the vectors changed. Yes, the attack has changed. They’re coming in through the soft underbelly of people. That’s the biggest kind of area of issue. It is the old defence in depth.
Mark Hind: 22:19
I don’t like the newer terms, but it’s layers and layers of security. If you think network security is important, it’s absolutely important. If you think people security is important, it’s absolutely important. If you think software is important, it’s key to kind of keeping things. Keeping things patched is important. The challenge is change is the enemy of stability. I’ll say that again change is the enemy of stability Because when you go and patch a system it might often work but it could fail. And when you’re in an organisation or when you’re in a service provision where you need five, nines and a seven uptime, you need to make sure that that’s going to work. Day zero patching is not a reality. You’ve got to move as quick as you can safely to get to the right outcome, and so you end up overbuilding. You would have to right to achieve that.
Mark Hind: 23:10
Yeah, put a drawbridge in, build a moat. Make sure the last line is cobbled so the horses hurt the hooves. That’s kind of where you’ve got to get to, but it’s only going to get worse. We’re going to see more attack traffic on our networks than we see normal traffic soon. Not us personally, but I think as globally as an industry, we will start to see more attack traffic than normal traffic.
Michael van Rooyen: 23:31
It’s like the old days of the network management traffic exceeding the actual traffic of the actual users. Right, yeah, correct, managing the hell out of it.
Mark Hind: 23:38
We’re just checking that that system’s alive. We can’t let normal traffic on because we don’t know. We want to make sure it’s alive. Correct, correct.
Michael van Rooyen: 23:47
I hope you enjoyed part one of my interview with Mark Hynde. Be sure to tune in.
