Meet Defence's new go-to guy

Australia’s Department of Defence has brought in an experienced IT architect to drive the organisation’s complex technology transformation.

Craig Magee, Defence.

Craig Magee, a former technology strategy lead at organisations as diverse as the ANZ Bank and BHP, has come onboard at what is one of Australia’s largest IT outfits as the head of infrastructure transformation, reporting to CIO Peter Lawrence.

Defence’s infrastructure transformation includes everything from a data centre migration (complete) and consolidation program (ongoing), the streamlining of terrestrial telecommunications to a single provider (Telstra, in play), a new outsourcing contract for centralised processing (negotiations narrowed to two preferred tenderers) and delivery of the Next Generation Desktop for Defence personnel.

Read here for more on Defence CIO Peter Lawrence’s transformation agenda.

Magee has been charged with driving these programs - among others - with a specific emphasis on managing program risks and the interdependencies between them.

“My role is less about a change in strategy and more about enabling large programs to be successful in delivery,” Magee told iTnews.

“These are the heavy, muscle-moving programs of Defence’s transformation. When a lever gets pulled on one program, what is the impact for others? How do we sequentialise this work to deliver in a coherent manner?”

Magee is well placed to answer this question after a 25 year career in which he played the part of the customer (strategy and architecture roles at ANZ Bank, Australia Post, BHP and Philip Morris) and the service provider (at CSC and IBM).

Magee will provide a keynote speech at the Australian Data Centre Strategy Summit, March 18-20 at the Gold Coast Marriott.