“Relationships and connections are an important part of how we see the world, and how we frame up solutions. I wanted to break through all the jargon to seek out clarity and simplicity.”

Drawn to technology and a desire to understand how things work, Steve’s curiosity was fuelled as a young child who enjoyed taking things apart and then trying to put them back together.

A Bachelor of Science in Computing from the University of Leeds, Steve settled into life as a young, ambitious software engineer at various small boutique software companies before moving to the South of England when an opportunity presented itself at IBM Labs near Winchester.

“I enjoyed the rigour and structure of IBM, there was a methodology behind what we were doing absent in the smaller software shops. But the relentless amount of information you needed to know as a technical lead, the information you have to absorb and articulate, quickly became a very heavy burden to bear.”

An advocate of mind maps, visualisation, and understanding the complexity around how one thing connected to the next, Steve often found himself being one of the first to jump up during a meeting, marker pen in hand, to translate what he had heard and draw the problem the team was being asked to solve. Without fail this would channel the discussion to drawing an abstract representation of the solution and away from the jargon.

“I wanted to break through all the jargon to seek clarity and simplicity, an issue which increases the more diverse the technical knowledge is of the people involved. I’d often draw something abstract and ask the question - is this what we all mean?”

Now an award-winning Solution Architect, Steve decided to leave IBM to focus on family life in New Zealand. This move also provided Steve with the head space to work on a solution to the problem. Coincidentally, as a nation, New Zealand tends to work with multiple technology platforms, multiple vendors and contractors and has constant moving and shifting intellectual property. This turned out to be fertile ground for prototyping the concepts that underpin HubScope which are now proving to be scalable across IT projects around the world.

“Having the responsibility for holding so much technical knowledge can be incredibly stressful. You can feel isolated and a bit alone in it all. I just thought, I have to solve this problem for myself and others like me.”