Choosing the migration path that made the most business sense — then taking responsibility for execution.
Following an acquisition, the organization inherited roughly 20 Cisco communications sites alongside a much larger established Avaya environment. Leadership had two broad choices: transform the larger environment to Cisco or bring the smaller Cisco footprint onto the existing Avaya platform.
The smaller transformation was the more practical path. The technically obvious answer was not automatically the best business answer.
Ian served as the technical lead and boots-on-the-ground project lead, coordinating vendors, sites, conversions and implementation work across a geographically distributed enterprise. His experience included hands-on work across roughly 60 locations.
The final implementation took him to Hawaii, completing a transformation that required more than architecture diagrams — it required people, planning, vendor coordination and disciplined execution in the field.
Good architecture is not isolated from economics, operations, people or timing. The right answer is the one that can be justified technically, operationally and financially — and then executed successfully.
Make technology serve the business.