Mandy Shaw - Chief Architect

How did you get where you are today?

I wouldn't recommend my approach to career development - it owes a lot more to luck than to judgement! I've been at Logicalis - via various predecessor companies such as Pacific Associates - for 21 years. In that time, I've been a developer, a comms specialist, a systems engineer, an educator, a consultant, a senior manager and now an architect. I have stayed all this time because there's always a new challenge and because of our customers, our technologies and the people I work with.

What are you working on right now?

My current projects include being the computing design authority for Logicalis' Innovation Centre; architecting a highly available enterprise content management (ECM) infrastructure for a large insurance company; architecting a secure printing solution for a High Street bank; and recruiting an additional architect for my team.

Who or what has been the greatest influence on your career to date?

Without a doubt, Paul Newman, one of the founding directors of Pacific Associates. He was a great educator and mentor, who sadly died in 2004. I would also say my customers, especially those I have worked with for many years and those who belong to Logicalis' IT Forum.

Who in the IT industry do you most admire - and why?

First, Tim Berners-Lee, who had a deceptively simple idea that changed the world. Second, all those people who invest their time and energy in delivering and supporting open source software, another simple concept that is turning the IT industry upside down.

What aspect of your job do you find the most satisfying?

Bringing together people from different backgrounds and with different assumptions to design solutions to our customers' problems.

What has been your most valuable lesson learnt?

About ten years ago, I project-managed a Lotus Notes rollout that went spectacularly wrong because I had neither taken into account the parlous state of the customer's WAN nor investigated their existing desktop configuration in sufficient detail. This taught me the simple lesson that the application is almost always the easy bit.