"Most of the time we are looking for new ways of doing things," de Lima said. "People approach me with questions [such as], 'is it part of our strategy', or 'how we can use it as technology within PwC'."
de Lima is the national client services leader for Australia at services organisation PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), which means that the company's partners and staff are effectively his 'clients'.
Primarily, de Lima's group is responsible for setting up the technical infrastructure at PwC, including installation and configuration, as well as support on an ongoing basis.
de Lima said he utilises technology such as Novell NetWare, Windows NT and 2000 servers, and also Lotus Notes. The group is also responsible for PwC's voice infrastructure, including PABX, voicemail systems, and call accounting.
In all, PwC's client services group has 100 staff, with the geographical leaders for different regions in Australia reporting indirectly to de Lima.
de Lima has worked at PwC for seven years, and moved into his current role earlier this year. Previously he was client services leader for PwC's southern region in Australia and also spent a stint as manager for controls and policies.
Currently his day-to-day tasks include managing staff, in addition to liasing with internal clients, made up of PwC partners and other staff.
Service-level agreements within the company is another area de Lima looks after. "It basically means that we are responsible for developing a good level of understanding of what our clients' expectations are, and establishing the correct balance of our group's ability to deliver, and our internal clients' expectations," de Lima said.
de Lima said he often has to take a pragmatic approach to achieving this. "At the end of the day everything can be done at a cost," he said. "We establish a vanilla service, available to everyone in the firm. If [internal] clients have a specific request we can basically deliver the services to them for an extra charge."
As for technology trends, de Lima points to wireless. "For PwC it's important for us that we be leveraging a security infrastructure, within PwC and to our clients," he said. "The challenge for us is to guarantee security of information which is going to be circulating across this wireless network."
Web technologies is another area de Lima sees as having growing importance, particularly from a relationship point-of-view. "Because we have such a diverse range of [external] clients working with PwC we needed to be prepared to interact with them in the way which best suits them," he said.
"As much as possible we try to establish an infrastructure and work processes that are going to be enabling to each of the partners involved in the transaction--to have effective access to the information they require."
And what about bugbears de Lima has about IT in Australia more generally? With most services that organisations require today being bandwidth intensive, he believes the price of telecommunications in Australia is still really high. "The time that comes down will make it much easier for everybody," de Lima suggests. "That'll mean that cost of services can come down and we can focus on other areas and invest in technologies."
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What an interesting profile??
What an inspirational article. Is he still at pwC?
Suzanna