As well as his role as managing director, Milner is also responsible for coordinating the efforts of the 15 IT staff at Chime, a division of ISP iiNet. "One of my mantras is that you need to be very focussed and understand very clearly what you do," Milner said.
He describes Chime as essentially a wholesale IP carrier which has a number of ISPs, including iiNet, as its customers. This includes managing the network infrastructure, and other functions such as e-mail and Web hosting for these customers.
Chime has three teams which deal with IT functions--operations, developers and commercial.
The operations team is headed up by its network manager and are responsible for day-to-day maintenance and management of the network. This includes tasks such as responding to faults and managing planned upgrades.
Its' development team plan and maintain all Chime's software systems and the tools which it has developed, Milner said.
"The third group is our commercial team which manages all of the commercial arrangements, for example, supply contracts we have with our suppliers and also with our customers."
Outside of these areas, Milner said internal IT functions like desktop support and internal e-mail were carried out by its IT services team. In addition, this team also looks after the company's 40-seat call centre and the PABX system.
Milner is responsible for overseeing these teams with a team leader from each reporting to him, and also works on setting up IT-related policy within the company, such as broad guidelines and direction.
"Because we're an ISP I think it's safe to say that the IT function within a company like ours is so integral to what we do [that] it's of higher strategic importance in our business than you'd typically find in an average organisation," Milner said.
What about the issues Milner sees CIOs and IT managers in Australia facing at the moment?
"Obviously attracting and retaining the right people," Milner admits. "When you're in a period of high growth [a company] needs excellent people to manage that for you. We've got some excellent people, but it's always nice to have some people coming up in the pipeline as well."
As for the technical areas he's keeping an eye on, Milner said that operating in the managed IP business means there's quite a bit of innovation going on. This includes Voice over IP PABX technology, as he thinks it's now reasonably mature and quite well featured. "It's on our radar screens to allow us to innovate more in our call centres...we'd love to have people work from home, for example."
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