"You see this," John Gygar says taking out a portable PC and bringing up a screen covered in digital dials, time zones from Bangalore to Boston are displayed in neat rows. "That's my constant companion at the moment."
Taking a moment for a cup of tea in the foyer of a Sydney hotel, Gygar explains the technicalities associated with real time global project management.
"Anything that needs to be dealt with in India or the US, I send out in the evening, and if I need to talk directly with people I can catch them first thing in the morning before they leave the office," he explains.
When asked, Gygar smiles and says he is organising a "big IT party", as casually as if it were a simple dinner for a few friends. In reality he has spent the last 18 months chalking up frequent flyer points by taking the WCIT 2002 message to the world in a non-stop evangelisation tour.
"England, France, Europe, four cities in India, the US, I've become a pseudo-ambassador," he says. "One of the first things we had to figure out was how, exactly, you went about running a world congress. This industry changes so fast that each congress is different from the last, but we have to make sure that nothing falls through the cracks."
It's a long way from selling typewriters for IBM, the job which first took Gygar's career down the IT path.
"I am not a technical person per se, it is more the organisational side of things I have been involved in. I am more interested in what we can do with the technology, rather than what the technology does," Gygar explains.
Initially a school teacher in regional Queensland, Gygar took his training skills to Big Blue in 1969, on a hunch the IT industry was going to keep growing.
However, rather than adhere diligently to the corporate treadmill, Gygar's career took a sudden change of direction in the mid eighties when he says he "indulged in a bit of an ego trip", by opening a restaurant in the coastal town of Noosa.
Still a keen cook when he has the time, Gygar says his interest in global cuisine stems from when Lebanese migrants started arriving in Australia.
"Bulgar and cinnamon was just not on the radar in most Australian homes at the time, so when I was coming home asking mum to make us kibbies for afternoon tea, I don't think she knew how to respond," Gygar recalls.
Later he managed to intercept a cousin on his way back from India, and began to discover the finer points of mixing curry spices. From there he was onto international cookbooks, and a dedication to making good food on the barbeque.
Within about 12 months his dream of running a restaurant had became more of a chore, and he sold it to swap back into an IT-focussed management consultancy.
"I had a very romantic idea of what it would be like running a restaurant," Gygar explains. "In reality it is a lot of fairly tedious work."
Ever interested in the practical implications of technology, he spent some time working for Smart Business Technology. A series of projects saw him putting second-hand computers in gaols to assist in rehabilitation programs for convicted criminals, and revamping the IT backbone of the state's emergency services department.
"The great thing about project work is that there is a lot of pressure, but you know exactly when the valve is going to be released," Gygar said. "I know I'm not very popular at times, because I tend to take a zero-tolerance attitude for failure, 'no' is not an option."
Throughout the nineties, he worked with DMR consulting on a series of different projects, finally taking off to Malaysia to open a new office in the region.
"I was basically a bit of a trouble-shooter, I would go into organisations to get a job done because for whatever reason they couldn't do it internally," Gygar says. "There was the usual round of business take overs and I ended up working for Fujitsu as Business Development Manager."
In August 2000, after more than a decade in IT project management, a colleague suggested Gygar apply to organise and manage the World Congress on IT 2002, which had been awarded to the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA).
And that is where the fun really started.
While the last 18 months have seen him on a non-stop world tour promoting WCIT 2002, he is also keen to create a legacy for up and coming world congress organisers.
"After March, we are going to file it all away, and make sure to send it on to Athens for the next congress in 2004," Gygar said. "The idea is to create a bit of a legacy for future organisers, and use what we have learnt for others."
