Before I became an IT auditor, I spent seven years traveling and during that time I got shot twice, once in El Salvador and once in Chicago. I laugh about it now, but I wasn’t laughing about the experience at the time, and it did change my outlook on life. I’d probably assess the risk a bit more thoroughly if I did it all again!
But I still love traveling. I have been traveling around the world and done all kinds of long-distance hikes on every continent except Antarctica. So, I love hiking, and I still do this extensively with my family and friends. We do lots of hikes in the Dublin Mountains near where we live, and every year for the past 16 years, I have organized a friends hiking trip somewhere in Britain or Ireland. I love hiking, running and any sports, really. It’s something completely different from what I do for a living. Sometimes I run home from work; it’s about 7 ½ miles, it takes me just about an hour or so, and in that time, I go from being really wound up to coming in like a Buddhist priest into the house. All the problems in the world have gone.
I’ve dipped in and out of IT audit multiple times, and I’ve had pretty much every other kind of IT job in between. I’ve been in operations, I’ve been a programmer, I’ve been a project manager, and I’ve been head of IT, and in between almost all of these jobs, I’ve gone into IT audit. It’s almost like I keep refreshing my knowledge, and when you come back as an IT auditor, you actually have pragmatic experience, and you can make recommendations that people can actually do. I see it a lot with the younger auditors, they go by the book, and it’s like ‘No, no, no, what would you actually like to do yourself if you were in this situation?’ I’ve developed a lot more empathy over the years.
Glanbia is a traditional cheese company and you wouldn’t even think all the changes in technology would affect us that much, but it has. We’ve got to get to market and we’ve got a lot of products. If we just go through Amazon for the rest of our lives, we’ll have no business at all, so we have to learn to set up websites and apps and social media sites. That has led to me having to refresh my knowledge on them and research what the risks are. And similarly, even in the factories now, there’s a lot of push to move stuff into the cloud, so I’ve had to learn about cloud technology. Only a few years ago, this was irrelevant to our industry and to me, and now, all of a sudden, I have to become an expert in it.
But it doesn’t take any toll on me, really, because I like learning. I’m not a techy enthusiast, but I’m really interested in how technology is used by the business and what the risks are, so I’m a willing learner. I think the minute you start fearing it is the minute that your stress levels will start rising because there’s always going to be stuff you don’t know. You’re often just thrown in, and you have to just go and do it.
I do have some concerns about technology from a personal life standpoint. I have two boys, 9 and 8. As a father, I’m concerned about all the technology that’s out there, and because I’m in the industry, I’m probably more aware of it than almost any other parents I know at their school. I personally don’t let my children have any games, consoles, they get very little TV time, and I don’t let them get on the internet unsupervised. It’s just too soon in my opinion. They need to learn about the outside world first. Having said that, they do need to learn how the internet works, how personal technology can increase their access to information and how to utilize IT to enhance their lives rather than take them over. In my working life, we have gone from ticker tape and punched cards to iPhones and self-driving cars; it’ll change as much again for the next generation, so they need to be ready and understand the risks.
