From time to time we like to give the teams at GDS the chance to talk about their work. This time we dropped in on the IT network team to find out if life in the bat cave really is like the IT Crowd.
Thanks to Richard Thomas, Paul Collman, Mohamed Hamid, Charles Turner and the rest of the team for braving the camera.
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Transcript
Meet the IT network team
Paul Collman, Internal Network Team Leader
Ohh, you’ve all seen ‘The IT Crowd’, haven’t you? It’s probably a bit like that; we probably don’t think we are.
Richard Thomas, Head of Internal IT Services
It’s the people that make the IT team.
Mohamed Hamid, Network Analyst
The way you think, I think you need to have a strategic outlook.
Paul Collman
I think the main thing really is to be interested in problem solving.
Charles Turner, Internal IT Analyst
It’s knowing that solution is going to have such an impact on the business and it’s going to make the workflow so much easier and better.
Mohamed Hamid
It is a fun job. GDS is an environment that’s always changing.
Richard Thomas
If we can give the best service, people respect us and it demonstrates that we respect other people as well because we understand their pressures, we understand what difficult jobs they’ve got.
What’s in the bat cave?
Paul Collman
So the bat cave, what we’re doing in there is, number one, build the network, and number two, run it; configuring network devices, implementing servers, managing those servers.
Mohamed Hamid
One thing that I like about GDS, and it’s quite unique, is that because it’s always changing, there’s always new people coming in, it’s a growing organisation, that means that the network’s also growing.
An exemplar for government
Paul Collman
We set out trying to build our network environment and build our Macs for a fraction of the cost that it usually takes government. Other departments are coming to talk to us and they are coming to say. “How have you done it?”, “What do you do?”, “Tell us what kit to buy?” It can be different. You don’t have to outsource that. You can do it yourself if you’ve got the right skills, and you can save an amazing amount of money.
