Danny McCarthy joined WCL in 2016 as Client Services Principal Technician before being promoted to IT Operations Manager in 2018. Before joining WCL, Danny worked as Technical Operations Manager at Sodexo.
Name: Danny McCarthy
Job title: IT Operations Manager
1. Can you tell us about your career journey so far?
Before joining WCL I worked for a private company that runs several prisons. I was the IT Manager for eight years and before that I worked at an immigration centre.
In the prison service I looked after IT systems, all the security systems including cameras, and the email system for the whole company.
In 2016 I joined WCL because I wanted a change from prison – I’d served my time! I I joined WCL just when it entered a period of rapid growth so it was perfect timing. The company and my role in it have grown since I joined.
2. What is an average day in the life of a IT Operations Manager?
Every morning starts with an online catch-up meeting with the entire support team. We are all working from home at moment, so it’s important to make sure everyone is keeping well, we agree project deadlines, and hand out work. I have to admit we do spend a bit of the beginning of the Monday morning meeting catching up on football from the weekend! Since lockdown and working from home, we speak more frequently as a team than we did in the office.
But, really, there’s no average day. They’re all different as incidents arise – ISO work, project and management work, internal IT work and supporting the team. That’s the great thing about this job.
I joined WCL just when it entered a period of rapid growth so it was perfect timing. The company and my role in it have grown since I joined.
3. What do you enjoy most about your job and why?
The complete variety and the opportunity to use new technology. It’s great the way WCL want to continually innovate. This year we moved all our hosted services into Azure. We are using Azure Logic Apps, a cloud-based platform for creating and running automated workflows that integrate your apps, data, services, and systems.
We are supporting a number of APIs the new technology phrase everyone is using – Application Programming Interface. It’s a software interface that allows two applications to interact with each other without any user intervention. APIs allows a product or service to communicate with other products and services without having to know how they’re implemented. It means we no longer need a physical server in a data centre. Clients don’t need to call our services – we can give them what they need with API, and the data is in the cloud.
4. Which areas for developing technology do you see as the most important for your business and industry?
APIs are the most important, and the next are Logic Apps that will allow us to move to serverless processing. It means clients don’t have to build a server, and that all the apps are already installed, so it’s ready to go out of the box.
The insurance market doesn’t always move as quickly as we would like and is still using some old processes in certain areas, which is why it’s great that we are pushing new innovations such as Logic Apps.
5. What is your proudest moment in work or your greatest achievement in your career and why?
My greatest achievement in the prison service was helping implement a kiosk system. The system made lives easier for everyone in prison – staff and prisoners. The kiosks allowed prisoners to take control of many things from shop orders, booking visits to reporting a fault in their cell. I won a Butler Trust award for this work and went to Buckingham Palace to get it from Princess Anne.
At WCL, I’m proudest of how we moved our data centre to Azure in only 60 days – it’s taken some companies a year to do the same. It was a seamless process for our clients as we physically moved them into the cloud overnight at the weekend.
6. Following the acquisition by Zywave what are you most excited about / opportunities to explore.
The growth opportunities that Zywave bring. They’re keen to grow and are bringing opportunities and potential clients in both the UK and the US market.