Chief Information Officer
The success of MatchBox Exchange saw the business scale significantly in terms of employee headcount as well as the number of markets that it was operating in. In addition, our partners had greater expectations around cybersecurity, compliance, and privacy. Given that the product required a full-time focus, and my time was being diverted to these other areas, I split my role into two and become the CIO with a CTO reporting to me, allowing me to still retain a holistic vision of MatchBox Exchange's overall IT strategy.
The role naturally involved a large amount of BAU (business as usual) activities such as the management of users and systems (e.g. Freshworks, Microsoft 365), recruitment, people management, vendor management, alignment with changes to business processes, and technical support (internal & product). I continued to contribute to the product, particularly around security and partner integrations.
Accomplishments
- Consolidated business systems to reduce operating costs and improve cohesiveness
- Created a Power BI solution to improve business insights
- Worked with a cross-section of vendors to provide an integrated global VOIP telephony solution
- Improved the utilisation of our cloud infrastructure from a cost, security, and deployment standpoint
Skills
Projects
Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity was a large part of the focus of the role, both with internal acknowledgement as well as increased scrutiny from our shipping line partners, especially given recent cybersecurity breaches in the logistics industry.
There were multiple initiatives as a part of this work:
- Improving our overall security hardening for the product, our infrastructure, and the systems we rely on (e.g. email, Microsoft 365)
- Moving to vendors that could support AAD / OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect SSO for our internal business systems
- External penetration testing
- Continual improvements to our modern identity solution (Identity Server) as well as a push to get our partners to use SSO.
- Starting the ISO 27001 journey
Freshworks Migration
Like any digital SaaS business, MatchBox Exchange not only had its product to maintain but a myriad of other software platforms required to run a successful business. The sales, customer support, and internal support functions were using different software platforms and processes which did not integrate seamlessly.
MatchBox Exchange were using Freshdesk for customer support and I made the decision to migrate all of our systems to the Freshworks platform to reduce the number of vendors we were dealing with, provide an incentive to Freshworks for cost reduction, and provide better data integration across these systems.
This project consisted of:
- Modelling Freshsales Cloud to match Zoho CRM, and then in a separate phase working with the sales team to optimise how the data and sales process were represented in the CRM
- Creating a custom data migration tool to migrate all of MatchBox Exchange's Zoho CRM data to Freshsales Cloud
- Moving the internal support capability from Freshdesk to Freshservice
- Configuration changes to support telephony changes
Telephony
Telephony was considered an important aspect of MatchBox Exchange's customer communication for sales as well as customer support. The business needed to use VOIP solutions in order to integrate with Freshcaller (Freshwork's telephony platform) and to allow phone numbers to be transferred to other team members in other countries should that employee no longer be available.
There were also two added challenges:
- Mobile support for the sales team
- Not having a legal entity in all countries that we operated out of. This sometimes meant we needed to use a different underlying telephony provider and integrate that back into Freshcaller as Twilio (which powers Freshcaller) would not provision a phone number without a legal entity in that country.
This project required a lot of communication in understanding the compliance requirement of each phone number and how well positioned MatchBox Exchange was to comply, identify suitable vendors, and then identify a solution which would tie back into the Freshworks platform (either through SIP phone integration or existing Freshworks marketplace integration).
Infrastructure as Code
MatchBox Exchange utilised Azure DevOps to deploy changes to all of its environments. However, infrastructure changes were still largely manual (click ops). The tech team wanted to move closer to continuous delivery and this was identified as a key impediment from doing so, as any changes which needed infrastructure changes would need to be handled manually outside of the automatic deployment.
Working with one of our senior engineers and the CTO we used Bicep to define our infrastructure and make any infrastructure changes part of the deployment process.
Business Intelligence
MatchBox Exchange operates in 11 markets, each with separate infrastructure (with some sharing). Some critical business information was also stored in different systems (e.g. CRM, Xero). Whilst the in-product reporting did provide some business insights it was limited in usability and mainly targeted customers and partners, not internal stakeholders.
I developed a quick stop-gap solution which was able to aggregate the data across all markets, perform some basic data sanitisation and then allow internal users to view data across multiple dimensions using 10+ created reports. Using this reporting users could obtain better insights on customer, product and market trends.
In what started as a 'How hard can Power BI be?' personal project quickly morphed into something that the business saw immediate value in, with regular change requests.
Later I would also create a proof-of-concept integration with other systems such as Xero and Freshsales Cloud, which would then allow Power BI to be able to provide a true consolidated picture of the business.