ICT Consultancy

I have over ten years as an ICT designer and consultant, designing and implementing data centres, labs, offices, shopping malls, hotels, and many other kinds of commercial intelligent buildings and construction projects.

This is one of my specialisms, alongside project management (PMI PMP certified, 2023), procurement and negotiation, and logistics planning to keep projects on deadline or cut the delays down. I offer it here with Jolyn Pek, a corporate real estate consultant and client representative based in Singapore, working across APAC. She covers the property and programme side, I cover the technology side, and the two are integrated and delivered together as one piece of work, not two that get stitched together later.

Every commercial building is an intelligent building now, so the property decision and the technology decision are tied together. The real estate side sets the programme and the capital budget. The ICT side sets the distribution design and how much network capacity the building actually has. Wifi, AV, VoIP, security, BMS and IoT have all converged onto IP, so costing the technology in early means fewer surprises later.

All of it comes from the same place: creatively solving problems, and strategic contingency planning, which for me is real risk management, spotting which phase, stage, or item is most at risk of becoming a blocker before it does. Not producing theory that doesn’t work in real life or unnecessary paperwork and admin. Getting the work done, where it matters most.

I have sat in the design team with the client or their representative, architects, project managers, interior designers, AV, and electrical and mechanical engineers. I would be the translator of the IT technical requirements, creating the coordinated ICT technical specifications through the construction design stages (RIBA).

For data centres and IT labs, I would work with the data centre and the client’s technical team to understand their requirements, then design the equipment rack, the network and switch architecture, the cabling and communication layouts, and the Bill of Materials (BoM). I would handle quotations and negotiations, availability, procurement and PO process, logistic management and timing, and the contractors for the build, implementation management, then run the site and build audits, quality control and checks, and the documentation for handover.

I negotiate the commercial terms behind the design too: colocation, connectivity and hardware contracts, rate benchmarking and renewals.

A lot of the work is option comparisons, and that is actually the larger piece of it: cost models across the design scenarios, so decision-makers have the facts and figures to make the call.

Between us we cover the whole run: feasibility, costing and option comparisons, design management and ICT design, procurement and commercial, delivery and programme control, then handover and operations.

Behind that: eight years of infrastructure architecture and data centre delivery at a global software company, Copper and Fibre Optic Structured Cabling with Connectix, and a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science and Network Communications from Kingston University.

The Jolyn & Hoi brochure

Quick note on the link below: it opens in a new tab. If you would rather grab your own copy to keep, just right-click the link and choose Save link as.