Paul HobsonTechnology Platforms, Plains
Technology Platforms Leader · Calgary, Canada · 2023 — present
Responsible for technology platform strategy supporting large-scale operational environments across North America. Plains operates one of the largest pipeline and storage networks on the continent — a technology estate that spans enterprise systems, operational technology, and the increasingly consequential boundary between them.
The work centres on evolving large technology ecosystems while maintaining the reliability and operational continuity that safety-critical infrastructure demands. That means holding the long architectural view while dealing with a daily reality of complex dependencies, legacy systems, and the practical constraints of organisations that cannot afford to stop running while they modernise.
Focus areas
- Platform architecture and infrastructure modernisation
- IT/OT convergence — connecting enterprise and operational technology estates
- Technology resilience, reliability engineering, and operational continuity
- Enterprise architecture governance and technology standards
- Technology strategy and investment alignment
Enterprise Architecture, WestJet
Head of Architecture · Head of Technology Strategy & Enterprise Services · Calgary, Canada · 2018 — 2023
Led enterprise architecture and technology strategy for WestJet across five years that included airline growth, the impact of the pandemic on aviation operations, organisational transformation, and the sustained work of modernising a complex operational technology estate.
The architecture challenge in aviation is distinctive: the systems that run an airline — reservations, operations control, crew management, loyalty, maintenance, ground handling — are deeply interdependent, highly regulated, and required to be available continuously. Building a coherent architectural practice in that environment means understanding not just the technology but the operational rhythms and risk tolerances that constrain what can be changed and when.
Focus areas
- Enterprise architecture practice — governance, standards, and long-term roadmapping
- Aviation operational systems and their constraints
- Technology investment strategy and business case development
- Platform reliability and operational resilience
- Technology governance and architectural oversight
Technology Transformation, UBC
Director of Enterprise Architecture · Vancouver, Canada · 2011 — 2018
Led enterprise architecture for the University of British Columbia across seven years of significant institutional investment in technology modernisation — alongside a parallel responsibility for research computing infrastructure that sat alongside the enterprise architecture role rather than beneath it.
UBC is not, in any meaningful sense, a single organisation. It is a complex conglomerate that happens to share a name and a governance structure: marine biology and medicine, law and forestry, engineering and music, a teaching hospital, an astronomical observatory, a farm. Each domain has its own computing requirements, its own data infrastructure, its own relationship with commercial and open-source software, and its own expectations about what technology should do. The marine ecologist’s needs and the radiologist’s needs and the composer’s needs share essentially nothing except a network and an authentication system — and in some cases not even that.
This diversity is an extraordinary training ground. The use cases a large research university generates are ones that most organisations cannot even formulate, let alone solve — and many of them arrive with budgets that would look like rounding errors in a commercial IT department. Supporting world-class research under those constraints develops a particular kind of resourcefulness: you learn to distinguish between what genuinely requires investment and what can be solved by understanding the problem more carefully. You also develop an instinct for the difference between institutional complexity and unnecessary complexity — universities have plenty of both, and the skill is knowing which is which.
The architectural challenge is as much about governance and alignment as technology. Academic institutions have strong traditions of disciplinary autonomy; technology decisions that in a corporate environment would be centralised are in a university distributed across dozens of faculties, departments, and research groups. Building architectural coherence in that context requires influence, patience, and a genuine understanding of what each constituency is trying to accomplish — the mandate-and-govern model that works in operational organisations does not transfer.
Focus areas
- Enterprise architecture governance across a diverse, federated technology estate
- Research computing infrastructure — HPC, research data management, specialist scientific platforms
- Institutional technology strategy and investment alignment
- Large-scale programme business cases and technology transformation planning
- Student information systems and academic technology modernisation
Digital Infrastructure, Cardiff University
Deputy CTO · Head of Research Support · Associate Director, Web Service Delivery · Cardiff, United Kingdom · 2005 — 2011
Six years at Cardiff spanning three distinct phases — web and portal infrastructure, research computing, and technology leadership — reflecting the arc of a period when UK research universities were beginning to invest seriously in both enterprise architecture and high-performance computing as strategic capabilities.
Cardiff is another institution that defies easy categorisation. A Russell Group research university covers archaeology and dentistry, brain scanning and forestry, hospitals and engineering and music. The technology estate that serves those domains is not a single coherent system; it is a federation of specialised infrastructures, each shaped by the demands of its discipline and the funding landscape that supports it. Understanding how to serve that breadth — and how to build common foundations without imposing uniformity that the diversity cannot absorb — is a specific skill that most enterprise environments simply don’t develop.
A significant part of the Cardiff period was building ARCCA — the Advanced Research Computing @ Cardiff facility — which brought high-performance computing infrastructure to a research university that, like most, needed world-class compute on a budget that reflected institutional reality rather than commercial pricing. The work involved not just the infrastructure itself but the support model, the governance, and the integration of HPC capability into research workflows across disciplines that ranged from computational chemistry to climate modelling to large-scale genomics. Research computing at this level sits at an unusual intersection: technically demanding, operationally complex, and dependent on close collaboration with researchers whose requirements are often at the frontier of what existing infrastructure can support.
The Cardiff period also overlapped with national programmes exploring service-oriented digital infrastructure for UK higher education — early, practical work on enterprise integration patterns and shared services at a time when those concepts were still being tested against institutional reality.
Focus areas
- Advanced research computing — building and operating HPC infrastructure (ARCCA)
- Research support and specialist scientific computing across a multidisciplinary institution
- Enterprise architecture and digital transformation in UK higher education
- Web services, portal infrastructure, and early enterprise integration
- National programmes on shared digital infrastructure (JISC, Eduserv)
- Technology leadership and building the case for architectural investment