Today is Australia Day and I’m in Wellington, New Zealand. Today I was awarded a Conspicuous Service Cross within the Australian National Honours System. The citation reads in part “… for outstanding achievement in project management, strategic reform agenda implementation, and the development and acquisition of an e-health system for Defence”.

I’m very humbled to be recognised with such an honour, because as almost anyone who has received similar awards will tell you the effort was not solely theirs. Many people contribute and they go unrecognised. This was most certainly the case for my award.

Naturally I’m also very proud to be recognised in such a way: more so because I used the Business Network Analysis™ methodology described elsewhere on this website and in my PhD thesis as part of my project management approach, and in particular for the e-health system.

After 33 years of service in both the Australian Regular Army and the Reserve I’ve decided to finally move on and hang up my hat. For the past two and a half years I have been working in a full-time Reserve capacity on the information/knowledge management requirements for a multi-million dollar e-Health initiative known as JeHDI (Joint eHealth Data and Information system). This has been a fascinating and very worthwhile job, but my real interests lie in network analysis and knowledge management. Accordingly I have decided to pursue these and have established a company called HyperEdge Pty Ltd . Why HyperEdge?

A hyperedge is a type of connection or link in network analysis so it has direct relevance to what I intend to do (for a full explanation go to the HyperEdge website or Wikipedia ). I like the name and it’s easy to say and spell. I also think it has a nice ring to it, and just as importantly I was able to capture the domain names.

The power of social networks was used to arrive at a name.