In a successful company like Mitrais, there are a host of team members who contribute to that success. Many are obvious to staff and clients due to the high profile of their roles, but some of the most important are rarely seen or acknowledged.

As CIO, Hartoyo heads up the IT Support Team. The fact that they can be almost invisible to the organisation and clients on a day to day basis is a testament to how well they perform their roles – generally things simply work, and when they don’t, his calm influence is a real asset.

But how does such a quietly competent operator as Hartoyo come to be? Born in Bali, Hartoyo undertook his primary and secondary school on the island. On graduating high school, he was able to continue his education at the University of Arizona (yes, he was a Wildcat!) majoring in Management Information Systems. He became immersed in the innovative culture that existed at that time, working with some of the most renowned Unix Wizards (“real-life geeks” Hartoyo says).

Hartoyo became so involved that he took to collecting examples of differing platforms in his room. Having working Sun Solaris, Apple PowerPC, Dell Pentium Pro machines had an unexpected benefit. They generated so much heat that Hartoyo never needed to turn on the heating – he was always toasty warm in the chilly Arizona winter!

Like a lot of IT professionals, Hartoyo was initially attracted to IT via games. Starting with Nintendo/Sega consoles, he quickly became interested in the much richer variety of gaming titles available on the PC’s DOS platform. Wing Commander became his favourite pastime, and he was an avid player at that time.

Interestingly, now that he is a respected IT professional, his enthusiasm for gaming has not diminished, and it remains one of his favourite downtime activities. These days, though, his interest is piqued by considerably more sophisticated historical warfare simulations, and he has a strong passion for historical hoplology (the study of arms and armour). He finds that this compliments his gaming hobby nicely.

Within Mitrais, though, Hartoyo and his team are simply known as the “go to” guys on all matters relating to IT and Networks. He is equally at home managing the considerable internal demands of Mitrais staff (both reactive day to day problem solving and longer-term strategic planning), and the wildly varied requirements of Mitrais clients (for whom we regularly need to create and maintain a dazzling array of virtual environments that mirror their own). However, Hartoyo still retains the ability to focus on and manage vital organisational elements like disaster recovery and network security.

Perhaps he runs his team like one of the armies in his beloved battle simulations, and that is the secret behind the team’s consistent performance?

One of Hartoyo’s favourite quotes might give us a glimpse into his management style. As the 15th century Italian writer, Niccolò Machiavelli, said, “He who wishes to be obeyed must know how to command.” And if that sounds like a quote from the game Total War: Medieval, it works, so we can forgive that!