RCN Digital Leadership: Aaron O’Connor, LCdr

Lieutenant-Commander (LCdr) Aaron O’Connor

Elizabeth Wolfe
Business Analyst/Technical Advisor, Naval Personnel and Training Group

—

In this series, we showcase digital leadership across the RCN to illustrate how our enterprise solutions are successfully leveraged for the benefit of our teams.

Born and raised in the Halifax area, Lieutenant-Commander (LCdr) Aaron O’Connor is a Naval Reserves Senior Staff Officer at Personnel Coordination Center (PCC) Atlantic. He joined the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) as a Reserve Entry Officer in 2008 while studying Informatics at Dalhousie University. He is a CISCO-certified Network Administrator pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Public Policy and Gender Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University.

Before working full-time for the RCN, LCdr  O’Connor was employed by a subsidiary of Rogers doing real-time adherence management for call centres, creating schedules for 500+ people across Canada. His professional and academic experiences undoubtedly prepared him for his current role. He is responsible for all non-operational tasks at PCC Atlantic and has between 42 and 200 personnel reporting to him, depending on the time of year.

As a self-described geriatric millennial, he started building his computers very young, which led to a broad understanding of all things computers. He is also committed to staying in contact with friends who have pursued advanced Computer Science degrees to remain abreast of technology trends and innovations. He is currently interested in data manipulation and management, accurately using data, and identifying and developing relevant tools and solutions.

Regarding his military responsibilities, he advocates maintaining the accuracy and freshness of monitoring mass data, as this enterprise-level tool is critical for effective and efficient decision-making. Time invested in Monitor Mass data will result in better support for our personnel from the PCCs, plus better time management for our ships.

LCdr O’Connor’s recommendations for improving your digital skills include:

• Use the most advanced tools available;
• Clean your data so that it can be interpreted in a useful form;
• Present your data with a narrative to contextualize the results;
• Excel is not a briefing product but a tool to help you understand what you will brief; It’s not an answer to an Analytics question; PowerBI should be used instead;
• Contact your Analytics cell to confirm whether a query has been done before; and
• Be willing to do your research to solve the questions appropriately posed.