I'm a senior systems administrator at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health with over 30 years building, operating, and maintaining production systems.
Systems Under Real Constraints
My work focuses on how complex systems behave when theory meets reality: scale, security, reliability, latency, cost, and the human factors that sit beneath all of them. Having spent much of my career in well-resourced environments, I'm particularly interested in how technology must be engineered — not merely adopted — when applied in resource-constrained contexts, with Ghana as my primary focus.
Technology doesn't fail in the lab. It fails in the field — under budget pressure, unreliable infrastructure, and the weight of decisions made by people who weren't in the room when the system was designed.
Remote Sensing, UAVs, and the Ground Truth
Beyond enterprise IT, I've applied remote sensing, UAVs, and geospatial analysis to environmental monitoring — including a pilot project with the Ghana Forestry Commission that surfaced the operational realities of illegal logging in a protected forest reserve. That work reinforced something I'd long believed: the most important insights rarely come from the data alone. They come from understanding the environment the data lives in.
Accra. Addis Ababa. Boston. | CONTACT: ✉ walter@kwami.me