About Me

Maxfield Allison

I design enterprise infrastructure, argue for it, and then run it.

I've spent ten years working with enterprise customers, starting in field support and becoming the global owner of an output-management platform on Azure. It serves thousands of devices across four regions. When it stops, people can't print, and in parts of that business printing isn't optional.

I'm the person an issue comes to when the regional teams need help, and I approve production changes to the platform. That often means following a problem into a system another team owns. In one case, stopping our application services made DNS work again. Starting them brought the failures back. I worked through it with the firewall vendor and the customer's security team until we found the configuration faults and got them corrected.

I've also been involved in the architecture decisions, from the move into Azure to regional redundancy. When we needed a test environment, I worked out the design and resource requirements across three organizations and made the business case that got it funded. The platform teams own the provisioning. Getting it approved took a lot more work than the design.

Better documentation and self-service have been a big part of the job too. Platform support tickets fell 38% year over year, measured in the customer's ServiceNow. I'm now reworking the account's operational information so AI agents and Microsoft Power Automate flows have something useful to work from.

The Tools

How I Use AI

I use AI a lot, and I spend a lot of that time asking questions. What already exists? Why this approach? What would make it fail? Agents can investigate those questions and implement changes while I work through the choices with them. With dnsweaver, they write the code. I decide what the tool should do and whether it's ready for a release.

That gives me room to explore things I might otherwise leave alone, or to have a proposed design challenged before committing to it. I still need to understand the system well enough to make the call. I've written more about how I use AI and the parts of this process I'm still figuring out.

At Home

Still Playing with Computers

Games got me into computers long before I had a job working with them. I played DOS games beside my mom, learned to fix my own machines, and eventually hosted servers for friends. I just wanted to play games is the start of that story.

The homelab came later, initially so I could watch movies. Now I'm hosting AI services and working on self-hosted replacements for the things I'd otherwise use Google for. There's Kubernetes and a Proxmox cluster with Ceph underneath, which is quite a lot of infrastructure for a hobby. I enjoy it. Some of what I learn turns out to be useful at work, but I'd be doing this regardless.

Experience

My resume has the roles, projects, and technical detail, including the path from field support to the work I do now.

Recognition

Specialist of the Quarter (x2) and Specialist of the Year
Ricoh STAR Award
Microsoft Azure Fundamentals, plus multiple enterprise product certifications

Say Hello

Let’s Talk

If there's a project or a role you think I'd be a good fit for, I'd like to hear about it.

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