In less than six weeks Jon North, Area VP, Enterprise Architecture and Partner Enablement at NinjaOne, will be taking to the stage at SITS for How to script at scale so your support staff aren’t bored to tears and you don’t break anything
What’s the most rewarding aspect of your job?
To put it simply, making people’s lives easier and better.
Our customers, their customers, my colleagues.When I run training sessions, or sessions like I did at SITS last year, I can literally see the lightbulbs going off in people’s heads as they start to understand the implications of what I’m talking about – I had people commenting on my post about last year’s session saying they went back and implemented the ideas I shared, and achieved great success.
My ideas to deploy RMM/endpoint management agents to remote laptops in a Windows domain environment have had a huge impact, with numerous devices deploying at global scale within a couple of hours; my processes and automations for migrating away from other RMM/endpoint management solutions make the transition much quicker, more robust and more scalable, with agents deployed much easier and with less impact and disruption than other models; getting to the “single source of truth” of what Windows Update has been doing makes for far more trustworthy data.
Having a direct impact on the knowledge, skills and career trajectories of colleagues has been incredibly satisfying to see play out.
How did you get into scripting and automation?
I learnt to code when I was 12 and was published by 14, reverse-engineering computer games to allow readers to cheat with infinite lives etc – I was always more interested in how they worked than actually playing them – and I’ve been scripting, automating and simplifying ever since.
During my corporate days I reduced a 22-page document on how to configure a particular application to a three-line Batch file and a registry export. Then when I went vendor-side I had the opportunity to create similar solutions, only now on a much bigger scale (tens of millions) – and I’ve been coding, and teaching coding, ever since.
What’s the most painfully repetitive task you’ve seen a support team still doing manually, and what was the moment you thought “there has to be a better way”?
Repetitive – the first was probably that app config I just mentioned as we had to do it constantly, it took a fair while to work through each time, and was prone to human error. That said, it’s still probably something really mundane and predictable like deleting temporary files – relatively simple to script, but saves SO MUCH time versus doing it manually and interactively on box every time.
“A better way” – the agent deployment model for Windows domains is based on an idea that installs the agent via an automated process that happens on every domain controller every couple of hours or so, rather than the previous model everyone was using (many still do) which tried to install it on system startup before remote laptops had connected, so they’d never get hit. This model hits remote laptops when they next connect – it’s been a game-changer for companies with a lot of remote workers – I first did it at Datto a few years ago where it hit 250k endpoints in the first quarter, and have since completely refactored it for Ninja, which was released the other week. The migration and deployment scripts I’ve written for customers transitioning have been incredibly impactful and made the journey far smoother than it has been historically.
What are you most looking forward to at SITS?
Seeing the lightbulbs go off during my session, and meeting customers at the NinjaOne booth to talk all things endpoint management and automation!
What do you want visitors to take away from your session?
The session is all about things to think about – and watch out for – when you take your scripting to the next level and write code for hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of endpoints (or more!). The audience will learn actionable insights they can take away and put into practice straight away when they’re building and testing their code.
SITS – Service Desk & IT Support Show, taking place at Excel London 13-14 May 2026.
For further information, please visit www.servicedeskshow.com.