Thoughts on technology, leadership, security, infrastructure, automation, and the systems between them.
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Leadership
For students, faculty, and staff, the beginning of a new academic year feels like a fresh start. New classes, new faces, and new opportunities. For those of us working in technology, it feels a little different. It feels like the Super Bowl. While many campuses slow down during the summer, IT departments rarely do...
Leadership
There’s an old military style saying I’ve always liked: “The effective range of an excuse is zero.” In military terms, effective range is the distance at which a weapon or system can reliably accomplish its intended purpose. An excuse has none. I think the same principle applies surprisingly well to IT leadership. The...
Leadership
If your disaster recovery plan includes calling Bob because he's the only person who knows how something works, congratulations. Bob is now critical infrastructure. 😄 We spend a lot of time in IT thinking about redundancy. Redundant power. Redundant internet connections. Redundant storage. Backups. Failover. High...
System
It Started With a Discord Webhook... Some of my favorite technology projects don't happen during the workday. Outside of work, I'm part of a military simulation (Milsim) community that enjoys cooperative storytelling, teamwork, and creating immersive experiences around a game. What started as "making Discord a little...
Technology
I heard a phrase recently that immediately resonated with me: "Everything you need to learn you learned in kindergarten." My first reaction was, "You know... I think I agree." Then I started thinking about my own career. Kindergarten didn't teach me how to configure a firewall, design a cloud environment, recover from...
Technology
One sentence has been stuck in my head all day: "Find your way to yes." It wasn't the headline of the presentation. It wasn't on a slide. It was mentioned almost in passing. But I haven't stopped thinking about it. As leaders, many of us are trained to evaluate risk. We protect budgets. We enforce policy. We ask hard...
Technology
If you've worked in higher education long enough, you've probably heard IT described as the "Department of No." I understand why that perception exists. Faculty are constantly discovering new ways to teach, collaborate, and engage students. Innovation should be encouraged. But innovation also needs stewardship. Every...
Technology
As community colleges prepare for another Fall semester, many of us are continuing to strengthen cybersecurity by expanding Multi Factor Authentication (MFA). It's the right thing to do. But here's a question I've been thinking about. Should owning a personal smartphone become a requirement for accessing a community...
System
I've been thinking about a term I recently heard: digital dust. It's the data we continue to keep because nobody has decided whether it still has value. As IT leaders, we're often asked, "How long should we retain backups?" The discussion usually turns into storage costs, licensing, or cloud pricing. Those are...
Leadership
One of the most interesting things about leadership is that most of us can describe the kind of leader we think we are. The harder question is whether the people around us would describe us the same way. In IT leadership, I’ve found most leadership styles tend to fall into a few common categories. Autocratic leadership...
Leadership
When our help desk had a vacancy, I had a decision to make. I could immediately redistribute the workload, or I could use it as an opportunity to learn. I chose the second option. For a period of time, every new help desk ticket was assigned to me first. Not because I intended to resolve every issue myself. My goal was...
Leadership
Lately, I’ve been thinking about something I’ve seen happen across IT organizations in both private and public sectors. I call it the IT Department Bubble. The bubble forms when organizations begin building roles around specific individuals instead of building roles around long term business and operational needs. At...
System
That sounds obvious. But many organizations unknowingly build monitoring solutions that rely on the same power, network, internet, and infrastructure they are supposed to monitor. That creates a dangerous blind spot. If your primary environment fails, your alerting platform may fail with it. No power. No network. No...
Technology
Early in my career in IT, I believed technical skill was everything. The more you knew, the more valuable you were. If you could solve complex problems, troubleshoot systems, and understand the technical details better than others, success would follow. And to a degree, that was true. Technical skill builds...
Technology
One of the unexpected places I find myself thinking about leadership is while playing Fortnite with my son. Even though we are playing the same game and trying to achieve the same overall objective, we often approach it very differently. My approach is fairly direct. I want to land quickly, gather weapons, ammunition...
Infrastructure
One of the easiest traps for leaders, especially in IT, is confusing activity with progress. A day can disappear quickly. Emails need responses. Meetings fill the calendar. Phones ring. Teams messages arrive every few minutes. Unexpected issues demand immediate attention. By the end of the day, you may feel exhausted...
Leadership
I was listening to a leadership discussion recently that used a simple analogy that stuck with me. Imagine you're riding down the highway at 70 mph. If you're the driver, the experience feels very different than if you're the passenger. As the driver, you control the speed. You know when you're about to brake. You know...
Technology
You can teach anybody to be a technician. You can teach somebody how to reset passwords, replace hardware, troubleshoot networks, manage systems, follow documentation, or learn a new platform. Technology changes every few years anyway. If somebody is willing to learn, the technical side can be developed over time. What...
Cybersecurity
There was a time in IT where the safest strategy was to stay slightly behind on patching. Let peer institutions discover the hidden landmines first. If an update caused issues, the community would usually uncover it before it ever reached your production environment. That approach is becoming almost impossible now...
Leadership
I’ve learned over the years that most technology products are not what fail the relationship. Support does. Too often, the sales process feels like a courtship. Fast replies. Endless meetings. “We’re here for anything you need.” Then the contract gets signed. Suddenly the emails slow down. Questions take days...
