The CTO Project

The summit was pretty good today. A CIO at a large state university gave a presentation on outsourcing “non-distinctive” services such as email. He compared the CIOs/CTOs who are futzing with their email systems and meager 100 mb quotas to Zulu tribesman clutching their spears watching a rocket zip by overhead. He’s outsourced everything to Google. He got out a thumbdrive and started jumping on it to make the point that storage is really cheap, even though it’s expensive for us to administer on our pathetic scale… Someone asked, “but aren’t you afraid that next year Google’s going … Continue Reading

Everyone’s overwhelmed keeping up with the routine. We’re all managing email, upgrading file servers, customizing widgets for departmental apps, re-imaging and troubleshooting desktops, blah blah blah. When we hear about something new or cool or exciting, it’s hard to find the time to pilot it, let alone making the infrastructure shifts that are sometimes necessary to accommodate it. Infrastructure shifts? Like changing identity management systems, or file systems, web servers, etc. These are big projects which, when done successfully, are completely invisible to the end user yet result, eventually, in a much better, more responsive, more stable, more attractive … Continue Reading