Work Tales I

University of Nevada, 2003

When I arrived to my original position at the university as the manager of the IT systems administrators, I was amazed to find what seemed like computing chaos. There was virtually no central administration of computer systems (servers or users' computers), anti-virus was seemingly random, and reliability whimsical. Having come from a corporate environment where we had been able to ensure consistent computers, users having very limited ability to break their own computers, and a solid infrastructure, the university was in shambles. It seemed like a disaster waiting to happen.

Lo and behold, a week after I started there was a campus-wide outbreak of a virus that resulted in more than a third of the campus computers being shut down or removed from the network. With limited resources and no central administration of the computers, virtually everyone in IT had to visit each of the affected computers and fix the issues. We had individual users who were down for over a week. The loss of productivity, though never discussed in actual dollars, was staggering. While only a portion of this was part of my new-found responsibility, it was unacceptable to me.

There are several parts to this story and I'll get to them later but there was something about this instance that gave me an excellent understanding of the lay of the land and a sense of the historical difficulties in this environment.

As soon as this outbreak occurred, I worked with our IT technicians to determine a fix and we then burned CDs with the fix and sent everyone into the field, myself included. During this time I got to know my new staff infinitely better than I could have in regular weekly meetings, I got to know the users, I became acquainted with the campus (which has 80+ buildings), and was noticed by higher levels of management than my immediate supervisor as well as the campus. I didn't plan for those results but by doing what seemed like the right thing (identifying the problem, a short-term solution, and then jumping into the fire), it helped me to advance quickly. It also helped me to lay the foundation for a better long-term solution for the campus that we implemented later, but that's another installment.