Zach on Leadership

I had a great opportunity to be a guest on the The Schmidt List Podcast with Kurt Schmidt. We talked in-depth about IT Transformation. We covered career advancement, corporate politics, how to bring new ideas into an established team, data center migrations, innovation, Agile, DevOps, being a linchpin, and the future of digital business. All in one action packed episode. Listen to the episode on iTunes or Google Play Be sure to subscribe to the The Schmidt List Podcast for all around good…

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Technology is science. Art is art. Technology can’t be art, can it? Think about it. Technology fits into the left-brain activities of logic, reason, mathematics. Art is a right-brain thing, like creativity, music, expression, and feeling. When you go to college, you major in “the sciences” or “the arts.” Your Associate’s, Bachelor’s, or Master’s degree is in either Science or Arts, but not both. We even have special magnet schools that focus exclusively on STEM education, which stands for Science,…

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Bird migrations just happen naturally. Data center migrations… don’t. Few projects in IT are as big of a deal as a data center migration. This is one of the most complex, highest risk, and potentially disruptive things IT can do to a business. I’ve had the opportunity to do several data center migrations over my career, two of which in the past two years at CHS. Traditionally, data center migrations involve trucks. You dismantle systems in your old data center,…

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Fear I started my professional IT career in January of 1999, which was a fantastic time to start. The world was careening toward the ticking time bomb of Y2K, and IT budgets were infused with capital to squash the bug and usher technology-dependent enterprises into the new millennium. I don’t know first-hand how IT was run before 1999, but I saw evidence of it. IT wasn’t much of an enterprise function before then. Technology was a hodge-podge of unstandardized components,…

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Enterprise IT teams have a lot of responsibilities. We need to run 24/7/365 operations, give great customer service, develop new business capabilities, keep the hackers out, refresh the technology on lifecycle, orchestrate M&A activities, implement business projects, and somewhere down the list is innovation. Yes, the business expects us to innovate. It’s part of the job. The term, innovation, has some connotation for us. In my role, I buy technology and services from tech companies. Those tech companies have R&D…

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I love the Back to the Future trilogy. It’s hard to admit this, but growing up, this trilogy was probably even more influential than Star Wars. Marty McFly was the guy that everyone wanted to be. He skateboarded, played in a rock band that I’m afraid was just too darn loud, and had time travel at his disposal. He basically had it all. Marty McFly was late for everything. As you think back through the series, just about every scene…

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Boba Fett is one of the coolest characters in Star Wars. He’s mysterious. He’s independent. He has his own unique style. Best of all, he’s a bounty hunter. That profession may give you the impression that Boba Fett is a not very nice, but to the contrary, he is actually a very caring individual. Case-in-point, Darth Vader wanted to test his carbonite freezer to make sure it was safe for people before using it on Luke. When Vader volunteered Han…

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The only thing constant in enterprise technology is change itself. If you boil it down, that’s the essence of our jobs. We change things: applications, web services, networks, desktops, databases, architectures, you name it. That’s the bulk of the work. Keeping systems humming without any change isn’t really that hard. It’s all of the new business requirements, refactoring, security patches, technology upgrades, organic growth, and audit remediation that makes life exciting, isn’t it? With all of this change, you’d think…

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Life in modern corporations is often marked with frequent reorganization. This can be frustrating for individual team members, who are struggling day-to-day to get their work done. Breaking-in new management is an extra distraction. It can sometimes feel like management is full of busybodies that get bored, so they decide to reshuffle the deck and watch everyone squirm. With 18 years in enterprise technology, I’ve been reorged more times than I can remember. As a leader in enterprise technology, I’ve…

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We like to be competent. As experienced professionals, and especially as leaders, there’s a built-in expectation that we know what we’re doing. If you’ve advanced in your career and had some success, changes are good that you have the confidence to take on challenges, make them your own, and make stuff happen. I’m lucky because I have leaders that report to me that exhibit these great qualities every day. I have no worries about the level of dedication, commitment, and…

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