Zach on Leadership

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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The big bad car rental company I recently rented a car from one of the major car rental companies. During the trip, I had a flat tire. After changing it out for the spare, I called the roadside assistance number on my contract to let the rental company know what happened. They promptly answered and directed me to get the tire replaced at a local tire shop. They even made an appointment for me. They did tell me that I needed…

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In enterprise technology, we love cloud computing. While for some it may be threatening, for most of us, we see it as an opportunity to change the way we consume, broker, integrate, and secure technology. It’s not about moving application workloads from one building to another, it’s about creating a better technology experience for the business. This can be done regardless of where the server racks are located. Cloud computing started out with a few basic service models such as…

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I take security incident management very seriously. For most of my career, I’ve been a part of a team that is responsible for protecting the enterprise from cyber threats. I jump into action to understand what is going on and contain the threat as soon as possible. Today, I will share with you one of those fateful events from several years ago. The day started out like any other day. I read emails and attended meetings. Things were off to…

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