April 18th, 2010 by Al

I want to give an update of what’s been happening: Things are going well in the PDA department. A special call-out to Mindy Byers of “Mega-Mouth Mindy” who gave me incredible insight and opinion with her own experiences the iPhone. Many thanks Mindy. I appreciate your time and willingness to answer my questions.

The iPhone is working out better than expected. (That’s always good, right?) It’s simplified my personal data, solving communication problems by providing real-time access to both email and voice. In all actuality, it’s FUN! I’m using 2 productivity applications daily:

iTimeSheets,  which tracks many different yet recurring tasks I’m working on. The great part is, it emails the report in a CSV format, easily imported into Excel.

MileBug, which tracks mileage for IRS purposes, allowing me to toss the paper log book. This one allows setting presets for orgin and destination, business purposes and start/stop mileage. In all, it does it all. Plug in the IRS allowance and it calculates the total mileage and $ amount. The reports are emailed as well, in the same CSV formats.

The other standard applications  on iPhone are simplifying my organization and making my life so much easier, I can’t even begin to explain. Maybe it’s just my own personal preference, but my philosophy is, if it works for you, then it’s right.

I’m continuing updating my systems here at home, this is a must. Connecting to anyone’s corporate network is an exercise in personal responsibility. What I mean is, you must practice safe computing. You can be held liable for disruptions. Your Anti-virus software must be updated (which I just updated yearly subscription) and you must scan your drives, regularly.  All of them, including and especially your email as most viral payloads are delivered by attached documents.

Verify your security settings and make sure everything is ship-shape, because when you connect and accept, you are saying you’re good to go and will be held accountable for infecting their servers. As for mine, they are clean and I’m now set for remote work. Updated systems makes life easier don’t it?

The current project I’m on is just awesome. I enjoy the people I’m working with and the environment is more than I could have hoped for. It’s stretching my abilities and providing a great opportunity to grow and learn from professionals that love and are good at what they do.

Last Friday, in order to really become acclimated, I visited the co-location DataCenter where our corporate servers and network gear are hosted. Wow, talking about expansive! The sheer size of the place was impressive. It’s beyond imagination at how much data passes to and from this location and how much is stored there. Think about that the next time you IM, text, send an email or connect to a website it going through or stored somewhere, often many times over!

I’ve been dealing with server names on master sheet but seeing them, yields a whole new perspective that will help as the project moves along, which it is in full swing. Well, that’s my update, hope you leaned something and enjoyed it.

© Al Ardon IT Strategies Inc. 2010

June 3rd, 2009 by admin

Technical Talk

IT – Stands for Information Technology and is comprised of systems and services supporting a business.

This morning I read a question that was obviously troubling to a person that works within an IT organization as a Software Developer. His concern was that most of the time, his particular service group has been lumped into and generalized as just another function from within IT. However, if you really look under the hood, most of the time IT is defined more in line with the underlying infrastructure rather than the programming.

Here’s my answer:

“I think it’s common to see it condensed into one general field. Most of the time, the other departments see it as another single part of the organization. We had one department (IT) but 2 distinct service groups:

•    Infrastructure
•    Information Management

Your team would have fallen under the second because most of those making the changes to code running business processes.

However, there was a third group that was focused on developing software for the product called, “software engineering” and was within the Engineering department.

I do see your concern and agree that this renders your particular field into a meaningless category. One that quite possibly will have a detrimental impact how your particular service group is represented and valued.”

I think it’s up to people like you to help set the record straight, in constructive ways, if you want to better the visibility and importance of your profession.”

Clarifying it a bit, let’s just saying, most organizations are all for streamlining and efficiently. Having as flat an organization as possible, is advantageous. So is many parts within an Infrastructure.

For example: Servers. Consolidations have saved companies millions of dollars in support and maintenance costs along with space and cooling. I see no difference with organizations. It’s more efficient to think in terms of a single org, than separate and I think the 2 that I mentioned in my reply are descriptive and serve to distinguish each particular service group.

Best,