It has been almost a year since I left OldJob. In that time I've gotten a pretty good handle on how things work here at NewJob. While the office politics that I need for day to day getting along is done, I've still to learn even the majority of the politics related to deciding what we will be doing in 6+ months.
My position at OldJob was both more and less responsible than what I have here. There, I was working for a unit that losely compares with ATUS/ADMCS, though with broader powers of enforcement. There, there were two people under 'Jerry'-equivalent, and they headed up ATUS-equivalent and ADMCS-equivalent. In addition, Jerry-equivalent also had the CAS-equivalent and CBE-equivalent tech-heads reporting to him directly. As the astute reader will notice, this gives the Jerry-equivalent (dare I say, CIO?) much broader powers than Jerry actually has here. Since my office was down the hall from Jerry-equivalent, and my boss right next door to Jerry-equivalent, we saw a lot of eachother.
When it came to strategic planning of the future, I was one of the first people management came to for technical advice (ATUS/ADMCS stuff, the CBE/CAS stuff was largely informal for all but the biggest of projects). I spent four years proving the case for a Storage Area Network, and got budget approval in time to deploy it. When budget-season rolled around, I was one of the people expected to submit budget requests into the process for aggregation into the whole Information Services request. Since I was working in the 'core services' area, a lot of the stuff we worked on were all-enterprise projects. While I was involved at most steps, I wasn't a true decision maker.
I was in the process of training up a pair of minions. These people would (and eventually did) ostensibly backfill me in the (all too soon) case I fell off the face of the planet. These weren't people I was Supervising, I was more of a team lead. I wasn't involved in the Job Review process, though I suspect I would have if I had stuck around long enough. It was quite clear that Management had me marked up real good in their succession planning (boomers, gotta love 'em).
Here things are different. Now, I'm one of the minions; though technically the three of us are supposed to be interchangable on matters of technology. The department I work for (Technical Services) is a small branch next to the main trunks of ADMCS and ATUS. The Division I work for had less control over the enterprise than I had at OldJob. The silos of tech out there big enough to support their own IT departments still have them, and getting them centralized will involve arm-wrestling of epic proportions at the Dean-level.
Then there is the money. The budget process is an every-two-years thing instead of every year, and I've yet to see it in action. The department I work for has no effective budget beyond salary/office-supplies, so all of the stuff we spend money on has to come from someone else (usually ADMCS and/or ATUS). I've yet to penetrate how spending money is accomplished around here, something that took only three years to pick up at OldJob.
At OldJob there was a mindset on the helpdesk (and in certain other IT areas) that if it is broken, ask me as I might have a clue as to why it broke or where to look next. This meant I got a lot of oddball questions about products I didn't know a lot about, but sometimes the issues brought forward were truely interesting. That hasn't taken hold here generally, but when it comes to things Netware it seems I'm the new goto person. I'm not sad at this at all, as I've come to learn that my Netware knowledge is right up there with some of the techs AT Novell (first-line support at least in most areas), which does save us service-requests. I hold that CNE for a reason darnit.
On the technology front, I'm doing a lot less Windows stuff these days. At OldJob I was the primary Windows admin for our area, and that included the gamut between Oracle database servers, to IIS webservers, to application-servers of many kinds. Here, I do some Exchange, a little SQL-server and generic troubleshooting when the other admins aren't around.
And most importantly (hehhe) no backups. OldJob, I was He Who Manages The Backups. Here, I just back up the guy who does it. Hee. I'm not sad about this at all since tape-backups are the bane of my existance. Tapes fail. Fact of life. Users expect to be able to undo Oops! mistakes. We expect to be able to resurect-from-the-dead servers that smoke. The attitude at OldJob was that backups are mission critical and any failure in the backup process must be troubleshoot as data is at risk, and most importantly they funded backups like the critical systems they were. Here, that attitude is just now begining to take hold, and that is something I'm having trouble adjusting to. Rant for another day.
Probably most telling is that the two admins who replaced me at OldJob mentioned to me when I visited recently that they had real trouble keeping up with my duties in my absence. Two people had trouble. Here I actually have time to thumb-twiddle once in a while, which is a luxury I didn't have at OldJob. I realize that workloads like that are years in the making, as the maintenance of systems is assumed piecemeal and in aggregation over years gets to be quite sizable. So, ask me in four years what my workload is like, and I'm sure I'll tell you "full".
My position at OldJob was both more and less responsible than what I have here. There, I was working for a unit that losely compares with ATUS/ADMCS, though with broader powers of enforcement. There, there were two people under 'Jerry'-equivalent, and they headed up ATUS-equivalent and ADMCS-equivalent. In addition, Jerry-equivalent also had the CAS-equivalent and CBE-equivalent tech-heads reporting to him directly. As the astute reader will notice, this gives the Jerry-equivalent (dare I say, CIO?) much broader powers than Jerry actually has here. Since my office was down the hall from Jerry-equivalent, and my boss right next door to Jerry-equivalent, we saw a lot of eachother.
When it came to strategic planning of the future, I was one of the first people management came to for technical advice (ATUS/ADMCS stuff, the CBE/CAS stuff was largely informal for all but the biggest of projects). I spent four years proving the case for a Storage Area Network, and got budget approval in time to deploy it. When budget-season rolled around, I was one of the people expected to submit budget requests into the process for aggregation into the whole Information Services request. Since I was working in the 'core services' area, a lot of the stuff we worked on were all-enterprise projects. While I was involved at most steps, I wasn't a true decision maker.
I was in the process of training up a pair of minions. These people would (and eventually did) ostensibly backfill me in the (all too soon) case I fell off the face of the planet. These weren't people I was Supervising, I was more of a team lead. I wasn't involved in the Job Review process, though I suspect I would have if I had stuck around long enough. It was quite clear that Management had me marked up real good in their succession planning (boomers, gotta love 'em).
Here things are different. Now, I'm one of the minions; though technically the three of us are supposed to be interchangable on matters of technology. The department I work for (Technical Services) is a small branch next to the main trunks of ADMCS and ATUS. The Division I work for had less control over the enterprise than I had at OldJob. The silos of tech out there big enough to support their own IT departments still have them, and getting them centralized will involve arm-wrestling of epic proportions at the Dean-level.
Then there is the money. The budget process is an every-two-years thing instead of every year, and I've yet to see it in action. The department I work for has no effective budget beyond salary/office-supplies, so all of the stuff we spend money on has to come from someone else (usually ADMCS and/or ATUS). I've yet to penetrate how spending money is accomplished around here, something that took only three years to pick up at OldJob.
At OldJob there was a mindset on the helpdesk (and in certain other IT areas) that if it is broken, ask me as I might have a clue as to why it broke or where to look next. This meant I got a lot of oddball questions about products I didn't know a lot about, but sometimes the issues brought forward were truely interesting. That hasn't taken hold here generally, but when it comes to things Netware it seems I'm the new goto person. I'm not sad at this at all, as I've come to learn that my Netware knowledge is right up there with some of the techs AT Novell (first-line support at least in most areas), which does save us service-requests. I hold that CNE for a reason darnit.
On the technology front, I'm doing a lot less Windows stuff these days. At OldJob I was the primary Windows admin for our area, and that included the gamut between Oracle database servers, to IIS webservers, to application-servers of many kinds. Here, I do some Exchange, a little SQL-server and generic troubleshooting when the other admins aren't around.
And most importantly (hehhe) no backups. OldJob, I was He Who Manages The Backups. Here, I just back up the guy who does it. Hee. I'm not sad about this at all since tape-backups are the bane of my existance. Tapes fail. Fact of life. Users expect to be able to undo Oops! mistakes. We expect to be able to resurect-from-the-dead servers that smoke. The attitude at OldJob was that backups are mission critical and any failure in the backup process must be troubleshoot as data is at risk, and most importantly they funded backups like the critical systems they were. Here, that attitude is just now begining to take hold, and that is something I'm having trouble adjusting to. Rant for another day.
Probably most telling is that the two admins who replaced me at OldJob mentioned to me when I visited recently that they had real trouble keeping up with my duties in my absence. Two people had trouble. Here I actually have time to thumb-twiddle once in a while, which is a luxury I didn't have at OldJob. I realize that workloads like that are years in the making, as the maintenance of systems is assumed piecemeal and in aggregation over years gets to be quite sizable. So, ask me in four years what my workload is like, and I'm sure I'll tell you "full".