Dog Days of Summer

What exactly are the "dog days of summer" anyway? Whatever they are, I feel like I'm in 'em. I guess I was hoping that things would slow-down a bit for me over the summer and I could spend more time reflecting and writing my thoughts in my Blog but that just hasn't happened yet. I've been keeping busy at work and at home with the family. And, I've been spending a lot of my free time reading instead of writing. All this to say, I need to do better capturing my thoughts here than I've been doing.

So for this post, I'm just going to blast-out some random thoughts from the past month. Here we go:

• I had a great visit with my CIO friend up at Clackamas Federal Credit Union. I got to know their IT operation a little bit better, see the new offices and data center they're building, and enjoy some pleasant conversation over lunch. Comparing notes with other IT manager's is one of my favorite things to do and I would highly recommend it...if you don't already do it.
• I've been thinking about switching our DR vendor for several reasons. We have completed our Business Continuity Plan and now we need to turn our attention to aligning our DR plans with the BCP. The BCP process showed us we need to do better DR planning and we will.
• A couple of my staff and I visited a vendor up in Portland to further explore the possibilities around a server virtualization implementation so that we can do some server consolidation and also help us in our DR planning. I'm really stoked about it. Their preliminary findings suggest we could consolidate something like 30 of our servers down to just 3. That would really help us with some of our power, space, and cooling issues. I expect this to be our flagship project for next year.
• I've learned more about MShift recently and how they might be able to help us with some of our mobile banking initiatives. If you haven't seen their product, you can get a good idea from Amplify's web site here. I see it as a nice, simple solution for our members but really just a piece of a larger mobile and on-line banking picture.
• I found some good documentation that helps IT managers make decisions around purchasing or renewing a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement. It's really a complex decision not to mention an expensive decision. I've looked at this a bunch of different ways and it's just really hard to get the numbers to pencil-out in our favor. I wonder if there are any vendors out there that are built-up around negotiating these agreements on your behalf...or at least helping you to better understand everything at play. As I say, it's very complex. Unless, of course, money is no issue...then you just plop it down and make your life easier.
• Oh yea! IT Governance. We had our first IT Governance meeting a few weeks ago but, believe it or not, it only just got started before we were interrupted by some guy who decided to rob one of our branches. Fortunately no one was physically injured and the police caught the guy shortly after it happened. But can you believe the coincidence? I've been gearing-up for months on this deal and we had to cancel it just as we were kicking things off. So, we've rescheduled the meeting for later this week.

I guess that's about all for now. More to come soon - I promise!

KL