Policies, Trust, and Old Posts

By tadgeobrien, 29 August, 2017

So I have been looking through my web site debating what to write about in the last few weeks and I keep either pulling up older posts or starting new post thinking I will complete writing them. There always seems to be a desire to write, but not the will to actually put the pen to the paper. I also often times think about why am I writing this at all? As my wife would say "no one is reading this." So am I just writing for the sake of it? Regardless I think that is okay.

The following short snippet I started to write in January of 2011 and the funny thing is that there still is some truth to what I wanted to write. Since that time I have actually seen what I am writing about from both sides of the story.

----

An interesting thing has been occurring at my place of work. I work at an Educational Institution as an educator who focuses on the use of technology as a learning tool. Recently our organization has begun to move towards a more centralized administration of technology. This to me is an interesting prospect. I am of the disposition that I will work within the system if it makes things work smoother, however, I also realize that there are going to be growing pains.

At this point, I have been pretty apprehensive, since most of the people that have been transitioned have not been excited about the move, and many of them have live within a managed environment. . .

----

So if my memory serves me well I believe there was some transitioning from the older Novell services that the organization had been running to using Microsoft's Active Directory services. As with any change related to technology, there are always unforeseen challenges and issues. This was going to be no different for those that were involved. I also think there was some concern as there were going to be more management of the devices than there had been in the past. People wouldn't necessarily be local administrators of their machines and a few other concepts that were being implemented as they should have been.

So how does this relate to where I am now? Well in between then and now I have had the wonderful opportunity to be a Network Engineer at another organization. We had to migrate users as they were acquired and integrated into our organizations business. We also had to interrupt users with updates and upgrades. Most of the time we tried to do this with the minimum amount of interuption and during times that we wouldn't actually be kicking a large number of people offline. One other major difference was the organization I was working for has some of their sites that were a 24x7x365 operation. This meant that we would have to be interrupting the business function of the organization to ensure that they were operating in a consistent manner.

Upon returning to the world of education one of the struggles I have had again is trying to understand why we are limiting students, or creating experiences that aren't always beneficial for teachers and students. It does seem that there has been some change in this general direction where fewer people are so fearful of technology. Expectations within schools on how teachers should be using technology haven't drastically changed. It still seems to be this smattering of stuff without clear expectations for what it is going to be used for.

This combined with the continued miscommunication (my perception) at times between people that are in charge of some of the technology infrastructure and the people that are using it doesn't help to ease the anxiety around technology. Technology as infrastructure is not simple, but it also is manageable in most instances. I know as a network engineer I wasn't always the best at communicating things at times. You are balancing what you had to do from a support standpoint for the users, the projects that are being pushed down from management, trying to make sure that the systems that you are running aren't so out of date that they are breaking, and then monitoring the devices so when they do break they aren't broken for too long.

Granted every career has its balancing act. I still think that these things can be done with better communication. Though sometimes I think we all have to take some of these things with a little more stride and less personally. Everyone's time is valuable so how can we each respect that and work hard at what we love?

So I am hoping to write more, most of it will be a train of thought. I am sure I will have a few corrections coming but I am okay with that. Hope that no one is reading this.