To the entire NAG community; First off, I would like to apologize for my comments yesterday directed at certain individuals, and for my speech used in my posts as a whole. I freely admit I am a hothead, which unfortunately means that a lot of times I end up doing just what I am now; apologizing. I will warn you up front, this post is long, and preachy, and perhaps hard to follow at times. I apologize for those of you whom disagree with what I have written down here. I also wish to apologize for my spelling and grammar yesterday, I was going to tell whomever it was that pointed it out, that an automatic spell check would have been nice, but as pointed out to me earlier, I was using the older system and making judgements I should not have been making. What set me off yesterday was yet again it looked like MSU was given a golden opportunity to replace an older system with a product that is deserving of the universities needs. And yet again it seemed that an opportunity had been squandered, and that the current solution had once more been chosen “from a variety of solutions as being the best, cost effective solution that we could deploy this year”. This same attitude, the one that the current solution is the best, was the attitude I saw when I worked for MSU, and according to the NAG postings I have read since continues to be the norm, rather than the exception. This is what, in my opinion, is the number one problem with the university’s IT community. ‘If it ain’t busted, don’t mess with it’ There are very few companies, universities, private organizations, and even government facilities that like change. Change requires people to do things in a different way, and truth be told, the vast majority of the American workforce is convinced they are overworked, and have no time to learn new things. However, this is simply not the case, and in fact is one of the reasons why the worker feels that way in the first place. If a newer system comes along that halves the amount of time needed for that employee to get a certain task done, then the time spent on training for that newer system is just a drop in the bucket of the time that would be saved. The problem is that until a company is willing to actually make the change, they never truly understand that concept. I have seen businesses run themselves into the ground by not changing, or updating themselves to compete in their marketplace. I have seen nightmares (well, for IT folk at least) that I was convinced would finally wake up the business to their problems and FORCE them to change, only to be shrugged off after the disaster with an “S%it Happens” explanation. I continue to this day to get the willies walking in the door of some of our customers, telling their IT staff ‘This could be the day’ (The City of Lansing was on Netware 4.11 the last time I was there). Change is an essential part of life, and for any company it has to be part of their very core. ‘Learn from your mistakes’ When I interviewed with MSU, I had almost no knowledge about the university. Our family had just recently moved to Lansing from Ohio, and the only thing I knew about MSU was that apparently the students got a ‘little’ out of hand when their basketball team won. It wasn’t until my first week that I truly got my mind wrapped around the potential this university had. The sheer fact that MSU had a full class A IP subnet was amazing. The history behind the university, the diversity, the cyclotron; anything seemed possible, the future looked wide open. I was ready to have what I thought would be the time of my life. Then I found out the hard truth. It started small; ‘You can’t do that because it is a union member’s job, and you’re not in that union”. Then it was “Yes, I know that the people in the division are yelling for a calendaring solution, but we are not ready to provide that to them”. And as I looked around, I started to see the cracks in the walls. Having a full class A is wonderful, physically assigning routable IP addresses to not only desktops but production servers is risky and stupid. Not having those servers behind any kind of firewall (especially the Windows 2000 one being used at the time) was going way beyond risky and heading into complete insanity. Telling your network administrators that any data placed by a user into the divisions servers was considered private property of the user and NOT the division was questionable and unheard of by me at the time. Telling your network administrators that when the before mentioned server’s disk space is being consumed at a pace that will shortly bring the servers down, and they cannot delete the useless data being placed there to fill that server up, but must send out a written REQUEST for the users to remove or at least look into removing the junk they had placed on the servers, went against all common sense. AND when the users failed to actually do anything about the situation, and the servers crashed bringing down the division, the solution was to throw money at the problem by buying another server, took the cake. I had heard over and over again about how MSU was financially in a rocky situation, and we had no spare money, and we should be HAPPY with our just over 1% raises we were getting yearly. Yet here I was spending money on a solution that needed to be corrected by having the users (Oh and by the way I worked for a business division on campus, so the actual users were employees of MSU) delete their hundreds of MB’s of music , movies, and games they had placed in their personal directories. Having thrown a full blown hissy fit about this, I was introduced the AUP. As I read this document, I couldn’t believe my eyes. According to these rules, then if my machines had been attacked by a hacker or zombie bot worm and were being used to store IRQ crap, then they had the same rights as the users in the division did and I had to REQUEST THEM TO STOP HACKING MY SERVERS! Thinking this had to be a joke, or that I had misread the entire document, I requested, and was reluctantly taken to my first and only NCC meeting. I brought up my questions to those learned gentlemen, explained my disbelief, asked for a clarification on this nonsense, and was given my answer in the form of an hour long lecture of freedom of speech, and freedom of information. When at the end of this lecture, I asked how that could be translated into a business unit’s solution; I was told that since I came from a corporate environment I ‘just didn’t get it’. Period. My boss (whom took me) has to ask me to leave before I blew up at them. In the nearly four years I worked for the university, I learned to live with the insanity. I stopped fighting the useless fights, and became as complacent as the next worker. Sure, I complained at times about union workers whom had been there so long they comfortably sat and played solitaire all day long, while complaining they were overworked, and making my job twice as difficult because we had to pick up their slack. But all in all, I decided that what happened would happen, and who was I to fight for change no one else wanted. When I left the university, it wasn’t because I was mad or upset with the insanity. It was simply because I could no longer afford to keep working at the current pay rate, and lack of raises, and expect to be able to support my family. I had to change. I will freely admit I cried when I left the university. The individuals I worked with are to this day the finest I have ever met, both professionally and as a person, and I thank God I was blessed with the time I spent with them. However, I had no choice, I had to move on. ‘There is a time for everything’ Working for the university, and especially working at the football games still to this day, have made me a diehard Spartan fan. Like many of us out there, we are constantly taking abuse for our team, and constantly being told we are the second hand, little brother, college in Michigan. During one of my many debates with others on why I disagree with those statements, I began to see why we were viewed as such, and I remembered what I had seen and done while I worked there. I remembered the fight against change, the complacency with which things got done at times, the fact that no one thought it was unusual to carry dead weight in the office and hear them complain about their life bringing the few whom did actually work, down until they too wanted to stop. I began to realize that until the university woke up and decided to FIGHT for themselves, then the others whom talked trash about MSU were correct. And I began to get mad, began to get angry with MSU. I wanted to demand they fight for their rights, demand they fight to live, demand they fight to become the top. It seemed so clear, the core corruption that caused this decay, the lack of drive, the problems. The solution was really a very simple one (at least for their IT); the needed to STOP viewing themselves as academia’s, and start viewing themselves as workers for a business. The fine folks at MSU whom hired a vast majority of you all (including me), did not hire us as network administrators to teach classes, they did not hire us to play sports, they did not hire us to debate our rights as citizens, they hired us for one reason. They hired us, and paid us, to ensure that the clients of our divisions, whether they are in academics or business or athletics, can do their work smoothly and efficiently. They pay us to be NETWORK ADMINISTRATORS. To keep their servers, applications, and workstations up and running and to ensure that the division would be prepared to tackle and future goals. It has been posted here, and it is quite true, the without all the fanfare, and trappings that people would still meet up to learn, to play sports. That statement is absolutely correct, yet you all are getting paid to keep the fanfare and the trappings up and running. One of the things I hated about working at MSU was the fact that they lumped in IT with the support staff. In essence they were correct; IT is nothing really more than support for an organization. It is critical support now of days, but none the less still support. There are very few ways for IT to shake off that nametag. The easiest one is to present your customers, or business owners with an IT solution that blows their socks off, saves a load of money, and improves the companies name in the public. Sticking with the old, slapping on bandages and new faceplates, telling the customer you hear their complaints and are sure that the next version of the ‘new’ software will have that element included, telling your customers and bosses at disaster times that as soon as the vendor whom made the software you bought gets off their regular job, or that the time difference is too great for you to get a response, or that they have to develop a solution to the disaster, will NOT get you out of that collar. IT is the first way a company looks when they want to change themselves, to improve themselves, to get a better market share for themselves. If you refuse to change, then you leave them with no choice but to replace you so they can move on. However at MSU, thanks to the unions, they don’t even have that option. You all in essence therefore are the ones that are the determining factor in the universities success or failure. If you continue to choose to ignore this fact, and continue to fail in your duties, then this college will continue to fail as well. I am sorry I have to even apologize for saying this, you should all be embracing this with a passion and be honored that you have been granted that right. Yet you fight with anyone whom tells you these facts. You are fighting for your rights to do what? Prove that you are correct? That your way is the only way, and that since you are positive your way is the only way, then the other division’s network administrators must have the same passion that only they are correct, so you CAN’T possibly join together as you both are so vastly different and you both are so vastly correct? Remember whom your clients are, who pays for your checks, who hired you. If they are asking for change, are you so correct that you have the right to deny them? Are they happy with barely having enough money to scrape by budget wise? I will write no more on this, I am done. I cannot force a change, or force you to exam your views. Only you all can do that. I hope at least someone stops and thinks, if not, then I know where I will not be sending my children to college.