Well, sort of.
All the management it affects knows. All of my direct reports know. Short of some utter disaster in the final planning stages, it should all be officially announced sometime between this weekend and next.
When I started out here in Denver, it was a new professional leaf. I’d been a programmer and systems analyst and DBA for about five years, and had really burnt out on it (some turmoil in my private life at the time had taken its toll, too).
Coming to Denver, I was a manager of IT services for an office — PC and network maintenance. It was a very educational experience, both technically and administratively, as I got to learn the joys of jugging personnel around, doing hires (and, more rarely, fires), and the like. That operations experience eventually expanded from Denver to other offices in the Rocky Mountain region.
The new CIO turned things on their head in 2001, by creatnig a functional organization, rather than a solely regional one. That made some new job niches, and I got sucked into one of them, developing global standards, policies and procedures. With some change in management (both above me and below me, and to the sides as far as that goes), that’s largely what I’ve been doing since then.
And I’ve enjoyed it. I like writing. I like editing others’ writing. I like organizing stuff. I like being creative and pedantic at the same time. I’ve liked my boss and liked the folks I was working with. It’s been pretty close to ideal, and certainly comfortable.
And then I got a phone call from the CIO, and my boss, and a peer of my boss, and the CIO took me up on the mountaintop …
So, this is what I’m going to be doing: IT has, over the course of the CIO’s tenure, been consolidating various IT services, budgets, etc., under the corporate IT umbrella, which has been a real challenge in as decentralized a company as I work for. But because it’s been successful, providing demonstrably better service for demonstrably lower cost, it’s given him leverage to continue that process.
Scattered around the business organization are various lone wolf programmers. These folks are usually hired on by a local operation or project that wants a system developed in support of a single project, and they have a budget for it, or can hide the budget in their G&As, or whatever. They don’t want to go to IT for support in this because either they don’t know they can, or they want to have full control over the effort, or because (to be honest) IT’s apps development group can be a bit … ponderous in turning around development projects.
That’s going to change.
Introducing the Tactical Workgroup Solutions group, part of corporate IT (under a different boss), managed by Yours Truly. I get various and sundry apps programmers that have been ferreted out. There are twenty or so in the US, based on job function codes that look like IT developers but which belong to folks who don’t work for IT. There are still more overseas.
I get to pull these folks together, get their systems in shape to be usable beyond just their particular office or project (and do so before, as so often happens, some sales guy gets wind of it, and sells a project in a different office to another client based on the system, only to have to approach corporate IT to get the damn thing made portable and flexible and usable outside of its previous niche), get them tied into the IT support network, using common tools and best practices, provide them a career path, make the local operations folks happy as well, and end up with a group of folks who can turn-around these sorts of small, local systems in a week or two, rather than a month or six.
Lots of challenges. Lots of opportunities. Lots of visibility. Lots of risk. Lots of chance to use my people skills and my organizational skills and my standards skills.
But when the CIO asks you personally to do it, whatcha gonna do?
Those aren’t the only org changes going on, but the only ones that directly affect me (or that I can say anything about, or that, for that matter, you’d be interested in).
I do think it’s ironic that I’m getting back into the app development side of things again. And there are some particular ironies if a certain group of programmers end up getting brought into my group. What goes around, comes around, and all that. Heh.
And now you know an alarmingly large proportion of what I do, given that I’m gonig to have to actually do it.
Hey, congratulations!