IT Director & Senior Project Manager
What does your title really mean?
Software better be bug free, clients happy, and all systems up.
In seriousness, that’s what we try to do. Even though it’s not possible to meet it 100 percent, we shoot for it as close as possible. I apply a broad understanding of technology and its trends to the business of VP-DCS and our clients. Much of this entails helping to define, organize, and manage projects from inception to final implementation. This includes timelines, internal and external resources, and lots of communication. I cannot underscore the latter enough; it is likely the most critical part of what I do.
What goals do you have for yourself and for your co-workers?
It’s pretty easy to maintain a process, a resource allocation, a technology, etc., to accomplish something. When it loses its efficacy, however, often even incrementally over time, the solution is rarely to do more of the same. Almost always, the solution is to try something different. Determining how and what are the hard parts.
This takes many forms. Do we build in-house when we can’t find an adequate off-the-shelf solution? And, vice versa. When a staff person may be struggling to support an area, often it’s time to move that support to someone else and give the original person different challenges.
Business conditions always change, especially in the IT world. There is an ebb and flow to the skills of staff and the skill needs of the market. The best place to “be” is where these align, which requires continual coordination. Thus, a big goal is for me and our staff is to be cognizant of this and try to adjust to this ever-changing environment.
Thus the solution supports the workflow of users to meet all aspects of their business needs.
What do you and your team bring to the table?
I bring a great deal of depth and breadth to our clients in both the application of business and technology. Through a variety of reasons, my background started in pre-med, went to engineering, then to the soft science of sociology (also psychology and philosophy). Afterwards, I got my MBA with a concentration in information technology.
This has given me much breadth in understanding our clients’ goals, how to interact with them, how to be personable, and how to apply technology to help both VP-DCS and our clients.
Our IT team is not your everyday team either. I was the very first full-time IT hire at Village Press and the strongest IT staff we have ever had was not in the past, but right now. I only expect that to continue.
I don’t mean this to be measured in sheer size of the staff at ten and a half people with some partner contractors on the side. By this I mean our staff is very broad in experience, with impressive depths of specialization.
We bring an IT view to any project, but also much more. I’ll be the first to say that IT people are not always personable—it’s often the nature of the personality type that gravitates towards this field and that’s okay. As a group, however, the VP-DCS IT Team is different—we empathize with the users, we are personable, and we approach projects more broadly than your typical, yes I’ll say it, “geek.” Overall, it is a competitive advantage.
How much experience does your team have?
I won’t be able to speak to our partners, but I’ll try to provide total years of experience across our group. Keep in mind that geeks often start hacking in their bedrooms as kids so it is often hard to say when they started! Having said that, our team’s combined years of technical experience falls between 125 and 150 years.
How does your past education in other fields shine through?
I am still a sociologist at heart who applies these concepts very broadly; I see my current job as applying this discipline to the technology field. Why is that? Well, sociology is the study of the relationship between the individual and a group, and the relationship between two or more groups. Global human culture is nothing but the culmination of human interaction through time.
I approach the recent human innovation of the technology industry as a microcosm of the sociological field. Perhaps larger rhetorical questions can help explain, “What role do computers and the Internet play for people to interact with others? How does hardware support this? How does software support this? What role does data tracking play? How does social media impact this?”
What’s the best part of your job at VP?
Delivering and maintaining great solutions to clients. Note I did not use the word “technical” and that was intentional. We mostly provide technical solutions for sure, but we often provide process/procedure solutions as part of the development deliverable. Ideally the development effort includes direct input from users, or what we call Stakeholders. Thus the solution supports the workflow of users to meet all aspects of their business needs.
