Responsibilities, title, and focus

In keeping with my commitment to add some personality to my posts, and flesh-out details that might not be solely technical in nature, I wanted to start by providing some specifics about my current position.

I work for a technology company, and provide IT infrastructure and integration services in support of our core business. Our core business provides what I’ll generically refer to as custom application design servicing a niche market of enterprise customers.

Over time the IT needs of our core business have grown, and we’ve expanded our IT staff and competencies to support these evolving business needs. The result of this staff build-out has lead us to start offering IT services to SMB customers to fill the gaps between project work.

As far as titles go, the IT profession tends to have quite a bit of variation when it comes to titles and responsibilities. Technically, I’m a “Senior Systems Engineer, and Operations lead”. Practically, what this means is that I’m a Server Analyst and consultant who is responsible for anything and everything that might be related to “IT”, including our IT operations staff.

Key focus areas for me right now are expanding the technical aspects of our “managed services model” for the growing SMB customer base, while continuing to provide technical ownership and direction for the IT projects in our core business.

Needless to say, I’ve got a lot on my plate right now.

Why the blog you ask? Well, first and foremost to provide something interesting and useful to other sysadmins out there who might benefit from some of what I’m doing. But also because it forces me to do something that’s not entirely technical in nature, and that stands to improve my written communications.