Ranking Information Technology

John wheeled into the parking lot at 7:50 A.M. It was the beginning of a typical day. A clock could be set to that time on any day. One just needed to wait for John’s car and set the clock.

The day actually started two hours earlier when John received a morning wake-up call. The voice on the other end spoke, “John, we are unable to login. Patients are beginning to call. We need the computers so we can fill the doctors’ schedules. ” John agreed, “I will see what I can do. I will give you a call in a few minutes. ”

It is likely something weird happened with the backup. John expertly tapped a few keyboard buttons, a couple of mouse clicks and he was logged into the work database server. He quickly checked to see if the database was running. “I see the problem”, he thought out loud. The backup took too long and the database never started. It was fixed in a matter of minutes.

Problems were not always solved as quickly. The information was always sparse when an end user called. All they knew is they could not login. It could be an application problem, a network issue, a database problem or any number of other things. John had worked for the same company for a number of years. There were very few times when a new issue presented itself.

By now John had settled into his office. He was thinking about the issue that morning. He remembered when the office had one Unix server. No one thought about it. It was not unusual for it to be live for months without a reboot. John was a long time linux advocate and managed to retain a few linux servers. The rest of the network was windows. Most of the problems were on windows servers. It was a backup application running on such a server which failed earlier in the day.

Fortunately, John had a capable staff who handled all of the issues with those type of machines. He was able to spend time writing scripts and retrieving information not always readily available from the several databases. He also enjoyed diagnosing and fine tuning network related issues. The company had grown to several offices, software carried more overhead and bandwidth was beginning to become an issue.

A typical day was filled with calls. It seemed everyone had a unique issue. There was a funny thing about most of the problems. They were almost all issues with end user applications. John thought it strange, a person who never used the program as a user was consulted as the expert. It was strange, but it was quite rewarding to find the answers. The typical day became boring.

The big issues such as upgrading systems, maintaining databases or application updates occurred in off hours. The procedure might be executed one time. There were time limitations. Next time it would be completely different. It was stressful. It helped to do a run on a test server, but something unforeseen would usually rear its ugly head on the live server.

John had always loved computers. Who would have ever dreamed the skills he began acquiring on a Texas Instruments, model TI99-4A, home computer would result in a full-time career? Who would have dreamed that the person who barely slipped by Cobol and Fortran classes in the sixties would be maintaining database servers, web servers, email servers and networks? John felt blessed. He acquired most of his knowledge from the internet. The machines which provided a living also provided the education needed to perform the job.