IT Professional Community

I’ve worked in IT for over 15 years. Some of the companies have had fewer than 100 employees and a single location. Others have had a handful of locations within a single state. Currently, I’m with a company that’s in over 20 states with over 800 separate locations that have technology that must be managed, supported, maintained, etc.

During this time, I have seen varying levels of maturity in the area of IT processes, tools, structure, etc. That has also led to a number of changes, not without some growing pains, as things grow and necessarily change processes, tools and structure in order to handle the increasing complexity and demand to support a larger technology infrastructure.

With so many projects to make changes and continue to grow and mature, one question has continued to come up over and over and over again…

“How do other companies do this?”

Whether you’re in a small company and you’re the only IT guy there or you’re in a company with 100,000 people in 10,000 locations around the world…there are other companies who have done or are doing what you’re trying to do. And with varying degrees of success and failure.

What if there were a place to connect with those other people so that you could find out how they’re doing things, what their experience has been like with a particular Help Desk application or server hardware? What if you could go somewhere to ask someone what the benefits and / or the drawbacks are to a particular type of data storage technology?

What about if you are provisioning new computer equipment and you’re tying to evaluate tools to automate this process in order to deliver faster, higher quality PC’s and laptops to your user community?Or, maybe you’re looking at adopting a new methodology such as ITIL or Sarbanes-Oxley, or ISO20000 and aren’t sure where to start, what questions to ask or what the differences are.

Whatever the case may be, many of us tend to be a bit skeptical of the promises made by the sales forces of the world who tend to overstate the features, benefits (and, sometimes, the quality) of the product that they are trying to convince you to buy. The problem is, you don’t always know which claims are overstated. So, who can you ask?

That is why I have created TECKI (Technical Experts Communicating Knowledge & Ideas). Yes, I do recognize that this is a totally cheesy name. That’s often a problem with technical people. Very left brained and logical. Not much happening in the right hemisphere where all the creativity takes place.

Now, this is a brand new forum, so I’m going to be asking that you be patient as it will obviously take time to gain enough members to really start being more useful. However, if you will register and tell other IT professions about it so that they can register, we can begin building this community and making it more useful.

So, for the first little while, I urge you to get the word out and to keep checking back on the forum. I expect that the initial growth will be a bit slow, but if you continue to check back there, eventually someone may post a question you can help them with and we can get the ball rolling.

Thanks for helping to make a resource for our IT community!