| Job Title: | Senior System Adminitrator |
| Company: | Open Text Corporation (aka OpenText) |
| When: | April, 1998 – January, 2000 |
| Location: | Waterloo, Ontario, Canada with some global responsibility |
| Brief Description: | As a company that had grown up fast and with a diverse set of very talented individuals, from a technical and procedural aspect, Open Text was being run with an eclectic and unique set of procedures, processes, and "working knowledge" that kept things running reasonably well but had little formal structure, procedure, or process. The corporate goal was for a doubling of size over 18 months but the infrastructure was ill-suited for the task. In such an environment, the ability to meet change is essential, the speed of growth and change is more than most people can keep up with, attrition takes it's toll. Within 18 months or joining OpenText and for about three months before the start of b2bScene, i was the de facto head of global IT. The position was not given to me as much as taken by me when the two bosses above my level had both left and not yet replaced. It was because of the pending start of b2bScene that I left this more traditional IT role for others to pick up. |
My years working at ITS / CCS at the University of Western Ontario allowed me to bring discipline and process to a department and, to some degree, company that was chasing it's IT tail. There was conflict and division between IT and the users, a lack of consistent process and in many cases a lack of processes at all. There was very little in the way of official policies and procedures and though some of the brightest people I knew worked there, they all worked more as individual hot-dogs rather than a focused team. That isn't meant as a criticism, it is exactly that sort of people required for small business startups but as growth sets in so must some formalism.
I started by addressing the Business Continuity requirements for the corporation, they were at great risk at the time do to an inadequate / non-existent Business Continuity Plan or even a good enterprise backup program. Moving then to the formalization process itself, and again heavily borrowing from previous efforts, I provided the corporation with the first IT-related policy and procedure document and process. This would be sufficient to see the corporation through another 5 years or more of growth.
As a developer myself and having friends within the OpenText development department, I opened up the lines of communication and allowed the two departments to function as a team creating a more efficient, more secure, and more reliable infrastructure for all concerned.
Also under this role was the first ASP model developed, it was called "Livelink Online" and it was little more than a Sparc20 hanging out unprotected on the Internet when I was hired, but was quickly secured and made more robust as my first primary responsibility. Having managed literally dozens of computers with hundreds of applications, I didn't find this a particularly difficult task and thus spent my time finding other things to do.
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