10 March 2006

The Evolution of the IT Professional

The rain came to the Hudson Valley yesterday, early in the morning while I slept. Upon awaking, I did not venture out into the cold wet of the day because of the beginnings of a flu having taken root in my chest and head. This is not to mention a desire to catch up on some work which I had needed to do. But the flu makes a nice excuse for everyone who would ask about my absence from this meeting or that class.

This morning, I awoke to find, instead of rain, unseasonably warm weather. I rose late and had to hurry to work, but I enjoyed my walk there, lasting 15 minutes as it usually does. The air was nice and warm, rippled by an occasional, slight breeze. It did not occur to while I strode toward my office that my morning walk would be the longest I would spend outside during the marvelous day.

Perhaps I would not have felt such remorse and disappointment now for forsaking a beautiful day for the sake of earning a few dollars if I enjoyed my work to a greater extent. Allow me to elaborate briefly on my current occupation.

I work at an office on a college campus that coordinates study abroad programs. In running these programs, my organization is responsible for promoting these programs, recruiting students to participate in them, reviewing student applications, and coordinating the administrative aspects of each program with the foreign universities that are our partners.

This may strike some as being an exciting line of work that provides opportunities for travel to exciting cities across the nation and across the world; a line of work that lets one see foreign lands and interact with people from a wide range of backgrounds. And the work certainly promises that for my supervisors, who are responsible for the administration of programs which I described. My work is far more mundane. I began working at this organization last semester, doing the very simple, soulless work of data-entry. Recently, though, I have been entrusted with some more interesting work: maintaining a website for the organization and working on restructuring the database in which I was entering data in for so long. Yet I find that despite the fact that I enjoy greater responsibilities, I am still dissatisfied to a great degree with my work. This is not due so much to my work per se, but to my work environment, including both the physical and organizational environment.

First, I shall address the physical. The organization I work for is housed in an oddly shaped house, octagonal from a bird's-eye view. There are three floors to the building, with a cramped spiral staircase snaking from the ground floor to the third. My organization is spread throughout office space on all three floors, though the second and third are shared with offices from different departments. The fact that our seven staff people are spread over three floors does not make collaboration very easy. Add to this that staff computers have yet to be networked, preventing the sharing of common files and data, and it is clear that the physical design of the organization's space does not serve its purposes.

Regarding the organization of the environment, things are even more hopeless. Certainly the staff can work around physical barriers and rely on phone and e-mail communications to share data, but the data being shared is so often poorly organized that it stands in the way of efficiency as an institution. Information is not stored in a centralized location. Various staff members maintain multiple versions of documents on in their own folders. The databases containing information regarding our students and professional contacts are unwieldy and inefficiently designed. There are no standard procedures for organizing materials such as, for example, the constituent parts of a student's application for a particular program. The application is simply thrown into a folder, helter-skelter, with items in no particular order. Should such chaos continue, my organization will find itself floundering in an attempt to accomplish even the simplest daily tasks.

I admit I have exaggerated the helpless state of my organization, though I would not readily say that the degree to which I exaggerated is great. Be my concerns completely unfounded or underwhelming, there must be a change in the organization of the office soon. There is certainly a will among many of the staff members, but changes have been held back by two forces: first, a lack of time among staff members to undertake changes (which is understandable, given their workload); and second, a lack of commitment from the IT staff of the college (which is completely unacceptable). I certainly appreciate the services that the IT staff provides, and can understand that they well may be handling an excessive workload at times, but it seems that now they are simply dragging their feet. My organization has waited weeks for a network to be installed in its building and for months has tolerated using a database which is simply dysfunctional. While the IT staff has proven to be more helpful and efficient over the past few months than it was last year, these current problems are intolerable. Not only do they disgrace the IT department, but they also hinder the efficient functioning of an entire office.

08 March 2006

March in New York...

...is probably not as nice as April in Paris. I can't really say, never having been to Paris. But I would hope that April in Paris is a little more consistent than March in New York. Case in point: today, the 8th, was a rather nice day. Near 40 degrees Fahrenheit, with a mostly clear sky and an occasional gust of wind. The wind picked up slightly in the evening, but, overall, it proved to be quite nice. However, I was dismayed to find, this evening, that the National Weather Service has posted a winter weather advisory for Dutchess county, where I currently reside, for Thursday the 9th, calling for "a wintry mix of freezing rain and sleet." Of course, this is preferable to "a summery mix of freezing rain and sleet," which would simply be odd; "a wintry mix of 22 inches of snow," which would be redux of the largest snowfall in New York City that occurred ealier this winter (and would be something of a oxymoron); or "a wintry mix of fire and brimstone" which would be a downright biblical. I wonder if there is anything particularly wintry about the mix of freezing rain and sleet which we in Dutchess county will be experiencing tomorrow. Is it wintry simply by virtue of it's occurring in winter? Is there a specific ratio or a range of ratios of freezing rain to sleet which qualifies a mix as "wintry?" Of course, maybe the folks at the National Weather Service were getting a little weary of their lifeless, coldly rational take on the weather and were trying to spice up their prose a bit. I shall see if there are any similarly strange and obvious descriptions of weather in future warnings.

07 March 2006

Inaugural Post

For years, I've promised myself that I would write on a daily basis, be it an hour or a half-hour or how long I was able to force myself to write. Of course, being the procrastinator that every person pretends not to be, I haven't gotten around to seriously attempting this until now. Blogging strikes me as a good way to allow myself to write on a regular basis and share my writing with others, though I must say that for the time being I am more concerned with simply writing rather than getting extensive feedback. I certainly believe that sharing is crucial to improving one's writing, but, as of now, I would be content to write a few pages every day without a single comment. Of course, should anyone who might be reading the wish to comment, please feel free to do so.