[0:39] What is your least favorite thing to do on a computer?

Book any hotel room. I would rather pay bills. It’s the constant barrage of missing fields.

[3:18] What do you miss most about the internet prior to modern search engines?

I miss the dial tone when connecting to AOL.

[4:56] You’ve worked for schools, right? Tell us a little about that.

I went to school and graduated with a bachelor’s in business education, and then I went into teaching. I started in the classroom teaching Word and PowerPoint, but I was only teaching at 80%, so not full-time. So, I taught myself computer programming and web design, and that brought me to become a full-time teacher.

[7:15] So you were a teacher and eventually you morphed your way into the IT department?

Yes. I was a Technology Coordinator and put my web design skills to use. I rolled out some of our first virtual classrooms back in the 2000s. Eventually I learned more, took courses, and really got into IT.

[11:06] You kind of bore your way into it.

People often ask me if I miss the classroom, and the answer is yes. I love interacting with kids. But, I don’t miss the day-to-day grind, late nights, and paper grading.

[12:32] So now you’re working for the City of Grand Rapids. How do you handle budget limitations?

Working in government is different, but it attracted me because I want to make people better and the community better. We use a federated model. Our departments can engage in technologies that will help further their business. There’s a lot of intentional planning and collaboration with other departments.

[19:46] How do you control—if it is controlled—spending when departments are just doing their own thing?

I would love to say I could find it all just going through invoices, but it’s not always that easy. It is kind of shadow IT. So, we do what the government does best: we put governance around it. Our finance department are the gatekeepers. Any investments the city makes in IT has to go through our Tech Coordination Group for approval.

[28:20] It sounds to me like they do what they do well, which is bureaucracy with a purpose.

Yes, it’s for a good purpose. My role is to maintain the equipment. I’m basically building a playground for the rest of the city to play on. Grand Rapids is a medium-sized city—a mid-sized business. Our job is to play the offensive line. You don’t know we’re there, but we play a part in every touchdown.

[35:30] Data is great, but it can become complex and stress your resources. If you get it right, it can be more work.

That’s the good thing, right? Our model has empowered our department. It could expand beyond the department and into the enterprise. It’s cool. We’ve got some good energy behind it.

[39:15] You mentioned you helped lead a transformation to the infrastructure as a service. Can you speak to that?

We have an on-premise data center, but we began looking at private cloud first to explore what was possible. We have one department—the police department—where we did a huge data dump. So, how do you scale effectively without overscaling when you have unpredictable monthly growth? We have a great partner and now we’ve transitioned into the Microsoft Cloud.

[42:53] We all know storage in the cloud is expensive, especially considering when retention will be forever. How are you handling that and reducing the storage cost?

We have a private cloud, and with that we have options. We’ve got archival storage and offsite backup storage. There are different pots we can move things into.

[48:41] How are you meeting MFA requirements?

With our SSO. It was more advantageous for departments to not have a thousand different passwords or logins to remember.

[51:17] What does coaching and mentoring mean to you?

I’m sitting here now because people took time out of their day. I am a result of people put time into me.

[57:10] What is the future of IT for school or government?

I think we’re going to see a lot of growth, and it’s all about experience. It may be a more personal yet automated experience. Technology levels the playing field for learning which is great. Augmented reality is going to be a big thing.