Penultimate Week in IT Systems Support

All things being equal, this was a pretty good week.  On Tuesday, after a much appreciated, three-day weekend, and an additional two-hour snow delay (caused by icy conditions on the roads), Joseph JaJa, interim VP and CIO, announced my selection as Head of the new OIT Client Relations Office at the University of Maryland. Here are his exact words (which I've already posted on FaceBook, ego-maniacal narcissist that I am):

     -----Original Message-----

     From: Joseph F. JaJa

     Sent: Tuesday, January 18, 2011 1:16 PM

     Subject: Client Relations Office

     I am pleased to announce the appointment of Jay Elvove as the Head of

     our newly established Client Relations Office. The new office will be in

     charge of coordinating and streamlining the interactions of OIT with

     campus constituents while tracking user satisfaction of all OIT

     services. In addition, the new office will play a proactive role in

     fostering stronger partnerships with the academic and administrative

     units on campus. Jay will be reporting to the VP and CIO.

     Over the years, Jay has successfully played a number of critical roles

     in OIT and is well known to the campus community. I am confident that he

     will do an excellent job in organizing and running the new office. Let's

     all welcome Jay in his new OIT role.

     Joseph

Now isn't that nice?

About an hour before the message went out, Fran, my current boss, and I met with my staff in her office to break the news.  Since Fran doesn't generally call impromptu meetings with us as a group, they knew something was up right away, I hope I was successful in conveying how hard it was to make the decision to take the job. I wanted to be sure that understood how much I enjoyed my six-plus years managing the group, and that I'd miss our daily interactions--both technical and otherwise.  They are extremely productive, proactive, and painfully honest.  They're also as talented a group of individuals as any manager could hope to have working for him, and I'm not just saying that because they might stumble on the blog someday.  They are collectively creative, love to learn, and have a strong sense of fair play.  I know this because I forced them about a year ago to take an online strengths evaluation (http://www.viacharacter.org/Surveys/SurveyCenter.aspx) and those characteristics figured prominently in the results.  I thought long and hard about leaving this stimulating environment behind.

But, for better (I certainly hope) or for worse, I did.  Whatever contributions for the good I was able to make as Manager of Distributed Computing Systems (DCS) group, I hope to make on a larger scale in the newly formed Client Relations office.

While this meeting was in process, the first of two announcements via email went out, that one to OIT Senior Management.  A second message went out to all of OIT about a half hour later, during Fran's weekly staff meeting with her managers, which began immediately after the meeting with DCS.  I first learned of the announcements while in the staff meeting because I began receiving congratulatory text messages on my phone soon after it began.  A nice way to start things off, and I found a similar number of voicemail messages expressing well wishes awaiting me when I got back to the office.  But these were a mere drop in the bucket compared the volume of email I found waiting for me when I got back to my office.  I must admit, I smiled quite a bit that afternoon--and fairly late into the evening as I tried my best to respond to each email and voicemail message before I went to bed.

Oh, I almost forgot.  There was yet another meeting that day--the first of three that week in my new capacity, even though I don't start the new job until Monday, January 31st.  It was a meeting with the CIO, a couple of OIT Directors, and a subset of the Campus Academic Computing Directors.  Joseph introduced me in my new capacity (I knew everyone present), gave an informal report on some of the current goings on within OIT, and solicited questions from the group.  On Thursday, he did the same with the Administrative Computing Directors. Between the two, on Wednesday, I sat in on my first IT Council Meeting along with OIT's Directors. There, more formal presentations were made to  key, high-level campus executives (Deans, Directors, etc.) by Joseph and Abdella Battou, Interim Executive Director of MAX, the Mid-Atlantic Crossroads, who discussed some of the projects his gigapop organization is working on.

Friday, my staff invited me out to a buffet lunch at Tiffin, a local Indian restaurant.  It's the first of several going-away/moving on dining events that I'll be attending within the next few weeks.  I'll need to spend more time at the gym in the mornings to make up for the additional caloric intake.  I also met with Sridhar to give him a sense of what he'll be getting into when he takes over management of DCS.  So far, it's a two page spreadsheet's worth of stuff.  As I start thinking about transitioning in earnest, I'm trying to keep my active inbox under 100 messages.  So far, I haven't succeeded.

Spent Friday night vegging out watching "Graduation Day," "The Burning," and "Mr. Wong in Chinatown."  I stopped watching the first film, a Troma cheapieFu Manchu and Gen. Wu Yen Fang, when he wasn't playing monsters or mad scientists or other forlorn individuals.


I see that I'm rambling (readers may have noticed this much earlier), so it must be way past time to sign off.


Friday, January 21, 2011