Building Non-Functional Requirements Framework – Requirements Categories
I'm planning on documenting a framework that we built for managing non-functional requirements. This is post #2 of the series. In Post #1, Last In - First Out: Building a Non-Functional Requirements Framework - Overview I outlined the template and definitions for our Non-Functional Requirements. We also had to address outstanding audit findings that ... Read More
Building a Non-Functional Requirements Framework – Overview
I'm planning on documenting a framework that we built for managing non-functional requirements. This is post #1 of the series. A pain point for our infrastructure and security teams was a lack of usable, consistent availability and security requirements for our internally developed applications. The business analysts worked with the organization ... Read More
Thirty-Four Years in IT – Why not Thirty-Five?
After I was sidelined (Part 10) we had another leadership turnover. This time the turnover was welcome. I ended up in a leadership position under a new CIO. This allowed me to take advantage of some topics that I studied while I was sidelined. My new team took on a couple of ... Read More
Thirty-four Years in IT – Leadership Chaos, Career Derailed (Part 10)
This post is the hardest one to write. I've been thinking about it for years without being able to put words to paper. With the COVID-19 stay-at-home directive, I can't procrastinate anymore, so here goes.As outlined in Part 9, Fall 2011 was a tough period. To make it tougher, the ... Read More
Thirty-four years in IT – The Application That Almost Broke Me (Part 9)
The last half of 2011 was for me an my team a really, really tough time.As I hinted to in this post, by August 2011 we were buried in Oracle 11 & application performance problems. By the time we were back into a period of relative stability that December, we ... Read More
Thirty-four years in IT – Swimming with the Itanic (Part 8)
For historical reasons, we were a strong VMS shop. Before they imploded, Digital Equipment treated EDU's very kindly, offering extremely good pricing on software in exchange for hardware adoption. In essence, a college could get an unlimited right to use a whole suite of Digital Equipment software for a nominal ... Read More
Thirty-four Years in IT – Addressing Application Security (Part 7)
In the 2008-2009 period, we finally started to seriously address application layer security in our development group.By that time is was clear that the threat to hosted applications had moved up the stack, and that the center of gravity had shifted towards compromising the web applications rather that the hosting ... Read More
Thirty-four years in IT – Building out Disaster Recovery (Part 6)
In the mid-2000's, our organization started to get serious about disaster recovery. By that time our core application was an e-learning application that was heavily used (a hundred thousand students on a typical day). That app became critical to our mission.To bootstrap a DR capability we paid consultants for what ... Read More
Thirty-four years in IT – System Administration, Backups, and Data Centers (Part 5)
As a side effect of building and running the backbone, I introduced UNIX systems into what was then a wholly VMS organization. We initially used Linux - roughly from 1994 - 1997, then over the next 20+ years, briefly migrated to Solaris x86, then to Solaris SPARC and back to ... Read More
Thirty-four years in IT – Security and firewalling (Part 4)
As a natural fit with running the network my team took on the task of securing the campuses and data centers, starting with firewalling the data centers from the rest of the network. We started fairly simply by just segmenting enterprise-wide servers from networks with users and students and restricting ... Read More
