The biggest difference is how public everything is. I went from being a person who spent his entire career building products and services to someone whose primary responsibility is to buy the right products. The diversity of what someone in a large IT organization role has to think about was a big revelation for me in terms of how much is going on everywhere.
I can always pick a set of areas where I can contribute immediately even as I am learning about areas [that] I don’t know much about. That is technology, but in terms of interacting with people, there is something new to learn every day.
IT financial management [systems]. We did a substantial review of everything that is available and have identified a vendor that we are in the final stages of writing a contract with.
Another area where we are making some progress is experimenting with cloud platforms. We are actively looking at Microsoft Office 365 as a solution for our email, and I will very likely have some of our agencies on it. [But] we have not signed a contract yet.
We built out more data center space than necessary and this was primarily because of lack of awareness of the way virtualization increases [both] the density and the need for data center space. The short answer is, in this calendar year we’ll be utilizing the data center.