John Borwick’s blog

It’s been a little while.  I have a new job: I’m now in charge of “process management & continuous service improvement” for my department, as part of our new “planning & strategy” team.  The job’s really exciting and really it’s my career goal, so now I’m trying to learn as much as I can to be effective.  I’ve been reading “Business Process Change” and I have a set of the ITIL v3 books, so I want to read these carefully and create a bibliography of process improvement information.  I’m trying to figure out how my blog/a blog will work into all this, as I’d really like to document what we do with process improvement and what I learn–partly because it’s so hard to find useful introductory information about actionable IT process improvement.

Well anyways–happy holidays and a festive new year to all!

I’ve been working on a temporary blog for work: http://itsmfusion2007.wordpress.com.  Another guy from work, Mike, is also using the blog.  We’re at the three-day itSMF (Information Technology Service Management Forum) USA conference, in Charlotte NC.

I’ve given the utilities and some other people like my insurance company the new Grand Central phone number.  So far it’s worked OK, although the insurance guy thought he was being asked to leave a message so his name identifier is “Hi John this is…”

I tried to demo Grand Central’s “call out” feature to Greg this afternoon, but it didn’t work.  Grand Central didn’t call my phone to initiate the first part of the two-way call.  Also my phone/Grand Central wouldn’t let me hit “1″ to answer Greg’s (separate) call; I don’t know if it was my phone not sending the right tone or Grand Central ignoring my phone.

My cell phone has been getting worse and worse; I’m not sure if it’s some kind of memory leak, or AT&T’s sub-optimal cell phone coverage, or both.  I don’t think phones were meant to be used more than two years nowadays.

At work, we’ve been re-organizing into a “Support” team and a “Projects” team.

At home, Lauren and I have been painting, moving boxes, and getting appliances for our new house.  Today the Wilson Pest Defense people came.
I just finished Harry Potter.

My Getting Things Done system broke down under the pressure; I didn’t do my weekly review on Monday and I didn’t even get through my e-mail inbox from Friday until today!  When there’s too much work to do I’m just piling it on rather than being more judicious with what work should be done.

Last week I booted up FreeBSD partition for the first time in a while, so I could run ‘portupdate’. That’s ended up taking a while, as the UPDATING comment says “You are about to embark on a mystical journey…”

I was booting up FreeBSD to try to write a mechanize.py script to help me screen-scrape through a web site’s list of users and compile them. I ended up giving up; it’d take me a while to write the script, plus I realized that just the FreeBSD boot-up process was going to take a while.

At my job now I don’t strictly need to program. I like programming, and I always have, but because I’m not having to program I’m getting a little rusty. It’s scary! I don’t want to stop knowing python, or FreeBSD, or system administration!

I’ve been learning a little about Oracle, and our ERP system to compensate and to help give me the background I need for understanding problems now.

I’ve been testing out “Highrise,” a 37 signals web site dedicated to tracking your contacts with customers/vendors.

Highrise is a very simple “CRM” (Customer Relationship Manager) system.  I think Salesforce.com is a more “complete” solution, but I believe Highrise is intentionally simple, for people who aren’t doing any kind of CRM and need a basic tool that will give you 80% of the benefit for 20% of the work.

I’ve been surprised; by using Highrise I’ve been able to learn quite a bit about our vendors.  I have the contact information for a half-dozen people at our reporting tool’s company.  I know the last time I made contact with any given contractor.  I can tag the people who’ve helped me understand ITIL.

I’ve also been surprised at how much I interact with vendors; I can easily log a dozen Highrise contacts a day.  (I’m using Highrise whenever I contact anyone outside the University.)

The user interface is simple and straightforward.  I asked 37 signals if Highrise could be purchased annually, rather than monthly, and they said no.  I like the concept behind Highrise and many of the other 37 signals products: the tools will do what they were designed to do, and hopefully that’s what you need.  If you want something different, that’s fine, but 37 signals will not accomodate you: they have a defined service with defined parameters and (to use ITIL v3 terms) they are happy to provide an excellent warranty of service for the service’s narrow utility.

Wake Forest University’s new director of Human Resources, Mike Tesh, sent out the below e-mail today–to staff only, not faculty. To my knowledge the University has not previously had a dress code:

The following guidelines are applicable for the summer, Commencement through
August 20th. 

University casual dress is defined as business casual and would include:

Men: slacks and collared shirts

Women: pants, dress shorts, shirts/blouse, skirts and dresses

What university/business casual does not include:

- Denim shirts, sweatshirts, t-shirts, halter tops, low-cut tops
(revealing), midriff shirts, tank tops (unless under a jacket or blouse), or
tops with spaghetti straps.

- Blue jeans, sweatpants, warm-ups, mini-skirts, shorts, bottoms that are
frayed, fringed or tattered.

- Footwear: flip flops or tennis shoes

Attire at off-sites should reflect the guidelines identified above. In many
instances, off-sites include interaction where the participants represent
the university. As a result, be prepared to attend external events in
business attire as the function dictates.

A good rule of thumb is that if you would wear it to an outdoor activity,
such as a trip to the beach, or if you wonder if your attire is appropriate,
choose something else to wear to work.

I can tell that it’s winter because everyone at work is getting shocked now whenever they touch anything metal. I mean, can’t we either a) buy a humidifier or something so we can’t build up so much static electricity or b) create some device I can strap on my arm to regulate my static charge vs. ground?

Probably not. So, the new perk of my office is watching each person get shocked when they go to the bathroom. I don’t delight in other people’s pain; I appreciate the incremental humor of each new person having to get shocked every day for the entire season. Including myself.

Some crazy person has been emailing the postmasters for over 40 universities (postmaster@wfu.edu, for example) with a really elaborate story in many parts. One section read, for example:

I have no special powers like jesus
But then, jesus was a religious man
And I am not

It was probably 100 lines in each of 20 emails. One of the postmasters actually replied to all talking about how the last emails are kind of a let-down.

I saw Wake Forest pull up all its plants last week to get ready for its president’s inauguration this Thursday. They must have been pulling up thousands of dollars of fancy plants.