Infrastructure

From the title you can tell what was determined to be the most important thing to tackle. We determined that while we would not obtain appreciable competitive advantage (read not the most important thing to help our kids learn) via our infrastructure, a solid infrastructure was determined to be the core building block for our IT environment.

Because of these we decided to commoditize our infrastructure. The 3 maxims were standardization, mobility (work anywhere/anytime) and simplicity. We developed core standards across the environment for all software and hardware that we were responsible for (we took on literally everything except copy machines). We also decided that since we were commoditizing our infrastructure, and due to the fact that the organization was in its infancy and would be going through some serious growth periods, we would "single source" outsource the management and maintenance of our entire tech infrastructure end to end.

The work anywhere/anytime mandate added some complexity to the equation. We were very early adopters of RPC over HTTPS in Outlook, getting all admin staff blackberry's with a BES and the ability to tether, pervasive wireless in all schools and offices with unified credentials, and a laptop for all staff including all teachers. We also implemented an Asterisk system that was both a great blessing and a great pain point. The Asterisk and RPC over HTTPS implementations expended some of the capital that we accrued through the Website development project.

One key thing to note is that we decided due to the way our schools operate we would have 49 weeks of absolute change control lockdown. The only time we would allow for execution on technology projects would be during the 3 weeks our teachers would have off. Of course the first year that was completely unrealistic given the nascent stage of our outsourcing agreement and our large project to implement the across the board standards while opening 2 new schools and moving 1 into a brand new facility. We were well short on our time and quality metrics for our summer infrastructure projects but in the end we did complete all of our objectives. The problem is that we left alot of pain in our wake.

The outsourcer we chose was great to us in our initial growth phase, though they had their hands full.

The work required alot of heroic actions and one of the things that i stated when i was interviewed is "we don’t want heroes". If we need heroes then we did something wrong.

After a few years we felt we had outgrown our outsourcer's service capacity, and moved on to another service provider which we are currently experiencing some growing pains with but we are hopeful that they can see us to scale.

To date the biggest challenge with our Infrastructure has been management of our outsourcer and management of our carriers. I have a vent session about ILEC's in poor neighborhoods on the docket for this blog.