Can You Be Your Own IT Professional?

Question

Don’t mess with the electronic ecosystem.

We have talked about Information Technology (IT) enterprise focusing on a very tight spec. Well, a one person shop can learn something from big IT.

So far, that conversation has focused on Apple and HP’s computer hardware. But, IT has a much bigger ecosystem to consider. By way of example, the Commonwealth of Virginia has 39 public colleges and universities with over 100 campuses. That means on any full session weekday, over a half million people on Virginia’s public college campuses are plugged into that IT ecosystem. For those 18-88 year old learners, that system needs to be as close as humanly possible to 100% uptime.

As the sarcastic saying goes, “What could possibly go wrong?” That’s exactly what IT program directors have to ask themselves about. Here are the suppliers at the core of a pubic college system’s IT ecosystem:

Adobe
Autodesk
Apple
Canon
Cisco
Epson
HP
LaCie
Microsoft
Nikon
Sony
Wacom

The IT people do a great deal of testing and regular upgrading to the system, but they also have to depend on the testing those 12 key suppliers do.

When we use the term “tight spec,” it means the fewer variables, the better. Though some people growl about computers which don’t allow the user to open them up and do custom configurations, that customized stuff are the variables which cause IT people to not get the sleep that they need.

When Adobe’s Photoshop team runs tests on the next version’s release, they can run tests against the many, many products of those 12 suppliers (and many more) but they can’t test what they don’t know. And, if those public higher education campuses were to make the mistake of switching out their computers’ RAM and storage and WiFi to unique, untried hardware, those variables open the doors for Photoshop to hit bumps in the road that Adobe (or the rest of those suppliers) could not test.

So, how can you be your own IT professional and go for maximum uptime? First, let’s honest, no matter how much testing is done, there will be bugs. That’s what all those dot releases are all about. Hence, the bug fixes of Adobe InDesign 13.0.1 would inevitably follow the release of InDesign 13.0. But, if you find one bug in 13.0, and 13.0.1 fixes it, will you still stumble on unknown bugs if they’re coming from incompatibility issues on your custom hardware?

If the inconveniences of those glitches are worth it to you, well, go for it. However, if you need smoother roads, pretend a half million people on college campuses are depending on you to not waste a minute of their valuable time.

Ussnorway7605025 · Answer

in the case of Adobe and Microsoft, both are known to push out *untested software upgrades so any tight system needs to assume all these "upgrades" are bad and block them from the network... that (and the fact there may be a young 15 year old somewhere on the campas) is why they run behind proxy | system center | firewalls. a school system works in blocks (usually a year at a time) and they do their testing before the students start and assume that what they have tested will be able to handle the students needs for that term | year but the problem with this system and IT in general is that changes happen so fast that many schools find themselves out dated. perhaps they lost their old head teacher and a new guy wants to teach game design in stead of Cisco networking or mobile apps instead of Vmware... now the school finds its entire network just isn't up to the task and change of any kind becomes their nightmare

that is why smaller business groups that can just rent an outside (the campas network) space and shub a dozen computers into them (without all the red tape) are becoming the new trend in IT education... because students DO need to be able to open up the systems and see what makes them work and they DO also need to understand that there is more to IT than just the small amount of hardware | software | ideas that any tight system can show them or to put it another way, if your school sells you a diploma in IT that covers Windows XP, PCI graphics, Flash design and ip4 networks then don't expect a job

*lets BE honest then, even when testers find bugs before set shipping dates its not uncommon for these to still be sent out into the public anyway.

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded