The unglamorous work that keeps everything running: operations discipline, monitoring, maintenance windows, and the daily practice behind systems that don’t fail, from a career running them.
Business ContinuityMy consultant called while I was driving to a Renaissance fair: the power had failed, the generator had not come on, one UPS was missing, a coin-sized battery had died, the DR link had been down for two days, and…
Change ManagementNobody in the room called it digital transformation, because the term did not exist. We had a retailer running accounting, HR, and payroll on paper, a mandate to computerize all of it, and years later the industry invented a name…
Business ContinuityA DR plan is a set of precise claims about a specific environment. A transformation is the deliberate, wholesale changing of that environment. Put those two sentences together and you see the problem most transformation programs never address.
IT OperationsWe were hunting for a machine during a disaster recovery effort. Systems were talking to it, work depended on it, and it was not in the server room. We found it under a user's desk in accounting, running decade-old software,…
IT OperationsThe migration budget covered the conversion, the cutover, the infrastructure, the testing. The real bill arrived afterward, by invoice: hundreds of SQL queries that had to be re-optimized for the new platform, by six specialist DBAs, over six months, on…
Change ManagementThe system that worked yesterday would not come up today, and there were no logs to explain why, because the failure was the logging. We spent three days awake hunting an earthquake. The cause was a punctuation mark, and the…
Incident ResponseClean machine A. While you are cleaning machine B, machine C reinfects A. We played whack-a-mole against a network worm that never got tired, and lost, until we stopped treating machines and started treating the network.
IT LeadershipThe Gantt chart crescendos to cutover weekend, and the boxes after it say 'stabilization,' thin little boxes, drawn by optimists. Then you go live and discover what those boxes contain: weeks of triage, expectation management, and a system running on…
IT OperationsFriday we were on the old platform. Monday we were on the new one, and it was buckling. We stood at the edge of a rollback with the whole company standing on a system that could not carry the load,…
Business ContinuityThe consultant's heroics got the disks back. Then came the part the first article only promised: bringing up applications that had been written on the assumption they would never stop. No restart procedures, no known states, dependencies documented in nobody's…
Professional ghostwriting for executives, founders, coaches, and authors who want to get the book done right. 113+ books authored. 54+ ghostwritten for clients.
Ready to discuss your book?
BOOK YOUR PRIVATE CONSULTATIONNo pitch. No pressure.
Four short, practical guides on writing, publishing, and selling your book, plus the occasional note when there's something worth your time. No fluff, no daily inbox clutter. Drop your email and they're yours.
We use MailerLite to manage our list and send these emails. Your address is used only to send you what you signed up for. We will not sell it, share it, or use it for anything else, and you can unsubscribe anytime.
