What does an IT director do?

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That was the question I jokingly asked twitter the other day, @sgala said "make IT happen".
How right he was!

In one week I've:
Tried to support my guys while they launched a new client store http://shop.ghost.co.uk/, or should I say officiated at its birth. Thankfully after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing between anxious client and harassed project manager it snuck into action last night.

I've had to rebuild and redistribute PC's in the office to keep the wheels of industry turning while I sort out my purchasing budget.

I've fixed some annoyances with the internal DNS server and a certificate problem that had stopped us from using Outlook when we weren't in the office.

I've set up a dead letter email account in M$ Exchange for diverting bounces to, first time I've touched Exchange. It isn't Apache James.

I've installed JIRA and provided some initial training to project managers and developers, but there's still a long way to go. At least we're starting to get most of the immediate tasks and all of the new stuff into some kind of workflow.

I've set up the tomcat/IIS ajp "thing", and set up a proxy in IIS, for JIRA. I've never touched IIS before either, and boy was it wierd compared with the king of webservers Apache httpd.
I've chaired a meeting with my managers, and another with the same folks for project status updates.

I've been to a sales meeting at a potential client's printing works, we got lost on the way there but it was interesting and hopefully worth our while.

And last but not least I've been exercising my sysadmin and dba skills (how that will make my SLC former colleagues laugh!) getting tough on slow performance by optimising httpd and applying new indexes to speed up worst offending queries. Now http://www.allsaintsshop.co.uk/ and http://www.qubeshoes.co.uk/ are flying along in fine fettle for the peak of the christmas shopping season.


So Santiago, you were right it seems like I have just made IT happen. :-)

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