My interest in computers is rooted in the interest I took in electronics as a youngster. I probably picked it up from my dad—he was always looking at the latest gadgets. I took a couple of electronics classes in junior high school and that was probably my first hands-on exposure to how computers work. I went on to study electrical engineering at college. There were some programming classes as part of that curriculum, and I found that programming was what I was most excited about. So I got my degree in computer science.

Our high-level goals are to provide solutions and services that will help our customers improve performance and the overall quality of healthcare for everyone. What's really exciting about being at Press Ganey is that the IT department plays a very active role in supporting those goals. IT is a strategic partner with the business side of the company. We have a continuous and open dialogue with them to ensure that we're working on the right things at the right time, because situations change and the right solution today may not be the solution tomorrow.

We have about 600 workstations internally and approximately 140 servers in two data centers. Along with several other large businesses and entities in the area, we co-locate our primary data center at a state-of-the-art facility in South Bend, Indiana, and also have a disaster recovery data center in the region. The environment is a mix of Linux and Windows, and our core technology database is on IBM DB2.

Over the past couple of years, we've been adopting the dark fiber that's available in South Bend as our wide area network. That should be completed before the end of 2007. It's a big step up for us.

We're making a big investment this year in Microsoft Dynamics™. As part of that, we also decided to standardize our software development on Microsoft® .NET. Previously we used C++, then some Java, but as we moved to Microsoft for our enterprise solutions, we realized that .NET would be a more strategic choice for us. It will allow us to unify the development platform and skill sets of our three development teams, which is not the case today.

By moving to Microsoft technology, we're going to be able to easily reassign resources to where they're most needed for a particular project. We can also provide lots of uniform training to groups. Just this year we've had whole teams go for training together, instead of separate training based on their skill sets.

Finding the talent needed to support growth is a challenge for any company experiencing the continued success we have seen at Press Ganey. I believe that we have had success recruiting the best talent from around the country because we have exciting technology, a unique culture, and practically unlimited opportunity. However, computer science isn't the major it was years ago, and there are fewer college students aiming at a career in IT, so the talent pool is smaller. We're working to make South Bend a technology center that will continue to attract and retain talent from across the country as well as local universities like Notre Dame and Indiana, so that these students will be more likely to stay here post-graduation.

We're using Linux primarily to run our DB2 technology, instead of running it on AIX. It was attractive to us when we compared the price point of Linux versus AIX licensing along with the greater availability of local talent to support it. And from a perspective of maintenance and supportability, it's worked out very well.

We bought a Linux distribution from Red Hat, but we do the support ourselves. I've found that investing in Linux support typically doesn't add value proportional to the cost. They can't help with the really tough problems, and we can handle the easy problems ourselves.

That's the model that we used for choosing Linux. It works as long as you realize that it's not free—that there is a cost, whether you're paying for third-party support or providing it yourself. That's something I think the world's realizing now.

We don't start out asking how we can do something at the lowest cost. We ask, what's the right solution for our problem? What are our other options? What are the tradeoffs? By breaking it down that way, the business is better informed about what the real costs of certain types of solutions are. It's not just IT operating like a black box.

I'll be honest: I'm a UNIX guy from way back, and there was a time when I was very religious about my platform choices. But in my position now, I'm much more reasonable about it. Today I ask, "What's the right thing for us to do?" As IT's role has evolved, the old model of the UNIX guy, working in his cubicle and not thinking about the business side of things, is going away. That's not the model today at all.

With the Microsoft enterprise project, we've realized some of the resource flexibility that we had anticipated getting eventually. It was really great to be able to demonstrate those results to our management team sooner than we'd expected.

We look forward to Microsoft enterprise and business intelligence products that will have full integration with the desktop. Then our users won't be learning something new with every application we deploy. If the interface is one that they're familiar with and they already know how to use, it helps reduce the amount of training that we need to invest in. I think we'll see more of those benefits as our relationship with Microsoft grows.

On the Windows® side, we follow the Microsoft model of update deployment. We use discretion about what we deploy, but we stay current. On the Linux side, we evaluate things completely on our own. We pick and choose between major updates, and try to minimize change as much as we can. So we only apply absolutely necessary updates for security or defects that we encounter, because that always requires some quality assurance and regression testing.

We have real-time monitoring in place for our critical applications and services, and we're looking forward to adopting the Microsoft System Center family of system management products. With that we'll be moving toward a more centrally managed and monitored environment.

We also do forecasting for capacity and performance needs based on business trends such as growth in our customer base, additional sales, and so on. We regularly check key metrics to make sure that the rate of change is what we expected it to be, so that we can stay ahead of any issues before they develop.

Online, I often go to places like CNET for breaking news. I really enjoy reading CIO Decisions magazine. When I travel, I'll always grab the latest Information Week and throw it in my bag to browse through later to see what the latest buzz is. I also look at Slashdot—because of my developer roots, probably. I'll always be a developer at heart.