I played computer games as a kid, but my first career experience with computers was in the mid-1980s, when I was a research chemist at a biotech company. At the time, all the researchers and developers were using calculators and pencils and graph paper to do their analyses. I brought some Macintosh computers and software into the company to help them automate their work and produce results much faster.

When I moved to my second company, also as a research chemist, there was a lot of equipment that we used to generate tremendous amounts of data. People were manually entering that data into Microsoft® Excel® and then doing their analysis. We spent hours just punching the data into the system. So I connected Macintosh computers to the equipment and wrote some programs that automated the data collection process.

With that project I realized that I had a great love for computers and technology and programming. When a position opened for an IT person, I threw my name in the hat and started my official IT career.

We successfully implemented a new Lawson M3 ERP system to lay the foundation for our future growth. It was a very long project—almost three years. We went live on October 1, 2007. With the old system, we had difficulty in scaling our business costs effectively. As our business grew, we needed to add an equal amount of administrative overhead—almost a one-to-one relationship. Our new system allows us to grow the business exponentially.

We want to continue to expand the reach of our brand through the world and to develop new and exciting confectionary goods. Also, Jelly Belly is a family-owned business and is dedicated to driving down costs so we can continue to make the majority of our products in the United States.

Our IT systems provide tremendous amounts of information that we use to continually fine-tune our product mix and measure our sales performance across various channels. We also help keep administrative overhead under control. That lets us focus more resources on product development and marketing.

Now that we have the new ERP system, over the next several years we expect to implement a CRM component to help our sales people in the field. We plan to configure a plant maintenance component as well, which will help us efficiently maintain the automated equipment that runs our manufacturing plant. And we will continue to expand the breadth of our data warehouse. Previously it's been focused on sales, but there's a wealth of other information in our databases.

Also in the next few years, we will look at deploying Windows Vista®, Windows Server® 2008, and a newer version of Microsoft Exchange Server. And the last big project on the near horizon is to move the company to a purely voice over IP telephony system.

I find it particularly hard to keep hardware costs under control. Hardware providers want to replace their equipment every two or three years, but in many cases it can run just fine for five or more years. It's a constant battle to find that right balance of functionality and support when a piece of equipment is working perfectly but the supplier is telling us that it's at the end of its life. We haven't found a place where we see eye to eye on that yet.

Very little, actually. We are almost 100 percent Microsoft. The only thing that's running Linux in our environment is our firewall, which is configured and managed by a reputable company. But other than that, all of our operating systems and all of our software, except for the ERP system, tend to be Microsoft.

I'm not opposed to using Linux as long as it's highly managed. I think that application availability and compatibility could be an issue, as well as support. It isn't something that fits into our environment well, and it makes me a little nervous to think that a company would want to risk its productivity and security on a set of technologies that are open to many developers to work on.

The experience has been very good: we're happy with the technology and its reliability. There are comprehensive pathways to newer technology with Microsoft products. And I would say the support organization is very good. When we have a tough problem and we have to call Microsoft support, they tend not to not point the finger at someone else, even though in a few cases we're running someone else's applications on top of Microsoft technology. They're willing to stay engaged with the problem until it's solved, regardless of what the problem might be.

We have an operator that answers all of the phone calls coming into Jelly Belly. She has this big phone on her desk with 100 buttons on it, and they all light up. Well, there was one light that was dimmer than the rest, and it was bugging her. We had a technician come out multiple times. He replaced the console, he replaced some parts on the switch, and he still could not fix this one light!

Three months into trying to solve this problem, he removed the paper template that covers all of these buttons and has little holes in it where the lights shine through. Right away he saw the problem: there was one hole that didn't have the little paper tab punched out, so it was covering the light. Altogether, he spent about 40 hours trying to fix the problem with technology and it turned out to be a piece of paper.

All of this happened during the 2000 presidential election and all of the controversy over the "hanging chads" on election ballots. The template with our own "hanging chad" is still tacked up on the bulletin board in my office.

I have a very short answer to that one. Everything about IT is customer service. If you don't like helping others, don't go into IT.