I was in the Army for 20 years. Back in 1977, I had a guy in my outfit who was pretty sharp. He was in the electronics repair section, and he had created his own little computer, which I thought was pretty cool. That was my first inkling that this was fun stuff. When the Army started changing out its rather bulky computers I saw the artillery computer that calculates how to shoot bullets straight go from something the size of a small refrigerator to a calculator-sized unit with a little chip in the back of it.

Toward the end of my Army career, I sort of became the go-to geek in the office for making computers work. In three years, I guess I became so good at this extra duty that a firm that was providing IT contractors to the Pentagon liked what I did, and they basically took me on for five years. Between the hobby for those three years and the five years with the IT company, that's where my credentials got bronzed. I've been with the City for more than eight years now.

My biggest coup was transforming the city's phone system to a voice over IP system. The city had a 16-year-old analog telephone system, and the switch was starting to fail. Of course, in a city this small, cost is always an important factor. We were able to get voice over IP installed in the city's 11 office buildings for about $100,000 less than it would have cost to put in analog. Needless to say, I didn't do this alone. I had a great team and a terrific vendor, too.

We're basically in a Windows® environment. We have 450 desktops, about 30 servers including a Microsoft® Exchange Server, with a voice over IP system for the telephone that integrates with that. We're part of a wide area network that's headquartered in Washington County here in Oregon. That's a group of government entities that share networking, Internet access, and security.

Sustainability is pretty important to me, to the point where we're trying to make things as vanilla as possible so that I don't have 30 exceptions to worry about when we have to change something. Whenever I can keep things standard, that's what I try to do, whether that means having the same flavor of printers in a given department so that they only have to worry about one toner cartridge instead of twelve toner cartridges, or having everybody use the same desktop arrangement.

Some of the Cisco stuff we use has some Linux in it. We also use a spam filter that has a Linux kernel in it. But the experiences I've had with Linux have been experimental. I've also had some of my techs experiment a little bit "on the workbench," and they usually have to go through a lot of grief to find out where a driver is for this card or that card. In the Windows world, you know where to go.

Folks like to tell me that Linux is free. However, that isn't exactly the case when you consider that I would have to increase my staff in order to bring on something like Linux. I'd also want to be able to support it. That means finding a tech who does that kind of thing as a sideline or a hobby, or investing in a company-branded version of Linux, neither of which is appealing to me. I don't have those issues with Windows, because I already have talented Microsoft-knowledgeable people on my staff. So when something happens in Windows, we can fix it quickly. I only use Linux when it's included in something like an appliance that's backed up by a big company.

Novell NetWare worked for us for several years. But I have only one NetWare-certified person on my staff, and he's on the verge of retiring. So it made sense to put my eggs in the Microsoft basket. When you're straddling fences like that, it causes a few extra coordination points that you have to take care of. Getting to be pure Microsoft will get rid of that and give me the ability to leverage a lot of the power that I, quite frankly, couldn't use because I was in a mixed environment.

I just know that my Windows systems are reliable. There's virtually nothing that can happen to a desktop that we can't correct in ten minutes.

This is a field that you have to keep on top of because it changes. So you need to be able to be comfortable saying, "I want to maintain what I have, but the technology is pushing me this way, and I need to learn what way that is." And you have to be comfortable with that kind of a floating career, because what you thought was important ten years ago is obsolete now.

I have a subscription to PC World, but I probably do more looking on Web sites. If there's a blog or site headline that says, "Microsoft just invented this, and it'll blow everybody away," I'll go look at what they're talking about to see if it's something I might be interested in, either personally for me or professionally for the city.