This kind of dates me a little bit, but when I was in college I took my first computer course in FORTRAN. I switched my major from electrical engineering to computer science, which led to a number of job offers after graduation. I wound up accepting an offer from a retail department store chain to work in its IT group. I've been in IT ever since.

Before coming to Beall's, I spent nine years as the CIO of one of the world's premier watchmakers, and during that time I was able to see the results of standardizing technology on a worldwide basis. From a business point of view, being able to use the same systems whether an employee was in the United States, Europe, or Asia gave us a lot of flexibility and capability. I would say I'm most proud of that, because we took that initiative from the earliest stages to its full realization. We're in the early stages of doing the same thing at Beall's.

One of our more important goals centers on end-to-end process improvement, and IT is certainly an important part of achieving that goal. Many of our legacy systems were designed as stand-alone silos within the enterprise. Now that we're replacing them, we have an opportunity to design and deploy end-to-end systems that provide more automated and integrated processes across the business. So that's the path we're on, and Microsoft is one of our key partners as we move forward.

Microsoft technology is the foundation of the new infrastructure we're building, including operating systems, messaging, database platforms, as well as a host of tools such as Microsoft® System Center Operations Manager 2007 for monitoring and software deployment. We're in the process of switching all of the Point of Sale systems in our stores from Linux to Windows® Embedded devices. So, we'll be operating on a version of the Windows operating system everywhere.

The downturn in the economy relative to the housing market, the credit market, gasoline prices, and insurance costs all have a dampening effect on our customers' spending. That is probably the biggest challenge facing most retailers. But we believe we're doing the right things in terms of navigating those challenging times and making the right investments to help us not only in the short term, but also in the longer term.

Having a good internal team is very important. Beyond that, it's having strong technology partners that we can reach out to. Microsoft Premier Support is an example of that. Now that we've started this journey toward a new, standardized infrastructure, it's very important for us to have that type of support in place. In addition, because we have specific needs for consulting resources, Microsoft Consulting has been helpful to us, as is having access to Microsoft partners.

As we move forward, our reliability will be aided by the automated tools that we're implementing. For example, System Center Operations Manager 2007 gives us operational monitoring and alert capabilities that we never had with our legacy systems. In that environment, a lot of the monitoring was done manually.

Once we've finished migrating our legacy systems, we won't be using Linux at all in our environment. Again, it comes down to standardization as a key part of our IT strategy. By migrating from Linux to the Microsoft platform, we can achieve those goals of greater reliability, stronger support, and automated processes throughout the company.

Vendors are a good source, as well as trade magazines, Web sites, and a selective use of technology analysts. The key point there is something that my dad told me as I was growing up: "Joe, make sure you get yourself a good education." I always thought he was talking about finishing high school and going to college. Only later did I realize that the education never ends, and you always need to keep up with what's going on. I think that's true no matter what area you're in, but especially in IT. It's easy to be left behind.

I'd tell them that, regardless of what they may hear, it's a great field. The best days are still ahead, and there will always be a need for people who are open to continuous learning and improvement. IT continues to provide a wide variety of opportunities, whether you've been in it for a while or if you're just starting out.