I'm an electrical engineer by training, and my first memory of using a computer was when I turned an audiocassette tape recorder into a data recorder for a Commodore 64. It might have been an Atari.

Right now, the business goals at Pacific Coast are to survive the current building materials downturn. Not only survive it, but to come out of it in better shape than we went into it from a process and a technology perspective. We want to become more effective, and we're going to take advantage of the current economic downturn to make that happen.

Primarily, we're working hard on server virtualization. We're probably 70 percent virtual right now, excluding the SAP servers—they run on IBM AIX, so they're not really candidates for virtualization right now. We're also focusing on reducing the Oracle database footprint so that in the near future we'll run SAP on Oracle and everything else on Microsoft® SQL Server®. In the long-term, when the IBM equipment is ready to be retired, we'll replace it with the Microsoft platform.

We've built a high-performance technology team by recruiting and retaining some pretty strong talent. To keep them on board in a very challenging economic climate, we're being creative in how we use them by taking on business roles that traditionally haven't been part of IT in our company. It takes a long time to put together a talented team, and one of the ways you keep them is loyalty. Loyalty is not free, but you try to mitigate that cost by finding more creative ways to put them to work.

For example, we're helping with applications on the shop floor—not just with the software but actually going down to the shop floor and helping them pick out gauges. It's a relatively small thing, but we have a different view of how IT aligns with the business than most IT departments have. Our goal is not alignment but assimilation, where there's no longer any question of whether IT is part of the business. When I was an engineer, nobody talked about aligning engineering with the business; we were just part of it. Everybody knew it. I'll know we're successful when they feel the same way about my team.

First is our highly focused customer relationship management model. It's not uncommon for a developer to spend two weeks at a plant helping to build walls, so that he understands how to develop an application that meets plant needs. The second part is our governance. Our Business Enhancement Advisory Team meets semiannually to discuss strategy and funding. That team created a group that we call the Business Optimization Committee. Its role is to decide what projects we work on, what order we do them in, and the value that we're getting back.

Primarily, we like to try new technology out using virtualization. We have a lab environment where it's easy for us to build servers, test them, and see if they're going to do what we want. Five percent of my team's personal time is meant to be spent on research and development.

We used to use Linux a great deal, but right now we're only using it in a limited way, such as with external DNS, some network monitoring, and on a few servers. The main reason that we switched platforms [Linux to Windows Server®] is because our relationship with Microsoft changed—recently it has done a good job of demonstrating that it understands the needs of the enterprise and knows how to respond effectively.

Get some business experience. If you don't know why you're using technology, it's really hard to optimize the use of that technology. Nearly everyone that works for me has business experience of some sort, and it makes them so much more effective.

For general issues, I read CIO, CIO Insight, or Baseline Magazine. When a technology change takes place, I think about what it means for our company. I gather specific information and figure out how we can use new technology to make our company better.