Three Month Update

It has been some time since I took up the role as ICT Technical Officer, three months to be exact, it has been a wealth of new experiences. Firstly, I am responsible for about 5 different sites. I am working mainly out of one of them and I visit the other as the need arises at a minimum of once a month. Two of the sites are nearby my primary location while others are what some would describe as “quito quito”. At my primary site, I am slowly settling into my roles trying to learn the office culture. As we all know every office is slightly different.

I am in a new place in the country the first couple of weeks everything seemed strange and had to rely on Waze to get in and out of the here to avoid getting lost. It’s a big distance to go every day about 1 hour and a half both ways on a typical day but I don’t mind as the discomfort is temporary. As my spouse the month before was hired to work in the same area we have decided that we will move to a place closer to both our places of work. In a few months, our commute will go down to less than 30 mins if all goes to plan.

I had to learn a few things on the fly when I got here. As an ICT Technical Officer at a school, I had to learn about software and tools you don’t typically encounter in your typical ICT position. Tools like Sanko Lab 100, a library database application, and student information database. There are your typical ICT infrastructure things here too. Things like wired and wireless LAN multiple WAN broadband connections across the school and some aging computers. I am generally left to my own devices which can be a double-edged sword as we all know the only thing worse than working too hard is not having enough work to do. Therefore, I have been occupying myself with some projects. Or should I say trying to get some projects off the ground?

At my main site, after evaluating the state of the campus, there are 2 major weaknesses in the ICT infrastructure that I think should be high priority one of which the school has already identified and taken steps to improve. Which is the LAN. There is another project that I also think should be looked at, but it will require and a mountain of funding to resolve., this is the aging PC across the campus. All things considering things are not too bad.

For the LAN and WLAN, I have looked at the school’s plans and made some modifications to the original designs filling in the gaps. Things like adding a network rack to house the switches and routers and other network devices, adding enterprise-grade routers, and patch panels for a more organized network work layout. Due to budgets, I have not been able to move forward on these plans, but I am confident that we will get there over time. We are getting some donated equipment to this end in the next 18 months hopefully and I am incorporating these devices into the overall project.

The project that I am less confident about is the PC upgrades. Current estimates for preparing the campus for Windows 11 ais in the ½ million-dollar range. Even though I have a project outline with a rollout over the next 4 years it’s still a big ask. I hope I can get them to see the value.

On a smaller scale, I was recovered from a power outage that disabled half my network due to failed UPS that I subsequently got replaced. Unified as best as I can the Wi-Fi infrastructure so there are only 2 Wi-Fi networks for the most part. And updated some of the older PC from Windows 7 and 8 to Windows 10. I was also able to get an 8X increase in the broadband speeds for the same price after some investigation.

Over the short term, I hope I move forward on some medium-scale projects to get the network to a more managed and unified state to have broadband redundancy. So I can then set up some domain-based services like printing, Windows deployment, updating, and backup to help make it easier to manage these devices. But that’s a project for another time.