Happy Tuesday
Blogging seems to have become a regular part of my Tuesday activities. I don't want my blog to completely lose all value to my limited readership, so I will attempt to make these updates more frequently. I have just been so busy, I haven't remembered to do it. Well, I think I have devised a solution to that problem: I have stuck a sticky note with the word BLOG on it on my monitor. There's no escaping now (at least not without a twinge of guilt).
The thanksgiving holiday was nice, but now it's time to get back to business. Here is some information on my products:
Acceptance Test Environment. We have developed our war room into something useful. We have plastered the wall with the different systems that we have in production, and we are identifying resources for acceptance test. Our first priority has been authentication and NDS. We have servers for that environment, and we are in the process of configuring them. That will be a big win. One thing that is becoming more evident as we progress in this project is that we have a lot of holes in our change management procedure that need to be addressed before this acceptance test environment will be successful. We are working with engineering and operations to fill those holes.
Web Authentication. We have taken yet another step outside of our old paradigm and now we are actually gathering data on the actual deficiencies of our current authentication system. Now, I realize that a perceived deficiency is just as damning as a real deficiency, but it is possble to manage perceived deficiencies without modifying the product.
Actuate. Still working on migration plans for 6. We haven't had any outages for a month, and we are working with DOH to determine their actual business requirements rather than jump to conclusions. It turns out that their insistance on quantifying a deadline for system restoration is mostly rooted in the desire for their problems to be escalated to the right people quicker. Well, we can't really commit to a time in an evironment that is not HA. Once we migrate to 6 and we have failover we should be able to make more of a commitment. I believe our relationship with DOH has improved as a result of our action on Actuate. Also, I will be meeting with an Actuate sales guy on Thursday.
Content Management. Working on that business case. I am gathering info from our customers and other vendors. I will be meeting with Dave Fletcher and Phil to discuss this product in the near future.
Employee Portal. I have not been able to allocate any time to this product since last week. Right now I am concentrating on Acceptance Test, Actuate, Authentication, Content Management, OSBR, and Payment Portal.
OSBR. I have been helping the steering team determine what we need in the way of support plans. I will be going with James and Pete to the various participating entities to determine their support needs and ascertain the components that they supply to the process that could potentially cause a service outage. James has expressed his gratitude for my involvement. I don't know who would be asking these questions if I wasn't involved.
Payment Portal. I am drafting our vision and scoping document for this project. I have assumed somewhat of a leadership role in getting documents created that describe what we want to build. We will be presenting to the cabinet this month.
8:09:16 AM 
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