An Operations and Maintenance Approach to Improving Air Quality

The COVID-19 pandemic has been disruptive to physical workplaces for so many reasons. One of the biggest challenges for businesses has been adapting offices to new and often equally disruptive safety standards – social distancing, sanitization, contact tracing, etc. While there’s keen emphasis on these practices, indoor air quality (IAQ) in many offices is only now getting the attention it deserves.

Let’s fix Status Code 2!

Who hasn’t run into that pesky old ‘Status Code 2’ problem? Your backup fails with a NetBackup message indicating that "none of the requested files were backed up." Well, let me dig through my notes and see what I did about it… Ah, yes! I remember when a customer ran into a Status Code 2 error when running an SQL database backup. In my investigation to help them fix the problem, I stumbled across a Symantec support article specifically focused on this issue.

Technology Implementation goes Hand-in-Hand with Therapy, Steps 4 and 5

In the first blog entry of this series, I used this AdultSwim video on YouTube to outline the five stages of grief and then related them to the five steps to a successful technology implementation. The subsequent entries included have gone into more detail for each stage and step – Needs/Denial, Process/Anger, and Training/Bargaining. That brings us to this final entry in this series, which will cover: Step 4: Technology Rollout; or, Stage 4: Depression Stage 5: Rallying the Users; or Stage 5: Acceptance Along the way I’ve drawn a comparison between Technology Implementation, Therapy and the Kübler-Ross Model for Grief. Implementing new technology in your agency, or any organization, can be hard and if not done right can have catastrophic consequences. Don’t believe me? Just ask Hershey; yes, the chocolate company. Hershey Food Corp spent $112 million and 30 months of implementation effort, however, when they attempted to go live in July 1999, the company experienced catastrophic failures with sales order processing, which had a crippling effect in shipping delays and deliveries of incomplete orders. That’s a lot of melting chocolate.