David Avery:  

A little application that I installed on my computer desktop at work tells me that I have 582 days until my scheduled retirement on May 1, 2016. I chose that date because I expect both my daughter to graduate from prep school at Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, CT and my son to graduate from Clarkson University in Potsdam, NY that month. Twenty or so years ago when my wife and I decided to start a family late in life, we tried to talk about all the probable consequences of that decision. I have to admit, scheduling my retirement around their graduation ceremonies didn’t occur to me at the time. This is my twenty ninth year working for Dartmouth College. For most of that time I’ve been in the IT department for the College. When I started work as a mainframe systems programmer, the entire server room had ten computers which in aggregate had about 30 gigabytes of disk storage. Today the iPhone in my shirt pocket has 32 gigabytes and the server rooms now have about 800 terabytes of disk. We’ll break the petabyte ceiling next year. The server count has gone from 10 to about 800. In the beginning, IT was a fairly loose enterprise. We had some critical computer applications such a payroll and student registration, but lots of business activities were entirely or mostly manual. We could schedule four hours a week of down time for maintenance. Today the tentacles of IT extend to almost every facet of the business, from unlocking doors to posting the nutritional content of lunch in the caf...Expand for more