Hello (DEX) World
Why DEXStack
Years ago, I began my “professional” writing career largely writing content for the IT world for publications such as TechTarget, CODE Magazine, Microsoft, 4sysops, IPSwitch among other outlets. My articles were mainly focused on how-to content around PowerShell, Chocolatey, Windows, Puppet and other components of an IT automation tech stack. I did this for a few years on a part-time basis, also speaking at a few PowerShell and IT conferences.
Then, the writing I was doing stopped becoming enjoyable and became a job. I was no longer invested or intrigued by new content I was creating, the love was gone. Every month I had a quota to get out between 3-5 articles for my clients and my writing became more about just trying to make money than actually trying to make quality and compelling content. So I stopped.
I have always tried to make intelligent decisions when it comes to how I spend my time, both personally and professionally and it became apparent that writing content as a side hustle just was not worth the time spent any longer. I have always been afraid of winding up in a job that I hated and although this was not a full-time job, I was no longer enjoying the work.
Fast forward to today. I miss writing, and I do not intend to write for the sake of making money, but for the sake of getting ideas out into the community, in this case a growing DEX community.
What I intend on writing is content specific to enterprise DEX, in the context of IT digital experience. Meaning, for employees using IT services, how can we measure, analyze and improve the IT services that are being offered. Ultimately, what I am most interested in is how can we use DEX tools to improve productivity of the organizations employees, both in the business case but also the technical methods behind it, e.g. PowerShell.
About me
I am now in year 16 of my professional IT career. A career that has largely been spent performing IT duties such as hardware, endpoint management, server management, networking, automation and now digital experience. The organizations I have worked for have mostly been in the education space, but now I am working for one of the largest companies in the world, a huge shift that has been a fun challenge.
Back in 2011, I took on my first PowerShell project and found it a great way to learn the language to use to automate any Windows related tasks. This was my entry point into the automation space. At that time, we were migrating on-premises mail to Office 365. This was a perfect example of how PowerShell, any automation in general can be used at scale. We managed to migrate tens of thousands of mailboxes over a few weeks to Office 365.
Up until 2019, I was really working in the system admin / systems engineering world, that is when I was hired in my current role to join their growing DEXOps team. With my background in automation and Windows, not to mention some data science skills, it was a great opportunity.
At that time, I had no idea even what digital employee experience even was. It wasn’t something any of the organizations I had worked at were talking about and certainly not doing. The main measure of IT was tracking incidents and all of the metrics that go along with that. When it comes to IT’s relationship with an organization, I had always found that metrics need to be closely tracked with the actual experience of an end user, and DEX is exactly that.
Since 2019, our use of DEX within my current org has really exploded and evolved. I have seen our team as sort of a startup within our organization, attempting to collaborate with other teams on their issues but also bring about a change in mindset about how we manage the end user experience. Needless to say, it’s been a great success and I look forward to sharing what I have learned and my thoughts that go along with that.