Figuring it out

Part of the reality of my job is that almost every day I'm at work--and usually several times a day--I'm asked by someone else to do something that I've never done before. That hasn't always been the case. When I was a classroom teacher I pretty much did the same thing every day. Sure, as an English teacher, some days I was teaching grammar, some days I was teaching writing, and other days some type of literature, but I pretty much came to work each day with a clear idea of what was going to happen that day and how I was going to do it.

Not anymore. In my job as the head of technology for the school district, I usually have a vague idea of what's going to happen at work each day, but as often as not I'm met by a person during the day who is requesting something that I've never done before. In the last week, here are just a few of the questions that I've had to tackle, all things that--while not necessarily new to the world of Information Technology--were new for ME:

• Do you know how to set up the buses in [our student database system] so that users of the system can easily track what bus a student rides?
• Can you make the "http" at the start of our website "https" for part of the site so that we can set it up for secure banking information?
• If I send you some information about a recent fundraiser and maybe 30 photos from the fundraiser, can you create a web page that has the information on it and that randomly shows 4 or 5 of the30 photos each time the page is loaded?
• Is it possible to load some music software onto a server so that everyone in the district can use it at the same time?
• Can you set up a system--without spending any money--where we can dump students into one of three groups: 1) those who have Internet access, 2) those who don't, and 3) those who have access to only certain sites, and can you make the system easy enough to use so that a classroom teacher can move kids in and out of the three groups AND edit the sites that students do and don't have access to?
• Can you create a program that allows me to walk through the buildings and take notes on how teachers are doing, and that will dump all of the data into a database that I can use to crunch numbers, and that will send the data for an individual teacher to that teacher automatically via email, and that will have exactly the fields we want in exactly the spots we want, unlike our current walkthrough software? And can you get that done by the end of next week?

When I'm asked questions like this, I basically give one of three answers: 1) Yes, I can definitely do that, 2) No, I definitely CANNOT do that, and 3) I think I might be able to do that. And for option three, I usually say the same thing: "I don't know how to do that now, but I can probably figure something out."

I say that so often, in fact, that it's apparently become a bad habit, like someone saying "Umm" before speaking. I hadn't noticed until one day a couple of weeks ago my wife asked me if I could do something for her (I honestly don't remember what it was now). Before I could answer she said, "And if you say 'I'll figure it out' I swear I'll scream at you!"

I was a little taken aback. First, because she said it with such vehemence. Second, because "I'll figure it out" WERE the words that I had been just about to say. And third, because I had never noticed that I said that any more often than any other set of words. After she said that to me, though, I've heard myself say it all of the time. And I've become pretty self-conscious about it.The other day I heard myself say to our Foods Director, "Okay, so we'll meet next Tuesday to look at the Foods database and the student information system database to make sure that they match up, and if they don't we'll fig--I mean, if they don't, we'll determine where the breakdown is and try to resolve it."

Which was a stupid thing for me to say. It's stilted and hard to follow. "We'll figure out the problem" would have been more direct. Besides, I don't know that saying "We'll figure it out" over and over is necessarily a bad thing. As I said at the start of this blog entry, it's more a reflection what I do from day to day in my job. I'm constantly "figuring out" things.

Maybe it should be the motto for people in my position: "Chief Information Officers: We figure things out!"

By the way, the answers to the questions above were "Yes," "I'll figure it out," "Yes," "Yes," "I'll figure it out,"  and "No.