Heroix is excited to announce that technology professional and blogger Dave Atkins will be contributing regularly to the Heroix blog. Dave has spent the last 13 years working in startup companies as a systems engineer and hands-on technology manager where he has amassed a wealth of experience–and stories to tell–about the nuts and bolts realities of making IT work.

Dave spent 7 years in Silicon Valley–administering an HP-UX server at one of the early internet “backbone” locations on the Stanford campus, then leading teams of engineers in a series of web-based startup companies before relocating to Boston in 2002 where he led the technical operations for http://quitnet.com, and more recently, http://spire.com.

Dave’s perspective is that making IT work–and making a business work–is about much more than choosing the right technology. It’s fundamentally about solving problems and responding to the unexpected.

We are all familiar with crisis situations where technology became a roadblock to what a business was trying to achieve. Sometimes, entire IT departments spiraled down into a “culture of blame,” with occassional bursts of “heroics” to save the day. But that kind of existence is not sustainable for people or business.

Real IT Heroics are performed every day through the projects that went off without a hitch. The data center migration that no one noticed. An email at 6am announcing, “Exchange Server has been upgraded.” The realization one day that no one has heard a pager go off for weeks.

Dave does not claim to be an IT Hero, but he wants to offer his experiences and perspective on the many lessons he has learned from others. The right technology can free us up to make better decisions under pressure and alert us to problems before they become chronic. But experience teaches us the judgment to take advantage of those opportunities to make things better.