About The IT Garbageman | The IT Garbageman

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I am Colin Cecil, an IT professional with 30+ years of experience. Grew up in England but have been living in the New Jersey for over 25 years. I’ve worked for Merck & Co. in the IT division since moving to New Jersey and have supported many different business functions over the years.

And I am an IT Garbageman.

The blog focuses on the work that I have been doing for the last 8 years which relates to the retirement of IT applications and the archiving of their data.

Like many paths in life this was more stumbled upon than chosen – my then boss stopped me in the hallway and asked me to archive an ERP application that had come with an acquired company. At the time I was overseeing the operations group for Finance applications so it might have been a planned move on his part, or I might just have been the first person from his team he saw that day. Either way it ended up on my plate.

My first reaction was to find out how we had archived prior ERP applications and use that as a template, but discovered we had never completed the archive of an application that large before. Further discoveries were that our archiving software wouldn’t scale to this size of application, that we didn’t have standard practices or services across the company for archiving and that our application lifecycle procedure for retirement needed refreshing.

The most important discovery for me was that strong data governance practices, a service based organization with governance authority and a talented cross functional team were necessary to deliver a high quality retirement and archiving service. There was an intersection between my passions and the needs of the company, and my path was set.

But Why The IT Garbageman?

Best practice in life: don’t overcomplicate things. Selling people on the idea that we are specialists in data governance and cost/risk mitigation is tough, and their eyes typically glaze over before your get to the point. The mental image of an IT garbageman is easy to get across. And has caused a spit-take or two over the years!