As I mentioned in The End of an Era, this past Friday was my last day as a Starbucks partner. I am now a proud Starbucks retiree, but my working days are not over quite yet.
This morning I’ll log into my work laptop for the first time and officially start my new role as a Chief Technology Advisor with World Wide Technology (WWT). I’ve been working with WWT for well over a dozen years as a customer, starting way back in 2011 when I was a freshly minted director running infrastructure services at Starbucks. I’ve always been impressed with their operation, and they were an invaluable partner in more ways than I can begin to list. I’m honored and humbled that they chose to add me to their team, and I’m excited to get started on this new adventure.
At this point you’re asking yourself “what the heck is a Chief Technology Advisor?” Don’t feel bad - I asked the same thing when they approached me about the role! In short, I will be helping to build a new Retail Sector-focused vertical team within WWT, and my primary responsibility is to be a trusted expert that WWT’s clients can tap into when they have particularly thorny problems to solve, or when they need a hand building strategy to address their infrastructure, cloud, data, or digitization needs. I like the intent of the role especially because it will allow me to bring my years of experience to bear on behalf of multiple clients, both small and large. I love helping to solve problems, and this gives me an opportunity to continue doing that without the additional stress of operational responsibilities. Building and running infrastructure is a passion of mine, but it will be very nice to not have the spectre of 2am Sev1 bridge calls constantly hanging over me!
I intend to continue posting here about my experiences and insights as much as I can, though understandably I will usually not be at liberty to reveal specific clients or identifying details. I may also end up writing content for WWT to publish, and if I do I’ll put some pointers here as well.
Onward!
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