Brian Johnson is the director of network operations at MMIT, where he runs a team that manages everything from creating client usernames and passwords to finding the best solutions for automation within applications and client tools.
What’s an example of some of the work you do?
I make sure our applications are performing, and so I work on architecting network solutions. We recently moved pretty much all of our application stack to the cloud. This was a project that started in October of last year, and was completed in May of this year. I worked on finding the right place to put these applications, which was a complete overhaul. All the databases moved and so did all of our applications: Analytics, FormTrack, the API and Formulary Navigator. There’s probably 20 or 30 minor applications that go along with that.
What is your day-to-day like?
What I mainly work toward is being able to hand off our network projects to my team so they always know what to do, step-by-step. I set the groundwork so everybody going forward has the exact same setup and can work through their tasks. We just had a recent acquisition [of the Dedham Group] and they want some things integrated, so most recently I was working to get their resources in our ecosystem.
When you work on projects like the cloud overhaul, do you usually use your team members or is it more of a solo project?
I took on a lot of that particular project, since it was a huge undertaking and very visible. I had other teammates like my system engineer working on the email migration. And since it’s a different ecosystem in the cloud, we worked with the developers to be able to show all of the different design changes. We also had meetings with Microsoft, and we’d bounce ideas off of them. I had to learn from other people using Microsoft resources.
What do you like about working at MMIT?
The technology that we touch, everything is just so new and there’s nothing to hold you back. When we moved to the cloud, it was very much about finding the best solution for us. The leadership backed this, instead of just wanting to find the quickest solution. The investment in technology, the investment in learning — we were provided technical classes on the cloud platform — and the investment in our people to have further knowledge of the applications and the architecture that we’re using is awesome.
Where do you think MMIT’s tech will be in the next 5-10 years?
I think it’s great that we’re getting our feet wet in cloud solutions because it opens up more possibilities in automation. When all of our applications lived in our data center, automation wasn’t as easy and we couldn’t scale to where we wanted to be. I think that’s where we are headed with automation of scale so that when you need resources, they’re available on demand.Spotli
What do you like to do in your free time?
My free time is more or less completely consumed by sports for my kids. My son plays baseball and my daughter plays softball, and I coach both of them. So I spend my time either in the backyard pitching to them, coaching them or bringing them to practices.
by Lisa Gillespie
