2010 PASS Board Applicants: Geoff Hiten

Introduction
 
I am interviewing 2010 PASS Board Nominee Applicants. As listed on the PASS Board Elections site the applicants are:
  • Allen Kinsel
  • Andy Warren
  • Denny Cherry
  • Douglas McDowell
  • Geoff Hiten
  • Jack Corbett
  • Mark Ginnebaugh
  • Markus Sprenger
  • Steve Jones
I’m asking everyone the same questions and blogging the responses in the order received.
 
Geoff Hiten is up next:
 
Interview WIth Geoff Hiten
 
1. What’s your day job?
I work for Intellinet, a business technology consulting company based in Atlanta.  I help people succeed by using technology to solve business problems.

2. What motivated you to run for the PASS Board of Directors?
Twitter 🙂  Seriously, my friend and former co-worker Aaron Nelson (@SQLVariant) suggested that you and I should run for the board.  You quickly demurred, but my silence was taken as assent for a while. The follow-on tweets encouraging me to run from people I really respect in the SQL Community  made me think about it.  I looked at what it involved and decided that I could effectively help lead this organization and I would learn and grow personally and professionally from the experience.  As one person I turned to for advice said “Why wouldn’t you do it?”

3. What is PASS’s largest challenge right now?
I see PASS needing to better reach the local chapter members who never attend the Summit.  SQLSaturday is a great first step towards this but I would like to see more effort in that direction.  The Summit is a great event but it must move around more.  Only a very few of my members (I lead the Atlanta SQL Users Group) can make a trip to
Seattle for a conference so having more or less Microsoft “involvement” at the event is moot for them.

4. What is PASS’s greatest opportunity right now?
Most of us tend to think of PASS in terms of the Summit.  However, that does not meet the needs of the majority of the SQL community who never attend the Summit.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the Summit and want it to continue to succeed, but that event is simply not relevant to the majority of SQL users.  I would like to see PASS be the first
resouce SQL professionals turn to for career growth.

5. Complete this sentence: “If I only get one new thing accomplished while serving on the PASS Board of Directors, I want to…” make the processes and procedures for governing PASS structured, documented, and ttransparent.  Much of my work is in Highly Available SQL platforms.  Process and documentation are the fundamentals of those environments and I want to see the same principles applied to PASS.  This is not glamorous or dramatic, but it is the foundation of a solid organization that can grow and adapt to the changing technology landscape.

6. Complete this sentence: “If I only get to change one existing thing about PASS while serving on the PASS Board of Directors, I want to…” make PASS a key resource for every SQL professional..
 
7. Share something interesting about yourself!
I keep tropical fish as a hobby.  First rule is “keep the fish alive”.  Everything else is secondary to that.  Clean looking tanks, pretty plants, clear water are all nice but the first purpose of the tank is to keep the fish alive.  Think about that next time you look at what being a DBA means.

:{> Andy

Andy Leonard

andyleonard.blog

Christian, husband, dad, grandpa, Data Philosopher, Data Engineer, Azure Data Factory, SSIS guy, and farmer. I was cloud before cloud was cool. :{>

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