Alumni & Friends

Home > Alumni & Friends > Alumni Profiles > Master of Science in Telecommunications and Network Management > Peter Spier

Peter Spier

Technology changes quickly.  It is best when it solves a need.  In business, it should be an enabler.  It is up to us to strategically plan for and successfully manage it to create value.
I believe that I am one of the iSchool’s, or as I will forever recall it, IST’s, earliest Telecommunications and Network Management graduates.  I have long since forgotten course names and numbers, but learned the above perspective during my studies there.  At the time, the iSchool shared space with the School of Engineering.  We had, what my peers and I often considered, a “one room schoolhouse” in that we literally had one classroom.  All classes that were not held there took place throughout the University campus.

In our proud schoolhouse, we had an overhead projector, a digital projector, an OS 8 Apple Macintosh, and one Windows 95 PC.  If you had the benefit of owning a computer, you were able to bring in your presentations on a floppy disk (if you don’t know exactly what that is, imagine a clumsier thumb drive) and run it off of the platform of your choice.  If you either did not own a computer or were not presentation savvy enough to develop one in a campus lab, you got the overhead projector.   
My final project, completed in cooperation with a fellow alum, was a local consultation to an area magnet school whose computer instructor wanted to monitor student use and  transfer lesson plans to their systems remotely.  Our proposed solution was a piece of freeware software that fit on a single floppy disk called pcAnywhere 1.0 and another that allowed modem-based dial-in connectivity.  We presented on the differences between and advantages to remote access versus remote control.  
As I said, technology changes quickly.  If you look at the iSchool today, it is impossibly hard to imagine the school that I once knew.  Students attend classes with laptops and tablets in tow and their projects seem comparatively more complex than our remote access versus remote control one.  But, remote access and remote control were, in fact, cutting-edge technologies at the time.

Therein lies the most important similarity between my own experience and that of iSchool students and graduates today.  We each benefit of the same common thread that, should we choose to become enamored with the fleeting significance of the technology du jour, we may otherwise miss.  There must be an appropriate business need for technology to prove a solution.  There must be an effective plan for technology to prove of value.  Additionally, there must be due consideration given to business concerns should business support also be expected.  In the end, it is rarely ever about the technology, or the size of the classroom, itself.

Peter Spier (www.peterspier.com) is Manager Professional Services at Fortrex Technologies (www.fortrex.com) based in Frederick, Maryland and President of the ISACA Western New York Chapter (www.isacawny.org).  Peter attained his graduate degree from Syracuse University's School of Information Studies and over the course of 12 years of experience, has earned multiple certifications which include Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), Certified in Risk and Information Systems Control (CRISC), Certified Information Security Manager (CISM), and Project Management Professional (PMP).