Hello, LOPSA community! During the board’s recent face-to-face meeting, certain issues pertaining to the future of LOPSA as an organization were discussed. Declining membership and involvement has given cause for some honest introspection into our goals and processes as an organization. We were founded almost 20 years ago with the specific goal of advancing the practice of “system administration,” and we found ourselves wondering what specifically system administration means in today’s information technology landscape.
With the large-scale shift of resources to cloud providers and the focus on rapid, automated deployment, the traditional system administer role has been replaced with a much less specified and more flexible job role. Systems still play a large part in our day-to-day of course; whether you are a site reliability engineer, a security operations guru, or a white-box networking wizard, you are likely to need quite a bit of knowledge of the underlying systems, but these jobs also require application and implementation specific experience. Modern IT requires quite a lot of flexibility, and LOPSA has not been flexible enough on an organizational level and has not remained as relevant as it has been in the past.
In order to revitalize LOPSA and make it again useful to the membership, we would like to focus on educating and supporting you as you move from role to role within your organizations and the industry. A major focus of ours will be providing LOPSA members with access and discounts to online training materials to help you keep your skills sharp and up-to-date. Personal and professional connections are also very important, so we want to focus on rebuilding our local LOPSA chapters to help build communities of like-minded IT professionals that you can rely on for mentoring and professional advice.
None of this will happen overnight, but we hope that together with your help we will make great strides this year towards improving LOPSA. To read the long-form of the board’s thoughts on the future of LOPSA, please visit https://lopsa.org/thefuture and send your thoughts to board@lopsa.org. We look forward to working with you all to take LOPSA forward into the next chapter of its existence.
