Ron Smith

Spotlight

Ron Smith
Director of IT – Networks and Telecommunications, Deerwood Center

Ron has been with FCCJ for the last 15 years. His career history at the college includes; Network Support, Campus Technical Support, Computer and Network Instruction, Vocational Evaluation, Test Examiner and various positions in adult education.

As Director of IT, Ron supervises the staff that manages college-wide servers, network equipment and phone systems. His crew also handles the 24-hour processing of Orion batch jobs and printing as well as college-wide computer and software purchasing for classrooms.

During his time as IT Director, FCCJ has moved to an end-to-end Cisco Network environment, upgraded the campus interconnection and Internet speeds and created an enterprise management solution for its Cisco Dell, Microsoft and Symantec products. FCCJ has also developed the first stages of a Storage Area Network and has migrated over half of its phones to Voice over IP, opening up new capabilities and future possibilities in both areas.

Ron Smith and family

While his group manages over 200 continual projects, some of them in active development that excite him are; the college-wide Voice over IP conversion, Internet Content Filtering of High School Programs, the creation of a Disaster Recovery Site to run replicated core systems from another area of the country, re-architecting BlackBoard to handle our growing customer population, college-wide print management, the Storage Area Network Expansion, Citrix Application hosting, Home Directories for all staff and the construction projects at Nassau, Cecil and Deerwood.

Ron has a bachelor’s degree in Vocational Education, Training and Development from Southern Illinois University as well as many industry certifications including; Cisco Certified Network Professional, Cisco Certified Network Designer, Cisco Qualified Specialist certifications in Wireless, Voice over IP and Call Centers as well as Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer.

Ron relaxes by playing golf, boating, rock climbing, scuba diving, hiking, fishing, hunting and playing with his new son, Eli.

His leadership/management tip: “Hire problem solvers you can trust to work with little supervision, get them involved in forming the long-term vision, spend most of your time making sure they have the needed resources, be there when they request advice, and otherwise, stay out of the way. They will accomplish great things.”

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