Through 2009, a capstone engagement with ITT Technical Institute’s information systems security program: a student team given scoped authorization to test the city’s estate, working from an infrastructure checklist provided to them, and then briefing ITD management on how they got in — twice, the second time in the division’s own training room to an audience of the people who owned what had been tested.
The findings came back as a formal report, and they were answered the way a professional engagement is answered: a written ITD response, taken to a second revision and circulated for review. That distinction is the point of the entry. A student exercise that ends in applause teaches the students something and the organization nothing; one that ends in a document with a revision number enters the record and can be argued with. It fed directly into the penetration testing and security assessment work the division carried through 2010.
The value was never free labor. It was an outside look at the estate by people with no stake in what it was supposed to look like — the specific thing an internal review cannot produce, because everyone inside already knows what the diagram says.
A second partnership followed with Florida State College at Jacksonville from 2014, where the Chief Information Officer named me one of two enterprise architects to sit as expert judges on capstone design presentations, with a data center and infrastructure tour for the college’s enterprise systems integration class.
Outcome
An outside look at the estate by people with no stake in what it was supposed to look like, and a documented response that outlasted them.