I’ve been in IT for over 30 years. I started in the 1990s on Novell NetWare networks, moved to Windows NT before Active Directory existed, and watched client-server give way to virtualization, virtualization to cloud, and cloud to… whatever we’re calling this moment. But nothing prepared me for the velocity of the past twelve months.
The Acceleration
Consider what my small healthcare IT team accomplished in 2025: We migrated over 19 million documents—2.16 terabytes of legacy records—to cloud archive storage, reducing our ongoing storage costs to about five dollars a month. We rebuilt our HL7 integration engine on new servers. We refreshed our public website and moved it to the cloud. We replaced expensive monthly digital signage subscriptions with Raspberry Pis pulling content from the cloud. We migrated our entire phone system to new servers. We completed a years-long medical image migration. We upgraded servers, consolidated infrastructure, and began expanding our remote radiology reading services to a new partner.
Oh, and we did all of this while closing well over 3,800 helpdesk tickets.
This isn’t a humble brag. It’s a confession of bewilderment.
The Paradox
Here’s what nobody tells you about efficiency: it doesn’t create spare time. It creates expectations.
The tools that should give us margin instead give us velocity. Every hour saved becomes an hour redeployed. The goalposts don’t stay still—they accelerate away from you. What impressed our leadership last quarter is table stakes this quarter. The project timeline that seemed aggressive in January looks leisurely by December.
I feel this tension daily. We’re accomplishing more than ever, moving faster than ever, delivering more value than ever. And yet the pressure doesn’t ease. If anything, it compounds. Because now everyone knows what’s possible.
But if I’m honest, the heaviest expectations come from inside. No one asked me to be at the office on New Year’s Day. No one demanded the weekends I spent in 2025. The business has its demands, but I have my own—and mine are harder to satisfy.
An AI Story
Our document archive migration tells the story of this moment perfectly.
We started the project in 2024. I wrote an upload script with an AI assistant and began moving files to cloud storage. It quickly became clear it would take months, so I dedicated two PCs to the task and let them churn.
This year, I ran that same script through a different AI tool and asked it to find enhancements. After a couple of rewrites, we uploaded the second half of those 19 million files in days rather than months. Nothing changed about our internet bandwidth or the PCs doing the work. The AI just found a process that was that much faster.
That’s the world we’re in now. The same hardware, the same network, the same person—but dramatically different results because the tools got smarter.
Looking Forward
2026 isn’t going to slow down. Major system deployments ahead. Integration work with multiple partners. Automation projects to streamline how we onboard and offboard staff. The list grows faster than we cross things off.
The late 1990s saw the Internet go mainstream, creating enormous change and opportunity. But that transformation, significant as it was, looks modest compared to the age we’re now entering. The Internet changed how we access information; AI is changing how we create it, analyze it, and act on it.
This week, we said goodbye to a colleague who retired after 45 and a half years at the healthcare organization where I work. She started before the IBM PC existed, when CT scanners were fairly new and MRI was still years from FDA approval. The entire arc of modern computing happened during her career. And now the pace is accelerating beyond anything those decades prepared us for.
Here’s to momentum—and to the people who keep things running while the world speeds up.