ITSM Uncovered

To compare a "Core" technologist to that of a general technologist will always garner the contempt between various IT fields. My background is in support for example. I love technology and make every attempt to learn about the technology behind the products I have supported. Now, further on in my career as an Incident, Problem and Crisis Manager, I have to know about all areas of the products and services that IT delivers to the Business, including the likes of Storage, Database, Applications and Networking/Voice. I am not a specialist any any of these core technologies, but I am a GEEK for driving to understand them and how they work together to enhance our deliveries to the business.

Having said that, it is also one of many roles which requires soft-skills in dealing with core technologists, leadership on both the IT and Business side, I would probably not be employed if I didn't learn to interact and maneuver around the politics and personalities at all levels, in getting anything done in IT. So to say there is a back-lash or that I am a weenie for possessing soft-skills is somewhat an oversight as to how Technology needs to function in the modern business environment regardless of industry.

In short; all roles in Technology play their part in delivering on a business strategy. If we are failing in anything it is not ensuring that technologists "core" or otherwise do not think of themselves as better than any other technologist and that each requires different skills to serve a higher purpose. The cog in the machine if you will. Maybe then we can begin to leverage these different skill-sets instead of further instigating a "who's better than who" battle in IT. This is no longer the 1980's.

To compare a "Core" technologist to that of a general technologist will always garner the contempt between various IT fields. My background is in support for example. I love technology and make every attempt to learn about the technology behind the products I have supported. Now, further on in my career as an Incident, Problem and Crisis Manager, I have to know about all areas of the products and services that IT delivers to the Business, including the likes of Storage, Database, Applications and Networking/Voice. I am not a specialist any any of these core technologies, but I am a GEEK for driving to understand them and how they work together to enhance our deliveries to the business.

Having said that, it is also one of many roles which requires soft-skills in dealing with core technologists, leadership on both the IT and Business side, I would probably not be employed if I didn't learn to interact and maneuver around the politics and personalities at all levels, in getting anything done in IT. So to say there is a back-lash or that I am a weenie for possessing soft-skills is somewhat an oversight as to how Technology needs to function in the modern business environment regardless of industry.

In short; all roles in Technology play their part in delivering on a business strategy. If we are failing in anything it is not ensuring that technologists "core" or otherwise do not think of themselves as better than any other technologist and that each requires different skills to serve a higher purpose. The cog in the machine if you will. Maybe then we can begin to leverage these different skill-sets instead of further instigating a "who's better than who" battle in IT. This is no longer the 1980's.

I'm not sure why it is a general human trait to want to be satisfied with chaos. What I mean by that is in the world of technology there needs to be a certain state of order to be effective. It is for this reason that certain "Industry Standards" have been develop based on best practice.

Take for example the basic premise that the entire existence of technology is to serve the user. Somehow that concept becomes lost on those who work in technology. As long as I have been doing support, I still understand that no matter what happens, it isn't about protecting mistakes made by individuals, nor is it about throwing people who make mistakes under a bus. It is simply about making sure that the products or services that we in technology provide are available to those who make a living using it.

In order to do this, it has been my experience that you need to put in place guardrails of sorts to ensure that no matter what side of the road you travel down to get to to your destination, you are at least not going to run off of the road completely. These guardrails are the processes and policies that are developed and implemented to ensure that all is operating and being measured within a set of standards.

It is an evolutionary thing really, organizations start out small. There is no real level of complexity that demands standards, so you do what it takes to get the job done. This is the "Wild West" phase of organizational growth. At some point however, you do reach critical mass where simply doing "whatever it takes" creates more problems than it solves. The mentality is to get it to market and if something breaks, just fix it and push on.

At this point is when a serious assessment needs to be made on whether or not it is a one-off issue or a growing state of mind that needs to be adjusted or reigned in with some structure. The general perception is that there is a right way or a wrong way to do things. I would argue that there is a single way to do things. A way that is dictated by several things. The first is the tolerance of the technology deployed to adapt, the other is the tolerance of the business to accept failure from its technology.

The bigger an organization gets the less tolerance for failure will be accepted. I believe it is the mark of a good technology leader to see this coming and put controls in place to ensure that everything begins to melt down at one time. It is a serious cultural change in the way technology organizations operate.

Take for example, a service like Twitter. For years, it worked. It drew crowds. Then it began to hit critical mass and the infamous "Fail Whale" began to appear more frequently. So much so that capacity outages became almost a daily occurrence. Not having been a fly on the walls of twitter-ville, I can't say that anyone had the controls in place to see this coming. To predict when things were due to break before they actually broke. From a customer point of view, all I knew what that the uproar from the twitter community was huge. Many began to leave for other services, giving up on twitter completely.

Apply the service provider/customer model to any business and you can see where managing technology effectively becomes a higher priority than just making it through another day with a few outages. At the end of the day it is about revenue and market share. When technology understands its true contribution to this model will we then begin to see more investment in controls, governance and risk management.

These are not traditional hands on development or system administration roles, and that is probably the reason why technology departments haven’t embraced the concept of managing technology as a business. Most senior management has grown up in the very chaotic environment that they now struggle to manage. There is no experiential growth that can get them to understand the importance of running technology as a business.

The most effective leader is one who abandons "the way it has always been done" and begins to look to the industry to provide the answers needed for stability and growth. Once that happens, can the chaos begin to be managed into something which supports growth and stability in any organization.

With the introduction of strict regulatory requirements being imposed on most industries today, the curtains allowing corporate technology to operate in a vacuum are being drawn back to expose some interesting landscapes from which technology operates, or doesn't in some cases, as a business.

Another reason for change is a direct result of technology's impact to the bottom line in terms of stability and failures. Failures which occur due to bad software development or hardware failure contribute to millions, if not billions of dollars annually in lost opportunities, revenue streams and downtime of personnel unable to perform their work. A very painful example of where business suffers when technology goes wrong.

But who is to really blame? There is a term called "Time to Market" In a business environment where margins are shrinking and more competition is vying for the same customers, getting your product out the door and on the street first is the one way where you can quickly gain competitive advantage over your competition. As a result, technology is sometimes forced to do whatever it takes to get it done.

The shortcuts taken or processes skipped are sometimes viewed as acceptable risks to get to market. The view that once the short term goal is achieved, time can then be taken to go back and work to reduce the risk of stability introduced. When a technology failure occurs, IT is always accountable to the business. But in most cases, it is the business who has failed technology.

For the past 20 years the pace at which technology has evolved has been mind-boggling. Because of this evolution there has been an equally aggressive push by business to take advantage of new technology to increase the bottom line. The problem is that the speed of thought will always surpass the physical world, which is to say that technology has, in many instances, sacrificed proper design and implementation processes which take time, in order to meet an aggressive time to market as set by the business.