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.