Introspection, Collar Codes, and IT’s Place in Business
January 5, 2010
Some people say “navel gazing” like it’s a bad thing. I’m pretty sure if all you do is think about what systems administration is, then you probably don’t get a chance to do much actual administration. That being said, it’s important to stop occasionally, and examine the role, and be aware of what the role is and isn’t.
I’ve noticed that over the past month or so, there have been a few stories on the practice of systems administration (as opposed to The Practice…
The post I made last year (jeez, that sounds like a long time ago) about blue collar vs white collar sysadmins struck a chord, I think. Ben Cotton posted a story before New Year discussing the changing role of IT, and Joseph Kerns wrote an interesting history of his education (formal and informal) as a sysadmin.
At the same time, there have been a few sysadmin-related Slashdot posts, too. Directly related to the white / blue collar discussion, someone wanted to know if he had a shot at becoming a sysadmin without a degree. One of the more interesting comments that surprisingly didn’t receive any replies was by falcon5768:
IT doesn’t need “degrees”
But you damn well better have your certifications in line, and some experience under your belt. I really dont get where this idea of EVERY job needs a degree to function came from. I would easily say that a good 60% of jobs out there SHOULD be done by people without higher ed experience. Leave higher end for who it matters for, science/math geeks, buisness jerks, and fine arts. IT is a trade job for all purposes, I know a lot of IT people who really had that designation but its true, as a person WITH a degree in technology and currently in IT, I see no reason to sugar coat the simple fact that we are 21 century plumbers and electricians.
(Emphasis is mine)
That’s not a new thought, but it is certainly open for debate. As a profession, we have wrestled with the argument that IT is or is not a utility service. Lets be clear with our definitions, if we want to get sucked into that debate.
From the infallible Wikipedia entry for “public utility“, we get
A public utility (usually just utility) is an organization that maintains the infrastructure for a public service (often also providing a service using that infrastructure).
I think we can safely ignore the word ‘public’ in that definition, and we get “A utility is an organization that maintains the infrastructure for a service (often also providing a service using that infrastructure)”. That sounds a lot like IT to me. Then again, there’s a wide, wide range of activities performed by IT that fall outside of that definition, too. To lump us in with water and electricity would be to do us a grave injustice.
Of course we provide the infrastructure for services, and we also provide the service over that infrastructure.To phrase it that way, you would think that there was only one infrastructure, and only one service. Our networking, mail, DNS, and hosting teams would beg to disagree (along with any number of other teams dedicated to an individual infrastructure).
We are a utility, but we’re also so much more than that. We don’t just provide the power that allows the gears of business to run, we’re part of the gears, too. in some industries, we’re nearly the entire machine.
Because of this interrelationship we have with business, we can’t be considered “just another utility”. We’re beyond that. There is a symbiosis between IT and other departments, and there’s every sign that as more business functions continue to rely on (and take place in) IT, this relationship will get deeper and more codependent.
Because I’m lucky enough to work in a small company that realizes the importance of IT in its overall strategy, I know that I’m insulated from the majority of ill will and mistrust that I suspect takes place in some companies. I’ve heard stories from many people about IT being considered a cost center rather than an institutional asset. I know that’s not the case everywhere, but I can’t help but think that if you’re in a situation like that, it must take a change of personnel rather than a change of attitude.
Here’s my question to you…what is the attitude toward your department at your organization? Are you seen like the asset that you (hopefully) are, or do your managers think that the business succeeds despite you, rather than because of you? If you’ve changed their opinion to something more favorable, what advice do you have for people still in that situation?
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January 5th, 2010 at 9:17 pm
Very interesting thoughts. I would certainly agree with the fact that the degree of dependence on IT can vary all over the place but I’ll take that a step further and say that will only become larger as time goes on. “Smarter” electronics are becoming increasingly available to the public. With IPv6, eventually every appliance will be internet-enabled. As you mentioned, companies are becoming more and more reliant on internet services to conduct their daily business. I think we have to be very cognizant of this growing trend, for it places even more importance on our work as sysadmins. At my particular company, IT IS our company; we are very much considered an asset (thankfully). I might not have any good ideas on convincing less-then-intelligent management the true reality of the situation, but I am confident that if managers and companies do not eventually realize this truth, they will be left in the dust as smarter competition surpasses them.
January 5th, 2010 at 9:39 pm
I think management, especially Finance management, is looking for a way to change how their companies deal with IT. Finance hates capital assets, and loves overhead instead, because the tax laws (in Canada anyways) deal with the two differently. I think that IT is evolving towards where most traditional IT services will become utilities. There will always be exceptions, just as there are companies today that employ their own electricians or plumbers — but the vast majority of companies don’t need to. Look at email. gmail shows that outsourced home-user email is very possible. Many companies (my employer included) demonstrate that even higher-needs clients can be adequately served through outsourced Exchange services. Companies now need to be pretty big (or pretty specialized) to absolutely require their own self-managed email services. I think that for many companies, records storage, document editing and sharing and storage, will all become outsourced services, with the corresponding drop in requirements for high-caliber IT support at the customer end. More of us end up working the way I am, where I do hit-and-run IT jobs for customers of varying sizes without them requiring a full-time body with my skills.
January 6th, 2010 at 8:09 am
Have to agree with @David, much of the services provided by IT are common across many different organisations and are likely to be commoditised in some way be that by outsourcing or just running your own commodity hardware with commodity software installed on it. That’s pretty exactly the way it is now I don’t think it is going to stop. We run a vanilla Dell server with Windows Server 2003 installed that serves us pretty well. We are going to experiment with using Google Apps or maybe a managed Exchange service for our email soon so we can get rid of a dodgy patched together with duct tape sendmail config we run on our internet server. Where IT is important is making strategic processes more efficient and singular. That’s where we want to put most of our effort. The filesharing, printing, desktops etc etc is not strategic and I’d prefer to waste little time on it.
January 6th, 2010 at 2:51 pm
My experience in IT has bourne out the trend that other posters have mentioned– the commoditization of “infrastructure” IT services. In general, I think this is a Good Thing. If you’re not working on the edge of the performance or scalability envelopes, there’s little need for really deep-dive type knowledge for most day-to-day applications of infrastructuer IT services (file and print sharing, authentication, email, etc).
As an aside– It’ll be interesting to see how VDI impacts desktop management, since I still see that being poorly executed in most companies I’ve worked in (hand building desktop software images, loading software by hand, in-person visits to troubleshoot user issues, etc). Efficiently supporting a desktop infrastructure is still something that I’m not seeing as regularly being well-executed in organizations of any size, let alone being “commodity”.
Outsourcing of infrastructure services is becoming more attractive for businesses of greater and greater size, but Internet bandwidth is still (at least in the Midwester US, where I work) a major inhibitor toward more widespread adoption of outsourced IT services. Hopefully that’ll get better sooner rather than later, but the incumbent telco interests in the US are working hard to keep bandwidth expensive and scarce.
Working as a contractor exclusively, it’s important that my Customers consider IT as a driver for business efficiency and expense reduction, rather than a “sunk cost”. For my business, this has meant leveraging business knowledge that is ancillary to IT (accounting, finance, marketing) to identify potential applications for IT beyond the traditional infrastructure services.
Identifying and implementing applications of IT isn’t “system administration”. Creating efficient business-critical processes centered around IT infrastructure causes system administration to become a business-critical activity by virtue of its support of these processes… (”We can’t ship product w/o a working IT infrastructure”, etc) System administration must deliver reliable infrastructure services to support these business applications if there’s any hope of being considered “just an expense” (or, worse, a liability).
January 11th, 2010 at 9:43 am
i’ve personally arrived at the conclusion that the world thinks of sys admins as electronic janitors. They’d prefer not to think about you unless someone has barfed on them, and need you to clean up the mess.
as long as things keep running, your pretty invisible.