Comments on: Introspection, Collar Codes, and IT’s Place in Business

By: chewy_fruit_loop

chewy_fruit_loop — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 13:43:30 +0000

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.

By: Evan Anderson

Evan Anderson — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 18:51:05 +0000

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).

By: Jack Hughes

Jack Hughes — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 12:09:46 +0000

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.

By: David Mackintosh

David Mackintosh — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 01:39:45 +0000

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.

By: Anthony DeChiaro

Anthony DeChiaro — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 01:17:48 +0000

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.