The new year represents an opportunity for IT managers to evaluate their accomplishments and sift through their less successful projects and relationships in an effort to get things moving in the right direction. IT consultant Shannon Kalvar offers some advice that will help you keep things on track in the new year.
2006 has sped by, leaving us with little time to ponder the approach of 2007. Massive upheavals in the OS, software, and processor spaces have left us with new, and radically more expensive, distributed architectures to consider. Meanwhile, our operational and support environments continue to decay under the weight of corporate neglect, since we have trouble showing ourselves as anything other than an expense.
The following observations are intended to help keep you grounded in the basics while dealing with the challenges of the new year.
1. Bigger is not better
We can now buy a blade enclosure with 86 cores in it. A full
rack could hold more processing power than some server rooms we were thrilled
with in the late 90s. We can hurl memory at problems for pennies, and
media access keeps scaling up to ludicrous speed.
That's all great, but it doesn't relieve us from our duties. The ability to mask problems by overbuilding hardware does not mean we've solved the issue -- it just hides the problem for a time. Similarly, the ability to build a data centre in a rack doesn't mean that doing so is a good idea.
2. New does not mean stable
It usually means the opposite. We call the adoption of
radical new ideas "the bleeding edge" for a reason. However, in the coming year,
many of us will face the terrible challenge of choosing between remaining where
we are, with our currently stable support structures, and moving to new
platforms where our support teams will have to retool their knowledge base.
New environments do not make for stable operations and support. Before jumping headlong into a new operating environment determine whether the business can endure the turmoil.
3. Virtual devices still reside on physical hardware
Virtualisation has finally come into its own. We can make
one server look like five, share limited resources, and create a "logical"
environment that only vaguely resembles the physical one.
Just because we can doesn't mean we should. Always remember that at the end of the day, all those virtual servers live on a physical box somewhere. That box needs the same maintenance and support it always did and more, now that we've added yet more layers of complexity.
4. Follow-though on matters as much as execution
As project portfolios grow and management takes control of
all three sides of project management's iron triangle (scope, cost and time), there never seems to be
enough time to follow though with activities. We get one thing done, then jump
to the next three, hoping that somewhere in all the chaos a real change took
hold.
Rather than sprinting from failure to failure, take a few moments to follow up on the activities of the past. You may well discover that the thing you thought was a failure can, with just a little nudge in the right direction, turn into a success.
5. One size fits all never fits anyone at all
We all know this, but it bears repeating. Boilerplates, best
practices, and the fabled "industry leaders" all suggest that one solution will
fit every situation. We just have to ram it into our environment and everything
will magically transform into rainbows and bluebirds.
Every IT environment represents a unique collection of people, processes, and technology. Best practices generate terrible distortions in the environment when we try to implement them without first accounting for the people and how they actually get things done.
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