Grrrrrr......
IT Departments behave like bratty teenagers by insisting they know best and must always figure out their own way to get anything done,
Yes, because thats what we are paid to do, i dont wander down to the beancounters office and tell them that they are running our VAT return wrong, why should they come up to IT and tell us that the way we are allocating space on the SAN isnt optimal.. If you approach IT and say i would like X implimented IT will look at what X is, how it fits in and then determine the best approach to ensure that end of world type cockups do not ensue, they are the ones who will issue a P45 if we cock it up so why shouldnt we do it our way ensuring this doesnt happen?
Such behaviour, he believes, is not very helpful to businesses and syadmins should therefore remember think back to the time in their twenties when they finally figured out their Dads did know a thing or two and listen to more experienced folks about how to get stuff done.
What happens if the IT dept is all in their 20's? But also, the same applies in the opposite direction.. Just because you dont know how it should be done, doesnt mean the way we are doing it is wrong...
Mueller's preferred method of administering this kind of tough love is to point out that IT isn't actually about technology: helping a business do business better is the goal. He therefore preaches ignoring the potential of the gadget you just bought, downgrading your opinion of your own ingenuity and realising that you cannot devise a way to get stuff done as well, quickly or cost-effectively as a standard process.
BS, no such thing as a standard process, process should be written according to the task at hand not according to a task roughly of a similar nature! As for the gadget remark... Gadget demand is generally driven by management types who want the latest iToy or whatever because thats what all their management type golf buddies have! Most places i have worked IT arent allowed gadgets unless management are bored with the ones they already have and dish them out as hand me downs and consider it a "treat"..
“You need to shift mentality into a mode where you deliver capabilities 100% successfully every time, to deliver results to the businesses,” he told a BMC event in Sydney today. “You cannot approach IT randomly because there is too much complexity and change. You must have an orderly, repeatable way of doing things.”
Generally IT do, again its the management and middle management types who end up trying to drive the unorderly through, normally to suit their own petty ridden agenda.
That mentality means process, process everywhere, plus heavy emphasis on configuration management so that you can always pinpoint just what's going on in IT and how it applies to the business.
This sounds like a line spun to management by a sailes driod to convince them to take a product they dont actually need!
It also requires a mindshift away from caring about kit and instead focusing on applications, because all the kit in the world is merely a tool that end-user wield to spend quality time in apps.
BS, you have to care about the kit, if you dont, your "quality time in apps" will not be quality it will be headache inducing and full of issues! This also sounds like a line to get IT to buy management iPads!
Which is not to say Mueller is entirely opposed to a pleasant morning spent trawling through log files: he just wants that effort to create information that advances the understanding of how IT powers the business.
No its done to understand what is going wrong and fix it so that its right.. Most people in IT understand how it powers the business already because people ring you when it doesnt work or when it doesnt work how they need it to!
Mueller is not, it needs to be pointed out, grumpy with IT departments alone. He also showered marketing teams with scorn, proclaiming they expect the impossible from IT almost as soon as they hear about a new gadget.
Its not just marketing, see above!
He also said there's room for some geeky fun in IT, thanks to the trend towards “gamification”. That trend, he said, can motivate IT workers by giving them the chance to top a leader board for user satisfaction.
This might work for a helldesk/1st line team where their stats are their crust but to those of us above that we dont play games with systems, its an easy way to end up in the unemployment line!
End-users, he added, could be offered game-like processes to make sure they do things properly and don't wander off the beaten paths in ways that make extra (and stupid) work for IT teams.
This line read to me as "End users are idiots, treat them as such" which is a fair point i guess, but then according to Mueller I am part of the problem not the solution!