Posts by Frangipan Crumble

We ain't in 1996 anymore, Dorothy: SQL Server 2016 proves it

"Microsoft’s rock-solid server operating system Windows NT". Totally rock solid. Meanwhile, back on planet Earth...

Your pointy-haired boss 'bought a cloud' with his credit card. Now what?

Re: Fair enough

SLAs can mean a lot, but the services they document were often designed in simple % terms for uptime, rather than in performance terms including critical periods, and they can't be scaled at an economical price. Or the business/ financial leaders thought they would underinvest and wait until push came to shove.

Are there still architectural and business purists who believe that IT and business strategy can be perfectly aligned over 5 years? These days 5 months can be a challenge, so Shadow IT (whether cloudy or user-developed including spreadsheets, client/ server or whatever) is always going to crop up. And what starts as a stop-gap becomes an undocumented and invisible legacy risk for businesses with immature asset management.

We all know that major wins can be had by ignoring the boss and bureaucracy. Yes, there's always Mr Clever in HR, Marketing or Sales who never got to work in IT, and who's IT department are smug and inefficient, and now he's going to repay this disrespect by playing games with services and requirements he doesn't understand, just to show everyone who's boss. Proper policy, internal education, and proper conversations would fix this, but building good culture requires that all parties are co-operative and play nicely.

It's a business, architectural, and risk/ security management question. If you're herding cats instead of having these mature conversations aligned to practicable policy because the Richard Heads don't understand "You can have it cheap, you can have it right, or you can have it now. Pick any two", then overall, you're in a disfunctional business. Good luck.