Wednesday, March 17, 2010

What Makes you Mad about the current state of the IT Industry?

We recently started a poll on LinkedIn to ask people what makes them mad about the current state of the IT industry. The results so far are insightful, but perhaps not surprising.
Many people sited short-termism and lack of a coherent strategy as a key factors.
Others spoke about how Management (and in particular Management Processes) were preventing innovation and stopping IT from delivering what the Business wanted.
There were also a significant number of comments about the way in which employees are treated within our industry, citing lack of commitment to training etc.
When the poll is closed, I am hoping that we can publish the summary analysis on this blog. We will also share some thoughts at the upcoming Service Desk and IT Support Show which we are attending in April.
In the meantime, this is your opportunity to share a brief rant with your fellow IT professionals. It could be the constant pace of change, the lack of training, the "fire-fighting" culture, the lack of proper processes (or maybe too many?)....
Whatever particularly drives you mad about our industry, feel free to share it!
A famous entrepreneur once said that "every good idea begins with a rant".

Friday, February 12, 2010

Is "Big Bang" a good way to implement Infrastructure?

I was recently involved with a UK client who have just cancelled their Infrastructure deployment project, which was originally going to be implemented as a "Big Bang" deployment.
Part of the reason for this was the underlying risk of such a disruptive deployment.
To put this in context, when I was first brought in to review the project, I realised that the new technology was so disruptive that it would actually be far easier and quicker to have a clean switch-over, rather than trying to incrementally upgrade the infrastructure. My view was that the risk could also be managed.
Since then, the Client's Business has moved on, the risk analysis was reviewed, and they decided to move forward incrementally. This will mean only getting (say) 40% of the improvements in the same timescale. Nevertheless, because of the changed business circumstances this makes sense, and so I supported the change of Strategy.
As an IT Production Consultant, I am generally unhappy with big-bang deployments. I prefer the gradual incremental approach which is more risk-averse, and more in tune with the culture of IT Production generally.
It would be interesting to have comments from other consultants in this area.