Examiner.com

Faithful subscribers (Ruben),

I'm now writing as an SF Information Technology Examiner for examiner.com. Here's my page:

http://www.examiner.com/x-40630-SF-Information-Technology-Examiner

and here's my RSS feed:

http://rss.examiner.com/RSS-40630-SF-Information-Technology-Examiner.rss

The "Information Worker"

Sometimes I take a step back and think about what people like me in my field actually do. What a lot of it comes down to, is taking concepts, applying other concepts to them, and then making something new with those same concepts to potentially have an outcome of some other concept.

I started my career doing warranty repair on Dell and Apple laptops - and that was actually having a physical issue, figuring out what was wrong, and then replacing parts until it worked as (mostly) good as it did before. I had immediate feedback and satisfaction into what happened. But don't get me wrong - doing that work was not my favorite thing in the world and I got out of there as fast as humanly possible.

But what about when I moved out of that kind of work - and started doing more business analysis and system design? I wrote about those things, in some cases made little pretty drawings, and even wrote about people's behavior surrounding those physical byproducts. It's a step removed, you know? You're talking about a physical process, you're describing ways to improve it, but you aren't doing it yourself. Drawing a diagram for a client/server architecture of a system isn't the same as going into a lab and running assays to generate data. But the client/server architecture supports the knowledge and the process around that action.

For optimization, must one become removed from the process itself, and only then can the opportunity be presented where something can truly be made better? Is this why it seems that so many folks who do the day-to-day operations type jobs and tend to have great ideas never seem to get past that stage of trying to solve world hunger? Why do their supervisors ignore them and just view it as bitching? What breaks that circle?

And going back to what I said before about loathing the warranty repair work - is that just my view on the type of work, or do I have a natural aptitude that is suppressed by repetitive work like that?

Ruben, I know you're dying to comment.

The Perfect Machine

Nature is the perfect machine.

In all of our endeavors to come up with technological innovation and feats of engineering, we only have to look in the mirror to see an example of a perfect machine. A combination of cells, organs, tissue and nerves make up the human body. The human body is one of the most efficient machines out there - and it is duplicated billions of times over on our planet. Anything that is wasteful on the human body is simply evolved away slowly. Everything has a purpose, and if it doesn't - it will disappear as time passes.

But humans are pretty boring. We can't fly or breathe underwater or do anything beyond the feature set of our current system's release. But there's plenty of things out there that can - and we do a great job of mimicing how they work.

We fly in the same way that birds do, and we even dive and swim in the ocean the same way whales do. In fact, we even looked to them to see how to do it. And then after that, we take it a step further - such inventing crazy rockets to shoot us to the moon. When a whale shoots itself from the ocean to the moon, we'll have to kick it up a notch.

So - why reinvent the wheel? Why not outsource to nature? Seriously. Look at the way IT organizations are run. Decentralized vs. centralized, remote locations, etc. Well, how are we setup? A single brain controls all aspects of the human body. Decision making is done at the top with input via senses from the rest of the body. This translates into a centralized IT organization - which in my opinion should (almost) always be the way to go.

We don't have multiple brains controlling our one system - the hand doesn't pick up something if it feels like it. The brain decides that something is hot as hell and then makes the choice to go or no go. The hand might not like it - and it will definitely give great pain feedback for the brain to consider in the future, but that's how it works.

I'm no advocate of unquestionable loyalty in a military style chain of command - however, I do believe in strong decision makers who are open to all manners of feedback and criticism. It takes someone who is naturally apt to the role to be able to do this.

Our bodies don't have to choose. The brain is easy because it was born that way and is situated right in the head. But our IT departments are different. Our leaders aren't gelatinous masses of pink and grey - we have to actually choose them, and they more or less look the same. I believe leading and inspiring is a natural ability born out of a combination of charisma, social skills, subject matter expertise and trust. Not all people have this, and attempting to shoehorn people into this role will only lead to a fragmented organization. Brains developing in the fingertips and toes is not the right way to go.

You can sense leadership qualities in someone without being a leader yourself. And there is absolutely no truth to a "leader" being better than everyone else and should be where one gets promoted to in order to have a prosperous career. It is quite the contrary - the leader inspires everyone around him or her to go beyond their potential and drive the body to success.

For IT, Technology is a "Bad Idea"

I know - weird title right?

Technology kind of sucks on its own. Seriously. It tends to:

1. Overcomplicate things
2. Invalidate your existing skillsets
3. Have its own requirements that your company may not already meet

If you look at IT in the general context of most companies, it is a "Service Organization." A "Service Organization" can have a lot of different meanings. It can mean here's the vegan whopper soaked in pickle juice and then wrapped in a tamale like you asked, or it can mean "that's a stupid idea, here's a tamale."

You can't solve organizational issues by introducing new technology. You can't solve people issues by introducing new technology. And you certainly can't solve technological issues by introducing new technology.

So, what's the technology good for? I don't know. Ask your business. What do they do - what's their core competency? How can technology aid them in achieving the organizational goals without shaping those goals to just be slaves of a technology?

More simple than that - ask your people. What do they do? What will make their job easier?

"So, let me get this straight. You apparently:

1. have a macro initiated via a blank spreadsheet that reopens Excel, parsing out columns which you have to manually download every morning at 6:57 AM (not 6:58 AM, because it gets deleted as the auditing of file share size happens and our spreadsheet goes over the limit)
2. which then requires you to launch a separate executable which prompts for credentials, launches Outlook and sends an e-mail to a service account's mailbox
3. that someone else opens and downloads
4. then runs a freeware utility to convert it to a CSV file
5. then double-clicks the ftp command line batch file someone on the Helpdesk made to send critical consumer info to a bank
6. and then have to wait a day to see if it worked.

Wow, sounds like your job sucks."

Spend 400 grand to upgrade a technology platform to a newer version that never explicitly fixes your issues, or actually talk to people and find out what they do, and figure out ways you can make it "not hilarious?"

No brainer.

Efficiency

I like efficiency. I'm one of those nerds that thinks the idea of no friction in space is way mindblowing and the fact that something can keep going on forever is ridonkulous.

By the same token, I believe that processes can be perfected and engineered to a near 100% efficiency - creating an amazing harmony of minimal waste, perfect repeatability, and rock-solid metrics. Especially in IT - you never need to buy a new product in order to create a value-added set of processes or make your IT infrastructure renewable. You always have the tools available and at hand.

The only thing that stops business processes fueled by technical underpinnings from being 100% efficient is politics. But politics are what get you the support and the funding to be able to pursue those endeavors. Weird.

The "Alerting" Concept

This has kind of been one of those things that has been tugging at my brain the past few weeks. When it comes to maintaining an infrastructure - for purposes of this post, we'll talk about Desktops and Servers - I strongly believe in the concept of both preventative maintenance and non-client facing alert mechanisms.

The idea of production operations, in my opinion, should really be hidden from the end-user 99% of the time. Patch notifications, maintenance notifications, any kind of infrastructure alerts do not belong in the hands of non-IT personnel and really aren't the kind of thing that I believe should be distributed out there. While it is true that not enough information is hazardous, too much information can have exactly the same effect.

The number one priority in any kind of IT infrastructure should really be as minimal disruption to the client as necessary - and in many cases, this actually should mean withholding information. These are the top things that have come to mind:

1. Alert Saturation - Too much of an "alert driven" infrastructure causes saturation of "alerts" and lessens the importance of the act. The "boy cried wolf" scenario. Alerts should be so fine tuned that the only time you ever get one is when there is something actually legitimately wrong that requires action in order to be made right. This negates hundreds of e-mails, in which maybe only 1% of them are actual alerts, from going into filtered spam boxes.
2. Self-Remediation - If an alert is going to go off, or if not an alert some kind of action that requires correction, it should be scripted or made to correct itself automatically. This is crucial. Many products out there that are capable of generating alerts can actually trigger scripts as well. I personally have experience with Citrix EdgeSight, and you could essentially run any command you wanted (at one point I had it using psexec to change the desktop background of a coworker when the print service died on one of our Citrix servers.)
3. Preventative Maintenance - This should absolutely be a priority - once you have your alert-driven self-remediating infrastructure humming along, being able to spot trends to provide preventative maintenance should be done routinely. Database grooming scripts, defrags, cache cleaners, etc.
4. Metrics - Above all, you should have down to the percentage per sample, accurate metrics of each of these steps in order to report to management. Dollars can be associated with exact incidents a lot easier than ballparks.

The premise of these points is that the technology to do all of this is not new - it has been available for a long time. It requires more process than technology in successfully setting up a self-healing infrastructure. It's not hard to write a script that can read an error or do a disk space check - but to actually do something about it automatically, silently, and in an auditable fashion is a true work of art.

The Routine

It's been a few months since I posted - primarily because I got a new job, and I actually really enjoy my new place of employment. So with those initial acclimation experiences out of the way, and life not getting any less busier, it's time to try and fall back in a routine again.

Which is my topic for tonight. Routine.

There's safety in "doing something the way you always have." It's familiar, easy to do, and can always be defended simply because it is the incumbent method of doing things. It served and still serves a purpose - meeting a need. It may not be the most elegant way of doing something, but hey, it works, and has worked for x number of years. But, sometimes, it's just time for a change.

Like triggering breeding in animals by slightly changing their environments, change often comes about in mystical ways. Maybe the weather, a new product release, a new hire - or just the right question asked at the right time. Change can be triggered by lots of things. But, the drive for change is a delicate spark of a fire - it requires quiet nurturing by those with just enough influence to push it through.

I've never been a fan of "top-down" decrees - lighting a small fire and giving it all the fuel in the world will soon present you with a roaring inferno of creativity, motivation, and efficiency.

Spotfire

So the awesome folks at TIBCO Spotfire let me know they have per-month hosted subscriptions of their applications at a much lower cost than a full on package. If you're looking for an unbelievably simple out-of-the box tool for business intelligence applicable to all areas, then give this a try. It's an incredible bargain. If you have a job that even remotely touches metrics or could be improved by visual representations of data and trends, at least check out the demo on their website.

Being able to link databases, files, data feeds, dumps, etc. for near-instant business intelligence without hiring a horde of integration programmers to work for months on a project that constantly changes scope ought to convince you that this is worth it.

Check it out: http://spotfire.tibco.com/Webstore/

Seeing Information

There's something quirky about people's brains that lets them make connections in data when it's seen in different ways.

Not to be advertising or anything, but there is a data visualization program out there called TIBCO Spotfire, which is absolutely unbelievable when it comes to visualizing data. In my line of work I've seen it used for drug research, but it's cross-industry applications are limitless. I've luckily had the opportunity to understand how it works in-depth and see some really amazing things come from how people operate the software.

Anyhow - showing data in concise, easy-to-read visualizations is a very valuable thing. Microsoft Excel is pretty much the standard for showing graphs of data samples, but I find it to be arachaic and anything but intuitive. It's simple, basic, and a little limited. (Granted Excel 2007 is an improvement, but it's a little limited.)

With something like Spotfire, you're able to poll disparate data sources in real-time. You can link together things and make artificial spreadsheets from an unlimited amount of sources. I mean, think about hooking up your Helpdesk system's incidents with some kind of weather feed. Wouldn't it be hilarious to find out that you get more calls when it's crappy weather outside over a 5 year period? Hilarious stuff.

I suppose that's what "business intelligence" is all about. I've never held a position in that field, but I find it to be interesting. Gathering data is all well and good, but being able to actually present that data is an art form. It's useless to have millions of points of data and present those millions of points in a pretty bland spreadsheet. But a webpage, with nice colors, or perhaps some very descriptive labels makes all the difference in the world. They may seem like ancilarry stuff, but the more organized and presentable your data looks, the more impact you can make.

The problem with new jobs...

When moving to a new job - I tend to get this anxiety that slowly builds up. "Am I able to do the job" or "will I be able to do the job effectively" - which do get proven wrong, but it's almost as if my brain is challenging me and providing me with a healthy dose of self doubt.

I'm not sure if these are doubts that are more for the technical / groundpounder type that are required to exercise a certain amount of analysis and/or creativity on the job, or if it's for everyone. It's probably something that has dawned with the era of the information worker - a competition to create, so to speak, in an industry typically governed by people who view information as a closely guarded secret - even when that information is widely available on a free medium.

I guess, then, that the anxiety is more toward the work environment, or meeting the people. It's an anxiety toward figuring out the boundaries of your job, the amount of trust given to you, and what you can expect your duties to be. In IT these tend to vary from job to job, and are never the same - no matter the title. I used to think that the size of a company would dicate things like that - but honestly, I'm now convinced that it's entirely dependent on a cross-section between your boss and the company's culture. It keeps things interesting, at the very least.

Automation

Isn't it funny the more things we try to automate, the more of a pain it ends up being? At one point does a "workflow" become a "crapflow" of broken and over-engineered features? I see them constantly in my line of work, and the way to prevent that is good communication and analysis skills - as well as being able to talk openly to people to figure out what they want, not what your resume wants.

Directions

Things tend to go in directions. Not moving cars, or paths of walking people - but trends, technologies, and even ways of life.

With the dawning of the MMORPG genre (Ultima Online, EverQuest) - there was a direction toward simulating your real life as much as possible in a virtual life. Obviously, your simulated virtual life had cool things like spells and weapons, but it was very much geared toward making it as "close to real" as possible.

I wonder where technology is going - specifically the use of personal computers and computing devices. A few years ago someone could say "smaller" or even "faster." I think these days that's a given, though.

I tend to think that technology is going nowhere unless it actually becomes easier to use. But by virtue of becoming easier to use, you have to be incredibly more complicated. Take for example an articulated action figure. It can pose in any way a human can, making it a very simple replica of a human body. But, it requires so many moving parts, and so many exceptions to be able to make those movements possible.

The more flooded your piece of technology is with options, features, and functionality - there is more of a challenge in making that technology intuitive, easy to use, and presented in a way that demonstrates pure utter simplicity. This often requires having eyes on board that aren't classically trained in technology - artists, writers, musicians - that can provide that aesthetic touch and bridge the gap between technology and usability.

Bartering

So I've been watching Six Feet Under lately and it's a pretty good show - has some interesting moments and seems to generally put some tough issues on the table.

One of the episodes showed that the old funeral director would offer funerals in exchange for other goods. You know - good old fashioned bartering.

So that got me thinking. We all do stuff for payment. If you're looking to get a service, most of the time it's a little complicated dance around the fact of "how much are you going to pay me" and "is that enough for me to do what you require."

It seems to boil down to the fact that we're all just prostitutes. Prostitutes for a paycheck. At what extent does it stop, you know? Someone I used to work with said that his boss used to have his employees wash his cars for them - they're hourly, and getting paid, so what makes the difference - right?

Whenever I trade a good for a good, a service for a good, or a service for a service, there is some kind fo unquantifiable mental satisfaction that arises from the transaction. Getting money from doing something is temporary - it lasts for a little while until you spend it on something stupid. But providing a service and getting something in return seems like a much healthier way of doing things. You forge relationships with people, you develop honesty, and overall you feel much more valuable.

The Sale

Sales is an incredibly interesting career path. You get the opportunity to be someone's worst enemy, someone's best friend, a living saint, or even the biggest dick in the world.

It's all about charisma - the ability to make people realize they have a need, and that need can only be solved by you. Is it deception? Or is it just a clever way of breaking through someone's psychological barriers?

Well, I don't think it's deception if you're selling them a legitimate service that will actually save them money. If you're a slimeball and are getting the check and running, then yeah, it is deception. Maybe that's why people hate salespeople - because they view them all as deceptive.

Or is it just because they view them as mental ninjas that are able to quickly analyze and pierce barriers that have been erected for self-defense? I imagine there is a lot of psychology to be learned when in sales - and not just smooth talking and dinner buying.

Technology

My phone talks to me

It has really odd voices

Can't sleep clown'll eat me

Stability

I wonder if stability is just an illusion that suppresses real urges inside people. Cookie cutter suburbs, the fear of change, a specific car, specific house with a certain square footage, a certain job, a certain title, a specific income.

Is it all really healthy to suppress your natural urges? Or is civilization just a method of control? Should you be happy sitting in a cubicle from 9 to 5, commuting to work every day?

It's a very Generation Y kind of thing to have a need for connection and/or purpose in the workplace. The feeling of changing an organization and having a say in the way things are done is unparalleled - but it certainly isn't something that is new. Maybe it has just been suppressed for so long.

Commencement

So, I sent this e-mail to my coworkers today, and I'd like to share it here:

Hi all,

Last Friday I participated in my commencement down in Southern California to officially receive my Bachelor’s degree.

It was a long and interesting road – originally I had moved up here for college at Sonoma State University in the far North Bay, and soon after that it hit home that a History major had nothing to do with my true passion – being a professional computer nerd. The college only offered programming classes and I never felt a calling to actually do programming. Really – how was it possible to get a degree in something as fast-paced and changing as the type of IT I was interested in?

So, I ended up dropping out of college to get hired full-time by the college working in their IT department. I took classes for free and continued my general credit requirements, but that slowly tapered off and I dedicated myself to my career.

It always bugged me that I never finished my degree. It was one of those things I knew I had to do, but never thought I would actually do. One night a few years later I filled out an online survey about college education and was matched up with “DeVry University.” I thought the place was a joke and it just existed to take money and pass all its students as long as they paid the ridiculous tuition. I was definitely wrong about that.

One of the admissions advisors, Tiffany Garcia, called me a few days later. She spoke to me for hours, addressing what happened in my quest, what I wanted to do, how I felt about my degree, etc. She told me about the Technical Management program they had – which was a mix of Business and Information Systems, and she told me I could do it completely online or go to one of their many campuses around the Bay Area. She also told me it was a fully accredited university and that it was a true Bachelor’s degree, much to my doubt. I let that sit for about a year and she called me once a month, and eventually asked me to come down to her office in San Francisco and enroll. I thought about it and then went ahead and did it, enrolling for my first class in January of 2007. All 30 of the credits I had from my time at SSU transferred.

Since January of 2007 I have been taking two classes every 8 weeks online full time with no breaks, and as of two weeks ago, finally completed my 125^th credit for graduation for a Bachelor’s of Science in Technical Management with a Project Management concentration. The education was top notch – the professors were 90% of the time still employed in their respective fields (project managers, business analysts, information security analysts) and taught their courses. They were always available by phone and e-mail and were very dedicated to their jobs.

To this day my family doesn’t quite understand what sort of degree it is because it isn’t from a traditional state school or in one of the more normal sciences or arts, and I think that is going to be one of the challenges for any of us in these types of IT careers. It was never something you could go to school to really learn up until now – and the type of school you do learn it from is so radically different than tradition that oftentimes the quality of the education can get overshadowed by the perceived lack of establishment.

I promised Tiffany I would try to do good where I could in return for how much she twisted my arm, so if any of you ever encounter a DeVry graduate on a job interview, please know that it was truly a challenging yet rewarding curriculum and the things they learned apply to everyday life in the corporate IT world that oftentimes people have to discover on their own, outside of the nurturing environment of a classroom.

Mike

The Path Well-Traveled

It amazes me that there is this "path" through corporate America that somehow gets ingrained in our heads. Especially in IT, it's "do what you like doing for a while, then forget all of it to become a manager because managers aren't technical - as that is the only way to make money."

I've been thinking about that "path" a lot because I had admitted to myself that I was on it - but I think it's a bunch of crap. I don't know why it is such a mental obstacle for people to believe that they'll get paid good money to do what they love doing. I don't necessarily think its a bad thing to be on Desktop Support if you're happy doing it, have the appropriate amount of responsibility, and are getting paid well.

I think what makes people miserable is the people who get fast-tracked out of doing what they like in to Manager roles, and then when they become a manager and they suck, they make everyone else's life horrible for whoever works for them - completely demotivating a group of people that had the same responsibilities that manager actually enjoyed. And of course, you can never demote a Manager. Right?

Requirements

Why do companies continue to implement software solutions just for the sake of the technology? Is it a testament to the effectiveness of a good sales pitch, or are IT departments really getting weaker? Why do you need to have something as an Amazon Virtual Machine in a cloud? As an amazing mentor said to me once, "Cloud is just a business model. Figure out what you really want to be able to do." And it's true - it's a business model surrounded by hype.

With a floundering economy, you'd think that there would be a focus on "doing more with what you have" and utilizing the technology you already own to perform cost and time saving miracles. The biggest buzzphrase of the millenium - "ROI" - is all about this. Yet users continue to drive technology requirements, and not actual user requirements.

A user should never say we need to implement Sharepoint. A user should say, "this is my set of requirements, this particular set of requirements really means a lot to me." And IT should then guide them toward an acceptable solution.

Going further, this illuminates another potential area of why IT tends to fail - no communication with the user. There's no analysis performed, no actual "so what do you do exactly?" questions being asked. If a user is using a single table in Access to store static text values, why would you embark on a multi-thousand dollar project to upgrade your entire infrastructure to be able to handle a newer version of Access when it comes out? Why not find out what they are using it for, and offer a simpler, more elegant solution.

The Best Way

The best way to do something is honestly the way that makes you the laziest.

Think about a tweak you have to do to a server, or something that is a registry key entry. Why do it on each server? You'll have to ensure that every time a new server is deployed, or if something happens to that server, that that configuration is present on everything from that point forward.

Good documentation can take the place of that - but come on, we're all in IT. Who actually reads documentation?

The best way to get something out there is to do it once and just forget about it. Write a custom group policy that applies the setting to a bunch of servers in a specific OU. Add something to the logon script. Become a scion of laziness, and you will succeed in ultimate efficiency. As ironic as it is, it's the best way to go.

This applies to making images, too. Don't put things on images that can be done with policy. Honestly, the only thing you should ever have installed on an image is security updates. Keep the rest as a deployment package template on a per-group or per-department basis. You don't have to have SMS to do it - batch files are still good. VBScripts are even better.

Some people argue that when you do these kinds of things you threaten your own job. I tell you, negative nancys - if you can never be replaced, how will you ever move up?

Losing your Humanity

Fear is one of those things that cripples people from being effective. Fear of losing a job, of being wrong, and even of going out on a limb and taking a risk. Fear sickens me because it drives people to be less than human - to be sheep, to be ant drones that only exist to serve the whims of the queen.

Risk, as Sir Anthony Hopkins said in the film masterpiece "The World's Fastest Indian," is the spice of life.

I've seen fear cripple people into making horrible decisions that do nothing but promulgate stagnation. I've seen people in authority breed a culture of fear which actually causes the effectiveness of their subordinates to enter into negative territory. Yes, actually making people devolve into something stupid. Devolve into "resources" without independent thought. Sickening. A human is not a resource. A human is a human.

Fear is the literal Flowers for Algernon. It makes you stupid. And, it makes everyone around you stupid.

If you never admit that you are at fault or at wrong, you are not human. The only way you can never be wrong is if you are a tool - an insignificant unimportant piece of a machine. A gear, designed only for one purpose - to turn, and to turn only when the gears around it turn. You serve only one purpose - the whims of your watchmaker.

And all the watchmaker cares about is what time it is.

The Aversion to Risk

Risk is one of those weird things that people tend to isolate on one end of the benefit/detriment scale. In my opinion, it's kind of like a lot of people's understanding of 21 CFR Part 11 and SOX requirements - unclear, paranoid-driven, and overzealous to provide complicated processes due to a fundamental lack of understanding.

Risk is defined as "uncertainty" in whatever you're looking at - projects, process, etc. But it's the uncertainty of something that could cause harm (via cost overrun, schedule delay, etc.) as well as the uncertainty that it could cause extreme benefit (cost savings, ahead-of-time implementation, etc.)

What if you could cheat with risk? What if you knew the worst possible outcome and mitigation possibilities of each decision, and as such, every risk was just suddenly a scale on the amount of positive it brought? It's true that - yeah - it's kind of like betting black when you see 5 red rolls on a roulette table in a row, but wouldn't that make life a lot easier?

The whole PMBOK project management philosophy is providing tools for planning, as opposed to reaction. The more you plan for risk - the more you embrace it, and the more you see that all plans are malleable and are subject to alteration, meaning that in the end, it's all about the positive.

Shining lights in dark places is scary, but it's a lot better than getting your head bitten off when you don't turn on the flashlight by something that was afraid of light to begin with.

Standardization

Chaos breeds growth, resistance, and advancement. Always improving and always being able to destroy that which you have built can be an extremely nourishing environment.

But, chaos can not exist without order - especially in the IT industry. Standardization is good, stability is even better - but only if it allows for chaos. A stable hardware platform with a stable operating system environment is one of the most coveted things any company can achieve. It's like one of those "congratulations on passing the white belt course in karate" gold trophies made out of fake plastic.

But, what's even better, is having such a robust imaging and deployment system in place that your users can do whatever the hell they want and understand that going back to the corporate standard is an incredibly easy and pain free process.

If you could jump out of a plane all day every day and never worry about hitting the ground, wouldn't you try to fly at least once?

Floating to the Top

It's interesting to think about what you say when you meet up with relatives, or you are trying to make a first impression on someone at work. There's always the inevitable "What have you been up to?" or "Tell me about yourself" kind of deal.

More often than not I tend to blurt out something that is somewhat of a new development in my life, or is something that I think is very important to me - even if I haven't necessarily put enough mental capital into it to actually rank it as a priority. Those little side-projects that you're completely psyched about, or even something you read that very same day that got you excited.

Why do these things tend to float to the top? Well, I think it's because they stimulate your natural motivation. They are things that you, at your core, find completely interesting and are willing to spend time on with the sole reward of satisfying your own curiosity. It's these kinds of things that drive people to excel and venture to places thought impossible.

Good managers pick up on things that motivate their employees and do everything in the world to cater to that. Even if it doesn't fit their immediate agenda.

Employee Feedback

It's always tough to tell someone they need to improve or that they're doing something wrong. But, it's tricky. How do you know that they're wrong and you're right? Is it arrogance that drives you or is there something that is generally being done wrong? As Vice President Daniels said at the end of Season 6 of 24, "You think you have all the right answers when you aren't sitting in this chair. You have all of the answers and none of the responsibility."

I think that's one of the traps in giving people feedback. You don't give someone feedback unless they've specifically asked for it, or something in your gut tells you that something needs to be said or done.

The "gut" factor, I suppose, is a mixture of your logical and emotional conscience - more or less. Most people out there in the workforce are smart. They wouldn't have the jobs they have if they weren't smart, honestly. The problem comes about when it is the norm to behave a certain way - or to respond to situations in a certain way. This is, again, defined as the company's culture. The problems come about when you introduce new people into the culture. They have a completely different viewpoint based on experience within a different culture, and that period where adjustment has to happen where one culture has to clash and integrate with another can be very turbuluent.

A company's culture is more powerful than doing the right thing. A culture of lax acceptance of standards, slow execution of processes, shift of blame, or even vulgarity in the workplace will overpower any law or right way of doing things. Among other reasons, this is why you can't introduce a quality / six sigma program into the workplace the day you arrive. To implement quality, you need to have a culture that believes in quality.

Anyhow - feedback is delicate. I believe that all feedback needs to be constructive and focused on the business. Feedback needs to never incriminate, point fingers, or name names. The positions, the entities, the dimensions and the processes need to be exposed. Weaknesses in these are what the business can change. You accomplish nothing if you insult your boss. The second he reads that you have just submarined your argument and eradicated any respect you may have gained.

But, why come to the point where you have to "formally" give feedback? Why is it such a process filled with trepidation? Well, honestly, I think it's because the person asking for the feedback has to establish a relationship with you - one of two-way communication that proves they are willing to do two-way conversation. You can not simply tell your employee your door is always open and they're always willing to talk.

Part of being a manager is playing the games out there, and giving things to your employees. Shoot the shit with them. Give them dirt. Talk a little harmless trash about something. Show them you're a little frustrated with your boss. Stick up for them in a meeting or take the blame for something they know you don't have to. They will open up to you in a heartbeat and you will have a very healthy relationship. Every boss that has done this with me I am happy to say has always been informed about my frustrations the second they happen. Once you reveal yourself to your employees and show them that you work for them as much as they work for you, you will have a much easier time managing them, and the business will benefit. Feedback won't be so scary.

Cutting Costs

I'm in the midst of doing some homework for my Advanced Cost Accounting class. One of the questions is - how would you cut costs while avoiding employee layoffs?

Well, that's an interesting question - especially with all of what's going on right now with the general dimension of the economy and the job markets. In the IT industry, there are a lot of contractors who are very specifically trained and have an expertise in a very specific technology. I find these contractors/outsourced IT agencies to be the equivalent of a "technological SWAT team." They are able to understand a specific technology and get it implemented because of their extremely focused skills.

This becomes interesting in a heterogeneous environment that is very common in IT departments - the mixed contractor/FTE phenomenon. You have contractors that are doing the equivalent of full time position the company could never afford in a full time position.

When it's time to cut costs and introduce layoffs, why cut these people first? Their contracts are time-bound as-is, and, without their specific knowledge the technology the company is trying to introduce is at best going to be in a stalemate. Why not, as a cost-cutting measure, turn these people around and focus them on areas of the company that need improvement in line with their expertise? Instead of cutting out the project they're working on, why not shift their focus toward optimization of the environment as opposed to introduction of new technology?

Seems like this would benefit both sides - a contractor gets to keep a job, and a company gets to benefit on costs already spent. The company gets to become leaner and more optimized. It sets a good framework for future implementations, too.

Motivation

I read a book a while back that said something pretty profound. It went something along the lines of:

"No boss will ever be able to create motivation in his employees - the best he/she can do is recognize it and nurture it."

I find this to be an incredibly accurate statement. There was no reason for me to gravitate toward building Windows and Mac images at my first job - I just really, really felt motivated to do it - and my managers saw that and made sure I was on the project. That motivation stuck with me into the off hours of my job and they really benefitted from my natural tenacity. The same thing happened with SMS/ConfigMgr application deployment and update patching - I was really interested in the technology and naturally gravitated toward it, and my managers allowed me to be immersed. That immersion benefited the company and again, it went into the off hours and I spent a lot of time on those things.

So, a coworker found this article. I thought I'd share it since it's an amazing text on motivation and how you can use it, especially for IT employees. I took it from a site that also reposted it (citation at bottom:)

"Recently, a couple of intended compliments threw me for a loop. Two people called me in the same week and wanted me to present keynote speeches at their conferences. Of course, that was the flattering part, but what got to me was that they both referred to me as a "motivational speaker."

Since I'm a typical geek, the phrase motivational speaker immediately sets off alarm bells in my mind. It conjures up an image of some tall, tanned, large-toothed, smiling charisma machine expertly manipulating the emotions of a crowd, whipping up a frenzy at one moment and bringing forth tears of sadness and joy the next.

"Well, I suppose that many people find what I have to say motivating," I suggested, "but I don't try to make people cry or tell stories about overcoming cancer."

"Oh, that's fine," they both said.

Whew!

But the invitations got me thinking about all the things managers do to try to motivate their staffs: giving inspirational speeches, handing out bonuses, making up awards, inviting everyone out for drinks, hosting family picnics or sending staffers to training on cool new technology that they may never get to use.

I admire the sentiment of those active managers, trying to motivate their teams. But when I reflect on the most engaged groups I have worked with, it's not clear that managers who explicitly try to light a fire under their teams are any more successful than those who are less attentive.

True motivation in technical teams tends to grow organically. Individuals find their own motivation in many sources. For some, it's the opportunity for learning and advancement. For others, the broad and perhaps even global results of their work are very engaging. Some are just excited to work with the group of peers they are currently engaged with.

But the one thing that most of the managers with motivated groups do have in common is that they all avoid demotivating their teams.

Although the motivation of teams grows organically, often out of the control of managers, demotivation and dejection usually start at the top. Internally generated motivation tends to be a relatively fragile state. While a manager may not be able to create a motivated team, he often has the power to kill whatever motivation grows.

So, what sorts of things do managers do that demotivate their teams?

Excluding technicians from decision-making. Technical people's distress at being left out of major decisions is about more than just feeling out of the loop. They often sense that their talents have been disregarded. They have been insulted. And, since many decisions are influenced by technical considerations, they also feel that the decisions themselves could be suspect, since managers' technical knowledge is rarely respected. Any of these interpretations would qualify as demotivating.

Inconsistency. People who are drawn to careers in technology typically have a strong need for consistency and predictability. Early interactions with computers are quite comforting for them. As youngsters, they draw conclusions about computers, their parents and themselves. "If I type in this command, the computer always does the same thing. That's cool. I wish my mom was that predictable."

Next thing you know, they're programmers. When managers are inconsistent, at best they create distractions, and at worst they encourage their people to feel insecure. Neither result is particularly motivating.

Excessive monitoring. Among technical groups, there are few bigger insults than to call someone a micromanager. The feeling of being micromanaged is profoundly demotivating. Monitoring someone excessively, intentionally or not, communicates distrust for the person being overseen. And in many kinds of technical work, it can also serve as an impediment to progress. In intellectually demanding, creative work, interruptions can disrupt thinking for long periods of time. A manager's one-minute drop-by can result in hours of lost productivity regaining the concentration lost.

So if you want a truly motivated team, one of the best things you can do is to make sure that you're not a demotivational leader. As it turns out, not having a negative effect on your team can be a huge positive."

Paul Glen is the author of the award-winning book "Leading Geeks: How to Manage and Lead People Who Deliver Technology" (Jossey Bass Pfeiffer, 2003) and Principal of C2 Consulting. C2 Consulting helps IT management solve people problems. Paul Glen regularly speaks for corporations and national associations across North America. For more information go to www.c2-consulting.com. He can be reached at info@c2-consulting.com.

The "Right" Solution

What makes something the "right" solution?

It's not the mathematically best way to do something.
It's not the most logical way to do something.
It's not the way that the instruction manual says to do something.
It's not the way that gets you the most results directly correlated to time and money invested.
It's not even the thing that makes the most sense.

Surprise - it's what the business owner defines as being right for them.

So, pissing on a lemon tree every day to make it grow as opposed to watering it is a perfectly acceptable solution to a business owner. Chastizing them for not watering it and using the perfect type of fertilizer is not.

However, educating the business owner, working with them, and giving them the pros and cons of each situation from your perspective and working with them to see theirs is. Them coming to their conclusions - with both IT and themselves involved is the ultimate victory.

Upper Management

Upper management that is out of touch with its own department is a cancer in the organization.

Think about it as a metaphor - a giant slinging flaming boulders down from a mountain while people try to bring up food so it can eat. How could that not be bad? How will the giant get food?

Having to present a solution and sell it to different managers over, and over, and over, and over again kills an employees motivation and harms the efficiency of the company. As a coworker put it, the manager's job is to shield his or her employees from bullshit so they have as much of an open field as possible. It's a bad sign when you get directly involved with the bullshit and are doing no work because of it.

I think American upper management should take the Japanese lead and move their desks to the manufacturing floor. Meet with employees a step over your own direct reports. Encourage open communication. Most employees I'm sure love figuring things out and doing things. But, doing them just to do them, or because they have had unclear goals communicated to them as to why they are doing it is a waste of time and breeds frustration.

Job Satisfaction

With the onslaught of technology, instant gratification, a younger workforce generation (Gen Y), and a bunch of other factors hitting the traditional workplace - there's something nontraditional that I think people need to embrace.

It seems to me that people are switching jobs on average every 2 to 4 years. Is it true - you have to leave to get something better? These days I think - yes, it is. Statistically, you can look at the data points of where you are at now. It's very easy to change yourself, but it's harder to change your company. More pay, a better title and other tangible assets that have been denied year after year - what makes one think that there will suddenly be a change of heart?

I think the days of "growing" at a company have since past. Starting at the bottom in a company and working your way up in the same company does not seem feasible at all anymore. For everyone who is still there, you will have the association of where you came from and where you started. For me, it was being a Desktop Support technician. Because that's where I started, it's how people knew me - and first impressions really do matter to most people. With new people coming in at higher pay, higher title, and more responsibility on a very regular basis - why waste the time to develop and guide talent when you can get it at a good price knowing that they're just going to leave in a few years anyway?

All recruiting and hiring is, is serving the organization. It's feeding the company talent and using the talent for as long as it can. It's not a charity. And neither is your work.

I think people need to shed thinking about where they're going to go and that they'll be happy there. People need to be happy where they are at right now, and if they aren't, then move or change it. Stop trusting your career and ultimately your personal happiness to empty promises based on budget and ego.

Challenge or Dead End?

I think it's one of the hardest things in the world to differentiate a challenge from a dead end. I guess what I'm really trying to articulate is that dead ends aren't necessarily always dead ends. I think there's something to learn in every situation.

Being assigned a mundane project or having to do something you don't quite agree with can be classified as a waste of time very easily. But, examine it deeper - why are you thinking it's a waste of time? How did you end up in the situation that is apparently a dead end? What can you learn from the people around (or above you) that have facilitated this dead end? Maybe you can learn to not be like them.

Is it truly a place where you can't learn? Are you really just on an assembly line snapping caps on to bottles? Those hard and useless challenges I think are moments where you can really learn. If you end up learning that you have to leave, then you just picked up the knowledge and the skill of having to toss aside the familiar for something better. That's still learning.

An Agile IT Department?

The "Agile" craze hit a few years back, and it really was an excellent idea. While I was never formally exposed to any projects or development/design scenarios specific to the agile movement, I understood the basic premise. The adoption of short term easy to quantify goals as fast and as clear as possible. I've been reading up on it lately, and I really agree with the approach.

I think that we should have Agile IT Departments. I mean, it makes sense. I think too much responsibility and accountability has been centered on those in the managerial role. Managers in an IT department are often technical in nature, but have gotten to the point in their career where they have been "promoted" into management by sheer seniority/pay raises. They lose touch with the technical aspect of the field, but they are responsible for now managing a team of technical staff who are in touch with the field every day as part of their jobs. This presents us with two problems:

1. You have managers who are not as technical as their direct reports often interjecting outdated technical assumptions about projects (and, they are often clever or come up with scenarios that are hard to 100% answer), and
2. You have neutered technical staff members, accountable for as much as their manager gives them according to their own comfort level of that individual making them look good.

Therefore you have extremely protected technical folks, with unbelievably accountable managers. It's a bit lopsided. I think it comes down to trust.

More trust should be given to the technical person. This will in turn allow that person to execute in an Agile methodology. This person may see an immediate fix to a problem, however, through normal processes the red tape and bureaucracy of a corporate IT department may string it out - or, in some cases, shoot it down and ask for a more detailed analysis of a "root cause." That person needs to be able to implement a fix or an optimization as they see are qualified to perform.

I really think that if you've invested the time and money to hire someone to perform the job of a specific position, you need to give them the trust to perform that position. You need to give them accountability, and trust that the inputs you give them will produce a unique output according to that person's ability to solve the problem.

So, what happens now, then? You end up with half-assed implementations that are built on band-aids that these technical people sneak in because they can't go through the official process of implementing clear-as-day solutions to problems. If the IT Department was Agile, then these implementations would go in legitimately and quickly. It's like penalizing people for buying music with horrible DRM technology - people will download illegal versions of the music they bought just to be able to listen to it how they want.

Development Plans

I had a former coworker ask me what career path he should put down in one of those development plan type documents that was required for work. He mentioned a few titles such as systems engineer, project manager, analyst, etc.

It kind of dawned on me at that moment that it's extremely easy for people in the IT industry to attach themselves to a title and think that the world will come with it. Five years ago all I wanted to be was a Network Administrator. As I gained experience, I realized that was exactly what I didn't want to be.

The only reason I thought I wanted to be a net admin was because I thought that's where the money was and it was the only place for someone with my skillset to develop toward. A few years later, I know from experience that while the Network Administrator track is a perfectly viable career path, it's not for me. It's a position that rarely integrates with the business and really performs the same function no matter the company. In other words - it's technically challenging as it mostly requires updated skillsets and technology, but it is extremely easy to outsource. On the other hand, it's very easy to find consulting jobs for as well.

Anyhow - the best thing that you can do in my opinion when looking at your career path is not looking at other people and what they do. Sure, they may be making a certain amount of money equivalent to what you want to make in the future, but they aren't you. Critically think about what you like doing now, and imagine how that can develop. Imagine how that aspect of your job now that you like can turn into all you do. That's what you need to develop toward. Be it writing user guides, fixing AV equipment, talking to cell phone companies or even just teaching people about technology. Each of those has a very lucrative career path. Maybe not necessarily where you're at - but think big picture and long term.

Lost in the Details

I think that getting lost in the details is one of the easiest things for people in the IT industry to do.

There's so many strange and weird technical implementations out there. If everyone used off-the-shelf technology and configurations, then a lot of us technical professionals would be out of a job. Implementing technology is an art form, really. Each individual - be it an analyst, a programmer, a designer or even a project manager is going to leave their unique signature on an implementation.

The good artists make themselves timeless. They provide open documentation, transparent implementations, and a paper trail of explanation.

The bad artists "get it to work" and then jump on to the next thing. They leave a tangled mess held together by essentially rusting metal and hamster wheels.

I prefer to think of my line of work as a professional puzzle solver. Not all puzzles are business process related. Sometimes, they're peer related, and involve a forensics case of trying to understand the mind and methods of those who have preceded me. It's never bad - it just takes time, and sometimes, inspires me to think differently.

The Rant

My first supervisor probably taught me one of the most important lessons that would stay with me through my career. Going through a technical career right now, it's interesting to say that the most important lesson wasn't something technical.

I remember that he told me when someone is speaking to you that is agitated about an issue, or is otherwise in a bad mood about something that happened, they've thought about it immensely. They have worked up to the moment. An anger-fueled engine is running in their minds to develop a script of what they're going to say to the first person who might be able to do something about the issue.

He told me the best thing you can do is let them get through that script. Let them unleash it in its full glory and let them be done with it. You won't be able to talk to them until they've broken through that milestone. Finally, once they've said what they wanted to, is when you can lower the blast shield doors and then begin to talk to them in a sane fashion.

Perspective

Change is good. A change in one's perspective is even better.

It's scary to take that leap into the unknown - to cast aside the warmth of the comfortable and predictable and wear the shackles of doubt and uncertainty. It's hard for people to change. It's certainly possible, but it's just hard to do. It's hard to change yourself. However, you can change your surroundings. You can change your environment a little easier than you can change yourself.

When you change your surroundings and your environment, you open up to new things. You see things from a different perspective. Your past experiences are now an alloy made in combination with your present and future experiences. It solidifies character - and in my experience, makes the overall sum of your experiences a much more valuable asset.

Original ideas are hard to come by. Ripping off observed successful ones from a myriad of perspectives and experiences and being able to modify them to fit into whatever environment you enter, on the other hand, is a true talent.

The Buzz

One of the issues with being in the IT industry as a career is the monumental amount of effort required to stay "up-to-date" with technology. Microsoft's products alone seem to be on a ridiculous release schedule, with Windows 7 just around the corner when it seems like Vista was released.

Personally, I tend to get a little anxiety filled when I see a new technology like that. A new version of perhaps some kind of server operating system or server-based management application. It triggers something inside me that says "Great, now I have to learn something from the beginning all over again."

Well, I've found in my experience that it's all pretty much buzzwords and inflation. Technology really doesn't change that much to the point where you have to learn it all over again. The concepts stay the same - the issue is that more features are added. More right-click contextual menus and perhaps some additional log files to look at. Once you machete past the mystical forest of marketing and buzzwords new product releases are typically bug and feature fixes, new versions of a couple things, and a couple new functions.

I find certifications to be a good way to keep "up to date" on the technology, but I don't find them a good measure to show industry expertise. I think the litmus of a certification is excellent for ensuring that you are familiar with the product. The reason I don't think it's a good measure for industry expertise is that they are very easy to pass and really are not a substitute for experience. They are internal measures that are necessary for keeping up to date on the industry.

The User Experience

The only thing that really matters is the user experience.

Why? Because the customer is always right. Why is the customer always right? Because they're handing you money. They're investing mental and physical capital into something you pulled out of thin air - a service, a product, an idea, entertainment or whatever.

When you work for a company, you're like a maid on retainer. You clean up whatever mess comes along. It's your job. You ensure that the living beast entity of a company has enough food to eat and keeps chugging along and conquering the industry it is in. It's like one of those photos of the Mona Lisa made from millions of individual faces/still shots. That's what you are. Miniature in the grand scheme of things, but essential to the system.

IT isn't about glory. It's about making sure the messes are cleaned up, the batteries are fully charged, and there's an umbrella in the trunk of the car when it starts to rain. It's the sunscreen on a sunny day and the first-aid kit in the glovebox. It's the gum on The Rocketeer's jetpack and should never be the focus, ever. When IT gets the spotlight, you know you're in bad times.

Change Management

I think change control/management is one of the most important things an IT department can implement in order to provide a stable operating platform for its users.

The problem with change management, though, is that it can be incredibly burdensome. Not only from a "how much do we capture" approach, but a "how easy is it to capture" dimension.

If your change management system is an Excel document on a fileshare, you run into the problem of consistency, versioning, and no real way of consolidating changes. If anything, a change management system should be incorporated into an incident tracking system in order to correlate changes with specific incidents or events. A ticket system that can intelligently search and apply metadata about changes to each entered incident is something I'd use in a heartbeat.

The system should be able to produce easy to read and useful reports as well. The easier the system is to use, the more changes will be captured, and the more adoption within your department.

Walls Within

Corporate America is an interesting place. An organization can have a goal - a mission statement, a "vision." This is defined as "strategy." This strategy defines the organization to outsiders, shareholders, and basically the general public.

In theory, every element within that organization is contributing to that vision. It's easier for people actually in-line with the industry of that organization (engineers for an engineering firm, or perhaps scientists for a life sciences company) to quantify their contributions to that strategy. But what about those of us in the service sector?

Analysts link technology to business. They link IT, Quality, and Development together. Once those links have been formed, engineers, technicians and support specialists keep them maintained. It is the burden of the analysts to ensure that the needs of the business are met by the capabilities of technology.

What technology do you choose? How is it applicable? Does it fit in with the organization's current infrastructure? Overwhelming questions, perhaps, but sound more complicated than they truly are. The key to solving all of these is communication. Communication, most of all, with the people who are ultimately going to be using the technology. It's one thing to pitch the technology to an audience who is administering it - but it's absolutely a different beast to pitch the technology to someone who will be using it every day. It's never an all or nothing and it should never be a mystic process.

IT is never the only stakeholder in a technology implementation. It is the death of an IT organization when it begins to have its own agenda in a company that can easily outsource those services. As such, an IT organization that builds walls around itself and within itself to its own functional areas is doomed to fail.

I often wonder what phenomenon brings about these walls - is it management, is it culture, or is it simply something wild allowed to grow if not cut down every now and then. Regardless, I think it's very common - especially in the IT field - to have these walls for the sake of job security and knowledge hoarding.

Cash

I look at the Yahoo! Finance homepage and see in a giant "breaking news" box about the DJIA dropping 500 points and the Lehman Brothers going bankrupt. Every contextual ad is about the safety of FDIC insurance, banks, blah blah. It's as if the nation is in a bank-running panic.

Following daily financial news is pretty stupid. You'll end up with gray hair after a week. It's a good time right now to invest in broadly diversified index funds with low management costs. If I had more liquid cash I'd invest it all right now.

Nowhere to go but up, Vanguard.

Vocations

I went to Catholic school my whole life, up until college. Preschool, gradeschool, junior high, and high school.

St. Peter and St. Paul, Sacred Heart, and eventually Damien High School.

Around 6th grade this term started to be thrown around. It was the term "Vocation." I really had no idea what it meant and at first I thought it was a way for my teachers to recruit young children into promising that they'd be priests when they got older - or some other manner of employee within the church. It was mainly focused around the religious vocations, but eventually they started opening up to other "careers."

The synonymous theme between "careers" and "vocation" appeared to be, as defined by my schools, a calling by God to do something. Most of the time this meant to be a good Christian and go to church and perhaps volunteer or even take up the cloth and all that stuff. But I slowly learned that it really meant to do what you love doing. If that's the higher power's way of calling to you to do something, then I'll definitely agree with that statement.

When you absolutely love doing something, it guides your life. I loved sitting in front of my TV and playing Nintendo games for hours straight. This was my vocation when I was younger. I was a child born of the electronic age with short attention spans and expensive hobbies. I craved stories, puzzles, adventures, and worlds bigger and much more fascinating than my own. This insatiable hunger for entertainment transcended most of the equipment I used to get it - from the Nintendo, Genesis, Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, Gamecube, Game Boy, Game Gear, etc. Eventually, it settled on to the most malleable of all of them - the computer.

I started playing around on computers when I was about 10 years old. The "pay by the hour" AOL days. My first real computer that I could call my own I received as a Christmas gift at the age of 12. I loved that thing, and did everything I could to make sure it played games in the best and fastest possible way without me having to worry about money or asking my parents for anything.

Little did I know at the time, playing video games turned out to be my vocation. Through the acts of wanting to make my computer better and faster, I learned how to do everything I do now as a career. Analysis, design, engineering, troubleshooting, making the best out of minimal resources - it all came about from a young age of wide-eyed awe and mystery at games.

Hindsight is interesting, is it not?

"The Effective Executive" by Peter Drucker

Well, I may as well do a book review.

This review is for The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker. Amazing book. If you ever wanted a book chock full of real-life examples of effective and not-so-effective time management, I would recommend reading this book.

It is full of stories from Peter Drucker's bloody journey as an executive coach through the cutthroat corporations of America. It has enough anecdotal stories to compete with the density of a neutron star, and is a very easy read. It will make you question your business, your general outlook on things, how to run meetings, and your overall efficiency.

Power

I honestly believe that power and strength in an organization does not reside in its main functional parts, but rather in the skeleton of technology and support that hold it together.

The skeleton is always around and often neglected, but when it is broken, pain is felt with a task-stopping urgency that affects every function.

This is why being in a position that is responsible for operations - both IT and otherwise - is an amazing responsibility.

Specialization, or Jack-of-all-trades?

Usually when I sit down and start typing I have somewhat of an idea of what I'm going to say for the blog entry. This time I really didn't know, so I decided to write about something that I don't think I've touched on before.

You can't really go to school for a career in IT. I really won't concede that one to anything. You can't go to school and know you're going to be a Network Administrator or a System Engineer.

You go to school for the framework, the base skills, and the contacts. All learning in IT is done on the job, and honestly, takes a lot of personal investment. The person who works in IT that hasn't dedicated off hours to learning or advancing themselves is someone I would absolutely never hire. You just can't do IT without accepting the fact that: yes, it's a crazy world that will touch and intrude on your life in every aspect.

So, what do you do? Some people jump in and learn everything they can and become masters of nothing. Sorry, you just can't be the best at everything. If you're one of those people that are never wrong - then please, find a new career. Too many of these people exist in IT already. The profession is a black hole for people with asinine personalities simply because there is a lot of knowledge hoarding and opportunity to make entire systems or processes dependent on whatever mood you are in for the day. Not the way to go.

Other people tend to specialize, and only excel in a single skill. Ok - you can become the master of your skill, but it is going to be really hard to find places that hire you for that one skill if you end up needing to change careers or are no longer needed / replaced. Someone in this situation needs to be ready to be able to move vast distances and make sacrifices. Just make sure that maintaining the knowledge in your skill is worth the tradeoffs in convenience and being able to find jobs easily.

So, I guess I've just said that both paths aren't really that great. That's right - neither of them really matter, honestly. What does matter is these basic facts: you're easy to work with, have an open mind, aren't afraid to be wrong, and knows how to ask questions. Master those four skills and you'll only have problems sorting out the vast opportunities always available to you.