Published:
August 31 2010, 10:34 PM
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1 Comment(s)
by
Marcel den Hartog
How did YOU help him lately?
Boys, remember your dreams when you were 16? About your favorite car and how good you would look in it? It was probably a Porsche, a Lotus, a Ford Mustang or it had at least an open rooftop. All other cars looked horrible compared to your dream-car. And then, when the moment came to actually BUY one, you found that you could only afford a VW Beetle - the old model. Girls had similar dreams, maybe about other things but with the same blind spots.
Today, especially IT savvy people suffer badly from a kind of childish, almost fanatical behavior that resembles the way we spoke about our favorite cars back when we were teenagers. Maybe because a lot of us are still a bit "nerdy".
Look at some of the discussions about Apple (nothing else even comes close) vs. Microsoft, Open Source (how to hack your home router), gamers (my Real Time Strategy Game is so much better than yours...) etc. The discussions are of an almost religious tone people are abusive and the rest of the world can't help thinking; "What on earth is THIS all about???"
Back to our Industry; Database A vs. database B, Operating System C vs. Operating System D, Platform Y vs. Platform Z, .NET vs. JAVA, etc. Especially in larger corporations, you will find supporters of every different part of "IT". Pushing THEIR favorite IT gadget often ignoring the greater good and very often spending too much time defending THEIR choice and fighting other people's preferences...
And as a CIO, one has to filter the bias, pick the solution that's best for his company. Only to find that in the trenches, long after decisions have been made, IT staff will continue to fight for what they think was the right, or the wrong solution... No wonder IT is still complex and often not as reliable as you would like.
Mainframers, distributed folks, Architects and others know that every single one of us is sometimes guilty of favoritism. And we know that it's not helping the company. I even dare to say that we know it's wrong. When I worked as a Mainframer, it felt as if I "lost" a battle when the company decided to move something off the mainframe. I felt like I won a war when it was decided all mission critical data would stay on the Mainframe. But ALWAYS, I either had to give something in return to the "losers", or get something back from the winners. And I knew that it was wrong.
The industry has grown up, right? So what I described no longer happens? I'd like to hear from you if that's the case... Recently, I assisted in a POC (Proof of Concept), moving an ERP system from 100's of distributed servers to a z10 Mainframe. It performed extremely well - the cost of management was 20% of what it was before, and the company would save millions. The fights I encountered were beyond anything I have ever seen before and a decision that looked like a no-brainer is still "on hold".
As a CIO, how you deal with this? And as an IT professional what do YOU do to prevent this? (Or are YOU also guilty of this?). Let me know.