Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: How Do You Tell a Compelling Story About IT Infrastructure?
An anonymous reader writes "Every month we submit status reports to upper management. On the infrastructure side, these reports tend to be 'Hey, we met our service level agreements ... again.' IT infrastructure is now a lot like the electric company. Nobody thanks the electric company when the lights come on, but they have plenty of colorful adjectives to describe them when the power is off.
What is the best way to construct a compelling story for upper management so they'll appreciate the hard work that an IT department does? They don't seem particularly impressed with functioning systems, because they expect functioning systems. The extensive effort to design and implement reliable systems has also made IT boring and dull. What types of summaries can you provide upper management to help them appreciate IT infrastructure and the money they spend on the services it provides?"
What is the best way to construct a compelling story for upper management so they'll appreciate the hard work that an IT department does? They don't seem particularly impressed with functioning systems, because they expect functioning systems. The extensive effort to design and implement reliable systems has also made IT boring and dull. What types of summaries can you provide upper management to help them appreciate IT infrastructure and the money they spend on the services it provides?"
It sounds like you're upset because upper management is treating you like infrastructure, rather than the heroes you are?
You made the point yourself - nobody cheers when the lights come on, they get pissed when they go out. IT SHOULD be boring and dull. To an average person in your company, they shouldn't - EVER - care about how or why their systems work.
Do you think providing electricity isn't a difficult enterprise, requiring a huge number of highly-trained people doing a bunch of things right, 24/7? And I bet, a hundred years ago, people looked at people working in "electricity" the same way people looked at "IT" twenty years ago.
It's not 100 years ago. It's not 20 years ago. And we're not heroes or geniuses. We're plumbers. (Except that we're too dumb to unionize.) If anything, we are incredibly lucky that our uses are satisfied with the - in most cases - poor level of service they receive. Think about it - in all the time you've worked in IT, how many times have you seen the electricity in a building just go out, without explanation? Now, how many times have you seen major server outages, costing more than a million dollars in lost productivity? For me, I have never seen an electrical outage not related to a major disaster that kept everyone out of the building anyway. I have seen at least 5 outages that led to $1m or more in losses - and three of them were for stupid, easily preventible things. (Really? You upgraded both the primary and backup SAN at once, and killed the entire network for six hours when the patch turned out to not run properly?)
Take another look at your question. It's premised on the proposition that IT SHOULDN'T be boring and dull - which I disagree with entirely - and that IT should get more appreciation than it does, which is questionable at best. What's driving you to ask those questions, in that way?
How do you tell a compelling story about IT infrastructure?
Once upon a time, there was a filing cabinet. This was no ordinary filing cabinet, for it sat beside a large server rack, and every day it gazed longingly at the shiny, blinking machines and wondered what it was like to be in the cloud storage business.
How's that, OK for a start?
I have a better idea, courtesy of politics:
"We have successfully prevented Al Qaeda from taking down our infrastructure in April"
"This month, we are proud to announce that our infrastructure is now gender-neutral and completely embraces the LGBT community!"
"The IT datacenter is now fully secure against velociraptor attacks."
"We are happy to inform you that as of this month, our IT infrastructure is 100% Animal Cruelty Free!"
"For the month of April, we have completed our (self) certification, and as a result we now feature only Free Range servers in our infrastructure."
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Geez, how many times did you fire the guy before wising up?
Try this one:
Jane felt there were too many cables under her desk so she took her scissors to several of them and cut them back to the floor opening.
Our team successfully ran new cables and got the network up and running in the space of half an hour as well proactively took steps to prevent such an occurrence in the future by tossing Jane out the window.
Wrong approach. I suggest this:
The slow throbbing of the server room A/C barely distracted from the stifling heat. As Jane sat restlessly in her thigh-length, red skirt, a bead of sweat dripped onto the network cables below. Her display, a pitiful 17" CRT from the mid `90's, flickered a 404 error. Jim, the strong but quiet network repair main, soon knocked on her office door. Despite wearing a workman's coveralls, his powerful frame was clearly visible with each move he made. He casually walked up to Jane's desk, leaned in close, and looked at her intensely with his sea-gray eyes. He said casually, but close in, "Cable trouble. I need to get down there."