Times Change
When I got my start in IT, I counted myself among the wave of IT professionals that had emerged to support the demand of organizations looking to modernize by moving away from antiquated mainframe systems and paper processes. There was a technological revolution afoot, and it seemed obvious that it was going to take away from, or at least change the jobs of many. While some people worked to sharpen their skills, others proceeded as they always had, unconcerned because their positions were critical to the organization and therefore (seemingly) irreplaceable. Ultimately, most of the old jobs survived, but morphed into something else. Those affected either adapted to the new technology, found new work, or retired. The world moved on.
Years have passed since the dot-com boom and bust. If we take an honest look at the industry, it’s plain that on the average, in-house IT is terrible. The systems are cumbersome, the average IT shop doesn’t understand the business, and doesn’t know how to break away from existing paradigms that stifle innovation. For someone in IT Ops, awareness of our poor performance makes watching the uptick in adoption of cloud services by corporations and governments that much more intimidating. Organizations are outsourcing more and more of their internal systems because they can attain superior solutions for less money, which in turn allows them to focus on their core business. Ten years ago, if you were an Exchange administrator, you were in the cat-bird’s seat. Now, you’re either very nervous, have learned additional disciplines, or are potentially in for a rude awakening. This isn’t limited to mail, and the trend is only going to continue. We have become the bearers of antiquated processes and technology.
Don’t Panic, IT Ops is Still a Thing
The good news is that information systems are becoming a larger and larger part of what organizations are doing. The bad news is that the sort of repetitive tasks that many of us have specialized in for years are being automated out of existence. There is still a role for IT Operations, but it’s going to be different. It will no longer be focused on services that can be commoditized, but instead will be focused on those key applications that are actually business differentiators.
Staying relevant will require becoming familiar with what the business side of the house needs. It will mean understanding your company’s key applications better than anyone else. It will mean managing distributed systems at scale. It will mean learning new tools and processes to make changes to production systems faster and more safely. It will mean getting out ahead of whats coming and facilitating change instead of getting swept up by it.
Change With the Times
New approaches require new skills, many of which can seem difficult to acquire if your organization is doing things the old way. While it is convenient to blame your company for an antiquated skill set, it’s no excuse. You need to become an active participant in your career and elevate yourself. You need to read, you’ll need to train, and you’ll need to spend at least some of your free time doing it. If you’re serious about being good, this needs to be a continual process. It’s time to think in terms of personal Kaizen.
Build a Lab
Nothing beats learning by doing. By building test environments, you can be more aggressive than you’d ever be on the company’s servers, and you have a free hand to learn what you want. What you don’t want to do is spend all of your time installing operating systems. This is something that you already know how to do. We need a way to quickly spin up lab environments so that we can break free of the drudgery and get to the good stuff, the stuff you don’t yet know how to do.
In this series, we are going to explore different approaches to building Windows environments from code. This will allow us to create consistent, repeatable environments that can destroyed and rebuilt at will. This may sound intimidating, but there are tools to simplify the process and help you on the way.
In part 2, we’ll get started by building virtual environments with Vagrant.
Image courtesy of www.nasa.gov - http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_2184.html