Death of the factory
Working in an IT department is like running a tool factory. The customers are the end users who arrive at work every day to use a range of tools to get their jobs done. Tools like email, web browsing, filing, printing and accounting. If someone happens to reboot their Exchange server in the middle of the business day very quickly the office hallways are filled with aimless wanderers asking stupid questions like “Is the email down?” If they were in the middle of an email that’s now lost - well they get rather angry and abusive. If it happens to be someone with political clout then all hell breaks loose on the IT department.
Because IT tools are an arcane priestly thing user belief systems are mired in superstition. They haven’t a clue as to how these tools work or keep running from day to day but availability of those tools is critical to their job performance, without them end users cease to function. They react to changes and problems in irrational ways that come from deep within their anxious sub conscious. To them, the inner workings might as well be quantum physics wrapped in yesterdays newspaper and covered with tomato sauce. Helpdesk stories of the stupidity of end users is legendary stuff.
Somewhere behind a closed door in the office are a bunch of IT people. They see the inside of the factory on a daily basis and if they’re good at what they do they have a pretty good idea of how things work. For them an error message isn’t a show stopping disaster written in a foreign language. It’s a pointer to where a problem lies and a subtle clue for how to fix things. Superstition doesn’t get you very far inside the factory, although there are plenty who reboot anything on the off chance things will magically start working again. Years of working inside the factory should eventually cure this uncontrollable urge to reboot everything as understanding increases. Eventually the skilled arrive near the top of the heap and when the chips are down they are the “go-to” players. The ones you want to throw the ball to get the team out trouble. They are the rational few.
Sadly for IT the joys of the revolution are waning. As more IT tools are moved into the internet cloud IT factory after IT factory is being shut down or shut out. Knowledge increase is stalling and the IT department is becoming an end user looking at the closed door wondering what magic happens behind it. Eventually the “go-to” guys will disappear leaving a department that doesn’t know how anything works and therefore can’t fix anything. We’ll all become the end users we made funny jokes about. Getting on the phone and abusing our cloud partners when things don’t work, still the lightening rod for abuse by our end users but unable to control anything.
It doesn’t sound like a very nice place to work.
What an irony it will be that a revolution that swept away industry after industry along with millions of jobs will, as it’s last clean up act, sweep up most of it’s own staff as it closes the door on the biggest business transformation since the industrial revolution.
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