Bladewatch.com

Kevin is an IT manager (we’re calling him Kevin as he wasn’t willing to be named) and he works for a small investment bank, I thought it would be interesting to have the previous interview, “Why IT isn’t” and see his responses.

IT don’t communicate effectively, any comments?

He’s right, there are an awful lot of IT people, and IT departments that are too technology focused, that don’t quite get IT is there to earn money, that the business just want it to work.

It’s a two way street, IT needs to communicate, to be open with the application teams, but the application teams and the business lines need to invest in IT to understand that they get what they pay for.

I’ll give you an example, we had a five hour outage on one of the trading systems, it got escalated to me, the head of business lines asked me what was going on, why we had this outage, why IT had failed and I told him:

“You’re running on legacy unsupported hardware and software, we’re doing all we can, returning the system to service is a priority.”

The hardware and operating system was out of support years ago, they need reminded about this regularly.

Ok but what about the inconsistency?

Again it’s a two way thing, the IT teams need to be business aware absolutely, the more I know about your application and the infrastructure the more we as IT can deliver a customized service to you, that I know which systems are crucial to your infrastructure and fix those first.  However, equally I want some benefit of the doubt, the endless statements about downtime and who’s fault it is after an outage is necessary but can get unnecessarily emotional, in the time I spent in the last three months discussing who would accept liability, we could have rebuilt the sytem from the ground up.

Indeed in the example you read me, the cost of testing; that’s what say four man days, £1600 or something, you really want to debate £1600 over testing? How much effort, emotion and time has it cost our bank to debate £1600, what you, your manager and three other people before you got to me?

There are times where I’ll pay the costs to move things on, to remove the financial debate, but every now and again its time for a reality check.

What about the delivery angle?

Well I can understand this, it’s important that IT delivers, but one of the things that I will always say is that the infrastructure is only as good as the applications that reside on it.

Often we’ll take the blame for an outage when we know it’s application; the servers out of memory, the cpu’s gone to 100% for hours making the batch fail. It’s factored in, the cost of doing business, I can keep throwing hardware at the problem, and don’t get me wrong we do, there was an application that up until recently kept getting me and my engineers called out, the application team said it was due to the server being inadequate, got the techies to check and they said well it looks like a rogue process, this was reported back to the application team, who said they didn’t believe me and demanded a new server; a new server was bought, plugged in, only for the same problem to happen again six months later.

So an application problem in this case has cost thousands of pounds of unnecessary hardware, but you know what, the cost of re-developing the application is so high that it’s cheaper for IT to every now and again make impulse hardware problems, pay the more or less fixed cost of application support than it is to have the application re-written, until the business invest long term in their applications, this will remain an ongoing activity.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.