Why IT isn’t

Dan (we’ll call him) has been working for the last six months at a bank in one of the business lines, his main driver is the reliability of his application servers, and has a rather tainted view of IT.

I thought it might be interesting to find out why this is so, what IT has done in his view to damage the relationship, what can be done to fix it.

Thanks for this, so what’s your view of IT?

They tend to be rather inward facing, lack a coherent structure and worst of all you get mixed performance dependent on who you speak too, there’s little consistency, I might phone Bill who’ll help me immediately, when I phone Peter he’ll say can you log a call, and raise a change for that, I’m willing to follow the process, but I just want a little flexibility, a little help to manage my infrastructure, my application, in essence my business.

It drives me nuts when they start doing things to the IT; there’s the tendency to play with new technology, to keep changing the rules, all I’m after is someone who’s accountable, who talks to me, having my server rebooted by accident, then IT claim ignorance and have me waste time trying to find out what happened is most frustrating.

I want a relationship, a customer focused guy I can call and who’ll not tell me what I want to hear, but to deal with me professionally, to understand my systems.  Often there’s this mentality that it’s just another windows server, it’s not, I look after one of the tier2 trading systems, when it goes down, it gets quite emotional.

But what’s the key issue for you?

Communication is everything.

I’ll give you an example, I’ve just kicked off a project to invest in new infrastructure for my development teams, we’ve gone have way through the procurement stage, the you need four servers, 100GB disk space per box, and the model type is I don’t know a small server, I’ve now been told actually you’re going virtual.  When was virtual infrastructure announced?  Don’t I need to test it first?  They want me to pay for testing my application against this new virtual server?

So how have you and the team reacted to this?

I’ve been trying to highlight the importance of the change process, to show IT that I’m willing to follow the process, to build a relationship with the IT server teams first of all. The early morning person now reads the overnight incidents and everyone now has the help desk tool that IT use to log calls, we’re also looking at an intranet page listing the servers and their roles.

What do IT do well?

The security patching process is alright, we’ve been doing it so long, that IT know what they can get away with, know which systems are key to my application (on the whole, it does depend who’s doing it).

What’s key to you as a business/application manager?

Delivery, delivery, delivery.  I just want whatever I asked to be done, fine we’ll no doubt have our debates, every now and again IT will say no to my requests, that’s a given, but I want a consistent level of service, that when I call for an engineer that he’s ready for my call, understands the service impact and will do whatever it takes, not escalate to management unnecessarily.