Blade Watch

A strange thing has been happening in the wintel world for at least a few colleagues working across our sunny City of London. It is the blurring of the lines of responsibilities. A colleague (Anthony) called me up, he has a contract working for a financial in West London.  “You ever been asked to rack a server?”  No I replied, I’ve unracked servers, not racked them, I’m sure I could work out how to do it.”

“Yeah thats fine, but thats not what I signed up for, health and safety and all that. I don’t want to be installing servers. I’m a Windows guy. What happens if I damage my suit and no one seems to be answering whether I still have to wear a suit to work if I’m just installing servers that day. They’re also talking about hardware support, that’s not my job, I know enough but not detailed hardware stuff and I don’t want to be arguing over system boards with some vendor all day.”

“It’s the cost of doing business, as we commoditize the infrastructure your role by definition changes towards a server delivery role. They need servers racked and you are capable of doing it will be the management viewpoint and in some respects we could turn around and say the industry rate to rack servers will be a lot less than your rate, so do you want to get paid well for racking servers and doing the Windows stuff, if not there will be other people.”

So Anthony will have to see what he thinks. Interestingly it was the little things that were upsetting him what he had to wear, that it wasn’t his job. I wonder if a little dialogue might not have made a world of difference, it’s all about how the message is put across – “from next week you’re doing hardware swaps and racking”, away from the “guys can you help us out racking servers and doing hardware support?”

As we change the nature of IT, remove the cost, improve the delivery, I wonder what this means for roles going forward and how we manage the need to reduce cost and deliver, with the need to incentivise our teams.

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