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I was having a conversation with a PM who works in Edinburgh deploying servers for an enterprise, I was asking his views on some concepts and issues which I have been discussing with colleagues in the server and middleware space.  The market is changing, with Converged Infrastructure, with Instant-On-Enterprise, we’re aiming to reduce complexity, improve deployment times and agility of the infrastructure. The silos are therefore getting broken down, quoting my Project Manager colleague ‘what matters is good enough’, I don’t need a rocket scientist, I need someone with the following characteristics:

• Service delivery and business focused individual – someone who isn’t process bound
• Understands how my specific enterprise works – who does what, what the rules of engagement are
• Is familiar with the technology from an operational and a technical basis
• Owns problems and sees them through to completion.

It’s interesting, as we automate, as we reduce the complexity we need what I refer to the olden days traditional engineer, skilled in the technologies used, but at the same time, we need client facing and client conversation capable engineers that can not only aid in delivery of projects, of maintaining support, but also in aiding in identifying issues before they happen, illustrating what technologies we could be using or how by using the technology differently, we might achieve business goals.

At the same time, the PM wants more from the business:

• To be asking the right questions to our suppliers, our service providers and our clients
• Be engaged in the technology to understand what components make our services and our business
• Understand the concept of Service Level Agreements in partnership with the business needs – what backups do we need as opposed to ‘everything’ for example, or stating the 5×9 (99.999% availability) when what we actually need is a batch run and complete between Saturday 10am and 4pm.

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