“What IT people call shadow IT..what other people call getting work done.”
-Jeff Gelb, Director of Technical Strategy at Pearson
Getting work done is what people are paid for. IT exists to provide tools, platforms, levers, force multipliers, accelerators. No one invests in IT to create inhibitors to the work that needs doing. But where there’s shadow IT, you have a very strong signal that that’s exactly what is going on.
The good: people very motivated to get things done
The bad: IT not a part of things getting done
The ugly: disintermediation, loss of confidence in IT
Despite all the hand waving that goes on about this, it’s not so bad. This is an opportunity for IT to reconsider not just how, but why, it does what it does.
Quoting Hugh MacLeod, “Relentlessly ask, ‘How are we helping our users kick a**?’”
Operators who develop. Infrastructure as code. Automation permeating systems. Very good. As a one time sysadmin, I hold to the notion that the better an operator the more of her work she eliminates through code.
But developers operating? No. I don’t want coders, especially app coders, anywhere near infrastructure. Specialization and abstraction create a big gap from developers to infrastructure. Taking systems for granted makes them dangerous.
Enter DevOps/NoOps. Developers are responsible for their code: what it uses, where it goes, how it works, when it breaks, who it affects. All of it. All the time. They have to learn how systems that deliver and execute code function. They have to plow through the abstractions and close the distance to infrastructure.
That’s how things started anyway. Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi.
Former colleague asks on Facebook. The context is a large public technology company.
Why, so often, are customers seen as the enemy?
Because they're the thing in between the company + the revenue. Because the real customer is shareholders + the buying-customer is part of the supply chain. Because product managers think customers exist to buy their products. Because better competition is seen as a decision failure on the customer's part instead of a portfolio/marketing/competitive failure on the company's part. Because large entrenched public companies are often myopically, maladaptively egocentric.
Adrian Cockcroft of Netflix has said/tweeted/presented:
IaaS = Ops without Hardware
PaaS = Devs without Ops
SaaS = Business without Devs
Ops getting rid of infrastructure, infrastructure vendors, infrastructure support, infrastructure architects, infrastructure engineers, infrastructure procurement, infrastructure maintenance. Devs getting rid of ops change control, ops provisioning, ops maintenance windows, ops support. Business getting rid of devs and ops and infrastructure.
This is a variety of empowerment. Each group taking a greater hand in its destiny and taking it out of the hands of... the next group down in their own service supply chain. The cloud is being used as an agent of empowerment. Empowerment through civil disintermediation.
And what if you're that next group down? Maybe, disintermediate yourself.
I finally ran out of dead-tree reading material today and took the kindle for a spin to a coffee shop. Using a device like that at home is one thing; in public, a whole other. The first thing that struck me is that it’s an inherently antisocial device.
Some argue that reading is itself an antisocial activity. Not entirely. More than one conversation with a stranger (or not) in my life has been spurred by the title tucked into my hands. Books are social objects of the first order. The kindle [irony!] kills this.
Antisocial reading.
* manipulate your cognitive context, widen
* stuff your mind with interesting raw material
* connect an idea from one context to another
Mine, to be exact.
I finally get foursquare—it makes places into social objects.
That’s a nice soundbite, but the rest of it: places have always been social abstractions, codified as objects in books, maps, vacation photos, etc. Those old objects have for the most part just been grafted onto the web without anyone developing a new object. The location-based social apps made check-ins the social place-object. Interesting.
There’ve been plenty of services that overlay notes of some kind on the web, or share clippings, or build a stream of them, etc.. but they all require some tool beyond the web to both produce and consume such highlights.
What if highlighting were built into the web? My highlight stream could be a data asset, e.g.:
- to google as an input to ad-targeting
- to amazon as input for book suggestions (exceedingly useful there)
- to the same people who might subscribe to one of my tumblogs
- …
Just a thought.
In my admittedly short career (just over 15yrs) so far, every observation I’ve ever made has led me to the conclusion that size is a fundamental competitive disadvantage [though not necessarily a fatal one]. Why? Because to make size manageable, we typically arrive at a series of abstractions in the form of: process, bureaucracy, hierarchy, etc. This creates a large opportunity space for mistakes, disconnection from reality, safety from the negative consequences of decisions, general incompetence, gerrymandering, insularity, etc.
