Continuing on the theme of balancing priorities in IT roles, I want to turn, today, to operations. When I think of operations I think of the goal to keep the lights on. Change occurs slowly. Focus is placed on maintaining smooth operations with minimal disruption to systems and access to those systems.
So what is there to balance in operational priorities? I can think of a few things:
Disaster planning, implementation, and testing an important priority that is often cut short because of restricted resources. Sometimes there is a plan, but it is not modified when new systems are brought online. The reality is that a true disaster plan is not a static event. It is something that must be maintained and exercised to be effective.
Security is another area of concern. Have you ever had a security audit performed by security professionals? Do you know what your areas of risk are? How about applying updates to software to plug holes constantly being found?
Capacity management is another area that must be balanced. Most IT systems continue to grow on a constant basis. How do you handle increasing needs for resources? Often is the sigh from a SAN manger heard when receiving another request for more disk space. You Virtual Machine group has a similar feeling as the needs for more CPU power or memory continues to grow. With limited resources, how to you meet, or even project, the growing demands on your systems?
All of these priorities are constantly pressing for your attention. In order to handle them more efficiently, some companies implement sysops in order to optimize some of these tasks. Sysops often have programmer as part of the operations teams focusing on software to optimize the operations tasks. Working together with administrators, the team creates utility for keeping the lights on. This is another form of balance, by combining the two skill sets of programmer and administrator to effectively manage precious assets.
That ends my thoughts on balance. Tomorrow we start on a new topic. Do you have something you’d like to suggest? Share a comment or drop an email to btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben