TenBrink Tech Technology | Life

Infrastructure Agility & Supporting the Business

I was over reading James' blog this morning, and his notes about Microsoft's Infrastructure Optimization assessments hit home dramatically.

This is something that I've been pounding into our group's heads for years, without making much in headway. There are a few sure things in IT:

• It's not about what tools your are using, it is how you are using them. Am I using the right tool for the job?
• There are no "IT Projects", only business initiatives that IT is there to support.
• IT needs to have the ability and agility to react to changing business priorities at any time and shape.

Unfortunately, all too often people look at IT as a black box, not knowing how to best fit it into their organization. We're left off as a support group, but perhaps in many cases less-engaged in the business then even traditional support roles such as HR or finance. IT breeds this within as well, with our manic ideas about how to get tasks done, our many times overreaching authority over the applications and services, and our religious wars over technology and architecture decisions.

IT needs the ability to be brought into the business and vision discussions and then strive with every ability to help the business achieve the overall goals - regardless of the technology actually implemented.

To fill in my assessment of where my group is today with our infrastructure, I'll take James' quick quiz. You should do this yourself as well and share the results with your peers. The formal assessment is available here. Start the conversation about how you can better meet the needs of your business and engage them.

(the more answers to the left, the more dynamic your environment is = good)

There is some great technology out from Microsoft (yea, here's the plug) that can do things to help the business, and I bet most of management doesn't even know outside of IT. They won't know unless you start the conversation of "how can we better help the company succeed".