Once More Unto the Breach...

If ever I took you for granted Mac, I am truly sorry. Recent events give me pause to appreciate your elegant simplicity and ease of use. Once more I've been thrust into the abyss that is corporate IT and its dreadful trident, Microsoft Windows. Am I so shallow as to fall to the temptation of a large payday? Will I commit to soiling my hands with the muck and mire of the "technology" spewing from Redmond just to buy a new BMW? Alas, once more unto the breach, my friend.

In late 2009 I left my position as manager of a corporate IT department. Not a big one, just a handful of servers and eighty or so desktops. I left it all in the capable (or so I thought) hands of the person I had trained for eight years, feeling quite good about the future of the site that was now in my rearview mirror. I would eventually learn what a difference 40 months can make.

Well, as it turns out, the man I left in charge had more shortcomings than I had realized at the time. I actually thought he would follow my example and strive to imitate my style and methodology. Silly me. Not only did he not imitate me in any discernible way, it appears he actively and consciously turned 180º from the path I'd blazed. When I left, the company's datacenter enjoyed a 99.99+% service factor and the number of user service requests had diminished to just one or two per week. A situation I was quite proud of by the way.  You see, when I took the reigns in 2002, the department was in shambles. The file and email servers were down (or otherwise unavailable) 20% of the time, the desktop workstations were woefully outdated and users had no confidence in the on-site IT support to the point of even installing their own workstations for fear of the IT guys screwing everything up. In short, an absolute mess. That's why I was hired, to clean everything up. It took a couple of years, but after more than a few budget fights I managed to build a new datacenter, upgrade the old 10/100 network with gigabit fiber and replace most of the old clunky workstations with shiny new Dell models. I quickly became the most popular manager on-site. It really wasn't that hard. I had a very easy act to follow.

The next five years went smoothly. In fact, I was getting pretty bored near the end. After installing the first SAN in the corporation, designing a new datacenter and migrating the old one to the new engineering building and installing all sorts of new toys like a Cisco VPN, disk-to-disk backup (both also the first in the corporation) just to name a couple, things quickly became mundane. When things become routine due to a lack of capital projects or other big initiatives, higher-ups in corporations seem to abhor the vacuum and set about passing down bullshit mandates like new security procedures or network access regulations. The mundane quickly becomes aggravating. With very few work requests and little or no project work, the next corporate inevitable happens; reduction of force. Somebody loses their job. In our case I was told to reduce the IT staff from three persons to two. It was the hardest thing I've ever had to do. Sure, I've fired people before. Anyone in a management position for more than a couple of years does that. It's never easy, but letting someone go for poor performance is a simple fact of life. Telling someone they no longer have a job because some executive's budget is a little out of whack is an entirely different matter. I had to let go the hardest-working kid on my staff just because he had less than half the seniority of the next man up. It was a shitty deal all around, not to mention the fact that this layoff meant that I'd just lost a third of my staff. Well, that was the beginning of the end for me. Within a year I had resigned my position and was running my own IT business.

Fast forward 3 1/2 years. The former Vice President (called out of retirement to fix what his successor screwed up) of the company called me out of the blue one morning and asked me to lunch. Three hours later I walk into the restaurant where I'm greeted by not only the VP, but the site director and the technical manager. Under different circumstances I would have felt ambushed. After the normal introductions and pleasantries the three of them told me their tales of woe. It seems the man who assumed the position I vacated over three years earlier had turned my silky smooth IT operation into an absolute hairball. I patiently listened to their stories that included innumerable problems with a new thin client architecture, general end-user malaise and to top it all, loss of several months of company data due to a SAN crash. Obviously, my successor had not been keeping his backups current. Too bad. Anyone who's known me for more than five minutes will tell you I'm almost anal retentive about backups, especially when my job depends on keeping that data secure.  It's such a simple matter, its hard to imagine how an IT manager can allow multiple months of user data to disappear. I guess that's why I'm here now and he isn't. What a hammerhead.

At the lunch meeting I agreed to perform an evaluation of their IT organization and report back in a couple of weeks. Knowing the site as well as I did, this was a very simple task. I interviewed users, managers and of course, the IT staff. I also spent a little time combing through hardware specs, server provisioning and the like. As it turned out, I could have written my report after just a couple of days. I didn't, of course. That would be stupid on multiple levels. First, I was billing at a healthy rate, and second, I wanted my employers to believe I was doing a thorough job. Finishing too quickly meant money out of my pocket, but more importantly I needed to make sure my initial perceptions were accurate. After all, there were a couple of people's jobs on the line. I never take that responsibility lightly.

After a couple of weeks I presented a 2500 word, 8 page report (complete with charts and illustrations) to the same three men I'd had lunch with that first day. It was not very complimentary to the IT staff. You see, for independent consultants like myself, the first rule of evaluations is to make sure you point out deficiencies that you'd be ideally suited to correct. This report did that in spades. While it contained no falsehoods or even anything that could be construed as a half-truth, I did provide my employer with a number of current IT practices that completely flew in the face of how they knew I'd done things before. In my favor, two of the three managers remembered the "good ol' days" when I ran the department the last time. I had very little selling to do.

The report had its desired effect. A few days later the technical manager called asking me if I could be there the next week to spend a few weeks getting them headed in the right direction. Cha-ching! (In my business that's known as a "money call".)

So, here I am up to my chin in Windows Server 2008, VMWare, thin clients and a whole host of other technologies too distasteful for this Mac addict to mention. In all fairness, the new virtualization tech is pretty cool. The new hardware the company bought to host it all is state-of-the-art as well. Big, balsy servers with oodles of SAN storage and all the auxiliary equipment one could dream of to keep it running. No, the IT mess wasn't due to a lack of funding. My successor had fallen into the all-too-typical trap of spending so much money and time buying and playing with new shiny stuff he had almost no resources left to keep his users happy. On top of that, his people skills didn't amount to much and the guy he hired as his #2 was worse. Some of the user interviews I conducted revealed an almost "stupid user" mentality by the IT staff.  You know what I mean. That's when the IT folks revel in their technical superiority to the point of talking down to the end-user and even blaming them for being too incompetent to use their new workstations. Those types of IT people just don't get it. They don't understand that it's the IT department's job to make things simple for their customers, not the other way around. And it's never wise to make someone feel stupid, no matter how computer illiterate they are. When users are unhappy they make noise. When the IT support staff doesn't have the time, money or will to address the users concerns then the noise level goes up the food chain. If managers reach their noise threshold they call me. That's when I have to decide whether to 1.) continue sleeping late, working at home on my Macs in cut-offs and flip-flops and going fishing whenever I want or 2.) start the 9 to 5 routine of Windows Wrestling in slacks, starched shirt, shiny shoes and big fat paychecks. 

I am such a whore.

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