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I've been consulting for public sector and the companies in the Fortune 500 that are behind the software and operations curve from even start-up companies and a

I've been consulting for public sector and the companies in the Fortune 500 that are behind the software and operations curve from even start-up companies and always will by choice + self-imposed bureaucracy. The problem I've observed consistently across various custom cloud and openstack implementations is that none of the products and technologies that people are developing are able to succeed because everyone assumes that they "solved" basic infrastructure management a decade ago when their operations teams are woefully unskilled, unmotivated, and unable to meet the demands of today's environments. Most organizations do not have monitoring beyond what comes out of the box even for production environments, most places do not have defined SLAs, almost nobody tests backups or their DR runbooks even though they spent $2M+ on a DR implementation. None of this is the fault of the engineers though; their managers wanted silos and people that just go implement their promotion-garnering plans that all go south.

HannibalLecter 10y ago
I wish you were wrong. Silos are everywhere -- ugly and unavoidable bottlenecks. Nobody has a plan to fix that culture though because it works only just good enough.
- devonkim 10y ago
  I personally don't see anything "wrong" with silos - they are the partitions of the distributed systems of human society and are going to emerge anyway partially due to Dunbar's number in a "flat" organization. The issue I see is that managers are unwilling or very slow to understand new lines of division of labor ("What do you mean that sysadmins should also be developers? Why would we want that?" - direct quote from a customer) because it doesn't correspond to what their information systems management textbooks from 2002 told them how IT labor is divided. Then comes issues of training managers and telling people why this re-org is so much better than the last 10. This is why the "devops" movement in enterprise is cheap business consulting labor to me - it results in a re-org in most places, and that's the equivalent of developers showing up at a new shop and suggesting refactors as a newbie. Furthermore, most IT managers have such poor data from the organizations they run that the only things they can track are money spent, not money saved and such. And showing that a CIO doesn't know wtf his company gets you kicked out of meetings permanently in most (typically dysfunctional) organizational cultures.

HannibalLecter 10y ago

I wish you were wrong. Silos are everywhere -- ugly and unavoidable bottlenecks. Nobody has a plan to fix that culture though because it works only just good enough.

devonkim 10y ago
I personally don't see anything "wrong" with silos - they are the partitions of the distributed systems of human society and are going to emerge anyway partially due to Dunbar's number in a "flat" organization. The issue I see is that managers are unwilling or very slow to understand new lines of division of labor ("What do you mean that sysadmins should also be developers? Why would we want that?" - direct quote from a customer) because it doesn't correspond to what their information systems management textbooks from 2002 told them how IT labor is divided. Then comes issues of training managers and telling people why this re-org is so much better than the last 10. This is why the "devops" movement in enterprise is cheap business consulting labor to me - it results in a re-org in most places, and that's the equivalent of developers showing up at a new shop and suggesting refactors as a newbie. Furthermore, most IT managers have such poor data from the organizations they run that the only things they can track are money spent, not money saved and such. And showing that a CIO doesn't know wtf his company gets you kicked out of meetings permanently in most (typically dysfunctional) organizational cultures.