Archive for 'IT Department'

I’ve done it! I’ve successfully created a Single Member LLC in the great state of Arizona! w00t!!!1! Okay… sooooo… now what?

If you recall in the first part of the first episode of this series over on my old blog and the second part of the first episode posted on this blog, my direction when creating my own business was aimed more at being a consultant or contractor. In fact, the impetus for me to start a business was because a friend needed a technical manager for an upstart website and wanted to contract me. To be contracted I needed to be a business entity. As a result, I chose to form as a simple sole-proprietorship.

In the second episode, I reconsidered my assumptions about how to form my business and chose to form an LLC which gives me greater legal protection. It also future-proofed me if I decided to create a more significant business in the future.

But was I going to make a more significant business? As I considered owning a business and the possible directions I could take it, I had a moment of clarity: I don’t like working for people.

Maybe that’s a bit harsh. I actually enjoy working and interacting with people of all kinds, in all departments and with all temperaments. That’s the truth. It’s not that I don’t like working for people as much as I really enjoy designing, implementing, maintaining and optimizing systems. That’s not something that I can be guaranteed to have the opportunity to do if I work for any ol’ company.

I like to call the shots and design things exactly how my engineering mind is convinced is the best way. I don’t like to be hobbled by the potential for a Sr. manager or director being hornswaggled by a salesman or his nephew that’s “really good with computers” giving bad advice. If I’m going to be called out for poor design, Id rather it be by a fellow SysAdmin who knows why I’m making a mistake rather than a director who doesn’t think I’m buzzword compliant.

Prior to starting a business I was looking around at higher-responsibility jobs and feeling tense. I really wanted to be part of an organization that was proactive and progressive in their view of IT. However, I worried about being in a department that was stifled and choked. Thinking about doing all the footwork and research to find a good company to work in was a bit overwhelming. Plus, I’m a bit mis-trusting of IT headhunters. (Any angelic IT headhunters out there reading this, please forgive me)

After beginning to start a a business merely to be contracted by my friend (which was intended to be a part-time job), I considered becoming a full-time contractor. However, the stories of what IT contractors often have to endure frightened me. “You’re Mr. High-Priced-Contractor, you’re supposed to know everything yesterday and work 80 hours a week for your whole 12 month term!!”

I then considered starting a MSP. After some thought, I realized that staring at a management console (GFI Max, for example) and shuttling around town doing what amounted to overpriced help desk work made me weep in agony. Plus, there was far more of an initial investment in equipment, software and salesmanship than I felt I could afford. Especially the salesmanship part.

So how could I land a job doing what I like to do and ensure that it was in a great environment? I don’t even have to have free food and massages! Is that too much to ask?! It seemed like it was. Woe! Woe unto me!

Then an inspired idea came to me: Why don’t I make my own job? I know what I like the most and where my strengths lie. I know where and how I’d like to develop my professional skills. I could choose to design and implement exactly what I wanted to work with (provided my funds and the market were favorable).

I started to think about it deeper. All of the articles I’ve read over the last year and a half were all aflutter about outsourcing, SaaS and cloud computing. Many analysts have been cogently arguing that SaaS and cloud computing are changing the face of the SysAdmin profession. Those concepts and others are seen as continually pushing IT workers out of internal IT departments and into departmental units or service providers.

If you want to read more about it, you can see my articles “Corporate IT – More Suggestions of the Changing Role of the SysAdmin” and “Avoiding SysAdmin Obsolescence; The Only Thing We Have to Fear is Telepathic Robot Drones” among others on this blog.

It all made sense, but was scary and made me just a little sad at first. I had held onto the idea of working as a member of a traditional internal IT department. However, in the last year or so, especially the last few months, I’ve been convinced that the SysAdmin role is changing. Changing right now as I type this. And it’s a change that is logical, needed and one that isn’t going to turn back. I’m convinced that much of the future of Systems Administration is in SaaS, cloud and service providers. It was time to live what I believed. From those convictions, my company is born.

I am starting a hosted services company. I also have some smaller business ventures that will hopefully create a modest revenue stream so I can save and then invest in the creation of my first hosted service. I hope to begin setting up the first hosted service later this year (2010).

So what service am I going to start with? What’s my company name? Where’s my website?! What are my prices?!?

I’m not going to tell you! At least, not yet anyway. I don’t want to turn this blog into some kind of marketing channel or advertisement for my services. I want to stay as indie as possible. In all likelihood, I’ll mention my company name at some point in this blog’s lifetime. Just not right now. Maybe not for a while. Anyway, it probably wouldn’t be that hard for someone to find out what my company is named if they searched a few public records databases.

As far as the services that I will eventually be offering, those are much more likely to be discussed to some degree in the future. Probably not in reference to my company, or prices or general business chit-chat. It will most likely be exposed in a more editorial or troubleshooting sense. You see, I like to write. I like to share what I know (as much of a nublet as I am). I’ll most certainly share my experiences as I troubleshoot and evaluate various systems and engineering feats.

That’s my professional life as it stands now. This is one SysAdmin who has ditched the notion of internal IT and embraced the external service provider role. I have officially had a paradigm shift. Now I get to choose the technology I work with, call the shots and have all the fun. I get to work the budgets, approve the projects and eat all the M&Ms from the candy dish. Of course, I have to pay for those M&Ms, but I can live with that. I’ll also get all the blame if things go horribly wrong, but I think I can avoid that as well as anyone else that enjoys this job.

I’ll almost certainly be hiring help in the future as my projects get bigger and need more support and engineering roles. Who knows? Maybe you’ll be filling a position at my company in a few years. Are you willing to depart from internal IT to embrace a different SysAdmin paradigm?

Furthermore, do you think I’m daft in taking this leap? Is my business patently doomed to failure or mediocrity? Let me know what you think! It’s going to be an exciting several decades until retirement.

The Corporate Executive Board (CEB) has released yet another article that suggests we IT people will have to adapt or risk being disappointed when the inevitable changes take place. The article, published on BusinessWeek.com, predicts that within the next five years a major shift in corporate IT will be taking place. It’s already happening now.

The CEB’s survey showed that in 5 years it is likely that only 25% of most business’s current IT staff will remain within the internal IT department. The other 75% will be pushed to external service companies or into what the article refers to as “shared services groups” within the company.

I’m still trying to grasp what exactly a “shared services group” is. The way the article defines it is a bit too heavy on buzzwords and corporate-isms. It seems to be a small group of IT generalists that serve the generic needs of business units in contrast to the predicted trend towards hyper-focused IT units within each distinct department. However, I’m  not sure about the article’s justification of the need for a “shared services group”.

I take issue with some of those reasons that the CEB listed for why IT departments will be fracturing. On the flip side, I tend to agree with some of their reasoning. Let me lay my thoughts out for you.

First to be mentioned in the article as a reason for IT department decentralization is the concept of outside service providers being able to better meet targeted needs: “This business shared services organization will have within it an “indispensible IT” function with specific responsibilities around managing the external providers to ensure service levels and integration with existing technology” (emphasis added)

That goes without saying, I believe. I’ll touch on service companies later in my post.

Another reason stated for decentralized IT is that: “the lines between what is “IT” and what isn’t will become so blurred that the activities may be rehoused elsewhere in the business services group.” I think that this methodology (at least, as I interpret it) may be attempted, but I’m skeptical that it will last in the long run. I see a chaotic future of disparate technologies between departments being selected and ultimately conflicting or being generally unsatisfactory. There needs to be some kind of centralization of IT, even if it’s within business units.

Speaking of business units, the next reason given for decentralized IT is that the technology that is truly making money for a business will be acquired and managed by the units themselves. The study states that the technology initiatives that add business value usually require a deep knowledge of that business function that could only be known by people who are in that unit daily. Thus IT workers will have the opportunity to be aligned directly with a business unit rather than a single internal IT department. I tend to agree with this based on my own experiences.

Finally, it is alleged that non-IT people are increasingly tech-savvy and can handle their own technology to a greater degree than previous workforces. While I agree that people have a greater appreciation for technology and aren’t so quick to make another paper workflow, I disagree that the increasing friendliness towards technology will translate into a Nirvana of shared IT duties between most members of a business unit. I believe there will still be a need for some kind of centralized strategy behind the selection, implementation and management of technology even if it’s within individual business units rather than a single monolithic IT department.

Stepping back from it, this is what I take away from the article:

First, big IT is, in most cases, dying. The centralized department of ten IT people that I was fortunate enough to work in for four years not too long ago may have been my last. Big IT is not responsive enough to justify itself.

Second, IT needs to provide actual business value. It’s not enough to just keep the lights on with services like anti-virus, application deployment, lifecycle management, asset management, email, collaboration and etc. Those services are great, but they’re as expected as water, electricity and HVAC in the building. Not one is terribly impressed with those projects anymore.

IT is expected to create systems that have a direct impact on customers. No matter what the industry, that concept seems to be increasingly focusing on either business intelligence (data mining) or some kind of web based interaction with users (in my opinion, that primarily takes the form of making user portals suck less with the help of UI people).

That puts me and every other IT person (SysAdmin, Developer, etc.) at a crossroads. In the next few years, do we want to be hyper-focused within a business unit or do we want to focus on providing services externally? Do we want to snuggle up to the marketing department or engineering or finance and learn their ways so we can create better systems that directly impact them? Or do we want to tend to a cloud provider’s server farms, work in datacenter infrastructure, provide SaaS or offer specialized consulting skills (security, ITIL, compliance auditing)?

The answer to those questions are largely personal and will reflect an individual’s personal preferences concerning what they like to do in their vocation.

Either way, it seems obvious that change is coming. Change that I wasn’t expecting just a year ago. Where you? Are you braced for it now or are you unconvinced? Take a look at the article and tell me what you think.

This has made for some unexpected decision making in my life.