Give me a minute to figure it out…
November 21, 2006
I have many gripes about this place, but one of them is how IT is treated when things break.
I don’t know of any system that’s perfect (ok, well maybe DOS), but in any case, why does this place expect everything to be perfect? It’s not so much that they expect the systems to be perfect, but rather, Management doesn’t even give us a chance to look around and figure out what the #$#@$ went wrong.
As I usually do, here is a typical example:
0:00 hr System X goes down
0:05 hr Me: Gee, let me look at System X and see if I can get it up again….
0:06 hr IT Management Help Desk joins the call.
0:07 hr IT Management: What’s wrong?
Me: System X is down, i’m trying to see if I can get it back up.
IT Management: Well what happened?
Me: I don’t know, i’m working on getting the system back up right now, please wait a sec
IT Management: Well how can we keep this from happening again?
Me: I don’t know yet, I’m still working on getting the system back up, once I finish that I can try to determine what broke it.
IT Mgmt: So any luck with that, getting it up yet
Me: I’ve only been look at this for less than 5min, please wait.
IT Mgmt: So, what do you think caused the issue, should we call the vendor, contact other groups?
Me: Can you please just give me a 10 minutes or so to look at what happened and then I’ll tell you what I need, thank you.
IT Mgmt: OK, but as soon as you know what went wrong, we should figure out how to prevent this in the future.
Me (to myself) : Gee, really, you mean we don’t want systems just going down randomly for no reason – Jeezz!
Do you see the crazyness here? I don’t have 10 frigin minutes to see what the hell went wrong with something before people want an explination as to why. Also, if the problem persists for more than 30min, we are supposed to contact the CTO of the Company (a $15B, 25k user company), for ANY incident over 30min, can you imagine!
Entry Filed under: Uncategorized. .
2 Comments Add your own
Leave a Comment
Some HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <pre> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed
1.
B | December 2, 2006 at 9:03 am
To add to this…
Over the last 6 months I have interacted with couple of CIO and CTOs at this part of the world I work.. but nothing comes close to your’s/our experience.. at times its sheer madness and cacophony… to add to that there are IT Cops asking you irrelevant questions.. trying to do their bit … I guess everyone trying to gain visibility amongst chaos…at the expense of the helpless IT Ops team.. My sympathies ….
2.
retireoncsco | December 2, 2006 at 3:35 pm
Thats ironic, our security guys are pretty good. They implement systems I actually agree with, and putting up with ‘corporates’ mandates as best they can.
Although, you’ve reminded me of some of their stories I’ll have to bring up in this blog.
Thanks for your comments, never figured it would ever get read