Or is patience just an acceptance of latency and friction? A criticism oft made of today’s generation is that they expect everything now and this is a bad thing but is it really?
If a bottle of fine wine could mature in an instant and be good as a ’61; would this be a bad thing? If you could produce a Michelin quality meal in a microwave, would it be a bad thing?
Yes, today we do have to accept that such things take time but is it really a virtue? Is there anything wrong with aspiring to do things quicker whilst maintaining quality?
We should not just accept that latency and friction in process is inevitable; we should work to try to remove them from the way that we work.
For example, change management is considered to be a necessary ITIL process but does it have to be the lengthy bureaucratic process that it is? If your infrastructure is dynamic, surely your change process should be dynamic too? If you are installing a new server, should you have to raise a change
1) to rack and stack
2) to configure the network
3) to install the operating system
4) to present the storage
5) to add the new server to the monitoring solution etc, etc
Each of these being an individual change being raised by separate teams. Or should you be able to do this all programmatically? Now obviously in a traditional data-centre, some of these require physical work but once the server has been physically commissioned, there is nothing there which should not be able to be done programmatically and pretty much automatically.
And so it goes for many of the traditional IT processes; they simply introduce friction and latency to reduce the risk of the IT department smacking into a wall. This is often deeply resented by the Business who simply want to get their services up and running, it is also resented by the people who are following the processes and then it is thrown away in an emergency (which happens more often than you would possibly expect 😉 ).
This is not a rant against ITIL, it was tool for a more sedate time but in a time when Patience is no longer really a virtue..do we need a better way. Or perhaps something like an IT Infrastructure API?
Don’t throw away the rule-book but replace it with something better.
p.s Patience was actually my grand-mother; she had her vices but we loved her very much.
You are accepted into the noitil org with this awesome post 🙂