Another milestone for the Storagebod blog; this is my five hundredth post! I should write something really meaningful but I’m not sure I can think of anything, so I thought I’d just put down a number of short ideas which might get developed more into full blogs.
Enterprise IT – Enterprise IT is a meaningless term; it is insulting and disparaging of anyone else who is not an Enterprise. If you run a business and your IT infrastructure is core to the continuation of your business; you need IT which is reliable, scalable and all those other good things. You can of course leave off paying the premium for what people call ‘Enterprise’!
RFPs – Request For Pain. RFPs generally exist for one reason in IT; that is to give a bunch of vendors a kicking. In the storage world, you probably have little reason to change vendor but you might as well kick the crap out of your incumbent for laughs. The result of nearly all RFPs is driven by politics and not technical reasons; it is probably better for your sanity if you acknowledge that up front. If a customer really wants to change, they will.
It’s a PC Plus World; the reality is that if you’ve got a desktop, you will probably keep a desktop. Don’t expect this to change any time soon. Yes, you will probably be able to get access to some services via an alternative device but I suspect that most desktop users will stay just that. You will see more mobile devices about but we all know that it’s a pose and it gives us something to do in tedious meetings.
Big Data; use Big Data to make better decisions, don’t use it as an excuse to dive into analysis paralysis. If it has all the characteristics of a duck, it probably is a duck…you don’t need to decode it’s genome before you serve it with Orange sauce.
Cloud; it’s a way of delivering service but it’s not the only way of delivering service. If you find yourself getting religious about how you deliver a service as opposed to delivering the service…take a holiday and get some perspective.
Internal Service Providers; you only have one customer to focus on. This is your biggest strength and weakness.
IT Management; take the chance if possible to manage a team outside of your technical experience. You learn to manage, delegate and trust your team; you focus on managing and not trying to do two jobs. You can always go back to managing in your technical discipline but you will bring new insight and ideas.
Work/Life Balance; you will die, this is inevitable. Make sure that the people you love remember you for the right reasons and not for times you weren’t there.
So that’s post 500 done…here’s to the next 500!!
I think I’ve read every one! Very enjoyable and I’ve learned a lot, so thank you!
Request for Pain?! LOL 🙂
Congrats on the 500th! Keep em coming!