IT is Complex
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We all know that IT is complex, it's a big field with a lot of moving parts. But too few people really stop and understand why it is so complex. How can it be so difficult to know all of it, why are things so impossible to repeat, why can't companies find people with experience in exactly what they do? But do we need so many specialists for each little thing?
Companies need to understand this because believing that IT "isn't that hard" or not understanding the scope and complexity of the field does much to undermine good management of IT workers and departments.
IT is not defined. This is a bigger problem than people often realize. IT is not well designed. Talk to a dozen people who think that they work in IT and likely you will get at least ten totally different definitions of IT and at least half the people won't feel that one or two of the people in that dozen even work in IT and are using the term for working in a different field! As people with IT labels, we struggle to even know if we ourselves are working in IT! That's now complex things are. What the average consumer things of as IT is actually what we call "bench" work, a related but non-IT field; and many others confuse IT with electricians (even businesses often make this mistake.)
IT is enormous. Few fields have as many aspects as IT does. IT is one of the largest fields that there is for work and there are so many vastly different jobs. The role of a network engineer, a systems administrator, a help desk technician, a database base administrator, an automation engineer or an application manager are all so different as to reasonably be completely different fields; each requiring a lifetime of study to really know well and each with it's own foci so extreme that there are "lifetime studies" within each foci within each IT discipline! And those are just the well defined roles, roles that overlap some or all of these are common and can include just about anything.
IT roles are undefined. Both within the field itself and outside of it, almost nothing done in IT is well defined. What one person calls a system administrator is likely to be nothing at all like what another person calls it. The same title at ten jobs will likely involve ten nearly unrelated roles. Someone who is the best network engineer at one job could be the worst at another without changing anything that they are doing. Everything from tools, techniques, tasks, goals, expectations, resources, technologies and desired outcomes can be polar opposites or even unrelated between jobs of the same level, pay, region, market and title! There is no way to predict if your experience or skills that have been a perfect fit in the past will even be useful or applicable in a new role regardless of the amount of interviewing and research done.
IT exists in every market. IT exists not as its own thing but as an addendum to every other business category. That means that while you might be experienced as a DBA for healthcare, you might see the same role but with a different twist in finance, manufacturing, government, military, research, aerospace, tourism, construction, etc. Knowing everything about IT alone is only part of the picture. Each industry is highly unique in how it uses IT, expects IT to behave, and what IT will do. There are many axis for working in IT, no one can do them all.
Every company is unique. This can't be overstated. Outside of the complexities of IT and the complexities of different industries, each individual business is totally unique from an IT context. IT actually sees this just as dramatically or even more dramatically than any other business function. Not only does IT need to deeply understand all of the unique aspects of their business, they also then have to combine that with all of the unique aspects of the IT of that business and the two effectively multiply against each other. No other role really experiences the geometric increase in complexity from these two angles in the way that IT does.
IT is cross discipline. IT is not a single thing and it is certainly not primarily a technical field. IT is primarily business, but a business support role that manages the infrastructure of the business. IT professions, especially those in decision making roles, need a deep business understanding of both business in general as well as the specifics of the industry, locality and individual business themselves. Then, on top of a business scope that rivals that of positions like CEO, COO and CFO, IT must also then know and understand technology and how it is used, could be used, should not be used and so forth in relationship to those factors. IT pros don't get to just be experts in one thing; they have to be experts in many. The IT department in any company will normally need an understanding of general business, the operations of the business in question, accounting and finance, legal, human resources, infrastructure, regulations, and then IT itself.
IT doesn't control the majority of the "pieces". IT is not in the business of making the technology that it uses, it uses parts from other vendors. But it has to assemble a business infrastructure from the pieces that vendors provide. So like a car mechanic, IT is at the mercy of the manufacturers and vendors to provide working systems; but unlike a mechanic IT has to take a multitude of different parts and assemble a business infrastructure out of them that, itself, is very complex. IT has no control over the individual parts that they must work with and is at the mercy of many other organizations to keep pieces working individually and, in some cases, together.
The tools of IT are vastly complex and always changing. IT doesn't exist in a vacuum, it uses tools from vendors (or vendor-like entities.) Each product is vastly complex from a hard drive or CPU to servers, switches and software. A single company might run billions of lines of code, none of which they control or create, most that has never been tested together, all which need to be updated constantly and exist in a multitude of states at any given time and use an incredible array of highly complex hardware moving at incredible speeds. Nearly everything in IT is a miracle of engineering. It can take decades of training and experience to really know some products on their own, let alone in combination with other products. But IT faces products that are constantly updating and potentially changing so there is no way to accumulate experience on a single product in a highly useful way without creating huge danger from a lack of updating. The idea that any IT professional can really know everything about any product is far fetched. Even simple products require constantly learning new things about them and keeping up with changes and learning how things change in the real world when interacting with other components.
IT cannot be ripped and replaced. Unlike a car which has a set of known components which can be replaced to fix "any" problem, there is no reliable approach like this in IT. There is no "pay to fix it" or just "stop trying to fix it and replace it" magic fixes. There is no known machine that we can look up all the tested parts of and just make sure that each is there. Every business is a unique "machine" and is in constant motion. The machine that works reliably today may not tomorrow. IT cannot know what will happen, only predict risk and cost and manage change as best as it can.
IT is not isolated. Moreso than other environments, IT does not exist in a vacuum. The infrastructure that was fast ten years ago is slow today. The security that was tight last month is wide open today. The threats that we plan for are relevant one day and totally different the next. Making a car that can drive on a street in 1930 is still useful today. Cars used benzine in 1900 and still use it today. Few aspects of study have the world change around them making knowledge and techniques obsolete even when the business or technology internally does not change, but IT does. IT doesn't have the choice to stand still, many factors, especially risk and security, change constantly.
IT is young and still evolving. IT has only existed theoretically since the 1940s and only practically since the late 1980s. Very little research has gone into the field and the market is still driven by vendors and products rather than research and the industry promoting its own experts. This is slowly changing but has a long way to go.
IT has no unified training process. Other fields have options such as university programs in which to learn about their disciplines. IT, however, lacks this. No university programs exist (or are known to exist) that teach IT as a whole. Some teach ancillary topics, some teach technical bits or do sales on behalf of vendors but no solid university programs teaching IT as a discipline exist and no university has the resources currently to do this. The field requires that common sense and self education provide what is needed and will continue to do so until the field is saturated and the university system has an opportunity to afford and attract research level IT practitioners to its ranks. As long as IT resources remain overly scarce in the field, the field will continue to compensate far beyond the reach of the university system. There is no concept of IT certification (for IT as a whole) and not even the possibility of such a concept at this time. We are decades away from being able to reasonably entertain such an idea.
IT has high expectations. IT professionals are often expected to work long hours with little breaks or time to study, often expected to work all of the worst aspects of management (giving all time and energy to the firm), professionals (extensive personal training, personal responsibilities and guarantees) and blue collar factory workers (often forced to sit idly by when impractical just to be not be seen as "different" by other employees.) The expectations put on IT are often unreasonable even by the worst standards. The field is often mistreated on such a scale that it has impacted the field as a whole as to its ability to progress.
IT is rarely understood by outsiders. Those that hire, manage and utilize IT resources cannot, for understandable reasons listed above, reasonably understand what IT does, should do or would do it allowed to. IT is often encumbered with assumptions from those both above it and below it and this sense of confusion leads to distrust, mistreatment and distancing that increases the complexity and decreases the quality of IT work and potential. IT is often forced to play politics unnecessarily simply because it is not treated equally with other departments and has to work around organizational problems that are unique to IT.
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Great write-up !!
It takes me to positive side (while I used to have negative feelings sometimes due to bothering issues once in a while).
But the problem is Management (non-IT) and end users do not realize this
So many users thinks, IT is like "Run Application -> Next -> Next -> Finish" , "Take the screw driver and fix few drives and RAMs" and worst cases are when users says "AC is not working in my office".
And some end users and Management (non-IT) thinks IT guy can do programming, DBA work, fixing computers, networks, web development etc.....
which drives crazy to us.@scottalanmiller have you already wrote up this article in SW too ?
I believe this article should be highlighted till it reaches to my Management and end-users
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@openit said in IT is Complex:
Great write-up !!
It takes me to positive side (while I used to have negative feelings sometimes due to bothering issues once in a while).
But the problem is Management (non-IT) and end users do not realize this
So many users thinks, IT is like "Run Application -> Next -> Next -> Finish" , "Take the screw driver and fix few drives and RAMs" and worst cases are when users says "AC is not working in my office".
And some end users and Management (non-IT) thinks IT guy can do programming, DBA work, fixing computers, networks, web development etc.....
which drives crazy to us.@scottalanmiller have you already wrote up this article in SW too ?
I believe this article should be highlighted till it reaches to my Management and end-users
Print it out and put it on their desks.
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Is it bad that my reaction upon reading was:
Youtube Video -
@Breffni-Potter said in IT is Complex:
Is it bad that my reaction upon reading was:
Youtube VideoNope. I think that's spot on... But we work in IT and know this. @openit is spot on in that Management thinks that one IT person can do a lot of everything.
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@dafyre said in IT is Complex:
@Breffni-Potter said in IT is Complex:
Is it bad that my reaction upon reading was:
Youtube VideoNope. I think that's spot on... But we work in IT and know this. @openit is spot on in that Management thinks that one IT person can do a lot of everything.
management - you mean anyone who it's IT. For most it seems if you say you are IT, then they assume you know anything/everything to do with computers. Plus they lump things that aren't IT into IT.
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@dafyre said in IT is Complex:
Nope. I think that's spot on... But we work in IT and know this. @openit is spot on in that Management thinks that one IT person can do a lot of everything.
Tonnes of SMB IT people think this way too, or say that they do. This can often be where management gets the idea. Someone in IT claiming that a generalist should be able to handle "anything".
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@Dashrender said in IT is Complex:
management - you mean anyone who it's IT. For most it seems if you say you are IT, then they assume you know anything/everything to do with computers. Plus they lump things that aren't IT into IT.
And not just broad knowledge, but historic and insanely current, too. That computer from thirty years ago that is nothing like any machine today and for which there is no documentation; you know all about that thing, right? And this new technology that just released this morning while you were busy in a meeting and haven't even been to your desk yet, you've already studied it and have years of experience on it, right?
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@scottalanmiller said in IT is Complex:
@Dashrender said in IT is Complex:
management - you mean anyone who it's IT. For most it seems if you say you are IT, then they assume you know anything/everything to do with computers. Plus they lump things that aren't IT into IT.
And not just broad knowledge, but historic and insanely current, too. That computer from thirty years ago that is nothing like any machine today and for which there is no documentation; you know all about that thing, right? And this new technology that just released this morning while you were busy in a meeting and haven't even been to your desk yet, you've already studied it and have years of experience on it, right?
Here Here!
