devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Tag: IT roles

  • Things We Should Acknowledge, Part Two: Skills Are Less Relevant

    Things We Should Acknowledge, Part Two: Skills Are Less Relevant

    This is perhaps the toughest issue for all of us to acknowledge: The longer you are in the space, the more skills you have filled out on LinkedIn (or wherever you are tracking your career for HR reps to look at) but the skills you possess today are, by definition, a subset of the skills you will possess even a couple of months from now if you change roles. Note that I said “change roles,” not “change employers.” The fact is that we use an insane number of tools in the development, DevOps and operations environments, and we’re addicted to adding new ones (that might be a hint about part three of this series). Changing roles within a company can involve minor changes, or it can take you to a whole new environment where no one cares that you are a Java genius; they want to know how fast you can pick up Python and be truly productive. Or they nod at your talk of configuring servers and ask if you can do that with Ansible on containers. It’s just not as important anymore for most employees to have a specific skillset. That’s a major contributor to the problems I talked about in part one.

    Of course, there are roles in IT that involve far less change. Email administration, for example, isn’t all that different from the way it has been since, well, forever. We have changed how/where the server is configured and many orgs have added SSO or multifactor authentication, creating new issues, but it’s all evolutionary. When NoSQL systems came out, it looked like a major change in DBA work, but it really wasn’t. Within a year, reality put SQL over top of NoSQL stores and DBAs kept chugging along.

    But DevOps has impacted both development and operations in profound ways. We pretty much standardized on Java, with all of its warts, because it was object oriented, general purpose and could be compiled if needed. Though embedded largely stayed with C, there was no serious competition in the enterprise for Java and Java-like (.NET) languages. Knowing them meant you could do everything but real-time/embedded development jobs—and even some embedded work shifted to Java as prices for miniaturized compute power dropped.

    But that changed. The inflection point was JavaScript, and from there, we went a little bit crazy. When JavaScript took off, full-stack developers needed to know one front-end and a couple of backend languages. Other languages still existed—the staying power of both Perl and PHP is somewhat surprising to me; they’re both good languages but have limitations. But still, no serious competition. But Node.js took JavaScript to the server, Ruby was popular for backends, Python came along for quick scripting … And now we have apps written in those and a dozen more languages floating around.

    I chose languages to fit the whole story into a blog because they see less change than the operations side, where we’ve gone from annual big releases to rolling deployments updated frequently and all the support tools changed in the process. Infrastructure has changed, data stores have changed, mobility has changed, UI targets have changed—basically, it’s a chaotic mess.

    And you’re in the heart of it, keeping the data flowing and the org running. It’s astounding, and you deserve more kudos than you’re likely getting. So approach hiring differently. Some orgs are already there, but skill-based hiring is still too prevalent. Hire broad technical knowledge and a desire to know more. As someone I know honestly said in a job interview once, “No, I never used it, but it is just another programming language. I’ll be productive in a week.” She got the job and delivered as promised. For all but those few corner-case roles, hire for potential and achievements and skills will follow.

  • Many CIOs Left Out in the Cold, Survey Finds

    Many CIOs Left Out in the Cold, Survey Finds

    While many enterprises realize that the very success of their business depends upon how well they invest and execute in their technology deployments, a full quarter of CIOs don’t have direct access to their company’s board of directors. This was a finding from the recent “ITWeb Brainstorm CIO Survey.” The 2019 survey was conducted August through October and captured input from close to 200 CIOs.

    While a quarter of the CIOs surveyed said they don’t have direct access to their company’s board, more than half did say that they report to the CEO and half do have a seat on their board.

    Those results indicate that at least half of enterprises realize the importance of enterprise technology in their future.

    However, when it came to public sector IT, those CIOs expressed that their organization perceives IT as more of a technical support role than as a strategic business partner.

    The survey also found enterprises have significant work to do when it comes to their digital maturity. According to the survey findings, 54% of respondents self-reported as having a “basic” digital maturity. While 38% self-described their digital maturity as advanced, and only 6% as fully mature. That could explain, at least partially, why CIO respondents in private sector businesses said their organizations perceive them as a strategic business partner.

    How do CIOs say they spend their time? Forty-seven percent said they spend their time digitizing processes, while about a third of respondents said they spent their time discussing strategy with business leadership, security/risk management, governance/compliance and developing new products and services.

    When it came to what is holding back their efforts, the CIOs cited the following in order of importance: lack of skills, conflicting stakeholder priorities, unrealistic expectations around delivery, legacy constraining new developments and low budget. So it’s no surprise that 55% of respondents said their organizations are actively seeking new skills, while only 13% are not growing new talent.

    The survey also found that respondent IT budgets are outpacing core price inflation and those budgets are targeting cybersecurity (63%), data analytics (47%), ERP and core applications (44%), network infrastructure (40%) and automation/RPA (40%).

    What is so surprising with these findings is that only 36% of private sector organizations have an IT budget for innovation (only 15% for public sector organizations), and 17% of private sector CIOs said that they don’t have any time for innovation as they are too busy supporting their current systems. That figure leaped to 39% for the public sector.

    In today’s era of digitization, that’s not a tenable situation for enterprises that want to succeed and thrive. Our recent post, “CIOs See Dramatic Change Ahead,” covers the results of a 2019 Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO Survey, which found those organizations where the IT team is formally involved in business technology decision-making have better business outcomes.

    Also, according to that survey, those enterprises that consider themselves to be digital leaders outperformed in many categories including the time to market, customer experience, revenue growth and profitability in the previous year. Digital leaders were found to be more likely to introduce “major new changes to products and services” in the next three years and focus on profitability.

    When considering those findings, it’s clear maintaining legacy business-technology investments just isn’t good enough.

    — George V. Hulme

  • How the Cloud is Reshaping IT

    How the Cloud is Reshaping IT

    The cloud has been rapidly reshaping and redefining IT as we know it, from the language we use to describe it to the management models and infrastructure itself. Providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure have transformed cloud computing, giving businesses access to IT resources anytime, anywhere. At the same time, this rapid migration off-premises has been reshaping the needs and roles in the IT department.

    The Cloud and IT

    The following are four ways that the cloud is redefining IT roles and operations:

    Sysadmin vs. DevOps

    When you compare sysadmin vs. DevOps, you’ll find that they’re similar roles, but also distinct. A system administrator, or sysadmin, is the person responsible for configuring, operating and maintaining computer systems, servers in particular. This jack-of-all-trades IT role handles everything from installations and upgrades to security, troubleshooting, technical support and more.

    And then we have the evolution of DevOps, which could very well be the biggest game-changer to the IT process. Under the DevOps umbrella, a team of software developers, IT operations and product management people must combine strengths to effectively streamline and stabilize operations for rolling out new apps and updating code to support and improve the whole business.

    With the cloud taking over and without the need for physical, on-prem servers, a large portion of the sysadmin role has become lost to automation. As this change was occurring, sysadmins remained effective as their role shifted toward the support of developers, combining efforts and thus giving birth to the term DevOps. So, can you truly compare sysadmin vs. DevOps? Well, the roles are similar in the sense that sysadmins can do a lot of what DevOps guys do, but not the other way around, making DevOps the newer, bigger jack of all trades.

    IT Operations Management vs. Cloud Operations Management

    IT Operations Management is responsible for the efficiency and performance of IT processes, which can include anything from administrative processes to hardware and software support, and for both internal and external clients. IT management sets the standard policies and procedures for how service and support is carried out and how issues are resolved.

    Thanks to the cloud, IT management has also given way to automation and outsourcing. Cloud operational processes are now a more efficient way of using resources, providing services and meeting compliance requirements. In the same way IT operations and projects (ITOP) manages IT processes, cloud operations management is doing so in a cloud environment with resource capacity planning and analytics that provide vital intelligence into how to control resources and run them cost-effectively.

    IT Service Management vs. Cloud Service Management

    Traditional IT service management (ITSM) dealt with strategizing in the design, delivery, management and innovation of the way an organization is using IT. This involved developing, implementing, and monitoring IT governance and management using frameworks such as COBIT, Microsoft Operations Framework, Six Sigma and ITIL, for example.

    As the cloud became a better option for operational management, companies have turned to it to transform their business model via service providers including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure to outsource IT for more efficient, scalable services.

    Since cloud computing resources are hosted as off-site VMs and managed externally, ITSM has grown more complex, introducing cloud service management (CSM) as an extension of ITSM, pushing in three core areas: automated service provisioning, DevOps and asset management. And as ITSM shifts toward CSM, the concerns lie in the adoption strategy and the approach for designing, deploying and running of cloud services.

    Finance and Operations vs. DevFinOps

    In a world where IT projects are known to exceed budgets and coming up with cost estimates is no easy feat, how can businesses break down a reasonable overall estimate for projects in which applications are developed, built and run on a utility? The answer is to make estimates little by little as parts of the work get completed, integrating financial planning directly into IT development operations. In other words: DevFinOps.

    IT asset management (ITAM) merges the financial, contractual and inventory components of an IT project to support lifecycle management and strategic decision-making. The strategy involves both software and hardware inventory and the decision-making process for purchases and redistribution. DevFinOps expands and builds upon ITAM by fixing financial cost and value of IT assets directly into IT infrastructure, updating calculations in real time and simplifying the budgeting process.

    What This Means For You

    Cellphones, self-driving cars, DevOps … cloud computing is yet another evolution in technology—albeit a huge one—and IT is simply going through a metamorphosis. The best way of looking it at is that cloud is not killing IT, it’s redefining IT. Enterprises are following suit as they make the shift and change or update traditional IT roles. As IT evolves, the cloud is paving the way for opportunities for those who adapt and evolve their roles with it.

    — Jay Chapel