The IT Ten Commandments

If you'll permit me to indulge in a little philosophy, I'd like to share my view of how IT should work in an organisation. It revolves around ten simple rules (unimaginatively called the IT Ten Commandments) for managing computing services and infrastructure. They are:

1, Know your customer, understand their business and align with it
2, Focus on core and critical functions, outsource the rest
3, Find the best people, look after them and get out of their way
4, Always look for the elegant solution (Effective, Efficient and Simple)
5, Always seek to make your customers life easier
6, Use the right tool for the job
7, Keep abreast of new developments, new technologies and apply when necessary
8, Document everything
9, Protect the assets of your customers. Be fanatical about it.
10, Automate as much as possible

Some of them probably seem a little like navel gazing, but the above is what I live by in my job. I looked around for something like these rules, but nothing really described the core philosophy of this kind of work. I'm a sysadmin from way back and have learned the hard way at times that not paying attention to the fundamentals leads to trouble, late nights and premature hair loss :-)

I'll expand on the commandments in later postings, but for now I will leave you to ponder them and see if they are in away related to your own thinking. I'm always interested in hearing other peoples thoughts on the philosophical aspects of their work.

Welcome...

Good day to whomever may stumble across this humble offering to the blogosphere.

My name is Adam and I'm an IT architect for a Fortune 1000 company. We are involved in the resources sector and have substantial operations across the globe and in particular in some pretty remote places. The scale of our operations creates some fairly interesting technical problems on the IT front, particularly as we deliberately run relatively lean on IT (and other) support staff. My job is to take a bunch of disparate technologies, some of them developed internally and others from the market and make 'em work nicely together.

My main area of focus is building an effective, efficient and simple IT infrastructure that gets out of the way of the end users and lets them get on with the job at hand. I call this the "IT Glue", hence the name of the blog. A good infrastructure creates the foundation on which you can build a modern business and get stuff done. Badly run infrastructures cost more money than they should, create security and risk issues, increase user frustration (thus lowering productivity) and prevent organisations from doing new things that need IT to help them get accomplished.

Over time, I'll be pontificating, sharing and searching for information on this topic through the blog, all with the goal of learning more myself and perhaps helping those in search of knowledge themselves. Anyway, enough rambling. As a first offering, I'd like to share a link to a site that largely sums up the kind of approach I'll talk about in this blog. It is run by Steve Traugott and can be found at Infrastructures.org

More later...