Legacy, whenever the word comes up I think of characters
like Don Corleone, Michael Jordan and Bill Gates. Legacy means at some point you've left
something that will endure long after you've moved on.
In IT, legacies are usually synonymous with curses and
lately I've been doing a lot of cursing.
I've inherited a legacy of sorts with the start of a new contract.
It's with an industrial electronics company with an IT
history that stretches back at least as far as Novell Netware from the piles of
old software I've found.
From what I've been able to gather from sources inside the
company as well as former IT employees (now acting as fair weather consultants)
there was a time when IT was ruled with an iron fist. The head of the gang of six, as I now refer
to them, was an unpleasant database administrator. His rule was absolute because databases and
specifically the data within them are this company's lifeblood.
In case you haven't gotten the picture yet, he who holds the
keys to the data holds the company by the short hairs. A legacy that's persisted to the present
day. A legacy that now haunts my every
billable hour.
To say that the previous IT manager abused his position
would be an understatement. The only
force that could displace him and eventually the entire gang of six was when
technology began to make it possible to bypass him.
The tipping point? When someone made the decision to move a
critical resource, messaging, out of his control and into the cloud. Not that it was ever of any real concern to
him but this sudden defiance of his rule was taken as a bad omen of things to
come. For him it was time to abdicate
the throne.
Remember, up to that point, his rule was absolute like some tyrannical
overlord. User concerns were of no
concern with unbridled shouting matches the norm if any dared question the
authority of the gang of six. By the
way, the primary duty of the gang of six was to massage the data. Everything else was secondary and it's still
evident in the present day.
Not long after the overlord's departure the remaining gang
members found themselves in an uncomfortable position. Instead of tightly regimented tasks assigned
by their overlord they now had to support an unpredictable user base. A role they seemed unsuited for from the
evidence I've uncovered so far.
There was even one who did nothing all day except "cleanse"
the data. Which for all intents and
purposes involved little more than editing spreadsheets produced by the
overlords many data mines.
Say what you want about Microsoft's Office 365 but I for one
have a new found respect for anything that would get rid of that kind of IT
organization.
Shortly after the overlord exited the company in a huff due
to the peasant revolt and subsequent embracing of cloud democracy other members
of the gang of six soon fell away.
Fast forward to the present day and open on me sifting
through the remains of an abandoned IT department.
Surprisingly, instead of boxes or assorted refuse piled up in
some kind of dilbertesque cubicle nightmare, I find dedicated office space. There's actual doors, desks, rooms and even a
workshop with the remains of long abandoned projects still waiting for
attention on the workbenches along the wall.
It's a little spooky, like someone let loose with a neutron
bomb. I keep looking for those outlined
shadows on the walls that look like the photo negative of somebody's
shadow. Thankfully, I haven't found any
yet.
Somebody was trying to be organized at some point but like
the old saying goes, the proof is in the pudding. I'll put it to you this way, I don't think
Bill Cosby will be doing any commercials for these guys.
As I start my third week I already have bad memories. One of the worst was working on what should
have been a relatively simple project with one of the former gang of six (now a
consultant). It was a simple PC swap but
the wrinkles became evident all too soon.
The now "consultant" refused to come onsite turning what
should have been a day's work into three. When things went wrong it wasn't the
disembodied voice on the speakerphone that had to bear the brunt of a fuming
department head.
Unforeseen
complications that should have been addressed in a lab instead of on the
production floor almost cost the company thousands in lost revenue. Quick and dirty fixes instead of solid
solutions ruled the day.
It's not that he didn't mean well but the lack of planning
and laissez faire attitude toward the critical nature of this aspect of the
business bothered me. When I discussed
it with the site supervisor he recognized the attitude immediately. It was no different under the rule of the
overlord.
IT is a dynamic affair and no one day is like the next but
there is always ample opportunity for good planning that includes a fallback
position if something goes wrong. At
this company it seems things going wrong are the order of the day.
As I traverse the lonely halls and rows of cubicles I see
evidence of the same kind of haphazard deployment and lack of planning that
have crippled IT in the organization. In
short, the tyrants didn't need to burn the castle as they fled, it was already
crumbling.
By now it's become obvious to me that IT people that massage
databases for a living aren't always the best qualified to make decisions for
an entire organization. Some things are
better left to those of us who'd rather not spend our time memorizing SQL
queries and worrying about primary keys.
Let me be blunt. I
respect someone who has the ability to manage huge volumes of data and
understand the intricacies of how it all relates to each other. In the end, however, these people are power
users not network or system administrators.
There's simply too much to keep track of in both disciplines for anyone to
perform both functions competently.
Defy that logic and you end up with an organization like the one I'm
trying to piece back together.
Shortly before I arrived the company suffered something
largely unheard of in IT these days. A
rampant virus infection. Caused by
ineffective security policies, lack of management tools and outdated security
software, it was an inevitable event just waiting for an opportunity.
Token gestures of security like a recently implemented
mandatory password policy are good but trivial in the context of a broken IT
organization. Make no mistake, this is a broken IT organization. Its most poignant symbol, a four foot high pile of discarded rack
servers numbering in the dozens just inside the door of the abandoned IT
workshop. With the relative dearth of IT
services available it seems more like evidence of a scorched earth policy than
evidence of a virtualization project.
Truth be told many likely became unnecessary with the move
to cloud services and a "sort of" consolidation of physical servers
into virtual. Ultimately, however, it
seems more like evidence of retaliation than consolidation. Ask any system admin, for example, how many Domain controllers should exist in
ANY Windows network and the answer you'll get is 2.
We currently have one and it lives on a virtual server with
no backup and no failover. That's one of
my priority projects by the way. I'm utilizing
a discarded hulk and parts scavenged from the carcasses of similarly afflicted
hardware.
Questionable licensing, inadequate resources and a lack of
documentation are all symptoms of an IT organization in disarray. When the answer to "What's the admin
password" requires a phone call to an outside party for the answer you
know you have issues.
In short, my job is to try to rebuild an IT organization
while trying to convince a wary executive suite that I seek no term as the next
IT overlord
The most significant hurdle has little to do with a new
server or software, however. Years of
abuse from a bad IT organization has made every purchase and every policy change,
no matter how insignificant, an exercise in bureaucracy. A trait that has seen others (not of the gang
of six) leave after only hours.
There's such distaste for the way things were that I'm
relegated to cubeville, far away from those cozy IT digs.
My story is ongoing and luckily much of my remedial work can
take place after hours where I'm free to curse the names of my predecessors
without concern for delicate ears.
The lesson here can be summed up in one of the first
meetings I had with my site supervisor. We
were discussing how the IT organization should be structured in the future. Remember, right now I'm the entire IT
department apart from a few specialized "consultants" still massaging
the data.
He thought the organization should be headed up by yet
another maestro of data to which I replied, " So you're ok with the way
things were?"
He replied, " Well, no, it was awful"
Don't get me wrong, data's important and this company lives
and dies by it. Thing is, I see a future
with at least two people to keep this place humming along. One a data specialist, the other
concentrating on the network and server infrastructure. Both can offer support and with a properly
running IT shop, both will have plenty of time to support the user community
instead of putting out fires and making excuses.
...and both will be equals.
Sadly, most of us can't afford to set up an server farm in a
spare bedroom just to satisfy our need to tinker; but with virtualization you
can come very close.
So what happens when you're the guy tasked with fixing the
mess someone else left behind? In my
case the best course of action was to take it one step at a time.
The
point is that the key to fixing problems in IT is to identify them in the first
place. This particular organization was
a victim of ad-hoc management. In short, IT was repeatedly blindsided by
issues that wouldn't have existed if someone was paying attention. 
A
week before my departure the business hired on a full-time IT manager and I was
glad my efforts were able to provide him with more than horror stories. Having laid out the issues, current
configuration and procedures put in place he had a better starting point than I
did.
We currently have one and it lives on a virtual server with
no backup and no failover. That's one of
my priority projects by the way. I'm utilizing
a discarded hulk and parts scavenged from the carcasses of similarly afflicted
hardware.
How times have changed.
Now you're hard pressed to find server hardware dedicated to something
other than virtualization in any organization of size. Gone are the days of hovering around the
lobby waiting for your RAID controller to show up so you can get your new
Exchange server up and running. Now, a
few clicks, an ISO image and you can have a new server online in minutes. 
