Ladies and Gentlemen, Knowledge Has Left The Building

  by Richard Muirhead | 06 Mar 2008 | Permalink | CMDB, IT Management, Teamwork

Back in the early 90’s only 10% of the operational expenditure involved in running a data center was people , by 2001 it was 30% and today this has risen to around 50% driven both by escalating numbers and scarcity and hence cost of skilled staff.

That’s a significantly increased number of expensive, skilled folk filling war-rooms’ white boards with application topologies and system behavior diagrams in an effort to fix outages faster, plan for safer changes and remove configuration time bombs from their environment.

And what happens to all that work? At best it is captured in an Adobe Acrobat file and rapidly becomes out of date, most likely it is wiped from the white board before then next meeting. A good chunk of this critical knowledge on how to run the data center remains in the heads of these technologists and much of it is forgotten, only to be wastefully regenerated and refreshed for the next audit, project or crisis.

Here at Tideway we often refer to this as tribal knowledge, hard won and essential to keeping the Amazon.com, Facebook, Barclays online banking, CMC Marketmaker® international Foreign Exchange trading, Oracle general ledger applications, SAP Supply Chain Management applications running and the world economy growing.

As the storm clouds of the sub prime crisis roll in over the darkening and increasingly unwelcoming seas of 2008 perhaps some thought should be given to the consequences of inevitable headcount adjustments in 2001.

At the best of times the average tenure of these artisans is 12 months. Would shareholders think it acceptable that the organization be dependent on the knowledge held within the heads of these skilled staff? Is it professional for the managers of IT to meet their headcount reduction targets by allowing another wave hard won application configuration tips and tricks to cast off and float out the door to find refuge in some contract work.

Then when the next wave of profits washes over the banking industry and they are hired back full-time to deposit a few more feet of ill understood IT sediment …and most likely in some other organization. Back at your organization, your new recruits are busy leveraging what tribal knowledge they carried over from previous gigs in negotiating a healthy pay packet and severance terms from you!

Time’s a wasting, there is a better way: knowledge capture, decision support, automated service topologies. It has come a long way since the manually populated Business Service Management tools of 2000, let alone the flashing traffic lights of the 1990s. And unlike many tools of those times, it could be giving you piece of mind, and securing your job…not next quarter or year, but by the end of next week. Now that just sounds sensible.