Pride in Equipment

CIOs and IT Managers of the past took pride in how many servers they managed. CIOs and IT Managers of the future will pride themselves in how few.

Recently one of my team members went to one of our regional offices to help rollout some new equipment and redo the IT infrastructure. What they discovered was chaos:

Notice the mess?

Here is the result after fixing it, with all cables color-coded, fiber optics built to connect everything etc:

Mess? What mess?

The point I am illustrating is that the server room, like everything else, needs maintenance and attention. It needs to be managed by professionals. Why would anyone want to do this when their core competency lies in making people laugh, making widgets, or fixing them?

I have been at conferences where people talk about the tribulations of  moving premises with a server room and how proud they are of their new server room and their team who set it up. But seriously, why should anyone be proud of their server equipment for its own sake? Yes, we should take pride in our work, yes we should  take pride in being professional, and we should be embarrassed if we see entropy bring a rack down to the example shown here. But our true source of pride should come from enabling our business to be the best it can be in delivering its core competency.

Unless servers are part of our core competency, More servers, less fun I say.