Get your IT house in order

One recent Saturday morning, I woke with one seemingly simple thing in mind: cleaning out and organizing the closets in my bedroom. If my closets were a database system, the contents would be stored as BLOBs (binary large objects) of varying sizes with no defining structure — just a dumping ground for stuff. As I began dragging things out of the closet, I found items as varied as a backpack, a pair of old ski gloves, about 10 square feet of foam padding, and pocket change in three different international currencies (anyone need Thai bahts?). Faced with a mound of the messy detritus of my own life, I did what most people would probably do: I went to the store to buy even more stuff to organize the stuff I already had.

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In short order, I found a top-of-the-line shelving system and loaded it into the car with high hopes. I unloaded all the pieces and parts and took them to my bedroom, but I was quickly distracted by something else. When bedtime rolled around, the path to my bed was blocked by all the junk. I crammed the backpack, the ski gloves, the foam padding, and the Thai bahts back into the closet and jammed the pieces of the shelving system into the sparse remaining space — which is where the shelving system sits as I write. My closets have never been in worse shape.

I’ll leave it to the Martha Stewarts of the world to offer home organizing advice, but my closet experience reminds me of some of the particular trials of IT. As IT managers, we spend lots of time trying to organize and make sense of disparate systems — the “stuff” of IT. To make it all the more challenging, unless you’re working for a brand new startup, the homes IT managers move into already have closets full of stuff that need to be made sense of and organized. Quite often, IT managers take the approach I took when I realized my closets were out of control — they start looking for products to help put it all together, when in fact what they really need is what money can’t buy: discipline, planning, and thoughtful execution.

I have no doubt that I will eventually need some kind shelving to solve my closet problem, but I jumped the gun a bit on the timing of my purchase. What I needed before buying anything was a ruthless analysis of the need and function of each item in my closet — a task that is admittedly less engaging than shopping for a shiny new shelving system.

Technologists who go through their careers believing that IT provides strategic leverage need to be circumspect about proposing products as solutions to business problems. Technology is a business enabler, not an elixir that cures all ills. If your company has project management problems, rushing out to buy Microsoft Project probably won’t improve the situation markedly, just as rolling out a groupware solution with shared calendaring will not make meetings run on time. Good technology choices can reflect, amplify, and reinforce good management practices, but products do not create them.

Once you’ve gotten your priorities straight, you won’t find a better source of product information than our deep-dive Test Center reviews and our online IT Product Guide. The evaluation we offer will help you make purchasing decisions that increase your chances of success — just don’t buy shelves before you really understand your closet situation.