Effective IT calls for intelligent urgency

If you’ve been CTO at the same company for a few years, things ought to be running fairly smoothly. All major systems should be stable, and overall uptime should be solid. Your sys admins’ pagers and cell phones should be mostly silent through the night. You’ve probably dispensed with what I call “wasted urgency” in your IT organization — the frenetic activity so often wrongly conflated with actual forward movement toward problem solving.

Once your IT operation is clicking, a more intelligent urgency should ultimately take hold, leaving your team in a position to get ahead of the curve by continually refining IT infrastructure until it’s bulletproof. A period of hard-earned, relative calm is the best time to fill nagging IT gaps. But how do you identify and prioritize them, establish a vision for improvement, and then execute properly?

First, if most of your IT strategies have been focused on initiatives with the broadest impact, it could be time to take action on ones that affect smaller employee populations. If your ears are open, you’ll hear informal feedback regularly, but formal employee surveys are still a useful way to elicit feedback about a variety of workplace issues, including IT.

Here at InfoWorld, our Mac user population has been ghettoized for quite a few years now, while our back-end and PC desktop infrastructures have received the lion’s share of extremely tight budget dollars. Worse yet, one of our key vendors has yet to ship a version of its software for Mac OS X, leaving many of our Mac users doing their most critical work in the withering OS 9 environment.

Mac users can be a passionate bunch, and so in our annual employee survey, they let us know exactly how they have felt about their IT struggles. Good relationships involve both praise and criticism, so I appreciated the feedback — especially because it aligned with actions my staff had already taken. With the Mac issues so clearly identified, I exercised my management prerogative to raise their priority in terms of the budget available.

But recognizing a problem and assigning it a high priority means little without a vision for improvement. Previously, we had never had a coherent strategy for managing our struggling Mac environment. Ordering and deploying new systems has provided a perfect opportunity for us to implement the more consistent Mac administration approach we have quietly been architecting.

Going forward, we’re looking at our Mac population as a collection of consistent systems that can be managed organically, not just as a scattering of individual workstations, each with a quirky personality of its own. We’re standardizing system images, putting systems in place to push out consistent patches and software updates from a central source, automating hardware and software inventories, and enabling remote administration. This vision is consistent with how we have architected our back-end server and our desktop PC environments during the past few years; it’s just extending our general IT operating approach to the Mac environment. The tools are new — Mac OS X Server and Apple Remote Desktop — but the approach is standard practice for the rest of our IT infrastructure.

In the end, the moral of the Mac story at InfoWorld is pretty simple: Listen to your users, but don’t waste the urgency of your response implementing quick, reactive solutions that don’t really address the core problem. Take the short-term heat from the users and leverage the time to build a coherent solution that will put the core problems to bed for good.