Tom Peruzzi's thoughts on digital, innovation, IT and operations

This post is inspired by Rita’s blogpost showing an interdependency between Coppola’s view on movie sets and organizations and how a startup or company looks like. According to Rita Coppola’s code of ethic is:

1. Write and direct original screenplays
2. Make them with the most modern technology available, and
3. Self-finance them.

Thinking about that as a company sounds like plenty of work, quite easy and like day2day task (strategy, methodology/technology, money) thinking about that in regards to (IT)Ops looks quite harder, but think about IT Ops as a self driven (self financing) organization brings you to 100% the same situation:

1.) Write and direct original screenplays

What’s the vision of your IT Ops department, what’s the mission, which scope and borders do you have to take care? As IT Ops is an Service Fulfillment “company” think about who your (internal) customers are … and how to best reach them?

2.) Make them with the most modern technology available, and

Which technology, ops methodology and process frameworks do you need to fulfill your companies and your customers needs, compliance and security belongings? Not more, not less, within SLAs, not oversized, hypersecured or whatever, but “on the edge”, create a platform for your Ops Environment and keep on developing (use methods like DevOps to secure ongoing Ops Platform Development). Keep your system, your eco-system and your development up and running, always think about customer success and customer value than investigating in technology. Sounds easy, isn’t it. Ops business is people and stress driven “keep alive”, mostly you have no time and/or money to keep your ecosystem up and running. Step back, think about your mission and why you are there as an Ops ? The worse the situation the more pressure will be. Pressure to improve and pressure to outsource. The worse you do the more will stand up and ask why your company does operations on their own… Is it key value to the company?

3.) Self-finance them.

Mainly not your problem, you get the money you get out of your budget, some percentage of overall budget and that’s it, but: Think like a company will do… How do you want to use your money? Just to keep licensing up and running? Just to bring in 2 new e-gadgets per year to fulfill your admins needs of “the new hardware”? Can you do some strategic investment in potentially interesting trends (like trying all those beautiful clouds before your customer wants you to use the cloud?)? Even if you have your fixed budget act as a company, do IT controlling and understand, where your money goes to and whether it creates value or not. If you control and understand your finance structure you will be able to start reflecting your organization and your investment strategy. And beside that: If you know and understand your cost structure you will be in a much better for the upcoming budgets! If you can talk to an economist at his level he will understand and respect you. A Firewall will be no longer “another expensive electric toy for IT”, it will be a risk-reduction investment to secure the company’s IP and business flow…

Thinking about, Coppola can be used for both, company and standalone Ops.