‘IT professionals increasingly define themselves by capabilities they excel at managing’ says Atlassian chap
- Reference: 1598255532
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/08/24/it_professionals_increasingly_define_themselves/
- Source link:
“But it’s increasingly more common for IT professionals to define themselves by the capabilities they excel at managing, like recruiting, marketing, finance and accounting, or sales tech.”
Stame is Atlassian’s senior manager for enterprise architecture and SaaS management and has offered up that opinion in a post titled [1]“How roles and responsibilities change in a cloud transition” .
The post offers the observation “Simply put, moving to cloud releases IT teams from time-intensive maintenance of on-prem technology infrastructure. No more downtime to install updates, and no need to worry about expensive technology falling out of date.”
Little of which, to your humble hack’s mind, is correct outside of a SaaS environment.
Stame ploughs ahead, as follows:
Roles like solutions architect and enterprise architect, which focus on stitching together external cloud services to address business needs, become especially crucial in a cloud transition, though their titles may change. Infrastructure roles such as network administrator, database administrator, and storage administrator, have to calibrate skills to cloud scale infrastructure, and have to deal with more layers of automation. Workers with this valuable experience often refocus on managing cloud environments like Azure or AWS.
At which point, surely, they represent themselves as AWS or Azure experts, which is rather similar to representing themselves as Dell or Microsoft experts today.
At times, Stame seems to be quoting from the procedure manual at the Department of the Bleeding Obvious, with proclamations like: “The degree to which the IT org chart changes will depend on what proportion of the department’s workload is shifting to cloud.”
Or there’s this: “The restructuring of an org chart that accompanies a new tech stack can get lost in conversations that center on budgets and technical capabilities, but it is no less important. Managers should be ready to move personnel around in a way that matches their skills and experience to new and altered tasks. This may require training opportunities for staff. It will also scale back the need for certain skills, and could require completely new skills in their place.”
Hang on a minute, is he saying that when things change, business had better change too? Now that’s disruptive thinking.
Stame also argues that “In an on-prem setting, IT professionals only interact with vendors at the point of sale, after which those in infrastructure management roles are responsible for maintaining the software or hardware.”
Which will come as news to plenty of IT pros that have ongoing vendor relationships as they work together to keep demanding applications humming.
The post suggests that once organisations go cloudy, “managing a capability largely becomes a matter of staying on top of the vendors that enable it, rather than physically maintaining the infrastructure and software. While this system does require some people skills, vendor management is typically less time-consuming than on-prem stack management.”
Which feels a little off, as it’s not as if software that backs up cloud data - for example - is set and forget. Nor did managing an on-prem stack come without vendor management requirements, either to stay on top of issues or to participate in the customer feedback for a vendors use to ensure a constant flow of feedback.
The thrust of Stame’s post – that cloud will mean plenty of change for IT pros and that business expertise is increasingly important - is hard to deny. But his post is also enormously contestable in many ways. ®
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[1] https://www.atlassian.com/blog/enterprise/how-roles-change-in-cloud
[2] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
“In an on-prem setting, IT professionals only interact with vendors at the point of sale, after which those in infrastructure management roles are responsible"
Hmm.. there was me thinking that as someone paid to manage infrastructure, I was an IT *professional* ... you know, on account of being PAID to work with IT!
Maybe I should add "IT Professional" to my skills list on Li / CV etc given that I both manage infra AND go to vendor meetings?
You probably should not. I went fine as "sysadmin" for the past twenty years - if someone wants to know more, he can always come over and ask. Just be damn sure you can cope with the answer.
Not surprising
It is hardly surprising that this Stame is a high-ranking manager, he's got the knack for not saying anything useful in more than enough words.
He also manages to contradict himself when he says that IT workers no longer define themselves by the product they're good at but by the skills they have, then goes on to say that they refer to themselves as AWS or Azure specialists.
He [1]calls himself a strategist, but he has clearly been working more on the sales side of the business.
No wonder he can spout so much bull without thinking.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnstame
Re: Not surprising
I do not know anyone at all who describes themselves as an “IT Professional” and come to think of it I do not think I have ever heard it used outside of people who suffer from the Dunning–Kruger effect.
Re: Not surprising
Presumably, people who agree with him are part of the self-selecting "IT Professional elite".
Re: Not surprising
“IT Professional”
Sometimes I pick that description from a drop-down list when I renew my subscription to an IT publication.
Here's a choice
Do you want to manage, or actually do something productive? It would seem that some 'IT Professionals' have gone for the former.
The post offers the observation “Simply put, moving to cloud releases IT teams from time-intensive maintenance of on-prem technology infrastructure. No more downtime to install updates, and no need to worry about expensive technology falling out of date.”
This "observation" in itself makes it clear that this guy has absolutely no clue whatsoever and should bugger right off. Probably go work for Gartner or somewhere suitably useless and just more blatantly paid-for "research" that coincidendally backs up the claims of whoever paid for it.
A Semantic Web Developer writes in ...... and questions an answer ?
Is that then indicative of the rise of the consultant vapourware agent in the new age style of a financial market expert?
I can't see that as being enormously contestable in many ways, but it is sure to be implausibly denied [:-) as may be shown with a number of down votes here on this thread comment on El Reg, although without further contextual textual clarification accompanying any disagreement is such an opportunity for the sharing of an alternate wisdom immediately lost and presently squandered]
Some folk just have far too much time on their hands and not enough wit to use it in these spaces and media places constructively.
"No more downtime to install updates"
Just unscheduled downtime when the cloud provider goes down.
If I just leave that there some cloud apologist will be along to explain that despite the usual shtick about cloud taking care of resilience the punter has to arrange for multiple clouds yada yada yada to look after that.
And there goes this guy's argument that IT professionals no longer define themselves by the technology they manage. They now have to manage those aspects of cloud technology.
“But it’s increasingly more common for IT professionals to define themselves by the capabilities they excel at managing, like recruiting, marketing, finance and accounting, or sales tech.”
It sounds more like the way HR and agency pimps want to define them.
"Little of which, to your humble hack’s mind, is correct outside of a SaaS environment."
You stole my thunder in the article. The problem is, people like him talk to the PHBs, and the PHBs seem to lap it up and apply it to 'anything in the cloud'.
To get that high in a company to make that sort of dumb-arse leap of logic takes a special kind of stupid - which seems to be around in greater abundance the higher up the management chain you go.