Let me begin with a disclaimer. This is my opinion.
Skype recently had a major service outage that lasted almost two days. Millions of blogs seem to have talked about it. Since I didn't use Skype, I wanted to talk a little bit about a more relevant outage. This week TNS had a service outage for the Unity Voice Mail system. Needless to say, I have been involved in some of the work regarding this outage.
Lots of people wonder what happened. In a nutshell, a message store on one of the supporting servers got corrupted. The repair process for the 4000 users located there to prevent loss of data was very time consuming. The short version is that some things were done right and some things were done wrong.
What was done right? A bunch of people in different departments worked together to fix the problem for Penn State.
What was done wrong? Lots of group provide services. Why do IT folks create separate departments to manage the same service? I have always been puzzled by this attitude. We have designers, admins, support staff, and marketing people to name a few. Lots of times these groups work independently of each other and only talk during meetings.
Why?? It makes little sense to me to separate the functions of service delivery from each other. As a designer of solutions, I know that I have to talk to all the people who come later in the process to build a system.
1. I have to talk to admins for their perspective on keeping things running.
2. I have to talk to support people so that I know what kinds of problems exist, so that I can design a better system removing those issues.
3. I talk to marketing so that I can figure out what is being sold.
Most importantly, designers need to talk to the USERS. Why would any IT person want to talk to the users? Um, because without users there is no service, that's why. Also, when we talk to our customers, we make sure that all the different expectations can line up.
At the high level, we are all Penn State.(To borrow some school spirit.) Since collaboration and openness facilitate processes by getting the relevant parties together, maybe we ought to look at building service and project teams instead of building departmental boundaries(in the form of processes). As Penn State IT we are here for the mission of the University. Our users are the University in the form of faculty, staff, and most importantly the students. If we listen to the users, then we can build relevant, useful, and reliable services together.
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