Ready, Fire, Aim, Paint New Targets

I always seem to find the shopping cart with the misaligned wheel, despite what I'm sure is a whole lot of engineering and management "process" that goes into preventing this little annoyance. Oh, well, maybe I should just learn to accept that shopping cart misalignment is an unavoidable fact of life?
.
Speaking of inevitable misalignment, let's switch gears and talk about the equally pervasive misalignment of Information Technology, and the people who, for all their well-intentioned "process," seem unable to prevent, and perhaps even unintentionally foster, the problem.
.
IT Alignment: everyone wants it, but, if you ask the average CEO, practically nobody seems to have fully realized it. Why?

.
IT alignment demands the simultaneous targeting of four basic organizational goals:

• Optimizing and applying the individual talent of the IT professionals on staff, consultants and employees alike, to...
• ...meet the day-to-day business requirements of the individual corporate clients they serve, while...
• ...shepherding the collective design efforts of all IT professionals on staff: the hardware, software, and networking tools they use; the solutions they buy or build; and the architecture they establish, all to support...
• ...the achievement of the collective organizational mission of the company as a whole, as embodied in the various operational and customer-focused initiatives of corporate management.

Whether instinctively or consciously, every IT manager understands this. However, because the essential identity of an IT organization is defined more by its reactive response to immediate technical contingencies than by its proactive contribution to long-range business planning, IT leaders typically tackle these four targets separately rather than simultaneously:

In reacting to the myriad things that go wrong in an IT environment, IT leadership understandably establishes isolated processes to manage and measure their performance in hitting each of these targets, and voila! Misalignment.

.

Psychologically speaking, how do IT managers reconcile and accept having to live with this misalignment? All it take is a little cognitive dissonance: "Ready, fire, aim." Then, by clever application of a few cooked-to-order metrics, they paint new targets wherever their arrows land, and pat themselves on the back for hitting the bullseyes. Situation ethics, after all, can make a virtue of any vice, and are a well-known means of rationalizing and taking comfort in situational behavior.

.

How do we fix this situational misalignment of Information Technology?

.

I think I know. But, who cares what I think?

.

What do you think?

.

What's IT All About, Anyway?

"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."

- Edsger Dijkstra, 1930-2002

I've been in computing for a long time, working on countless projects, large and small, at every level of the OSI Systems Inrterconnection Reference Model. Over a longer span of years than vanity allows me to enumerate here, I've been "'round the block," as they say.

So, I wondered how it was, then, that my kids always managed to stump me by asking the simplest possible question: Dad, what do you do for a living?

For all my experience programming, installing, upgrading, configuring, maintaining, and retiring thousands of "things," could it be that I didn't really know, in any fundamental sense, what I was doing? That I'd never come to terms with the deep basics of Information Technology?

So many things, so many distractions: computers, from laptops to servers to mainframes; data storage systems, from high-end multi-terabyte farms to the tiny iPod; the dizzying array of networking widgets, from firewalls to gateways to hubs...

So many things, each with their own special language to learn and master... But, does their mastery make me an auhentic master, or just some modern-day Nimrod?

Question: Peering past all these distractions, straining to find a way out of Babel, what is all of our "stuff" really for?