On 12/15/2011 6:17 PM, Doug Hughes wrote:
On 12/15/2011 10:57 PM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
You're in a social situation - at a party or something - You're
talking with some CFO or otherwise interesting financial person about
work, and Dilbert cartoons, and the wastefulness and inefficiencies
of typical corporations or typical organizations, etc. Somebody uses
a term like "overhead" or "secondary" referring to support roles.
But you're an IT person - You're a support role, and depending on
what is your core business, most likely you're overhead.
With only a moment's thought, and only a few words, how do you
describe the value that your role adds to the organization? How do
you justify your own existence, casually, when talking to a CFO or
somebody in a social situation?
Simple: we drive efficiency in the rest of the organization through
applied information technology. We help people make the best use of
computing resources through expert advice. We are a dollar multiplier
for the organization. "What if I could make your reports or
simulations run 2-10x faster than they do now? What if you didn't have
a person and they ran 5x slower? What value does that provide to the
organization? What if you had a security breach that took the company
totally offline for days? We help prevent that." You could then ask
the rhetorical question about what value marketing folks provide?
(dollar multipliers for bringing in sales).
This pretty much sums it up for me. I tend to describe myself as an
'enabler', and I try to approach my work with that perspective. Server
and platform stability has to come high up, but so does them actually
serving a purpose and meeting the needs of the company and staff.
In my case I'm lucky in that I never have to justify my existence. Our
entire business model is based around the web (egovernment company). No
sysadmin/support, no servers; no servers, no business. Even if they
start to talk about the cloud, my role as sysadmin stretches far above
and beyond. My work, just like the work of the project managers and
developers, is on the central product.
Paul
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