> You are missing something very significant. There are times when doing > so, might give you a significant competitive advantage. Whether that > is time to market, efficiency gains, or some other advantage, there > are many cases that make strong business sense for having paid staff > do customization of third party source.
When you have tens of thousands of servers on farms all over the world to manage, the only thing that can save you a structured processes. Ad hoc is the bane of any such environment. And BTW, all we ever do are customizations. They are just carried out in a very methodical and uniform fashion. Configurations are uniform and repeatable. Exceptions are handled in a consistent manner. Policies and workflows that handle possible exceptions are well established. In the times of crisis, the organizations falls back to well defined processes. No ad hoc is allowed. But most importantly 99% of the stuff is fully automated and repeatable. If I am hit by a car while crossing the street tomorrow, everything will continue to run and somebody else can take over, and not have to wonder what the guy before him did. And let me tell you - time to market is extremely short. By following these well established management processes, we are able to respond in record times, with ultra-high stability and manageability to boot. > If you forget that business needs are the primary driver of IT > specifications, you are going to eventually find yourself out of > employment. (You aren't just doing technology for what you think is > cool. You have to be doing what the business needs, not just what you > *think* the business needs). Actually, that is one of my big regrets. Automating everything and guaranteeing ultra-stability means we aren't allowed to "play", since everything is strict engineering. But I hold that to come up with exceptional service and innovation, one must be allowed to play with stuff, which we are currently not allowed to do. I am actively try to change that aspect, because I believe it's important. Innovation is important. _________________________________________________________________ Connect to the next generation of MSN Messenger http://imagine-msn.com/messenger/launch80/default.aspx?locale=en-us&source=wlmailtagline_______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
