I remember being warned as a teenager about the Golden Chains that bind us. This was meant to refer to the fact that you can end up getting locked into a job from a financial perspective. As you progress through your career you end up getting more and more in your pay cheque and then eventually as your spending grows and takes up the slack you cannot live without the large salary. That being the case the idea of quitting your job and taking a lesser paid job with more job satisfaction seems anathema.
IT Services organisations struggle to deliver in an agile manner and get blamed by their customers for a lack of ability to roll out anything in less than a six month window. If that customer is a government department then the whole thing becomes exponentially more complicated. The constraints that get imposed on you begin to become completely self defeating and in some cases I preside over a situation where security considerations have wiped out any chance of a solution. If they don’t disable the process, they insist on measures that create duplicate and triplicate systems to allow for different security domains. When I worked with the defense industry I was in an environment where each person had two desktops. One on a secure network, the other on a less secure network. Never the two would meet, but I did manage to extract data from one system and migrate it to the less secure system.
If security isn’t cramping your style, then the commercials will. Customers will complain that the supplier is slow and immovable whereas, in reality, they are fulfilling their contract to the letter because if they don’t the financial penalties are astronomical. No-one wants to take the risk! The commercial vehicles that most service providers are working under currently are constructed in such a way as to ensure that the supplier will be completely risk averse. There is no way to circumvent it. I did work with one UK Government Department where we agreed to roll out a solution, get a “feel” for the volumetrics and performance and then frame a service level agreement that encapsulated what we thought was achievable based on the trial. Now that was innovative. Can I get anyone to accept that if we cut corners there are risks that need to be mitigated? Can you imagine the disbelief if I suggested that we stand up a solution that might bring the whole IT infrastructure to its knees – maybe?
Most Systems Integrators could create a solution and have it running on the live estate within weeks, but their contracts preclude them from doing so. If everyone was prepared to take a grown up view of the risks and take some joint ownership of the risks then maybe, just maybe we could get something done. I liked Jeffrey Phillips blog – Timeless Innovation – we can’t continue trying to be Innovative if we are shackled by the Golden Chains of contractual obligation. Those chains need to be broken.
