When I started my IT Career I heard this joke about developers…,

…A team of IT experts/developers are sitting together in a room bragging to each other about their skills.  Then the phone rings.  The head developer picks up the phone and talks for a few minutes.  Then hangs up the phone and says to the group, “That was the boss; he has a new software project for us.  You guys start coding; I’ll run upstairs to see what he wants.”

At least I thought it was a joke.  Too often working with software development teams, IT experts and even for managers this is the exact scenario I run into over and over again.  There’s this idea that we need to start getting something done before we know where we are at or where we are going.  What happens a year later we hear the lament,

“If I knew now what I knew then, I would have done it completely differently, but now it’s too late.”

Long before there was a PMP certification, Agile or Scrum we were developing strategies for avoiding these types of “cart before the horse” problems.  I’ve found that the first successful step is a strategic Assessment.  I outline this in my planning process on my site.

I like to think of a project like a walk through a dark crowded forest.  (I probably read the Hobbit at too young and age and it has affected how I think about these things.) If you had a map of the forest you would need to identify two things before you find a path.  You must understand “Where you are at” and “Where you want to go”.  The strategic assessment identifies where you are at today.

I’ve noticed that lots of developers prefer to start over from scratch.  Especially when working on a website.  I know that building a Network for the first time is similar for the infrastructure expert.  I think this is because when there is nothing, we know where we are at today.  We are at ground zero.  We have to build something from scratch.  As the business grows and the network grows, networks become convoluted.  So without a good change control process, most IT groups have no idea where they are starting from.   When looking at a map, it’s obvious that in order to create a path from point A to point B, you must know where point A is.  Yet IT experts seldom know where Point A is.  So when trying to get to Point B, they miss steps.  These steps become problems that haunt the IT department for years.  Unfortunately if the IT department has no idea where they are at today, they have to admit this to management.  Admitting this to anyone means admitting to fallibility in the minds of some IT experts.  Instead these experts start “coding” like our experts in the joke.  This gives the impression that they know what they are doing.

Just as important as knowing where you are going on a project is knowing where you are starting from.  “Winging it” means that you really don’t know where you are starting from.  For the client this is going to be wasteful of the time and resources while the IT team tries to figure out where they are going.  The strategic assessment becomes the tool for identifying where you are at today.  Consultants like me, work with IT departments who have never done a strategic assessment.  It often puts us at odds with IT departments.  I would recommend to any IT expert, to develop an IT assessment process.  This way when the IT consultant is brought in, it’s only a verification that you do know where you are at

How to Document Working with IT departments as a Consultant in Seattle, I find that most IT experts may be good at technology, but have no idea how to document it.  Over the years I’ve developed my own style.  Most IT people usually ask how to document their systems.  Actually this comes from their managers who want me to teach their IT professionals how to write their documentation.  Spend some time with ITIL and it begins to break down.  I’ve tried to share some basics here of where to start when documenting a network.

IT operational roles center on the network technology components.  Network technology components include hardware, software and even users on the network.  Each component is described by the settings associated with the component.

Hardware – This is the physical, mechanical component that manages the data and data transmission.  Common hardware components include (but are not limited to): Servers, Routers, switches, printers and workstations.

Software – These are a list of digital instructions that the hardware uses to interface with other network components including users.  Software is dependent on a hardware platform and is not necessarily compatible with all platforms.  Software is divided into two primary types: Operating system and Applications.

Users – An information system converts data input into data output based on the digital instructions in the software.  The user determines the information conversion and the way that the data provides What, Why, Where, Who, How and When answers to questions.

Infrastructure properties

Additionally, to define hardware, software and user components settings define each network resource.

For example:  A server description includes

The hardware configuration information – of the server includes manufacturer, central processing unit (CPU), random access memory (RAM), hard disk space and other hardware settings associated with the physical Server.

The Software configuration – of the server, includes all software loaded on the physical box.  Software settings, within the application, describe the Operating system, Application(s), utilities and communication protocols.

The user configuration –Includes security settings that describe what users may and may not use including: What level of access the user has to network resources.  A list of network resource would include: Company databases, fileservers, email, printers etc.

The complete server configuration will have an “–ability” description, a technical description and a long list of hardware and software settings.  Each IT tactical role will use the network configuration settings to maintain and troubleshoot the system.  A documented network will include enough description of the overall network, that the systems could be replicated without a backup of anything more than the corporate data.

This is a start.  Remember that most networks are pretty much the same.  They can be described by their hardware, software and users.  Properties are the specific details in each of these areas.  In a process, document each path a data might take through the system.  Remember as technical experts we really don’t know what we are doing until we can write it down in a way that makes sense to someone else.

I’m kind of used to the way technical and non-technical people interchange the terms Information technology and Information System.  I was speaking with a very savvy client who began splitting hairs over the difference between IT and IS.  I mentioned that most people use the term interchangeably because they don’t know the difference.  I asked her to clarify the difference she saw between the two terms.  

As I listen to her description I wondered if most technology professionals could do as good a job.  When I was going to college I picked up a degree in MIS after deciding that programing in Pascal was interesting but programing was really not my life’s passion.  I quickly transferred from CIS to MIS.  But that’s about as much I picked up in college about what Information systems was/is. 

To define Information system the term is frequently used to refer to the interaction between people, processes, data, and technology.  

In my career as an IT Consultant I’ve found that I have been focused on work systems that involved people communicating between machines (often through a machine.)  As an IT Consultant I am focused on work systems devoted to processing (capturing, transmitting, storing, retrieving, manipulating and displaying) information.  Then making sure that each person involved in the business process had access to the information needed to be considered successful. 

Working on multiple software development projects I found that Information Systems for the CIS professional had a different meaning.  Somehow the people part of the project seemed less important.  Rather than focusing on people, the developer focuses on the information systems themselves.  Retrieving data from a data store often requires an algorithmic process that the MIS expert seldom thinks about.  The focus of the CIS professional then is computational theory while the MIS professionals if focused on the work system between people and machines. 

The confusion between IS and IT (The acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information) seems like a natural thing.  If we think of technology as an iceberg; Information Technology is the tip of the iceberg seen above the water.  Information system professionals are the 90% of the iceberg that is under the water that can’t be seen. 

It’s interesting too that most IT professionals can’t see below the water line as well.  In a world where marketing language allows us to expand the definitions of words far past their boundaries IT and IS seem to be suffering from this problem.  Over the years IT professionals have become almost as clueless as their users.  I’ve always thought it was a little odd when an IT professional takes the credit for building an application.  When all they’ve really done is start a complicated automated process.  I guess though it makes up for all the times the developers blame the problem on the IT professional instead of the code. 

As technology becomes more and more complex it seems that more and more of the technology is disappearing from the view of the users and from the technicians themselves.  Very few people have a full understanding of the entire system.  My thought then is that with the cloud and unified communications entering the modern network architecture there will probably be more confusion about the two areas of technology.