The Proverbial Best Practice Mantra
How often? How often? How often? have you had a consultant, a specialist, an expert, a professional…tell your bosses: Implement it with Best Practices!
I hear this all the time. Not because the pro’s and experts an consultant are right. But because my boss simply does not think I am worth what he pays me! (There I said it!)
So, the proverbial bite into the apple of Best Practices is that even ITIL.org has changed the reference to Good Practice. There is always a good way to do something. Don’t reinvent the wheel when you can do it the same way someone has done it.
If you are a business owner, then you’d be two minds about this:
1. Innovation requires thinking out of the box! that’s where you are willing to put your money.
2. Following precedence will save you money. Simply because it has been proven to work.
That said, each day (ask your IT Engineer/Administrator, and he will confirm the inevitable truth!) something goes wrong with your IT systems for one simple reason: Someone is being creative/innovative with your money! – Do you hear those ching $ chings $!!! That is money being poured right out of your pocket!
Let me get back to the interesting bits. IT Companies are profit makers like any other company. But since the Dot.com bubble, a lot (if not all of them) have realised that to stay in business, they need a service delivery model that builds relationships with customers. This model is based on giving the customer a hassle-free Service and make sure they build a long lasting relationship with you as a customer (Yes, I work for one of these companies). But the crucial factor, is that they need to apply Good Practices to the solutions implementation and daily operational support to your IT systems.
That little tit-bits said…
The frequency at which things go wrong is phenomenal. Thus a monitoring system – not to prevent but to detect when something goes wrong – this is an essential tool for your IT Administrator! A cost that would save you thousands!.
Next, is the indelible TechNet and online resources. These are essential tools. Mainly because – whatever challenge you have, someone has had it and found a solution and shared it with the world! So why not send you IT Administrator to those Geeky gatherings and forums? it will probably cost you $1,000 or loosely R8,000! – So think again about what you save on.
“Best Practice” or “Good Practice” whichever you choose, the fact remains, it is there for a reason. But this reason is not absolute. The fact that your business is unique with unique circumstances, means that the “Good Practice” baseline has to be adjustable. And someone has to make this determination (ref: Monitoring Systems). This is human computer interaction (#HCI) on another level, not your users but your administrators.
Show me a perfect system, I’ll show you a perfect universe. Better yet, I will show you a perfect person! All these are a fable! no doubt about it. Innovation is a continuous improvement thus there is no perfect anything.
There’s always room for improvement. The Best Practice Mantra means you need to find how it will best suite and work for you and your environment. And that only remains until something else changes or gets added to the environment, then “The Best Practice” has to be adjusted, improved, modified.
We insist every time on two things: Keep a record/track of changes, know how to reverse the changes if they are not suitable. If these two are not done, then you are definitely in trouble things will always break and you’ll always be chasing your tail trying to figure them out.
The bigger the environment, the more you will have to spend on monitoring both operation environment and the changing environment. Any good CIO knows that a good IT strategy has to have very good tools. If you are paying your CIO/CTO around $500K (R2mil), make sure you have a supporting IT CapEx and Opex of at least $20million (R100mil ).
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