Provoking IT from Good to Great
Can IT go from Good to Great?
Could this be you, the IT guy supporting the world?
In the past few months of using Twitter, which I think is awesome, I’ve met some fantastic people online.
These are people from all corners of IT: business leaders in the form of VPs who know ROI inside-out; enterprise architects who are designing large scale systems; operational gurus who have engineered operational systems and authored books like Visible Ops; and VMware Certified Professionals who are using the virtualization tool to evolve their organization’s IT. Amazing.
I would never have met these people if it wasn’t for Twitter.
All of these great people have one thing in common: they are thinking about, and acting on, their ideas for making IT better. They dislike inefficient, ineffective and poorly governed IT systems. Good enough is not good enough: these people want to do something great, and they are capable of it as individuals.
But what one can achieve as an individual is limited by the actions you can do and the other people you can influence. Just like one atom flying through space, you might, one day, hit and influence another atom… but if you find other atoms that you can work with, and then more atoms glue together, then you might create something really special – like a star 
I’m convinced that if just a handful of the brilliant people I’ve met online start to work together then something amazing might just be possible. To encourage this coalescence I’ve started a Twibe called “good2great”. Find out more about good2great.
At the time of writing there are nearly fifty people, of all kinds of experience and skills, who are grouping under the good2great banner. I am going to reach out to each of them to ask:
- How would you describe a great IT system or organization? What makes it great, not just good enough?
- What action(s) would you do to make an organization great? Perhaps it’s a business strategy; or a design pattern; or an operational procedure: they all count.
- How do you think the good2great movement might work best? Should it stay online sharing of ideas, or should it go a step further and meet once a year?
My personal goal is to do what I can to make IT systems great, and I want to share everything I do online, at conferences, and over beers 
If that resonates with you, if it’s something you want to contribute to and benefit from, then sign on to Twitter and join the good2great Twibe!
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| Print article | This entry was posted by Steve Chambers on 16 June, 2009 at 19:21, and is filed under good2great. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
about 1 year ago
hmm. Interesting questions. Just off the cuff I’d say:
1- A great IT organization is one that meets the operational day-to-day needs of the business while still having sufficient resources available to make creative, proactive improvements. “Fires” are few and far between, and when they happen they usually have no operational impact. In many ways this describes a “well funded” IT organization, so the additional qualifier is that the organization achieves this with minimal overhead.
2- Vis ops. I have yet to find something that is more usable or produces better results. It’s also important to have a leader who “Gets It”. I worked briefly for Jason McKerr at InsightsNow in Corvallis Oregon, who is one of those rare managers who “Gets It” in a fundamental way. He knew exactly what kind and how much support to provide, and when to provide it. He knew when to get involved and when to back off. He was simultaneously “one of the guys” and clearly in charge. He saved my sanity at that company, and because of his influences, I still wonder if leaving was the right choice, despite the big “on paper” advantages my current job has.
3- I think this will become obvious as things evolve. When it’s time to organize a meetup, it will be obvious.