IT Rock'n'Roll Band
Having just watched an awesome four hour documentary on the legendary Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, it finally struck me: Tom Petty is like a passionate IT sysadmin, and his record producers are the ITSM guys.
The way that Tom Petty describes his art: the way he writes songs, on his own and with teams, how much effort and passion he puts in, how it takes over his life but how it’s quite freestyle and comes from somewhere that isn’t his conscience and certainly isn’t to a plan (that he knows of) reminds me of IT.
Whether an app dev, app admin, infrastructure engineer or operations: a technical role is a mixture of technique and art just like guitar playing. But, being a good guitar player doesn’t make you a recording artist that can produce a profitable product on time: you need a producer and engineer. ITSM claims to offer these production and engineering quality and efficiency services to IT artists.
This is a much more positive view than the prevailing view that ITIListas have been trying to push their process onto non-ITIL people, because apparently non-ITIL people are broken and Just Don’t Get It, for the longest time. Time to heal the rift with techies valuing ITIL for its production values, and ITIListas like Rob England valuing IT experts for their skills.
Tom Petty worked well with producers and engineers who knew how to make a good record efficiently. Without a good producer, Tom struggled to produce output: his Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) was horrible.
Here’s where I think Tom and his producers become a good metaphor for IT:
- Every IT org needs a rock’n'roll band who play their role. This means they need to be awesome and need to be awesome together. Rewarded for results, not for mediocrity, not for bad rock’n'roll behaviour that produces no value and just broken TVs.
- Every IT rock’n'roll band needs a producer/engineer team to make them efficient. This means the producers need to know a lot about their trade, and not just superficial criticizers.
I have several projects this year to bring IT Rock Stars together with the ITSM Producers: it’s going to be a rock’n'roll tour!
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I hope you aren’t suggesting I’m a superficial criticizer. I speak JCL, CICS tables, unix scripts, PHP, VB, PC-DOS and SQL amongst many other languages. I can reorg an index, create a VM image or configure Apache. OK network protocols are beyond me but I can still carry a tune and play lead guitar, to continue your analogy.
To also extend your analogy, I’ve had enough of wearing leather and waking up on strange sofas and now have a real job running the business.
the analogy also works on another level: 99% of musicians think they are Led Zeppelin or Nirvana but they aren’t. they’re banging away behind chicken wire in a bar in a strip mall on Saturday nights. Or worse still they’re playing a third-rate lounge in Vegas on Tuesday nights and thinking they’re really hot. Most of them can’t manage a bank account, forget the chords, and bust their amp because they don’t have a proper trolley to move it. But they still throw tantrums like Nirvana and expect people to understand when they throw up or sleep in because they’re Musicians.
I’m a huge fan of yours, Rob, as I always knew you were into leather… I think that, perhaps sometimes, you come across as a technophobe whereas you clearly are “one of us”. Perhaps if you talked a bit about how much you appreciate tech and how you’re doing your bit to Make a Better World, there’d be less of a divide between IT and ITSM? Just a thought! Thanks for commenting, hope to see you at #pink11 though I’ll probably be locked in a cage on show for ITSMers to throw rotten fruit at
Steve.. Tom Petty deserves to not be compared to some IT freak, even though he was sometimes (or more often) as awesome and/or misbehaved
Great analogy, there is no point in being an amazing IT team (art set aside;-) if it’s not supporting the business !
but keep bashing it, it is provoking/inspiring, and fun !
Rob, you had to have some shell background to come up with “theitskeptic”, and we loved the “techie” confession
(had been wondering for a while what viewyonder was)
Great comment, thanks!
@Steve Chambers See the problem is I don’t appreciate tech – I loath it. And it’s mutual – technology is out to get me.
If you mean techies, then I can marvel at the virtuosos like Trevor http://www.itskeptic.org/node/1089, but in general i find techies frustratingly narrow-minded, even blind. It saddens me when they cripple their own careers as a result. 87 of my colleagues from CA will remember the courses I ran to try to prevent such wasted potential.
Rock’n'roll is fantastic but if you devote your life to it you’ll most likely end up broke, divorced, with a drug habit. 0.01% end up super-rich, divorced, with a drug habit. the lucky ones grow out of it
hah! brilliant! sorry you’re so bitter!
I just want to be the Colonel Tom Parker for this group.