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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