An “aha!” moment.
In 1998, I was a systems engineer for server, midrange and network systems.
It was the year I entered the world of Enterprise Systems Management where I built solutions to inspect, instrument and monitor technology deployments to find technical degradations or outages that would impact users.
This work helped me to reframe the way I thought about my role. My value was less about being able to do cool stuff.
I soon realized that IT was only around and invested in to serve at the pleasure of the business and the needs of its technology users.
I have since evolved this further to think less of a technologist’s role as “serving” and more as “partnering”. The word “serving” can imply a master – servant relationship, when in fact, Information Technologists are no more responsible for the entire success of the enterprise than the person driving sales or the person managing the security desk. All of us are employees and what we individually do, will help to make the business strong.
What we do as partners who collaborate, build trust and share ideas is what makes the business grow.
Today, I like to impart this philosophy with the newly emerging technology workforce and to gently remind them that technology services you are paid for, need to be useful to the business and usable by end users who may not just be customers, but the workforce and also the third party companies that are brought in to provide additional services.