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Are you prepared to hire a body guard for your key IT staff? |
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Is this a question too far fetched? No so…
Last week our Web site went down for two hours, I was forwarded the major incident report on Monday morning. The report detailed the incident resolution process by minutes, where I found that the direct cause was the failure of the second power supply (the primary power supply was gone 5 weeks ago). While I was impressed by the diligence of the incident manager and our newly implemented CobIT process, the story of how this incident happened have been lingering over me for days...
The fact of matter is that the application server has passed its designed life span for a couple of years, it has been identified as one of the items that required refresh, even the hardware was acquired a year ago and ready to commence. However, it has yet been treated as high priority.
One of the key reasons of the upgrading being put off once again a few weeks ago was that a key IT staff with legacy system knowledge was going to take a much deserved 5-week vacation on a beach somewhere at Mediterranean Sea after a couple of years of continuous services without taking any serious days off. A few earlier upgrading discussions were ended on the same resource issue but for different reasons, such as no immediate business benefits, or much urgent demand on the resource to deliver application or services that were perceived of having much higher business benefits…
Availability was one of the top QoS for many IT shops, few mission critical applications are not having failover measures such clustered servers, SAN, and multiple switches that offer double assurance. However, when it comes to the IT skills (not staff but the staff with the skills or knowledge, particularly the legacy systems), the vital ingredient of all, the double assurance is frequently not there. As a matter of fact, some may trim the workforce in areas that are perceived of having skill overlapping.
IT management recognizes the ones who have the key skills to keep the lights on as the vital to businesses. Not many have taken proactive measures to ensure that the availabilities of development skills and knowledge of certain legacy systems are there all the time, or at least, have yet considered the skill availability as high on their agenda. The situation will be worsening when large workforce reaches retirement stage and training has yet caught up, or at the time a few staff with key skills decide to “pursue other interests”. Pretty soon, management will be forced to answer the question “are you prepared to hire a body guard for your key IT staff?
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