Meet the New Boss

Or, Re-ARGH-inization

Hasturcom just reorganized my... department? Section? I'm not sure what it's called, exactly. It's larger than a team, and smaller than a department, really. Assuming there are even formal sizes that go along with those words.

Anyway, whatever it is, Hasturcom just reorganized it. As far as I can tell, the new org doesn't really improve very much on the old org. They inserted another manager between my boss and his boss. His office unifies several teams that support various aspects of what I like to call Hasturcom's "enterprise e-commerce" operations, but what Hasturcom likes to call "business compute services" (yes, "compute").

They also created another manager at my boss's level, and transferred the database adminstrators on my team to this new manager.

Neither of these org changes make much sense to me. Enterprise e-commerce is, in my experience, very different from what I think of as "IT infrastructure".

IT Infrastructure vs. Enterprise E-Commerce
IT Infrastructure is internal, providing computing resources to the company itself and its employees. Enterprise E-commerce is external, doing business with paying customers. This defining characteristic--"doing business with paying customers"--places very heavy demands on Enterprise E-commerce. Demands that in most cases IT Infrastructure never has to satisfy.

As a result, there is a very different mentality on each side of the divide. IT Infrastructure is typically a nine-to-five, Monday through Friday kind of world. There's not a lot of investment in redundancy. Projects typically have longer timelines, and deadlines can usually be extended without too much complaint. Service outages on the order of a few hours or even a few days are tolerable. Formal "service level agreements", spelling out specific performance metrics and penalties for failure to meet them, are almost never drafted. If the email server dies over the weekend, it might be okay to wait until the tech gets in on Monday to fix it.

Enterprise E-Commerce, on the other hand, is much more. . . intense. Instead of 9-5, M-F, the schedule is 24/7/365. Your customers are online all day, every day, and your robots better be online, too. It's understood that for every server you have doing business, you have a second server running alongside it, just in case the first one breaks. Typically you have a third and fourth as well. You have staff on-site, and on-call, every hour of every day. Any interruption in service is unacceptable, and every incident must be remediated immediately. Projects typically have shorter timelines, and deadlines are very rarely changeable. Services "go live" on schedule, and they work right on Day 1 (and if they don't, the techs stay awake until the problems are solved).

Because of the "business-critical" nature of Enterprise E-Commerce, and because of the different paradigm which that nature requires, I feel very strongly that a company's EEC operations should be entirely segregated from its IT Infrastructure operations. EEC IT teams should be focused on the unique demands of the EEC world. They should be crafting policies and procedures specifically for EEC. Everything from hardware procurement, to system design and implementation, to managing the day-to-day operations should be handled by EEC-oriented teams.

The Hasturcom Way
But that's not how Hasturcom does it. Hasturcom only recently got into the EEC arena. Their "core business" isn't about selling goods and services to customers over the Internet. But the opportunity is there, and there's (potentially) a lot of money to be made by expanding into the EEC market. So Hasturcom recently started setting up computers and networks for this purpose.

At first it was kind of an ad-hoc thing. IT Infrastructure was already providing servers and networks for internal operations--how different could it be to provide the same things for external operations? And for a while, it really wasn't that different, mainly because IT Infrastructure didn't give much thought to how different it really should be.

Once Hasturcom did realize that EEC was very different from IT Infrastructure, they started trying to re-organize their IT department to address these differences. The resulting organization, which had been in effect for about six months when I came on board, was an abomination.

They had split the EEC IT support right down the middle. Resource procurement, system design and implementation, and even production deployments, are all handled by IT Infrastructure teams. Day-to-day maintenance and support is handled by what, in any sane world, would be EEC teams.

However, Hasturcom is not a sane world. There is no real EEC team. In fact, my department is a random assortment of IT teams. Some support Hasturcom's internal operations. Others--mine, for example--support Hasturcom's external operations.

In fact my team is the one which, having been totally out of the loop during the design, implementation, testing, and deployment phases of any new EEC service, must take over responsibility on Day 1 for that service, when it goes live and customers start using it.

Naturally, I've been thinking a reorg is in order since I first got here. If it were up to me, I'd remove IT Infrastructure from the picture entirely. I'd put my team in direct contact with the Hasturcom units that are developing these EEC services, so that we could work with them through all phases of development, and support systems we were intimately familiar with. As things are right now, all that intimate familiarity stays with IT Infrastructure, and doesn't cross the divide when they turn the system over to us.

Coming Full Circle
But that's not what Hasturcom has done with this reorg. Apparently, having realized that something is horribly wrong with the current reorg, they've created another layer of management, and sort of half-heartedly grouped together several disparate teams that are currently supporting EEC operations.

I guess this is a good start? I mean, sure, it's nice to see that Hasturcom is beginning to figure this out, but it doesn't really do anything to address the systemic horror of the current organization.

I figure, any time a company tries to solve an organization problem by adding another layer of middle management, something has gone horribly wrong.