If you are working for a Fortune 2,000, and hold P&L, or in other ways are responsible for the compensation levels of your SA team and have doubts answering this question, I will argue your operations are not automated, nor will it be competitive in tomorrow’s IT-operations market. The industry unites around the belief that automation is the only way to stay on top of IT Operations. Automation has become a prerequisite for supporting the business in their growing demands. However, few are willing or capable of adjusting their outdated view when it comes to the competence mix needed and new cost allocations associated with the transition to automation. Most of the times we meet dreamers with Winnie the Pooh attitudes wanting both. Highly automated operations, and cheap labor. Well, the sad truth is you can’t. You cannot end up with a highly automated IT infrastructure run by fewer, very competent engineers and keep paying traditional average SA salaries.
Blame the corporate ladder?
The attitude among automation laggards is an oxymoron, and a reason why many automation projects fail to live up to their promise. For people with successful experience under their belt this is obvious, but why is it so hard for the others to follow up? When we look at the organizational structure of highly efficient IT infrastructures and compare them with less efficient, we see clear patterns. I have previously argued how the view of the involved engineers needs to move from System Administrators to System Engineer, how a key to success lies in the culture , and how this can lead to amazing results . After experiencing VPs and Directors of IT Operations, a big blame as to why it is hard to follow this through, seems to lie with the corporate ladder. Who in their politically correct minds would pay subordinates more than themselves? Apparently very few. If you are a Director of IT Operations today your salary might be in the $130k - $200k range. If you are a Manager it will be lower. How can you then pay your SA senior team members $150k? The answer: You don’t. So, here we are. An average Fortune 2,000 company will jump on the DevOps bandwagon, they will buy an Infrastructure as code solution and initiate a new automation project. Unless you change the culture, train your people to embrace automation, get rid of the ones who stick to “this is how we always have done it”, your IT Operations will only improve slightly, if any at all. You will be able to install the new shiny automation software, but there it stops. Unfortunately. The promise of highly automated IT Operations with multiple daily deployments into production and a proactive way of working where the majority of changes relate to new features and not bug-fixes becomes a broken one, and the organization is left with the old stressful reactive mode of operations.
Automation requires top management involvement
Corporate ladder and established compensation structures seems to be a main prohibitor for why the necessary competence is not brought in / trained. This is a major reason for why new automation projects need support and mandate from senior management. Senior management has the power and mandate to call for the necessary changes in compensation structures and culture needed. Without this support, we will continue to see automation projects with mediocre results. As the world is running on software at an accelerated pace, Fortune 2,000 companies shouldn’t be surprised when new younger organizations suddenly pass by at high speed. ….and yes, $150,000 is base salary.
