I am reading Friedman’s and Mandelbaum’s book That Used To Be Us (http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/bookshelf/that-used-to-be-us). You may recall Friedman’s book The World is Flat, a must read for any business leader on the major trends and changes that affected and will continue to impact how businesses must think, operate and execute. In That Used To Be Us, they articulate the four great challenges facing this country (I won’t elaborate on the four challenges here, but encourage you to read the book. Even if you don’t agree with everything in it – it’s still a fascinating read). One of premises of this book is that America had stopped following the formula that made this nation prosperous. Those “pillars” are in education, continual infrastructure modernization, immigration, research and development, and regulatory / fiscal responsibility. These principles can be tightly or loosely applied in the context of Technology Operations.

Education: Quote from the book: [From Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education on 10/19/2010:: “About one fourth of 9th graders fail to graduate high school within 4 years”]

One of the areas under constant budget attack in operations is the training and travel budget. To me, it is the same as budgeting in hardware and software maintenance. You have to make sure your infrastructure is up to date and current. Same thing applies to your people. Your best people not only love to learn and but also to broaden their technical and business acumen. They know if they stop learning, they are falling behind and often bolt to greener pastures, not because of compensation issues because they feel they are getting stale and left behind. Investing in continually educating your technical teams generate higher quality implementations, competence and excellence in operating the technology, and the ability to add value to the bottom line by leveraging the new features and capabilities of the hardware and software that add business and / or operational value.

Continual Infrastructure Modernization: Quote from the book: [“In 2009, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) issued a Report Card on America’s Infrastructure, and gave America an over grade of D. The report also gave individual grades to fifteen infrastructure categories. None got higher than a C+.”]

Aging, outdated and legacy infrastructure are the equivalent to anchors to your business. It holds you in place or at a minimum slows you down from being nimble and responsive. Your competitors are either greenfield or making investments re-platforming their technical and application stacks because they know that races are won in the turns. The company that can quickly adjust to economic conditions, customer demand, competitive threats can accelerate through the turns and pass others and then turbo-boost into the straightaway and create a formidable lead. If you have to make wide, slow turns (or worse, can’t make the turn) because your network, database, storage and compute platforms cannot scale horizontally or vertically, cannot be re-purposed/shared/virtualized, cannot be geographically dispersed or have high maintenance costs, time to really embark on a modernization program before the next turn comes. If you are already in the turn, good luck!

Immigration and Research & Development: Quote from the book: [“All this matters, Wadhwa writes, ‘because immigrants are critical to our long-term economic health. Although they represent just 12% of the U.S. population, they have started 52% of Silicon Valley’s tech companies and contributed to more than 25% of U.S. global patents. They make up 24% of science and engineering workers with bachelor’s degrees and 47% of those with PhD.s.”]

I’m going to integrate these two topics and recast them as talent and innovation. The book articulates very well what is and will continue to happen with jobs within and outside IT / Technology organizations. As a successful technology operations leader, you will have to become, as the book quotes from John Jazwiec, “a serial job-killer”. That is because you will continue to automate, and right-source tasks and work to the lowest cost structure. However, the book continues to quote from John on the sustainable jobs and the value creator employees that you cannot eliminate. Value creators in your organization are researching, designing, inventing, and implementing tools, scripts, workflows. They are eliminating wasteful, non-value added tasks out of your processes. They are introducing ways to make themselves and others more productive, efficient and with higher quality, faster outcomes. They can come from out of your industry, out of your normal network. If you are not hiring or retaining these value creators, they are potentially working putting you or your company out of business.

Regulatory / Fiscal Responsibility: [Quote from the book: “There is a fine line between a regulatory environment that promotes the risk-taking that is necessary in a market economy  and an environment that fosters destructive recklessness”….  “It is not that every issue each party favors is trivial or unworthy, but if our political systems cannot put the nation’s priorities in order--increase revenue, reduce benefits, and reinvest in the sources of our strengths–this too will have a huge cost”.]

For this post, let’s scope this to the internal policies, processes, politics and management of your company. In any large organization, there can be different parties with different agendas and the politics can be paralyzing and dysfunctional. Many successful organizations have internal bickering and fights, but are aligned on company strategy and goals. That alignment needs to extend down to the middle management layer along with the respective headcount and budget. Investments made should be aligned. Internal business and operational processes should enable high quality, predictable and cost efficient outcomes. Compromises must be made to optimize the process and business results, not the vertical metrics of an individual or a department. Get your priorities straight –it isn’t about you or your department winning – it’s about doing the right thing to make the business successful.