I mean figuratively of course. As stated in my post on Outsourcing;
complexity causes instability, instability causes breakage, and breakage causes downtime and costs money.
And my recent post about using IT Vision to ensure that you have planning in your IT environment to avoid the IT equivalent of urban sprawl
An acquaintance in the IT field pointed me to a particular SMB IT Administrator job advertisement – I include the ‘required skills’ they posted below.
This advertisement is looking for extensive experience in some 20 different tools or skill sets! And many of these products or skills are different vendors implementations of the same thing. So why would an SMB want this kind of complexity?
Forget it – extensive experience with all of these will not exist – perhaps the old adage of jack of all trades – master of none is more like it. And since many of the technologies are security related – that is not something I recommend.
Second point; the below list of skills could suit a larger organization that has grown through M&A, but in the SMB space, complexity causes instability, instability causes breakage, and breakage causes downtime and costs money.
So many of these products overlap and compete with each other that you can guess that there was no long term, strategic IT vision as this organization matured. Point solutions, or what someone thought was “cool” for the day was used. To be fair, I don’t personally know the company or the location – so they could be trying to rein in this sprawl in the future, but the cost in time and money doing it will be difficult.
This is not to say that there is anything wrong with any of these technologies and products, my point is that for an SMB – there are just too many of them. Many of the individual technologies below can be a full time job in themselves.
Look at this laundry list ‘o skills; (This is just a summary)
Certifications in Novell and MCSE
Minimum ITIL Foundation an asset
Extensive technical knowledge LAN, WAN, frame relay, xDSL, TCP/IP, ATM, T1, 802.11x, SLP, NCP
Extensive client/server and operating system experience with Microsoft and Novell and Suse Linux
Knowledge of Symantec END Point server and workstation anti-virus software, Check Point, Symantec
Endpoint, Windows firewalls, Radius authentication services and intrusion detection systems
Knowledge of MS Server 2003 and Active Directory, MS Exchange Novell OES GroupWise and ZenWorks.
Extensive experience in developing and managing Windows Active Directory OU Structures and Group Policies.
Extensive experience with Novell eDirectory.
Extensive experience with Novell Zenworks for application deployment, patch management, and data collection.
Plus “knowledge” of H P OpenView and Cisco Works, Wireless technology, MS Exchange 2003, Citrix Metaframe, and the list goes on!
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