The zeitgeist in IT appears to be defer as much actual work as possible. Whatever and however one can make any possible work or effort someone else’s responsibility appears to be the only option anyone wants. From a business standpoint, it’s hard to argue (theoretically) lower costs and direct risk!
It has always been difficult to show value in operational services that are well run. The more successful they are, the more invisible they appear. The amount of effort and attention to detail this level of execution takes in large, complicated environments is well known by Michelin Star dining locations, though far less celebrated.
It has gotten far worse as web-based products now dominate the landscape. Dozens, if not hundreds, of subscriptions and micro-transactions now replace what used to be a single piece of software running on a single server machine.
And you may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?”
David Byrne, “Once in a Lifetime”
In the beginning… we had physical system boxes. They needed so much space, power, air conditioning, and security!
Rack-mounted equipment condensed that. Virtualized server hardware, such as VMware vSphere and MS Virtual Server, condensed it further.
These were still physical equipment in your building that you had to run and take care of, though.
Finally, the internet speeds were strong enough that it led the way to cloud-based computing! Hooray! We are free from the physical chains (and overhead) that bind our business down! I mean, what does that IT person even do?! Clearly we are better without any of that!
Of course, over time, we’ve also found the joys of enshittification. If there was ever a word which deserved to be in the dictionary, it was that one.
Almost every web-based service will follow this pattern because it is the pattern of harvesting money from a directly unseen source. Capitalism loves to “generate” money from any source where immediate ramifications or impacts are not directly visible.
Whether you dip your toe in gradually or jumped cannonball style into the cloud, eventually you will be treated as the boiling frog in those vapor-like-waters. Quickly reduced to a randomized account number in a database, you will find that every option squeezes more and more money from you for less and less realized value and unfulfilled promises.
The methods for you to contact people will evaporate over time. At first you might have a direct contact, but after a year you now have a generic call center. Later it’s hours contract from 24-hours to 9-6, weekdays only. Before long you have only a message form that may or may not be broken.
You will have no choice or say in this, because you have no leverage anymore.
At this point, one cannot expect a lifecycle of any more than five years for a service, process, or product to be active in your environment.
A continual service improvement mindset is critical for your entire IT portfolio – always improving, always planning for what is next in support of the business needs.
Chances are self-hosted (on-prem) services may be far cheaper and more manageable in the long run, so ensure that cost-comparison is not skipped because it was expected that cloud-hosting is always the cheapest.
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