You fix computers, right?
A surprisingly high number of the people I know who work in Technology Operations roles around the industry have parents who think they fix broken Outlook installations for a living. This is a not a reflection on their parents, per se, but rather it represents the challenge of distinguishing an Operations role from an IT role. Most people who work in any modern organization have interactions with IT staff, making the identification quite easy (Oh, that’s what little Johnny does). The problem with this identification is that it is probably wrong.
DISCLAIMER: This is also not a negative reflection on IT staff. Certainly, there a distinction between the roles, but I mean absolutely no disrespect of any kind to the helpful and hardworking people who keep computing systems running everywhere.
To grossly oversimplify, Operations represents the activities of an organization which directly produce the product or render the service to the customer. For a manufacturing company, Operations is what makes the widgets. For an airline, Operations is flying planes. And for an Internet portal, Operations is — you guessed it — providing that portal to those users all over the Internet.
A Technology Operations group employees the people who run the hardware, software, networks and systems which actually deliver the product that is offered. At AOL, Operations are the people who make sure that you can log in to the AOL service or send an Instant Message. We fight the ground war on spam and viruses in your inbox. When Mapquest gets updated roads in your area, Netscape.com gets a new look, or AOL.com gets new features, we’re the ones deploying the applications — probably in the dead of night.
In addition to helping when new things go out, we also play a large role in figuring out how to solve problems. We’ve seen a lot of things scale, so we can give developers pointers to what will and won’t work. As product managers draw up their requirements, Development and Operations work together to make sure that we can get the product out on time, ensure it grows in a healthy fashion, and can be supported easily. There’s nothing worse than making a popular new product that breaks every time it gets a healthy crowd, and Operations works full time to make sure that doesn’t happen.
A lot of the same things apply for an IT organization, but with a different sort of products. First, the vast majority of IT products are off the shelf applications from commercial software vendors. The landscape of IT full of products like Exchange, SAP, Oracle Financials, and Peoplesoft. While some products have moved towards a ’software as a service’ model (think Salesforce.com), most companies still run a lot of off the shelf software. That isn’t to say that this is easy by any means — these applications have the potential to be even more complex than the ones that Operations people run.
The key difference is that IT shops rarely are part of the software development life cycle. Commercial support, training, and documentation are available for most of these applications. There are mature user communities which provide opportunities to hire people experienced in these applications. In addition, the customers for those applications are different: they’re all employees too. This has the effect of limiting their number: a few thousand employees using Exchange versus many millions of Mapquest users.
While I can search a jobs site and find people with experience in all of the common platforms of IT, the best-case Operations resume probably contains 15% of the technology we use. You can’t really find a Certified Administrator for a platform which hasn’t been written. You’ve got to find people who can think on their feet, parley well with developers, and impersonate QA when nobody else has bothered to test whatever we’re being handed. Oh, and don’t let things break, or it’ll be reported everywhere from the blogosphere to the Wall Street Journal.
Sound interesting? Ready for that sort of challenge? We’re always looking for people ready to run some of the world’s largest web properties. Drop me a line if you’re interested - my contact info is in About Jacob.