Esoteric Curio

Business is king. Customers rule. Service is everything. Yet every organization I go into has an engineering group that can't see outside their bubble. Perhaps they can, but they certainly choose not to.

I'm an engineer, I write code. I've written approaching 100k lines of C code in my life time, I've administered tens of thousands of systems in my career and I've help plan some of the largest customer-facing infrastructure ever built. I've learned a tremendous amount about technology and the hubristic nature of engineering teams. The most important take away from all of this? The technology doesn't mean anything unless it enables business by providing better service to customers.

Now, I realize that when I rant about this to technology folk, they emphatically agree. But, I'm tired of the lip service. People today in architecture, engineering and operations say again and again that their focus on enabling better customer experience. It's a nice sentiment, but every time I dive into someone's instrumentation and monitoring, I see an absolute vacuum when it comes to non-IT data.

The obvious things like financial and customer service metrics are missing, but so are all the more subtle things. Hiring is hard; finding and retaining talent is challenging; providing good benefits that add value and increase job appeal is a competitive task. All of these things are critically important to the organization as a whole (and specifically engineering and IT) and yet they are completely absent from the "monitoring" within the organization.

The truth is that there is absolutely critical telemetry coming from every facet of your organization. All of this telemetry is either directly related to providing better service to customers or directly related to providing better service to your organization itself which, in turn, stabilizes the platform on which you deliver products and services. Of this, I shouldn't have to convince you and I find that no convincing of the general population is required. Yet, here we are with almost every organization I see standing blind to this vital information.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think technology isn't a first-class component of today's (and tomorrow's) organizations. In fact, I think the technology group has been applying radically advanced techniques to telemetry data for years. It's high time that these techniques and tools were applied to the organization unabridged.

There is a profound shift in data transparency and accountability coming to the organization to tomorrow. If you don't buy in, you'll simply fail to achieve the agility and efficiencies of your competition. I'm here, with Circonus, to make that happen.

Business is king, not engineering. The difficult (but exceptionally simple) shift of engineering's focus from serving itself to serving the business as a whole will remake IT as the engine of the organization. As soon as you embrace this shift, technology will be the most powerful tool your organization has at its disposal.